Jammy Dodger (9 page)

‘I keep wondering if there was something more we could have done,' I said at last.

Oliver sighed.

‘I know what you mean.'

He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

‘I was thinking of having a go at one point,' he said. ‘Tackling him. Getting the gun off him.'

‘Were you? So was I. That time when he was taking his jacket off?'

‘Yes, then. He was definitely off his guard. I think we could have had him.'

‘I think you're right. Given the bastard a good hiding.'

Silence resumed as we each indulged fantasies of varying degrees of heroism and brutality.

‘Did you see all those tattoos?' Oliver said.

‘I certainly did.'

‘Some of them were pretty sinister, don't you think – especially that one of Colonel Gaddafi? What's
that
about?'

‘Gaddafi? No. No, that was … I'm pretty sure that was Elvis.'

‘Really?'

‘The quiff? The sideburns? Yeah. Definitely the King.'

Singing broke out in the office below, a ragged chorus of
Happy Birthday
.

‘So do you think they're at Mad Dog's house yet?' Oliver asked.

‘I'd say they're in his kennel right now. Having tea and a … run-through. Maybe some raw meat.'

‘Poor Winksie. He didn't look too happy.'

‘No, he didn't. Though, to be honest, he should have kept his mouth shut.'

‘He
was
flapping his gums a bit. Still, it took the heat off us.'

Oliver had recovered sufficiently to make tea. Gush of tap. Click of on-switch.

The sense of movement in the vicinity suddenly made me realise how tired I felt. That was the problem with people like Mad Dog (but not the only one obviously): you were forced to burn energy at the same insane rate in order to withstand their orbital pull. It was very depleting.
Mad Dog
… I wondered how long ago he had become his
nom de guerre
, whether he could even remember without effort his given name or, indeed, if anyone still called him by it. His mother? Or had she become Ma Dog?

‘You know Oliver, I really think we have to go to the police with this one.'

Something smashed in the sink. Oliver rocketed into view.

‘
What
?' He stood there panting. Gorilla face. ‘Are you nuts? You heard what Mad Dog said. What he'd do to us?'

‘Yes but he can't do those things if he's in prison, can he?'

‘In prison for what? An illegal firearm? That'd only get him a couple of years and then he'd be out and … Artie, he's not the forgiving type. The clue is in his name.'

‘What about threatening behaviour? False imprisonment? Crimes against literature?'

Oliver shook his head.

‘I just don't think it's a good idea to get the scuffers involved …' He tore open the packet of Choc Delightoes he was holding. ‘Look, what's the worst can happen? A crap play gets produced? So what's new? It'll die a death after a few weeks and we'll all be on our merry way.'

I had to admit he had a point. All this would be extremely difficult to prove. Furthermore, it was an enormous risk for potentially very little. Our lives would be in danger – if not immediately, then later and we would have to live with that threat. And then there was Winks: would it be fair to put him in jeopardy? And wee Barney? It would also, in all likelihood, sound absolutely ludicrous in court.

‘There's another reason,' Oliver said quietly.

‘And that is?'

‘Sammy Niblock.'

Niblock. Of course. This was his patch.

‘What about that cup of tea,' I said.

We gave ourselves over to the restorative powers of hot liquid, sugar and carbohydrate.

‘Tell you what though.'

‘What?'

‘It was lucky Winksie was wearing his brown corduroys.'

‘
What?
'

‘Nothing.'

 

*

 

In the days following the Mad Dog incident, neither of us wanted to be in the office. The trauma was too present. Instead, we met up at The Greedy Pig, a café near the university specialising in bulk-feed for students. Officially these were editorial meetings but they doubled as mutual counselling sessions (Oliver was having a recurrent nightmare about an over-sized rabbit in a balaclava). They were also a chance for my co-editor to indulge in what he dismissed as ‘temporary comfort eating' but was in fact the servicing of an appetite grossly over-stimulated by the forced intake of milk puddings. I began to suspect that if he didn't have that just-breast-fed feeling he couldn't relax. Luckily, one of The Greedy Pig's specialities was double D-cup Creamy Caramel Desserts.

We called Winks from a phone box to check his corpse wasn't sitting by the side of a laneway with a bag on its head. It was a short conversation: yes, he was back at his desk; no, he didn't want to talk about it; no, we shouldn't talk about it either. I asked him what Mad Dog's play was like but his answer was drowned out by a fault on the line, a high-pitched whinnying sound followed by gusts of static, then rapid beeping.

Eventually, Oliver and I decided we both needed a break – from the incident, from
Lyre
, from each other, from everything. Oliver, after fantasising about a number of exotic locations, finally faced reality and caught a bus to his parents' holiday caravan in Donegal. I'd gone there once with him and a couple of the lads for a weekend of carousing but the only pub for miles around had been closed for renovations and we'd spent the entire time staring out the window at varying velocities of rain. The highlight of the trip was when we saw something moving outside in the mist which we think might have been a goat.

Being similarly short of cash, I reconciled myself to a week or so of peace and quiet in my own flat (
for peace comes dropping slow
) catching up on some reading. Anyway, wasn't the odd spell of solitude supposed to be good for the soul? Or was that just spread around by people who didn't have any friends?

I resolved to be methodical about my reading programme and on day one went along my bookshelves identifying all the famous tomes I'd always meant to read but never quite got round to (had I really skipped
Tom Jones
and
Middlemarch
?); that I'd only skim-read (
To the Lighthouse, Moby-Dick
, and yes I admit it,
Ulysses
), and that I knew I'd have to open one day but really couldn't face (
Crime and Punishment, Pilgrim's Progress, Under the Volcano, Finnegans Wake
). I'd soon amassed a shamefully tall stack, which I sat and contemplated for a while, reflecting on that verse from Ecclesiastes about there being no end to the production of books and how too much study is
a weariness of the flesh
.

After a while I took up the Joyce and began at the beginning. Two guys arguing in a tower. (What in God's name was a Chrysostomos?) They eat breakfast and then this English lad Haines joins them and they dander down to the sea for a swim. Hardly spectacular but more fun for them than a weekend in Donegal. That was as far as I got. It was clear, for the second time around, that at my reading speed it would take at least a year to do justice to this. It struck me that most of my favourite works of literature –
The Great Gatsby
,
Heart of Darkness
and
The Outsider
among them – were relatively short and I wondered whether this was part of the reason. Books in general were too long. I skipped ahead to Molly's bit. Even that took half an hour. This was where poetry had the advantage: a highly concentrated hit straight into the vein and you were on your way. I listened to my tape of
Graceland
instead and by then it was lunchtime.

In the afternoon I started
Ulysses
afresh and managed forty-odd pages before finally feeling woozy and succumbing to the ineluctable modality of a good snooze. When I woke up, I discovered that
A Country Practice
was on TV, followed by the weekly matinee which, as luck would have it, was the Hitchcock classic
Rear Window
, with Jimmy Stewart's wheelchair-bound photographer overdosing on voyeurism in his sweaty Greenwich Village apartment.

The following morning, I limbered up for the day's activity with some nostalgic light verse from my much-abused childhood copy of
The Golden Treasury of Poetry
: old favourites like
Jabberwocky
,
Father William
and
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
. By coffee time I'd flicked through (and discarded) two-thirds of the previous day's leaning tower of shame and assembled two new ones. I discovered I'd only read half of the books that had been integral to my degree course, and only half-read the rest. This was turning out to be a useful exercise. After lunch (beans on toast), I continued with
Ulysses
. God it was intense! Hallucinatory almost. The detail. The energy. The flow. The colours.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets … Moist pith of farls … the froggreen wormwood … mouths yellowed with the pus of flan Breton … rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink … sanguineflowered … Old hag with the yellow teeth … Green eyes … the blue fuse burns deadly … orangeblossoms … breeches of silk of whiterose ivory … a dryingline with two crucified shirts
… Pure poetry. Every page. Totally absorbed, I read until I realised the afternoon had gone and then feeling thoroughly Bloomish strolled round to Kavanagh's for a pint and a plate of stew.

On the third day of my holiday, I ran into Mick the Artist (doing some light shoplifting in College Books) who informed me that Johnny Devine's hap – party was back on for Saturday night and that I should definitely get along because it was going to be ‘far out'. He wanted to know when the next issue was due and whether we'd decided on the art content because he'd just completed a sequence of lithographs on the theme of industrial accidents that could look quite good. Not that Marty Pollocks's
Penis Parade
wouldn't also be outstanding. His main concern, though, seemed to be that we didn't succumb to the ‘bourgeois bullshit' of Heather Turkington, who painted pictures of dogs and white-washed cottages in the Antrim Glens and was at least four times as successful as her rivals.

I bought an ingot of cheese and some just-baked wheaten farls and meandered through the Botanic Gardens in the direction of my flat. A warm breeze was sighing through the pines and redwoods (
Yet still the unresting castles thresh …
). College administrators and office workers, released for an hour, were strolling along the sun-stippled paths and sprawling on the grass to eat lunch. In the distance, a young barefooted couple floated a lime-green frisbee to each other. The Palm House came into view, its chambered curves and countless facets like a shimmering deepsea palace risen to the surface. People were moving around in its jungle-spiced interior, poleaxed by the breath-taking humidity, awed by the profusion of life: orchids, bromeliads, banana trees, the silent hullaballoo of leaves. A century ago, thousands of Victorians would have been flocking to behold this wonder of the age … I came to a standstill trying to picture the scene.

‘Hello Artie.'

Rosie was sitting on the grass, nibbling a sandwich.

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your daydream,' she said.

She was wearing a soft blue cardigan over a pale green sundress and her face was lightly tanned. She looked beautiful.

‘No, no. Just thinking about stuff. How are you?'

‘Great. Do you want a bite?'

‘Fine thanks.' I held up my paper bag.

I hunkered down beside her and we chatted. I learned that she was thinking of moving out of her flat (‘it's very noisy', meaningful look, ‘and there's that odd smell'), that she'd finished her final exams and that she'd started a placement, just for the summer, at an accountancy firm on University Road. She came to the Gardens to eat lunch most days, though not usually on her own.

‘And how's the work going?' I asked.

She screwed up her face.

‘It's a bit tedious, to be honest.'

‘Isn't that a requirement of accountancy?'

‘That's a popular misconception, accountancy is actually fascinating.'

‘Really?'

‘No, it's deadly dull. But mathematics is. The complex mystery of numbers, that's what really interests me. In fact I'm thinking of going on to do postgrad.'

She must have detected some scepticism in my expression because she coloured slightly and her tone of voice tautened.

‘Of course, artsy types like you think maths is for geeks – '

I attempted to protest.

‘… You do. You think it's dry and self-referential, but do you know something? As far as I'm concerned it's a more convincing way for humans to explain the universe to themselves than … well,
literature
.'

Her eyes blazed.

‘And it might just interest you to know,' she went on. ‘That Einstein referred to maths as ‘‘the poetry of logical ideas''. What do you think about that?'

I'd never thought about it that way before. In fact, I wasn't sure I'd thought about it at all.

Realising I was on the back foot, I reminded her how lack of numeracy had very recently reduced two grown magazine editors to tears and she laughed.

‘How's your boyfriend?' I asked.

She swallowed a mouthful of sandwich, frowning.

‘Boyfriend? Oh, my
boyfriend
. Oh, he's … well actually …' She paused, gave me a momentary, unreadable look. ‘Actually, we broke up.'

On the grass in front of the Palm House one of the sunbathers switched on a boogie box and Aztec Camera's
Somewhere In My Heart
came bouncing out.

‘Really? Oh, I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be. It hadn't been going well for a while.'