The F*ck-it List

by John Niven

  He missed work. Editing a newspaper – even a small, regional paper like the Gazette – was like being a film director, Frank imagined. Every day there was urgency … demands. You were being asked questions all the time. ‘What about this?’ ‘What do you think of that?’ ‘Have you looked at this yet?’ ‘You need to … we need to … I need to …’ You were needed. And then he wasn’t. Those small grey boxes. Frank had made editor in 2001, at the age of thirty-five. He got fifteen years in the job. As it turned out they were fifteen years of increasing budget cuts and firings and shrinking advertising revenues before the small grey boxes that had done for his father did for him too. Brock Schmidt – approaching seventy – sold the paper and retired down to West Palm Beach, just after Trump won his first term.

  At the time Frank thought this was as bad as his life could get, a notion that now caused him to chuckle, to shake his head and emit a low whistle as he reflected on how idiotically he’d underestimated the savage fury of the universe. He was only forty-nine, with a new, younger wife and a four-year-old son. But he’d been there over thirty years, and at a senior level for most of it. His redundancy payment was generous.

  Pippa had gone back to teaching and Frank had finally got the chance to work on his novel, i.e. he became a house husband. He went from being the bread-maker to buying a bread-maker. He learned the ways of focaccia and sourdough and gained fifteen pounds. The bread-maker went into the garage. He spent time at the local library, doing research for a book he grandly imagined would be a history of social housing in Indiana. He stopped a few months later, after he’d amassed several legal pads full of notes, when he saw an old man at a nearby table. The man was filthy, clearly homeless, and he too had a stack of legal pads in front of him, full of notes for something he was working on, some grand key-to-all-mythologies. Frank walked by and glanced at a page over the man’s shoulder. A paragraph read: ‘The centre is all. The centre is held in place by the angels. The angels are ruled by the GOVERNING PRINCIPLE (see appendix 2). The GOVERNING PRINCIPLE is …’ Frank now saw that the man had pieces of newspaper stuffed in his ears. He stopped going to the public library to work on his book after that.

  So he got Adam ready for school in the mornings, he hit the golf course or the driving range, he shopped and prepared the evening meal, and he was there with a plate of carrot sticks, a glass of milk for Adam and a chilled glass of Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon for Pippa and a Diet Coke for him when the two of them came back in the door at 4.30 sharp. Pippa taught at Adam’s school, Truman Elementary. (Yes, that Truman Elementary in Schilling, Indiana. You’ve got it now, haven’t you? You’ve put the name of the school together with the names Pippa and Adam Brill and the dates and you know where this is going now, don’t you?) Looking back on this period of his life a decade later Frank could only view it as a golden time, shot with gauze or Vaseline on the lens, shot by Tony Scott or Adrian Lyne (he’d fallen asleep in front of both Top Gun and Fatal Attraction this week), with everything soft and rich and smeared and sumptuous. But if he was being honest, and at this point there was no point in being anything else, he knew that at the time he’d been tortured by feelings of worthlessness and insecurity: here he was, an American male born in the 1960s, baking and going grocery shopping.

  Another revelation of old age: life only has golden periods in the rear-view mirror. Upfront, through the windshield, it’s panic and chaos as it all comes at you much too fast.

  Frank came in through his front door, tossed his keys on the hall table, and shouted out, ‘I’m home, Alexa.’

  ‘Hello, Frank,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘I have cancer,’ taking his coat off now.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand that, Frank.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither. Lights.’

  Alexa turned the lights on. She’d been a present, from his daughter. Frank felt like … what? He felt like celebrating. Maybe he’d go out to eat later. He poured himself a Coke over ice in the kitchen and wandered across the hallway, where he stood in the doorway to the dining room, drumming his fingers on the door frame as he looked at the stack of files on the table, the inert PC, the plates and mugs and yellow legal pads. Sipping his drink, turning the computer on, Frank settled uncomfortably into a hardwood dining chair. He felt like he should have a toast to it, the cancer, all up in his asshole. It figured. Frank had given his typical American ass a fairly hard time all its life: red meat, chillies, jalapeños, fried chicken, pizzas and nicotine, all washed down with an Atlantic of liquor. He bore it no grudges. Decades of this and you’d throw the towel in too, wouldn’t you? You’d say, ‘Fuck me? Fuck you. You deal with this shit, buddy. I’m outta here.’

  Frank remembered he had to transfer some money, from savings to checking, as he wanted to withdraw a bunch of cash tomorrow. He got the bank home page up onscreen and then realised he’d forgotten his password. Fucking passwords – how many did you need these days? Pippa helped him set it all up. Now where had he written them down? He turned around one of the framed photographs on his desk, one of him and Pippa and Adam, and there on the back of the frame, in his tiny, neat block-capitals printing, were all his passwords. (Pippa had scolded him about this. ‘Gimme a break,’ Frank said. ‘What? Someone’s gonna break in and know I’ve written my passwords on the back of this photo?’) As he did his banking he noticed the date on the computer – November 11 – and suddenly remembered something else. ‘Alexa,’ Frank called over his shoulder, ‘CNN.’ He heard the set come to life behind him and he turned round to see the parade in Washington was in full flow.

  Huge crowds were packed into the bleachers, waving their flags, cheering in their red MAGA and KAGA and MAG hats as they watched the soldiers and the hardware rumble past: tanks, howitzers, assault vehicles, rocket launchers, thousands of troops, all lumbering away from the White House, towards the Capitol. The lead tanks were huge, M1 Abrams battle tanks, each weighing sixty short tons. Soldiers stood up through the open hatches, rigidly saluting the podium. You could faintly hear the cheers in the background – ‘USA! USA! USA! – as the camera swung over the rows of spectators. And here it was, the real America, the people who had travelled from Florida, from Nebraska, from Kentucky and, yes, from here, from Indiana, up to Washington, spending money they could ill afford to pay their respects on Veterans Day. They were cold and wet and mostly old and fat and they were all wrapped in thin, cheap coats, with their cardboard signs saying ‘GOD BLESS THE TRUMPS’, ‘DEATH TO DEMOCRATS’ and, ‘LOCK HER UP’. (The last one increasingly puzzling to Frank as former Senator Clinton had died peacefully in her sleep three years ago. Perhaps they feared a ghost situation, a zombie Hillary, clawing her way out of the grave and trying to take their guns and delete more emails.)

  There had been no tanks for the first few years. The roads couldn’t handle it. One of Trump’s first acts early in his second term had been to order a multi-billion-dollar programme to widen and strengthen Pennsylvania Avenue to accommodate the monsters every November. As Frank remembered this, as if on cue, the cameras cut to the presidential podium: President Trump and her husband Greg. (Her second husband, Jared, languishing in Rikers, having taken the fall for an awful lot of shit.) Vice President Hannity and his wife on her left, and on her right, still towering over the others even at eighty, Donald and his new wife, his fourth wife, Crystal, her belly swollen in the final trimester of her pregnancy. Thunder erupted suddenly as three of the fighter planes smashed through the sky above the parade. Trump put a protective hand on Ivanka’s shoulder as he shouted into her ear over the jet roar, his finger jabbing into the sky. Ivanka wore a cream overcoat and fur hat, her father his trademark black overcoat and red tie. Trump looked down at the vast, cheering crowd and gave them his signature thumbs up. They went wild. It had been a masterstroke, you had to admit: firing Pence halfway through his second term and nominating Ivanka as VP before resigning the office due to ill health. Ivanka automatically became president and had eighteen months in the saddl
e before she had to fight an election. Obviously one of her first acts in office had been to pardon her father of the multitude of charges he faced.

  ‘You wonder,’ the CNN commentator sighed as the coverage switched to a shot of the aircraft thundering off into the distance over the Capitol, ‘can we afford to have all these fighters and tanks here given the current situations in Iran and North Korea?’ The aftermath of the wars, still going on, years after Trump stood on the tarmac in Tehran, in Seoul, and gave his victory speeches. The oil was already flowing from Iran. What the American people were going to get out of the post-nuclear moonscape of North Korea remained less clear.

  ‘Alexa, Fox,’ Frank said.

  The channel changed. The shot of the jet fighters was pretty much the same, but the commentary went up a gear or three. ‘OH WOW!’ The female reporter was shouting over the noise. ‘YOU GUYS SHOULD BE HERE! THAT WAS INCREDIBLE!’

  ‘The new F-36s, Roberta …’ the studio anchor said.

  ‘That’s right, Ken, the most advanced thing in the sky.’

  The camera cut back to the Trumps, applauding on the podium. ‘And there’s Crystal,’ Roberta said, ‘looking absolutely radiant I have to say.’ The former president’s new wife of just over a year was saying something in Donald’s ear. She was twenty-eight, Frank knew, just a few years older than Olivia would have been now. ‘Don’t they make a beautiful couple?’ Roberta went on. The Donald, everyone agreed, had done an incredible job of getting over his grief following the death of Melania, who had perished in a helicopter crash just a few months after he left office, just after, rumour had it, she had signed a) divorce papers and b) an eight-figure book contract.

  ‘And, Roberta, I think Crystal’s wearing one of the president’s designs, isn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right, Ken. It’s a pantsuit. They’re available on the White House website as a matter of fa—’

  ‘Alexa, turn the fucking thing off.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank. I didn’t unders—’

  ‘TV OFF!’

  The screen went black and the room was quiet again. The clock on the mantelpiece told him it was nearly 5 p.m., the street outside darkening swiftly as night fell. He should really try and eat something. He still had to pack. ‘Alexa?’ Frank said, thoughtful, expansive and philosophical even, as he swirled the Coke in his glass.

  ‘Yes, Frank?’

  ‘Why does God hate me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank. I don’t understand that question.’

  He looked at the row of bottles still in the liquor cabinet – furred and dusty with age – and the thought came to him again: Why not? What could it possibly matter now?

  There had been a few fellow ex-drinkers in Frank’s house over the years. They’d all done AA of course and had been amazed to see that Frank was sober and yet lived with all that booze right there, that he hadn’t had his ‘pouring it all down the sink’ moment.

  Frank didn’t get this. It was there, it wasn’t there – what did it matter? Did you really need that moment of drama at the kitchen sink? He could be down the liquor store and fill the trunk of the car in fifteen minutes. He’d decided not to drink again, and that was that. Having or not having booze in the house made no difference. Frank hadn’t done AA. He’d just stopped. In lieu of the sobriety chip – the little metal button they gave you – he’d taken to carrying around the tiny penguin that had belonged to Adam. Pippa had taken it off the boy because it was too small, too easily swallowed, and Frank had found it on a shelf in the kitchen one afternoon. It helped him focus sometimes. He squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger again now as he took one last look at the bottles before turning out the light and heading for the door.

  Frank’s sobriety.

  He’d grown up and worked in newspapers – a drinking culture. He’d stopped when he was forty-seven, when Adam was two. There had been no grand moment of clarity, no hitting bottom, just a gradual realisation of what this habit he’d had for nearly thirty years was costing him. He’d gone through periods of not drinking, a week or two here, a couple of months there, and had always slipped back. He’d noticed something: when he was drinking his working hours extended – staying late at the office, having a couple of whiskeys with the subs. Hitting the bar with the team after the paper had gone to bed. His social hours too – staying at the clubhouse that bit longer after his round of golf. At home, in the evenings, there’d often be a reason to be in his study for a while, reading, ‘working’, when he was really getting increasingly toasted, thinking his grand thoughts, fucking around on the internet. Then there would be the hangovers. They were rarely severe, rarely disabling, but often enough to make him grouchy and withdrawn. The truth was, when he was sober he delighted in spending time with his wife and son. When he was drinking his family became a minor inconvenience to him. As he approached fifty, conscious of the fact that Adam – toddling and talking now – was very likely going to be the last child he ever had, Frank decided that family was where the smart money lay. That day, at the grocery store, he’d bought a six-pack of diet sodas, and instead of opening some wine while he cooked that night, he poured himself a soft drink over ice and that had been that. Thirteen years sober now.

  There had only been one lapse, which most people would have found entirely forgivable …

  THREE

  ‘Many of the victims may not have died right away …’

  Around lunchtime, a little over nine years ago now.

  May 5, 2017.

  A really beautiful day, in the high seventies. Frank had been in the high seventies too that morning: high-fiving himself in the locker room at Forest Glade, having shot a 78 to take the money in his Friday morning four-ball. He’d dropped Pippa and Adam at school at 8.30, been off the tee just after 9 and was strolling out of the shower by 1.04. (He remembered because he looked up at the digital clock above the doorway that led from the locker room to the clubhouse, already smelling grilled cheese wafting down the hallway from the dining room, thinking about having one and a root beer before heading home.)

  Forest Glade was the most affordable private golf club in the Schilling area. Two divorces by the age of fifty had taken their toll and Frank could no longer afford the fees over at Crescent Heights, the country club he’d joined back in the early nineties. Married to Grace then. One wife and no children. Saturday morning golf with George, Al and Brad while Grace played tennis with the wives – Gina, Clio and … Melanie? Mandy? Then lunch and cocktails by the pool in the summer. Twenty-five years ago. Whatever happened to all those guys? The lives we have, not singular. Several wrapped in one. The people who came into your orbit and then spun off, crossing your mind at Christmas, toiling over the card list, or when you came across an old photograph.

  That May afternoon Frank had been towelling off in the locker room with two of the guys he’d just beaten – Art and Ted? – when one of the older members came rushing in saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus Christ, haven’t you guys heard?’ He’d climbed up on a stool to change the channel on the old TV mounted high on the wall, changing it from the Golf Channel (a profile of Sergio Garcia, who’d recently won the Masters, how funny that Frank still remembered that) over to WRTV, the local station, out of Indianapolis. There was an aerial shot of a brown and white building, oddly familiar to Frank apart from the strobing blue lights of the police cars surrounding it, and a reporter’s voice saying, ‘Police have now closed off all roads and are evacuating residents in the vicinity as this remains very much a live shooter situation.’ The yellow ticker tape at the bottom of the screen reading ‘MANY FEARED DEAD IN SCHOOL SHOOTING IN SCHILLING, INDIANA …’ Frank started to hear a roaring noise in his ears.

  ‘Oh Frank, oh Jesus,’ one of them, Art or Ted, was saying, ‘isn’t that your wife’s school?’

  He didn’t remember much immediately after that, though he must have got dressed and got in the car. The next thing Frank remembered was fighting with the cop, the guy manning the roadblock on Eisenhower, the street t
hat led to the gates of Truman Elementary. ‘MY WIFE AND KID ARE IN THERE!’ Frank screamed at the guy.

  ‘SIR! STAY BACK!’

  You could hear it, in the distance, less than half a mile away – pop pop pop pop pop pop. Frank had launched himself at the officer, knocking him out of the way, trying to run. Then he was down on the asphalt himself, his ears ringing from the blow, another cop, who’d come from nowhere, standing over him, blocking out the sun, his nightstick in his hand, as he said, ‘Don’t make me arrest you, sir!’ Frank remembered the feeling of helplessness, of how, just a few years earlier, as editor of the Gazette, he could have got in there. If only there had been one of the older cops there, Chief Jacobs, someone like that. They knew Frank. They would have let him get closer. Closer so he could … what?

  Pop pop pop pop pop.

  From the Washington Post, Saturday May 6, 2017

  SCHILLING, INDIANA. A shooting rampage in this small Midwestern town on Friday afternoon left 22 people dead inside an elementary school, authorities said.