Bears in Mourning

After Victor died, the room-mate at the time wanted everything of Victor's, everything that was even reminiscent of Victor, cleared away at once. He wasn't being heartless, he just couldn't cope with a dead man's presence being imprinted so strongly on the rooms. I went along to help out, but it wasn't as straightforward a job as I had thought when we started. Apparently neutral objects kept leaping into hurtful life.

It turned out that Victor used to offer himself as a photographic model for his magazines and their stablemates. Surprising that a man with low self-esteem should so much enjoy being photographed. But apparently he used to tease the company's photographic editor about the scarcity of bearded images in the media, and offered himself to make good the lack. So as we cleared the room we found that the slippered individual on the cover of a mid-seventies hi-fi magazine, head cocked while he stroked a spaniel and listened to a hulking array of quadrophonic speakers, was a mid-seventies Victor. The genial chef on another cover, stirring a golden sauce in a kitchen hung with gleaming copper pans, was also Victor. Victor was even a tasteful Adam on the cover of a pop-psychology mag, Parts One and Two, receiving a glossy apple from an Eve with scheming eyes. Finally all the traces of Victor's presence were gone, stuffed under beds or bundled into bin bags.

The worst part of the visit, though, was finding in Victor's waste-paper basket something that was like the opposite of a suicide note. It was the note he would have left for his room-mate if Victor had managed to decide to go on living. Dear Bear, it started, and it said

Sorry I've been so hard to be around lately, that's the last thing you need. Thanks for bearing it anyway (bad joke), and I think I've turned the corner. I'll leave the car tomorrow – no point in taking it – and I'll see you in the p.m. Don't chuck the Guardian, there may be some jobs in it. Love Victor.

I had known that Victor was due to appear in court the next day for drunk driving (not his first offence) and was certain to lose his licence. I hadn't heard that he had also lost his job, which was probably because of his general unreliability, although the pretext had to do with fiddling expenses or paying somebody who was already on the staff to do piece-work under another name.

Instead of turning up in court, and instead of leaving the note, which he crumpled up and threw in the waste-paper basket, Victor took the car and drove down to the country, Kent somewhere, I'm afraid I've blotted out the details. I think it was where his parents met, or had their first date, or went on their honeymoon. It had a private significance, but I've forgotten exactly what. I imagine it was a beauty spot, and that he reached it in the early hours. He must have waited a bit, after he arrived, for the crumbling exhaust pipe of the old Rover to cool down from the journey. He wouldn't have wanted to burn his hands or melt the hose. Perhaps he waited again afterwards, before he restarted the engine.

He didn't leave a note, but he hardly needed to. For weeks he had been sitting around drinking and listening to a record – the first single he had bought for years, I dare say. It was called The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics, and by bad luck it was at number one. For a few weeks it was impossible to avoid it on the radio. It was all about not telling your father you loved him while he was alive, and Victor played it over and over again. Mike of the Mechanics is one of the very few beards in pop music, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. Far too lanky to be a Bear.

Victor had a little bag of runes, a sort of Celtic I Ching, given him by an Irish Bear who used them to make every decision, and he would draw a rune from the bag every now and then when he was drinking. He seemed to draw the blank tile rather a lot, or so I heard, from the black suede drawstring bag. The drawstring bag of fate. The blank rune means death, according to the little booklet that comes with the set, but I hope he read a little further and learned that it could also mean the absolute end of something. The blank tile can actually be a positive sign: new beginning. Still, I don't expect it would have mattered what tile he drew, or what he thought it meant.

I don't expect it occurred to Victor to think of that old magazine cover, with a younger and hopeful-looking him patting a dog and listening with an expression of neutral pleasure to an unspecified music. But I find myself thinking, as I didn't when Victor's death was fresh, of the two images, the one of posed contentment, and the other of real-life squalor and misery – a middle-aged man letting a pretentious pop single contain and enlarge all his sense of failure.