I said, “Mr Aiblins I am not the godfather of a Scottish literary mafia. There is no such thing. No firm will publish a book, no editor commission a review of it or print a poem from it because I order them. It is also many years since I was employed to show an interest in other folks’ writing. I am now a selfish old bastard who cares for nobody’s writing but his own. Please go away and tell that to as many other writers as you can. But you appear to be in poor circumstances. I am not. By a coincidence I refuse to explain I have seventy pounds in notes upon me. Here, take them. Goodbye!”
“You condescending piss-pot!” he said, smiling as he took the money, “But buying my poems won’t get rid of me. I know they’ll be safe here because your only claim to fame, your only hope of a place in world literature depends on them. So why postpone that? Your Antique Nebula will be forgotten long before critics notice where you got the few good lines in it.”
“Are you suggesting that I have plagiarised you?” I cried, horrified, “I deny it! I deny it!”
“You sound as if you believe that,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “Perhaps you’re unconscious of it. Perhaps most plagiarism is unconscious reminiscence.”
“I am staring hard at that brass-topped coffee table,” I told him, “because it is tempting me to lift it as high as I can in order to smash it down on your idiotic skull. But instead I will phone for the police if you do not take your poems and get the hell out of here.”
“Dearie me, dearie me,” he said waggishly.
“I seem to have annoyed the poor old fat bald wee man. He must still envy me.
I wonder why?”
He strolled with bag and folder to the front door, which I opened. On the doorstep he turned and said quietly, “One last word of advice. Publish these poems under your own name then try to live up to them. You’ll fail, but the effort may make a real man of you, if not a real writer. And think of the fame you’ll enjoy! I won’t resent that because great poetry is more important than fame. Here, have it.”
I closed the door on him. A moment later the folder, bent double, fell in through the letter box. My self respect felt as if it had been squeezed between the heavy rollers of a mangle. His poems were so strongly associated with this feeling that I could not bear to pick them up. Opening a cupboard holding gas meters I kicked them inside and locked them in. I so dreaded hearing from him again that I fixed an answering machine to my telephone and never took a call direct, but he never called again.
Time passed away. So did the Berlin Wall and the Russian Empire. In The Times Literary Supplement I read reviews of abstruse books by the former Marxist student who liked classical opera and now had a medical practice in Stuttgart. I discovered that the little Chinese girl who once visited me was now an award-winning feminist poet who wrote popular, very gruesome crime thrillers under a pseudonym. I read her works closely for signs of my influence and detected none at all.
One day I heard a friendly, eager voice say, “Hullo, how are you doing? What are you reading these days?”
I stopped and after a moment recognised poor Aiblins. He was completely bald with many bruises on his head and face and many unhealed cuts between them. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and shambled in a way I had not seen before, but his battered features had amazingly recovered the happily relaxed expression I had first envied.
“What happened to your face, Luke?”
“Oh, I had an argument in a pub with a man who glassed me so it became a police matter. I mean the police took me in and gave me a doing before turning me out. But it was all just usual reality, it doesnae matter. Have you read The American Claimant yet?”
“Not yet. Can I buy you a drink?”
I said this because we were in a street very far from where we might be seen by people I know.
After two unsuccessful attempts we found a pub that would serve him and sat with pints in a quiet corner. I admitted I had not yet read Two Gentlemen of Verona and steered the talk away from literature by asking if he ever saw his wife nowadays. “Neither her nor my son. In fact she kicked me out before he was born because she hated the name I was going to give him — a lovely name it was too, a perfect poem in itself: Tristram Pilgrim Aiblins.” He announced the name with great enthusiasm then repeated it slowly as if separately enjoying each syllable, then he asked if I knew what it meant.
“Tristram means sadly born,” I said, “I’m not surprised the mother didn’t want her boy called that.”
“You’ve forgotten what Aiblins means.
That makes a difference.”
“What does Aiblins mean?”
“Look it up, wordsmith,” he said, laughing. “Consult a Lallans dictionary, you antique Scottish nebula.”
“But how did you know a son was coming before he got born?”
He tapped his brow saying, “I heard it in here.”
I asked if his inner voice ever gave him poetry nowadays. He said, “I think it’s trying to. Sometimes a good line gets through but never a whole couplet or verse because the government is jamming me.”
“The government? How?”
“It keeps sending other voices into my head, loud ones that accuse me of terrible things I’ve never done, never even imagined doing. Why? Why should the government spend money on elaborate broadcasting equipment just to torture me with false accusations only I can hear? It makes no sense. It’s a total waste of taxpayers’ money.” He did not say this angrily or miserably but with a kind of puzzled amusement. I said, “Some people in high places must think you very dangerous.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Tell me a line your inner voice has given you recently.”
He pressed a finger to the side of his brow and after a while said, “Since breathing is my life, to stop I dare not dare.”
“I like that line. Any more?”
“Er … Great vessels sink, while piss-pots stay afloat.”
“Better and better. Do you still think I’m a piss-pot?”
He grinned apologetically and murmured, “If the cap fits … Oh, here’s another coming through: To die, to me, today, is like returning home from a war.”
“That’s the best line of all. You’re still a poet, Luke, in a fragmentary way.”
“The government must want to keep me fragmentary. Has your inspiration ever been broken up by outside broadcasting?”
“No.”
On his discoloured, distorted face appeared a smile of pure childish happiness mingled with sly mischief.
“Your work isn’t good enough to frighten them,” he murmured and gave my shoulder a consoling pat.
“True. I must leave now.”
I gave him money that he tranquilly accepted. I hurried away in a state very near panic. By pretending to share his world view I had almost been convinced by it. I was glad to learn later that the dare not dare line came from the introduction to John Lennon’s In His Own Write, that the sunk ship and floating piss-pots were from a translation of a Gaelic proverb in one of McDiarmid’s most rambling monologues. I haven’t found the source of the third, which may be a genuine Aiblins invention. But I am afraid to re-examine the verses in the creased folder in my lobby cupboard, afraid to show them to people who might judge them differently. It might emerge that I have driven a great poet insane by suppressing his earliest works.