Jammy Dodger (4 page)

For the most part a cheerful man, he became morbidly preoccupied by his war experiences later in life. He started reading everything he could find about the struggle on the Western Front and set about trying to track down survivors. A man from County Cork who had also been at Ypres answered his advertisement in the
Irish Times
and they began a correspondence, but after the second or third letter, the Cork man died. For several years then, around the time when the later of his ten children, including my father, were teenagers, he became a morose insomniac, prone to periods of crippling depression. The war poets brought him some comfort. He was particularly fond of reciting those famous lines of Rupert Brooke's:
We have found safety with all things undying, / The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth, / The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying, / And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
And when he did, water would leak out of the sides of his eyes and, being a kid, I'd be embarrassed and not know where to look.

I found myself thinking about my earlier encounter with Rosie McCann. She certainly was eye-catching, with a forthright aspect to her that I found attractive. But what on earth was with that smartarse song reference? What was I thinking? On the other hand it was hard to believe she had never heard of it. With that name. And she did have nut-brown hair. And it was definitely natural –

‘Buggering fig rolls!' yelled Oliver from the doorway.

My delicious solitude had ended.

‘Problem?'

‘That's all they had. Bloody stock-taking or some excuse. I fucken hate fig rolls …'

‘So, did you buy some?'

‘No, I had to get Kit Kats,' he said sulkily. The bag he was carrying appeared weighty.

‘What's in the bag?'

‘Milk.'

I grabbed a stack of envelopes from the floor and returned to the desk. Sounds of effort drifted from ‘the kitchen'.

‘You know, Oliver,' I said. ‘We really need to get cracking. There's virtually nothing to go in the next issue – '

I ripped open the first submission (‘
Dear Sir, As a fan of the good old-fashioned kind of verse
 …') and flung it over my right shoulder.

‘… And the clock's ticking. The last thing we need now is undue attention from the boys up on the hill. I hear budgets are under horrible pressure.'

I opened another. The fridge door slammed. I could hear the kettle nearing climax. I examined a polaroid of a topless middle-aged woman holding a cat and smiling enigmatically into the camera. On the wall behind her was a painting of a bare-breasted woman holding a cat. I tossed it and its accompanying sheaf over my left shoulder.

Oliver emerged with the tea.

‘Yeah, I know,' he said. ‘It's been on my mind. I've even had a couple of dreams about The Hawk. In one of them he was sitting on my chest, smoking cigarettes – not saying anything, just … smoking … and looking at me … Everything was dark except his face. It was really creepy,' He shivered. ‘In another he was trying to push my mother out of a window.'

He disappeared into ‘the kitchen' again.

‘Speaking of creepy,' he called. ‘There's a guy I keep seeing downstairs, in the street. He's been hanging around for a couple of weeks now. Real mean-looking hombre.'

He returned and settled himself opposite me.

‘Yeah?' I said, slitting another envelope. ‘What's he look like?'

‘Bad hair, moustache, Harrington jacket. Five'll get you ten he has a tattoo of a spider's web somewhere.'

‘Yeah … really?' I was only half listening. There was something about the letter I had just extracted that was demanding the bulk of my attention.

It was hand-written – left-leaning black cursive – on crackling, yellowish paper.

‘
So yous think your smart do you
?' It began. ‘
Well I don't. In fact I think your dog shite
.' (This was more abusive than usual.) ‘
Compleat dog shite. Yous would'nt know good riting if it bit yous on the arse so yous would'nt. Yous are wankers. Yous think your so high and mitey passing jugement, on evrybody else. Well let me tell yous something. Your not. And yous will reep what yous soe. Beleive me. Evry dog has it's day.'

I read it several times just to make sure I was understanding it correctly and passed it across the table.

‘Looks like we have a dissatisfied customer,' I said.

Oliver studied it carefully, taking an occasional slurp of tea. He pursed his lips.

‘Mmm, it's not signed … and I could be wrong …' He snapped a finger of Kit Kat. ‘… but I think that's Seamus Heaney's handwriting.'

He flicked it to one side. I noticed he had a pint-glass of milk on his desk.

‘Am I right in thinking you're having tea with a milk chaser?' I asked. ‘Or is it the other way round?'

‘Actually, it's a milkshake. I got vanilla syrup at the shop. You want one?'

I declined.

‘You know, this is quite worrying,' I said.

‘What is?'

‘What we have here is a genuine threatening letter. We should probably show it to the cops.'

‘Nonsense. It's just some weedy little poet whose stuff we slagged off. Forget about it.'

We lapsed into silence to dispatch our Kit Kats. Oliver had another milkshake.

Despite what he said, I was finding it difficult to forget what I had just read. I'd had countless insulting missives from spurned ‘geniuses' in my time but this one was different. Raw. Point blank. Distressingly badly spelled.

‘Right, back to work,' I said, clapping my hands together in a motivational fashion. ‘We're going to have to do a round of begging letters – all the big names. Let's make a list.'

We fed a sheet of paper into the trusty Remington and typed out the names of ten well-known poets, then dug out the all-important black book and retrieved addresses for six of them. The rest we'd write to care of the publishers.

‘It's nearly lunchtime,' observed Oliver. ‘I suggest we do a bit of – ' He performed bunny ears in the air with two fingers of each hand. ‘ – ‘‘signing'' now, and compose the letters this afternoon. Petty cash is getting very low.'

One of the more dubious money-making schemes Oliver had come up with involved inscribing bogus autographs on the flyleaves of books and selling them to second-hand book merchants. To begin with it was mainly unwanted review copies of poetry collections that were doctored but we soon moved on to medium-rank novels and the odd memoir (I remember a hardback copy of
The Moon's a Balloon
signed by the old Pink Panther himself fetching thirty quid). We deliberately kept it low-key – no James Joyces, no Shakespeares. It was, Oliver argued, a victimless crime: ‘What they don't know doesn't hurt them. Everybody's happy.' We liked to think we became quite expert with a variety of writing implements at matching signatures to styles and epochs, favouring elaborate swoops and swirls for the Victorians, for example, and sober, stubby script for the Modernists.

The trick was not to saturate the market and, of course, to keep Oliver on track. I caught him on one occasion inscribing a 1934 edition of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
with ‘
All the best, Tom Hardy
'. What made it worse, somehow, was that he was using a biro.

 

*

 

On Friday night, in the spirit of cultural solidarity, I shuffled along to a book launch in the university common room. These were invariably ghastly affairs but there was free booze and, besides, I had nothing else to do. Of course, it was supposed to be the night of ‘the happening' but that had been postponed indefinitely due to Johnny Devine's arrest for indecent exposure (some kind of protest against the ‘fascism' of clothes) on the steps of City Hall. I wasn't looking forward to the photos in Saturday's papers.

So, there I was approaching the ornate neo-Gothic faµade of my alma mater, both cheered and depressed by its familiar red brick and mullioned windows. I wasn't really in the mood for a literary event with its attendant ‘paranoic bores' but I'd earlier run into the publisher's PR officer and been assured the work was in no way about Sylvia Plath. ‘Not at all,' she gushed, ‘It's a wide-ranging jaunt through all kinds of things – it's fun, fresh, engaged …
definitive
.' It wasn't that I had anything against Plath, it just seemed every other scholarly work in the past five years had been about her. I'd seen her sad face, and that even sadder ponytail, so often I felt sometimes like we were related.

A table had been set up just inside the entrance to the common room and optimistically loaded with about a thousand copies of the book,
Erato's Labia: Sextra-Textual Aesthetics and the Margins of the Poetic,
a 500-page monolith that had cost Dr Marianne Trench ten years of her life. Unfortunately for her, the decade in question had been one of white-knuckle acceleration in the development of critical theory and this had necessitated many, many return trips to the drawing board. Eventually, her fear of new, and potentially contradictory, additions to the debate meant she couldn't see a copy of the
TLS
without having difficulty breathing. This cumulative neurosis had left her with a permanent look of bloodshot dread, like the Ancient Mariner staring into a hurricane.

Trench, a slim fifty-year-old with cropped salt-and-pepper hair and dangley earrings, sat now – mute, spent, wrapped in a tweed shawl – behind the display stand, accepting best wishes and scribbling (literally) on the flyleaves of books thrust at her by her colleagues. A tweed-clad counter-feminist of similar years, also with short grey hair, leant over the table, her earrings a good inch longer than Trench's: ‘Of course you do realise Marianne that the semioticians are going to have a field day with your chapter on performative erotics …' The author began rocking to and fro, whispering to herself.

I examined the work in question. The picture on the front was a close-up of a white, multifoliate flower with the blunt head of a bee entering the frame bottom right. I flipped it over: ‘
In this compelling exegesis, Dr Marianne Trench lays bare the hypodiegetic paradox at the heart of l'ecriture feminine and asks whether it is appropriate, in an era of sundried sexual dysfunction and balsamic mimesis, to apply phallocognitive criteria to the 20th century's most cliterogenic hegemonies
.'

I read it again, this time moving my lips … Nope. Professor Cecil DeVille – known to students as ‘the Sea Devil' – was standing nearby, also reading with a furrowed brow. An Anglo-Saxon specialist, he was famous for having painstakingly transformed his office into a simulacrum of his oak-panelled rooms at Oxford College Cambridge or wherever it was he had been, and for plying first-years with cheap sherry while he recounted tales of his glory days playing darts with J. R. R. Tolkien and arm-wrestling C.S. Lewis. I greeted him and we exchanged pleasantries.

‘Listen,' I ventured. ‘Have you had a go at this?' I held up the book.

‘Of course. Excellent piece of scholarship.'

‘Can you enlighten me as to what it's about?'

‘It's, um … it's about the paradox at the core of er,
l'ecriture feminine
 …'

I watched him closely, nodding encouragement.

‘And, you know, whether we should be using phallo … whatsits, to um, investigate gynecological er …'

‘Go on.'

‘Well, that's about it.'

He shuffled away, fiddling with the tideline of white hair that frilled his bald dome, already back in the age of wanderers and seafarers.

 

I scanned the length and breadth of the low-ceilinged, badly-lit room: a big turnout of academics and writers, a contingent of students, a couple of artists, some theatre types, and a scattering of civilians. I headed for the bar where ready-poured drinks had been set out in rows, and downed a glass of Lithuanian Merlot in a single gulp. Speed and quantity, that was the secret to these events. I paused for a moment to make sure it was going to stay downed, then helped myself to another.

‘Artie, how's it hanging?'

It was Dylan Delaney, one of the province's up and coming poets, a melancholy young man with vaguely Latin good looks and a fearsome reputation for womanising. We'd published much of his juvenilia in
Lyre
. His real name was Keith.

‘Oh you know, slightly to the left. What about you – how's the poetry going?'

He selected a goblet of Nigerian Chardonnay.

‘Oh, so so. Having trouble, to be honest, since the first collection, getting traction – '

He took a large gulp of wine, looked startled and swallowed with difficulty several times before continuing.

‘… on new material. It's very frustrating.'

‘Pity,' I said. And I meant it.

‘I know. What about you? I haven't seen the magazine in a while.'

‘Fine, fine. Slight delay with this issue but we're getting there. Just got to keep the Arts Council sweet, keep the cash flowing, you know how it is.'

‘I hear you. Speaking of which, isn't The Hawk due to pop in tonight?'

There was one of those sudden, momentary outages in the conversation grid. We both looked around. Everyone else in the room was doing the same. I was having difficulty with the concept of The Hawk ‘popping in', used as I was to picturing him swooping down out of a darkened sky.

‘I've no idea. We usually deal with his deputy, Stanford Winks.'

‘Oh he's here alright. I saw him earlier deep in conversation with that theatre guy Quigley. Talk about camp.'

‘Indeed.'

‘Not that there's anything wrong with that,' he added.

‘Of course not.'

There was a silence. We both took a pull of wine.

‘So, have you read Trench's book,' I enquired. ‘I haven't had a chance myself.'