Wishful Thinking (34 page)

‘How did Mummy feel about that?' I asked.

‘She never knew. She thought the boys left the cage open.'

‘Have you ever had a pet?'

‘I wanted a tarantula, but they wouldn't let me. Your cat isn't very friendly, is he?'

‘I always think he's like the cat in the
Just So Stories
,' I said. ‘You know: I am the Cat that Walks by Itself, and all places are alike to me.'

Meredith didn't know, so I fished out the book and read her the story, while she succeeded in coaxing Mandy to climb on to her lap, where he kneaded her legs with his claws in customary cat fashion before condescending to sit down. (I keep all my favourite children's books and re-read them regularly.) Georgie went into the kitchen and produced pineapple squash and chocolate digestives, bought on the way home. After the story, Meredith chose an unsuitable video.
Die Hard
. ‘That's the one where he walks on broken glass and his feet bleed,' she said. ‘I like that.'

‘Because of the bleeding feet?' said Georgie.

‘I like the villain. He's funny. I wish he didn't get killed. Why do villains always get killed? They're often much more fun than heroes. Heroes are boring.'

‘That's fiction for you,' I said.

‘Talking of heroes,' said Georgie, ‘how do you get on with Ivor?'

‘Ivor's not a hero!' Meredith retorted, with an unexpected grin.

‘Depends,' said Georgie. ‘How boring is he?'

I stretched out to give her a dig in the arm.

‘He's not boring,' Meredith said decidedly. ‘He bought me a dress from Monsoon, with pink fluffy bits on, and glitter. I don't like pink, but Mummy says it's really cerise. That's French for cherry – only the cherries I had last summer were purpley-black.' The jury was clearly still out on Ivor. ‘I might wear it, though. The twins didn't like him at first, but they do now. Just because he's into football, and when he found them looking at porno pictures on the computer he laughed. Boys are stupid. They like anyone who likes football.'

‘Does Ivor play chess?' I inquired.

‘Yes,' said Meredith. ‘He's pretty good. He nearly beat me, but I won in the end.' Tactful Ivor. ‘Mum says he's only staying for a bit, but I think he wants to stay forever. She wants it too. He goes all soppy and romantic over her, and she likes it.' Her voice was dark with disapproval.

‘Your mummy was bound to get another boyfriend sooner or later,' Georgie said.

‘Why?' Meredith demanded.

‘She's young, and pretty, and she wants to be loved. All women do.'

‘I shan't. I don't want boyfriends. I'm going to be a Lesbian when I grow up.'

I choked.

‘Do you know what that means?' Georgie asked, temporarily distracted.

‘It's a woman who wants to marry another woman, so she doesn't have to do all that yukky sex stuff with a man.'

‘Mmm. Good definition. Anyway,' Georgie got back to the point, ‘your mummy doesn't love you any less, just because she's got Ivor. You and the twins will always come first with her. I know that.'

‘That's what Ivor said. Your mummy loves you, and I want to love you too. I asked if he was going to be my daddy, but he said no, my daddy's dead, and he wouldn't want to replace him. At least he was sensible about that.' Conflicting expressions glanced over her face: a disconcerting intensity, a regression into childishness. ‘It isn't Ivor, exactly. But I liked it best when it was just us. Why do things have to change?'

‘That's life,' said Georgie. ‘Things change all the time. You didn't do a sicky on him, did you?'

‘I was going to.' Meredith's monkey-face looked doleful. ‘But Mummy said she would
kill
me if I did. She looked all pale and tense, as if she meant it. That wasn't very loving of her, was it?'

‘Of course she didn't mean it,' I said mendaciously.

‘
And
she hid the mint-choc-chip ice cream. It's much harder without ice cream. I have to have runny stuff inside me.'

‘Do we really need the technical details?' Georgie murmured. ‘On balance, I think it's a good idea
not
to be sick over people – unless they deserve it. Like mass murderers and bank managers and traffic wardens.'

Meredith's face brightened. ‘There's a traffic warden in our street sometimes,' she said. ‘Mummy doesn't like him.'

I decided it was time to switch on the video.

On Monday we reminded Lin about contacting Andy Pearmain. ‘You've got a date for the wedding now,' Georgie said. ‘You don't have to feel – uncomfortable – with him any more.'

‘I know,' Lin said. ‘I told Ivor about it. He said he's looking forward to going – visiting a castle in Scotland and everything. And Vee Corrigan said she'll have Meredith as well as the boys. I thought I'd call Andy tomorrow. You'd better write down all the stuff I have to ask him – I'll never remember the names.'

‘So that's sorted,' Georgie commented afterwards.

‘The research problem?'

‘The Andy problem. Lin seems to have forgotten her desperate yearning for might-have-beens. The dimples beat the beard any day of the week.'

‘Hyperion to a satyr,' I said. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman.'

‘In the theatre,' Georgie remarked, ‘quoting
Macbeth
is considered unlucky.'

‘It was
Hamlet
.'

‘Shit. So it was. I don't know what's wrong with me. My brain's gone on hold.'

‘Have you talked to Cal lately?' I said.

Georgie threw me a dagger-look, and reverted to considerations of publicity.

On Wednesday, Lin reported her conversation with Andy. ‘Acme City's a new shopping centre they're building in Birmingham,' she said. ‘Andy's going to find out about the other names and call me back. He said he was really pleased to hear about Ivor. He wants to come down to London before the wedding to meet him. He might bring Cat, if she can get away.'

‘You can have a cosy foursome,' I said, a little too drily.

‘I could take her round the shops,' Lin pursued. ‘Andy said she'd like to go to Harrods and all the glamorous boutiques.'

‘You never shop in Harrods!' Georgie objected.

‘I know. That's why you'd have to come with me.' Lin's voice was pleading. She's good at pleading.

‘Georgie isn't safe in Harrods,' I said. ‘Unless you lock up her credit card first.'

On Thursday, we went to the Ultraphone Poetry Awards.

Before the advent of the gramophone, poetry was a big deal. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries great poets were like rock stars, idolised by the masses, or at least the masses who could read, their verses quoted by all and sundry, their celebrity lifestyles the subject of envy and scandal. Drink, drugs, sex – they had it all. Where Sting went off to save the rainforest, Byron fought for the freedom of Greece and died of fever in the process. Where Mick Jagger was arrested for possession of cannabis, Coleridge swigged a quart of laudanum a day. Hutchence hanged himself, possibly by mistake in the course of hazardous sexual practices; Chatterton took arsenic at the age of seventeen. In those days, poetry had rhyme and rhythm, it was catchy and memorable, the words made a tune in your head. For music in the home you needed an instrument, a musician and a singer, and while many families had a piano the level of talent available was limited to your immediate circle. Then along came His Master's Voice – the wind-up, hi-fi, sound system – 78s, LPs, tapes, CDs – the Sony Walkman and portable CD player. Pop had arrived. Like painting on the invention of the camera, poetry shot off down a side-street. Rhyme went out of vogue, metre vanished. The parameters of language were breached, whether they liked it or not. The poet gradually became an obscure figure, celebrated only in his own field. Even if he
did
take drugs or have sex, no one cared any more.

Now, poetry is struggling to get back on the scene. We have rock poets, performance poets, post-modern poets, protest poets. Larkin epitomised a sort of grey northern dullness and Betjeman was a rather camp character from P. G. Wodehouse, but the new generation of poets are starting to be glamorous again. Televising the Ultraphone ceremony – even on BBC4 – meant there would be as many egos on show as at the Brit Awards, but without the millions of fans, the multi-million-dollar incomes, or the multiple minders. Georgie marked the occasion with the floating chiffon dress she had once offered to lend to Lin; it was far more frilly and feminine than her usual style, and I couldn't help feeling she didn't look quite like herself. But then, nor did I. The posh dress clung and scooped and plunged, its angled skirt going for a little flutter down one side, its blood-orange tones enhancing my topped-up tan and newly trimmed, anti-frizzed cloud of hair.

‘This dress isn't me,' Georgie said, surveying herself critically in the mirror in the Ladies' loo. ‘I think I'll give it away. But it doesn't matter. You're the star tonight; I'm just your sidekick.'

‘That's rubbish,' I said. ‘You always look stunning.' Which was true, but I couldn't help feeling a tiny thrill of anticipation. My dress
was
something special, a centre-stage kind of dress, and I'd never been centre-stage in my life. For once, I really did feel like a sex goddess, exotic and voluptuous . . .

Beware the day your wishes come true.

Lin joined us, in a two-piece of crinkly rainbow silk which wouldn't have worked on anyone else and probably didn't work on her, but no one would notice. Even without Ivor, who was babysitting, she glowed with inner bliss. I still found it slightly scary, but I wasn't in the mood to worry any more.

We took a taxi to the Reform Club, Georgie gave her name to the doorman, and we went in to mingle with the throng. Throngs are rare at poetry events, but the lure of the TV cameras had done the trick. The usual accoutrements of television were in evidence: tripwire cables, very bright lights, and young men balancing chunks of expensive technology on their shoulders. We looked round for any of ‘our' poets. Mainstream publishers won't normally touch poetry, but in the last couple of years Ransome had produced an annual anthology of work by first-timers. It had a print run of about fifty copies and made no money whatsoever, but it was good for our lit cred, and our presence at the Ultraphone Awards was the result of it. At least two contributors who had started with us had gone on to higher things: protest songs for the more intellectual rock bands, or prize-winning verse for upmarket ad campaigns. To survive, the modern poet has to be versatile.

‘D'you know what our guys look like?' Lin asked.

‘No,' said Georgie. ‘But it doesn't matter. They'll have labels like everyone else.'

It was the kind of occasion where you were given a badge with your name on it as you came in, but only Lin was wearing hers. Georgie and I, not wanting to mar the impact of our dresses, had pinned ours to our shoulder bags. In any case, name tags at a party aren't as helpful as you'd think. People peer at your shoulder when speaking to you instead of looking you in the face, and even when they've deciphered your name they still have to ask if you are animal, vegetable, or mineral, and precisely what you're doing there. I did a good deal of shoulder-peering, but never found a poet who belonged to us. Not that it was relevant: we'd come for the party, not the poetry.

Poets are even rarer than writers at any literary function, even a poetic one. I did recognise a few of the more glamorous variety: Angus Dudgeon, the only poet whose very name sounds depressive, his bony good looks now going to seed (he would have been craggy, but Ted Hughes had the monopoly on cragginess); Philip Wells, whom I'd once seen perform, resembling a rather dishy footballer, prowling the stage and throwing out rhymes in all directions; Aidan Dun, with long black hair and the face of a Burne-Jones knight, who writes the way Keats might have done if he had been a latter-day hippy with Coleridge's opium habit and
no doorbell
. Around them, writers posing as journalists, journalists posing as writers, critics, publishers, publicists – the usual mob. There were even a couple of those rent-a-celebs who will turn up at any event just because it's an Event. I exchanged a few words with a children's TV presenter who was producing a book of verse for kids, possibly to counteract the stories of sex-and-cocaine binges in the tabloids, and nearly collided with an ex-Olympic runner who was talking earnestly to someone from Faber and Faber, last bastion of poetry publishing.

Just as everyone tends to believe they could write a book if only they had the time, so far too many people nowadays think they can write poetry. It doesn't have to rhyme or scan any more: how difficult can it be? All you have to do is remember to stop the lines before you reach the edge of the page. If it sounds like gibberish, that's because it's inscrutable, and the meaning is beyond the ken of ordinary readers. Sentimentalists may claim we are all poets at heart, but they forget to mention that we are not all poets at brain. ‘There won't be readings, will there?' I whispered to Georgie in sudden horror, as the tapping of microphones and the turning of heads prefaced a pause for speeches.

‘God, I hope not.'

I was experiencing worst fears again, but on this occasion they weren't realised. There were five awards: Promising Newcomer, Comic Verse, Lifetime Achievement, Publisher Who Has Contributed Most to Poetry, and Ultraphone Poet of the Year. The winners, three of whom I hadn't heard of, were selected by a panel of rather more famous judges, including a popular scientist and even a celebrity chef. Philip Wells won Comic Verse for a selection of nonsense poetry, Aidan Dun Poet of the Year. I didn't recognise the Lifetime Achiever, and the Publisher Who Contributed emerged from obscurity to make a robust acceptance speech and then vanished again. When it was over everyone applauded enthusiastically, probably out of relief that there had been no readings, and went back to guzzling champagne. (Not real champagne, of course, but whatever substitute they were serving was suitably fizzy, reasonably dry, and went down easily.) I began to be aware, rather mistily, that my flame-coloured dress and Page 3 cleavage were attracting a good deal of attention. Poetry, unlike prose, is male-dominated, and suddenly a lot of them seemed to be eddying round me. At one point Angus Dudgeon was hovering over me (‘Watch out,' Georgie whispered. ‘Love rat.'); at another Aidan Dun, looking too otherworldly to notice anything as carnal as a pair of tits, was explaining in his deep, musical voice how the Holy Grail was hidden in King's Cross. By then, such was my state of intoxication, I believed him.