by Alexei Sayle
Brunch to me is a silly meal and difficult to devise; it’s really a breakfast that’s been lying in bed too long. Nevertheless I have never been able to be inhospitable and, it being later in the year, at least there was more produce available from my garden, so in the end I decided upon courgette fritters with mayonnaise dip, eggs Florentine, Spanish omelette, kedgeree, broad bean dip, nasturtium salad and roast tomatoes with garlic. For cocktails I would do Long Island Iced Teas.
Recently Sam had taken to driving through the low countries and into Germany for his shopping: twice he’d been to Austria and once he’d got as far as the Hungarian border before the lack of a visa caused him to be turned back. There were a couple of bullet holes in the tailgate of his Subaru from where Sam had tried to sneak across the border on a rural back road — he’d heard that things were even cheaper in the ex-east than in the hypermarkets of France. He seemed to be going further and further on each of his trips and to be more distracted and edgy when he was at home. His farms literally ran themselves and he’d pretty much killed all the wildlife for hectares around so one day, I suspected, he simply wouldn’t come back, though I’m sure Mrs Sam would be able to monitor his progress, zig-zagging across the world via GPS satellite and her laptop. Maybe she would be able to see him drive head first into the onrushing Autobahn traffic, a popular method of suicide in Germany so I’d heard. Still it’s an ill obsessive compulsive disorder that brings no one any good, so Sam was able to fetch me from Austria a cake called a Wiener Apfelstrudel Gugelhupf, a Gottinger bacon cake, a selection of wurst and eight bottles of a decent Gerwurtstraminer.
His Landrover van swerved into my drive just after 12 o’clock. The day was extremely hot and I was wearing a short-sleeved fawn linen shirt made for me by Domediakis in Berwick Street, Soho, pale cream tropical nine-ounce double-pleated gabardine trousers from Adeney and Briggs and blue-and-white canvas yachting shoes. Earlier that morning I had found the Mau Mau hat still in its paper bag at the back of my sock drawer.
On this visit Emmanuel Porlock was not alone: he had brought his tribe along with him. What a shock. Bev and Martika and the kid Lulu were not as I had imagined them and Emmanuel was not the man he was when unaccompanied by these three.
To paraphrase Tolstoy: all thin families are alike but a fat family is fat after its own fashion. It was truly remarkable to my mind how three human beings could be so fat in three such distinct and individual ways. With Bev the surfeit manifested itself mostly in width, she was a very, very wide woman, enormous flat breasts stretching out to the side of her like stubby wings, gigantic hovercraft-bearing hips, a rolling, boiling stomach that hung down almost to her knees. In Martika, by contrast, the fat was confined solely to her bottom and her stumpy little legs that seemed to bend backwards in an entirely new way, like you see on one of those TV programmes where they try and pretend that they know how dinosaurs walked but really they haven’t a clue so the computer-animated puppet looks all wrong and impossible. In fact Martika might not have known she was fat at all unless she got a good look at her rear view in the mirror, or somebody unkind videoed her. The kid Lulu was just fat all over: fat scalp, fat elbows, fat eyelids, fat heels.
And they were not jolly fat people these three. Though I suppose I am a bit prejudiced, I have never been what I understand is called these days a ‘chubby chaser’; all my women have been trim and capable of looking good in the clothes of the day. I have never been that keen on fat women, so I believe that jolly fat people are only those who try and keep the self-hatred and disgust hidden under cover of jocundity. With this trio the loathing was out in the open and expressed itself mostly in a contempt for Emmanuel Porlock: each thing he said was greeted with a roll of the eyes or a look at the other two or a ‘tsking’ sound. Sometimes one would say to another, ‘What’s he saying now?’ in a scornful tone. Porlock himself was very subdued; overshadowed by them both physically and verbally, he took little part in the conversation and when he did speak his voice had an apologetic, humble note I had not noticed before. Over brunch the women merely jabbed at their food, nibbling at corners and tearing off small strips so that I was left with a great deal of it, which I took away, wrapped in cling film and left on the work surfaces and in the fridge in the kitchen. After they had gone I found the food had somehow departed with them.
I would not have flirted with Mercy in the hat shop three months before if my mind had not been filled with erotic reveries of the life I thought Porlock led with Bev and Martika, taking turns of each other, truffling away with their heads between each other’s slender legs. It was all a great big mistake.
After brunch the three females said that they would like to perform their chi gong meditation in my paddock, so Porlock and I had an hour alone to sit in deck chairs out the front. Porlock had the Mau Mau hat on his head even though the sun was bright in the sky. I said to him, ‘There’s something I want to say to you.
‘Go ahead.’
‘In the year 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was staying at a farmhouse, near a place called Porlock, in the county of Somerset. Of course everybody knows that Coleridge was addicted to opium; he took some one particular day, then fell asleep in a chair. Before he took the opium he’d been reading a book about the palace of Kubla Khan. In his opium sleep he started dreaming and in his dream there came into his mind an entire poem of something like two hundred or three hundred lines. When he woke up, what a gift, a whole poem complete! No need for months or years of work but a masterpiece delivered from the subconscious straight to the page. Of course as any of us poets would have done he began furiously writing: “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome decree …”
‘But after writing for a short time, he says in his diary he was “called out by a person on business from Porlock”, who for some reason he didn’t tell to bugger off, politeness maybe, I don’t know. He says this “person from Porlock detained me above an hour”. When he finally got rid of this man he found he had forgotten the rest of the dream. All he had left was fifty-four lines. And that’s all there is of “Kubla Khan” — fifty-four lines, unfinished.’
‘They’re a very good fifty-four lines though,’ said Porlock, ‘so all wasn’t lost.’
‘That’s one way to look at it. The thing of it is, though, I’ve looked for your name all over the place and I can’t find it. There are no books written by you in the bookshops, no poems written by you in any anthologies and the only reference on the internet I can find to your name, connected with poetry, is this “person from Porlock”: not a poet but a man who stopped a great poem being properly written.’
‘There’s something odd here, what are you saying, Hillary?’
‘I don’t quite know what I’m saying except that you don’t seem to be who you say you are and that you have brought terrible disruption to my life.’
‘Me? How have I brought disruption to your life?’
‘You made me go up to town to buy you a new bloody hat. When I was up in town I met Mercy, through meeting Mercy I am now living with a girl who is forty years younger than me, my house is full of noise and her friends, I’m in the stupid skittles team throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood about twice a week and I haven’t written a line of my poem, my great opus, my final testament to the world that will echo down the centuries, in fucking months!’
‘Well, first off, I don’t understand why you can’t find any reference to me, I’m all over, you must be looking in the wrong places. I mean what are you saying, that I’m some sort of sprite who travels through the ages stopping poets writing?’
‘Are you?’
‘Why would such a person exist, what would be the point?’
‘I don’t know, you mentioned something the last time you came: a sort of anti-muse… Maybe there are Porlocks all over the place stopping poets writing, stopping painters painting, for all I know it’s you who stops the gas board coming on the day they say they’re coming and makes the builder abandon his job half completed.’
He was looking discomfited. ‘Look, Hillary, you’re going off the deep end here,’ he paused. ‘Now what may have happened, I admit, is that I may have exaggerated a little bit how advanced I was as a poet. There may not be a lot, well any, of my poetry in actual print. I might have wanted to sort of associate myself with you to help my own career, I admit that. It’s only because I love poetry so. But I tell you this, Hillary, I would give anything to be at the point you are. To be on the edge of a masterpiece must be the greatest thing on earth and I know I wouldn’t let anybody stop me finishing it. You know what? I bet there was no man from Porlock, Coleridge probably only wrote that much and was making up an excuse for not writing any more. You blame me. There is nobody who’s stopping you working except you.
If you can’t write with all these people around then get rid of them. Get rid of Mercy, she’s a nutcase anyway if you ask me, a right mental case. If you get rid of Mercy then the darkie in the dress and the schoolgirl won’t come round either. Hillary, I’d give anything to have your gift and at the moment you’re squandering it. Be ruthless, be focused, get on with it, man!’
Over the next week as the heat of summer shimmered above the fields I thought about what I should do. Looking back I am aware that the options I considered are not those that another person might have considered. They were:
One. Going over to the Sams and saying to them, ‘Can I live in one of your sheds?’ I was sure they would let me. I would survive on out-of-date pâté and vacuum-packed saucisson sec while I worked on my poem. Two. I would go and live wild in a bender in the woods, eating foxes or something. I had been trained in bush warfare so it would be like in the old days back in Kenya. Again I would work on my poem while daylight lasted. Three. I could murder Mercy. Murdering Mercy seemed like a situation in which I won either way. If I got away with it then I would have my solitude back to write and if I was caught then I’d have a nice cell in prison to work in. I’m sure they’d let me have a pad and a biro.
You may have noticed none of these options consisted of me simply asking Mercy into the living room for a chat and then saying to her outright, ‘Look, I’m sorry but, Mercy sweetheart, could you just please go away. You’re stopping me working on my poem what with all these people coming round to see you and this thing with us being “friends who touch each other”, which is just a recipe for a cerebral embolism as far as I can see.’ But there was no way I could be so impolite. You might think that murdering someone was a tad rude in itself but I’m sure many women and maybe some men were murdered out of politeness. I’m certain a lot of husbands who wanted to break away couldn’t stand the idea of upsetting their wives, couldn’t imagine themselves saying the hurtful words, couldn’t endure the tears, the shouting, really couldn’t stand the thought of the pain they would cause, so instead they crept up behind them with a ballpen hammer and stove their skulls in.
I thought of a way to do it as well. The bad stuff they were selling in Northampton. If I could get some I could give it to Mercy as a present. Junkie dies, happens all the time.
I rode Mercy’s Piaggio to the back of the bus station on market day. I thought to myself that really he wouldn’t have any of the bad stuff but at least I would have tried. I said to the dealer, ‘I don’t suppose you have any of the bad smack that’s killing people do you?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve got lots of it, it’s very popular.’
I was a little surprised. ‘Why is it popular if it’s fatal? I’d have thought people would steer clear of it.’
‘Well there, sir, you don’t understand the mind of the drug taker. See, they think that if it’s near fatal it’s got to be an Al great buzz. It’s one of my most successful lines.’
I bought some but when I got it home I knew I couldn’t do it. I went out to the paddock and threw the deadly heroin into my compost heap where it would decompose and give my courgettes an extra zing next harvest time.
That evening in my tiny living room as usual Bateman and Suki were there as were a couple of new friends Mercy had made, Jessie and Gunther. They lived on a barge, Jessie was a juggler and Gunther spent his days miming as a silver statue in Northampton market. It was a trifle disconcerting seeing him on the couch as he had not taken his statue make-up off. I had just served them all welsh rarebit and coffee and was about to bring in a walnut cake I’d made earlier. With the TV bellowing in the background Bateman said, ‘You know when we was up in London, Merce, bringin’ your stuff back?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, when we wuz going through the West End in my van, I saw loads of people wearin’ them sweatshirts from like Harvard University and Princeton University but I don’t think them people went to them universities, or if they did then goin’ to one of them Ivy League places don’t help you so much, cos a lot of them peoples wearing them sweatshirts was sellin’ hot dogs from a stall.’
Suki said, ‘Did you go to college, Merce?’
‘Yeah, I did media studies at Harrogate University,’ said Mercy, ‘but you know I can’t remember a single thing about it. Not a thing. I think we went to a big place once to … no it’s gone. What about you, Suki?’
‘I’m still at school, remember.’
‘Oh yeah I forgot, and you, Bateman?’
‘I got a woodwork 0 level in prison. Which is harder than you think when they won’t let you have anything sharp. So, you know, the exam was like, largely theoretical, though I did make a teapot stand using a plastic chisel, paper nails and a rubber hammer.’
And finally, ‘Hillary, what about you?’
‘Oh ummm … well Cambridge, just after the war … you know.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Bateman. ‘What was that like, then?’
‘Well, it was a unique and rather odd time to be up at university, because on the one hand you had ordinary schoolboys like myself, and on the other a huge number of fellows straight back from the war. They seemed terribly fierce those men, commandeering cars in the middle of the Great North Road when they wanted to go to the pub and so on. And the thing that struck me most was that they were so determined, knew so clearly what they wanted to do. While most of us schoolboys had no idea what we wanted from life, these men had it all figured Out. They felt they had been through such a lot that their generation could do things in an entirely new way: write theatre plays that would bring about socialism in Scotland at their first performance, design monorails that ran under the sea powered by plankton, make typewriters that you could wear as a sombrero. And apart from re-making the world they knew they could also re-make themselves. These boy soldiers would study like never before because they had walked through the gates of Buchenwald; they would no longer be drunk because they had ridden a Superfortress to the canopy of the earth; they would no longer be shy around girls as a memorial to their best friend who they’d seen drowned, gargling in black engine oil, slipping beneath the cold North Sea. But after a year or so had gone by, their true natures, who they really were, suspended for the duration of the war, like Association Football, began to re-emerge. The drunks were brought back to college by the police having parked their MGs in cake-shop windows, the lazy stayed later and later in bed, the shy lost the composure that killing had given them and ran in fear from girls as they had never run from the Japanese. You see what I’m trying to say? You cannot be other than who you are and you cannot act in any other way than your nature permits you to act, do you understand that? It’s no use trying to fight it, you’re stuck with yourself.’
They were silent for a while then Suki said, ‘I heard about this bloke, right, got a terrible shock, right? But instead of his hair turning white, it turned red!’
‘What colour was it before?’
‘Dunno, brown I expect.’
That morning I had sat in front of my unfinished poem for what I think will be the last time. I had gathered up the bits of paper and put them in a drawer: not even the fifty-four lines of ‘Kubla Khan’.
There was high-pitched mewl
ing from outside in the back garden, I looked up. Adrian jumped up onto the window sill and stood there crying to be let in, his pink mouth opening and closing in petulant supplication. The others seemed to be too sunk into the furniture to get up so I went over to the window and opened it, the cat jumped down into the room and began clawing the moquette of the one Hille armchair that had so far escaped his depredation. I sat back down and the cat climbed onto my lap, sinking his claws into my best Gieves and Hawkes moleskin trousers and coiling himself with his nose up his bottom; after a few seconds he began purring.
Mercy said to me, ‘You got a cat after all, didn’t you, Hillary? You said the first time we met in that shop, you said that you thought you couldn’t stand the pain of having another cat. That you get to a point in life where the pain wipes out the pleasure. Where you’d rather settle for no pleasure than pay for it in pain. But really it’s better, isn’t it, having another heartbeat around the house and all that?’
‘Well, I’m not sure …’ I said, but then I saw she was looking at me with an expression of such savage entreaty on her face that I changed my tone and said in a cheerier voice that sounded in my head like clattering tin trays, ‘Yes, it’s better having one rather than not having one …
Then I added, ‘… just.’
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