Jammy Dodger (8 page)

‘HEY! FAT BOY! I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT BUT IF YOU DON'T FUCKEN STOP YOU'RE GOING TO GET A SECOND ARSEHOLE.'

Oliver stopped.

The man with the gun contemplated Winks for a moment but detected no possible threat and moved on.

‘Now there's a few things I want to know from you two tossers: firstly, who the fuck d'you think y'are …' He squinted down the barrel of the gun. ‘And secondly, WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO SHITE ON ME LIKE YOU'RE GOD ALMIGHTY?'

‘Pardon?'

‘SHUT UP.'

He helped himself to a biscuit.

‘Fuck me, these are rotten. Have you no fig rolls?'

‘We – '

‘Shut up, Oliver,' I said. ‘ Listen, Mr … um, sorry I don't know your name …'

He took his time chewing a mouthful of biscuit, swallowed and ran his tongue round his gums.

‘They call me Mad Dog.'

Winks whimpered.

‘Mr Mad … Dog. If you'll just tell us how we can help you, maybe we can – '

‘No, no, no, no, no. No …' He shook his head and looked to the heavens. ‘No, no, it's WAAYY too fucken late for that. Way too late. You had your chance. And you fucken blew it.'

He rubbed biscuit crumbs from his moustache, then ruffled his hair, checking its dampness level. The style was what cultural historians would later term ‘the Weeping Willow Mullet': flat on top, with long sideburns and a semi-perm effect at the rear. ‘And yese call yourselves editors.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I'm not sure what – '

‘SHUT UP! What do editors do?'

‘What?'

‘WHAT DO EDITORS DO?'

‘Edit?'

‘They edit. And what does that mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means they find new writing by new writers and they publish it. Isn't that right?'

‘Yes, but – '

‘You couldn't see what was in front of you, could you? You could NOT see what you held in your hand.Why? Because it was different, it was real. It was from
real life
. It wasn't smartypants, it wasn't fancy, it wasn't – ' His features twisted horribly – ‘
nice
.'

He glared at each of us in turn.

‘Mad Dog didn't go to a posh school. He didn't go to bigknob university. And that means he couldn't be in your nice wee fucken magazine, for your nice wee friends to put on their nice wee fucken coffee tables in their NICE WEE FUCKEN HOUSES …'

He was perspiring and a jagged blueish vein had surfaced in the crescent of tiredness beneath his left eye. (It occurred to me on some abstract level that he might have a point, and a quick, hot jolt of ill-defined shame swept through me.)

‘And yese didn't even have the COMMON DECENCY TO REPLY. To put one wee FUCKEN LETTER in the FUCKEN POST!'

He stood up (Winks cowered), set his gun on the desk and removed his jacket. A white cap-sleeved T-shirt revealed extravagant tattoo work, notably: a three-headed hellhound on his right forearm, the ace of spades with a grinning skull at its centre on his left. In gothic script beneath the playing card was
Do'nt forget the joker
. Sound advice. Assorted other creations adorned his heavily-muscled upper arms. (Despite the abject terror I still found myself puzzling over the H-E-A-T on his knuckles. Could it be a phonetic spelling of the Belfast pronunciation of hate?)

‘So you see,' he said, sitting down again. ‘In my world, it's very important that people are nice and polite to each other. It helps keep everybody calm. So, when people are rude, what generally happens is that they get a wee lesson …'

‘Now hold on – ' Oliver tried again.

‘SHUT THE FUCK UP I AM FUCKEN WARNING YOU I AM GOING TO FUCKEN SHOOT SOMEONE.'

A new vein sprang to life in his temple, as though a countdown timer had been triggered. There was froth on his moustache. He continued.

‘… A wee lesson in manners which, in your case, will mean stairs could be a wee problem for yese, if you know what I mean. In fact, yese might want to think about taking an office on the ground floor. I think you'll find that will suit yese better.'

He didn't smile. There was a hint of the whiskey drinker's broken glitter in his eyes.

‘Mr Mad Dog,' I began.

‘HEY … Just Mad Dog, you fucken tube.'

‘Mad Dog, if you'll just listen to me for a minute?'

He paused. Focused his attention on me. Readjusted his grip on the gun.

I took a deep breath.

‘We've had some technical problems here – I won't bore you with the details – but it's resulted in a massive backlog. As you can see – ' I waved at the drumlins of paper around us. ‘We've had a lot of submissions. But the fact is, we had just got to your work and, funny enough, it was due for discussion at today's editorial meeting.'

He leaned forward, his chin jutting.

‘Do you really think,' he said. ‘Mad Dog's head buttons up the back?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘One more fucken lie out of you son and you'll have trouble taking a piss let alone getting up the stairs.'

‘No, I'm serious. We were very impressed – just on a first reading.'

‘YOU ARE ON VERY THIN ICE SONNY JIM. DO NOT BULLSHIT ME OR I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL FUCK YOU UP!'

I had the drowning sensation again.
I can't go on
. How much of this could I get away with? What did it matter? There was no turning back.
I'll go on
.

‘No bullshit. Your stuff was top of our agenda and you were the first in line for a copyright check.'
A copyright check?
This was risky stuff.

‘I'm not going to ask you this again,' He spoke very deliberately. ‘Are you telling me the truth?'

‘Yes I am. But let me just refresh my memory. Oliver, would you fetch Mr – I mean Mad Dog's … material? I think you had it last.'

Oliver, to his eternal credit, took this one squarely on the chin. He rose from his chair like an elderly man recovering from a haemorrhoid procedure and shuffled to the far corner of the room where he began scrabbling at the largest mound of envelopes.

The rest of us were temporarily hypnotised by the sound of rain on glass.

‘Artie, maybe you could give me a hand here?' Oliver queried a few minutes later, his voice reedy, plaintive, as though he were calling across a roaring hillside. ‘The In-pile has got mixed up with the Out-pile again.'

I looked at our captor. He swore and waved me away with his gun.

I got to work on an adjacent stack, opening the envelopes as quickly and as quietly as I could. They all seemed to be from chancers whose work we rejected on a regular basis. Couldn't these people take a hint? In one I discovered another snap from the topless poetess, this time holding a labrador puppy and staring sadly (it could have been reproach) into the lens. One of her hands was encircling the pup's neck. Behind her, on a sofa was a bare-chested man wearing a cowboy hat.

‘This is hopeless,' Oliver whispered. ‘Laughing Boy's going to go to town on us.'

‘Just keep looking, it's here somewhere,' I muttered. I now dimly recalled frisbeeing a wad of hand-written horrors across the room a few months back that could have been by our man.

Back at the table, Mad Dog had zeroed in on Winks: ‘
Stanford?
What kind of nancy-boy fucken name is
that
?'

I started on another pile, a mixture of opened and unopened submissions. (‘
Sirs, Having resumed composing again after a recent breakdown
 …') Oliver was right, this was futile. We were headed for the Ministry of Silly Walks.

‘Arts Council? Really? That's very interesting …' Mad Dog was saying. Good, they were getting on.

I rifled through the next creative slagheap. Despite the terror of our predicament I found myself marvelling again at the number of souls putting pen to paper in a bid to be heard above
the human fracas
. And not for the first time was I unable to decipher the emotion this engendered. As I laboured I was trying to keep half an ear on the conversation developing behind me. Why on earth was Mad Dog suddenly talking about drama?
The people's theatre
? Did I hear that correctly?

Beside me Oliver had ceased ripping manila and was staring at the wall with his hand cupping the side of his face. I heard a sniffle.

‘Oliver, are you … are you
crying?
'

‘What? No! Just … a paper cut.'

‘Pull yourself together man – we've got to … hang on, what's this?'

I had hit paydirt. A clump of crumpled school jotter-style pages with spidery, left-leaning hand-writing. Five poems:
Ballyclava Blues
,
The Dead Wo'nt Leave Me Alone
,
World of Heat
and – on the softer side –
Black & Decker Daydream
and
My Ma
. The spelling was highly unorthodox and they were signed ‘By Mad Dog'.

‘Come on, you fucken balloons, what's keeping yese?'

‘Yep, with you now.'

I took a minute to skim the verses and formulate some vaguely convincing terms of praise – multi-purpose crowd-pleasers like
unashamedly hard-hitting … refreshingly visceral … bold and iconoclastic
and, if it looked like the author's ego could fend off his paranoia,
works of profound genius
. But as I resumed my seat I sensed there had been a change in direction, a mutation of the group dynamic.

‘So you're telling me you have absolute power? You can say yes or no and what you say goes?' Mad Dog was asking.

‘Well, yes I suppose I am,' Winks replied loftily. ‘That is, I mean, between me and my colleagues. That's what we do.'

Mad Dog's blink rate was increasing as he assimilated some kind of possibility.

‘So … if you thought something, let's say for example, a
play
, should be put on by a theatre, then that theatre would
have
to put on that play?'

‘If they wanted to keep their funding coming in, and by extension, their jobs, yes.'

Mad Dog fell silent. Then he began to laugh, a strange, slow, staccato guffaw, as though someone was trying to start a water-logged tractor. I looked at Winks. He was giggling like a schoolgirl. This was grotesque. Winks was showing off to a man who had come to remove our kneecaps.

Oliver and I swapped incredulous glances.

‘Ah Holy God, that's brilliant,' said Mad Dog, swiping a hairy forearm across his damp eyes. ‘That is fucken brilliant.'

What happened next could not have been predicted.

(Mind you, this was not your average Monday morning.)

Mad Dog jumped to his feet and in three swift strides had Winks by the throat and the muzzle of the gun pushed hard into the centre of his forehead.

‘Now you listen to me Mr Fancypants,' he hissed. ‘Do you feel that? DO YOU FEEL THAT? Fucken cold isn't it? Well that's how cold YOU'LL be if you don't do what I fucken tell you.'

He glared sideways at Oliver and me.

‘And don't you two get any ideas, you hear me? Or I'll plug ye.'

Oliver moved his head from side to side. I nodded. Fifty thousand volts wouldn't have produced an idea in either of us. I'm not even sure I was breathing.

Mad Dog turned back to Winks, whose eyes were bulging so much they appeared to be smudging the inside of his glasses.

‘Right you. This is how it's going to be.' His tone was measured, deadly serious. ‘Forget the poetry.
Fuck
the poetry. I have wrote a play. And
you
are going to get it performed. By real actors. At a proper theatre. With all the bells and whistles. Adverts, posters, radio, TV, the lot. And it's going to be good. And it's going to be soon. Very soon. In fact, if this isn't happening by September I will come after you. I will hunt you down and I will make you wish you had never been born. And then I will kill you. Do you understand?'

Winks seemed to be paralysed. Or had he died of fright? With his eyes open?

‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND?'

Winks managed the barest of nods.

‘What's your wife called?'

‘Barney.'

‘I will kill Barney too.'

(Mad Dog's brain took a moment to update its files.)

‘And it goes without saying, if you tell anyone – ANYONE – about what's went on here today I will kill you. And that goes for you two bucketheads as well. If I get so much as a whiff of pig you're dead.'

He released his grip on Winks' neck and stepped back. The gun had imprinted a perfect O on the Arts Council officer's forehead.

‘Are we all crystal here? Everyone on the same page?'

Everyone indicated they were.

‘Excellent!' Mad Dog was pleased. He broke into a little boxer-style dance, hopping on the spot, jabbing at the air.

‘Now Stanford, me and you are going to take a wee trip to my house where I will make us a nice wee cup of tea and we can have a wee run through my play.'

Winks, it was safe to say, was no longer within his corporeal housing. He was somewhere far away in space and time. Somewhere safe and warm. With the finest soft furnishings.

His vacated body rose now and moved like the Undead to the door, where it stood awaiting fresh instructions. Mad Dog, meanwhile, had tucked his pistol into his waistband and was pulling his jacket on.

‘You boys be good now, don't do anything silly,' he warned. ‘I'm looking forward to your next magazine.'

With that, the man with the gun took the man from the Arts Council by the elbow and guided him towards the stairs, tugging the splintered door to behind him.

 

*

 

After the others had gone, Oliver and I sat without speaking for a long time. The rain petered out and the sun began to break through the clouds, spilling light across one half of the room. Water from a gutter ticked on the windowsill. In the street a line of traffic had come to a halt, someone's radio up loud – muffled horns, Natalie Cole singing about a pink Cadillac. High overhead, a helicopter pinned to the sky over the Holy Land was droning like a dentist's drill. Quotidien sounds. Diurnal certainties.