Jammy Dodger (19 page)

No, that's not right.

Esau's …
priceless stew?

No, that's not right either. What about costly?

Esau's costly stew. Found in the stomachs

Of neolithic corpses.
(Thanks Seamus.)
Staple fare

Of …
what? Jailhouse? Workhouse? Hospital?

Of workhouse and sanitorium.

Phew. Hard enough. I munched a Crunch.

The molten gruel starts to heave and sigh

Molten lava. Volcano. Liquefied metal …

Craters and steam-gouts, a shipyard foundry –

Local reference, good.

Volcanic birth pangs of a new planet …

Hey, where did that come from?

He kills the heat. Leaves it aside to rest.

Making me hungry. Quick breather. More chai. (Three cups of tea and half a packet of biscuits later I had roughed out the next few lines.)

He is savouring this time, this headstart

On the day, for soon it will be someone else's.

Hint of class politics. No harm.

Outside, deliverymen rattle crates

And bring yesterday's
– something –
news

Horrible? Predictable?

And bring yesterday's undigested news:

‘
Guess what? We still don't understand each other
.'

Running out of puff here.

The streetlamps fade. The dreamers are stirring
.

Now the last line. The punchline. Something chunky. But resonant. Something –

‘Artie.'

Block him out. Concentrate.

‘Artie.'

Just need one more … Nearly there.
Morning has broken
– no, dammit.
It's the dawning of the age of
– bugger!

‘Artie?'

I dragged my eyes from the page.

‘Yes Oliver?'

‘What about Shrigley Macosquin?'

 

With a degree of discipline unheard of in less pressurised circumstances, we stayed in the office at lunchtime and ate sandwiches (supplemented in Oliver's case with a selection of homemade fools and mousses from his refrigerated stash). Despite an increasingly assertive hangover, I attempted another poem, this time about a 19th century damask loom I had once seen in action at the Ulster Folk Museum. It started well enough –
He works the yarn like a virtuoso, / Pedals and strings like some strange piano
– but quickly foundered on lack of technical knowledge: chiefly, which was warp and which weft? And where did that leave woof? I earmarked a few rhyme possibilities (shuttle/subtle, brocade/blockade, flax/attacks) and put it aside until I could get to the library.

Oliver, meanwhile, had boiled his poet names down to a shortlist of six, which he wrote out on a sheet with a black marker pen and pinned to the door: Tynan Galbally, Gortin Pomeroy, Derry Kinawley, Moy Trillick, Tyrone Dunseverick, Glynn Seskinore. By the publication date, we assured ourselves, a process of elimination would have revealed the winner.

Chuffed with his map-work and invigorated by several jugs of lime-flavoured milkshake, Oliver volunteered to try his hand at a poem. I suggested something on the theme of forbidden love, which seemed to excite him. In longhand, tongue protruding, he began.

For myself, I thought, a sonnet. Good to have the discipline of form. But on what topic? I scanned the room. On the wall near the bookcase was a poster advertising an exhibition, long past, of artefacts from the
Titanic:
a jade and sepia-tinted photo montage including the stupendous vessel itself; its white-bearded captain; a cut-away of its massive central propellor, and spectators at its launch from Queen's Island (truly that was the era of the hat). I gazed at it for a while, at the faces staring back out of the photographic mist, at the doomed unsinkable liner framed by showers of silver light. An hour later I had completed
Ship of Fools
.

‘What rhymes with husband?' Oliver demanded.

I thought for a moment.

‘Hatband?'

He peered at his notebook, muttered something inaudible and resumed his labours. I rose and crossed to ‘the kitchen' to refill the kettle. I was pleased with the start we'd made. If we could maintain this pace surely we would have enough in a couple of weeks to harvest at least a solid dozen? And it would be useful, I was thinking, if one of them was long, fifty lines or more, to fill up a few pages. That might be one for Oliver. I glanced over. He was staring into mid-air in a rictus of horrified wonder, as though witnessing something supernatural. Then again, perhaps my hopes were too high. Of course, there was always the possibility that this enforced creativity might unlock something deep within him, that he would turn out to be some kind of poetic idiot savant. I looked again. He already had the haircut.

When he left the room to perform one of his notorious three-act bowel movements I had time to run my eye over his work-in-progress. It was indeed on the theme of illicit passion and, while syntax and imagery were somewhat tortured in places, it had achieved some rhythmic momentum, and a certain emotional honesty.

 

We spent that Saturday with no clothes on,
Mostly in bed, but also on the sofa, and then
In my bathtub listening to Van Morrison
Singing about Jimmie Rodgers.
Your breasts were like two Jammie Dodgers.
You felt guilty about your husband
As you reached beneath the suds and
Took me in your hand. Poor bastard,
Back at home, alone, watching ‘Grandstand'.

 

The next few lines had been amended to the point of disintegration and then scored out, the only legible words being
feather
and
hatband.

Was it good? Sometimes it was hard to tell with poetry. It wasn't as bad as it could have been – there were definite signs of some kind of facility – but it seemed safe to shut down the sleeping genius possibility for the time being. In fact, it was beginning to dawn on me, depressingly, that when it came to creative partnerships through the centuries Conville and Sweeney were probably leaning less towards Wordsworth and Coleridge or Eliot and Pound and more towards The Krankies.

I devoted the remains of the working day to devising likely-sounding titles for pieces we might write; an exercise that was oddly exciting, each one containing its own perfect unwritten poem.

 

The Stubble Burners
Dark City
Morning Star
No Man's Land
Lagan Delta Blues
Put Out More Flags!
Schrodinger's Cat
Atlantic Visions
Evening Star
Mushrooms (On Toast)

 

*

 

By Friday, despite a couple of failures of nerve, our poetry factory was hitting its stride, the air fairly crackling with brain activity. By the middle of the following week it was at full capacity. We obtained a second typewriter and our clacking duets, when the muses favoured us, were deafening. Gradually, out of blizzards of paper, pages bearing squares and oblongs of print began to accumulate. Oliver, fortified by milky treats, applied himself with unexpected vigour and produced (with some micro-management) several passable lyrics and an affecting elegy for the owner of his local off-licence, who was run over by a drunk driver. He was also working on Sunnyland Farm slogans on the sly (I spotted a particularly tortured one over his shoulder about how the rabbit wanted everyone to
hare
his
warren-ing
about dairy substitutes and
cotton on
to the luxury of full fat etc) but I said nothing. I decided to take on the required long poem myself and, selecting
The Stubble Burners
from the title list, embarked on what I hoped would blend an account of the impact of industrialisation on rural life in northeastern Ireland with a meditation on humankind's need to impose order on nature, while also hinting that the whole thing was underpinned by a complex extended metaphor. It was no picnic.

Outside the window July had subsided into bloodshot August, and in the street below, the bad news on the sandwich boards in front of the newsagent's increased in frequency and brutality, flicking past as though in a film: IRA Kills Parents & Child ‘By Mistake'; Two Catholics Shot Dead By PAF; Provos Murder Two Protestants In Belleek; Eight Soldiers Dead In Bus Attack …

During that period we rarely left the office. I met Rosie a couple of times for a drink after work but she was distracted by having to go early to visit her aunt, who was back in hospital, and at the weekend she was called in to babysit her inept father while her mother came up to town. Oliver had little to distract him either as Iris had been dragged away by The Mongoose for their annual fortnight in the Algarve. We took it in turns to shop for sundries at the mini-mart across the road and ate takeaway food most nights. Eventually we gave up going home and kipped in sleeping bags on the floor. As the discarded pizza boxes and Chinese containers (not to mention Oliver's empty milk cartons) accumulated, space became a problem. Hygiene had already established itself as a real worry. So had Oliver's appearance, which was now – thanks to medieval hair, chronic sunshine deprivation and a diet of lactose, sugar and junk food – that of a bloated Nosferatu. I made him promise that when the magazine had been put to bed he would eat some vegetables. His skin, even though so etiolated it might have been bleached, seemed to absorb rather than reflect light … which reminded me.

‘What's this?' he asked as my brother's complimentary Sizzlemaster 9000 coupon swished to a standstill in front of him.

‘Free suntan.' I said. ‘Put some colour in your cheeks.'

 

Once it had generated a critical mass of basic material, the character of our factory mutated into something more akin to a forge, as we melted the less distinct stuff down and hammered it into shapes we imagined would be pleasing to The Hawk. The work was even more exhausting than we had envisaged and as the production deadline approached (our cheap but slow printing outfit needed a two-week turnaround) we were reaching the end of our mental reserves. The pending file now boasted nearly thirty poems, only a third of which were pure guano. Half of the remainder were actually good, or at least not immediately recognisable as counterfeit: we had built in enough ambiguity, musicality and pretentious allusion to keep the experts busy for the foreseeable, should they be so inclined. We even had a space-hogging epic in
The Stubble Burners
, which had taken so many wrong turns I despaired of ever getting to the end of it but I'd ploughed on and, after a final bad-tempered and occasionally weepy afternoon, punched a full-stop on the last of a ball-busting seventy-five lines.

We hunkered down for a final edit, augmenting a core of twelve works by exciting new talent Tyrone Dunseverick (the name seemed to us to possess a certain mist-wreathed Hibernian glamour) with the best ten poems from the slush pile. The same day, as luck would have it, a controversial poetess finally responded to one of our begging letters with a clutch of erotic sonnets we were confident would arouse intriguing, subterranean emotions in the kind of jaded middle-aged man that sat on funding committees, say. Padding material included an unctuous but largely unintelligible review by Boyd Monroe of
Erato's Labia
and a series of lithographs by The Walrus entitled
The War On Kitchen Appliances
(including a particularly upsetting bandaged toaster). All that remained now was to publish … and be damned.

‘Fantastico. Absolutely top notch.'

Stanford Winks was on the hotline.

‘You've had a chance to look through it then?'

‘I certainly have. More importantly, so has The Hawk.'

‘And?'

‘And he's over the moon. I've rarely seen him so excited. Where on earth did you find this Dunseverick fellow?'

‘It's just a question of knowing where to look really. In a way he was just waiting for someone to put him on the map.'

‘Well bravo to you guys, he's a godsend. And those dirty sonnets! Mama mia!' He let out a strangled snort of laughter. ‘Not my cup of tea, needless to say, but the suits upstairs – even the accountants! – are suddenly
very
into literature, if you know what I mean.'

‘Somehow I thought those might be of interest.'

‘Listen Artie, while I have you – you
are
coming tonight, aren't you?'

‘Coming? Where?'

‘To the opening night.'

‘The … what?'

‘Of the play.
Suspicious Minds
. It opens tonight, God help us all.'

‘Well, unfortunately – '

‘Free tickets. And a wine reception afterwards.'

‘Yeah, I'd like to but – '

‘Artie, you've
got
to come,' he hissed. ‘Moral support. Your man'll be there, that mad bastard, excuse my French …'

‘Maybe Oliver could – '

‘Excellent! Both of you then. I'll put your names on the guest list.'

 

To celebrate the success of the magazine, my co-editor and I hit Betjeman's for a slap-up lunch.

‘Here's to
Lyre
,' Oliver said, raising the first of several expense-account pints.

We clinked.

‘And long may we sail in her.'

Late morning light was illuminating the bar's rich interior, lapping at the ceiling, racing around the polished surfaces of our snug. We drank deeply. It tasted good. (A plate of Strangford oysters arrived in front of us.) We had met the challenge. Disaster had been averted and we were back on course.

 

The theatre was nearly full and the volume of pre-show chatter, its pitch raised at least a semi-tone by first-night anticipation, had plateaued at a quiet roar. The curtain would be going up shortly and I was beginning to feel self-conscious about the vacant seat beside me. Where the hell was Oliver? I performed another elaborate watch consultation and survey of the auditorium. We were in the third row, closer to the stage than I would have liked, and that ancient tingle of audience-participation-fear was making itself known. Earlier, in the theatre bar, I had seen several familiar faces: Quigley, in what appeared to be a matador's outfit, practically running on the spot with nerves; Monty Monteith, in a paisley cummerbund, inhaling brandy fumes from a balloon-glass, and – with a short-circuit of heartbeat – Mad Dog himself, leaning against the back wall watching the punters file in, a peculiar, sneering smile on his lips. He was wearing a black leather jacket with the collar turned up, and his mullet had been freshly coiffed and pomaded.