What? You old sot, you’re not right in the head. But come to think of it, he did speak highly of his brother. You don’t play the…
Fiddle and whistle and piano, yes, as well as the fool.
That’s it. And he said you were flippant and perverse as a rule. Rude to a fault, in fact, I recall was his phrase, and a fine one worthy of praise even among his considerable armoury of witticisms. Criticisms? But no, he’d have none of those. You were his fine little brother in all of his prose. You have his nose, distinguished as is the brow. Would you like a coffee now?
Six sugars please, I like to stock up. When do you lock up?
For lunch? Surely you’re not chatting me up you old goat?
Not at all, but I can father you if you like, as opposed to fathering your children, a chore I’ll leave to some other fool dominated by his biology. I prefer ecology, Nature, the birds and the bees, the things they do in bushes and trees as opposed-to to each other. I’ve merely wafted in here on a breeze to ask you about my brother. Where might I find him this weather?
Well, she checks her watch, an elegantly numberless number adorning her freckled wrist like an alluring garter, If you run like leather you might catch him at the pier, he said last night that he was leaving on the next boat out of here, to Oceania, where he boasts that most of his rich clients stay, ones who can pay his exorbitant prices. We only get to exhibit them here as part of some cultural grant given by do-gooders with ants in their pants, sycophants, pedants, who think that the downtrodden poor ought to get to enjoy his work, them being his subject so often. I mean, look at this one here, The Heroic Dockworker he calls it, doesn’t that have you in tears? Of sorrow or laughter we need not discuss here. And this one, The Fretful Fishwife, worrying whether her husband has been lost at sea… it makes a great diptych with The Lipsticked Whore…
But I am gone, gone from her door, leaving her rambling like a prize-winning bore.
*
I reach the dilapidated dockside just in time to see the white ghost of a luxury yacht pulling out, and on its deck a stout lout of a man waving, misbehaving, engraving his image on my mind: surrounded by young ladies in tight leather dresses and combed-back tresses sipping from wine glasses, and I confess to feeling jealous for a few seconds. I reckon, you know, says a voice at my side, a total surprise, -that bloke looks like you…
And who may I ask are you? I clack, stepping back, -Some cheap hack pursuing that goon for your latest titbits of news to amuse the somnambulating masses?
He takes off his dark glasses and rubs his eyes to peer at me more closely, morosely, preparing to administer some sinister truth in insipid doses. Police… he says, releasing his disguise and watching my eyes widen, as he lifts an identifying pass up at an odd angle to dangle in my face. Brace yourself, Ithir, here comes the revelation. And now can I see your identification?
Mine? I slap my wretchedly empty pockets, eyes bulging out of my sockets. Are you serious? Delirious? I’m a tramp, man, a vagrant, one of the silent army of the indigent, the homeless, the hopeless, the couldn’t-cope-less, the financially defenceless. I don’t do D.H.S.S or P.A.Y.E, just B.Y.O.B in brown paper bags, beg-your-own-booze, born free and keen to stay that way, any day, ever day. Anyway, the answer’s no.
So… you must have a name though?
Wilberforce Fontainbleu
You know what? He grins. I’ve made his day. I don’t believe you. Will you accompany me to the station please?
To do what? I’m not chipped like a stray puppy you know, not yet anyhow. Or are you lonesome and eager for company along the way? I mean, I know it’s a rough area here but it’s not so bad that you couldn’t make it home safely alone, you being a policeman and all.
Not at all. I relish a good fight. Physical or verbal. Your patter, like your breath, is terrible. Walk this way so I can take a sample of your DNA then be on your way. Please, after you.
Well whoopee do, police harassment to add to my fiscal embarrassment, what daring-do you people resort to when bored, instead of remedying endemic street crime and vandalism.
That’s quite enough thank you, of your high-camp lip, rampant cheek to-wit, which all goes to fuel my suspicion that you’re the brother of that twit Zennad Learmot. You’re way too intellectual for an ineffectual bin-raker in my humble estimation, policeman plod, backbone of this nation.
I take his arm. Don’t be alarmed. I’m starting to take to this man, against all my better judgement and carefully distilled prejudices against such fascists in uniform who vote Tory from birth and grow up in posh schools hurling racist abuse at Pakistani bus drivers, you know the type, usually end up in Whitehall or borstal, animal aggression and the will to power being the common focus. Locusts, a plague of them in black suits, sent to torment the rest of us who just want to get on with our lives, from schoolyard bullying to pernicious taxes, praxis, an axis of banality, foul frothing foam rising to the top of a pint of boiling piss, give them all a miss or a wide berth is my advice or shoot them like pheasants if they gain flight and attain high office. Novice, this one, maybe, not yet learned the tricks, beating immigrants with sticks and memorising tattered copies of Mein Kampf like street atlases, the pricks.
What a grubby old town as he leads me through the streets away from the docks. Like they turn back the clocks another year every Sunday. Post-industrial decline in excess, middle-aged men in string vests sitting on flea-ridden sofas, loafers, watching the box all day, behind net curtains, apt to depress the zest of youth if any grows here at doom’s behest, like weeds through cracks in the pavement. Statement in itself: the success of betting shops flowering like dry rot on every corner, you’re getting warmer, knocking back beer and the wife in tears as you waste your money on mirages and the jealous religion of false hopes. Not a stern god, but one laughing constantly in your face. Know your place. Sink. Without a trace.
Now a fog unwinds from the quayside, licking at our backsides with the cold snout of a deathly dog, spreading grey uncertainty in burgeoning clouds before us like a plague of vague ague, as we climb a hill until we find the station, the hornet’s nest at its crest, and they usher me inside. Two at the door, and more at the desk, three-a-breast, like the old joke, even inside their inner sanctum. Let’s rank them, a game to pass the time as they fill out their forms to formalise crimes with. Transgressing the norms. Oh let me be done for something outwith their normal tawdry boundaries. Four constables, two inspectors, a superintendent, an assistant inspector, an insistent prospector, persistent investigator, prospective Phil Spector impersonator, a translator of desultory street lingo, a real-time narrator, a digital recording operator, and an unplugged vibrator. Bingo. The tape is running, the questions cunning.
Photographs of some bloke on the table. Are you able to tell us if this man is you?
Who? Now hold on a minute, guv, this havering is the limit, innit? What’s this geezer done that you want to frame an old wheezer with his misdemeanours? And unless I’m wavering, wouldn’t I remember if I’d done something unsavoury?
My reasonable bobby who’s called Caldwell, now hands over to a knob called Solihull whose hobby is psychology, and a medic called Prezic who probes my skull beneath the hair and finds a scar that interests him, which he rubs eagerly as a clitoris. Then they throw more photos on the desk in random array, X-rays from days gone by. They say that’s me and I shot myself in the head, attempted suicide, failed like everything else I tried. But why? –I cry, half-believing, half interested in this strangely familiar stranger’s tale.
Jumped bail, high-tailed out of the constabulary’s clutches. Last seen as a tramp on crutches. Amnesiac, just like you. And just how much do you remember of yesterday or the day before, Mister Fontainbleu or should I say Learmot? And the crunch is… he slaps the desk with his fist for effect while his friend munches biscuits. This slime spoke in rhyme… all the damned time. How does that chime? Sounding familiar?
Not in the slightest. How perverse. I’m strictly a blank verse man.
.. Damn.
They all look at me accusingly, disapprovingly. Daring me to hang myself with my tongue. I’m sweating, breathing like an iron lung. Why, I repeat quietly, why did this ned put a gun to his own… err… cranium?
A crazy story, of which we believed not a single word. Caldwell chuckles as Solihull crackles his knuckles, amused by a memory flickering in his seedy cerebellum like a dodgy seventies cinema showing soft porn. He said he’d seen into the future and seen the man who was going to run him over, and took a note of his number plate, tracked him down and invited himself over, then stove the guy’s head in with a brick until it resembled raspberry pavlova. Didn’t half make me sick having to peruse that scene and lose sleep afterwards, I mean he might at least have done it over the sink. I hate mess, I must confess.
Why did you grant bail to the slime at the time, if he’d confessed to such a heinous… err… misdemeanour? I ask, sniffing inconsistency like a keen predator of a novel editor.
Nah mate, he only confessed in his suicide note, that was later, pardon me, I have conflated.
Caldwell, being a constabulary of lesser vocabulary, wrinkles his snout, thinking this explains the smell. Well, it was me, nerves loosening the bowels while I watch my vowels, but that’s the least of my postponed confessions in the present session. Friction of cheeks vibrating. Symptom of the large intestine cogitating. Procrastinating defecating. Indigestible herbage of verbs not conjugating.
At any rate and in any case… Solihull sighs, tiredness in his eyes of a thousand lies given and received, deceived, the dancing veils of half truths that have clouded his ken like a Victorian opium den, –We’ll know soon enough with just a swab off the inside of your gob you old knob, saliva and all that, DNA, the old viral double spiral, Lady Godiva, naked mother lode of genetic code. We’ll see if you’re your brother’s brother, or some other unfortunate nutter.
They lead me to a cell to contain my smell, but I can’t contain myself, I must confess, I tell them I could do with a bath and they all laugh but mine’s the last: a bed for the night’s a blessing not a blight for a ne’er do well. And bedded down, my wires unwound and trailing the ground, without a sound I trial the dial hidden on my chest beneath my vest and all my resplendent gowns and then I’m gone, lost and found, voyaging past and future like neighbouring towns. It’s been a jail without fail for a fair while I see, place of incarceration with cruel reputation for ten generations, serving gruel to the nation’s hapless reckless fools fuelled by booze and fights over floozies. Woozy, is how I feel, contemplating it all, right and wrong, fact and fiction merging under the same grey pall, like that maritime fog outside leaking under the walls. I see men in ancient attire, filthy brigands, despairing paupers on death row, footpads, painted harlots with rosy cheeks, lawyers, drunken fighters with their faces bashed up blue. And here I am observing, from behind iron bars, but more free than any of them dislocated as I am from time and space, behind my dreaming face.
How much time goes by? Day and night merges in the dim cell’s half-light, and I voyage into the future too, see that the jail will be demolished soon, pulled down by vengeful bulldozers under the duress of some edict of progress, and a park replace it, my word, resplendent greenery to make a sap complacent, and a monument to commemorate some poor sod who they murder in custody. Justice, conscience, regret expressed in rhapsody. Wonders will never lapse, nor sins to require forgiveness. And in this, I see I am but a minor player. A soothsayer who came this way, went hither and thither, old sot condemned to live then be forgot forever.
I wake at last, into a mighty hunger, bleary and confused and thinking I am younger until I see my chipped nails and ageing suntanned hands, remembering some random fragments of the lands that I have voyaged through, the many faces and voices surrounding me in momentary cacophony, a symphony of prosody without remedy, dissonance and assonance resolving into a dance of chance dissolving to the here and now and anyhow. I wipe my brow to wish away memory and the sweats of night fevers. Fugitive escapee from my self who hides in traces of every life except his own, that which I would disown as long as I am loaned some other mask and task to call my own.
So before I wake too far, let us make use of the magical power that flowers in the twilight of the waking brain. I reach out my hands and part the iron bars inside my eyes as one would some minor irritations, swatting flies, bending walls and space about my face and ears. Reality tears, thin as gossamer, pliable with suitable mental pliers and shears. He who sleeps steps outside of time, and when returning but by habit discards the hazy power he has lazily acquired to make seconds out of years, and more: as some mighty blacksmith to bend all reality to his will, to call halt to events and re-forge their mettle, making courage out of fears. Pop, slop, burp, slurp, I find myself outside my cell, ready to check-out of my hotel in hell. And there smiling is my reception: a plethora of police dumfounded by my deception.
Sitting and poring over reports and analysis, read-outs and print-outs, contemplating and cogitating to the point of black-outs, reaching for white-out, unable to think out how I have circumvented their designs on me. Solihull, Caldwell and Prezic, and several more in tiers, ten-a-breast in black like crows in rows in repose upon the branches of a tree. All looking not at me, but at a screen and a sheet and what it all means: Wilberforce Fontainbleu, you are free to go.
How so? You mean to say I am not the brother of that lauded and applauded piss-artist after all?
A shaking and scratching of multiple heads. We don’t know what it means, Einstein, except that our data is in error and we need to pull in Learmot himself again. When he gave his own sample, he must have been pulling our ample chains something obscene. If you see him abroad in your begging routines then tell him we need to pick his brains and saliva again. Until then, let’s forget the whole stooshie and keep it schtum between men. You still here? Do we have to tell you again?
So there you have it. Turfed out of a fine hostelry without even a bacon butty to initiate the day, no overtures of apology audible to propitiate my indignation per se. I wander in the fine light rain the same grey streets again, but feel lighter of foot and of brain this time, washed clean of grime and dizzy in the drizzle which urges me forward to some route and pattern whose puzzle remains beyond my conscious grasp. Until as the sun comes out at last, I find myself in a kind of city square and plant my arse on the first clean bench I find there to let myself dry off in clouds of steam rising into the sun’s beams and I close my eyes, seeking after fond encounter again with the recently lost land of dreams. Distant sound of thunder, my hunger shaking me, making me delirious, but nothing serious, I am content to savour the free effects of an entirely legal high, and gaze up occasionally, through flickering lids, at the mothering blue sky.
And now who do you think passes by? But that glamorous lassie, a snooty sight for glad eyes, that I so recently engaged in idle conversation in her gallery by and bye. Striding across the square, not on her venerable vulnerable own of course but with her complete toss of a fashionable boss togged up likewise in co-ordinated designer drag of expensive price tag and fetishised name and all that game. Shame, he’ll probably spoil the quality of our intercourse perforce of his premade preconceptions of my social station. No matter, nothing ventured, nothing for breakfast. I break my silence, and the two spin around, expecting violence perhaps, not just from me but from the various other unemployed now newly standing on corners emerging from the shadows after the recent rain. I fancy that the bloke even fingers a flick-knife in his inside pocket (glimmering above ermine satin lining) and am impressed that his dress stretches to such practical lengths. Tense, until I wave my hand, and the lady recognises me at last and laughs, recalling what a jovial fellow I am, what flowing words spout from between my yellow teeth, and gives a decent hearing to my latest verbal scam.
I have misjudged both him and her. For within a jiff they have me seated in some mid-price canteen with a plate of steaming victuals in front of me and I try not to slurp too much
while they pick at their cold salad greens, puzzling at what my every cryptic word means, tossed out between mouthfuls of bacon and sausage, potato scone, black pudding and beans.
Are you really Zennad Learmot’s brother? –the bloke, called Pieter enquires.
Shoosh, I say, not really, or to be precise, on this issue I am now entirely confused. The police in whose custody I have just finished languishing for days, convinced me that to say so would be a very bad thing, he being a bad bloke. But then, dispelling my fears, their scientific tests by which they put much stall, have firmly convinced them that I could not under any circumstances be Ithir Learmot at all.
And what do you think? –asks the girl, earnestly, called Cassy, Who do you think you are?
I am uncertain, truth be stated. But some of what they related to me of Ithir disturbed me greatly, rang more than a comfortable number of uncomfortable bells. But tell you what, though my stomach swells I’m still not sated, any chance you could get the waitress to have this plateful reinstated?
Waitress! –Pieter shouts with the unexpected confidence of a streetwise lout, attracting the ire of others seated roundabout. Sounds like you have amnesia, my friend. Did you bump your head or over-imbibe paint stripper as a nipper or at some point in the recent past by any chance?
I know not, but sense and suspect that Zennad Learmot knows some useful fragments of this cryptic plot. I’d swear he waved at me from his yacht shortly after last we three met, a salutation more respectful I wager than he often reserves for just a down-and-out old sot watching from the quayside.
He recognised his own likeness you mean? –His semblance, your resemblance?
Or his sibling… troubling, trembling. No trifling matter, when your twin is mad as a hatter, an escapee from the loony bin. Rifling through his grey matter to find a way to put a quick distance between me and him.
The Rhymer Page 6