Jammy Dodger (23 page)

I engaged Winks in conversation while Oliver helped Dunseverick down.

‘Didn't expect to see you here Stanford.'

‘No, well I thought I'd bring the mountain to Muhammad. How did it go?'

‘Excellent. He's a natural. The kids really connected with him. Ah, here's the man himself – ' There was no avoiding it. ‘… let me introduce you.'

The bard proffered an imperious hand, which Winks took while involuntarily performing a kind of mangled curtsey.

‘Glad to meet you sir, we're all big fans of yours up at the Council,' he gushed.

The writer grunted. Tears were streaming from his injured eye.

‘Are you alright?' asked Winks. ‘Your eye seems …'

‘Oh, it's nothing,' said Dunseverick, with a dismissive wave. ‘I often get overtaken by emotion when I read my work …'

(This guy was good. He
should
have been on the stage.)

Winks was instantly smitten.

‘I can understand that, of course. Your poetry strikes me as particularly personal, heart-felt, it has a passionate intensity – '

He was interrupted by news that the first-years were ready for their close-up.

‘Would you mind? It's for our next internal. Won't take a minute.'

The poet approached the clustered arrangement of boys in front of the stage even more gingerly than his trousers would allow. I noticed Winks do a double-take on his badgerish rear view.

‘That's lovely. Good. If we could just get Mr Dunseverick in the middle,' the teacher called.

Winks unwrapped his camera and began fiddling with a pack of flash bulbs.

‘Okay, stop moving around,' the teacher directed. ‘Boys, I will expel the next person I see mooning, is that clear? Are you alright Mr Dunseverick?'

The poet dabbed at his bubbling eye socket.

‘Right. I'm ready,' said Winks from behind his lens.

So, giant Dunseverick posed with his tiny tormentors and, much to my deep unease, his mad-haired, bushy, broken-eyed image (the only one on the roll free of rabbit ears or devil horns) entered the annals.

 

*

 

With Dunseverick's first public appearance out of the way, and his next not due for several weeks, life in the
Lyre
office returned to its customary gentle pace. We showed up late, broke early for lunch and mostly read or dozed in the afternoons. We sent off letters to poets begging for new material, and every couple of days Oliver would ring round the publishing houses to blag review copies of the latest releases. After a while I started tinkering with some new Dunseverick poems for the next issue (there hadn't been much pick-up in contributions) and my co-editor resumed his quest for a Sunnyland Bunny slogan. The competition's closing date was fast approaching and he embarked on a final milk binge, struggling in each morning with sacks of homemade puddings and ices, and whipping up tall creamy beverages at every opportunity. I helped him out where I could (drawing the line at the egg nog) but the man himself was a living appetite-killer; a slurping, belching, waddling cautionary tale.

And all for what? Could he even remember? The various elements of his futile endeavour, it seemed to me – his desire to escape, his hunger to see the world, his addiction to comfort food – had fused into a mirage of elsewhere, an illusion that was threatening to blind him to his earthly blessings. What was so awful about here anyway? Okay it had been a bit tempestuous of late but we had prevailed, and now we were no longer under pressure. At least not in the way others were. The guys on the clock. The suckers.

The luxury of our relaxed itinerary had been underlined by a conversation with Rosie. I telephoned her office to arrange a drink after work and, get this: she didn't have time to talk to me! She was too busy! As I regarded the vacantly purring receiver, I was reminded with a jolt that the time zone in which I had operated for most of my adult life – a realm where half a day could be soaked up by a view from a window or a book plucked idly from a shelf – was not where the general public lived. Not even having a spare minute to shoot the breeze?
No time to see, in broad daylight, / Streams full of stars, like skies at night
? Unthinkable. Of course, I understood the principle (I had taken a little philosophy, after all): someone had to fetch the water from the well, blah blah, this person had to be rewarded, etcetera, this led to the exchange of commodities, blah, and ultimately the trading of time for money, and so on and so forth. This was a fact of life, and devising a way to juggle the two, it seemed, was to locate a string through the labyrinth. It was just that I personally wasn't ready to negotiate that particular balance of payments yet.

Neither was Oliver, needless to say, although the dictates of his stomach, his wardrobe, and his mistress-entertainment budget meant his need for cash was greater than mine (most of the review copies landing on the mat these days were being whisked directly to the second-hand book merchants, sometimes still in their Jiffy bags). Sometimes I wondered if his surrender to a nine-to-five could be that far off.

One person who was suddenly
not
short of the folding stuff was Mad Dog, a blow-up of whose moustache (and sideburns) had accompanied the incredible news that
Suspicious Minds
was transferring to the West End.

‘This ex-community-worker-turned-playwright came out of nowhere to bow-wow the Northern Ireland arts world,' the news reader chirped. ‘Now it's the turn of London audiences to pant for his unique take on life, love and loyalty. I think it's safe to say this Dog has taken the biscuit. Let's hear now from the director …'

Rosie and I were watching this in the saloon of The Pen and Quill, where we'd called for a swift drink on the way to the cinema (Wim Wenders'
Wings of Desire
– her choice).

‘I thought you said his play was crap,' she exclaimed.

‘It was. At least the bits I was awake for were,' I said.

Quigley appeared onscreen wearing a polka-dot cravat. It was a four-week run, he told us, and it was already sold out – a record, apparently, for an unknown provincial production moving to the West End.

‘This play is, quite simply,' he revealed. ‘A parable for our times.'

There followed some gritty footage of Mad Dog roaming the streets of his native city in the rain, pausing tragically before murals of monster-warriors feasting on the entrails of their enemies, emoting outside pubs as they disgorged lost souls into the night, brooding over glistening roofscapes from the heights of Cavehill. It may have been due to the weather but his hair was unusually pompadourish, and he was sporting a strange, cape-like garment that swirled out behind him in the long shots.

‘What's with that cape, is he a fucken superhero now as well?' I growled.

‘What's eating you?' Rosie wanted to know. ‘At least he's doing something.'

There was an edge to her tone.

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

She shrugged. ‘Nothing.'

‘No, please, go on.'

She shot me one of her unreadable looks.

‘I'm just saying that, you know, no matter what
you
think, he's being successful. And that's better than nothing. That's all.'

I was pretty sure that wasn't all.

‘Are you saying I've got nothing?'

‘On the contrary you've got a lot. It's just …'

‘Yes?' I could feel a prickle of heat on my neck, blood-static in my ears.

‘Well, you've got potential, that's obvious – to do what I'm not absolutely sure – but you're not using it. You seem content just to stay in the background and make others look good.'

‘That's not really … Like who?'

‘Poets. This new guy, Tyrone whatsisname, for example, that you say everyone's talking about.'

‘Dunseverick.'

Yes. Why can't
you
be Tyrone Dunseverick?'

(Reviewing this conversation at a distance I realised there had actually been a moment of high ground at this point, from which I had weighed the possible consequences of full disclosure and, despite a clamour of internal dissent, plunged on regardless.)

‘Let me tell you something about Tyrone Dunseverick …'

 

Clearly, it was a mistake to tell Rosie the truth. I know that now. I think I knew it then too but, as I say, I went ahead anyway. Why? Why indeed. This was a question I would puzzle over at some length. This, and why I had been quite so shocked at the cold judgmentalism of her response. What had I expected? Approval? Admiration?
Respect?
Was it possible I was somehow
proud
of the entity I had brought into the light? I mean, who was I kidding? Rosie, I had to admit, was on the money: our strategem was not a masterclass in stylish anarchy, it was ‘devious, dishonest and – ' (perhaps most stinging of all) ‘… 
juvenile
'.

There were other home truths that found their target in our row that night, not least the accusation that I was a moral coward of the first water, paralysed by fear of failure. This I hotly denied, of course (shouting about psychobabble and cliches), but later in the pounding silence of my room I began to wonder.
Was
I hiding from reality (whatever that was), and if so, what
was
it I was afraid of? The word juvenile kept coming back. Juvenile … infantile … puerile … Wait a minute! Was I
jejune
? I paced. I smoked. I stood at the window. I stood smoking at the window. I turned the radio on. The end of the late news: ‘Gunmen … feud … punishment … dead …' I switched it off. Tried to read. A book at random from the shelves. …
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur, a standing chill / That slows each impulse down to indecision …

Eventually though, even the words of the unblenching Larkin became just that: words. On paper. And I fell asleep.

 

*

 

Rosie and I didn't speak again for a while after the dangerous-truth-telling session. My pride was hurt. But whether she was right or wrong (she was right) wasn't the point: I still couldn't see a way to abort the Dunseverick project. We had no choice but to follow through.

As luck would have it the poet's next appearance turned out not to involve children but around twenty members of a cross-community Women's Group who met once a month in the back room of their local library. Officially, their purpose was ‘to raise consciousness via the embrace of modern culture' but in reality it was an excuse to eat cake and trade tales of spousal imbecility. They regarded Dunseverick with some concern (I overheard one of them remarking that he could do with ‘a good dose of Shepherd's Pie') and began fussing over him immediately. Oliver, who had spent the entire journey gripped by fear that we were entering an ambush of feminists, saw he was among sympathetic women more or less the same age as his girlfriend and relaxed.

The bard, in particularly crapulent condition but managing to pass it off as artistic angst, rumbled through his set. Apart from a minor loss of chin control during
Lagan Delta Blues
and a barely perceptible unravelling of the beard as he cast his eyes to the heavens at the end of
Put Out More Flags!
, it was without incident. We moved on to the Q&A. The ladies wanted to know where he got the ideas for his poems. Why didn't he write more about love? Didn't he have a girlfriend? Would he like one? (Ribald laughter.)

Perspiring freely (and worryingly for us, given his prostheses), our man of letters was then taken by both arms and led to a long trestle table laid out with hot drinks and treats. The silver-haired lady manning the teapot seemed oddly familiar.

‘What'll you have son, a wee eclair? Or a wee tray bake? Those wee vanilla slices are lovely, so they are. Go on, have two, you're looking a wee bit peaky.'

Mystifyingly, given that thanks to a hasty beard job he resembled a child's Etch-a-Sketch drawing of a werewolf, Dunseverick proved irresistible to the women. Oliver and I watched in amazement as they clustered round, jockeying for position, now and then one of them finding an excuse to stroke his sleeve. (‘Are you
seeing
this?' Oliver squeaked through a mouthful of caramel square.) The poet, initially daunted by the attention, began to enjoy it, indulging his fans with sardonic apercus they in turn contrived to find hilarious. (He delivered these with a peculiar waggle of the head that I hoped was affectation rather than the emergence of a new affliction.)

Eventually, after Oliver had collected the price of twenty copies of
Lyre
, we extracted Dunseverick and took a taxi back to town. It was Halloween and the streets were teeming with vampires and demons, fireworks crackling along the skyline like gunfire. Several times before we reached the pub our way was blocked by gangs of drunken monsters, a couple of whom mistook Dunseverick for one of their own.

Installed at the bar with a large whiskey and a chaser of stout, the poet seemed delighted at how things had gone with the ladies, positively pumped up on feminine feedback.

‘One of them even slipped me her number,' he purred, removing his Larkins.

‘Really, which one?'

‘The small good-looking one.'

We were stumped.

‘Sorry,
which
one?'

‘You know, the wee blonde serving the tea.'

 

*

 

We had entered November (‘the Norway of the year', as Emily Dickinson once remarked) and there was an icy edge to the wind that chased the remaining leaves along the avenues. The city turned up its collar; people began withdrawing to the fireside; the pubs kept their samovars constantly at boiling point to meet the demand for hot whiskies. In the parks, the trees were black tangles of arteries against thin grey sky.

At the office, the building's antediluvian heating system, with its church organ-sized radiators, seemed to have jammed on, and as a result Oliver and I were spending more time there than in the meat lockers of our respective flats. Despite that, we weren't making much headway with the next issue, inspiration on the Dunseverick front having all but dried up.