Jammy Dodger (2 page)

‘No no, Gypsy Creams have rustic charm – you can see it in the adverts – Hobnobs are just agricultural … like being taken roughly by a farmhand with eyebrows on his cheeks. They should put a bit of chocolate on them.'

‘Actually, I believe they
have
brought out a chocolate version … Hang on … Jesus!' Oliver swung his legs down from the desk with a double thud, splashing hot liquid over his trousers.

‘Man-over-board … Where's my spoon?' He began fishing disintegrated biscuit from the bottom of his mug and I briefly wondered, not for the first time that week, where my life was headed.

‘More chai?' I said, rising and moving towards the cupboard containing a fridge and a sink that we referred to as ‘the kitchen'.

‘Go on then. Plenty of milk.' Oliver thrust his tannin-streaked beaker at me.

‘Now where was I? Oh yes … you know two items whose credentials I view with suspicion? The Jaffa Cake and the Wagon Wheel, and here's why …'

 

I managed to tune him out, and while I waited for the teabags to infuse I gazed down from the window into Botanic Avenue. Even though our office was at the top of a tall Victorian building the street always seemed an inordinate distance below.
All that air
… I imagined jumping off the sill, the downward pluck of gravity, the upward rush of blood, the violence of impact. I wondered whether I'd survive. Unlikely. (Though it's not the fall, they say, it's the sudden stop at the bottom.) Looking up, my eye was led across the rooftops of Cromwell Road and Wolseley Street to the warren of redbrick terraces harbouring chintzy bed & breakfasts and nests of slumbering students. Further up, to the right, was the glowering granite presence of the theology college, softened by the tropical promise just beyond of the Botanic Gardens; turn left and cross the railway bridge and the nexus of Shaftesbury Square offered conduits to six different worlds, including the delights of ‘Loyalist Sandy Row'.

It was a mellow summer's morning with a slight haze to the light and the boulevard was busy: the whistling postman, the breadman unloading trays of loaves, Mrs Adamson from the stationery shop returning from the café swinging an extra doughnut in a paper bag. Office workers, traffic wardens, Chinese cooks, tramps …
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Not really the weather for Eliot. No brown fog. Still, what was the next bit?
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. / Flowed up the hill and down King William Street …
Unreal city indeed.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
. What a great line. Fantastic line.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?
Another good one.
In the mountains, there you feel free
. Not bad.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
Or was that Lou Reed? From the
Transformer
album?

As I stared down at the wretched creatures of the lower air my reverie was broken by the realisation that I was being stared back at. Leaning against the wall outside the newsagent's was a short, thick-set man in his early to mid-thirties with black hair that was cropped at the sides but long and curly at the back, and the kind of moustache that in Belfast suggested tattoos couldn't be far away. He was wearing dark trousers and a Harrington jacket. He had a tabloid open in his hands but his attention was fixed very intently on me, or at least on the window I was framed by, because I couldn't be sure, with the sunlight reflecting off the pane, whether I was in fact visible. Either way, it unnerved me and I turned back to the room.

‘… Okay, I'll make an exception for the Choco Leibniz,' Oliver was saying. ‘I mean that's German engineering at its best – the way they embed that, well what is essentially a rectangular Rich Tea, in that slab of chocolate … Hats off. That Leibniz was a smart cookie – no pun – designing treats as well as being a philosophical genius.'

I peered round the corner of ‘the kitchen' but couldn't tell from his expression whether he was serious or not. This was, after all, a man who had signed up to a degree in Classical Civilisation in the hope of toga parties.

I dropped the teabags into the sink, trying not to focus on the debris already in there.

‘Hey, you did a bit of philosophy, what was Leibniz on about anyway?' he asked as I handed him his cup.

‘I think he believed the world is as good as God could make it.'

‘Oh. Really? In that case, God help us.'

 

There wasn't much happening in the office so we knocked off towards lunchtime and headed for The Betjeman Arms, a Victorian spit-and-sawdust pub popular with the artistic demimonde. While Oliver bellied up to the bar to order pints and food, I staked out a booth under one of the ornate stained-glass windows. As I slid along the cool leather I realised with a frisson of dismay that Mick the Artist was already installed, coiled in a corner reading a newspaper, a glass of brown lemonade in front of him and a smouldering roll-up between his thin lips.

‘Alright?' he enquired, appraising me with shiny, feral eyes while drawing heavily on his cylinder of Old Shag.

‘Not too bad. Yourself?'

Mick the Artist was the unspoken, unelected leader of the city's painting fraternity, a formidably combative forty-year-old who was constantly goading the others about their duties and rights – like a union boss. Sooner or later everyone who knew him would find themselves squirming in the merciless grip of his dialectic. He had never been known to laugh. (I could never quite grasp the concept of a dour artist, given they got to play with colours and paintbrushes every day.)

‘Ah y'know, chippin' away as usual.'

‘Yes, well, what else can you do?' I observed, glancing around and finding the snug a little too … well, snug.

Mick the Artist, whose fibrous body supported extensive piercings, stroked the silver ring in his left nostril.

‘When's your next issue due?' he demanded.

‘Oh, shortly, we're just waiting on a couple of – '

‘Johnny Devine says you haven't paid him for the artwork he gave you last time …'

‘Did he? I mean, does he? That's strange, I'm pretty sure cheques – '

‘You know you're going to have to put your rates up. You know that, don't you? We've all got to …'

He stopped.

‘What the – ?' He was staring at my co-editor who had arrived with our drinks and had, I now noted, forgotten about his Pebbles Flintstone top-knot.

‘That big barman there was giving me a really weird – ah Mick, how's the form?' said Oliver, setting two Rembrandtian pints on the table.

‘Yeah … Sweeney. Yeah, I was just saying to Conville, we've all got to make a living – you guys are going to have to pump up the money a wee bit.'

Oliver jabbed a finger of acknowledgement in Mick's direction.

‘You're absolutely right. We were just discussing exactly the same thing this morning,' he said. ‘We've already asked the Arts Council for extra funding.'

He stared encouragingly at me. It was the first I'd heard of it.

‘Really?' Mick was taken aback.

‘Yep. To pay you guys for your work. Mag wouldn't be the same without the pictures.'

(Personally, I would have had no truck whatsoever with the artists, but one of the conditions of our funding was that we find space for their onanistic daubings. This meant that not only did we have to suffer relentless challenges to our ‘poncey bourgeois' ideas about art but we also had to put up with their self-consciously unhinged behaviour. What was that remark of Paul Valery's?
Everything changes but the avant-garde
?)

The Artist's metal-heavy nostrils were attempting to flare with excitement.

‘Well that's … that's fucken brilliant,' he concluded. He ground out his rollie, then appeared to have a thought. ‘Hang on a second, are you sure The Hawk will actually sign off on this?'

At mention of The Hawk, an icy sensation shivered through the booth and Oliver's right eye flickered briefly, like a faulty fluorescent lamp.

‘The Hawk,' Oliver said, taking a ravenous swig of stout, ‘is right behind us and he loves you guys down at the Collective.'

‘He does?'

‘Oh yeah. Thinks you're … dedicated and cutting edge.'

‘Sweeney,' said Mick, his eyes contracting to the size of ball-bearings. ‘Are you taking the piss?'

‘No, I swear. He's keen as mustard. The cash is as good as in the bank.'

The waitress bustled in with our bangers-and-champ, which Mick regarded with a look of distaste. He didn't strike me as someone who liked food.

‘Well anyway, I'll be heading on here and leaving you two to your grub,' he said, getting to his feet. ‘But a wee tip for you – Marty Pollocks has been doing some great stuff. He has a series of close-ups of penises – ' For a clenched nanosecond we all avoided looking down at the plates. ‘… in really wild acrylic colours. Bit Mapplethorpe, bit Warhol, very strong. Would look fantastic in the next magazine … Right?' He gave us a fisty salute and disappeared into the throng.

‘Yeah right,' I said, having fully exhaled.

‘In a pig's arse, friend,' said Oliver.

We took up our eating irons and addressed the carbohydrate clouds in front of us.

‘What was that bollocks about extra moulah for the artwork? The Hawk hates the artists.'

Oliver, traditionalist that he was, had made a well in the centre of his mashed potatoes and was scraping the second foil wrapper's-worth of butter into it.

‘Listen, you just gotta tell these people what they want to hear and they leave you alone. First rule of business.'

‘Yeah but Mick – '

The Artist's close-cropped bony head reappeared, shockingly proximate, above the door of the snug.

‘Forgot to say, there's a happening at Johnny Devine's on Friday night. You should probably be there.'

Oliver and I exchanged glances.

‘Alright?'

‘Sorry Mick, what is it that's … happening?' said Oliver.

‘A happening. You know.'

‘Sorry, a …?'

‘A happening. You know what a happening is.'

‘You mean like … a party?' asked Oliver.

‘No, not a party, a happening.'

‘I'm not sure …' Oliver began.

‘Come on lads!' Mick's pupils, I noticed, were getting small again. ‘A happening. You know? A
happening
?'

We were maintaining eye contact but it was becoming more difficult.

‘Jesus, you're not
that
young! A happening. It's a …' Mick's face was deepening in colour.

‘Is it a
kind
of party?'

‘No, it's not a fucken
kind
of party!'

What was he talking about?

‘FOR FUCKSAKE!' he shouted. ‘A HAPPENING! A FUCKEN …
HAPPENING
!

This was scary. What was wrong with Mick?

‘A FUCKEN HAPPENING! A
HAPPENING
! ARE YESE THICK?' he shrieked.

A tiny comet of spittle streaked from the corner of his mouth and landed in Oliver's lunch.

‘Mick, Mick, Mick,' I said, rising to my feet and holding up my hands. ‘Take it easy. We just need to clarify: will we see you at Johnny Devine's on Friday night?'

He was panting.

We waited.

‘Yes,' he said.

His head swivelled and was gone again.

I looked at Oliver. ‘What in the name of fuck was
that
about?'

‘I've no idea. What's his problem? He makes me very uneasy.'

‘Not sure, I think he's just a bit – pass the ketchup would you – intense.'

‘
Intense
? His balls are going to go off like popcorn any day now.'

‘Like
popcorn
?'

‘Forget it.'

The old pub was in full lunchtime swing now, a sense of well-being rising through the soft hubbub of voices and the clinking of silverware on ancient china. Doors opened and closed, admitting the wah-wah of traffic and the ululations of the newspaper boys. The place smelled, as it had done for a century and a half, of treacley hops, gravy steam and tobacco. The filigreed ceiling was stained the colour of a chain-smoker's fingers. Every few seconds another pint of black or gold would arrive with a clunk, foaming, on the granite counter-top and another hand would reach out for it …

The booth door was ajar and I could see the lifers at the far end of the room, arrayed on their stools like prisoners of a morality play, their faces already heavy with alcohol, their movements sclerotic.

‘
The weeks go by like birds,'
I murmured.

‘What?' said Oliver, unwrapping another lozenge of butter.

‘
And the years, the years / Fly past anti-clockwise / Like clock hands in a bar mirror
.'

‘What?'

‘Oh nothing.'

 

*

 

The poet E.E. Cummings once said running a literary magazine was like pushing your head through a straw. Having been involved in more than my fair share over the years I have to disagree: it's nowhere near as easy as that. My first,
Dystopia Now!
, folded after three issues, largely because people seemed to assume it was a journal for sufferers of chronic indigestion. More successful (in that it lasted for four editions) was
Uranus
, but again, I think the name may have been transmitting confusing signals to the astronomy crowd.

Titles are crucial. You've got to get it right, and get it right from the off, because once that beast is released into the wild it can never be recalled. I'm thinking now of the appearance of the first (and only) issue of
Epididymis
, which one of our ill-fated editorial committee at that time had mis-remembered with
absolute certainty
as the name of one of the Greek muses. Words can be treacherous. (As, of course, can memory.)