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Letter to hope

Alex James

Wednesday, 2nd April 2008

Alex James leads a Slow Life

I was struggling with the seasonal jetlag this morning, unable to wake up even after being repeatedly playfully punched in the face by the four-year-old while the twins poked tiny fingers in my nose, ears, mouth and eyes. My wife came into the bedroom dressed for London and broke down. ‘Angus Fairhurst killed himself yesterday,’ she said, and I was suddenly awake. There were tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t sit down.

She’d been to a show of his a couple of weeks before and it sounded as if his career was going from strength to strength. What had driven him to despair? We’d recently invited him to come and stay for a weekend. The things that run through one’s mind. I’d said I was going to send him some cheese. I hadn’t, I realised all of a sudden.

The dreadful story has been unfolding all day. He went to Scotland alone with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself on the rope in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.

It sounds as if he’d recently sent postcards to a lot of people he knew. I don’t know if I was his friend or not. I liked him, of course, he is my favourite artist, but I wonder if I made him feel better or worse. I owed him one and I wanted to pay him back. There was a postcard. I can see it from where I’m sitting now, I suddenly realise, pinned to the wall, peaking out from behind the holiday booking confirmation.

In the picture a large comic gorilla is cradling a limp, naked Angus. It’s a funny picture, even now, a big cuddly monster and a pale skinny artist apparently in sleep, fighting the good fight. First, I look at the postmark. It says June. Can he have been considering his fate even then? I can kind of remember what the postcard said, but it’s going to read very differently now. He’d signed off with ‘You really are one Hell of a lucky bastard.’ And a kiss.

The dayglo square in the picture that says: ‘When I woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there’ reads differently now, too. Angus! You idiot. You were better than all of them.