by Graham Joyce
"No William Blake poetry today, Antonia? You usually have some clever and obscure line to throw at me."
She released me from the embrace. "I'm a little tired." She cleared a space for me and drew out a plastic chair. "Have a seat."
"Tell me something, Antonia. Who does it for you?"
"Does what?"
"The selflessness. The sacrifice. The patience. All this endless giving."
She looked at me with cloudless eyes. "If you ask that question, you've lost the point."
"Aren't you going to ask me why I'm here?"
"No, but you're going to tell me."
"Right. I'm reasonably confident that come the spring we might be in a position to make another donation."
She shook her head and looked away. Then she looked back at me again, searching my face. There was a smile on her lips, but it was strained. The lines at the corners of her eyes were engraved deeper than ever. The wrinkles around her lips seemed today to be claw marks. "It's great, William, but it's redundant."
"What! They're trying to close you again? But they've been trying that for years! So what?"
"It's not that. We've come to the end of the project."
"The end? Why?"
"It's me, William."
What? What about you?"
She offered me that thin smile again. "O Rose, thou art sick."
"What?"
"The invisible worm has found out my bed. I'm ill, William."
"What?"
"I have an advanced cancer. I've known for a while. I've had some treatment, but it's flaring up everywhere. They treat it in one place and it pops up in another. They've done everything they can."
I found myself standing up. "But we've got to get you good treatment. We'll find it for you, Antonia." I heard myself shouting, as if it were someone else's voice.
"William, William, you sweetheart. Sit down. Come on, sit down. I've got a brilliant oncologist. There isn't anyone better. It's just the cards that have been dealt. Now listen, I'm making arrangements about closing GoPoint."
It felt like news that a war had been lost. An empire crumbling. "You mean it's really all over?"
"There's no way it will stay open after me. Everyone knows that. I've been given three months, four at the very outside. We'll sell the lease to property developers and donate the proceeds to a similar organization. The work goes on. You won't stop giving, will you? They all still need it."
There she was. Dying of cancer and still thinking of other people. I felt utterly ashamed.
"Don't cry over me, William! I'll only feel worse."
"I'll squeeze out a fucking tear if I want to!" I shouted.
Then she hugged me once more, and we didn't let go for a long time. Finally she pushed me away and told me she had lots of work to get on with. I kissed her again and scanned the tiny room. There was no trace of anything. Nothing demonic could find the tiniest finger-hole or the smallest foot-hold around her. She burned too brightly. She'd chased them all off with a glowing white heat that had ultimately turned inwards upon herself.
When I left the building, the padded woman harangued me again. She took a thin roll-up ciggie out of her mouth to have a go at me. "Oi! When will it be four o'clock? Oi!"
"Oh, fucking well shut up,' I barked back.
She straightened her back, indignant. "No need to be like that," she shouted after me. "No need at all."
I was already a ticking bomb when I marched across Bloomsbury towards Holborn to meet with Ellis. I was angry with Ellis and I was angry with everything in this dirty world. I looked at the hardness of my own heart and I looked at this great capital city, where we have no leaders and no one to admire. Our government ministers are fraudsters, liars and deceivers without conviction, whose only ideology is to cling to power; our captains of commerce are wolves dining out on blood and bone; our religions prey on small children and feed us stories of nightmare; our media poison us with consumerism, a hideous bloated worm eating its own tail; our football heroes beat their wives and rape young girls; our movie stars and our models are junkies and drunks; our poets are incomprehensible.
I rage! I do! I rage when I see the lives of ordinary people squandered. The lives of young men and women, weak like me, going under the tidal sludge of drugs spilling across the sink-estates of the nation; the homeless drifting like wraiths; people eating themselves into oblivion and doping themselves with bad television; brave boy soldiers sacrificed in deserts for the ambitions of the insanely rich. I do rage! I weep! To see life held so cheap! And all I have as antidote as I stand lost in the middle of these leaders who are not leaders, these demons hidden in the souls of men and women, are my humanity and my rage.
Demons feed on us at every compass point. They lap, they slurp. They devour us in cruel slow motion. And the illusion of love is the only promise of defence, and even that will crumble. And I know that even Yasmin, coming to me in the guise of love, is inhabited by the cruellest of demons, just there to get my hopes up.
And in this state of rage I crossed down to the pub where I'd arranged to meet Ellis at the Cittie of York, one of London's oldest inn sites. Rumour has it that in this pub . . . Oh, fuck rumour, that's where he wanted to meet me, through the gloom of the great-hall bar and at the back where there are intimate drinking booths; though why anyone would want to be in an intimate space with Ellis defeats me. It also rankled because I knew that he'd once taken Yasmin there.
He was waiting for me. "Billy," he said dryly, urbanely, ironically. He waved his empty glass. "Get me a large whisky. Plenty of ice."
My real purpose in meeting him had been to stall him on Pride and Prejudice while I pretended to sound him out about whatever antiquarian book he might be on the lookout for next, so that I could possibly "find" him a copy; or maybe plant a couple of titles in his head that I "knew" were being offered on the market. My purposes in raising money from this game had now been confused by Antonia's news so I had even less relish for his company than usual. But I needed to keep him sweet and in place to complete the sale so that I could pay off the loan I had given over to GoPoint.
"What a piece of work you are!" he said as I planted his scotch on the table. "You and that Paki bum-boy. Hey, you forgot the ice."
I raised a single eyebrow at him. Not only was he a shit poet; he was also a racist homophobe. "Nice suit, Ellis. Armani?"
He shrugged his shoulders deeper into his jacket. "How long would you have kept it going? The pair of you?"
"Years, probably, if someone hadn't shopped us."
"Good luck to you, I say." He averted his eyes to take a sip of his scotch. "A shame the cat got out of the bag."
I looked at him. Could it be he was unaware that I knew it was he who'd tipped off the journalist? "I've no idea how the truth got out. Then they found scraps of paper in my wheelie bin."
"Yes, I read all about it in the Sundays. I was astonished."
It was true. He thought I didn't know! "Thing is, I didn't tell anyone myself. Not a soul."
"Really?" he said. He gave me an earnest and wide-eyed look. "Then it was probably someone very close to you."
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, they would probably be familiar with certain of your phrases. Signature remarks. Verbal tics. If they made a note of them they might have found them cropping up in Jaz Singh's odd vernacular style." The scumbag was actually revealing to me how he'd found us out. He was enjoying himself. Taunting me.
"Perhaps you're right." I wondered if I could trip him up over Yasmin. Get him to reveal that he knew we were seeing each other. I decided to chance my arm. "How's that lovely girl you had with you in the Museum Tavern?"
"Oh, her?" He stifled a fake yawn. "Yasmin? No idea. She was pretty enough but a bit deranged."
"Really? That's alarming."
"Yes, one of these dangerously promiscuous types. Come on then, have you got it for me?"
"A few more days."
"Oh, for God's sake. I've had enough of t
his."
"We arrange for full technical proofing," I said. "All part of the service. You don't want to be paying out that kind of money without being one hundred per cent certain of what you're getting. But it takes time."
He regarded me steadily. I changed the subject and started talking about the business in general. At first I suggested that the market had gone very slack and that not much was coming into view. Then I mentioned a few names. Dickens and the rest. Dropped a few hints about what I'd heard was about. Or what might be about.
"How come," he said, waving his large, putrid poet's finger at me, "how come I never hear about these? I scour the Internet and I ask other dealers all the time but I never hear about them. What are your sources?"
I took a sip of my wine, which wasn't half bad. Then I treated him to a delicious and murderous smile.
"Any prices mentioned with those?" he wanted to know.
"I never discuss prices until I know what's genuinely available. You know that. And it depends on other buyers."
"Other buyers," he said with contempt. "Do you think I'm an idiot? There is no other buyer on this deal, is there?"
There had been of course. But no longer. "I think I told you a bit about him already."
"What, this fucking toyshop owner? He doesn't exist, does he? You think you're smart, Billy Boy, but you're transparent. You know that? See-through. If he's real, give me his number."
"Obviously I can't do that."
"You give me his number or the deal is off. Simple as that."
He was in a sour mood and I do believe he meant what he said. I didn't know which way to play it. If I gave him the number, Otto wasn't going to be there. Someone might even tell Ellis that Otto was dead.
I took a sip of wine. Then from my wallet I took out one of Otto's business cards and handed it to Ellis. "Fair enough. If he confirms that he's prepared to beat your latest offer the book will go to him. Final."
Ellis snatched the card from me and took his mobile phone from his pocket, flipping open the case. He said he was going to bloody well check Otto's bid. He tapped in the digits and I waited with my arms folded. Ellis tried to stare me down as the phone rang.
I have no idea whether someone answered or whether Ellis connected to an answering machine. Either way, Ellis rang off. He clipped shut the cover of his phone and dropped it back in his pocket. I raised a single eyebrow at him. He'd lost. If I could just get Stinx to come through the sale was secure.
Then Ellis raised the matter of the vellum, a sample of which I'd already used to tempt him. He demanded that it be included in with my "outrageous" price. When I flatly refused he spat a unique kind of poetry at me, remarkable for its metrical brevity and industrial language. Punchy, I think literary critics would call it. Muscular.
"And what exactly is your commission on these deals, Billy Boy? I think I ought to know how much you get out of it every time I buy a new book from you."
"That's information," I said smugly, "that you don't need to know."
And then he launched into an unprovoked rant. About his publishers. About his agent. About his translators, for God's sake. About me. How we were all leeches and parasites and vampires sucking his vitality and living off his talent. After a while I stopped listening and marvelled at how his jaw worked the air and how his lips parted and mashed and how he bit at some of his words. It was like watching a dog chewing on a huge uncooked steak; spittle flew from his lips across the table as he found the choicest of remarks to describe all of us who had come within his orbit.
I remember thinking: How dare you say all these things when just up the road a saintly woman is dying of cancer; and how dare you refer to Yasmin in that way; and how can you sit there and pretend that you didn't betray Jaz and me to the Sunday newspapers; and what makes you think you can taunt me in this way?
He hadn't finished. "And don't think I don't know that you're tupping that slut Yasmin. Did you think I didn't see you coming out of Fraser's book launch? Hiding from me! That was pathetic!"
And in the next moment it was as if some spirit had got inside me, because I had Ellis by the throat. I'd pushed him back on to the bench in our private cubicle and I was throttling him. My fingers had sunk into his neck like talons and were squeezing his windpipe. I was choking him within an inch of his life and I was enjoying it. He was making these absurd spluttering, wheezing and sobbing noises; his face had turned pale blue and he was kicking out his leg and struggling in a feeble effort to drag my fingers from his throat.
Still with my hands at his throat I became conscious of other drinkers in the pub watching us. I looked up. The exertion had made my hair fall across my eyes. Two men at the bar were staring at me. A third, standing away from the bar, was Seamus, the old soldier. He watched with casual interest.
The truth is I wanted someone to stop me. But, shaking from exertions, when I looked them in the eye the men at the bar turned away and continued with their conversations. One of the bar staff was interrupted in the act of ringing a sale into the till. He looked horrified at what was going on, but when he saw me glowering at him he merely wiped a finger under his nose and continued with the transaction.
I thought it pretty appalling that no-one would intervene in a public place to stop a man from being choked to death. Indicative of our modern and uncaring society.
I let Ellis go.
"You're a fucking lunatic!" he rasped at me, fingering the bruises on his throat. "What's got into you? You fucking loony!"
I sat back and said nothing. I straightened my hair. I was surprised by how out of breath I was.
Ellis got to his feet and grabbed his coat. "Loony!" he bellowed at me again. "Fucking loony!" Then he marched towards the door without looking back.
"That's for being a shite poet," I bellowed after him.
After a few moments I went to the bar and ordered myself a glass of 1997 Château Pichon-Baron, 2nd-growth Pauillac.
"Large or small glass, sir?" said the barman who three minutes earlier had watched me strangle someone.
"Large, I think. Leave the bottle there, would you?"
"Certainly sir. Coming right up."
I didn't return to work after my attack on Ellis. I drank heavily at the Cittie of York all afternoon. I felt I was in a dangerous place and that I needed to sedate myself with wine. My sudden violence with Ellis hadn't satisfied anything. It had just started off a process.
I'd lost my purpose, my raison d'être in the manufacture of fake antiquarian books, and I'd lost our best customer, too, all in an afternoon. Worse, I'd just throttled the only means by which I intended to pay off my serious debts.
The barman kept a wary eye on me but my behaviour was impeccable until I got stuck in the Gents. I don't know how it happened. I remember standing against the porcelain urinal, pissing away. I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes because I woke with my cheek sticking to the wall tiles. There was some graffiti. I was sure it hadn't been there when I'd started pissing. It read:
Five, six, seven.
Just that.
"Ha!" I went.
I tried to find my way out of the Gents but I couldn't locate the door. On my knees I went round the room, pressing the walls, looking for egress. I did a complete circuit of the room, but still no door. Slumped against the wall, I called Yasmin on my cellphone. I was supposed to meet her after work, but I asked her to come and get me.
Someone came in, pissed and went out again, so I felt reassured that there was a door.
After a while the barman came down. "I got worried about you," he said nervously. "Shall I help you up?"
"I wish you would."
So the barman hauled me to my feet. Mercifully he discovered the door and we went out, me unsteadily, him with his hand guiding but barely touching me. He wanted to call me a cab.
"No, I've got someone coming for me," I said.
"Honestly?"
"Young woman. Coming for me. I know what you're thinking."
"I'm not thin
king anything," said the barman.
I found a seat. The bar's custom had thinned out during the afternoon, but the after-work legal crowd was starting to fill it up again. They gave me a wide berth. I don't know why but I started to think about Seamus, and his document.
Eventually Yasmin arrived.
She stood over me, bemused. "You're sozzled."
My God, she was beautiful. I wanted to have her, there, in the pub. The barman came over and they exchanged a few words out of my earshot. He looked at me and then he looked back at her. He stuck a finger in his ear and shook it, as if to de-wax. I knew what he was thinking.