Jammy Dodger (10 page)

Suppressing the urge to spring to my feet and attempt a triple salco with full twist, I put on my best we've-all-been-there expression and gazed soulfully into the middle distance – picture-book greens and blues – where some teenage Goths were shuffling around, baffled by the sunshine.

‘Listen,' I said, after sufficient silence had elapsed. ‘I was thinking, if you need cheering up some friends of mine are having a happening on Saturday night – if you're not doing anything else.'

‘Nothing major, but … they're having a what?'

‘A happening.'

‘A
happening
?'

‘Yeah, you know, a happening.'

She stared at me.

‘Do you mean a party?'

‘Yes.'

I could see doubt in her eyes. Mick and his bloody happenings.

‘Well, I'm actually supposed to be going out with a friend …'

‘Bring her. Him.'

‘Her. I suppose I could …'

We were back on track …

‘Should be a good party …'

‘Well …'

Nearly there …

‘Do you good to get out …'

‘Well … Okay, you're right. Why not?'

Success.

We arranged to meet for a drink beforehand in Betjeman's.

 

*

 

Over lunch I listened to
I'm Sorry, I'm Cleverer Than You
on Radio 4, then pulled down
The Complete Poems
of Emily Dickinson (
For love is immortality
) and hit the sofa. Unfortunately, The Actor was in residence above and just as I opened the book he embarked on his dreaded vocal exercises – muffled but infuriatingly audible: ‘Maaaaa … Mayyyyyy … Meeeeeee … Mowwww … Moooooo … Blue black bugs' blood … Blue black bugs' blood … Lovely lemon liniment … Lovely lemon liniment …' Every few minutes there would be a pause followed by a shouted ‘HA!' from the depths of his diaphragm as though he were trying to expel a hair-ball, and then the declaiming would begin again. ‘He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts … Eleven benevolent elephants … Eleven …' Past experience told me this could go on for ages so I sauntered up the street to the office. In the fridge I located some usable milk and settled down with a cup of tea to triage the post. Without Oliver's expansive (and expanding) presence, I have to say, the place was oddly quiet.

I found myself replaying the events of that stormy Monday. Did it really happen? Did Mad Dog really walk in out of the rain and hijack three lives? There were few signs of it now, except for a chair facing the wrong way and some duct tape on the door, holding the lock on.

The roll of tape was lying on the floor and as I replaced it in one of the drawers on Oliver's side I noticed an unfamiliar black ledger. Curious, I hauled it out and riffled through. It contained miscellaneous jottings in Oliver's distinctive scrawl, many of the pages stained with tea or chocolate or both. It wasn't marked Private so I started reading.

Much of the first half was taken up by fake signature practice, complete with experimental dedications, for example: ‘
What ho! Pelly (P.G.) Wodehouse
', ‘
Keep kicking the pricks, Sam (Beckett)
', ‘
From one super woman to another, Shirley Conron
', (sic), ‘
From one super man to another, Geordie Shaw
', ‘
Hope the op goes well, best wishes, Mary Shelley
'. The quality was up and down but it was good to see he was taking our cottage industry seriously.

Further on he'd turned his attention to honing a slogan for the Sunnyland Farm Bunny prize (I wondered, not for the first time, what on earth rabbits had to do with dairy products) and this was where the real work began. ‘Complete the following in no more than 20 words,' he had written at the top of the page.
The Sunnyland Farm Bunny would like to go round the world because …
And his first effort was: ‘
he wants to spread the word about his dairy treats'
. Presumably this was a butter reference. It wasn't bad, but by no stretch of the imagination was it a winner. Worryingly, he appeared to have stalled immediately because next he had scribbled: ‘
cheese milk cream udders pasteurise churn spread shake drink squirt breasts pudding teats icecream goodness
'.

The next six lines were all scratched out, then inspiration had returned: ‘
because it's always pouring at home
'. And again: ‘
because everyone should have icecream from a bunny when it's sunny
'. The line below had been crossed out, but read: ‘
he's full of the milk of human kindness
'. Hmm. There followed a further three pages of slashed, blacked-out and otherwise redacted text worthy of Laurence Sterne. Multiple indentations suggested frenzied stabbings with a biro. I wouldn't have been surprised at this point to come across an interlude of five thousand lines of calligraphically perfect, ‘
All work and no play makes Oliver a dull boy
'.

I skipped ahead to the last page that had writing on it. Here it became clear that frustration and self-pity had finally engulfed him. ‘
The Sunnyland Bunny would like to … because back at the farm the shite is past-your-eyes
'. Eh? And: ‘
Because he's a randy rabbit and he's run out of tail at home?
' Uh-oh. ‘
He wants everyone to try his cream?
'. Oh dear. Oliver, no. ‘
He wants to cream on foreigners
'. Oliver, for Godsake.

I went back to sorting the post. Another invoice from the printers, with a little note this time about it being the
third
request for payment. I wasn't sure I cared for their tone. The next envelope had American stamps on it and contained yet another broadside from a frustrated contributor griping that we hadn't responded to the poems he'd sent
fifteen
months ago.
Is this any way to run a
blah … What was this? Another demand. From the British Library's deposit office insisting we send copies of previous issues. A reminder of our
legal obligation
. I lit a cigarette and sat back. It was true, everybody wanted their spoonful.

A clock somewhere was striking the hour. I switched on the radio. ‘… a sixty-year-old woman and a twenty-four-year-old man were killed on the Falls Road earlier today by an IRA bomb intended for a British army patrol …' I hoisted my feet onto the desk and practised blowing smoke rings. Through the skylight I could see where two jet vapour trails had intersected and were decaying in slow motion, and for a second I had the sensation it was me that was drifting sideways. The last item on the news was about a farmer who had rescued one of his sheep from a slurry pit and brought it back to life by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ‘I didn't think about it, I didn't have time,' he told the interviewer. ‘I just grabbed her by the ears and did what I had to do.' Though evidently a man of few words he divined, correctly, his audience's need for a tagline and added that his wee sheep had ‘had the heart of a lion'. Cut and print! Pure poetry. I stubbed out my smoke. Hope he remembered to clean his teeth. I wondered what it would be like to kiss a sheep. Quite nice probably. Soft lips.

Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove / That hills and valleys, dale and field, / And all the craggy mountains yield
 …

For some reason these couplets were drifting through my head as I walked, and I was thinking, he certainly promised a lot in that poem, old Marlowe's shepherd:
melodious birds, fragrant posies, pretty lambs, silver dishes, dancing swains,
and – what has to be the clincher –
fair lined slippers
. The question for the object of his affections I suppose was,
pro tanto quid retribuamus?
This was not a love poem (no wedding rings on the table) – it was a
lust
poem. And that got me thinking about love/lust poetry in general.

There were all the flowery ones, needless to say, and I'd used my fair share of Keats & Co. to advantage over the years but, increasingly,
succinct
was the way ahead for me. (It's what's left unsaid that breaks the heart.) Love, like happiness, it seems, is in sharpest focus when half-glimpsed – in margins and interstices – lending itself to the subordinate clause, the short lyric, the apercu.
On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes
. Hard to beat that one (verging on zen archery). Who else? Shakespeare's sonnets? Rilke? Whitman? Gravesie, of course, lord of the love lyric:
Love is universal migraine, / A bright stain on the vision / Blotting out reason
. And the other symptoms? Leanness, jealousy, laggard dawns, omens and nightmares. All very familiar.
Could you endure such pain / At any hand but hers?
These are the questions.

And the sexy stuff … who were we talking about? That saucy one,
Come Slowly, Eden
, by Emily Dickinson with
the fainting bee / reaching late his flower …
How did it go?
Round her chamber hums / Counts his nectars – alights / And is lost in balms!
Oh Emily! And let's not forget Mr Cummings (you couldn't make it up) and his
i like my body when it is with your body.
Very hard to recall, old E.E. How does he put it?
i like kissing this and that of you …
blah, blah, something about
slowly stroking the shocking fuzz / of your electric fur …
Can't remember the next bit either, goes on about eyes being
big love-crumbs,
and then
the thrill / of under me you so quite new
. Phew. Warm today. I looked up. Trickles of smoke on the hillside. Gorse fires.

I was passing a delicatessen where racks of fruit and vegetables had been stacked on the pavement under a striped awning and sprayed with water. It was fresh and cool under there. Oxygen-rich. I paused to survey the produce, inhaling the earthy scents. I was thirsty so I bought a nectarine to eat on the way. Not counting a strawberry milkshake at Oliver's it was the first fruit I'd had in a fortnight.

Now, where was I? Ah yes, love poems. I briefly wondered whether I was cynically trawling my archives for something that might be useful with Rosie at a later date, but discarded the notion. She
was
nice though, and the first woman I had found myself thinking about on waking for a long while – usually a reliable indicator.

 

I had reached the mouth of ‘Loyalist Sandy Row' and as I passed across it I could see, further down, men up a ladder busy with decorations to mark the Twelfth of July. The street was already criss-crossed at lamp-post level with lines of red-white-and-blue bunting, looping like an outsized cat's cradle. Strings of dragons' teeth. In the distance, above a clutter of rooftops, a sloping patch of Black Mountain undulated behind a slight heat haze.

So, the Twelfth was nearly upon us once again. Somehow, it had slipped my mind but now I realised why the city seemed quiet: the annual middle-class migration, The Great Escape. In a few days the place would be teeming with banners, pennants and gaudy silks, and the air itself would be shuddering under the onslaught of the mighty Lambeg drum (at 120 decibels, they say, the loudest acoustic instrument on Earth). I remember as a child being taken by my spectacle-loving aunt one Twelfth to ‘see the bands' and having to be delivered home early wrapped in a blanket because of the noise of those drums. Always a street away, always approaching … Moving through the city like … like what? … like the id monster in
Forbidden Planet
.

I could see the ladder men unfurling a banner: King Billy on his horse at the River Boyne, framed in dazzling orange. He wore a long black curly wig, a frilly shirt, and a tangerine tunic. His white steed, which appeared to be prancing on water, had a look of the nursery rhyme about it. I moved on towards Shaftesbury Square. Didn't Van Gogh consider orange to be the colour of madness? I traversed the Square and entered Dublin Road on course for the headquarters of the BBC, where, thanks to Stanford Winks, I was due on air within the hour.

In the office earlier in the week the phone had rung – a rare occurrence – making me jump. It was Winks, sounding slightly less feeble than he had the last time.

‘Artie, here's the thing,' he said after thirty seconds of niceties. ‘Radio Ulster have asked me to go on their arts programme to discuss Dylan Delaney's book but I'm really not feeling up to it. I said you'd take my place.'

‘What?'

‘It would be a personal favour to me.'

‘But Stanford – '

‘And I also think it would be an excellent opportunity to promote
Lyre
.'

‘Yes, but …' To be honest, I wasn't exactly sure why I was resisting.

‘And there's a fee of fifty pounds.'

‘You're right,' I said. ‘It'll be a good profile-raiser for the magazine.'

As he seemed to be in better form I asked him about Mad Dog's play.

‘Artie,' he whispered. ‘It's an abomination of the first kidney.'

‘It's disappointing then?'

‘What can I tell you? It's the work of an evil, irredeemably twisted mind.'

‘That bad?'

‘Artie, it has taken me a full week of twelve-hour days to translate it into recognisable English. My eyesight has been impaired.'

I gathered the play was entitled
Suspicious Minds
and that it told the story of a Belfast hard man tormented by the belief that his wife was helping the other side and even planning to change her religion.

At this point Winks faltered.

‘… And?' I prompted.

‘And so he kneecaps her.'

‘What?' (I had a sudden headache.)

‘Yes, but then it turns out she was innocent all along.'

I massaged my skull.

‘What happens now?' I asked.

‘I've handed it over to Tristan Quigley at Lagan and told him to get cracking.'