Life Goes On (69 page)

He drooled. “What's it going to be called?”

“‘The Bandsaw Men'.” We lit up, and I blew smoke into his face, hoping to hide the worst of his features. South London born and bred, a remand home had been his prep school. He'd done ‘A' Levels in Borstal, gone on to university at the Scrubs, then entered a lifetime of postgraduate work in Moggerhanger's employ, though what use such a strong-armed dimwit could be had always puzzled me. He squeezed my elbow so affectionately at the unsolicited information about Sidney Blood that I waited for it to crumble. “You once said you'd introduce me to Sidney, but you never did, did you? Well, you haven't yet. I remember your promise, though, whenever I pick up one of his books.”

“It's
Mister
Blood to you,” I said sternly. “He told me only yesterday how he took a chiv to a poor chap who called him by his first name without being invited to do so. He left him bleeding by Tower Bridge like a stuck pig.”

I detected admiration, and a lick of fear. “He didn't?”

“He did. Sidney doesn't lie. And he likes respect. All writers do, only he's worse. But I promise I'll let you meet him as soon as I can. He sent me out this morning to get background material for another book he's got on the stocks called
The Body Bank
.”

His eyes turned into Hallogen lamps. “Fucking hell! Sounds like a good 'un. Can't wait to get my French fries on it. Tell me more.”

“I won't. Sidney would cut my throat if I did, and if you were there to see it you might come all over the place.” Such twitting went over his head, and he opened the barn door. “I only like you because you know Mr Blood.”

I took a look inside. “You seem to have a nice little business going. Those commodes and cupboards must be worth a few hundred apiece.”

“More than that,” he said. “It's all fucking Chipperdale.”

“Looks like chipboard to me.” The same old rogues of Moggerhanger's long acquaintance were busily occupied. I spotted Toffee Bottle of stumpy figure and large bald head, and Cottapilly and Pindary the tall thin inseparables, wearing overcoats down to their shoes even in the hottest weather, as they did now, carrying a load of boards to the bandsaw. Matthew Coppice who used to run an old folks' home and put their bodies in the deep freeze so that he could continue collecting their old age pensions, wearing the same Fair Isle pullover, schoolboy tie and tweed jacket, now having a stand-off with poofy Eric Alport over a bag of nuts and bolts. Moggerhanger had opened a trade fair for ex-jailbirds, and thank God I wasn't among them, because I would never work for him again.

Kenny slopped the cigar around his lips till it was unsmokable. “The lads are clever at making antique furniture from bits and bobs. It all goes to the Continent. English antiques are at a premium there. The good stuff was burned by the Germans in the war, to boil their coffee. After it's delivered our chaps bring furniture back to be repaired, and every piece is worth about a million dollars, because they're full of powders that make your head go bang in the night. If a wardrobe fell off the back of a lorry going over the Alps in summer you'd think the snow had come early.”

What an ingenious way of smuggling drugs. “Good to know the old firm is prospering.”

“It always is, you should know that. Lord Moggerhanger hasn't got no secrets from you.”

If he had any left I didn't know if he could keep them. The less I knew, the better. “I must be off. I'm going to call on my mother in Nottingham. Then I'll pop down to Upper Mayhem and see how my caretaker is looking after the place. I'll be sure and remember you to Sidney Blood, though, when I see him. He likes to know he's got fans.”

He trod the remains of his cigar into the cinders as if the prettiest toad in the world was underfoot. “Don't forget your promise to let me meet him. I'd love to shake his hand that writes the books.” He grinned. “I'd cut my mauler off then, and have it framed, wouldn't I? Give it to my mother for a birthday present. She loves Sidney Bloods as well.”

“I'll fix it up. He'll like your sense of humour at least.”

“Yeh, I'll make him laugh. But come back here any time. If you're a good lad Lord Moggerhanger might ask you to drive some furniture to Italy. Me and Toffee Bottle took a load last month. Toffee fell in a vat of wine at a truckstop, and he couldn't swim, so I had to drag him out. We felt rotten all the way home.”

Back on the dual carriageway I thought how lucky I had been bumping into Kenny Dukes instead of getting bludgeoned by someone else for my curiosity. The Picaro Estate shot me onto the outer lane, overtaking cars fast in case Moggerhanger's thugs decided on second thoughts to come after me and do me in.

I was soon enough out of their range, and beyond the Stamford roundabout stopped for a hitchhiker. If Moggerhanger's lads did tail me they might think it was another car, with two in it.

“Get in, mate.” Tall and slim, with a wispy beard and unstable blue eyes, he wasn't much above twenty. “Been waiting long?”

He threw in a small rucksack. “Long enough.” He may have been right, his forlorn face raw and windblown from sitting too close and long by a fire. “I've been sweating blood in the fields for a Lincolnshire carrot farmer, the meanest bastard on earth. He paid me a pittance, and now I'm off to Leeds.”

“You're a student, then?”

Fed up with getting wet in the fields, he was on his way home for some dry socks and a cup of tea.

“How did you know?”

“Experience.”

“Were you ever a student?”

I put on speed. “All my life. Still am. Can't afford not to be. Of people mostly. If I stop studying them, I'm dead.”

“It's like that, is it?”

“You mean you've heard it all before?”

“A million times, mostly from people who've never had the brains to study.”

I introduced myself, to put him more at ease. “I'm Michael Cullen.”

He shook his own hand. “And I'm George Delphick. I'm reading sociology at York, if you want to know.”

I didn't, particularly, but I'd heard that in the Kremlin there was the biggest bell in the world, and it gonged now at the name of Delphick. “Sociology,” I said, “what's that?”

“How should I know? I've only done a year.” He glanced at the instrument panel. “You're doing a ton.”

I threaded the needle of half a dozen hundred-foot juggernauts. “I like to keep up with the traffic. The faster you go the longer you live.”

“That's a new one on me,” the opinionated bleeder said, thinking I was serious.

“It seems I've heard the name Delphick before. Are you any relation to the poet?”

“I didn't expect you to ask that, because how can somebody like you know about them? On the other hand I'm glad you did. I used to deny it, but why should I? He's my cousin, and a lot older than me. When I was twelve he borrowed the money I was saving for an electronic calculator. They'd not long come out and were expensive, but he talked me into parting with my cash. When I met him three years later he denied I'd lent it, and threatened to hit me if I didn't stop whining.”

“The same old Delphick,” I laughed. “For an introduction to the world of grown-ups it must have been a bargain at the price.”

“When I saw him after that I walked right by, but one of these days I'll smash him in the face, so's I can forget what he did to me as a kid.”

“He's a poet,” I said. “He's a national monument, so what can you expect? He's incorrigible and irredeemable, and therefore best left alone. He'd end up having the clothes off your back. I didn't think you were related.”

His laugh was painfully cynical for one so young, as he took a piece of paper from his bomber jacket. “Just listen to this. I ripped it from the Yellow Pages. He's a right fucking con man.”

“Read it to me.”

“I will. It says: ‘Poetry and prose for all occasions. Why not have fifty glorious lines for a wedding, or a few stanzas of sombre comment for a bereavement? Satisfaction guaranteed. Rates to be negotiated, though reasonable. Ronald Delphick is your man. Enquiries to: Doggerel Bank, Stye-on-the-Ouse, Yorkshire.' There's a poem on the other side, and it's real crap. I'll read you that, as well.

“Delphick doesn't work for wages:

Poetry (or even prose) for all occasions,

A sombre promptitude of diaspasons

Or soothing lines for sanguine rages;

Anniversaries, births or weddings

(Makes a specialty of weddings)

But for the dear departed, an ode

For sending him or her along the road

Or, if the loved one's cat or hound,

He'll write you something to astound

And fit for framing on the wall:

Delphick versifies for all!'”

“At least he's enterprising.” I knew little poetry beyond what good ones Frances had read to me. “He doesn't sponge all the time, though he's robbed so many that nobody will put up with him anymore. There's one born every minute, if not two, these days, so I don't suppose he'll ever starve.”

Having lived most of my life as a confidence man I could hardly condemn another member of the fraternity. He hadn't latched onto any big-time scams like me, but instead had committed too many small meannesses, tricking people who couldn't always afford to be bilked. When I once caught him out his bare-faced response was to say that whoever he had cadged, filched, blackmailed or stolen from should feel privileged to know they had been of assistance to England's greatest poet, for which statement alone he should have been punched into crippledom, but I'd never had the heart to do it. If he'd robbed the rich that might have been all right, but the rich are too sensible to let the likes of him get close.

“If I ever pass him on the street,” George said, “and he's at death's door, I'll kick him in.”

Even I'd never do that. Luckily, we were bypassing Grantham. “I'm going to put you off here, because I take the A52 for Nottingham.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” he said, too snottily for my liking. “That's kind of you. Can't you get me as far as Newark at least?”

I set the hazard lights going on the slip road. “I'd like to, but I'm in too much of a hurry.” I sensed what was coming, though his pockets must have been full of tin, if it was true he'd been working for a farmer in the Fens. “Can you spare a couple of quid?” he said, “so's I can have a coffee and bun at the next service station?”

Maybe he wasn't a student, just bumming around the country in the traditional Delphick fashion. I all but pushed him onto the asphalt. “You've already had a free ride.”

“Twenty measly miles. I expect that'll make you feel like a Good Samaritan for a week, but if you give me a few quid you can feel chuffed for a fortnight and get written up in the Bible.”

“Fuck off.” All the Delphicks had a good patter. “Next time I see you on the road I'll run you over.”

His curses didn't bear thinking about. Should I give Blaskin a rundown on the trip he could sort them out. “I hope three of your tyres drop off at the same time,” was the most polite of his sallies.

I drove up the ramp and onto the A52, the smell of Nottingham already in the air, not so much black puddings and Woodbine smoke as drifts of curry shot through with whiffs of hard drugs. I decided not to pick up any more autostoppers, especially after searching the so-called glove compartment for a cigar and noticing that the small box of Belgian chocolates for my mother had gone missing. It was hard not to spin round and collar that prime specimen of the Delphick breed, and throw him under the wheels of an oncoming lorry loaded with a hundred tons of gravel, but it was no use trying to reverse bad luck, or worse judgement. The thieving bastard would go to hell in his own way, though I hoped I'd meet him again one day and kick him into the fires.

The dual carriageway coming up was a death trap created by malicious road planners who went everywhere by pushbike and made it their life's work to kill or maim motorists, because it was only a couple of hundred yards long. I wanted to get by a lorry going at thirty miles an hour and belting out diesel smoke, expecting my sporty little Picaro to make it easily.

For some reason the car lost power, and I thought my time had come. I almost crushed the accelerator through the floor, but there was no boost, so I got back into the inner lane because a shit-coloured banger was right behind me. Even then I could hardly keep up in the dual carriageway stakes, managing thirty for a while, the clutch responding less and less to my prayers, till it flopped so loose it wouldn't work at all, no doubt knackered by congested London traffic. The car had recently come back from a full service, so I should have known something would go wrong, as I peddled it into a lay-by just before it expired.

Only two years old, at least it had saved me from death. I sat for a moment to reflect, lit a cigar to calm myself, feeling as if in a boat on a salty river without oars or engine, going nowhere, the familiar bereft situation when a car packed up on you.

I upended the bonnet, though didn't need a mechanic to know that the clutch had gone. Lorries and cars went inches by, causing such shudders that I feared my fragile tin vehicle would be blown over the hedge, or pulled along in the slipstream to be played with by a couple of white vans along the dotted white line. My mother expected me soon after lunch, though a little lateness wouldn't trouble her. All I had to do was call the AA and get back on the road. The bonnet up was a flag calling for assistance, but the traffic flow continued, no one giving a toss for me. I had visions of camping for a month in the hedge bottom and living on slices of fried turnip poached from the fields. I'd sleep in the dilapidated car till the battery no longer worked my shaver, till I ran out of cigars and matches, till my clothes needed washing and my hair was too long—then I would walk away.