The Krill Bay Mysteries: chapter 1.
Brian knew a good deal about Eric’s life story from the first research interview. What he didn’t know was that Eric’s life (but definitely not his story) was going to reach its final destination in one hour and thirty minutes. Nor did Brian know that Eric’s account of his past in the next forty-five minutes would contain (if anyone cared to listen and adequately interpret) the answer to why he died. This, the second interview, began at 2:30 pm Eastern Time in a small room in Krill Bay’s large central library.
Brian pushed across the table a take-away tea from the library’s Red Herring Gull Cafe.
“God, this is cat’s piss,” Eric bemoaned good-naturedly.
Eric had been a musician and still was one of sorts. Albeit he had moved from Madison Square Gardens in the 1990s to a bench with a bottle on the promenade in this New Hampshire fishing town in 2023. This is where Brian – researching “Sudden-life collapses: the role of bad luck and its cultural context” at BU – literally stumbled upon him.
“Blimey,” Brian intoned (in his jumbled English-Welsh accent) as he slipped on a blue geranium which someone had laid in front of the bench. It’s perhaps worth noting in passing that this bench had been donated to the town ten years ago by a now deceased Miss Elizabeth Evans of Maine who, unbeknownst to Eric, had been one of his biggest fans.
The library clock ticked away the minutes without Eric realising how precious each of these now were. He began the interview with an account of his childhood.
“I always wanted a pet,” he explained wistfully. “But when I asked my father if we could get a hamster he replied, ‘have you got a recipe?’ And to this day, I’ve never owned a hamster.”
“There is still time,” Brian replied disinterestedly and, as we know, completely inaccurately. Brian (like Elizabeth Evans) had been a big fan of Eric’s and was keen to get onto the rock and roll years. Eric looked beyond Brian (perhaps beyond the present) at the churning sea. The wind rattled the half-open window, the door into the main library blew open, and the chatter of the neurological diseases support group (which Brian incidentally was a member of) drifted in.
“So, the doctor told me I had a novel disease. I asked him if he meant I read too much”.
The wave of gentle chuckling in the group was drowned out by the rising cacophony outside the building of “Trump 2024” and “Ban drag shows, protect our kids”.
“Feck’s sake,” Eric snapped, “they would ban Shakespeare if they could.”
“I’m afraid they already have,” Brian sighed. In the mega-crowd, there was one person who (unlike Elizabeth Evans and Brian Wollstonecraft) had never been a big fan of Eric. The wind blew the door shut. At 3:45, the interview finished. Fifteen minutes later (in the gardening section on the ground floor), so did Eric.
