Life Goes On

  ‘I thought it was all for the mag?’

  ‘I’m starting a poetry museum in the parlour of Doggerel Bank, so some of it’s got to go on that. I’ll need central heating, for a start. There’ll be an enormous plastic bowl for the public to slot money into as contributions for its upkeep, like in the Tate or the Royal Academy, and if they’re cold it’ll make ’em stingy. But with the old CH purring away they’ll give everything they’ve got.’

  I shut up, out of admiration.

  ‘I’m only telling you all this because you aren’t a poet yourself. Or a journalist. Tonight I’m giving a reading at the leisure centre, me and the panda. I might make a quid or two. I charge one pound fifty entrance fee, only I don’t let anybody in. My poems, and Panda’s, have to be spoken to the empty air. People’s auras would spoil it. But they can hear us from outside, and they can applaud if they like. That’s allowed. The door’s locked though, and that keeps it a pure experience. Poetry is for space, the spice of emptiness. Emptiness eats it up, regurgitates it into the atmosphere so that it gets back into people in its purest form. They might not know it – how can they, the bourgeois pigs? – but it sweetens their soul. A single ear inside the hall when I’m speaking would desecrate it.’

  ‘They should kick the door down,’ I said.

  ‘Then I would read my poems silently. You’ve got to let ’em know that poet power rules. Otherwise, what’s life all about? Most of the time I’m at Doggerel Bank, but every so often I go on a Panda Tour to a different part of the country. It gets me out of myself. Doggerel Bank’s very cut off. Do you want to come to my reading tonight? I need all the audience I can get, but don’t bring the dog. They’ve had plenty of advance warning at the centre, so there’ll be lots of fab women lined up to meet me. I sometimes end with two, and copulate to the rhythm of coryambics. “Them Greeks knew a thing or two, but you never reach the end of an ode/come in the middle of a line/like dying out of life/halfway through.”’

  He scribbled on a piece of paper, unable to speak for a few minutes. I was tempted to tip him onto the next layby, but unfortunately I’d promised him breakfast. When he looked up he was snuffling with emotion: ‘Is it far to The Rabid Puker?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The sky in front was covered in broken jigsaw shapes, pieces of white and crimson cloud, with blue between. The light was orange and ominous. A car behind tried to tailgate me, but I pulled away with ease. Delphick snorted, a dead cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

  I got the tank filled at the petrol station, then followed Delphick into the plastic dining palace. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ll start with a double whisky,’ he said. ‘I’ve been perished all night.’

  ‘You’ll have the basic meal, and pay for your own extras.’

  He picked up the menu card. ‘Bingo Breakfast, love.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Full house.’

  ‘Make it three.’ Dismal had stayed in the car. Delphick grabbed the waitress’s wrist. She was a lovely young blonde with a fine figure but a very sarky mouth. ‘Do you want to buy a poem for fifty bob?’ he said.

  ‘You must be joking.’

  He wouldn’t let go. ‘They make a lovely birthday pressie. Or a thoughtful wedding gift.’

  ‘If you don’t leave me alone I’ll call the manager. I hate this job.’ She looked at me. ‘Tell the tramp to let me go.’

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

  She glared, as if I was worse than him. ‘I wish people like you hadn’t got such soft hearts. You’re allus picking deadbeats up and bringing ’em here for a feed. I can’t understand what you get out of it. Makes you feel good, does it? Why don’t you leave the dirty old bastard to die on the hard shoulder?’

  Delphick’s eyes softened with tenderness, but he had an iron grip.

  ‘Look, crumb,’ she said, ‘stop it, or I’ll call the manager.’

  I was fed up. It was too early in the morning to tolerate unashamed con-men like him. ‘If you don’t let her go, I’ll smash you in the teeth.’

  He looked at me, as if to start a fight, then released her. She went to the counter with the little order pad swinging at her arse. ‘The trouble with you,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t understand the courtship ritual.’

  ‘Neither does she,’ I told him.

  He took the top off the sauce bottle and swigged a mouthful, and a few driblets at his beard gave him the look of a vampire at dawn. ‘I’ve been through the subtlety stage and, on balance, I get a few more successes by the direct approach. In war the indirect approach is best, but love is the opposite of war. Have you ever read the I Ching? Mao swore by it. He wouldn’t have done the Long March if it hadn’t been for the I Ching. But in matters of love, or lust, women get just as fed up with subtlety as men. A straight yes or no saves time. They’re too busy these days, most of ’em going out to work and keeping men just to show they’re more equal than we are. Lovely. So long as you say you love ’em you can just get straight in.’

  I realised how much I’d been cut off in my ten years at Upper Mayhem. It was like listening to myself in the old days. I’d learned though, but Delphick hadn’t, and I taxed him with it while waiting for our grub.

  ‘I could learn if I liked,’ he claimed. ‘It’s not beyond me. But if I learned too much I might get no more inspiration – as a poet, per se, see? You’ve got to be careful, because poets don’t get pensions. If they did, it might be different. Some of the eighty-year-old versifiers might well want to pack it in, but they can’t.’

  ‘I thought poets got good money, these days.’

  He looked like a poxed-up old pirate. ‘They earn a pittance now and again. There’s all kinds of spin-offs, like grants, and talks, and performances, and editing, or anthologising when you use all your mates’ poems and expect them to pay you back in kind for years to come. Then you might do an odd review and cut your enemies to bits; or you can waffle on on the BBC about a new working-class poet you’ve just discovered but who’s blind, eighty, and lives alone on a wet hillside in Cumberland with his dog – but whose poems you’ve written yourself. It’s not easy, but you can pick up a bob or two. For itinerants there used to be workhouses, now there’s local arts groups if you want to go on tour. All you’ve got to do is write letters, and plan it well. I can write forty letters a day when I’m in full spate.’

  ‘That sounds like work.’

  ‘Well, it’s better than filling in holes on the motorway. I never let work become a burden, though.’

  The waitress put three plates of breakfast and three pots of coffee on our table. Delphick locked onto her wrist again, but she snapped it free and stood out of reach. ‘If you do that once more, you mangy fucking tomcat, I’ll pour a pot of boiling water over you. I will. I promise.’

  ‘That’s the stuff, miss.’

  I took a plate of breakfast to Dismal. ‘Wake up,’ I said, opening the car door. His eyes widened, and a long purple tongue slid over an egg and drew it in. He paused, being a dog of good manners, and pressed his Button B nose against the back of my hand. I patted him a time or two, then left him finding his way around a piece of fried bread. I got back inside to see Delphick three-quarters through the second plate of breakfast – mine. ‘Hey, you bastard!’ I pulled it away. ‘Keep off my grub.’

  He yanked it back without looking up. ‘I thought you’d gone outside to eat yours. Anyway, you can afford to buy two.’

  I prayed for boots big enough to make an impression. ‘I don’t own that Roll-Royce. I’m only the chauffeur.’

  A lorry driver sat at the end of the room. ‘Next time I see his contraption on the road I’m going to drive all twenty-four wheels over it. He’s a right pest, he is.’

  Delphick kept his head down and wiped up fat with a folded piece of bread. I went to order another breakfast while my coffee got cool. ‘If that poet comes in here again,’ the waitress told me, her dazzling green eyes looking directly into mine, so t
hat I saw in even more sensual detail the delights of her undressed presence, ‘I’m going to put rat poison in his grub, even though I swing for it. He don’t respect anybody. And I like to be respected.’

  ‘Why don’t you put it in now?’ My hand was at her waist, and she didn’t push it away. ‘You don’t swing for murder anymore. The most you’ll get is eighteen months, for aggravating circumstances. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?’

  She smiled. ‘I’ll have to think about it, won’t I?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ettie.’

  ‘I like that.’

  ‘I’d have cut my throat if you didn’t.’

  ‘You are sarky, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sometimes. What’s your name?’

  ‘Michael. Do you want a drive in a Rolls-Royce to London?’

  ‘Not if it isn’t yours.’

  ‘It’ll be a lovely smooth ride.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  Maybe she thought a lot when she wasn’t dishing up grub – which was most of the time. Her thoughts had to be short, though, which was the best kind to have, because they didn’t take up much precious time. Neither did they keep her from action, I assumed. She was the sort of girl I liked, and couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.

  As a breakfast I could only compare it with the one from Bridgitte the morning I got out of prison. Perhaps because I had taken her part against Delphick, Ettie piled on bacon, two more eggs, beans, tomatoes, four slices of fried bread and half a tin of mushrooms. She either bribed the cook or she was having an affair with him. If she was, she wouldn’t be for much longer if I had anything to do with it.

  Delphick’s eyes bulged with envy at the sight of my plate. ‘Did you put grease on her nipples?’

  I pulled him up by his coat and held my fist the requisite few inches from the bridge of his nose. It stayed there for ten full seconds. He didn’t struggle or say anything, but turned whiter with each tick of the clock. I pushed him away, and he barely righted himself when the chair fell. ‘Get that panda out of my car before I set the dog on it.’

  He went, such pain and hurt pride on his face that only now did I think he was real. I didn’t like him, because he was spoiling the day by making me feel sorry for him, and now making me feel guilty at an over-hasty reaction. But he’d insulted a woman, and I hated that, though I suppose I should have been cool and taken it like a man.

  I sat down to eat, my appetite not entirely spoiled. In fact it returned, the more I put back. I hadn’t realised how famished I was. I drained the coffee pot, then ordered another, and two Danish-style pastries. ‘You’re hungry,’ Ettie said admiringly.

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s you that’s doing it. The more I look at you, the more I want to eat. And you know what that means?’

  She blushed, the little trollop.

  ‘I’m six foot two and weigh a hundred and sixty pounds, but if I lived with you, and you kept on feeding me like this, I’d weigh as much as Ten Ton Tommy. They’d have to lift me on and off with a block-and-tackle, but I don’t think you’d be disappointed. I shouldn’t talk like this, I know, but I’m only having a bit of a joke, though I was quite serious when I said you’re the best-looking and most vivacious woman I’ve seen for a long time. You really are. I respect you enormously. I’m often up this way, so I’ll stop more often on the road and say hello, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only don’t bring that fucking deadbeat ponce with the panda-wagon. I can’t stand him. He came here once before and we couldn’t get rid of him. The man who brought him suddenly took against him and wouldn’t give him a lift away from the place. So he fell asleep on the floor. We didn’t know what to do. He snored like a hacksaw. Then he woke up and started swearing. We couldn’t throw him out because it was snowing. He said he’d phone up the television news if we did. I told him to crawl across the dual carriageway and fuck off to Scotland, but he wouldn’t budge. In the end the manager gave a van driver five quid to dump him in Cambridge. But you’re different. Do you want any more to eat?’

  My early morning hard-on came back, and I thought I’d said enough already to indicate that I had nothing to lose by spouting a bit more in somewhat plainer fashion. ‘Do you let rooms here, that’s all I want to know. I’d give my right arm and more to be alone with you. As soon as I came in and saw you by the hot water urn I knew I loved you. I wasn’t going to say so, though, because it didn’t seem right. I respected you. And besides, there’s a time and a place for everything, as it says in the Bible. My wife died five years ago, and I made a vow never to make love with anyone again, and as time went on it became easier to keep that holy vow’ – I made my voice miss a beat, and held my head as if in pain – ‘until I came in here and saw you.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she smiled, ‘but go on.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a very sincere person. I wouldn’t have told you this if I hadn’t seen straightaway that you were a very sincere person. What I’m saying is the truth, and I couldn’t have told it, except to a very sincere person. You’re the first person I’ve told it to, and I respect you enormously for not believing me. If you’d believed me I would have got up and walked out. There aren’t many sincere people left in the world, and now you’ve certainly made my day. You’re busy, I know’ – there was no one in now except us – ‘but I’d like to talk to you properly, just the two of us, in a private room somewhere, any room where we can be alone.’

  My face got closer, and my hands crept around her waist. She shook, and I thought she was going to come out with some filthy language and run, but she held my hand and looked back at me so that while she melted at the touch of my fingers I melted at the crutch and pressed close enough for her to feel what, for better or worse, was coming between us at the hour of our tribulation.

  The windows and door of the flimsily built café rattled at the passage of some particularly weighty giant on wheels. I knew the time had come, that it was now or never, so pressed even closer to begin whispering sweet nothings into her pretty eggshell ear, my lips brushing against the plain wire earrings. ‘I love you. I want to kiss your lips, suck your tits, and lick your sweet cunt till you come, then sink my prick into you, and grip your shapely arse and push your lovely guts around till my spunk shoots so far up you it comes out of your mouth and splashes against the opposite wall. Oh my sweet darling, I can’t wait.’

  ‘Oh, you dirty bastard,’ she said. ‘Come on, though.’

  We leaned by the wall in a little cubby-hole of brooms and mops, and kissed ourselves into a frenzy. It was good to get back to somebody from the working classes (if I could find the right one, I’d always thought, and she was it) boiling for me because she didn’t think I was a slum-brat from the working classes. She came with a long moan, assuming I was somebody different (and I suppose I was by now), and then I shot, knowing that she could have been the girl next door, fully grown up, who I used to play dirty games with in the air raid shelter. It worked marvels, and was all the better for being over in a few minutes. Some say there’s nothing like a good fuck, and they could be right, but I say there’s nothing better than a quick fuck that comes off for both participants.

  I asked her again to travel with me to London, and don’t know what I’d have done if she had said yes, but I only asked knowing she’d say no. ‘Next time I might,’ she said. Would I phone and write and call again, and then maybe we’d slowly get to know each other because she had never met anyone like me before. I was astounded and gratified that somebody could know me – or think they did, which was the same – in such a short time, when I’d been living in my own skin all my life, and was nowhere near knowing myself.

  I thought, as I went out to the toilets, that you only had a chance of knowing yourself when you were acquainted with a lot of people who said they knew you and acted as if they did. But I also thought what a pity that somebody should fall in love with me
, and me half in love with them, when I was on my way to London in a situation where, before many hours were out, I would get into an argument which might leave my face so cut up that Ettie wouldn’t recognise me anymore.

  I felt as light as air because whatever was supposed to happen could never be said to have happened until it had, and between one and the other was always a wider space and a longer time than you could imagine. I glanced at the wall and saw a piece of paper stuck there, which I thought was something about not hurling your fag butts into the piss channel, but on zipping up and going close I read:

  Ronald Delphick, poet lariot, roped into life with a naval cord, cabin-buoyed to the Wash and the Severn Seas. Yo ho ho on a fat woman’s hornipipe. Poetry performance, panda-wise, at Stevenage Leisure Centre half past seven tonight. Admission one pound fifty. Programmes two pounds. Books for sail.

  I’d hoped he had vanished, but when I got outside he was wiping gnats off the windscreen with a piece of wet cloth. ‘Thanks for the breakfasts. I’m sorry for that bit of bovver in there.’

  He seemed different, as if he’d been drunk in the café, or stoned, but was now fully recovered. While I’d been with Ettie he must have had a wash-and-comb-up in the toilet, because he looked cleaner and smarter. I couldn’t tell him to walk to Stevenage, so opened the door for him to get in. Dismal dashed out and left a squalid mess by a dustbin. When I looked for his breakfast plate Delphick said he’d already taken it inside. ‘I saw that waitress, and she was crying. What happened?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’ I passed him a cigar. ‘Suck that.’

  Dismal sat beside me, and I set off once more into the mainstream of motorised life. We were quiet for a while, Dismal like a statue in front, Delphick like a dummy behind and the panda sticking out of the boot like a waxwork. I didn’t feel lively, either, but was otherwise happy. The clouds were white and dense, like those on engravings of Greenland in picture books. I almost expected to see a whaling ship come from behind one, then braked to avoid hitting a Cortina, and swung out to overtake after checking in the mirror that all was clear.