Jammy Dodger (21 page)

‘I think I know of someone who might fit the bill … Hold on, what's this?'

Page seven was given over entirely to a review of
Suspicious Minds
, complete with cast photographs and an insert of Mad Dog cupping his chin and scanning the horizon with poignant intent. Beneath the headline, She Ain't Heavy, She's My Wife, my darting eyeballs were subjected to a gush of rapturous prose that included the phrases, ‘a theatrical experience like no other', ‘
Shadow of a Gunman
meets
Viva Las Vegas
', and ‘this pistol-packing mama will run and run'. This couldn't
be
! Was this really happening? I read on. ‘… unashamedly hard-hitting … refreshingly visceral … dramatic writing of the highest order …' It bloody
was
. The country's most influential theatre critic had adjudged Mad Dog's play ‘a triumph!' A hot mixture of impotence and disbelief swept through me. Was this the way it was? Was this
really
the way things were?

 

*

 

Later that week I called at the door of my upstairs neighbour. I had earlier heard him arguing with our landlord, so I knew he was in.

‘Good evening … William, is it?' (I'd seen his name – William Fisher – on the envelopes that accumulated in the hallway.) ‘Artie from downstairs. I was wondering if I could have a word?'

Fisher's flat was smaller and even more untidy than mine; strewn with books and bottles and at least a dozen makeshift ashtrays, all spilling over. I noticed a selection of wigs hanging on a hatstand beside the fireplace, like a treeful of sleeping marmosets. He apologised for the mess and, sweeping a heap of magazines off the sticky corduroy sofa, invited me to sit.

‘You're the poetry guy, right? I've been meaning to drop by and say hello for ages. You want a cup of tea?'

‘Um – '

‘Good, 'cos I don't think there's any milk.'

He flopped into the armchair opposite, letting out an involuntary sigh as if just being upright had necessitated a tap on reserves. He was tall and thin, a few years older than me, with black hair and a long, handsome face defined by thick eyebrows and a pronounced chin. There were dark signs of insomnia beneath his eyes and he had the kind of undernourished look that would have your mother rummaging for her Shepherd's Pie recipe. So far, so good.

‘Don't worry about it,' I said, extracting a book from under me. It was a copy of
The Jew of Malta
. ‘Ah, the mighty Marlowe:
infinite riches in a little room
. I believe you're an actor? How's it going? Plenty of parts up for grabs?'

He ran a hand over his lugubrious features.

‘No, not really. Well … yes and no. Depends who you are.'

I nodded supportively.

‘S'a bit of closed shop round here, to be honest. A tight scene. You really have to be in with the right people. To tell you the truth I'm thinking of getting out.'

His voice was of a richer timbre than had been evident through the ceiling and slightly husky from heavy smoking. This was also good. And his diction was precise. All those infuriating vocal exercises, no doubt.

‘Really? Where would you go?'

‘London. The West End. That's where the real action is – ' He gazed over my shoulder and was briefly lost to a dream of neon and applause. ‘… Real creativity. Real talent. Loads of money. One of these days I'll get up off my arse …'

Just then he did something peculiar with his chin, or perhaps, more accurately, his chin did something odd, because I'm not sure he was aware of it – a twitch downwards and to the left, twice, as though tugged by an invisible string.

‘Are you alright?' I enquired.

‘What? Yes, fine. Slight hangover. Nothing major. What about you, how's the poetry going?'

‘Oh, you know how these things are: it's either a feast or a famine. At the moment it's neither one nor the other.'

We both realised simultaneously that what I had just said was completely meaningless. I smiled. He smiled. The silence edged towards vacuum.

‘Well Artie, what can I do for you?'

This was it. Time for the pitch.

‘I was wondering,' I said, keeping it casual. ‘If you'd be interested in a little freelance work.'

He shifted in his chair, stiffening his posture, and reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.

‘Possibly.' He proffered the pack.

‘Thanks. It's kind of a one-off. Pretty specialised,' I warned.

He shrugged.

‘We've all got bills to pay – ' He struck a match and leaned forward. ‘… What had you in mind?'

I began sketching out our unusual requirements, watching as I did so, his expression mutate from one of rapt curiosity into one of simian incomprehension. (To be fair, his understanding may have been impeded by some strategic vagueness and verbal acts of omission on my part.)

‘… So, you see, Billy – '

‘Please. Call me William.'

‘So you see, William, secrecy is absolutely vital here. It won't work otherwise.'

He said nothing. Taking a final drag of his cigarette, he ground the stub out in a jamjar lid and sat back.

‘So. What do you think?' I asked.

He rubbed at his eye. His chin spasmed. It dawned on me that this was a permanent feature. Was it a problem? I decided it wasn't. In fact, it struck me that it might actually add a useful grace note to our poetic persona: an outer manifestation of inner tumult. (Did it also explain why he wasn't getting parts?)

‘Isn't all this a bit … deceitful?' he said.

Uh-oh. A scruple.

‘That's an interesting word to use William,' I remarked, tilting my head and fixing on a particularly bad landscape above the mantelpiece. I took a moment. ‘But let me put it to you this way: doesn't all art depend on a kind of deceit? I mean, isn't acting itself pure illusion?'

‘Yes, but …'

‘The creation of something false in order to reveal something true?'

‘Um …'

‘Look William, it's probably best to see this job as a kind of artistic – ' (I nearly said ‘happening'.) ‘… Experiment. An experiment whose success depends on
your
skills as an actor. It's a challenge, I admit, but – '

He was on his feet waving at me to shut up.

‘I'll do it. How much will you pay me?'

Despite my fear of haggling (an arts education had left me singularly ill-prepared for the world of money) we went at it like a couple of cattle dealers, with Fisher pressing for fifty pounds per appearance and me keener on something around the thirty-five mark. Eventually we agreed on forty-two pounds fifty and sealed the deal over the dregs of a bottle of Sporran Dew that Fisher located behind the sofa. As the Chinese proverb says:
A wise man is never bound by his principles
.

 

Winks' promised schedule arrived in the post the next morning. In all, Dunseverick was down for half a dozen engagements before Christmas, the first of them the following afternoon – a little sooner than we'd expected. Winks had also included a note requesting a photograph of our man for the Council's in-house newsletter, which brought into even sharper focus the fact that … well, that we didn't know what Tyrone Dunseverick looked like. This was an obvious problem and possibly one we should have solved before my verbal contract with Fisher. However, if we'd learnt anything in the last few weeks it was that stuff didn't just happen: it required prime movers, discipline, and effort.

So, first things first. We knew, purely from the point of view of disguising our actor, that our bard pretty much
had
to have a beard, and I had reached certainty about one specific element of his attire, but that was about it. We gathered from the bookshelves all the volumes by male poets that had authorial pictures somewhere on their covers (Oliver, bless him, included Stevie Smith) and spread them out on the desk.

Boy, there were some beauties! Beards, I mean. From Sir Walter Raleigh's
contemptus mundi
Van Dyke, to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Dutch Elongated, to Walt Whitman's electric-grey Hibernator. These guys knew about facial insulation. (Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maltese appeared to have been excised from a dead Airedale.) There's a theory that beard fashions blow in on the tail-winds of ferment and upheaval, and thus we see the clean-shaven look favoured by the Romantics (you might have thought that rambling man of the woods William Wordsworth was a dead cert for fuzz) giving way to seventy years of pogonotrophic magnificence following the European Revolutions of 1848. The huge Victorian face-bush finally met its end during World War One, kiboshed by a ban on beards in the military (hygiene? gas mask efficiency?), although moustaches must have been permitted, at least for officers, going by the famous portrait of Wilfred Owen.

In the remainder of the hell-for-leather twentieth century, between the mass marketing of the Gillette Safety Razor, the influence of cinema, the Beatnik goatee (hello Mr Ginsberg), and the counter-culture protest beard (hello Mr Ginsberg again), all bets were off. Most of those who had attained heavyweight status by mid way, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, for instance, seemed to have spurned face furniture, the odd ones out being perhaps John Berryman and Ezra Pound (Spade and Ducktail respectively).

We were beginning to narrow it down. It seemed that what we were looking for lay somewhere between the Italian False Goatee of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Short Velutinous of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Given that Dunseverick was, for various reasons, under thirty, we couldn't have anything too gone-to-seed: no Garibaldis, Van Winkles or Old Testament Prophets, for example. At the same time the nature of his poetry – sensitive urban soul drawn to seek the deep heart's core in rural tranquillity – meant that anything too cultivated, anything that smacked too strongly of the dandy, would strike a bum note.

We turned our attention to eyewear, and here we had more practitioners but less range, the style of spectacles dictated in those days largely, I imagine, by the relevant national health boards. Robert Lowell, Patrick Kavanagh and Allen Ginsberg seem to have had a time-share on the same lead-framed pair. Larkin gazes sadly out from behind twin cathode ray tubes. The exception is Yeats, whose aerial-thin rims are in keeping with his cold, finely-tuned face. This was a dilemma. Was Dunseverick a vanity-free heavy-duty man? Or a studious aesthete with just a hint of self-regard?

These impressions could all be balanced, offset or corrected, of course, by his outfit, and here it was my firm belief that there was no room for vacillation: it had to be tweed; the primordial, rough-hewn, wheaten-flecked fabric favoured by the Irish literary figure for generations. The tweed jacket transcended age, build, religion and class while whispering ambivalently about all of them. The right one would be the bedrock of Dunseverick's identity, his backbone, his armour.

To this end and with categoric instructions, I sent Oliver off to his favourite charity shop armed with a fistful of petty cash. Meanwhile I rang Winks to try and play for time. No dice. However I did manage to negotiate the itinerary down to three appearances on the basis of Dunseverick's need to finish a career-defining sonnet sequence. The requested photograph of our poet, I blithely assured him, was forthcoming.

Early the next morning we convened at Fisher's flat to start work on our creature. To his credit, Fisher had raided the backstage lockers of the youth theatre where he helped shift scenery and stocked up on crepe hair and grease paint. He had also already chosen from his personal wig-tree two contenders for the poet's barnet (a component of the costume Oliver and I had overlooked). One was a nut-brown mass of Swinburnian curls that could be parted girlishly off-centre, the other an unkempt shock of beige tufts the texture of Alsatian fur. We decided to leave the hairstyle decision till last and set about constructing the all-important beard.

Who knew this would be such a painstaking task? After an hour of pasting, trimming and bickering, and an entire bottle of theatrical spirit gum, Fisher looked as though he had been bobbing for apples in a vat of pubic hair.

‘It's not my fault,' he moaned. ‘Normally this is the make-up artist's job.'

Oliver returned from Fisher's bathroom, into which he'd disappeared forty-five minutes earlier.

‘What, did I miss the cunnilingus competition?' he asked.

‘Very helpful, thank you Oliver. Let's see you do better.'

We applied several more layers of gingery fluff, and not helped by the unpredictable convulsions of Fisher's chin, eventually managed to pare the resultant bush down to a half-credible embryonic Hibernator. It wasn't what we'd discussed but it would have to do.

‘Right Oliver, clothes. How did you get on?'

‘Oh, I think you'll be pleased,' he said, and rummaging in the binbag he had brought with him, hauled out not just a jacket but a whole suit of heavy cloth on a hanger. It was tweed alright, the unrefined variety, so rough it was actually painful to the touch, and of a colour best described as ‘stagnant green'.

‘Ten quid,' Oliver cooed with pride. ‘And bagsy I have it when this is over.'

‘It smells,' Fisher said, holding it at arm's length. ‘Like some old boy lay dead in this for quite some time.'

Oliver affected not to hear him.

‘And here's your shirt.'

An off-white dress shirt with yellowing frills down the front landed on the chair.

‘I thought it was like something Shelley would have worn,' Oliver explained.

Fisher took his costume into the bathroom and closed the door. (We heard a shout of disbelief followed by choked outbursts of swearing.)

Oliver rootled in his bag again.

‘What do you think of these?' he asked, passing me a pair of heavy, black-framed spectacles. ‘Fifty pee.'