by Alexei Sayle
On the third day after Emmanuel Porlock the Million Pound Poet’s visit, I was starting to get back into thinking about maybe getting an idea about starting to work on my poem, when the telephone rang. It was him, Porlock, though he was one of those people who never say who they are on the telephone. His first words to me were, ‘Have you got my hat?’ No greeting, nothing, very impolite really.
‘Who is this, please?’
‘Have you got my hat?’
‘Hello, Emmanuel,’ I said.
‘Have you got my hat?’ he repeated. ‘The hat I was wearing when I came to see you, the grey hat, the Mau Mau hat.’
‘The Mau Mau hat?’
‘Yes,’ exasperated. ‘It’s a make of hat. Mau Mau, the name’s on the front. I was wearing it when I came to your house and now I can’t find it. I remember I had it on when I was driving to your house but I don’t remember if I was wearing it on the way back.’
I tried to recall whether he’d been wearing it on the doorstep when he’d shown me his mobile phone in the dark. ‘Well, I can’t remember but I’ll have a look for it.’
‘Yes, you do that now,’ and he rang off. We had only been in the living room and the hall so I turned up all the cushions but it wasn’t there. I looked behind the couch and the TV but it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t anywhere in my house. Fifteen minutes later and the phone rang again.
‘Did you find it?’
‘No I’m afraid not, I—’
‘Shit, fuck, I’ve got to have a Mau Mau hat. I can’t function without a Mau Mau hat. You’ll have to go up to London to get me another one. There’s nothing else for it. There’s a retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market that might just have one.
‘I’m not sure I can drop everything and … go up to London … my poem …
He started shouting, ‘I fucking lost it at your house! You’re responsible. You’ve got it somewhere or you’ve thrown it out, or you’ve given it to the boy scouts and you can’t remember because your fucking mind is going …’ There was a pause when I thought he was considering that he had gone too far. Then, ‘You’re not wearing it, are you?’
‘Of course I’m not wearing it.’
‘Alright then. I’ll ring you the day after tomorrow to find out how you got on in London.’ And he put the phone down.
When he’d said he knew I was writing poetry again it gave me an electric shock as if I was being worked over with a defibrillator by an untrained shop assistant in a mall.
‘How could you know that?’ I asked.
‘Oh you’ve a certain look about you, you know, like a lovely single girl who’s getting shagged regularly, after not getting it for a long time. So how does it feel after all this time to be doing it again? Quite a relief, I should think. I’m sure, if you’re anything like me, your entire sense of yourself must be tied up with your writing. I mean what are you, Hillary Wheat, without it? Another roly-poly old man in an out-of-date suit. It must have been terribly painful to be blocked out for all those years. I wonder if there’s a muse of the writers’ block, a sort of anti-muse who descends and uninspires the struggling artist. I mean if there are muses why aren’t there un-muses? That would be quite a thing, wouldn’t it? I bet you thought when you found you couldn’t write that there are loads of other things you could do, mountain climb or do voluntary service in Kenya or learn yoga but you don’t do anything, do you? It’s simply thirty years down the gurgler really, isn’t it?’
I said a trifle snippily, which made me feel immediately guilty, ‘You seem to know a lot about it … being unable to write, that is.’
‘Guesswork, empathy only, I’m glad to say. No, I’ve always been particularly fecund in the writing department. Can’t bloody stop that’s more my problem.’
‘Well, that is nice,’ I said. ‘For me it’s still painfully slow, only the themes are sketched in, the detailed work is still to come … and I don’t … there doesn’t feel like there is much time. I don’t know … how much time I have left to finish it.’
He laughed so much he spat clafoutie across the room. ‘Oh fuck off, Hillary. You are one very chipper old man. Don’t try and play the “look at me, I’m a sad old man approaching death” card just yet.’
True. You might have thought that I would at least get on with the villagers of my own age, reminiscing about the war and such and such but I seemed to inflame my contemporaries even more than I annoyed the younger set. My major crime with the senior crowd was that there was nothing wrong with me. While they aged and shrank and stiffened up and died around me, while remorseless diseases left them crapping in plastic bags and rolling around on ignominious little electric carts, I stayed more or less the same. Fit and healthy and spry; slightly greyer, that is all. I sometimes wondered if somehow the suspension of my output had frozen me at the age I was when I left London. I wondered if when I started writing again I would truly start to age and become subject to all the terrible infirmities. It was a price I would happily pay.
It occurs to me that you might have the idea that my poem, my opus, was no good. This had been my worry too, was it just a longer drawn out version of the delusions I had had before? There was only one person I still knew whose opinion I could trust: Paul Caspari, my old publisher, father of the late Blink. Though now ninety years old he was still functional. Like me he had been in a kind of suspension and it was the death of his son that had liberated him, giving him again a seat on the board of Caspari and Millipede, now independent once more after being bought and sold a hundred times, back in the building they had occupied thirty years ago, with the same name after a hundred aliases and the same letterhead after fifty corporate re-designs. What had been the point of all that upset if it only brought them back to the same place? What was the point of driving me mad?
After I sent him such fragments as existed of my poem, plus my plans for the rest, he replied in a letter almost by return of post.
Dear Hillary,
How marvellous to hear from you after all this time and to learn that you have begun to write seriously again. My pleasure at this news turned to extreme excitement when I read the opening stanzas and projected plan of your great poem. I do not want to prevaricate in any way: I think you are working on a masterpiece. You will, with this completed poem, claim your place at the forefront of twentieth century poetry. Indeed, you will stake a claim to be regarded as one of the greats of the twenty-first century also. Janus-like your work looks back to our great tradition and also forward with the yet untried face of the future of poetry in English. I do not know if I would immediately have recognised the work as yours as you seem to cloak your individual personality behind a new voice. This voice you are employing strikes me as absolutely right: so far from mediating between the poet and his experience, it serves instead as a way of lifting that experience to a new power. By means of it each item of sensuously registered and remembered experience becomes, whilst keeping its singular integrity, a sign and manifestation of an energy abroad in the waking world.
How we need this energy and vision now!
I have always thought of you as one of the most under-rated poets of recent times: how wonderful to have this opinion vindicated in what will be far and away your most important contribution to literature.
If I can help in any way with comments or discussions I should be honoured to be asked. I do not intend to get in touch with you in the near future as I do not want to distract you for a moment from your great enterprise, but I hope you will have the time to let me have any new verses as you complete them.
We would certainly be happy and honoured to publish your piece, perhaps also a re-issue of your older pieces . .
That would have to wait though. The day after my phone conversation with the Million Pound Poet I rode my Honda Melody to the railway station at Banbury and parked it in the motorcycle bay, squeezing it between a 900cc Triumph Speed Triple and a 200mph Yamaha Yakabuza. I went up to the ticket booth and said to the man behind the plexiglass, as I
would have said a long time ago, on the last occasion when I went up to town, ‘I’d like a first class return to London, please.’
Without expression he printed out the ticket in a machine and slid it under the window at me. ‘That’ll be one hundred and seventy-five pounds, please,’ he said.
‘How much?’ I gasped.
‘One hundred and seventy-five pounds, please. Standard first class return, I’m surprised you asked for it. Nobody buys them any more. See, what you should have bought was an Off Peak City Saver or perhaps a Multi Zone Access Pack.’
‘I’m terribly sorry but I don’t have a hundred and seventy-five pounds with me.’
He didn’t seem surprised. ‘No, well there aren’t any first class seats on the train anyway.
He tore the ticket up and printed Out another. ‘Senior Citizen’s Standard Class Fast-track Rail Rover? Twenty-two pounds?’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
A train came in fifteen minutes later. When I had first come to the country I would still make the occasional disastrous trip back up to town. Then the trains were a uniform blue and grey, with the gruesome BR logo on the side. Now they weren’t a uniform anything, seeming to be composed of the rolling stock of five different companies from a couple of different countries. Nevertheless I boarded with no trouble and found a seat. We gibbered our way south at only about half the pace I remembered from thirty years ago.
Our train snailed into the suburbs of London and the tracks spread out until they ran like silver streams on each side of us. In a meshed compound I saw Eurostar trains racked side by side, like a display of some imagined near future in a science museum. After that, as if in deliberate contrast, we came upon a district of early Victorian terraces, each backyard a bomb atrocity of disinterred, unidentifiable shards of wood, plastic, metal and decaying vegetable matter. Next there was a sky-darkening twist of concrete flyovers serpenting and intertwining above us, London underground tube stations now mixing with the suburban lines. Suddenly our train shook to a halt, waited for a few minutes throbbing quietly to itself, then crept on even more slowly. Out of the window I saw on the farthest track to us a whole train lying on its side, flame and black smoke only just starting to flick and lick out of the rends in its torn lemon-yellow metal. Several bodies hung from the cracked window frames. One carriage was still the right way up and entirely intact: on the inside passengers beat with their fists on the window glass, mouthing desperate pleas at us as we slid by. In the far, far distance there was the wail of fire engines stuck in unyielding traffic.
A man in a suit with his feet up on the seats opposite me glanced at the wreck, took out his mobile phone and dialled. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ he said, ‘yeah, if you’re thinking of coming into town today I’d take the car, there’s a Hyundai Cotswold Turbo gone off at Larkmead Junction … Ump … coupla or five dead at least, I’d say. Yeah, alright, see you this evening … Bye.’
The grand London terminus that I remembered was now a shopping mall with a big roof and trains in one self-effacing corner. Bumped and swerving I walked out into the shriek of traffic.
Unlike the trains, the bus that I caught was exactly the same as it would have been thirty years ago, apart from the price of the fare, that is.
London did not seem so much changed, I suppose if you watch a lot of television you are kept up with the metamorphoses in the capital, and anyway we’ve got a Starbucks in Banbury now.
I found the retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market easily enough, the pattern of the streets had not changed at all. It was called Girl/Boy/Whatever and apart from hats of the past it seemed to sell fake fur-covered hand cuffs, whips and patent leather bikinis for men and women. I went inside.
Behind the counter was a most lovely girl of perhaps thirty years of age. She wore a transparent muslin shirt and tight black leather shorts. A y-shaped chain was connected to each of her breasts by rings through her nipples, the slender chain joined above the rib cage before disappearing underneath the waist band of her shorts presumably to end between her legs.
Yet despite the way she was dressed and despite the scowl on her face, somehow her decency shone out of her, somehow I was certain here was a big kind girl, clearly a kind girl, an honest girl. In a previous age, I reflected, she might have been a servant in a big house or a stenographer riding the tram to work in a cheap two-piece suit and cloche hat. Now she was serving in a shop in Soho with a chain clipped to her cunt.
I approached the counter. I suppose I must have presented an odd sight in that shop: several of the items I was wearing had been present at the fateful meeting with Blink all those years ago. The silver cufflinks from Aspreys, the cashmere navy-blue overcoat, my father’s old Smiths watch. Not present at that lunch in the past were the white Egyptian cotton shirt from Turnbull and Asser, the dark-blue silk tie, the white crepe de Chine monogrammed handkerchief, or the forty-five-year-old double-breasted pin-stripe suit, teamed with a pair of black brogues that I had bought from Shoe Express in Northampton the year before for nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence. In deference to the fact that we were now in the twenty-first century I had decided not to wear a hat.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to the serving girl, ‘I was wondering whether you have a grey Mau Mau hat in stock?’
‘Mau Mau?’ she said. ‘Mau Mau. They haven’t made those for years. We do get a few in but not at the moment.’
‘Oh,’ I said, disappointment settling on me, ‘I was hoping you’d have one, I’ve a… friend who’s desperate. I don’t know what to do. Can you perhaps … um suggest another retro hat shop?’
She looked a little concerned at my agitation but replied, ‘I can’t fink of another place, no.’
‘I don’t know what to do, I live in a little village in Northamptonshire, this is the first time I’ve come up to town in decades …’
‘Sorry.’
As she raised her arms in a shrug the sleeves of her muslin top fell back to the elbow. I saw that almost the whole length of both her arms were covered in distinctive small puncture marks and longer red weals. Some of the cuts were old and almost shadows but others, around her wrists especially, were fresh and deep and rimmed with dried blood. I recognised the wounds immediately, they were familiar to me.
‘Those marks on your arms,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ she replied looking sullenly at me with lowered eyes, instinctively tugging on the thin transparent material of her sleeve to cover the scars. I dropped my voice to show that I understood the situation she was in, and looked her directly in the face.
‘You’ve …’ I paused, ‘you’ve … got a cat haven’t you?’
She looked embarrassed for a second then spoke in a smaller voice.
‘Yeah,’ she said again, trying to remain cool but the light of enthusiasm fired up in her brown eyes.
‘What’s its name?’ I asked.
‘He’s called Adrian,’ she said, excited now, speaking quickly, her voice full of remembered love. ‘He’s got this squeaky toy on a string that he likes to play with, he likes me to dangle it over him but sometimes he gets carried away and claws my arm … and, well, sometimes he claws my arm because he’s hungry and sometimes he just claws my arm because he wants to. It’s their nature, though, isn’t it? You got a cat?’
‘Not now. In my time, many, yes.’ I sighed and was silent for a second before continuing. ‘It’s one of the terrible sadnesses of ageing, how many of them you outlive; in the end it becomes too hard. They have such short lives, while ours seem so long, it’s like having a succession of children with rare diseases that you know are going to polish them off in ten, fifteen years.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but what about the pleasure they give, the companionship, the company, simply having another heartbeat about the house.’
‘Oh I know, I know and I miss it terribly. But over the years losing each cat becomes harder and harder. It’s a sort of cumulative thing and finally there comes a time when one particular cat dies and you
realise that all the pleasure they have given you does not compensate for the terrible pain their death causes. You realise that, bleak and miserable as it may be, you are still going to be marginally better off without another cat — you will have no pleasure but at least you won’t suffer.’
Though I meant all that I was saying there was also an element of calculation in it. I knew nobody else in London, or anywhere else for that matter, who might be familiar with the retro hat world and also … I don’t know what I thought I was doing flirting with a girl forty years younger than me, but I was. I suppose it was something to do with what the Million Pound Poet had told me about him living with two women. If he could do that why couldn’t I at least flirt with a young attractive woman? Anything seemed possible. Actually picking her up, of course, that didn’t really seem possible. After all what I would do with her once I had picked her up?
‘Oh you know, better to have loved and lost and all that …’ she said, idly flicking at the silver ring that went through her navel and via which the chain ran on its way to the heart of darkness.
‘Not after you’ve lost the fifteenth pet …’ I said. ‘I’ve measured out my life in Pollies and Princes and Bingos …
‘T.S. Eliot, innit?’
‘Sort of.’
‘He wrote a lot of poems about cats, didn’t he?’
‘Yes indeed, though that was my feline adaptation of “The Waste Land”. Do you like poetry?’ I asked her.
‘Only if it’s about cats.’
‘Um.’
‘No, I’m only joking with you. I like some stuff from like the last hundred years. Owen, Auden, MacNeice, Betjeman, John Hegley. Before that I don’t get it.’
I hadn’t expected any mention of me but it was still depressing when I didn’t get it. I said, ‘There’s poems about cats before then. Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” springs to mind.’