The Wrong Teletubby

Richard’s son stopped speaking to him a week after he died.

He had got into the habit of logging in to Facebook first thing every morning, when the weight of what had happened made it difficult to do anything, just to see once more the last thing his son would ever say to him.

Luke Davies cant wait to hit the surf this w/e!!!!!

23 October 2010 at 23:08

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And then, on the day of Luke’s funeral, after Richard stood and watched his child disappear impossibly into the ground, he got home and fired up the computer only to find he had taken his final message with him. Luke’s face was still there, grinning out of some overcrowded freshers’ week bar crawl, complete with the remnants of his gap-year tan and the wispy beginnings of a goatee beard Richard had never got to see in real life. And his name was still there, and the photos he was tagged in that had become so familiar, and the news that he had changed his location to Loughborough and become a member of Loughborough University and the Department of Modern Languages and the Athletics Soc and the Indie Soc and the Windsurfing Soc, and he was attending Fresh ’n’ Wild at the Union and the Poly Bop in the Cellar Bar and was now friends with dozens of people Richard had never heard of. And there was even a message from the very same day from someone called Hal Barnett asking ifNE1 got spare car space down to Plym on sat??????, but his status update was gone. Kaput. Disappeared. His son had gone silent.

Richard supposed they just cleared themselves after a while. Now he thought about it, he had put one up when he first joined –Richard Davies is not sure about this newfangled technology! or some such – and that wasn’t there any more, even though he didn’t remember deleting it. He only had a handful of friends – he’d only really joined the thing because Luke had said it would be a good way for them to keep in touch after he went to uni – and most of them never bothered to update their status things either, apart from Bob at work who seemed to put some rubbish about what he was eating or doing or watching on telly every couple of hours, till Richard had even thought about deleting him as a friend except he knew he would notice.

He sat staring at the computer screen for so long that the white light that bleached his face dropped to a dull grey and then switched itself off completely, and he became aware of the shadows and the cold around him and the fact that he hadn’t switched on a single light in the house, let alone the central heating. He twitched the mouse to bring the computer back to life, and accidentally managed to click on one of the links in front of him on Luke’s page: the Windsurfing Soc.

And he was so glad he had. The first thing he saw beneath the logo was a message from someone called Alistair Thorne. He remembered an Alistair from the funeral: a nice lad, he had come over to talk to him and Luke’s mother specially.

As many of you know, the society suffered a terrible loss last weekend when Luke Davies, one of our newest members, drowned in a freak accident at theBUCS event in Plymouth. I know all members will join me in passing on the society’s deepest condolences to his friends and family.

A party from the university will be attending his funeral in Guildford this Saturday at 3pm; I will be going on behalf of the society. There are still places in the minibus for any of Luke’s friends who would like to attend – contact Dr Buckland for details.

I’ve also startedthistribute page for those who will not be able to attend so they can leave their memories of Luke.

Richard clicked on the link and let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob: here was his son again, in a photo he had not seen before, in his wetsuit, grinning and waving at the camera on a shingle beach with sails in the background. The beard was a lot more impressive. This must have been taken on the day the accident ha