Stanley Klepp deceased (1)

As Stanley Klepp awoke that morning in his thirty-four year old mahogany bed, spluttering into the collar of his lilac pyjamas, his bulbous occiput pressed into a colony of pillows, in the room that had stayed almost completely unchanged since he’d moved in in 1974, likewise the rest of the modest first floor one-bedroom flat which sat within a nicely-tended block on the outskirts of Kingsbury, little inkling did he have that the day would be his last.

He’d caught a simple common cold some weeks ago; justifiable source of anxiety for someone of his age -- he’d turn seventy-nine this coming December -- and so he’d decided to take care until it passed: slow up and down the hall stairs, especially down, not to venture out other than for essentials -- he still did his own shopping at the local Tesco Metro -- certainly not without all his layers: one of his white, ribbed sleeveless vests, pair of long-johns, any one of his C & A sweatshirts on top, then one of the checked woollen shirts which he kept on the right-hand side of the main wardrobe by his duffle coat, an oversized turtle-neck jumper, woolly hat, gloves and Debenham’s scarf, plus of course his green parka anorak with its port-hole hood, and moleskin boots -- trussed up like an arctic explorer, though it wasn’t really winter yet, just mid-November -- despite all this prudence, he hadn’t been able to shake this damned cold, and no matter the ferocity of the seismic eruptions in his thorax, he didn’t really think he should bother Doctor Last again who he’d seen only two weeks ago, and whose diagnosis, on the presentation of similar symptoms, had been chronic non-specific inflammation of the larynx, the all-clear in layman’s speak, a prescription for ten Amoxicillin just in case, an exhortation to take it easy, consume lots of liquids, plenty of bedrest, all headed-off by a breezy assurance that for a man of his age he was in comparably good health, advice which though flattered him, he’d never had good reason to doubt -- he really just thought that the coughing was the infection come back again, and that after a few days in bed the whole would eventually pass as it had done all those times before. But although he’d had his vaccinations in October, an unkind twist of fate engineered it that the cold spread down the larynx and trachea and into the lungs, and without any suspicion on the part of Klepp, became what we know to be full-blown pneumonia, more precisely, a streptococcus pneumoniae. When he woke up shivering sweating and trembling his way through paroxysms of bone-shaking coughs, the fact that he’d committed the thought so clearly to mind that he was on the mend convinced him that he just needed to sit tight and let it pass. When it got particularly bad at ten-thirty, he did call the Doctor’s office and amidst fraught and fractious bouts of coughing up sputum, managed somehow to convey the message to one of the receptionists that he was concerned, was he really ok: should he come in, did she think, yes he could come in for the emergency surgery at 4pm, did she think it was necessary, well it was up to him, but he’d have to be there before 4 to guarantee being seen. What about Doctor Last? She was off today. Was there anyone else he could speak to, he was feeling lousy, the coughing fits were the worst of all. Not right now, but if he still felt bad at 4pm as she said, he should come in and get it checked out. By 2:15 he was dead.

It was a grey, grey day; a dense, heavy, impenetrable dullness canopied the communal gardens at the rear, relegating the yew trees around the manicured lawn to nothing more than faint silhouettes in a spectral fog. His mustard curtains had been pushed aside to their ends, covering part of the window frame but leaving the two large central window panes unobscured. The coarse white string that operated these curtains had been the cause of a twice daily struggle for Klepp, wound too tightly round the mechanism for his residual strength so that he was forced to pull down with all his might on the string, grimacing, to set them in motion, often causing his left foot to leave the ground and a momentary loss of balance. He could just about manage it. The miniature white PVC window positioned just a few inches above the centre-point of the two main central window squares was the only one that hadn’t been wedged shut by effluxion of time, and as normal, it had been opened a fraction of an inch to let a bit of air circulate, although Klepp wasn’t entirely sure that the draught wouldn’t make his cold worse and increase recovery time. The whole room was dusty from the cupboard surfaces to the visible baubles of hair, dust and other dead matter which sat up in the cracks between the old red carpet and the walls; the entire length of the glass covering the built-in side-top by the window was layered in dust, as were the surfaces of almost everything else: the lamp shade of the free-standing lamp that stood by the left of his bed, the TV aerial and the photoframe showing a picture of him and his dead wife in California some years ago; the room was veiled in a dust cloud, as Klepp hadn’t dusted or hoovered the room in years, nor did he want to pay for a cleaner. A free-standing body-length mirror, oval-shaped, pointing towards the bed, stood just by the door between the windows and the little table for his 14” Toshiba, where the sheets, and a thick blue and yellow quilt, that though tucked in, had been pushed down the bed diagonally towards the window so that the bulk of the sheets and quilt was actually resting on the carpet. In the mirror: the reflection of Klepp's corpse; he lay there, mouth agape, tilted backwards on the pivot of his neck joint, his face wearing an expression of such awe and terror, suggesting that his life had been taken from him when he hadn’t quite been ready to go. On the bedside table between the window and the bed lay an upturned copy of Maimonides’ ‘The Guide For The Perplexed’ and a quarter-filled mug of coffee.