Friday November 9th
Why I No Longer Write Love Letters
Oh b oody he !
My keyboard has a broken ‘ ’.
It seemed to work OK ast night,
as far as I cou d te .
h n ! The ’ ‘ has g ne as we ;
yet an ther key that’s damaged.
Such misbeha i ur’s ery weird.
And n w my ’ ‘ has anished.
It isn’t easy t write ike this.
My w rds are p aced in fetters.
k! N w th ’ ‘ has disapp ar d!
That’s th last f my tt rs.
Sergeant Tuck has been to collect the typewriter from my shed; DI Lansbury was attending a murder-scene health and safety course in Loughborough, he told me.
Forensics want to take a look at it, apparently, to see how the typography might compare with various correspondence found in Toby Salt’s house. I told Sergeant Tuck that he was welcome to it; the keys always got stuck and I’d never quite worked out how to change the ribbon.
Before he left, Sergeant Tuck asked rather awkwardly if he might borrow a few copies of Well Versed magazine for ‘background reading’ so he could try and understand a little more the ‘mind of a poet’. I loaded him up with the last three years’ worth and was glad to relieve some of the pressure on my bookshelves.
Saturday November 10th
Exclamation Mark
Mark was his name!
He would shout and proclaim!
Every sentence he wrote
would end just the same!
He would assert! He would blurt!
He would ejaculate and spurt!
Each line was a screamer!
A gasper! A slammer! A shrieker!
A literary loudspeaker!!!
It all began to needle and nark!
Why did no one think to question Mark?
Stuart was on the doorstep again, exclaiming at me.
‘Brian! What a beautiful autumnal day! Such magnificent colours!’
I closed my eyes and willed him to disappear.
‘You know, days like this almost make me wish we weren’t upping sticks and heading to New England!’
I opened my eyes. It hadn’t worked. He was still there.
‘Still, what an exciting time for Dylan. He’ll love it! Anyway, gotta dash! Sponsored hop! Indonesian lepers!’
Back inside, I asked Dylan about last Saturday but he looked all shifty and tried to change the subject. The poor boy looks increasingly ground down by all of Stuart’s high energy and positivity. I played him some Radiohead to help restore his equilibrium and then we settled down on the sofa to watch a Mike Leigh film, our happiness warming us like a blanket.
Sunday November 11th
The Book of My Enemy Has Been Selling Rather Well
The book of my enemy has been selling rather well
And I am distraught.
In huge quantities it has been shifting
Like drugs on a street corner, bought
By customers looking for a quick fix
Of culture. My enemy’s much-praised effort is stacked
Twenty copies deep on the front tables,
A sticker which denotes ‘3 for the Price of 2’ is attached –
Among all the cocksure and pre-ordained
Paper skyscrapers from big-budget
Marketing campaigns.
His volume – described as a ‘tour de force’ –
By the Sunday Times poetry critic –
No longer keeps the company
Of Seamus Heaney and Maya Angelou.
That worldly wise lyrical beauty is two floors up.
No, my enemy’s acclaimed collection
Prefers to rub its shoulders with Joe Wicks,
The ‘Body Coach’, and his 15-minute schemes
To keep you lean and healthy.
The book of my enemy has been selling rather well
And I’m as sick as hell.
I may be free from the shackles of book group and its monthly reading impositions but I am not free of the lure of the bookshop. There was a big pile of This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave on the front table – and one in the window, too. Someone must have made an ordering error. Oh dear!
In a new spirit of economy, I was modest with my purchases: Bramwell Price’s Spunk, Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Travelling to the US on a Shoestring.
Monday November 12th
I was reading some Tolkien when my phone sounded. I picked it up after just the one ring. It was DI Lansbury.
‘Acrostics,’ he said.
‘What about them?’
‘Write them much, do you, sir?’
‘From time to time. Why?’
‘We’ve had another look at your diary. And Sergeant Tuck here noticed your entry for 5th September is an acrostic. I must admit that I didn’t know what an acrostic was but Sergeant Tuck informs me that it’s a type of poem in which the first letters of every line spell out a word or phrase.’
‘Sergeant Tuck is correct,’ I sighed. ‘What does it say?’
‘Well, that’s the interesting bit, sir. It reads T-O-B-Y S-A-L-T M-U-S-T D-I-E.’
‘Does it? I had no idea. What a coincidence!’
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? I mean, the odds of the letters forming unintentionally in that way must be, what, a hundred million to one?’
‘Yes, quite large, anyway.’
‘Do you enjoy word games, Mr Bilston?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Well, here’s one for you to crack today. Rearrange the following words to make a sentence: Watching. We. Closely. You. Are.’
‘Mmm . . . you closely are watching we?’
He hung up.
Tuesday November 13th
It is practically mid-November and there are Christmas songs on the radio. Even the cat was disturbed enough to make one of her rare excursions into the garden.
I stayed in the warm and delved further into the murky past of Bramwell Price. The man’s got previous: a brawl with an audience member at a literary festival; a charge for assault on a waiter at a central London restaurant; and, most alarming of all, a restraining order placed on him concerning his first wife after he was found to be posting deposits ‘of a sexual nature’ through her letter box, following their estrangement. Not the kind of poet content to settle a score merely by writing some mildly scabrous remarks and cryptically hiding them within an acrostic.
Wednesday November 14th
To the Forty-Three
Oh, my poor and helpless herd,
waiting on my every word,
through all these pointless weeks
without the comfort of my tweets.
Use this time to make a plan.
Get some sleep in while you can.
Read a book. Or climb a tree.
Don’t put your life on hold for me.
Easier said than done, I know.
It’s always hard to just let go.
But I’ll be back before too long.
Despair not. Chin up. Please be strong.
I’d not looked at my own Twitter account for several weeks. My follower count still numbers forty-three. I wondered whether they’d missed me – or been worried by my absence – but there were no notifications to help me corroborate this. Toby Salt’s account was still frozen in time, like a bedroom kept as a shrine to the child who never came home. Bizarrely, his followers were still increasing rapidly. Bramwell Price, it appeared, did not ‘do’ Twitter. I looked at some photos of cats set against a cosmic background. I watched a video of baby pandas.
It is all pure avoidance, of course.
I know I need to get back to it.
It’s just that I’m not sure I can bear to go back in there again.
Thursday November 15th
I lit the wood-burner but the shed is still freezing. You could c
atch your death in here.
Friday November 16th
Alibi
I didn’t write this.
Must have been someone who looks like me.
I keep my nose clean, see.
I’m not the type to get mixed up in poetry.
Don’t pin this poem on me.
Besides, I was out drowning kittens
when this poem got wrote –
I’d’ve had my hands round one’s throat
around about that time.
So don’t say this poem is mine.
Sergeant Tuck has visited again. He called to ask whether they might hold on to my typewriter for a little longer as it was proving very useful. I gave him my assent and he seemed unduly pleased.
He was about to leave when he noticed my copy of Bramwell Price’s book on the table and asked me if I was a fan.
‘Not really my kind of thing,’ I said. ‘I just like to keep up with what’s happening in the poetry world, that’s all.’
‘I know what you mean, sir,’ said Sergeant Tuck. ‘I just wondered because DI Lansbury and I met him a few weeks ago. Peculiar chap. He’s got a lot of “issues”. We thought he might have something to do with Mr Salt’s disappearance.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said, attempting to keep my tone as neutral as possible.
‘Yes, that’s right. Until we found out he was at an arts festival in Rio at the time. There were photos of him there the whole week. Watertight alibi. Shame, because he was just the kind of person we were hoping might be the murderer,’ he said.
He walked off up the garden path.
Saturday November 17th
Dylan tells me that Stuart takes part in an average of four charitable events a week. This year to date, he’s raised over £120,000 for over eighty different charities. Perhaps one day there will be a Stuart Mould Fundraiser for Beleaguered Poets.
Sunday November 18th
The Postcard
Weather is disappointing as is the food. But Brenda and I trying to put our best face on things! Been to all the local attractions, inc. the castle. The hair museum was a highlight. Brenda had one of her tummies on Tues which meant I had to dispose of Cyril on my own. The look on his face when I hit him with that spade! Found a nice spot to bury him. Will tell you more when we’re back. Beach tomorrow if weather holds then home! Xx
If I am being honest with myself, my ISBN classification system has not been a success. It is simply proving far too difficult to find anything. I have decided to adopt a new organising principle – that of page extent. It was as I was in the act of re-sorting my bookshelves – moving all the slimmest volumes to the top shelves in the hope that this would remove Bramwell Price’s Spunk from my eyeline – when I noticed something sticking out of my copy of This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave. It was the postcard that had fallen out of it at last month’s book group.
The postcard was to promote his book. The front was a reproduction of the book cover. I flipped it over, expecting the back to be blank. Instead, I found a handwritten poem on it. I recognised it: it was Toby Salt’s winning poem about the wind from January’s Well Versed magazine.
I stared at it thoughtfully for a few minutes before returning to the problem of my piles.
Monday November 19th
Sophie called me. She thinks something is up with Dylan.
‘He spends all his time in his bedroom,’ she said. ‘He’s not been doing his homework. He answers me back. He avoids Stuart whenever he can.’
This was all wonderful news.
‘That sounds like completely normal behaviour for a sixteen-year-old boy to me.’
‘I knew you’d say that.’
‘Well, it is. I was just the same at his age.’
‘I can well believe it. I think this is all your doing,’ she said accusingly.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied, mildly bridling.
‘You’re a bad influence on him. Whenever I ask him what he’s been up to at your house, he always says “nothing much”. From what I can tell, the two of you seem to spend the whole day on the sofa.’
‘Perhaps he’s suffering from galeanthropy?’ I suggested.
‘What?’ I could sense Sophie’s levels of irritation rising.
‘It’s 21 across in The Guardian Bumper Christmas Cryptic Crossword. It’s the belief that you’ve become a cat. It’s from the ancient Greek – galéē, which means—’
‘Oh, shut up, Brian. It’s not about cats. It’s you. He’s even started listening to The Smiths.’
This was also wonderful news.
‘Ah, yes, that may be my influence. Better them than Huey Lewis and the News, though.’
‘It’s all a big joke to you, isn’t it? But this is our son we’re talking about, with his whole life ahead of him. He could do anything, that boy. He could really make something of himself. And I’m worried that he won’t. He’ll mess it all up. He’ll go wrong. He’ll end up like you.’
There. Sophie had said it and now it couldn’t be unsaid. There was a brief silence between us before I answered.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that he might be acting like this because he doesn’t want to go to America?’
She put the phone down on me.
Tuesday November 20th
I took another look at the postcard. It must have been handwritten by Toby Salt as a promotional giveaway at his book launch. There would have been similar postcards inserted in other copies, too. All the same, there was something about it that struck me as significant. I re-read the poem:
A rock for a jail
and nothing but the wind for company.
O Aeolian confidante! Dry my salty locks
and whisper the world into my ear.
The latest stockmarket news.
A child strangled. The shaming of a politician.
The pounding of the letterpress.
The jangle of my jailor’s keys as they bounce upon his hip.
But no. These chains. This rock.
What do you bring exactly? Only betrayal.
The dread beat of accipitrine wings,
the shooting pains,
and my ripped-out liver
shining at my feet,
surrounded by rock pools, ruby-red.
A queasy feeling of déjà vu washed over me as I remembered the hours I’d spent trying to understand it earlier in the year. But I’d got nowhere with it then and I got nowhere with it now.
Wednesday November 21st
DI Lansbury had returned and his beard was in an interrogative mood. It was Sergeant Tuck’s day off.
‘These eleven days that are missing from your diary. Can you tell me again what you were up to?’
‘I can’t really remember. Just this and that, I suppose.’
‘This and that? Can’t you be more specific?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘My mind’s a blank. Like my diary was. That’s why I ripped the pages out. I wasn’t in the mood for poetry.’
‘It must have been a difficult period for you. No job. No money. Alienated from all those around you. And there was Toby Salt, a man riding wave after wave of success. You must have resented that?’
‘What exactly are you insinuating?’
‘Nothing at all, Mr Bilston. Perhaps, though, if you were to be a little more forthcoming, it might help us in knowing where best to focus our efforts in this investigation.’
He left. I stroked the cat thoughtfully and wondered whether I should tell him.
Thursday November 22nd
I continued to wrestle with the postcard and at last it seems that I have made some progress. My Dictionary of Classical Mythology tells me that the figure in his poem is most likely Prometheus, chained to a rock by a wrathful Zeus for stealing fire from Mount Olympus and giving it to mankind.
But what was the significance of that? Did it mean that Toby Salt himself was being held captive? Was he Prometheus? If so, where was his rock? And who was his jailor? And why on ea
rth wasn’t ‘accipitrine’ an answer in my crossword?
I opened another packet of custard creams in search of further inspiration.
Friday November 23rd
Poem Sequence in E Flat Major
One
word
followed another,
each line augmented,
dressed up, embellished and tormented,
like some poor Chopin polonaise performed by Liberace.
It was only then that I realised my poem had got all Fibonacci.
Twitter tells me it is Fibonacci Day, celebrating that remarkable sequence of numbers that governs the population of bees and the shape of snail shells. I set about Toby Salt’s poem once more in the hope that I might find some inner pattern or sequence to unlock its mystery – if it was a mystery that is, rather than just a sequence of dull, only loosely connected words.
I found myself going around in spirals for the rest of the day.
Saturday November 24th
Stuart had to dash. He was skydiving for Romanian orphans.
‘That’ll be another one ticked off my bucket list!’ he said before proceeding to tell me about a succession of fulfilled dreams, including a journey on the Orient Express, a swim with dolphins and – with more detail than was strictly necessary for a Saturday morning – how he became a member of the Mile High Club.
‘But enough about me! What’s on your bucket list, Brian?!’ he asked.
‘At this moment, kicking it, most probably.’
He paused for a moment to reflect on this and then burst out laughing.
Diary of a Somebody Page 24