SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (28 page)

‘Hello,’
I said, ‘I’m Hillary Wheat.’ They stood and shook my hand.

‘Barry
Rush.’

‘Melon
Gabriel.’

‘Please
do sit down, is Mercy looking after you?’

‘Yeah,
she’s getting us coffee and stuff,’ said her father.

‘Lovely
little house you have here,’ said Melon. While Barry spoke in working-class
Scottish, her accent had been forged in a barrio bounded by Knightsbridge to
the north and Sloane Street to the west, Eaton Square to the south and
Grosvenor Place to the east. ‘My brother Rollo has a place over towards
Daventry. Fawkley Hall — do you know it?’

‘I’ve
been round it.’

‘The
Van Dykes are particularly fine, aren’t they?’

‘Indeed.
So are you here to stay for the weekend?’

‘Naww. Me
and Melon are attending a weekend pony club that’s being held at a stately home
over Byfield way. Starts tomorrow morning, so I thought we’d get here early and
spend the night with my darling daughter.’

‘Well,
yes, of course. You can sleep in the erm .

‘The
spare room,’ said Mercy coming in with a tray piled with coffee and burnt
toast.

‘Yes,
the spare room … You know it’s shaming but I don’t know as much as I should
about these country pursuits. Is a pony club some type of point to point?’

Barry
and Melon sniggered. Melon took it upon herself to explain in a voice
vibrating with a kind of self-regarding excitement. ‘No, Hillary, what happens
at a pony club is that all the women there dress up in special leather
costumes, bustiers, high-heeled boots and so on, plumed headdresses like you
see on horses at funerals, we all have nice swishy tails, the other end of
which, of course, are butt plugs, big rubber dicks, which are stuck up our
arses. Then we’re leashed to little pony carts and we pull the men around in
them. And the men whip us when we don’t go fast enough, somebody might get
branded and such and such.’

‘I see.’

Barry
chipped in, ‘It’s fantastic and we’ve made so many friends of like-minded
individuals at these weekends. As soon as it’s over we can’t wait to get home
so we can all get on the e-mail, chatting to each other.’

‘Toast?’
said Mercy, setting the tray down with a crash.

After
coffee we showed them up to the spare room. At some point Mercy seemed to have
moved all of her substantial amounts of possessions into my bedroom, her
underwear and her stuffed toys and her punchbag and her weights. She followed
me in there after we’d shown Barry and Melon the bathroom and they’d gone in
there together, carrying a coiled length of rubber tubing and locking the door
behind them.

Mercy
sat on my bed. She said, ‘I’m sorry about putting my things in your bedroom, I
don’t know… I didn’t want my dad to think I was sleeping in the spare room.

‘Why
not? You are sleeping in the spare room.

‘I know
but I didn’t want him to think I was.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t
know. Don’t give me a hard time please, Hillary. Just don’t, alright?’

‘I’m
sorry, Mercy.’

‘That’s
OK.’

That evening we all went
for a meal in the village pub, the pub which had been called the Royal Oak for
three hundred years, which had been called The People’s Princess for three
years, and which the landlady had now changed to The Stephen Lawrence. Barry,
Melon, Suki, Bateman, Mercy and me. Last orders weren’t called until sometime close
to 2 a.m. Afterwards we all filed through the pesticide-scented night air back
to the house and squeezed into the little front room to carry on drinking with
an assortment of portable stuff brought from the pub.

Because
I was drunk I tried to tell them the truth about the countryside, how it wasn’t
what it appeared to be, but somehow the conversation wriggled like an eel and
swerved onto appearances in general. Bateman said that despite overwhelming
appearances to the contrary he was in reality a really anxious person. He said,
‘Oh yeah, I suffer real bad from my nerves. Like I’ve got this terrible nervous
alopecia, except its only on parts of my body where I don’t have any hair, like
my knees.’

Mercy
said, ‘Yeah, nature’s cruel, isn’t it? I mean you’re all upset about something
and then on top of that all your hair falls out! So then you feel even worse. I
mean wouldn’t it be nice if, say, you were a baldy bloke and you were feeling
really fed up and instead of all the rest of your hair falling out, it grew
instead? So like even though you were feeling depressed at least you’d have a
nice new head of hair?’

Bateman
said, ‘Yeah or if you were a woman and you were feeling anxious about your
life, about not having a boyfriend or something but instead of getting
agoraphobia or becoming an alcoholic, you grew a really nice big pair of tits.
I mean that would be more fair, wouldn’t it?’

‘And
you’d probably get a boyfriend because of your tits,’ said Melon.

‘Maybe
there’s some sort of reason for alopecia and agoraphobia and that, maybe some
sort of balance in nature.’

‘But
that’s what I was trying to say before: nature’s a mess up, isn’t it? Look
outside — that’s not nature, it’s a factory, a green factory. It’s not meant to
be like this…’

Barry
Rush who had been quiet for some time said to me, ‘You got kids, Hillary?’

‘Noo I’m
afraid not, I never .

‘You
never stop worrying about them, know what I mean?’

‘I
think I…’

‘Yes, I
was really worried about my daughter, my Mercy. I mean she hadn’t had a good
seeing to for God knows how long, then a quiet old fellow like Hillary moves in
on her. Not the conventional boyfriend I imagined for her but I’m not one to
talk.’

I didn’t
know what to say to this so I simply simpered and uttered a noise something
like ‘nnggnmam’.

Barry
went on, ‘So what’s she like? You know, as a fuck? I’ve always wondered. What
dad doesn’t? Is she passionate, like her dad? Is she good at sucking you off?
She’s got that big wide mouth, I’d think she would be. Do her tits feel as good
as they look?’

I stood
up. I said, ‘Sir, I count myself as a good host but I will not have anyone,
especially her father, talking about Mercy like that. I’ll thank you to leave
now.

Barry
stared up at me, looking confused.

‘If you
don’t leave I’m sure Bateman would be happy to assist you.

‘Will I
fuck, Hillary,’ said Bateman.

‘Don’t
be a twat, Hillary,’ said Suki.

I
looked in appeal from them to Mercy. Surely she would support me. She stared me
straight in the eyes and said, ‘Take a chill pill, man. What’s the matter with
you?’

As I
left the room I heard Barry say to the others, ‘I never fucked her, did I? Even
though God knows plenty of fathers do.’

There
was a general murmur of approval at his restraint.

I lay on the bed. ‘I
suppose I’m a stupid old man,’ I said to Mercy who was standing in the doorway.
Downstairs I could hear the party still going on. She came in and sat down next
to me.

‘Hillary,
don’t talk about yourself like that. You’re a lovely man. It’s my dad, I can’t
stand up to him. I know I should but I can’t. I know you were only trying to be
honourable and I love you for it. How come, though it’s my dad who’s the awful shit,
it’s me who somehow feels guilty?’

‘Well I’m
not sure, but I think it’s a parent thing, Mercy. I think that he’s holding the
child that you were hostage, and you’ll be paying her ransom for the rest of
your life.’

‘I see.
Thank you.

‘Don’t
mention it. You wanted to know.’

And
yes, like her dad said, her wide mouth was good for that thing and her breasts
were as he imagined them to be. I know a poet should do better than this but it
was like riding a horse again after many years, the movements, the postures
unaccustomed, yet familiar, mounting her, sliding into her, the sweating
twisting body, except now there was a consciousness, a part of me that wasn’t
subsumed in the act, a part that worried about falling off. Like riding a horse
again after years and the traffic had got faster and more frightening.

The next day Mercy’s
father and his girlfriend had gone by the time we got up and she went back to
sleeping in her own room. She said to me, ‘I don’t want us to be a couple, not
yet. I want us to be friends who sometimes do stuff. Do you know what I mean?
That’s much more original, isn’t it?’ It was certainly much more frustrating as
far as I was concerned since I never knew when she would choose to activate her
franchise and I didn’t seem to have much of a voice in the matter. Needless to
say, this not knowing did not help my poem to progress. Plus my days seemed to
be full of housework and cooking. My evenings were no longer as empty as they
had been either, since I’d been recruited into the pub table-skittles team.
This strange game, peculiar to Northamptonshire, was exclusively the province
of the village proletariat:

Cedric
Gull the owner of the local garage, Len Babb who worked on one of Sam’s farms,
that sort of person. Twice a week I would be taken to skittle games in Cedric’s
1969 Rover Coupe, enveloped in the smell of cracked leather and lead
replacement petrol. Mostly we would talk about Mercy or rather I would answer
questions about Mercy for this fifty-year-old father of five as we rocked along
the country lanes, Cedric working the big bakelite steering wheel like a ship’s
tiller.

There
were several pub-skittles leagues: Byfield, Gayton and Town which was
Northampton itself, there were fourteen teams in the Byfield League including
Lyttleton Strachey. Each team has nine players. As to the game itself, there
are nine pins arranged in a square on a table in three rows of three. Each player
has three cheeses and has three throws of the cheese at the skittles. A cheese
is a piece of wood shaped like a small cheese and painted cheese colour. Each
player has five legs for his turn to knock down as many pins as possible. There
were various strange terms for the success you could achieve: a flora is when
all the pins are demolished with one cheese, a stack is when all the pins are
demolished with two cheeses and so on and so forth. Though my recruitment onto
the team denoted some raising of my status in the village I had not risen too
high as there had always been a problem getting new members: a lot of the newer
inhabitants of the Northamptonshire villages had difficulty in seeing the point
of throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood at skittles in the evening after a hard
day spent designing new forms of poison gas or new methods of torturing
animals.

It was summer by the time
he came again.

One
morning I was sitting in my study, the poem inert on my desk. Bateman had just
shouted up the stairs that we were out of milk and I needed to ride to the
nearest garage to get some, he said; I should also buy Suki some Tampax while I
was there. Then the phone rang, and before I spoke a man said, ‘Hello, Hillary.’

‘Yes?’
I replied in a ‘who the fuck are you?’ tone.

‘I was
thinking of coming over to pick up my hat.’

‘Is
that Emmanuel Porlock, the Million Pound Poet?’

‘Yes
indeedy.’

‘I’ve
been hanging on to that hat for three months.’

‘Well,
I better come and get it then, hadn’t I? Saturday morning alright for you,
round about brunchtime?’

‘I
suppose so.

‘Excellent,
see you then.’

It was
only after I put the phone down that I thought to myself, ‘How did he know I’d
bought him a new hat?’ I had never spoken to him since the day he had phoned
me, badgering me into going up to London and causing me to flirt with Mercy.

Brunch
to me is a silly meal and difficult to devise; it’s really a breakfast that’s
been lying in bed too long. Nevertheless I have never been able to be
inhospitable and, it being later in the year, at least there was more produce
available from my garden, so in the end I decided upon courgette fritters with
mayonnaise dip, eggs Florentine, Spanish omelette, kedgeree, broad bean dip,
nasturtium salad and roast tomatoes with garlic. For cocktails I would do Long
Island Iced Teas.

Recently
Sam had taken to driving through the low countries and into Germany for his
shopping: twice he’d been to Austria and once he’d got as far as the Hungarian
border before the lack of a visa caused him to be turned back. There were a
couple of bullet holes in the tailgate of his Subaru from where Sam had tried
to sneak across the border on a rural back road — he’d heard that things were
even cheaper in the ex-east than in the hypermarkets of France. He seemed to be
going further and further on each of his trips and to be more distracted and
edgy when he was at home. His farms literally ran themselves and he’d pretty
much killed all the wildlife for hectares around so one day, I suspected, he
simply wouldn’t come back, though I’m sure Mrs Sam would be able to monitor his
progress, zig-zagging across the world via GPS satellite and her laptop. Maybe
she would be able to see him drive head first into the onrushing Autobahn
traffic, a popular method of suicide in Germany so I’d heard. Still it’s an ill
obsessive compulsive disorder that brings no one any good, so Sam was able to
fetch me from Austria a cake called a Wiener Apfelstrudel Gugelhupf, a
Gottinger bacon cake, a selection of wurst and eight bottles of a decent
Gerwurtstraminer.