Graham Joyce

I stayed at Graham Joyce’s house on the 1st March last year. We were reading at an event at Warwick University. He wasn’t feeling too good. I was hoping he’d be up for a monumental Leicester curry afterwards, but his appetite was shot. His lovely wife Sue made me ham sandwiches instead. I slept in his study at the top of the house, the room where he spun gold.

Howz yer guts? I emailed him, a few days later.

Not great. Just had to cancel talk I was doing tonight. Doc thinks it muscular, so I’m on strong painkillers. Hope it goes away. Enjoyed seeing you the other night. Bright light in a dull evening.

It was a Graham Joyce sort of day, yesterday. The sun was out and the clouds were high and light. There was a touch of autumn in the air. I was out all day, working. By the time I got round to thinking of heading home, I received a phone call. Graham had died.

For some reason I thought of him at my wedding in 2002. At the time, Graham was adapting his novel The Tooth Fairy for a Hollywood production company. After the ceremony, after lunch, he stood with me and my dad. Dad was in the police force for 25 years, and then for seven after that he ran pubs. He’s no stranger to industrial language, but he has no truck with those who speak it. I dare not utter an oath within earshot of him, even now. In the past I’ve seen him harangue gangs of teenagers on street corners for trading four-letter insults.

‘Dad, this is Graham. Graham’s a writer. He’s doing stuff over in Tinsel Town.’

‘Really?’ Dad asked. ‘How are you finding it?’

Graham (normal talking voice, ie. loud): ‘They’re a bunch of fucking cunts, Grenville. Bunch of fucking cunts.’

It says something about Graham that he charmed the bristles smooth on my dad within seconds. To this day my parents still talk about that meeting. ‘He had a way of telling a story, didn’t he?’ my dad says. Too true.

I don’t remember getting back to my tram stop, but I remember walking through the park. I was expecting to see a ladybird. I was trying to see Graham in something. If anybody could reach through, it was him, this amazing writer who wrote so beguilingly about nature, who sometimes seemed so very close to the liminal, the numinous, that he was also somehow of it. I was looking for a sign.

The last time I saw him was on Boxing Day. My wife’s parents live in Leicestershire and we’d often take advantage of that to drop in on Graham, Sue, Ella and Joe. We all went on the walk in Wistow he describes in his final, stunning blog post. It was a glorious day. He was in good spirits. There was much laughter and we talked about writing and guitars and football and family. When we got back to his house he got the karate gloves out and sparred with my boys.

Yesterday I cried and my kids hugged me and I smelled their gorgeous heads and thought of Smoking Poppy. I hadn’t seen a ladybird. Or a heron. And there are no hares in Didsbury that I’m aware of. Later, my wife said: ‘Have you seen the moon?’

I went outside and there was a breathtaking, swollen supermoon rising over the village. Of course Graham would die on a day such as this. How could he not?

But he isn’t gone. He’s in the words of the extraordinary books he wrote, of course. And he’s larger than life (if that is at all possible) in the memories we have of him. He was a man of laughter and mischief and generosity. He was one of my very best friends and I’ll miss him enormously. But I felt self-conscious about my grief yesterday, and I imagined him with that twinkle in his eye, pressing a pint into my chest, telling me to cheer up, you soft bugger.