by Alexei Sayle
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.
In this village there were so many who did terrible things and never seemed to give it a second thought. In London I had never known anybody who had ever done anything that you would call really bad. Poets, painters, actors, critics, the worst you could say was that one of them might have written an occasional overly waspish review or that another opted for the easy syllogism when a few extra minutes’ deliberation might have brought out a more profound and winning argument. But how they suffered, my former friends, for even these minor transgressions! The agonies of doubt and self-loathing, the suicide attempts, the grabbing at drink or psychiatrists or other men’s wives, in order to ease the terrible mental pain. None of them had ever crushed a cat’s spine for a living, nonetheless they twisted and toiled and sweated in their beds at night, raked by remorse and guilt. Yet in this village, and one can only assume in all these villages about, there were Sams and his kindred whose day’s work might involve the tearing up of hedgerows or the barbed wiring of ancient footpaths, the spreading of hormones or the jabbing of antibiotics. Then there were those such as Miles Godmanchester who was a senior employee at Daventry Life Sciences which had taken over the stately home on the bend of the road north of Lyttleton Strachey. At this animal Lubyanka all kinds of experiments were carried out on poor trapped beasts, the vast, vast, majority of these experiments pointless and all of them cruel beyond belief. Surplus rabbits are burnt alive in that place. Yet Miles Godmanchester clearly enjoyed his work, was popular and well-liked, nobody ignored him in the pub, nobody said when he came in, ‘Hello Miles, had a good day stabbing cats?’ At night in bed, I imagined, he woke for a second, smiled and turned over with a happy, contented sigh.
The Million Pound Poet said, ‘No, of course you don’t want to come on tour with me right this minute, you need all your time to be here because you’re writing again, aren’t you?’
I don’t understand how he could have known that.
Emmanuel Porlock went after it was dark, leaving me disturbed and unable to work.
On the doorstep as we were saying our goodbyes he took a cheap Nokia, pay as you go, mobile phone from his pocket and held it out to me on the palm of his hand.
‘You see this?’ he said. ‘Do you know what this is? It’s a telephone, yes it is. But it’s not connected with wires or anything, it’s a mobile telephone that I can phone people up with anywhere in the world, walking about or driving in my car or anywhere.’
‘Yes,’ I replied feeling confused, ‘a mobile phone, nearly everybody’s got one.’
‘
Oh I don’t think so,’ he said, climbed into his green Landrover and drove off at speed without turning on his lights.
I sat at my desk for the next two days unable to write a word. My mind filled with Emmanuel and Bev and Martika. Bev I cast as WPC Lauren Haggeston, a character on a television police show that I watched regularly and which was called The Job. Some days, if you wished to, it was possible to watch two hours of The Job since UK Gold, a re-runs channel, would transmit two thirty-minute episodes from a couple of years back in the mornings, then ITV would show a brand-new, one-hour episode in the evening. Recently the producers of The Job had culled a lot of the crumpled real police-looking actors in favour of much prettier ones, WPC Lauren Haggeston was one of the new intake, being extremely thin but still with large breasts. I was interested to observe that the actress who played WPC Lauren Haggeston had actually appeared three years previously in the same show but on that occasion she was playing a crack dealer with a boyfriend in the Ukrainian mafia. This happened a lot on The Job: actors who were cast in the leading roles as police men and police women had almost always turned up earlier as criminals. I sometimes wondered whether the producers were making some subtle point about the moral duality of the police who must always carry a whiff of corruption about them; but I suppose it was just that the casting people simply liked to work with those they had already met and had found to be professional. In my fantasies of a life filled with sex the part of Martika was played by my dead second wife.
There’s that old joke: a footballer is told by his manager, ‘Play badly and I’ll pull you off at half time’, ‘Oh cheers, boss,’ says the footballer, ‘at my last club we only got a cup of tea and an orange.’ I was pulling myself off and it was nearly full time.