VI
Iddo Okoli, savage in Middle Temple mufti — pin-striped, wing-collared, with soup-stained tie — progressed benevolently through the collapsed markets, smiling on chaos. His wife, broad, dignified, sheet-wrapped, followed in his slipstream. His children, in a file, struggled with suitcases of outdated textbooks. How his optimism survived, nobody knew. He bellowed at back-counters. He shook the plaster from damp ceilings. He beat on tables. There had been good days when he almost covered his bus fare.
His prospects changed with a small piece of theatre that became apocryphal in the trade. A literary graveyard, lurking between the Royal Academy and the Museum of Mankind, was ‘rationalizing’ its stock, and adjusting to market forces (prior to becoming an airline office), by reshelving directly into a builder’s skip. Iddo watched, hands on hips, as the nocturnal assistants blinked into the brilliance of the street, carrying as many as three books each; which they dropped, with great precision, on to the growing heap.
Iddo removed his bowler, and mopped his brow. He examined a few items in this reserve collection. He nominated a dozen or so, on the grounds of weight and size; bounced the hernia-dodging juniors, like so many jackals, and made for the shop, three steps at a time. He attacked the counter and gavelled it ferociously with his fist, until the buyer appeared; yawning and pale with anguish. Iddo was not the most sought-after of ‘runners’. The buyer, fretful, and slightly hungover, inspected the current selection.
‘Um, yes. Better, Iddo.’ He could hardly believe it. ‘Quite presentable. The best books you’ve ever located.’ He prised open the jaws of the till, slipped Iddo the customary paper to sign, and let him get away with a fiver and three singles. Iddo was in the big time.
By now the skip was attracting the attention of a few lesser carrion; ‘outpatients’ on bicycles, shuffling dead stock between Shepherd’s Bush Green and the Charing Cross Road. Iddo palmed them aside and waded, waist-deep, into the unreconstructed dreck. A dredged armful and back to the counter. Three blue ones!
At the close of trade, Iddo staked himself to a lethally trashed set of wheels. His horizons detonated. No longer was he trapped within the confines of a fifty-pence bus ride. He could risk Penn, Brackley, Colchester, Guildford. He was one of us.
And here was I, once his patron, staggering into a docklands junk-shop, under a washing machine that was leaking what I hoped was water down the front of my trousers. There were two more machines waiting outside in the Traveller. And a brace of spin dryers on the roof-rack.
While the junkman and Iddo debated this lump of cargo-cult plunder, I subsided into the books. I rapidly cast aside the usual trenchfoot volumes of First War photographs. These are loved only by antique dealers, sternly refusing to sell them to bookmen, who wouldn’t give them house room if the dustwrappers were woven out of dollar bills. I spurned the damaged glitz of Edwardian decorative covers: the unreadable in the process of becoming the unsaleable. I was left with five hardcore targets to consider.
The Tilbury Catalogue. Spring, 1988. Codeword: Hopeless.
(1) A defective first edition of Joseph Conrad’s Youth, Blackwood, 1902. Pale green linen-grain cloth, with marginal tracery of cigarette burns (Craven A, c.1952). Endpapers somewhat nicotine-tanned. ‘The End of the Tether’, pp. 313 — 17, torn away and used as spills. A distressed copy that has not quite given up the ghost.
(Verdict? Better have it. My friend Joblard, the sculptor, wants to sample Heart of Darkness.)
(2) In Tropical Lands: Recent Travels to the Sources of the Amazon, the West Indian Islands, and Ceylon. Published by Wyllie of Aberdeen in partnership with Ferguson of Ceylon, 1895. Despite a trivial dusting of mushroom mulch, a nice copy. Author’s name suppressed under the imploded corpse of a potentially uncommon spider. The creature in question might have posed for the illustration on p. 103, giving this item the additional interest of being an association copy. We make no surcharge on this account.
(Verdict? Forget it. Anything with a map costs too much money. And Dryfeld is always saying that you can’t sell S. America.)
(3–5) The final three volumes constitute an incomplete collection of the works of Patrick Hanbury, Director, Department of Medical Entomology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. We can offer a yard of research on The Natural History of Tsetse Flies; and a slim octavo volume, complete with the uncommon ash-grey dustwrapper, produced in a version of the Fortune Press house style, and emphatically titled, The Louse.
This last item, a cornerstone in any library, is illustrated, in line, with an exceptionally delicate study of Phthirus Pubis (female), from above. An alarmingly vivid section throws a new light on ‘Methods of Rearing’ — by means of lice boxes attached to the skin, in a garter beneath the sock. ‘The louse feeds only on man, and must do so frequently; it has to be reared on human beings and it should be kept on the skin for long periods every day. The most convenient method of rearing the insect was developed by Nuttall…’
Increased costs of publication do not allow us to do justice to the ultimate volume: Researches in Polynesia and Melanesia, An Account of Investigations in Samoa, Tonga, the Ellice Group and the New Hebrides. The author’s sensitive use of the plate-camera presents extreme forms of physical deformity in the guise of decorative art. Disease-ripe flesh bursts and fruits, escaping from the stunned dignity of gracious native specimens. Never before, in our opinion, has Surrealism courted the analytical eye of Science to such effect. Disbelief wrestles with pathos. The gross excitements of the Freak Show are enclosed within the discretion of the ethnologist’s cabinet.
(Verdict? Irresistible!)
Iddo and the junkman had not wasted their time. While I have been browsing among the beached detritus of the Imperial Dream, they have slapped hands to celebrate the resolution of their infamous deal. Iddo alternately squeezed and pommelled the junkman, until he swallowed his still-burning fag. The junkman, in revenge, pelted Iddo with banknotes, and worried him in the general direction of the river.
Any offer for my fancied books is redundant to the thrust of the moment. Iddo’s motor — with fresh detonations, smoke clouds, the singe of chicken feathers — buffets him back to his self-inflicted Apocalypse. Normality creeps awkwardly on to the set. The junkman resumes his brave attempt to cook himself between two fires. Money does not interest him. A hip-flask does. He brews up; growing weary of the exercise long before the water boils. Condensed milk, Camp coffee, sewage water, whisky. We achieve a kind of bleak, post-bellum fellowship. And he is happy to elucidate the nature of the scam.
He has cornered the market in the unloved. The streets are awash with non-functioning electrical hardware. He gives it shelter. He operates an unsung Battersea Dogs’ Home for Zanussi, Hoover, Indesit, Electra, Hotpoint, Bosch, Bendix, Creda, Electrolux, Philips. All the tribes of brutalized and deserted dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and tumble dryers. They were never turned from his door. He has a backer, a deal-maker; some local publican with media connections, contacts on the Ivory Coast. They wait until they can cram a dozen containers, then set keel from what’s left of the docks, to Lagos. Top dollar!
‘We’re webbed up, squire,’ the junkman smirked. ‘All the way to the Generals. There’s a nobbled Russian geezer with the Third World Aid delegation who loves to bilk the “sooties”. We sweetened him with a nicked Harrods charge card and enough small change to play the slot-machines for a fortnight.’