THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
We were freezing, ripped off and forlorn,
As we travelled towards a false dawn;
But the truth of the stable
Showed my world was a fable;
Now I wish that I’d never been born.
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
I once missed the moment to be
Someone not on the periphery;
But my second-hand life
Was too dull for a wife:
Now the stairlift awaits only me.
FOUR QUARTETS
For an Anglican, time is too vast;
A rose or a vision can’t last:
It’s a moment in history,
Our grace and our mystery,
And the future is lost in the past.
JOHN OSBORNE
takes Jimmy Porter off his sweet stall to make a speech
Ladies and Gentlemen – or at least you think you are in your borrowed morning suits and marshmallow hats. I know your kind. Oh yes, you’re trying to strangle the life out of my daughter. Alice. God knows how we managed to have a child. Her mother – or Attila as she’s called by those who know her – managed to avoid having enough babies to run a Woolworth’s pick ‘n’ mix before Alice stuck it out. Oh yes, she’s got her mother’s ruthlessness all right.
She may look like a jelly baby but believe me she’s a toffee brittle you can break your molars on. That’s called a metaphor. I read it in a posh weekly that was trying to make me feel stupid. I bet the writer had never worked on a sweet stall. And anyone who’s never weighed out a bag of dolly mixture is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.
And here’s the groom, young Peregrine. Don’t be fooled, ‘Perry’, don’t be lulled by all that softness when you’re married. She’s a Gulag commandant, my daughter. She’s a Shankhill Road butcher. Any feelings of being human that you have, she’ll drain them out of you like a . . . like a . . . like an Eton boy sucking up a sherbet dip.
So you’re a teacher are you, Peregrine? In a ‘comprehensive’? But what can you comprehend? Do you fill their little heads with sentimental yarns of old Empire? What can you possibly know about real life? Ever run out of Maltesers on a Friday afternoon? Ever had to shoo a bluebottle from the liquorice twirls? I thought not. One day I’ll wake you from your death-in-life complacency. Believe me, I’ve no public-school scruples about hitting comprehensive teachers.
So, Daddy and Mummy are from Wiltshire, are they? The family that put the Pewsey into Pusillanimous. I suppose my daughter is expecting? I’m surprised you’re still alive to tell the tale. Normally after mating in our family the female consumes the male. Gobble. Gulp. One shudder and he’s swallowed in the giant maw of all that . . . all that candy-coated, oh so considerate . . . kindness.
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . those of you still here. Raise your glass to the Bride and Groom, the Died in Gloom.
DOROTHY PARKER
is famous for saying witty things at Algonquin lunches, but in fact she was mostly suicidal and wrote in verse
I pondered lonely as a cab
That’s stalled on Tenth and Madison,
When all at once I felt a stab,
A pang that made me sad as one
Beneath the car, beside the trees,
Muttering and whining in the breeze.
Unending as the lamps that shine
And mark the end of gloomy day
And mock the failures that are mine
Along the length of all Broadway:
Ten thousands cocktails at a guess
Have washed me to this twilight mess.
The puddles of the sidewalk threw
Reflections of the ghastly night;
A poet could not but be blue
Confronted by this awful sight.
I moaned and groaned but never thought
What wealth to me this stuff had brought.
And often when in bed I’ve lain
In bitter, suicidal mood,
The lamps reflect my inner pain
In verses that are short and crude.
And then self-harm is my delight;
My husbands say it serves me right.
BETWEEN THE SHEETS
JACKIE COLLINS
goes posh and literary, like a fourth Brontë
Cathy Earnswell lived in a to-die-for penthouse in Wutherley Hills. Her fabulously rich father owned the late-night place of choice in Micklethwaite. Cathy regarded her nude form in the mirror and marvelled at her ten grand’s worth of boob job, teeth whitening and elocution lessons. ‘I’m worth every last farthing,’ she thought. Just then the incredible 210-pound Latino pool-boy called Studcliff sauntered in. His eyes were liquid black pools, his chiselled abs were exploding from his jerkin and he had way too much attitude for his menial job.
It was lust at first sight. Studcliff was a legendary swordsman who put seven sovereigns’ worth of white powder a week up his cute little nose. Studcliff liked to wander on the bleak moors above Wutherley Hills where he had a weird nature thing. But Cathy, whose idea of the great outdoors was a Friday-night dogging, couldn’t get enough of him.
Till one day she met mega-rich Edgar ‘Eddie’ Lintonio, who ran a top-of-the range, state-of-the-art business in Heptonstall. His father was a world-renowned neurosurgeon with acute business savvy, his mother was the heir to a string of luxury hotels and kid sister Isabella was the raunchiest chick this side of Hebden Bridge. She was already an action-movie mega-star and head of rocket science for All Europe. She had a brain the size of Ilkley Moor and an ass as pert as a Pontefract cake.
Then Cathy had a brainwave. She could marry Edgar Lintonio, suck up his millions and play the little wifey while still seeing Studcliff on the side for mind-blowing bouts of wildness between her silicone bust and his prodigious endowments in every superlative department.
She checked her diamond Rigatoni watch and narrowed her eyes to fierce slits. This’ll make Jane Eyre look like a vicarage picnic she told herself, originally.
Unfortunately, that fall she got super-rare dengue fever and died. But Studcliff dug her up out of her grave for the kinkiest night of passion ever. She was literally in heaven.
STEPHEN KING
tries a frothy romance
‘Oh Thad,’ purred Dolores, slipping off her beautiful new shoes and standing in a silken underskirt, ‘you always seem to know what I’m thinking. It’s as though you can read my mind.’
‘I can,’ said Thad. ‘And by the way, I don’t do that thing you’re picturing. Not on a first date.’
‘Mmm, Thad,’ said Dolores when they had finished their love-making. ‘Did the earth move for you?’
‘Sure,’ said Thad, frowning in furious concentration as he used his telekinetic powers to move the four-poster back into the bedroom from the rooftop where they lay.
‘My sweetest Thad,’ said Dolores, ‘you have started a fire in my heart.’
‘What?’ said Thad. ‘That was meant to be my old teacher’s house. Pyrokinesis. Don’t move, Dolores, I’m going to call 911.’
‘Too late, my sweet,’ said Dolores. ‘A part of you is mine for ever. And you can’t take it back.’
As she made for him with a giant machete, Thad ran out of the house. But a minute later he was back, shame-faced, at the front door.
‘You know that thing, Dolores, that . . . part of me, that’s, like, yours for ever. I discovered what it was and I’d . . . kind of like it back.’
But it was too late. Suddenly, Christina, the over-possessive station wagon, rolled up her headlights in anger and reversed vengefully over Thad, crushing his brains out on the driveway.
‘Oh Thad, my dearest love,’ cried Dolores.
But then . . . Oh, what the heck? thought Dolores. This bedroom stuff is for sissies. Give me a hobbling sledgehammer and a bucket of pig’s blood and I’ll give you ‘romance’!
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
goes hetero
The football
game had been going ten minutes when Kev felt obliged to make an effort at conversation.
‘Who’s your mortgage with, Trev?’
‘The Abbey National,’ said Trev, wishing it sounded somehow less ecclesiastical, or at any rate more provincial.
‘Fixed rate or variable?’
‘Collar and cap, actually,’ said Trev, blushing as he wondered if this suggested something on offer from a Soho grisette.
A burly man in a coloured nylon shirt with a number on its back squeezed in between them.
‘Bob, Trev, Trev, Bob,’ said Kev with a reluctant irony that seemed to hold out little hope for either.
‘That new winger,’ said Bob with an inclusive relish, ‘’e’s a fuckin’ genius.’
‘Quite,’ said Kev, leaving it tantalisingly ambiguous whether by ‘quite’ he meant definitely or moderately so.
‘Hot dog?’ said Trev at half time, shouldering his way to the stall where a young woman served boiled saveloys in cotton-wool buns.
‘Fantastic tits,’ said Trev, appreciatively looking up at the vendeuse as she squeezed tomato sauce from a self-referentially shaped container.
‘You bet,’ said Kev, suddenly engorged at the thought of their . . . their . . . binarity. Two of them. Corr, thought Kev. Two! Phwoarrr.
‘Don’t get many of them to the pound,’ said Trev appreciatively, but with a faint regret, as though he wished that the mammary to avoirdupois ratio had been a fraction more favourable.
The football pitch was greened with a verdigris of age and longing. In the matrix of the white rectangle the perspiring players moved in dazzling ellipses, now pausing for a plié or an arabesque more daring or ironic than the last, eliciting the hoarse commendation of their supporters.
‘Wanker!’ they cried. ‘Send him off!’ when one of the visitors tumbled like a stricken Giselle inside the white marquetry of the penalty ‘box’.
‘What route you take your kids to school?’ said Kev.
For twenty minutes they discussed the school run, its cut-throughs, its anfractuosities, its triumphs and seasonal vagaries, in such a way that Kev felt obscurely proud to be both such a fecund breeder and so resourceful a navigator.
Bob passed him a plastic pint of lager and Kev inhaled its fizzy bouquet. He drank deep, and felt its chilly gas revive the dormant hot-dog onions in his gut. Recalling the elegant duality of the vendor’s breasts, he belched with unambiguous relish.
‘Cheers, Kev,’ said Trev.
‘Cheers, Trev,’ said Kev.
The tense obbligato of ‘Colonel Bogey’ sounded in Trev’s pocket and he fished out a vermilion Nokia.
‘Did you remember the yoghurt?’ It was his wife. ‘Did you get the baby wipes? What time will you—’
‘Sorry, love, terrible reception,’ Trev said, squeezing the disconnect button with hesitant finality.
Kev, meanwhile, stared straight ahead, his eyes focussed on neither Rovers nor United, but on a midfield of ironic conjecture.
E. M. FORSTER
imagines a more liberal age in his posthumous Tea in Venice
Aubrey Winsome had never liked the vaporetto; it reminded him of the steam engines that used to take him back to Bastards, his brutal private school in Surrey. And this morning it seemed especially tiresome as he found himself seated next to Archie Trader, who talked about his annual bonus from the private equity company that employed him.
But at that moment Aubrey saw someone who might be his special friend: Giancarlo Finocchio, the pagan gondolier he’d chanced across during last night’s ballo in maschera. Giancarlo waved his left hand in greeting to Aubrey as with his right he pulled out his wooden pole from the lagoon. Aubrey smiled. Giancarlo was all rough edges and anachronisms, like a Quattrocento bike boy.
That afternoon in the Scuola San Rocco, as he stood rapt before the Tintorettos, Aubrey heard a polite little scream. It was Miss Honeywell, the English teacher, and the clasp on her handbag had tragically broken.
What happened next was like a bulletin from the world of panic and email. Miss Honeywell’s mobile phone fell with a terrible tinkle to the marble floor. As Archie Trader went to help her, one of the great Tintorettos, unstable from many centuries of hanging, fell from its wall and crushed the mercantile man to death – killed by the art he had ignored.
Freed by this sudden death from social obligation, Aubrey sauntered back across the Piazza San Marco to where a special friend was waiting.
‘Signore,’ said Giancarlo, ‘now I take you on my Ducati over rough roads. You meet my mother. Then we have . . . linguine for dinner? Is good?’
‘Rath–er,’ said Aubrey. ‘Only connect, dear boy, only connect . . .’
JOHN LE CARRÉ
tries his hand at chick lit
Fiona had finally persuaded hunky George Smiley to book a mini-break, and next morning she received a printed postcard, second class. ‘Come to the Mason’s Arms, Railway Road, Beaconsfield at five o’clock. Ask for Mr White.’
Fiona screeched to a halt outside the hotel in her red Jilly Cooper Gti. The reception area smelled of Bovril and paraffin. She had hoped for a log fire and champagne. After a sotto voce exchange by telephone, the night manager gained clearance to show Fiona to a safe room on the first floor. The single bed had a candlewick counterpane, and through the net curtain she could see the exit and the entrance to the car park.
George returned from the bathroom down the landing and cleaned his spectacles on his tie, slowly, carefully, then replaced them on his nose.
‘Did anyone see you come in?’ he said.
‘Only the night porter,’ said Fiona. ‘Now, come on, Mr Grumpy, get those braces off.’
‘Were you followed?’ said George. ‘Do Brian’s people know you’re here?’
‘Brian’s at work, darling, I’ve told you.’
‘But who’s Brian working for?’ said George, taking off his glasses again and squeezing the bridge of his nose.
‘Abbey National, I’ve told you!’ said Fiona. ‘Ooh, I love that thing you do with your nose.’
‘Mmm . . . I think Brian may have been turned,’ said George grimly. ‘Bradford’s been on to him. So’s Bingley.’
‘Darling,’ said Fiona. ‘Get under the blankets. Do that thing where you pretend to be a mole.’
George took off his glasses – yet again – and did as he was told, without committing himself.
‘That’s heaven,’ called out Fiona. ‘And how is it for you, George?’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ said Smiley, getting up and putting on his hat. ‘I have to go now. My wife telephoned. We’re taking the children to the Circus.’
D. H. LAWRENCE
submits a treatment for a Carry On film
The proposed Carry On Mining is a story for the cinematograph in which the principal characters feel their souls ground down in the industrial valleys of the Midlands. Sir Rodney Longpiece (to be played by Mr Sidney James) is a man whose spirit is coarsened by the fear of Bolshevism and by the carnal demands of Lady Jane, played by Miss Harriet Jacques. An itinerant Polish worker called Bustier Brazoff (to be played by Miss Katie Price) arrives in Cokeby seeking work in the mines. The foreman is a degenerate type of the mincing kind of man, played by Mr Kenneth Williams; he asks Miss Brazoff to work his most dangerous shaft. A young miner called John Thomas, to be played by Mr James Dale, takes Miss Brazoff for a country walk, where she catches her first glimpse of Aaron’s rod. Afterwards they spend the night in a hayrick by an old farm. But John Thomas is appalled by the experience, the paucity of so functional an act, the miserable drip of the life force, and feels himself a soul wretched almost to hopelessness. His loins and nerves are tied up in shame and his bowels are moved with pity.
Angered by this response, Bustier Brazoff walks into a snowdrift to die, not knowing that she is with child by John Thomas. He next day applies to Sir Rodney Longpiece, the mine owner, for a job above ground among the hyacinths and the bluebells in the first tight buds of sprin
g in his longing to find the soul of the old England through the queer thwarted clumsiness of his spiritual relations. Alas, Sir Sidney is away on business, but John Thomas is welcomed by the enthusiastic Lady Jane round the Tradesmen’s Entrance, where she happily instructs him in his new duties.
BEDTIME STORIES
ALLEN GINSBERG
writes a Bedtime Collage, for children
I have seen Humpty Dumpty in Bellevue Hospital where doctors
In white masks with electroshock try to put him together again
I have seen Miss Muffet ride a boxcar out of Denver past empty lots
And diner backyards while the ghosts of Whitman and Pound
Smoke marijuana from the ashcans and sit beside her tuffet
I have seen Jack Horner strung out on Benzedrine in a coldwater flat
Beneath the El, begging nickels from the Buddha
I have seen Danton and Baudelaire crawling on the stoops of Bowery
Fire-escapes to read the I-Ching in Fugazzi’s to an
Audience of three blind mice
I have sung all night in Luna Park where Bo Peep naked with a baseball mitt
Dove from a pea-green rowboat with a cat who thought he was an owl
I’ve been wasted all night in the Village Vanguard where Little Boy Blue
Came blow up his horn with Coltrane and Lester Young
I have seen Old King Cole pursued by fiddlers three in straitjackets hymning
Cuban revolution to the tune of Nature Boy – or maybe it was Nat King Cole
In Atlantic City I have met a man who wasn’t there. We hitchhiked ten days
Pistache Returns Page 5