The Calligrapher

by Edward Docx

And I said, ‘Yes.’

  And she said, ‘Well, there’s this band on at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in a few weeks. They play kind of jazz funk but the paper says they are really good. Do you want to come and see them with me if I find out what night they are on?’

  And I said, ‘Yes, I’d really like to.’

  And she said, ‘Cool, that’s a date.’

  Ten smoothly driven minutes later, as Roy drew up outside number 61 Blomfield Road, Madeleine reached across and placed her hand over mine.

  ‘Hey, thanks for a nice evening. You sure you’re OK getting this?’

  ‘Yep. Sure.’

  ‘OK – well, listen: call me soon.’

  ‘I will. We’ll sort something out for next week maybe.’

  ‘OK – yeah – definitely.’ She hesitated for a second. ‘Bye. See you later.’

  ‘Bye.’

  She stepped out and I watched her fumble a moment with the lock. Then she disappeared into the darkness of the hall beyond and the green front door of her building swung shut.

  There were a few seconds of silence, as Roy Junior turned around slowly and removed his cap. He gave a low whistle. ‘Fuck me, Jazz mate. Fuck me.’

  I sat back and sighed, exhausted from the effort of not thinking about her in that way. ‘I know, Roy, I know.’

  ‘Jazz mate, I admit it. Man to man. I’m totally jealous. I thought that Lucy girl was quality but fucking hell …’

  ‘You haven’t had to look at her all night, Roy. I tell you – it’s killing me.’ I ran a hand through my hair. ‘You better drive around the corner. Or she might get the impression we are hanging around unnecessarily.’

  He looked at me in the rear view. ‘I know you get through the birds, Jazz, and respect, mate. And I know you know what you’re doing but bloody hell … you’ve got to be happy with that.’

  ‘You think I should have tried to go in with her? I never know how hard to push it?’

  ‘No mate. First date. Let it wait.’ He pulled way from the kerb.

  ‘You think? (What I was doing asking Roy Junior for advice, I have no idea, but it was an emotional time for everybody.)

  ‘Jazz – she just asked you out, didn’t she? Call me soon? Tickets for two? Birds don’t bother bothering unless they’re bothered – if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘So it’s in the bag. Chill. It will happen.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘But I’m telling you: when it does, Jazz mate, throw in the towel. That’s my advice. Pack it in and settle down. Don’t let her out of your sight. Because you have got to be happy with that result.’

  13. Song

  Go, and catch a falling star,

  Get with child a mandrake root,

  Tell me, where all the past years are,

  Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,

  Teach me to hear the mermaids singing,

  Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

  And find

  What wind

  Serves to advance an honest mind.

  ‘I am a complete arsehole. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen, I am. My mother hates me and so does my dad. I have no friends – only people who are physically too weak to force me to leave their company. When I walk down the street, lamp-posts mutter “piss off” under their breath …’

  Barge, dinner, comedy club: welcome to date three. In the brawny parlance of the great unwashed: a crunch match. The time: a little after ten-thirty on a Friday in late May. The place: a cosy, smoky, low-ceilinged basement of the Frobisher, a grand old pub in kick-ass Belsize Park, London’s least amusing arrondissement. Just arrived on stage, the last act and the man to whom we, the fee-paying public, are now excitedly listening: Vernon Turn On and His Amazing Cod Piece!

  ‘… They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, why not just tell him to fuck off? If you keep giving him things he’s bound to keep on coming back for more … No, but seriously: everyone is still getting married, aren’t they? Twenty years ago we all thought that was it: game over for marriage. “What’s the point?” we all said. But tell me this: what does everyone still want? Black, white, rich or poor – what do all the little boys and girls want in their heart of hearts? To get married. And not just that – they want the whole shebang: churches, priests, confetti and a beautiful white dress … Oh doesn’t she look pretty? Who’s doing the flowers? Honeymoon in the Seychelles. Flat in Balham … I know, sir, I know – there’s no need to look so disgusted … No, but seriously: I don’t understand why we have to give gifts at weddings – I really don’t. The special couple – they’re the lucky ones. Not the rest of us single losers. If you ask me, the whole thing is all the wrong way round. If two people have somehow managed to find love and happiness and mutual fulfilment and regular consenting sex then the least they can do is buy their poor lonely bastard guests a fucking toaster each!’

  Someone – presumably his promoter – shouted from the back: ‘Way to go, Vern!’

  I realize that there are those who might maintain that my choice of venue from which to launch the final coup was far too déclassé and that therefore I got exactly what I deserved. It is not for nothing (mutter the octogenarians) that so many of the best comedy clubs are below stairs. A concert hall in Vienna – yes, or St Petersburg for the ballet, or perhaps the gentle inevitability of the Venetian gondola – are not these more fitting preludes to the great act of consummation?

  To which I would respond: sadly not. We live in times of high farce and low comedy; our art galleries and our parliaments bulge with excrement alike and the protest of our radical youth is confined to a cappuccino taken without chocolate sprinklings. These days, more often than not, the path that leads most directly to the bedroom door is to be found amid an evening of cordial merriment, an evening of tavern warmth and intimacy, of careworn jeans and faithful old jackets, of the world as a topsy-turvy place … Regrettably, I’m afraid, modern seduction is not so much about songs or sonnets; rather it is about laughter and forgetting. Plus, after all the buggering about over dinner, the chicks usually prefer it if you can at least pretend that you’re normal on the next outing.

  After a very enjoyable London evening walk – Abbey Road and the quasi-sylvan pleasures of St John’s Wood – we had taken our seats in the corner: close enough to observe the nuances of the comics’ expressions but at sufficient remove to prevent unnecessary involvement. Behind us, a row of four: two couples who (to judge from what they mistakenly believed to be a conversation) were clinically obsessed with the exact learning abilities of each other’s children. And in front: a five-strong wedge of fifty-something women out for a good night – each of them privately hoping to be picked on by the compère so that they could ‘give as good as they got’. With the exception of some precocious seventeen-year-old girls – sacrificial virgins no doubt and local to the area – the rest of the milling audience consisted of men and women in their late twenties and thirties: London’s red-eyed wage slaves come to seek balm for the trauma of their chains.

  The room was smoky and close – wooden floors, whitewashed ceilings, a collection of cobbled-together chairs, benches and stools, arranged in neat rows, all of which were duly shuffled around as people arrived. At the back was a smallish bar, equipped with all the basics but clearly unused apart from on comedy nights. But what really gave the place its flavour was the posters plastered all over the walls: men popping bemusedly out of manholes; women coolly lighting cigarettes the wrong way round; men with ironic, starry glints coming from their teeth; women with their tongues stuck out and polka-dot head scarves; some comics shot from above so that their feet looked tiny and their heads looked amusingly large; others dressed in wacky clothes with wry moustaches – ‘Dominic Cake-Mouth as Gunter the Bavarian!’, ‘Denny Mauve in The McMauve Monologues! (You Won’t Enjoy a Better Night Out!)’, ‘Phil Hill! More spontaneous than combustion’, ‘Wankers in Space!’

  The first half had gone quite well. Not funny
exactly – but not not funny either. Things got underway with a guy with a truncheon. Then came a woman with a bicycle and the statutory gags about menstruation, chocolate and how men can’t do more than one thing at a time. (How about lying and cheating, sister? Right on.) After which there was an admittedly amusing man-and-woman double act, who had honed a series of scripted spoof interviews – police, job, television and so on. And finally, to introduce the interval, an adroit master of ceremonies took the stage. Throughout, I had proudly supped on my pint of London Pride while Madeleine had likewise slummed it with vodka and tonic. She was in those low-waisted jeans of hers, a tight T-shirt and a short denim jacket that didn’t match and didn’t care.

  ‘OK, ladies and … gentlemen,’ said the compère, coming to the end of his patter, ‘this is a game of two halves and we are now at half-time. And half-time means three things: one – I am available for sex in the back room over there if any of you ladies feel the need; two – you can all go and get fresh drinks; and three – those of you who have not wet your pants laughing can now go to the toilet. That means you too, sir.’

  ‘What did you think?’ I asked Madeleine, as everyone started to head for the bar.

  ‘The girl was OK. Pretty funny. And I thought the interview sketches were a laugh, especially when they started to mix them all up.’ She smiled and then lifted her hand to my face to remove a stray lash that was in the corner of my eye making me blink. ‘Gone,’ she said.

  ‘You want another vodka and tonic?’ I asked.

  ‘Get me two – I ran out halfway through. How many acts are there in the second half?’

  ‘Two. Andy Shandy, The Gentleman Dandy! And Vernon Turn On and His Amazing Cod Piece!’

  She grinned.

  All the time I was at the bar and all the way back to our seats – ‘excuse me, coming through’ – and all the time waiting for Madeleine to come back from the toilet, I was comfortable and relaxed and – yes – certain. As certain as I had been about anything in a long while.

  Something else had started to happen as well. From the very beginning I had been banishing any thoughts of Madeleine undressed to the backstage of my mind, lest their riotous appearance distract me from the intricate demands of what was actually happening between us at any given moment. But now I was finding myself fixing more and more on the shape of her naked body, hovering like an angel in my mind’s coulisse – for which hubristic temerity and presumption, the gods rightly rewarded me with a thunderbolt.

  Madeleine returns from the ladies. I hand her one of her drinks. We talk for a while. Then, just as the interval is coming to an end, she looks at me as if suddenly making up her mind and says: ‘Jasper, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes … sure.’

  ‘There’s a man I really like. But I’m not sure how he feels about me. And you’re into all that men and women stuff and I just wanted to get your opinion … on what you think he thinks of me. You know, if he likes me too. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times but it’s getting kinda funny with him.’ (A fool, an arrogant fool, even now I think she’s talking about me.) She continues: ‘I’m not sure whether he thinks of me in that way. Anyway, if I organize a dinner party, will you come and check him out? I’d just like to see what you think. He’s a nice guy. He’s called Phil.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Vernon, winding up for the night, ‘even though I am a tosser and everybody hates me, at least I am not nasty with it. My little brother, on the other hand, he’s a real bastard. When we were small and our parents used to try to abandon us in the woods, I would say to him, “Did you remember to drop the stones, Melvyn?” And for years he would say, “Yes, Vernon, I did.” Then one day I noticed that he wasn’t dropping the stones any more and I fell back from our parents to where Melvyn was lagging behind and whispered, “Melvyn, what are you doing? Where are the stones? How shall we find our way back?” And Melvyn just looked at me with his little piggy eyes – he has piggy eyes – and said, “I got bored of the stones so I’m dropping bread, Vern.” And I said, “But Melvyn – look, the birds are eating the bread and the trail is disappearing and we will be lost for ever in the woods and cold and hungry and alone.” And you know what he says, the little bastard? He says,”Hey, Vern, relax. I poisoned the bread. We can follow the trail of dead birds.”’

  Vernon Turn On held up a wet and shiny silver slab of dead cod, winked and left the stage.

  The following is rather resentful. But then there are some occasions in life when a man feels resentful. There’s nothing more to say about it: verse two from ‘Song’:

  If thou be’est born to strange sights,

  Things invisible to see,

  Ride ten thousand days and nights,

  Till age snow white hairs on thee,

  Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me

  All strange wonders that befell thee,

  And swear

  Nowhere

  Lives a woman true, and fair.

  14. Love’s Alchemy

  Some that have deeper digged love’s mine than I,

  Say, where his centric happiness doth lie:

  I have loved, and got, and told,

  But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,

  I should not find that hidden mystery;

  Oh, ‘tis imposture all:

  And as no chemic yet the elixir got,

  But glorifies his pregnant pot,

  If by the way to him befall

  Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

  So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,

  But get a winter-seeming summer’s night.

  Actually, ‘Song’ turns out to be just a warm-up. ‘Love’s Alchemy’ on the other hand, now that’s what I call the real thing. Balls to resentment. Bollocks to rancour. How about some bitterness and disgust? Rhythm like a nail gun: ‘I have loved, and got, and told / But should I love, get, tell …’ Love as a treasureless mine. Women as treasureless mines. Slag heaps, shafts, vanishing seams. Men like blind miners tunnelling on though all rumours of fulfilment have been discredited. Or men like alchemists, grubbing around foul-smelling pots in the dark, kidding themselves that sooner or later they might just find the philosopher’s stone. And all you get is a winter-seeming (i.e. bastard cold) summer’s (i.e. far too short) night. If you’re lucky, pal.

  Deep breath.

  You will, by now, have come to appreciate that I am a fair man – a man quite willing to see the good in everything and everyone. When, during the course of this account, persons or events have presented themselves in such a way as to invite instant derision, you will have noted how I have courteously held back and, with a shrug of the shoulders, pressed on politely, ever reflective that it takes all sorts. ‘In all mankind is my joy,’ sings Bach’s choir and I am happy to hum along. But even St Jasper the Tolerant has his limits. Even I find myself in the border towns of despair every once in a while. Even I must flick my cigarette towards the rolling tumbleweed, hunch down to take up the sun-bleached stick and drag it purposefully through the desert sand …

  … And so to the dinner party of all dinner parties. I arrived at Madeleine’s (what else could I do?) at around seven-thirty-five, five minutes late but early enough, I hoped, to seize a few sacred minutes alone with her, during which I might be able to cobble together some private rapport, the better to drive a wedge between her and her gallant suitor before he arrived.

  Having been buzzed inside, I went quickly down the stairs to Madeleine’s front door where I ventured a conspiratorial rap and listened for her step. She greeted me bare-armed in an apron with Chat Noir written across the front.

  ‘Hello, Jasper,’ she smiled, effusively offering me one cheek and then the other. ‘Watch out: I’ve got cider and honey all over my hands! Come on in.’

  Unnecessarily, I stooped a little as I entered.

  ‘The others are already here,’ she said in a slightly lowered voice.

  Fuckpigs, I thought. I had guessed they would take seven-thi
rty to mean eight. Like all decent Europeans do.

  ‘Come through. What’s this?’

  ‘I bought you something good,’ I said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A Gigondas ‘98. We should open it right away.’ I followed her down the short corridor: stripped plaster walls in mid-repair on either side, electric wires dangling here and there, and on the left an open door through which I caught sight of an upturned packing case and an old-fashioned alarm clock beside a double mattress lying on the floor. An assassin’s bedroom if ever I saw one.

  ‘Is it lamb?’

  ‘It is, it is,’ she said over her shoulder as she went through the door at the end of the hallway. The flat opened out at the back where she had the whole width of the building. She had a generous living space. There was a portable television, which squatted on another upturned wooden box by the patio doors, a single easy chair covered in a brown blanket, a decorator’s wall-papering board pushed against the near wall, a pile of paints and a huge stack of boxes shrouded in old sheets. This area gave way to a sort of dining zone with a carefully laid candle-lit wooden table, beyond which, over against the far wall, I saw her newly appointed open-plan kitchen area in all its terracotta glory. Two people were sitting at the table. They looked over.