SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (22 page)

There
was still a frisson of fear amongst the serving girls whenever I went in there;
they bunched together, static sparking off their nylon coats, and snickered
like gazelles at a watering hole snuffing the air, knowing that a lion crouched
nearby in the long grass. I also bought some crumpets and an unsliced cottage
loaf.

My
moped. You had to have some sort of vehicle in the country because there were
no buses or trains or trains and everything was a very long walk from
everything else, usually along roads down which caroomed giant grain lorries,
their drivers steering with, at the most, one hand, their other being used to
pin the mobile phone to their ear as they talked to God knows who about God
knows what.

Everybody
else in Lyttleton Strachey pretty much had a car except one man at the council
house end of the village who had four tanks, an armoured half track and a bren
gun carrier crammed into his garden, though I don’t suppose they were strictly
to get about in. I occasionally got the feeling that even some of the farmyard
animals had their own cars. I could have sworn I’d seen one of Sam’s pigs at
the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 156 on the back road into Banbury one day while I
was out for a walk. However, on my modest income, my pension and the small
cheques for some of my travel books on the canal architecture of Scotland which
still sold well in Turkey, I couldn’t afford a car so instead I had a small
moped, made in the 1970s and called a Honda Melody. It was purple with flowers
stencilled on the side and it had a basket on the front to put things in; it
was aimed at the woman rider. I had bought the machine for a hundred pounds
from a farmer over near Sulgrave. It had been his daughter’s but she’d been
mangled in a baling accident and didn’t need it any more because she had no
hands.

The
Honda Melody was powered — though that wasn’t really the right word giving, as
it does, some image of puissance — by a 49cc two-stroke engine, so weak that
going up the hill out of the next village, Woodford Halse, I had to stick my
legs out and help it along with a strange man-on-the-moon walking motion.
Sometimes I thought that one day if I ever again came into any money I would
like to purchase a 125cc Peugeot Speedfight which all the motorbike magazines
said was the best of the new style of fashionable scooters.

I
buzzed back through the country lanes with half an hour to spare. I took off
the brown leather American fighter pilot’s jacket that I had won in a poker
game in Kampala in ‘54, clambered Out of the boiler suit which I wore over an
old pair of corduroys from the Army and Navy Stores and a copy of a Daks shirt
made for me by a Malay tailor in Singapore’s Orchard Road. I had a wash in cold
water and changed into the clothes I had chosen to wear for tea, a brown
herringbone wool and mohair suit from Simpsons of Piccadilly, Turnbull and
Asser Tattershall shirt, knitted green wool tie and Grendon brogues that I had
polished the night before.

Then I
stood looking out of the living-room window.

A green
Landrover van coming from the north shot past the end of the drive, disappeared
out of sight round the bend, then a few seconds later came back in reverse with
that characteristic whine of a Landrover gearbox under strain. It went past the
house again, then came forward, turned up the drive and rocked to a halt on the
concrete hard standing, the rattle of its diesel engine subsiding in
diminishing coughs.

The
door opened and a long leg stretched out, on its foot was a Cuban heeled boot,
the leg itself was wearing a tight black bell-bottomed trouser. The leg hovered
for a second then was joined by its twin, together they slid the few inches to
the concrete. That was it for a while, perhaps a minute, then the legs were
joined by the rest of the man. He was tall, over six foot, long gingery hair
parted in the middle fell to his shoulders, sharp features behind a long beard.
He wore a frilly white shirt and a knee-length patent leather coat, in his hand
a black malacca cane with a silver top; the only note that didn’t fit in with
the Aleister Crowley look was a hat of some grey material with writing on it,
as might be worn by a young surfer or rapper.

My
thinking had been that if things flagged between us we might be able go for a
walk through the fields and along the green lanes to the knot of Scots pine
trees that grew above where the railway used to run. But in his high-heeled
boots and tight trousers, the Million Pound Poet had difficulty getting out of
his own car and certainly would not be able to totter along the muddy paths or
climb the several stiles on the way.

Having
wriggled himself out from the Landrover, the Million Pound Poet stood and gazed
at my house. He seemed disappointed; I imagine he’d expected a proper poet to
live in something made of mellow creamy stone, probably with roses round the
door. This looked like a council house, on the edge of a village certainly,
with a big garden sure, but otherwise pretty much like some of the old ones in
Daventry, from which direction he had come.

I
stepped away from the window to fiddle with the tea things and waited for the
doorbell to ring so that I could let him in. The first poet to visit me in
thirty years.

I
looked up from my teapot to see that he was standing in front of me, already in
the room. My small living room that looked out both towards the village and Sam’s
house over the road at the front and Sam’s fields at the back suddenly seemed
too small. A quince bush that needed pruning tapped insistently on the back
window as if wanting to be let into the party. I felt extremely awkward with
him staring down at me and he didn’t seem in any mood to start speaking.

So I
said, ‘Erm … hello. I’m Hillary Wheat.’

‘Yes,
of course you are,’ he replied, stretching out a languid ring-drenched hand, ‘…
and I’m Emmanuel Porlock. Sorry to startle you, the door was open so I strolled
in.

I could
have sworn that the door had been shut and locked.

‘Well,
do sit down.’

He
folded himself into my best armchair and looked around him, smiling.

I said,
‘Ah um … I had a vague picture of you in my mind as a smaller thinner man
with longer dark hair.’

It
turned out, like Gypsy Rose Lees, that there were two Million Pound Poets. He
waved his hand dismissively, ‘You’re confusing me with a ponce called Murray
Lachlan. Young, a scribbler of doggerel, disappeared now, a nine-minute wonder,
not the real deal like me.’

‘So,’ I
asked, ‘what does that mean exactly, a million pound poet?’

‘Well,’
he said. ‘It refers to my record deal. It’s a million pound record deal.’

I tried
to surprise him. ‘Ah I see. But I sometimes watch, I think it’s called
Behind
The Music,
on VH1 where they tell the stories of bands. And they often go
on about how so many costs are built into record deals, by the record
companies, that in reality what may seem like a million pounds turns out to be
twenty pence in the artist’s pocket.’

‘Hillary,
you are absolutely right, my friend. The Million Pound Poet tag is simply
newspaper nonsense. We both know you don’t get rich through poetry. That’s not
why we do it though, is it? It’s a need, a compulsion, an irresistible drive. Not
for the money, no.’

On a
pine trunk that had been dragged into the centre of the room I had laid out
tarte armandine, cherry clafoutie, beignettes, raghif alsiniyyeh, muhallabia,
quince compote, Towcester cheesecakes, toast: wholemeal and white, strawberry
jam, apple jam, coffee and tea.

‘Do
help yourself,’ I said.

‘Why
thank you.’ He leant forward, took a plate and piled it with six or seven
cakes.

For a
while we talked about my poetry. He told me how much he liked ‘Coventry Town
Centre’ and ‘The Hospital for Imaginary Diseases’, was more critical of ‘Daddy
Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau’, and didn’t like ‘Corrugated Irony’.

Then he
embarked on the purpose of his visit. He tried to persuade me to re-enter
public life. I felt a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film
Commando,
where
the CIA try and lure him back into counter-terrorism from his life inhabiting a
log cabin in the forests, chopping wood in his vest for a living. He said, ‘We
could go on tour together, there’s quite a network of arts centres out there
that put on poetry readings, the money’s good too and we’d make a great
package. Two ages of poetry or something I thought we could call it.’

I said,
‘Well, this is all a bit sudden.’

He went
on, perhaps thinking my horror was a negotiating tactic.

‘And
there’s another thing, seventy per cent of poetry is bought by women, right?
They like all that emotional truth, beauty, insights into the human condition
and what have you. Some of them that come to readings on the circuit are very
keen to sip at the fountain of beauty, if you know what I mean…’

I made
some other polite evasion and as suddenly as the topic had come it went again.
Instead he started to talk about the minutiae of his life in a big terraced
house in Daventry.

He was
one of those who used the names of people that they are involved with, without
explaining who they are. So he would say, ‘Bev says that I should get a horse,’
or ‘Martika was making nasi goreng the other night when …’ or ‘Lulu has her
Urdu lessons on a Tuesday night.’ These three, Bev and Martika and Lulu seemed
to come up in a domestic capacity until the notion began to dawn that Bev and
Martika were women and Lulu was the child of one of them and Emmanuel, and that
Bev and Martika and Emmanuel lived together. Lived together like in a pamphlet
that a particularly left-wing local council might put out. ‘Lulu lives with Bev
and Martika and Emmanuel. Bev sleeps with Martika, Emmanuel sleeps with Bev,
Martika sleeps with Emmanuel.’

When I
had been a famous poet this sort of thing, while not unknown in Bohemia, always
seemed short-lived and generally ended in alcoholism, rancour and suicide. This
arrangement, however, from what he said seemed to be a happy one. I said to
him, ‘I don’t wish to probe but do I take it that you live with these two
women?’

‘Yes,
Hillary, I do indeed live with Bev and Martika. I also have sex with Bev and
Martika.’

‘So how
does that work out then?’ seemed to have come out of my mouth without me having
anything to do with it. Fortunately he was eager to expound.

‘Well,
I do it with each of them and they with each other, though generally not the
three of us together, with that you tend to spend all the time rearranging each
other like St John’s Ambulance practice dummies. Our daughter Lulu’s cool about
it, all our parents are cool about it apart from Martika’s father and Bev’s
Auntie Glym who we suspect of a drive-by shooting at our house.’

‘Even
these days I must say it still seems a most unusual arrangement.’

‘It
shouldn’t be, Hillary, it shouldn’t be. It makes me crazy. There are so many
more ways to live than are sanctioned in our society. Take all these couples,
for instance, man and wife living in these little houses all around here,’ he
waved his arm about as if they were in the living room, ‘… wrapped up
together all sterile and tight like a pair of pork chops on a supermarket
freezer shelf. Say one of them fancies a bit of a change, a different hole, but
they can’t, can they? Not without lying, scurrying about like a rat or risking
bringing their whole world crashing down. Then there’s all this blame that goes
around when somebody goes off somebody else. You don’t get the blame if you go
off prawn tikka masala, do you? People don’t go around saying “Have you heard
about Toby? The bastard’s gone off prawn tikka masala! A friend of Pauline’s
saw him in town eating aloo gobi and pilau rice with a side order of brindal
bhaji! The faithless bastard!” But you would go off prawn tikka masala if you
were eating it every night, wouldn’t you?’

He
leant forward and helped himself to some tarte armandine and a Towcester
cheesecake.

‘Or
take all these single women that there are, lovely girls all about, going
without love from one year to the next because, well we know don’t we, you and
me Hillary, that the single available men out there are, to put it kindly, sub-human,
knuckle-dragging mutants with radioactive hair growing out of their arseholes.
You wouldn’t even want Mrs Thatcher to have sex with one of them would you? So
to take on two or three of them, and for them to take on each other, it makes
perfect sense. Hillary, what I say and do, is if we live in looser… tribes if
you will, these problems of modern society simply fade away, we spread out the
load … companionship, sex, protection, become available to everyone, not just
a lucky few. I do not believe we are meant to live alone, my friend. God
created us to live in a tribe then man told us to live in Milton Keynes. It is
all wrong, Hillary.’

All that followed in
subsequent months sprang from this conversation. I had always lived my life
according to Flaubert’s dictum: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a
bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ It was all
that sustained me through my thirty years of self-imposed exile for the crime
of zoolifting. Good manners, politeness, moderation, the consolations of
conventional morality, these were my tranquillisers. Now it occurred to me,
ludicrously, for the first time at the age of seventy-two: ‘What if I was
wrong, what if I was mistaken in the way I have chosen to carry on my life?’
That somebody could live out such a fantasy of perfection as Porlock lived,
seemed to shake something loose in me that I had always attempted to ignore. I
had maintained to myself that there was a price to pay for immorality, there
had to be, hadn’t there? But was it simply some idea I had developed when I was
a schoolboy and had never revised? I had made myself pay it. I had imagined the
gods to be some kind of ticket inspector who would always know if you hadn’t
paid your fare, and if you hadn’t would inflict a substantial fine. But when I
listened to commuters talking in the pub they said that these days the ticket
inspector rarely, if ever, put in an appearance.