The Book of Fame (6 page)

The curator closes his hand over his mouth to stifle a yelp.

‘Both signatures. Please,’ he says, and bites his hand.

Jimmy Duncan laughs. ‘Next you’ll be wanting our train tickets.’ The curator turns his head to look at Jimmy, and his lower lip drops. He bites his hand again, and nods. So Jimmy has to pull out his Leeds to Cardiff ticket. Jimmy Hunter fishes out a London to Oxford stub. Soon everyone is emptying their pockets and old theatre tickets and train tickets are falling to the carpet and the curator is scrambling on his knees to collect them all.

Bob Deans hands over a pair of cufflinks. Billy Glenn unknots his tie and gives him that. George Nicholson gives the man a handful of boot sprigs. It had started out as a joke but soon a small box has to be found. We fill this and a broken suitcase that we have no further use for, and hold the door for the curator to haul his booty off. When a gust of wind removes his hat we are surprised that he doesn’t stop for it; and turning away from the door we look at one another, and it is about then that we realise we have been looted.

In Dublin as Dave Gallaher stepped from the train a young newspaperman bounded up to him. ‘Mr Gallaher. Mr Gallaher, sir. How does it feel to be famous?’ Gallaher told him, ‘The pyramids are famous, son.’ We liked that; we liked Dave’s gruff dose of wisdom. But there was little time for Dave to expand because then the barriers holding back the crowd fell apart and the Dubliners swarmed towards us.

Ireland knew about us. She had been expecting us. All the flags were out. We were received like royalty at the Dublin Guinness plant. We climbed aboard a miniature train and wound in and out the barrels of Guinness stacked on end like cotton reels.

At Petersen’s Pipe Factory we got about like trade commissioners. Each of us was given a pipe. George Dixon held his under his nose. Steve Casey and Bill Mackrell stuck theirs in their pockets and looked around for the next treat.

That night the audience stood and cheered us as we filed into the Empire Palace Theatre to take our seats.

The applause continued the next day as we wandered Dublin’s streets. Men tipped their hats. Women smiled up beneath their hat brims. The wild shrieks belonged to small boys discovering us at the end of an alley or across the street. It was impossible to take in a statue with so many eyes on us. Dublin knew who we were, and every corner of the city appeared to have been expecting us the moment we showed up. We paused to regroup and the doors of a tavern flew open. A publican in a white apron appeared with a large tray of malt whiskies. It was the wrong time of day to be drinking but Mister Dixon gave his consent. The publican nodded encouragement and while we went about the malts a small boy scampered around our legs asking, ‘Which one are
yer, Billy Wallace?’ Billy Stead pointed him out, and the boy dropped to his knees, got out a piece of chalk and traced the outline of Billy Wallace’s feet on the Dublin street.

By now we were used to seeing ourselves on postcards hawked about town. In a London theatre we’d even seen ourselves up on screen. We got out our tobacco as the curtains parted on a huge white square. The lights dimmed and one or two of us looked around. Jimmy Duncan and Mister Dixon, obviously, as they were in charge of our safety and well-being. Then a yellow beam passed overhead and landed against the screen—not with any force but with the same effortlessness as pulling aside bedroom curtains and light finding the interior wall. Some numbers flickered up there. Then we saw pictures of ourselves. Life-like pictures. Limbs moving. Mona raking his fingers back through his hair. We left our pipes in our hands and moved to the edge of our seats. It was the strangest thing to sit down there and look up and see ourselves as others did. We stared at these shadows of ourselves. These likenesses. Fred looked like Fred, Billy Wallace like Billy Wallace, Jimmy Hunter himself but only more so. We watched our shadows perform knowledgeable tricks; and when you thought about it you realised that the shadows had to know their owners in order to be so convincing on screen. Our shadows remembered their origins spectacularly well. Things, personal things, previously intimate to ourselves. Fred Newton scratching himself. Billy Stead holding the front of his shorts out from himself to look down, looking for what? Massa closing one nostril to blow snot out the other. Now it was up there for all to see. There was some initial discomfort, but this soon passed and pleasure set in. We began to think about our haircuts and what in our appearance could be improved. Once we were able to tear our eyes away from ourselves, we got on with studying the shape of our game. It came as a shock to see
what a mess the lineouts were in. Up to now we had imagined we formed a straight line. Then Booth dropped a ball and we all laughed. Bloody hell, any one of us could have caught that from where we sat. Billy Wallace missed an easy goal. Gillett missed two. Someone booed—in jest. But as we sunk into ourselves, our private selves, we realised that we did mind, seeing how gettable the chances were, and yet up on screen we saw ourselves back on our side of halfway, our hands on hips, and that we hadn’t minded the misses.

On the field we moved to the whirring breath of cameras

Men crouched under black hoods aimed their tripods at us

or, as it sometimes happened

you might look up from breakfast

with a mouthful of toast

to find a man with a white napkin draped over his wrist

staring back

Moments of intimacy

when they came

snuck up on you

in the bath, alone

gazing up at the tiled walls

and on each tile

the impression of a peacock on its own

until you realised

that someone with a sketchpad

must have observed the moment

to capture it with a paintbrush

in order to say

‘Here is a peacock alone in its peacock world’

We learned to appreciate those things

which are utmost and confidently themselves

a lily flat on a pond

the pattern of wallpaper in an empty hotel room

the last tree in a paddock

the barefoot beggar dragging his grey blanket past the fires down by the river

We grew tired of our own company. It was too small a world to confine ourselves. We found ourselves craving news of other lives, and so we parted to visit our favourite monuments.

Billy Glenn to Speakers’ Corner

Deans to the Westminster Cathedral

O’Sullivan & a loose forward trio

to the Tower of London

George Nicholson to the Isle of Dogs to find the coal man who sold sheets of his music

Mackrell, Harper, Wallace, Gallaher and Messrs Duncan & Dixon to the National Portrait Gallery

Billy Stead to the Euston Railway Station’s public dictation room, from where he brought back story after story

Stories of terrible loss, and in some cases grief or foolishness. Russian émigrés with frayed collars and still dressed in clothes from a fancy dress ball a month earlier. American heiresses with travel arrangements to send on to distant ports. Pompous voices, others that were urgent and
charged with slight. ‘We wish to inform you, sirs …’ Penniless Italian Counts who would offload their sorry tale to Billy and try to hit him up for a florin while waiting for a stenographer to come free. Gamblers. Polish aristocrats who stood in line with heavy eyelids. There were the show-offs—lowly attention-seeking clerks Billy got to recognise and avoided like the plague. They’d borrow a white silk scarf from their employer to dictate in a plummy voice the terms of a make-believe will: ‘…and lastly, to my man Poutney, my horses and hunting dogs …’ Others … sad, dishonoured men with maps of broken blood vessels tracking their cheeks dictated letters of sombre resignation to expensive and select clubs—‘Perhaps put in “no regrets”. What do you think?’ The stenographers were older women who kept a prim and discreet distance. The most they might allow themselves was a clipped, ‘As you wish’, before their bony fingers raced back over the typewriter keys. There were letters from City gentlemen with their inside leg measurements to Indian tailors in Madras. The stenographers never flinched or showed so much as a sign that they had taken in this private information. They didn’t appear interested in unscrambling the mysteries of other people’s lives. So a man’s inside leg measurement was taken down with the same detachment as they attended to the Putney birdwatcher’s weekly correspondence with another in Aberdeen: ‘Counted one hundred and twenty-nine blackbirds on a guttering near Clapham Common at six twenty pm.’ A South London butcher used coarse language in a threatening letter to an Oxford student of Romance languages warning him to stay away from his ‘girl, Peg’. A young woman wrote to her admirer in Cologne. She had received his poem couriered by pigeon, thank you. It was indeed touching and beautiful … unfortunately she was replying with bad news. She wished to apologise from the bottom of her heart for the poisoned bread left out on the windowsill … A spoilt young wastrel in a party hat and reeking of brandy pushed past Billy to the head of the line. Swaying on his thin legs he shouted out the instruction
that this was his last letter to his family, that in the future they would find his ‘communications’ written in condensation over the window of a Pall Mall tobacconist.

One afternoon Billy is waiting in line. As usual there are the familiar faces. A young fop with his inner leg measurement. An aggrieved Slav dictating a letter to the editor of
The Times
. A club man with his white shirt hanging out the back of his trousers has just finished dictating an apology to the host of a party. ‘The glasses I can replace and Roger, please won’t you convey my heartfelt apologies to Gwyneth. God knows what came over me …’ As the stenographer calls ‘Next!’ a slight commotion breaks out across the other side of the room. Someone has jumped the queue—a young man with dark rings around his eyes who holds his place and extends a hand behind him as if to keep the complaints at bay. He’s in a white suit that is covered in grime and creases. He stands like someone hard of hearing, his chin tucked into his chest, eyes closed. When he speaks it is with difficulty as if the view he is reporting keeps shifting in and out of focus. As Billy watches the man presses his fingers to the sides of his head and begins with one word. Odessa. Something about the man’s voice catches the attention of the other stenographers. It is rare for them to do so but one by one they turn their heads while their own clients continue to pick their thoughts from the air. Billy finds himself shifting closer in order to better hear—

Six hundred families homeless

Stop

Some of the ruffians put their victims to death by hammering nails in their heads

Stop

Eyes gouged out, ears cut off, tongues wrenched out with pincers

Stop

Number of women disembowelled

Stop

The aged and sick found huddling in cellars were soaked in petroleum and burnt alive

Stop

More to follow in the am

Stop

There was a silence—the only time Billy recalled one in the public dictation room. The stenographer finished and dropped her hands to her sides. From across the room another stenographer started up but she too quickly realised her error and a few seconds later that typewriter was silent as well.

There was silence as well in the lounge of the Manchester Hotel as Billy reached the end of his account. Dave Gallaher awoke from his slumber. He removed his heavy arms from the back of the couch. It turned out he’d been listening after all. ‘All right. All right. Let me ask you all something. In a week’s time it will be Sunday at home. Overnight someone’s favourite grandmother will have died. A young boy, tragically, has drowned while crossing a flooded creek. A small girl places her hands over her ears while the old man goes outside to put a bullet through her lame horse, Rosalind. I could go on … But I’m happy to stack those examples up on one side of the ledger, and, the result of the match against Scotland on the other. Which one do you think the people at home will want to hear and read about the most?’ Dave had us there but he wasn’t finished. Encouraged by our thoughtful silence he bounced up off the couch. ‘Nope, wait. I’ve changed my mind. This is better. Let’s wipe those examples and put in Billy’s news from Russia about the slaughtering and so forth. Stack that one up against our result and given the choice which one do you think the people at home will want to hear? Which piece of news would they give up to hear the other?’

You could have heard a pin drop.

‘Exactly,’ said Dave.

One more word on this subject.

That night Alec McDonald hears Mister Dixon with an English official in the foyer discussing Russia and the sinking of its Imperial fleet in the Sea of Japan. Alec hears Mister Dixon say, ‘More than a thousand Russians out of their element, drifting in downward fashion to the sea bed.’ And the Englishman’s reply: ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

We began to notice

variously

attempts to ascend the greasy pole

In Rouen, a barber held his head under a bowl of water

while his ‘assistant’ stood by with a stopwatch

In Leigh, a piqued ex-Royal Guardsman sacked for inattentiveness

entered his fifth day of standing upright

In America

a white horse dived from a sixty-foot platform

into a tank filled with water

In Paris, 49,999 guests

sat down to lunch in le Galérie des Machines

to a banquet organised by
Le Matin
newspaper

Nine miles of tables, 3500 waiters

165,000 plates and 13 tonnes of food were provided

A Midlands toolmaker swallowed a 2lb bag of nails

In a pub garden in Kent

a beekeeper

entered his fourth day

of staying buried alive

In Paris, a young man hoping to impress

a young woman

crashed

into the Seine on his paper wings

From Dublin, a vegetarian set off to cycle to Persia

It amused Jimmy Duncan. Over his plate of mashed potatoes Jimmy shook his head.