If you’re a fan of gothic literature, horror movies or real-life disinterments, you’ll know that attempts to exhume the dead rarely end well. Think of Dr Victor Frankenstein, the hero of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, who sought scientific immortality by cobbling together the body parts of various deceased people and endowing the resulting creature with life. This vile, biological conglomeration ends up wreaking havoc and vengeance upon nearly everyone it encounters.

Or consider the cautionary tale of Louis Creed – another doctor – in Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary. His judgement distorted by grief, the doctor takes the corpse of his toddler son, who was killed in a road accident, to an ancient Native American burial ground. In most graveyards the dead are content to rest for eternity. But this place has the macabre property of being able to reanimate the deceased. Dr Creed’s little boy comes back to life, but not in the way he ever expected or wanted; the grieving father soon rues this foolish decision and bitterly regrets not having left the child’s body to rot in peace.

History is also littered with ghastly acts of disinterment for weird reasons. In the 17th century, Charles II of England had the corpse of Oliver Cromwell exhumed, only to have it beheaded and posthumously executed; that sounds like an oxymoron, but look up ‘posthumous execution’ on Wikipedia to verify that this was (and perhaps still is, in some parts of the world) a real and puzzlingly odd practice. It’s difficult to argue that Cromwell suffered in this bizarre piece of political theatre, given that he was already dead, but his reputation at the time no doubt took a blow.

In more recent times there is the so-called curse of the pharaohs that is said by many to have caused the untimely deaths of several people associated with Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the 3,300-year-old pharaoh.

Bearing absolutely none of these salutary tales in mind, at the end of 2019 I impetuously decided to do a bit of disinterment of my own. But before you flinch and picture me at Sydney’s Rookwood Necropolis at 3.00am, furtively peering around the cracked headstones all tilted askew, I should point out that my act of exhumation was figurative, not literal.

I had decided to dig up, so to speak, a former colleague who I will call Jake. I remembered Jake as a funny, self-deprecating guy, who gently made fun of other colleagues who took themselves a little too seriously. Unlike so many Aussie blokes, he was not a brash self-aggrandiser, and I liked that about him. I had lost contact with him, but I often wondered what he was up to. The only thing I remembered about his contact details was his email address. So one day, out of idle curiosity, I emailed him to see what the intervening years had brought into his life – if, indeed, he was still alive.

A few days later I checked my email – still no response from him. Maybe he was dead. But after about a week I saw a reply in my inbox.

Yes, he was doing OK, although he was now unemployed and had been for some time. He’d studied for several years at a university in Western Australia, then completed another course at a regional university in NSW. I suggested that we might get together and meet somewhere and talk about old times. I wrote that anywhere was fine with me. He offered to meet me at a restaurant or café in the suburb where I live, but I have a cardinal rule when meeting with friends and acquaintances: I never meet anyone in a restaurant or café in my own suburb. This rule is the antithesis of those that guide many parochial Sydney residents, who never want to venture beyond the boundaries of their own suburb or its environs. My suburb is amply stocked with eateries, but the thought of going to any of them fills me with a sense of dreariness and boredom. If I’m going to meet someone, I want to get out of my stultifyingly familiar surroundings and experience another part of Sydney, regardless of how far-flung it might be. Parramatta? Easy. I’ll ride my bicycle there and listen to a podcast in one ear as I pedal. Liverpool? No problem – I’ll take the train, and read a book en route.

I suggested that we meet at a Lebanese restaurant in Bankstown. A friend of mine with Lebanese heritage had suggested a good place to me. Jake agreed to this suggestion, but we arranged to first meet at Central Station, from where we would take the train out to Bankstown.

My first inkling that something was odd occurred when he texted me at least two times – maybe three – over the course of several days to check that I was going to be there at the agreed time and place. Yes, I wrote back – with an escalating sense of irritation, as I realised that my first assurance had proved insufficient. That sounded like the reflexes of someone who had made numerous arrangements to meet people in the past that too often had ended with no-shows; had he been stood up by prospective Tinder dates?

He probably never intended for me to know this, but his behaviour tacitly screamed out a message that he had been repeatedly disappointed in social interactions, whether with friends or with prospective romantic partners. Why else would anyone bother to repeatedly check that you’re going to show up?

He also told me to be prepared for a shock, because he had become morbidly obese. I thought this claim might be a joke, but what if it weren’t? It was the kind of joke I might have told if he hadn’t used it first, but I decided to play it safe. I wrote back: “Never mind the obesity. It’ll be good to see you.”

When I saw him opposite the timetable boards on Central Station’s Grand Concourse, I saw no signs of obesity; he had retained at least some of his sense of humour. As the train trundled to Bankstown we discussed former colleagues. Three of them had died: one, a middle-aged woman who was a heavy smoker and enthusiastic boozer, had succumbed to cancer. The second, a 20-something snowboarder, had frozen to death along with several of his mates in a blizzard in NSW’s snow country. And a third, whose facial features always seemed to be dragged downwards by a lugubrious sense of the pointlessness of life, had killed herself.

It took me a while, once we got to Bankstown, to get my bearings. I had forgotten that one of the things I intensely disliked about Bankstown train station and its environs was the seemingly endless sprawl of concrete, asphalt and paving. There was hardly a neglected sapling or a wilted cluster of sad flowers to break the monotony. The summer glare bounced off the man-made surfaces with pitiless intensity.

With my phone map in hand, I navigated us toward what I thought was the Lebanese restaurant recommended by my friend. But a phone conversation a few days later with him revealed that we were hopelessly off the mark. We ended up in a place that was ostensibly Lebanese, but which appeared to be run by Indians. Call me a stickler for cultural authenticity, but I would have felt more comfortable seeing Lebanese people running a Lebanese restaurant. Whenever I saw one of the restaurant staff out of the corner of my eye, I almost expected that a tray of samosas or gulab jamun would land on our table – which would have been preferable, given the dismal, desiccated offerings that we ended up with.

The first sign that the meeting was a mistake probably occurred when I realised that Jake had interrupted me for about the fifth time as I was talking. I also noticed that he wasn’t asking me many questions about what I’d been up to. Like most people, I resent being interrupted when speaking, and my usual response is not to compete but to instantly and conspicuously go silent, in an attempt to highlight the rudeness. But Jake just blithely blathered on, oblivious to how many times he had talked over the top of my words.

I had forgotten how self-absorbed Jake was. Only his good points had remained in my obviously unreliable memory when I decided to contact him. I was living out the banal truth of the maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Not to mention more forgetful. No wonder he hadn’t had much luck on Tinder – if he had tried that or similar dating services. Social success can be an elusive art to master, but most of us realise, without having to be tutored, that one of its basic principles – whether with a prospective romantic partner, a friend or someone you’ve just met – is showing a significant amount of interest in the other person.

We agreed that the food was dry and lacklustre, as if it had been reheated too many times. When we left the restaurant we wandered the streets of Bankstown for half an hour. I had remembered it as a hub of the Arabic community, but now it seemed to be predominantly Asian.

I love making excursions to Western Sydney; I live in Sydney’s north, where most people are shamefully parochial, hardly ever venturing outside the northern or eastern suburbs. But my walk around the streets of Bankstown with Jake now irritated me. He blathered on, in his self-absorbed world of complaints about various ethnic groups: the young Brazilians who flocked to his beachside suburb, the Islanders who frequented his once favourite pubs, and several other ethnic groups that he claimed were making life unpleasant for him.

When someone targets so many different sectors of society with such a bile-filled spray, I knew it was only a matter of time until I became an object of his criticism. He ascribed his inability to find work to the fact that he had not gone to a private school. “You probably went to a private school,” he said with a forced laugh and a hint of a sneer.

“What about all the successful people in Australia who didn’t go to private schools?” I said. “Like Scott Morrison or Michael Kirby? Or social commentator Jane Caro, who is a fervent advocate of public education?” Or John Howard or Paul Keating? Or Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd? Going to a government school is not an obstacle to career success.”

These examples refuted his claim. But I knew he wasn’t happy with what I had said. I had kicked out one of the props that supported his view of the world as an unfair place over which he had no control, and which directed all the good things of life to the lucky and undeserving. He would now have to work a bit harder to find other explanations for his lack of success.

I’m not saying that there hadn’t necessarily been powerful factors at work in his life over which he had little control and which shaped his current worldview. He saw himself as a passive recipient of bad luck instead of an agent of change. But his current outlook on life was warped and not serving him well, embittering him and foreclosing the possibility of his succeeding at anything. It was consigning him to a life of inaction from which there could be no escape. I had forgotten his frequent snide gripes about anyone who was successful, but all these unappealing aspects of his personality now came back to me. My unreliable memory had selectively erased them over the intervening years. I remembered only the sense of humour – and none of whatever it was that had made him bitter, passive and lacking in hope.

I asked him about the books he had been reading lately. He laughed. He said something about a musician’s biography; it was either a book about Lemmy from Motörhead or the Sid Vicious–Nancy Spungen story – I can’t remember which. That embarrassed laugh told me he wasn’t a regular reader, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that – not everyone is interested in reading. But I remembered him as being interested in ideas. Now he had almost nothing of interest to say.

We exchanged text messages over the months that followed, but I became decreasingly enthusiastic about responding to them. He did make some valid points, though, such as how universities had become corrupted in recent years by their shameless grab for cash from overseas students.

But the lowest point came when he asked me about how much money I had. I knew, from his previous text-message gripes about money and people having what he considers to be too much of it, that he was obsessed with the topic. I often like to see people transgress moribund social conventions and ask questions that other people are too afraid to ask; but this question, although transgressive, was boring. And however you answer it, you’re going to lose. If you say that you have a huge amount of money, you will be despised and become the object of jealousy. If you reveal that you have an amount of money that seems too paltry, you’ll also be despised, but for different reasons; you’ll be considered a slacker or a spendthrift or undisciplined – or all of those.

Jake told me he had $900 in his bank account. He expected me to be similarly forthcoming. “Do I have to tell you?” I wrote. I had no intention of ever telling him, but I was curious to get his response.

“Yes,” he replied. “I told you how much money I have.”                 

I wrote back to him: “I don’t feel like telling you how much money I have.” That ruled a line under the discussion. He asked me no more questions about money.

We exchanged a few more text messages but, thankfully, they soon dwindled to nothing. I haven’t heard from him now for several months.

I don’t know enough about the horror genre to be sure if it’s possible to return a reanimated corpse to its original quiescent state, but I guess that this was as close as I was going to get to that experience. I certainly didn’t want to see Jake prematurely consigned to the hereafter, but I regretted contacting him; my curiosity and selective memory had made me forget all of his unappealing qualities.

The words of Jud Crandall, the neighbour in Pet Sematary who introduces Dr Creed to the ghastly burial ground, rang in my ears: “Sometimes, dead is better.”  TG