Jammy Dodger

 

 

Kevin Smit
h was born in London and grew up in Northern Ireland. He has worked in print, broadcast and newswire journalism and was a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe for a number of years. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
Jammy Dodger
is his first novel.

 

 

 

www.sandstonepress.com

© Kevin Smith 2012

Editor: Moira Forsyth

ISBN e: 978-1-908737-09-0

 

For Eve, for everything

 

Brain, character, soul – only as one sees more of life does one understand how distinct is each.

–
The Lost World
, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

All that is left of the castle now are three stumps of wall, like broken teeth, sticking up on the edge of the crag. Down below, the North Atlantic worries at the base of the peninsula and in the distance, when the weather is clear, you can make out the coast of Scotland beyond the dark crescent of Rathlin Island. A couple of hours' walk round the headland and you come to the vast geometric puzzle that is the Giant's Causeway. None of this is particularly relevant, by the way, it's just that the signpost for this place, Dunseverick, caught my eye as I was driving back to to the city and, without thinking, I turned off the road into this little car park to take a look.

You see, I've never actually been here until now, even though the name features strongly in an unfortunate episode from my past that unfolded sixty miles away in Belfast and that gnaws at me to this day. It was, I'm afraid, a shameful affair, a farrago of deception, betrayal, embezzlement, and even outright fraud. Furthermore, others were led astray. I'm going to put my hands up right away and take my share of responsibility for what happened – no doubt I should have known better – but in my defence I believe there was an extenuating circumstance. And it is this: I was in love. To be exact, I was in love with Poetry. I'm aware of how odd that sounds, so let me explain.

 

Long ago in Belfast everything was
nice
. The sun shone out of a powder-blue sky most days and when it didn't there were warm, fuggy cafes to sit and drink tea in, attended by lovely old ladies in black and white uniforms. In the sunshine the terraces of red-brick astonished the eye and the long avenues foamed with cherry blossom. When it rained, the blaze of darkness from the roofs of Bangor Blue slate led all the way to the hill at the top of every street. That bank of mountain, reaching round the city to the mouth of Belfast Lough, seemed to shelter us, like a comforting arm around a shoulder.

In the mornings, yeast aromas from the bread factory drifted across the River Lagan and through the Botanic Gardens, sweetening the air on Botanic Avenue where, at that time – the year is 1988 – I both lived and worked. Late afternoons smelled of a mixture of frying meat and turf smoke which, as night fell and the lamps came on, began to be overlaid with vapours of perfume and alcohol: mystery and promise. It was in these slipstreams that my friends and I journeyed into the outer reaches. We had lots of well-lighted places in which to down pints and play snooker, and to meet well-fed young Ulster ladies with fine-grained skin and glossy hair, who we would take back to parties in our appallingly unkempt flats. There were love affairs and inevitably, I admit, some broken hearts. But there were no mortgages. And no children to suck away the money (what there was of it). And we were young. We were bullet-proof.

Long ago in Belfast everything and everyone was nice. As if bound together in recognition of the precarious nature of existence, shopkeepers, bus drivers, barmen, cabbies … everyone was nice to everyone else. In everyday speech, the world was diminutised and made more manageable, friendlier, by the prefacing of everything with ‘wee', as in: ‘Just hold on a wee minute', or ‘Would you get me a wee Big Mac?', and ‘Yes, Mr Johnson, it
was
a wee stroke, but we've also found a wee tumour'. The food we gave each other was nice too – wholesome broth and homemade wheaten bread, and the national dish: comforting mashed potatoes flecked with emerald-green scallions and whipped through with reckless weights of butter.

The climax of all this
bonhomie
occurred each summer when thousands of men draped in iridescent colours paraded through the streets to celebrate the glorious victories of an ancient king on his snow-white charger and all the people came out of their houses to cheer and wave flags, and everyone was happy.

 

Actually
… Hang on. Let's go back. That last bit's not quite right. Not
everyone
was happy. In fact – well, let's face it, about half the people
weren't
happy. And that was the problem: not everything was nice, and not
everyone
was nice. Some people, indeed, were downright unpleasant, as we shall see.

 

My name is Arthur Conville, Artie to my friends, and in the dog end of the 1980s, freshly-hatched from university, I believed in Poetry. I had faith in the power and importance of Poetry. I breathed it and was consumed by it. I recited it and discussed it. I mulled over the meaning of certain lines, sometimes for weeks on end. At night I dreamed in iambic pentameters. From Milton and Spenser to Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, (the odd helping of Tennyson for roughage); the Americans, Whitman, Berryman, Dickinson, Frost, (Lowell if you were feeling robust), through the Modernists, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Moore (let's not forget Yeats) to contemporary British, Larkin, Hughes, MacNeice, (Dylan) Thomas, and Northern Ireland's own gallery of live pyrotechnicians: Poetry, I was sure, could change things. Naïve you say? Perhaps. But the poetic world of sensitivity and beauty and eternal truths was far nicer than the one on the evening news – a bomb-lit domain of chaos and violence and dangerous, tattooed men incapable of second thoughts.

 

Besides, poetry paid my bills.

 

You see, a dividend (if that's not too callous) of Northern Ireland's ‘Troubles' was a torrent of cash from the British exchequer aimed at ‘normalising' life in the province, and a fat tributary of that
largesse
was directed towards ‘the Arts'. ‘The Arts', where people like me were waiting with open bank accounts. I was proud to preside (along with my co-editor Oliver Sweeney) over a small magazine called
Lyre
. It was subtitled ‘A Supplement for the Imagination' (is that pretentious enough for you?), and it specialised in, yes, you've guessed it, poetry.

Generous quarterly grants from the government meant we had an office of sorts to lounge in and enough money to pay our rent and cover sundries such as lunch and twice-weekly drinking sessions (thrice-weekly if we cut corners on the stationery). Did it sting that we, once the cultural revolutionaries of our generation, were kept by the state, that our's was a life lived in captivity? Not a bit. We sang in our chains like the sea. Times were good. Top quality angst and misery flowed from many pens and all we had to do was sieve and print. Northern Irish poetry was hot.
Lyre
thrived. Oliver and I were interviewed with tedious regularity by every foreign news crew and magazine passing through in search of
conflict chic
, including an appearance, at one heady juncture, in a
Vanity Fair
centre spread, with poor old Oliver made up like a homosexual vampire and me (I'm not proud of this) moodily astride a beanbag in black polo-neck and leg warmers.

And then, just when we had become really cosy in our subsidised nest, we encountered a problem: the poetry ran out. There was no more poetry. Or rather there was no more poetry of the
right type
. There was a shortage, specifically, of ‘Troubles poetry'. The heavyweights who had caused all the hullaballoo in the first place had fought their way through blizzards of praise to higher, greener pastures and these days would just about deign to be published in the
London Review of Books
or
The New Yorker
. They hadn't even an old shopping list left for us. Meanwhile, the handful of ‘promising newcomers' we had been milking, sorry, nurturing, seemed to have developed some kind of literary stage-fright (okay, the one who had the nervous breakdown had an excuse), and more worrying, the second division of established ‘war' poets we relied on for the critical mass of each issue, had quite simply dried up. In short, the cupboard was bare.

 

So, what happens when you run out of poetry?

 

Let's find out.

‘It's the prince of biscuits really, isn't it? The custard cream.'

Oliver Sweeney, aesthete, gourmand, bon viveur, had assumed his mid-morning tea-break position – sprawled in his chair, feet on the desk, mug in fist. The trouser legs of his Oxfam suit, an incongruous pinstripe, had ridden up, revealing odd socks and several inches of white, hairless shank. Frustrated all morning by his overgrown wheat-coloured mop flopping into his eyes, he had gathered it into a top-knot using an elastic band and now looked slightly surreal, like a gigantic baby or a failed sumo wrestler forced to work in advertising.

For a moment I considered ignoring him. I was tired, having been woken early by the actor in the flat above me doing his voice exercises. I reached across the ancient, formica-topped office table we shared and extracted a biscuit.

‘Isn't that the Garibaldi?' I said.

‘No, no, no.' He glared at me. ‘You're getting mixed up with the, er … with Machiavelli. No, none of your foreign muck here …'

He paused while his inky fingers stabbed again at the packaging.

‘No, there's no doubt, the custard cream has it all: fine texture, nice filling, not too sweet, holds together in a tight spot, but at the same time not afraid to show its feminine side.'

He leant his head back and dropped the tea-logged oblong of stodge into his greedy mouth. I noticed the soles of his Nature Treks were badly worn on the outside edges.

‘Sounds more like my uncle Toby,' I said. ‘By the way, what's your position on the Jacobs' Mikado?'

‘Ah, now.' Oliver set down his mug and clasped his hands together under his fleshy chin, making a steeple of his index fingers. ‘Essentially a satirist. Walks the line between biscuit and sex toy.'

‘Yes, I've always considered it a bit of a tease myself.'

I was warming to the topic.

‘Give me the firm handshake of a chocolate digestive any day.'

‘Or the iron fist of the gingernut.'

We ate and sipped in meditative silence. We were in no hurry. Large expanses of our working day often passed in this way.

‘I have to say,' Oliver continued. ‘I'm quite partial to a Hobnob, although they can be a bit hairy without a cup of tea.'

‘Aren't they just digestives with bits of rope mixed in?'

‘Well they have a certain rustic charm … I'm not sure about
rope
.'