Serendipity Leviticus

I hadn’t realised young Daniel was Jewish, at least in part, until I read his mother’s complaint about the Coroner (are there many Jewish Goths? I suppose Amy Winehouse was sort of ‘Goth-ic’ and she went a similar way to Daniel).

I say ‘Daniel’ but he had us all know him by the soubriquet ‘Serendipity Leviticus’ or ‘Dippy’ to his little coterie of chums. Even had it on the ‘Staff Contacts’. If one was responding to a letter from HMRC Recovery demanding money with government-sponsored menaces then one was forced to ask for the signatory by name which in this case was Mr S. Leviticus.

I don’t think Dippy was in any way over-committed to his career as a civil servant. He would swan in looking suitably dishevelled in a long black coat looking like Zodiac Mindwarp’s younger brother and maybe sat at a desk and looked at a screen without creating too much of a stir in the vibrant world of tax collection. In his mind he was probably still in bed in his little gaff in Tuffnel Park. Eventually he’d fancy a break from this riveting routine and approach a like-minded mate with just the word

“Smoking?”

And off the pair would jaunt to the lifts to gain a nicotine hit at the entrance of the vast, imposing tower of offices on the Euston Road.

Dippy had rock star looks but like everything else about himself, he played this down, although, paradoxically, he was perfectly capable of turning up at a pub clothed in a long flowing ladies gown. I sat on the telephone section next to his wee mate, Steve, and he would tell me the tales of Dippy. Strangely, he had the un-Goth like ambition of joining the transport police. A less likely upholder of law and order among the travelling public I found difficult to imagine, unless he fancied ambling about the barren tube stations of the small hours communing with the ghosts that are certainly down there.

The boss-man called us all together one morning to tell us that Dippy was dead. He’d been found at his flat but the cause of death was unknown. There was virtual silence until a couple of the girls started weeping. Shocking to hear of the death of a young man of twenty-two.

We sent a sympathy card to his mum’s house in Waltham Cross. Turns out this was the first she’d heard of his death as the police had neglected to contact her. Imagine that! Learning of your son’s demise from a card that comes through your letterbox.

The funeral was dramatic in the sense of the grief it invoked. Certain emotions sink home when a coffin is lowered into a hole. I was witnessing as a colleague and nodding acquaintance but a mother was leaving a son here alone in a lonely graveyard, a sister was saying a last goodbye to a brother and his friends would never hear ‘Smoking?’ again.

Young Daniel was taken from his home accompanied by surely some of the most profane death-metal-goth music ever written. The air was rent blacker than the rose on his coffin by the savage-violent lyrics emanating from the house speakers: some American rant about the utter futility of life and the need to ‘kill the world’. But this was the young man’s music and honour was duly paid to his taste.

There was a large gathering from the office and we followed the hearse to the cemetery there to watch the coffin lowered. Dippy was gone and laid in his casket with him were miniatures of Jack Daniels and the odd spliff that would never be smoked.

Why Serendipity Leviticus? I never got to ask him and if I had he’d have smiled shyly and muttered some vague response. The combination of fortune good or bad and the Old Testament: some sort of Gothic logic, or maybe he just liked the way it rolled off the tongue?

His story didn’t end there. The coroner had bungled and the corpse he described as Daniel Abrey was someone else, a shorter man with different bodily features. A dark serendipity.