3.8: Understanding

It is now mid December. Waking on a gloomy morning in his chair alone again in the saloon bar, Froggie recalls a passage from Kafka’s story ‘In the penal colony’ in which the condemned man only slowly comes to understand the nature of his sentence, carried out upon him, as a harrow literally, lethally inscribes it on his body. 

The period from Halloween to Christmas Eve has been his opportunity to understand his fate and now he does. That is why it has seemed so dark, in every sense. Quite why Christmas, of all times, should be a time for the spooky, the scary, the unearthly, Froggie has never understood, though seasonal radio dramas certainly assume it. But encountered for real, there seems no entertainment in it.

Now he realises that not only has Death visited his dreams, but he was here on Halloween. It was not his own reflection in the window that he saw back on Halloween, after all. That was also the start of the haunting which, he now divines, will finish one way or another next Sunday, on Christmas Eve.

He sits down in his favourite chair, with a quart of Toads’ Tipple for his breakfast, poured into a commemorative tankard from happier days, and merely waits with a kind of grim determination. He has a whole barrel of beer to get through and it is only Death who will visit him, after all. At least now he grasps, for the first time, that there is nothing else to fear. While his depression and anxiety all autumn has been general, all-encompassing and inchoate, it can be no worse than awaiting his Death. 

So he waits.