Life Goes On (20 page)

I tied him to the post of a litter bin while I walked up and down. All I lacked was Napoleon's hat and Caesar's sword. Lorries on the inner lane honked as they passed what seemed to be a man pushing a motorbike along the hard shoulder. To me it might have been a Japanese samurai on horseback – or on somebody else's back – till denser traffic cut the spectacle from view, and whatever it was had shinned up the bank to safety. The life of the road went on.

Not wanting to leave the layby, all I could do was reflect on the idleness which had afflicted me since birth. The few jobs I had taken since quitting school at fifteen had only been ways towards not having to work at all. Even in those days I considered it my duty not to deprive a fellow human being of regular and paid employment. To be without work was, to me, as natural as having work seemed to nearly everybody else, so I never wasted time making a decision on the matter. I had no conscience, because not to work was hereditary rather than acquired. I hadn't had the example of a father going out in overalls every day, which in any case would have convinced me as nothing else that I would never be so daft as to take on such drudgery myself. And seeing my mother go to work at the factory – though she had done it cheerfully enough – merely told me that no one ought to be subjected to it.

On the other hand, I sensed that it would not do for me to encourage anyone else to follow the same course into idleness. Somebody had to work and at the moment, thank God, a lot still preferred to. I had never wanted society to disintegrate into a state of chaos, because if I happened to be around I might get pulled in to help when the whole show needed rebuilding.

Before I could climb into the car I was transfixed by the apparition of a man in a blue forage cap with flowing hair and a dayglo orange cape pushing a laden pram along the hard shoulder towards the layby. A pennant said POMES A MILE EACH, and as he came into the space which seemed rightfully mine, with the tinny wail of music from a transistor, I saw that on one side of the pram had been aerosolled: POETRY COUNCIL ART-MOBILE and on the other RONALD DELPHICK'S ARTE-FACTORY. A huge black-and-white panda-doll in the pram looked as if it hadn't had its nappy changed for a week, and Dismal went into a frenzy of barking, pulling at the rope as if the panda's rotund guts were packed with the choicest hash.

‘Call your tiger off,' he said. ‘That panda is my living. And I'm very nasty when I'm roused.'

Dismal seemed to understand, and came away. Delphick wiped the sweat off his face and parked his contraption behind the car. He sat on the ground, opened his cape, spat, shut his eyes, spread his arms and went into a rhythmic muttering, swaying back and forth. A deep grumble came from his stomach and he sounded like a gorilla trying to get at his loved one in the neighbouring cage. He had little bells on the ends of his fingers, but much of the sound was eliminated by passing traffic though Delphick, to his credit, didn't seem to mind.

The name was familiar, and so the face might have been, except that over ten years had passed since Blaskin and I had stumbled into one of his Poetry Pub readings. I'd heard of him from time to time, when his antics hit the papers, as when he threw a heap of bedding from the visitors' gallery in the House of Commons, which he said to reporters afterwards was intended to signify his blanket support for the IRA. No doubt he had moderated his opinions from those days, otherwise he wouldn't have got so many grants from the Poetry Council, unless they had made them only to keep him quiet.

He stood up, looked at the sky and yawned. ‘That's enough of that. I've done me mantra.'

‘How often do you do it?'

‘Morning, noon and night, I give the Gods a fright. Night, noon and morning, I give them another warning.' He looked at me: ‘Three times a day to you. Haven't I seen you sometime before? I never forget a face. You're Gilbert Blaskin's son. I saw you in that pub, when I was pumping a plump popsy's pubes – or trying to. I'm allus trying to.'

‘That was ten years ago,' I said.

He closed an eye. ‘It's ten days, with my memory. I'm cursed with total and immediate recall.'

‘Lucky,' I said.

‘Ain't it? Do you want to buy a poem?'

‘What sort?'

His beard, and mane of black hair streaked with grey, swung around his face. He was about my age, but looked twenty years older because I was short haired and clean shaven. ‘There's only one sort of poem,' he said. ‘A poem-poem, a panda-poem, a polysyllabic pentameter poem. A Delphick ode, if you like.' He moved his panda pram a bit further from Dismal's frothing jaws.

‘How much is it?'

Quick as a flash: ‘What can you afford?'

‘Fifty pee?'

‘Drop dead. “Poems a mile each clean the mouth with bleach, though poems a killer-meter might sound a bit sweeter.” That'll cost you a quid. I've got to have some toast with my tea. I ain't had breakfast yet, and I've been pushing me panda pram all night. You want me to whine? I'll whine if you like. Haven't you ever seen a poet whine, you well-fed, Rolls-Royce-driving millionaire swine? What's a quid to a well-fed underbled chap like you? That angry young man peroration will cost you two quid. I'd like a Danish pastry as well.'

I laughed. ‘You won't get a penny out of me for a poem, but if you like to chuck your panda-contraption in the boot I'll give you a lift to the Burntfat Service Station and buy you breakfast, which I suppose will cost me more than a couple of quid.'

‘I knew I could rely on you,' he said. ‘If I remember rightly, we're working-class lads together, aren't we?'

‘Listen,' I told him, ‘any of that working-class crap and you and your pervert panda will spill straw all over the highway. Don't “working-class” me. I've never worked in my life, and neither have you.'

He looked at me through half closed eyes, while we lifted the pram off the oil-stained gravel into the boot. ‘I'll talk to you after I've had my breakfast,' he said sullenly. ‘The panda's hungry.'

I pressed the belly button, but it didn't squeak. ‘What's inside?'

‘It's none of your business.'

Dismal insisted on sitting beside me in the front. ‘I don't think he likes me,' Delphick remarked, when I wove through the mêlée of traffic.

I adjusted the mirror, flicked out of place by Dismal's tail. ‘It takes him a long time to get to know people. Have you seen June lately?'

‘Not since last year. It was a lousy wet month, if I remember.'

‘I mean the girl you got pregnant in Leeds, and then left to fend for herself in London. She worked at a strip club to support herself and the kid. A little girl, wasn't it?'

I saw that half his teeth were bad when he laughed. ‘There've been about five hundred others since then. You can't expect me to remember every one. I've got to do something in my spare time. You can't write poetry twenty-four hours a day. One of these weeks I hope to get married long enough to drive the wife into a loony bin. I'll never be a great poet till I've done that. Unless she's got a lot of money, then I'll have to watch my Ps and Qs.'

I wanted to set Dismal onto him, though I knew he wasn't as bad as he made himself out. ‘I thought you had total recall?' But he didn't answer. ‘What are you going south for?'

He took out a packet of cigarettes and didn't offer me one. I reached for my cigars and he put his cigarettes away. I didn't offer him a cigar, so he got a cigarette back from his pocket and lit up. ‘I'm on tour,' he said. ‘I've got a gig in Stevenage tonight. I'm on a POEMARCH to raise money for a new mag, so I stop at every place to give a reading. The mag's going to be run by the CIA – Community, Information, Arts. Some of it's going to be poems – my poems under different names. The first issue will have a hundred pages. There'll be a psychological analysis of the fiction of Sidney Blood and the difference between his influence on the working classes and the middle classes. Then some previously undiscovered poems from Bokhara by Ghengis Khan, each one a mountain of skulls made up of the word Delphick in tiny writing written by a German poet and translated by me. Chuck in a few Panda Poems, and there you have it. Maybe I'll get a slab of the latest book Gilbert Blaskin is working on. His stuff's real rubbish, but his name might sell a few copies.'

‘He's writing somebody's life story at the moment.' For one dizzy second I saw a way of embarrassing this man who made my immorality look like the minor transgressions of a Sunday School teacher with TB.

‘Whose?'

‘Moggerhanger's.'

Dismal snapped at Delphick's hand, so that he dropped his cigarette. I punched Dismal and told him to behave in front of guests.

‘Lord Moggerhanger's?'

‘Why not? A chunk of that should look good beside the poems of Ghengis Khan.' Back on the inside lane, a couple of lorries walled by. ‘What are you going to call your magazine?'

‘Drop dead,' he said.

I didn't think I'd offended him. ‘Fuck you,' I retorted.

‘No,' he said too mildly for me to think we were arguing, ‘
Drop Dead
is what I'm going to call it.'

‘A good title,' I said.

He pushed a form under my nose. ‘Sign a subscription form. Ten copies for fifteen quid.'

I screwed it up and threw it out of the window. ‘Come back next year.'

He didn't seem to mind. ‘I'll have the best table of contents any mag ever had to start off with. Every item the epitome of spontaneous art.'

‘How's the fund-raising going?' I passed Dismal a crisp from the glove box.

‘Awful. But I've got a grant from the Poetry Council, and some money from the CIA. It ain't enough, because I need to decorate my house at Doggerel Bank in Yorkshire, and that'll cost a bob or two.'

‘I thought it was all for the mag?'

‘I'm starting a poetry museum in the parlour of Doggerel Bank, so some of it's got to go on that. I'll need central heating, for a start. There'll be an enormous plastic bowl for the public to slot money into as contributions for its upkeep, like in the Tate or the Royal Academy, and if they're cold it'll make 'em stingy. But with the old CH purring away they'll give everything they've got.'

I shut up, out of admiration.

‘I'm only telling you all this because you aren't a poet yourself. Or a journalist. Tonight I'm giving a reading at the leisure centre, me and the panda. I might make a quid or two. I charge one pound fifty entrance fee, only I don't let anybody in. My poems, and Panda's, have to be spoken to the empty air. People's auras would spoil it. But they can hear us from outside, and they can applaud if they like. That's allowed. The door's locked though, and that keeps it a pure experience. Poetry is for space, the spice of emptiness. Emptiness eats it up, regurgitates it into the atmosphere so that it gets back into people in its purest form. They might not know it – how can they, the bourgeois pigs? – but it sweetens their soul. A single ear inside the hall when I'm speaking would desecrate it.'

‘They should kick the door down,' I said.

‘Then I would read my poems silently. You've got to let 'em know that poet power rules. Otherwise, what's life all about? Most of the time I'm at Doggerel Bank, but every so often I go on a Panda Tour to a different part of the country. It gets me out of myself. Doggerel Bank's very cut off. Do you want to come to my reading tonight? I need all the audience I can get, but don't bring the dog. They've had plenty of advance warning at the centre, so there'll be lots of fab women lined up to meet me. I sometimes end with two, and copulate to the rhythm of coryambics. “Them Greeks knew a thing or two, but you never reach the end of an ode/come in the middle of a line/like dying out of life/halfway through.”'

He scribbled on a piece of paper, unable to speak for a few minutes. I was tempted to tip him onto the next layby, but unfortunately I'd promised him breakfast. When he looked up he was snuffling with emotion: ‘Is it far to The Rabid Puker?'

‘I don't know.' The sky in front was covered in broken jigsaw shapes, pieces of white and crimson cloud, with blue between. The light was orange and ominous. A car behind tried to tailgate me, but I pulled away with ease. Delphick snorted, a dead cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

I got the tank filled at the petrol station, then followed Delphick into the plastic dining palace. ‘What do you want?'

‘I'll start with a double whisky,' he said. ‘I've been perished all night.'

‘You'll have the basic meal, and pay for your own extras.'

He picked up the menu card. ‘Bingo Breakfast, love.'

‘What's that?'

‘Full house.'

‘Make it three.' Dismal had stayed in the car. Delphick grabbed the waitress's wrist. She was a lovely young blonde with a fine figure but a very sarky mouth. ‘Do you want to buy a poem for fifty bob?' he said.

‘You must be joking.'

He wouldn't let go. ‘They make a lovely birthday pressie. Or a thoughtful wedding gift.'

‘If you don't leave me alone I'll call the manager. I hate this job.' She looked at me. ‘Tell the tramp to let me go.'

‘Let her go.'

‘Bollocks,' he said.

She glared, as if I was worse than him. ‘I wish people like you hadn't got such soft hearts. You're allus picking deadbeats up and bringing 'em here for a feed. I can't understand what you get out of it. Makes you feel good, does it? Why don't you leave the dirty old bastard to die on the hard shoulder?'

Delphick's eyes softened with tenderness, but he had an iron grip.

‘Look, crumb,' she said, ‘stop it, or I'll call the manager.'

I was fed up. It was too early in the morning to tolerate unashamed con-men like him. ‘If you don't let her go, I'll smash you in the teeth.'