Jammy Dodger (28 page)

Oliver, already in a state of near paralysis, was distraught. I tried to lighten the mood.

‘You know Oliver, it's true, he really does look like a mongoose.'

‘
What?
'

‘His face. It's kind of ferretty.'

Oliver stared at me tearily.

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Niblock. He has a weaselly demeanour.'

‘For Godsake Artie, don't you get it? He knows everything! I'm fucken dead!'

I feared he was right but I didn't know how to respond. The way I saw it, we were both finished. The hall was in uproar now. If only I could wake up and find this had all been a bad dream … just a bad dream … like in a film …

But wait a minute, it
was
a dream! Because there, at the door, was a giant white rabbit! Or was my fever worse than I thought, and now I was hallucinating on top of everything else?

‘What the fuck am I going to do?' Oliver sobbed, sitting down on the side of the stage and putting his head in his hands.

The giant white rabbit was conferring with a Marceau. Christ, I was seeing a woman in a red bikini now as well! The Marceau did an elaborate pointing mime in our direction and the rabbit and the woman approached.

‘Are you Oliver Sweeney?' the creature enquired, its whiskers twitching.

Oliver looked up with his scorched, tear-stained, lizard-skin face and both he and the rabbit recoiled simultaneously. A moment passed before Oliver was able to venture a hesitant affirmative.

‘Thank God, I thought I might be too late,' the bunny said, beckoning to a man with a camera who was standing at the door. ‘Your friend wasn't very clear about timing when I rang your office earlier.'

The photographer arrived, cocking his camera.

‘Oliver, it gives me very great pleasure,' the rabbit said, producing a glittering gold envelope. ‘As chairman of Sunnyland Farm Dairies, to inform you that you are the winner of our slogan competition and to present you with this ticket for a year's unlimited round-the-world travel.'

Oliver climbed uncertainly to his feet. The entrance of the outsize coney and its half-naked companion had drawn a deep semi-circle of spectators. Oliver's mouth was hanging open and his eyes were glazed. The rabbit grasped his hand and the swimsuit model put her arm (with some trepidation, it has to be said, given his appearance) around his shoulder. The photographer bobbed and weaved, his shutter snapping. A round of applause broke out. The rabbit pushed the top of its costume back to reveal the head of a balding, jovial man. Another glamour girl materialised and made Oliver hold up a placard featuring a stylised bunny wielding a butter knife above the legend:
Spreading The Word About His Dairy Treats!
The camera flashed and chattered. The clapping intensified.

Taking advantage of the distraction, I began to edge out through the throng. Fighting his way in the opposite direction was Fenton, a deck of Sizzlemaster vouchers in his fist. ‘Those girls could do with a bit of colour on them, whaddya think,' he grinned as we drew level. My parents loomed and I adjusted my trajectory (I couldn't face my father), and was immediately forced to swerve again to avoid an angry, ink-smeared Grainne McCumhaill. I squeezed past a swaying Frosty-Wash. Agog at the sight of the bikinis, he was attempting a four-fingered wolf whistle but only succeeding in making himself retch. Suppressing a bad memory, I pushed on through the never-ending mesh of bodies until, at last, with a final wriggle, I was free. A quick recce: no sign of The Hawk and the nearest exit was clear. I started forward and then stopped. There, perched on the book table at the back of the hall, swinging her legs, was Rosie. Our eyes met. She smiled. I smiled back. She jumped down and came towards me, wagging a copy of
Twenty Poems
.

‘You do know,' she said. ‘There are only nineteen?'

In the background I heard Frosty-Wash go to work; the first shouts of bystander panic. I took Rosie by the hand.

Let's get out of here,' I said.

So, there you have it. That's the way it was for me at the tail-end of the twentieth century's ninth decade, a time before the Internet and iPhones and email, and instantaneous mass media; when people still went to the bank to get their cash, and suitcases had to be carried rather than trundled noisily on wheels, in formation, four abreast. It was the year before the abandonment of the Cold War and the collapse of Europe's remaining communist regimes; the last months of complacency before the fall of the Berlin Wall revealed the true horror of the East German mullet. It was an era of headbands and shoulder pads and sports jackets with their sleeves rolled up, and – perhaps in itself an ironic indicator of the triumph of capitalism –
pinstripe
jeans.

What was it like to be young then? The same as it always is: exciting and confusing in equal measure. Although, we weren't
so
young. Signs that the years were elapsing were already apparent, even then. You know yourself, one day you realise you're holding your coat when you run (for a bus, say), that one or other of your nostrils is always blocked (try it now), that you've developed an interest in nightwear, that you've identified a favourite chair. Or that you've started reading books about the decisive battles of the Second World War. Another twenty years or so and you'll find yourself yearning for a life where everything is reduced to the barest essentials: Today is: Tuesday; The weather is: Rainy; The next meal is: Dinner.

 

When exactly do our lives turn from poetry into prose?

 

For me, it was the Dunseverick debacle. I may have skipped out the door pretty smartly with young Rosie McCann that snowy night but I couldn't outrun the consequences of my actions. There was hell to pay. Not to mention the money: six months' worth of grant-aid, rent, expenses, and printers' fees, as well as Pixie's wine and canapes tab and – thanks to Frosty-Wash – the (astonishing) cost of repairing the floor in the Great Hall. My father, bless him, took the immediate heat out of the situation with a large cheque, but only on the understanding that I work off every last penny in
Knicks ‘n' Knacks
, an undertaking that consumed my Mondays and Saturdays for a whole year and provided more than enough time, believe me, to consider the error of my ways. Watching Fenton's smirking face float past the window each day on his way from parking his Mercedes was punishment in itself.

Needless to say, I was blacklisted by the Arts Council. According to Stanford Winks, The Hawk was incandescent when he ascertained the true extent of the deception, retreating to his top-floor eyrie and refusing to speak to anyone for an entire week. Winks himself was much more philosophical about the whole affair, and actually talked his boss out of pressing criminal charges. Obviously, what hurt The Hawk most was the sucker-punch to his poetic judgment, and I felt bad about that, but let's face it, the words were there in plain sight, and he liked what he saw. Speaking of which, the Council chiefs tried to hoover up and pulp the entire print-run of
Twenty Poems
but a few escaped: I saw a copy for sale on eBay just last week (it was going cheap, though, which suggests it may have been a fake).

My partner in crime, meanwhile, hopped on the next available plane to London before catching an onward flight to Tibet on the first leg of his world tour. He may have been well out of it, but his paranoia travelled with him; unsurprisingly really, given that in addition to the wrath of The Hawk he had Niblock to worry about, and The Mongoose – subsequently promoted to the rank of chief superintendent – was definitely not someone you would choose to have in your life. Occasionally I would receive a postcard from some far-flung location, each time signed with a different name: Kesh Clogherbog, Clabby Madden, Shrigley Macosquin. I missed him, and this was made worse, somehow, by the celebratory photo of his nuked and ink-smudged face on the side of the Sunnyland Farm milk carton every morning at breakfast. After trying his hand at a number of different professions in a variety of countries he eventually settled in New Zealand, where he runs a sheep ranch near a place called Wanganui. I wonder has he ever given a sheep the kiss of life?

Mad Dog, it gives me no great pleasure to report, was unable to keep his temper in check and went back to the slammer for an extended stay. He continued with his ‘writing', but was unable to recreate the success of his debut. The last I heard, he was studying for a Phd in theology through the Open University. The text of
Suspicious Minds
was itself incorporated into the schools English syllabus some years ago, its profanities a source of much sniggering for students. Tristan Quigley, meanwhile, got off with a caution on the aiding and abetting charge but never really recovered from the humiliation of his public manhandling by Niblock's crew. He later left the theatre to set up his own broadcast production company, Metaphor Media, best known for the long-running soap opera
Where's The Vicar's Trousers?

Who else? Dylan Delaney was picked up by Faber & Faber. It turns out there
was
a scout at the launch that night. He now holds the Humbert P. Frotter Quality Plastic Extrusions Chair of Creative Writing at Hershey Academy, an exclusive, all-female college in Screamersville, Virginia. Enough said. The artists? Following an ideological schism (Mick's neo-brutalist radicalism versus Devine's crypto-nihilist hedonism), the Collective imploded and they all went their separate ways. But not before a final, apocalyptic ‘happening' at which Marty Pollocks cut off part of his own ear and glued it to a canvas entitled
Homage to Vincent
, and Devine and Mumbles were married by a ‘priest' in a lobster suit.

Monroe and Trench, I'm glad to say, are still together and living in a whitewashed cottage in the Antrim Glens – not far from where I am now, in fact – where they preside over a thriving vegetarian cookery school. Both of them were paid off during one of the education sector purges (‘rationalisations') of the 1990s, and though bitter at first, they soon came to see it as a lucky break. Monroe has since published a series of books on a variety of topics, including one on how to make your own wine from unlikely household ingredients, which is widely considered to be the best of its genre.

And William Fisher? I never saw him again. After a month or so of unpaid rent the landlord dumped the contents of his flat on the pavement (I retrieved most of the books and, for old times' sake, his wig tree) and re-advertised. Strangely, once they had stopped, I found myself still listening for the daily vocal exercises from above: they had been comforting in a shipping forecast kind of way. Setting aside the possibility that The Hawk murdered him and stashed the body, I can only assume the actor struck out for one of the bigger, busier crucibles of dramatic endeavour, London say, or New York, somewhere he could start afresh, perhaps under a new name. That would explain why he never shows up in any credits. I still watch out for him though, especially in period dramas where there's plenty of beard action, hoping to detect even a hint of that tell-tale twitch.

There's something I forgot to say about back then, something it's taken me a long time to work out (I'm still not sure I've fully grasped it), and it has to do with the -ologies and -isms we latch onto when we're young and impatient to assume the world. Gradually, I came to understand that
everyone
in Northern Ireland had their own dogmas and doctrines, some of them more extreme than others. At times, even the ‘niceness' of people in those days seemed more like the adoption of a position, unconscious or otherwise, against the horror in our midst. My own belief system, Poetry, was just another creed among many. It was a choice born of privilege, no doubt – by which I mean just being middle class – and one that insulated me from certain truths, as well as leading to dubious moral decisions that were ultimately my undoing, but (and this is important) no one else was hurt as a result. Not really. No one ended up dead. And maybe it was always going to take something like the episode with Dunseverick to wake me up, to prise me out of the Faraday cage in which I was sheltering. I once heard it suggested that disillusionment is a necessary prerequisite for a realistic happiness. I didn't think much of it at the time but I see some wisdom in it now.

Perhaps old Larkin was right after all.
What will survive of us is love
. As I've been sitting here, pretending to work through one of the files that take up most of the back seat, the afternoon has dwindled and a wind has started to buffet the car. The tiny lights of the Rathlin ferry are moving across the sound towards the island where (they say) Robert the Bruce, shivering in his damp cave, drew inspiration from the indefatigable spider. The sea is almost black, the scurrying white cataracts on its surface almost luminous. I start the engine, activate the heater. A sudden spatter of cold rain hits the window. I picture the scene back at home: the steamy warmth of the kitchen, my children coming in from school, dumping bags of damp sports gear, making for the fridge. And Rosie, at the table, reading or decoding a crossword, her face as she turns to me smiling, her eyes as they were all those years ago, as they'll always be: a blaze of blue-green.

Thanks are due to Eve Patten, Hugo Hamilton, Mary Rose Doorley, Julie McDonald, Gerald Dawe, my parents Maureen and John, and my brother Nolan for reading early drafts; to Moira Forsyth at Sandstone Press for responding so swiftly and warmly; to George Lucas for his help, and to Euan Thorneycroft at AM Heath for his advice and encouragement. And, of course, eternal gratitude to my children Milo and Esme for occasionally allowing me to use the computer.

I'd also like to thank my friend Patrick Ramsey who shared in so many adventures of the mid-1980s, some much stranger than the ones in this book.

The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from the following: