We floated down the ramp and joined the A1, and Dismal gave a half smile as I moved to the outer lane and overtook a macadam-breaking juggernaut. The sun polished my unshaven face through the windscreen, and instead of enjoying my run down the eighty-mile funnel to the Smoke I sweated at the prospect of getting there. Freedom ends where responsibility begins — or so I’d heard — but I would much rather have stayed in the muddy wood listening to the collared dove warbling mindlessly for its mate than come up against the Moggerhanger gang. In my feckless way I had fallen into the same mess that had forced Bill Straw to take refuge in the rafters of Blaskin’s flat, and little did he know that I might be joining him.
Insanity was my companion and I stopped in the next layby to consider the feasibility of driving to Athens or Lisbon. Even if I didn’t put the idea into operation, at least I would be delayed half an hour thinking about it. I stared at the map till its colours sent me boggle-eyed, then threw it flapping into the back, where Dismal, thinking it was some kind of toy, chewed it into tatters.
I tied him to the post of a litter bin while I walked up and down. All I lacked was Napoleon’s hat and Caesar’s sword. Lorries on the inner lane honked as they passed what seemed to be a man pushing a motorbike along the hard shoulder. To me it might have been a Japanese samurai on horseback — or on somebody else’s back — till denser traffic cut the spectacle from view, and whatever it was had shinned up the bank to safety. The life of the road went on.
Not wanting to leave the layby, all I could do was reflect on the idleness which had afflicted me since birth. The few jobs I had taken since quitting school at fifteen had only been ways towards not having to work at all. Even in those days I considered it my duty not to deprive a fellow human being of regular and paid employment. To be without work was, to me, as natural as having work seemed to nearly everybody else, so I never wasted time making a decision on the matter. I had no conscience, because not to work was hereditary rather than acquired. I hadn’t had the example of a father going out in overalls every day, which in any case would have convinced me as nothing else that I would never be so daft as to take on such drudgery myself. And seeing my mother go to work at the factory — though she had done it cheerfully enough — merely told me that no one ought to be subjected to it.
On the other hand, I sensed that it would not do for me to encourage anyone else to follow the same course into idleness. Somebody had to work and at the moment, thank God, a lot still preferred to. I had never wanted society to disintegrate into a state of chaos, because if I happened to be around I might get pulled in to help when the whole show needed rebuilding.
Before I could climb into the car I was transfixed by the apparition of a man in a blue forage cap with flowing hair and a dayglo orange cape pushing a laden pram along the hard shoulder towards the layby. A pennant said POMES A MILE EACH, and as he came into the space which seemed rightfully mine, with the tinny wail of music from a transistor, I saw that on one side of the pram had been aerosolled: POETRY COUNCIL ART-MOBILE and on the other RONALD DELPHICK’S ARTE-FACTORY. A huge black-and-white panda-doll in the pram looked as if it hadn’t had its nappy changed for a week, and Dismal went into a frenzy of barking, pulling at the rope as if the panda’s rotund guts were packed with the choicest hash.
‘Call your tiger off,’ he said. ‘That panda is my living. And I’m very nasty when I’m roused.’
Dismal seemed to understand, and came away. Delphick wiped the sweat off his face and parked his contraption behind the car. He sat on the ground, opened his cape, spat, shut his eyes, spread his arms and went into a rhythmic muttering, swaying back and forth. A deep grumble came from his stomach and he sounded like a gorilla trying to get at his loved one in the neighbouring cage. He had little bells on the ends of his fingers, but much of the sound was eliminated by passing traffic though Delphick, to his credit, didn’t seem to mind.
The name was familiar, and so the face might have been, except that over ten years had passed since Blaskin and I had stumbled into one of his Poetry Pub readings. I’d heard of him from time to time, when his antics hit the papers, as when he threw a heap of bedding from the visitors’ gallery in the House of Commons, which he said to reporters afterwards was intended to signify his blanket support for the IRA. No doubt he had moderated his opinions from those days, otherwise he wouldn’t have got so many grants from the Poetry Council, unless they had made them only to keep him quiet.
He stood up, looked at the sky and yawned. ‘That’s enough of that. I’ve done me mantra.’
‘How often do you do it?’
‘Morning, noon and night, I give the Gods a fright. Night, noon and morning, I give them another warning.’ He looked at me: ‘Three times a day to you. Haven’t I seen you sometime before? I never forget a face. You’re Gilbert Blaskin’s son. I saw you in that pub, when I was pumping a plump popsy’s pubes — or trying to. I’m allus trying to.’
‘That was ten years ago,’ I said.
He closed an eye. ‘It’s ten days, with my memory. I’m cursed with total and immediate recall.’
‘Lucky,’ I said.
‘Ain’t it? Do you want to buy a poem?’
‘What sort?’
His beard, and mane of black hair streaked with grey, swung around his face. He was about my age, but looked twenty years older because I was short haired and clean shaven. ‘There’s only one sort of poem,’ he said. ‘A poem-poem, a panda-poem, a polysyllabic pentameter poem. A Delphick ode, if you like.’ He moved his panda pram a bit further from Dismal’s frothing jaws.
‘How much is it?’
Quick as a flash: ‘What can you afford?’
‘Fifty pee?’
‘Drop dead. “Poems a mile each clean the mouth with bleach, though poems a killer-meter might sound a bit sweeter.” That’ll cost you a quid. I’ve got to have some toast with my tea. I ain’t had breakfast yet, and I’ve been pushing me panda pram all night. You want me to whine? I’ll whine if you like. Haven’t you ever seen a poet whine, you well-fed, Rolls-Royce-driving millionaire swine? What’s a quid to a well-fed underbled chap like you? That angry young man peroration will cost you two quid. I’d like a Danish pastry as well.’
I laughed. ‘You won’t get a penny out of me for a poem, but if you like to chuck your panda-contraption in the boot I’ll give you a lift to the Burntfat Service Station and buy you breakfast, which I suppose will cost me more than a couple of quid.’
‘I knew I could rely on you,’ he said. ‘If I remember rightly, we’re working-class lads together, aren’t we?’
‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘any of that working-class crap and you and your pervert panda will spill straw all over the highway. Don’t “working-class” me. I’ve never worked in my life, and neither have you.’
He looked at me through half closed eyes, while we lifted the pram off the oil-stained gravel into the boot. ‘I’ll talk to you after I’ve had my breakfast,’ he said sullenly. ‘The panda’s hungry.’
I pressed the belly button, but it didn’t squeak. ‘What’s inside?’