His Landrover van swerved
into my drive just after 12 o’clock. The day was extremely hot and I was
wearing a short-sleeved fawn linen shirt made for me by Domediakis in Berwick
Street, Soho, pale cream tropical nine-ounce double-pleated gabardine trousers
from Adeney and Briggs and blue-and-white canvas yachting shoes. Earlier that
morning I had found the Mau Mau hat still in its paper bag at the back of my
sock drawer.
On this
visit Emmanuel Porlock was not alone: he had brought his tribe along with him.
What a shock. Bev and Martika and the kid Lulu were not as I had imagined them
and Emmanuel was not the man he was when unaccompanied by these three.
To
paraphrase Tolstoy: all thin families are alike but a fat family is fat after
its own fashion. It was truly remarkable to my mind how three human beings
could be so fat in three such distinct and individual ways. With Bev the
surfeit manifested itself mostly in width, she was a very, very wide woman,
enormous flat breasts stretching out to the side of her like stubby wings,
gigantic hovercraft-bearing hips, a rolling, boiling stomach that hung down
almost to her knees. In Martika, by contrast, the fat was confined solely to
her bottom and her stumpy little legs that seemed to bend backwards in an entirely
new way, like you see on one of those TV programmes where they try and pretend
that they know how dinosaurs walked but really they haven’t a clue so the
computer-animated puppet looks all wrong and impossible. In fact Martika might
not have known she was fat at all unless she got a good look at her rear view
in the mirror, or somebody unkind videoed her. The kid Lulu was just fat all
over: fat scalp, fat elbows, fat eyelids, fat heels.
And
they were not jolly fat people these three. Though I suppose I am a bit
prejudiced, I have never been what I understand is called these days a ‘chubby
chaser’; all my women have been trim and capable of looking good in the clothes
of the day. I have never been that keen on fat women, so I believe that jolly
fat people are only those who try and keep the self-hatred and disgust hidden
under cover of jocundity. With this trio the loathing was out in the open and
expressed itself mostly in a contempt for Emmanuel Porlock: each thing he said
was greeted with a roll of the eyes or a look at the other two or a ‘tsking’
sound. Sometimes one would say to another, ‘What’s he saying now?’ in a
scornful tone. Porlock himself was very subdued; overshadowed by them both
physically and verbally, he took little part in the conversation and when he
did speak his voice had an apologetic, humble note I had not noticed before.
Over brunch the women merely jabbed at their food, nibbling at corners and
tearing off small strips so that I was left with a great deal of it, which I
took away, wrapped in cling film and left on the work surfaces and in the
fridge in the kitchen. After they had gone I found the food had somehow
departed with them.
I would
not have flirted with Mercy in the hat shop three months before if my mind had
not been filled with erotic reveries of the life I thought Porlock led with Bev
and Martika, taking turns of each other, truffling away with their heads
between each other’s slender legs. It was all a great big mistake.
After brunch the three
females said that they would like to perform their chi gong meditation in my
paddock, so Porlock and I had an hour alone to sit in deck chairs out the
front. Porlock had the Mau Mau hat on his head even though the sun was bright
in the sky. I said to him, ‘There’s something I want to say to you.
‘Go
ahead.’
‘In the
year 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was staying at a farmhouse, near a
place called Porlock, in the county of Somerset. Of course everybody knows that
Coleridge was addicted to opium; he took some one particular day, then fell
asleep in a chair. Before he took the opium he’d been reading a book about the
palace of Kubla Khan. In his opium sleep he started dreaming and in his dream
there came into his mind an entire poem of something like two hundred or three
hundred lines. When he woke up, what a gift, a whole poem complete! No need for
months or years of work but a masterpiece delivered from the subconscious
straight to the page. Of course as any of us poets would have done he began
furiously writing: “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome decree
…”
‘But
after writing for a short time, he says in his diary he was “called out by a
person on business from Porlock”, who for some reason he didn’t tell to bugger
off, politeness maybe, I don’t know. He says this “person from Porlock detained
me above an hour”. When he finally got rid of this man he found he had
forgotten the rest of the dream. All he had left was fifty-four lines. And that’s
all there is of “Kubla Khan” — fifty-four lines, unfinished.’
‘They’re
a very good fifty-four lines though,’ said Porlock, ‘so all wasn’t lost.’
‘That’s
one way to look at it. The thing of it is, though, I’ve looked for your name
all over the place and I can’t find it. There are no books written by you in
the bookshops, no poems written by you in any anthologies and the only
reference on the internet I can find to your name, connected with poetry, is
this “person from Porlock”: not a poet but a man who stopped a great poem being
properly written.’
‘There’s
something odd here, what are you saying, Hillary?’
‘I don’t
quite know what I’m saying except that you don’t seem to be who you say you are
and that you have brought terrible disruption to my life.’
‘Me?
How have I brought disruption to your life?’
‘You
made me go up to town to buy you a new bloody hat. When I was up in town I met
Mercy, through meeting Mercy I am now living with a girl who is forty years
younger than me, my house is full of noise and her friends, I’m in the stupid
skittles team throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood about twice a week and I
haven’t written a line of my poem, my great opus, my final testament to the
world that will echo down the centuries, in fucking months!’
‘Well,
first off, I don’t understand why you can’t find any reference to me, I’m all
over, you must be looking in the wrong places. I mean what are you saying, that
I’m some sort of sprite who travels through the ages stopping poets writing?’
‘Are
you?’
‘Why
would such a person exist, what would be the point?’
‘I don’t
know, you mentioned something the last time you came: a sort of anti-muse…
Maybe there are Porlocks all over the place stopping poets writing, stopping
painters painting, for all I know it’s you who stops the gas board coming on
the day they say they’re coming and makes the builder abandon his job half
completed.’
He was
looking discomfited. ‘Look, Hillary, you’re going off the deep end here,’ he
paused. ‘Now what may have happened, I admit, is that I may have exaggerated a
little bit how advanced I was as a poet. There may not be a lot, well any, of
my poetry in actual print. I might have wanted to sort of associate myself with
you to help my own career, I admit that. It’s only because I love poetry so.
But I tell you this, Hillary, I would give anything to be at the point you are.
To be on the edge of a masterpiece must be the greatest thing on earth and I
know I wouldn’t let anybody stop me finishing it. You know what? I bet there
was no man from Porlock, Coleridge probably only wrote that much and was making
up an excuse for not writing any more. You blame me. There is nobody who’s
stopping you working except you.
If you
can’t write with all these people around then get rid of them. Get rid of
Mercy, she’s a nutcase anyway if you ask me, a right mental case. If you get
rid of Mercy then the darkie in the dress and the schoolgirl won’t come round
either. Hillary, I’d give anything to have your gift and at the moment you’re
squandering it. Be ruthless, be focused, get on with it, man!’
Over the next week as the
heat of summer shimmered above the fields I thought about what I should do.
Looking back I am aware that the options I considered are not those that
another person might have considered. They were:
One.
Going over to the Sams and saying to them, ‘Can I live in one of your sheds?’ I
was sure they would let me. I would survive on out-of-date pâté and
vacuum-packed saucisson sec while I worked on my poem. Two. I would go and live
wild in a bender in the woods, eating foxes or something. I had been trained in
bush warfare so it would be like in the old days back in Kenya. Again I would
work on my poem while daylight lasted. Three. I could murder Mercy. Murdering
Mercy seemed like a situation in which I won either way. If I got away with it
then I would have my solitude back to write and if I was caught then I’d have a
nice cell in prison to work in. I’m sure they’d let me have a pad and a biro.
You may
have noticed none of these options consisted of me simply asking Mercy into the
living room for a chat and then saying to her outright, ‘Look, I’m sorry but,
Mercy sweetheart, could you just please go away. You’re stopping me working on
my poem what with all these people coming round to see you and this thing with
us being “friends who touch each other”, which is just a recipe for a cerebral
embolism as far as I can see.’ But there was no way I could be so impolite. You
might think that murdering someone was a tad rude in itself but I’m sure many
women and maybe some men were murdered out of politeness. I’m certain a lot of
husbands who wanted to break away couldn’t stand the idea of upsetting their
wives, couldn’t imagine themselves saying the hurtful words, couldn’t endure
the tears, the shouting, really couldn’t stand the thought of the pain they
would cause, so instead they crept up behind them with a ballpen hammer and
stove their skulls in.
I
thought of a way to do it as well. The bad stuff they were selling in
Northampton. If I could get some I could give it to Mercy as a present. Junkie
dies, happens all the time.
I rode
Mercy’s Piaggio to the back of the bus station on market day. I thought to
myself that really he wouldn’t have any of the bad stuff but at least I would
have tried. I said to the dealer, ‘I don’t suppose you have any of the bad smack
that’s killing people do you?’
‘Oh
yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve got lots of it, it’s very popular.’
I was a
little surprised. ‘Why is it popular if it’s fatal? I’d have thought people
would steer clear of it.’
‘Well
there, sir, you don’t understand the mind of the drug taker. See, they think
that if it’s near fatal it’s got to be an Al great buzz. It’s one of my most
successful lines.’
I
bought some but when I got it home I knew I couldn’t do it. I went out to the
paddock and threw the deadly heroin into my compost heap where it would decompose
and give my courgettes an extra zing next harvest time.
That evening in my tiny
living room as usual Bateman and Suki were there as were a couple of new
friends Mercy had made, Jessie and Gunther. They lived on a barge, Jessie was a
juggler and Gunther spent his days miming as a silver statue in Northampton
market. It was a trifle disconcerting seeing him on the couch as he had not
taken his statue make-up off. I had just served them all welsh rarebit and
coffee and was about to bring in a walnut cake I’d made earlier. With the TV
bellowing in the background Bateman said, ‘You know when we was up in London,
Merce, bringin’ your stuff back?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well,
when we wuz going through the West End in my van, I saw loads of people wearin’
them sweatshirts from like Harvard University and Princeton University but I
don’t think them people went to them universities, or if they did then goin’ to
one of them Ivy League places don’t help you so much, cos a lot of them peoples
wearing them sweatshirts was sellin’ hot dogs from a stall.’
Suki
said, ‘Did you go to college, Merce?’
‘Yeah,
I did media studies at Harrogate University,’ said Mercy, ‘but you know I can’t
remember a single thing about it. Not a thing. I think we went to a big place
once to … no it’s gone. What about you, Suki?’
‘I’m
still at school, remember.’
‘Oh
yeah I forgot, and you, Bateman?’
‘I got
a woodwork 0 level in prison. Which is harder than you think when they won’t
let you have anything sharp. So, you know, the exam was like, largely theoretical,
though I did make a teapot stand using a plastic chisel, paper nails and a
rubber hammer.’
And
finally, ‘Hillary, what about you?’
‘Oh
ummm … well Cambridge, just after the war … you know.’
‘Oh
yeah?’ said Bateman. ‘What was that like, then?’
‘Well,
it was a unique and rather odd time to be up at university, because on the one
hand you had ordinary schoolboys like myself, and on the other a huge number of
fellows straight back from the war. They seemed terribly fierce those men,
commandeering cars in the middle of the Great North Road when they wanted to go
to the pub and so on. And the thing that struck me most was that they were so
determined, knew so clearly what they wanted to do. While most of us schoolboys
had no idea what we wanted from life, these men had it all figured Out. They
felt they had been through such a lot that their generation could do things in
an entirely new way: write theatre plays that would bring about socialism in
Scotland at their first performance, design monorails that ran under the sea
powered by plankton, make typewriters that you could wear as a sombrero. And
apart from re-making the world they knew they could also re-make themselves.
These boy soldiers would study like never before because they had walked through
the gates of Buchenwald; they would no longer be drunk because they had ridden
a Superfortress to the canopy of the earth; they would no longer be shy around
girls as a memorial to their best friend who they’d seen drowned, gargling in
black engine oil, slipping beneath the cold North Sea. But after a year or so
had gone by, their true natures, who they really were, suspended for the
duration of the war, like Association Football, began to re-emerge. The drunks
were brought back to college by the police having parked their MGs in cake-shop
windows, the lazy stayed later and later in bed, the shy lost the composure
that killing had given them and ran in fear from girls as they had never run
from the Japanese. You see what I’m trying to say? You cannot be other than who
you are and you cannot act in any other way than your nature permits you to
act, do you understand that? It’s no use trying to fight it, you’re stuck with
yourself.’