Jammy Dodger (25 page)

We reached a junction and began a steeper descent before changing tack again and heading in a direction that would eventually take us back to our stamping ground. We were on a tree-lined road. Up ahead I could see cars at a standstill and a soldier kneeling on the pavement cradling a rifle.

‘Army checkpoint,' the driver confirmed.

‘
Cry ‘‘Havoc'' …'
  I declaimed in my actor's voice, turning to bestow an ironic grin on my fellow passengers. ‘
And let slip the dogs
– '

The expression on Oliver's face stopped me short: a wide-eyed, haunted look of fear as he peered intently past the driver's shoulder at the approaching roadblock. His hand, as he raised it to straighten his hair, was trembling. I sobered immediately. I had caught a glimpse of the world through someone else's eyes, Oliver's, and it turned out that all my assumptions were wrong: it was shockingly different to mine.

‘Afternoon gentlemen, could I see some identification please.' These words, delivered in a flat northern English accent, were accompanied by a draught of icy air that instantly converted the car's interior temperature to that of the exterior. The soldier, no older than us certainly, and probably younger, was pink-cheeked and his nostrils were glistening. The driver passed his licence through the window. It was occurring to me that the rest of us might have difficulty producing comparable documentation. I knew
I
wasn't carrying anything more valid than a video shop card. And then I remembered the last member of our party: the poet Tyrone Dunseverick. Or was he the actor William Fisher? My head was so numb I couldn't decide.

‘Just pull your muffler down there sir so I can – That's great, thank you.' The soldier handed back the licence, then stooped, breathing wreaths of vapour, and surveyed the passengers. He lingered momentarily on the bearded one.

‘What about you chaps? Any I.D. on you?'

There was a chorus of mumbling and some token pocket patting but nothing tangible.

‘Names?'

We all stayed in character, including Dunseverick. He came back to Oliver.

‘What's your surname again, sir?'

‘Sweeney.'

‘And where do you live, sir?'

Oliver stammered out his address.

‘And what do you do, sir?'

‘I, um, I, uh, I'm an editor.'

‘Really sir? And what do you edit?'

‘Um, I can show you, if …' Oliver indicated the bag on the seat between him and Dunseverick. The soldier leaned closer.

‘What you got there?'

‘Magazines.'

‘Go on then.'

Oliver reached into the bag and fished one out. He held it towards the soldier.

‘He – ' Oliver pointed at me (almost accusingly I thought). ‘… He's the co-editor. Like it says at the front. And he – ' He gestured to his side. ‘His poems are in there.'

The soldier riffled through the magazine.

‘Stay here,' he commanded.

He marched over to his unit's armoured jeep. A window was wound down and the magazine received through it. Our inquisitor waited, blowing on his hands and stamping his feet. Now
he
was answering questions. A discussion was taking place.

Meanwhile, in the taxi, we waited. Alone.
Tra-la
. A siren sounded, back up the hill, like the cry of a distressed beast, echoing through the afternoon. Here we were, halfway along a street in the capital city of a disputed province on a small island in the Anglo-Hibernian archipelago on the edge of the vast Atlantic, and none of us had any means of identifying ourselves beyond our names in an obscure periodical. Not to mention that one of our number didn't actually exist.

Eventually, our go-between trotted back.

‘That's fine, gents, you may continue your journey.'

He tossed the
Lyre
in through the window.

‘By the way,' he said, ducking down to address Dunseverick. ‘No offence sir, but the Sarge said to tell you he's more a fan of the good old-fashioned …'

We pressed on towards safety.

‘That could have been smoother,' the driver grumbled, pulling his scarf up again. He said something else but the only word I made out was ‘tip'. No one responded. After a few minutes he activated the radio and did a sweep of the stations. It was only mid-afternoon but already lights were coming on in the shops. The sky had an odd, yellowish glow to it. The needle halted at a weather forecast. Sure enough: ‘scattered snow showers, possibly lying on higher ground'. We dropped Dunseverick, as requested, outside an off-licence, and Oliver and I called it a day.

 

*

 

The picture was a reproduction of Canaletto's
London, Seen Through An Arch of Westminster Bridge
, with its softly-lit, swooping-bird's view of the teeming Thames and the city swelling along its edges; the palest blue sky, St Paul's in the distance. Morning or evening? Difficult to tell. Apricot tinge to the clouds. Evening? I read the reverse again:
At Tate yesterday – fantastic! Not much spare time though – too busy! Home for Xmas. Rosie.
Medium-size, easy-flowing, curvaceous script. But no love, I noted, no kisses. Nor was there anything for me in the
home for xmas.
It didn't say
see you
at Xmas, for example, it was just a statement of fact. Or was I over-parsing?

‘Christ, it's Baltic in here,' Oliver exclaimed from the doorway. He scuttled over to check the radiator. The system had ceased pumping out heat several days earlier. ‘Still not working,' he reported. No kidding. He pinched the neck of his duffle coat tighter and approached the desk.

‘Well?' I said.

He had just been down to the artists' collective to check on progress with the artwork for Dunseverick's chapbook, which was to be entitled simply
Twenty Poems
.

‘S'all under control.'

‘Really? They've come up with some good ideas?'

‘Kind of.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Actually only one of them came up with an idea.'

‘Only
one
? Lazy bastards.'

‘Yeah. Mick. So I went with it. There was one other but it involved King Billy being weird with his horse and …'

‘Okay. Well?'

‘What?'

‘What is it?'

‘Oh, you'll like it. Very minimal. Very dark.'

‘Good … Whaddya mean dark?'

‘Well … black actually.'

‘Black?'

‘Yes.'

‘Just black?'

‘Yep. Pure black.'

‘All over?'

‘Yep. Well, the way he put it was, look at
The White Album
by The Beatles, how successful that was. Controversial at the time but an acknowledged design classic now.'

‘I suppose so …'

What he was saying made a kind of sense but there was something about it I didn't like. My mind was elsewhere, though. I was shuffling through our file of Dunseverick material. The typescript was due at the printers that afternoon and it seemed we were a couple short of the titular twenty. I was going to have to make up the number with some of Oliver's left-overs.

‘Oh, and another thing,' Oliver said, blowing on his hands.

‘Yes?'

‘I've got some people to help out at the launch, you know, serving the snacks and so on.'

‘Really? Who?'

‘Well, you know the Belfast Mime Cooperative have their place next door to the artists? Down at the collective?'

‘Yes.'

‘One of them called in when I was talking to Mick and …'

‘Yes?'

‘Well, Mick suggested … demanded, actually … that … Anyway I think it's a good idea. It gives them a bit of exposure and we get free waiters. I think they feel a bit neglected, those mimers.'

‘I suppose so …'

I had a sense of things slipping beyond my control again. Oliver's initiative had reminded me that my parents were now on the guest-list, the result of my having secured Pixie Dixon's catering service for the launch (I was planning to put the discount-for-friends towards Fisher's increased fee). Needless to say, the bush telegraph had been instantly tripped and a few minutes later my mother had been on the line. Still, at least she'd promised not to tell Fenton.

It was so cold in the office that our exhalations were hanging at eye-level, like fog, and there were frost flowers on the inside of the windows.

‘For Godsake Artie, put the kettle on, I'm freezing to death here.'

‘No.'

‘It's your turn. Go on.'

The pressure in the tap was low and it took a while to draw off enough water. ‘The kitchen' was even worse than usual, the scabrous smears, spatters and encrustations made somehow more ghastly by their glistening film of ice, like seeping bacterial growths glimpsed in the beam of a caver's torch. I connected the flex and flipped the on-button, recoiling abruptly from a flash of blue, and a sound like a Christmas cracker being pulled. A wisp of pungent smoke curled in the air.

I picked up my gloves from the desk.

‘Oliver, the kettle's fucked,' I informed him. ‘Let's go to the printers.'

 

*

 

On the day of the big launch, I was jolted awake by a reverberating double boom in the street below. Shock waves scurried up through the building's exoskeleton into the floorboards and along the legs of my bed. A beat later, the window panes rattled. I braced for sounds of falling debris but none came; instead, a shouted conversation followed by the ignition of a large diesel engine and an articulated lorry, its shipment discharged, pulled away. I caught my breath, rolled over and squinted at the clock: bloody early. In the digital gloaming I lay back and regarded the familiar network of cracks in the ceiling. Like the suture lines of a human skull. I already felt weary, weighed down by a complicated burden, overwhelmed by the length of the day ahead. There was something else though, something physical. What was it? Idly, I ran my hand over my face, checking its crannies with my fingertips … eyebrows, cheeks, chin … all normal, and then, on the second pass I found it: a tight hotness at the end of my nose. Surely not? Not today? It
was
. A spot. I sprinted to the mirror. Dammit! Hang on though, no need to panic yet. There
was
something going on there, definite volcanic activity, but it wasn't critical. My teen years had seen much,
much
worse: profile-transforming Night Screamers as big as ping-pong balls; Pulsators that were visible to ships at sea. The key thing was not to mess with them …

As I sat down to tea and toast my nose was pounding like a bull's's heart, the brute at the end of it double its original size thanks to my half hour of mirror work. After breakfast I managed to find some out-of-date nappy rash cream left by the previous residents and rubbed it in, and then set about trying to borrow a car. Pixie Dixon, suspecting (astutely enough) a bohemian lack of commitment to prompt payment, had phoned me the previous evening to demand cash upfront, and despite my smarmiest assurances, had remained insistent. Eventually, Monroe came up trumps with his prized, but clapped-out Triumph Stag and I set off for Pixie's Spanish-style farmhouse in the Narnian hills above Belfast Lough.

Once in motion, the car, an ill-advised convertible, proved to be little more than a large and elaborate air filter and when I reached my destination I was so chilled I couldn't speak. Pixie, by contrast, having just stepped out of her home solarium, looked like someone in the viewfinder of a thermal imaging camera. While I waited at the buttoned-leather kitchen island for her to rustle up an invoice, her be-frizzed poodle Pepe happened along and, with the minimum of foreplay, began to roger my calf, his front legs clamped urgently around my trousers, his teeth bared in a snarly grin of lust. Grateful for the warmth, I did nothing to discourage it. I took a sip of the coffee the hostess had wrung for me from her state-of-the art Express-O-Matic. It tasted like industrial run-off but again, it was helping with the defrosting process. Pixie returned with the docket. ‘Stop that Pepe!' (Pepe quickened his pace.) I noticed she had slipped into a distinctly diaphanous robe.

‘There, that's the business out of the way,' she said. She was standing with the light behind her and I was trying hard not to assimilate the information being transmitted. She smiled. Put her hands on her hips.

‘Now, would you like me to hot you up?'

‘Um …'

‘Or is there something else I can tempt you with?'

I was having a sudden memory of something Fenton had mentioned once about a close encounter in a cloakroom at one of my mother's parties. At the time I'd dismissed it as adolescent fantasy but I was getting a definite trepidation now that Pixie was about to spring a Mrs Robinson on me. When she busied herself with the Enigma machine again, I managed to dropkick Pepe behind the Aga, then made fast for the hallway, shouting a vague ‘cheery-bye' as I closed the door on the escalating sounds of her devilish percolations.

 

Back in town, I was taken by a whim, and instead of turning into Monroe's street I kept going, pressing on past the whispering avenues and parks of south Belfast and out into the meadowlands. Once free of the city, I knew where I wanted to be: Rosie and I had spent an afternoon there in the early days, when the world was in full bloom.

At the top of the hill I parked and killed the engine. Rosie's postcard was in my pocket but I left it where it was. I knew what it said. Or rather, what it didn't say. I blew on my seized-up fingers. How did it come to this? No girl, no money, no prospects. Nothing, really, to show for my adult life, except a ridiculous deception involving a poet made of smoke. I thought about making a run for it. Monroe's banger would probably take me as far as the ferry but would it last until London? Unlikely. I stepped out into the icy dampness and lit a cigarette (the ninth of the day). I zipped up my jacket, wishing again that I'd worn a scarf, and squeezed through the turnstile that led to the ancient circular earthwork known as the Giant's Ring. Which giant, I wondered. Finn MacCool probably. It usually was.