‘It’s none of your business.’
Dismal insisted on sitting beside me in the front. ‘I don’t think he likes me,’ Delphick remarked, when I wove through the mêlée of traffic.
I adjusted the mirror, flicked out of place by Dismal’s tail. ‘It takes him a long time to get to know people. Have you seen June lately?’
‘Not since last year. It was a lousy wet month, if I remember.’
‘I mean the girl you got pregnant in Leeds, and then left to fend for herself in London. She worked at a strip club to support herself and the kid. A little girl, wasn’t it?’
I saw that half his teeth were bad when he laughed. ‘There’ve been about five hundred others since then. You can’t expect me to remember every one. I’ve got to do something in my spare time. You can’t write poetry twenty-four hours a day. One of these weeks I hope to get married long enough to drive the wife into a loony bin. I’ll never be a great poet till I’ve done that. Unless she’s got a lot of money, then I’ll have to watch my Ps and Qs.’
I wanted to set Dismal onto him, though I knew he wasn’t as bad as he made himself out. ‘I thought you had total recall?’ But he didn’t answer. ‘What are you going south for?’
He took out a packet of cigarettes and didn’t offer me one. I reached for my cigars and he put his cigarettes away. I didn’t offer him a cigar, so he got a cigarette back from his pocket and lit up. ‘I’m on tour,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a gig in Stevenage tonight. I’m on a POEMARCH to raise money for a new mag, so I stop at every place to give a reading. The mag’s going to be run by the CIA — Community, Information, Arts. Some of it’s going to be poems — my poems under different names. The first issue will have a hundred pages. There’ll be a psychological analysis of the fiction of Sidney Blood and the difference between his influence on the working classes and the middle classes. Then some previously undiscovered poems from Bokhara by Ghengis Khan, each one a mountain of skulls made up of the word Delphick in tiny writing written by a German poet and translated by me. Chuck in a few Panda Poems, and there you have it. Maybe I’ll get a slab of the latest book Gilbert Blaskin is working on. His stuff’s real rubbish, but his name might sell a few copies.’
‘He’s writing somebody’s life story at the moment.’ For one dizzy second I saw a way of embarrassing this man who made my immorality look like the minor transgressions of a Sunday School teacher with TB.
‘Whose?’
‘Moggerhanger’s.’
Dismal snapped at Delphick’s hand, so that he dropped his cigarette. I punched Dismal and told him to behave in front of guests.
‘Lord Moggerhanger’s?’
‘Why not? A chunk of that should look good beside the poems of Ghengis Khan.’ Back on the inside lane, a couple of lorries walled by. ‘What are you going to call your magazine?’
‘Drop dead,’ he said.
I didn’t think I’d offended him. ‘Fuck you,’ I retorted.
‘No,’ he said too mildly for me to think we were arguing, ‘Drop Dead is what I’m going to call it.’
‘A good title,’ I said.
He pushed a form under my nose. ‘Sign a subscription form. Ten copies for fifteen quid.’
I screwed it up and threw it out of the window. ‘Come back next year.’
He didn’t seem to mind. ‘I’ll have the best table of contents any mag ever had to start off with. Every item the epitome of spontaneous art.’
‘How’s the fund-raising going?’ I passed Dismal a crisp from the glove box.
‘Awful. But I’ve got a grant from the Poetry Council, and some money from the CIA. It ain’t enough, because I need to decorate my house at Doggerel Bank in Yorkshire, and that’ll cost a bob or two.’
‘I thought it was all for the mag?’
‘I’m starting a poetry museum in the parlour of Doggerel Bank, so some of it’s got to go on that. I’ll need central heating, for a start. There’ll be an enormous plastic bowl for the public to slot money into as contributions for its upkeep, like in the Tate or the Royal Academy, and if they’re cold it’ll make ’em stingy. But with the old CH purring away they’ll give everything they’ve got.’
I shut up, out of admiration.
‘I’m only telling you all this because you aren’t a poet yourself. Or a journalist. Tonight I’m giving a reading at the leisure centre, me and the panda. I might make a quid or two. I charge one pound fifty entrance fee, only I don’t let anybody in. My poems, and Panda’s, have to be spoken to the empty air. People’s auras would spoil it. But they can hear us from outside, and they can applaud if they like. That’s allowed. The door’s locked though, and that keeps it a pure experience. Poetry is for space, the spice of emptiness. Emptiness eats it up, regurgitates it into the atmosphere so that it gets back into people in its purest form. They might not know it — how can they, the bourgeois pigs? — but it sweetens their soul. A single ear inside the hall when I’m speaking would desecrate it.’
‘They should kick the door down,’ I said.
‘Then I would read my poems silently. You’ve got to let ’em know that poet power rules. Otherwise, what’s life all about? Most of the time I’m at Doggerel Bank, but every so often I go on a Panda Tour to a different part of the country. It gets me out of myself. Doggerel Bank’s very cut off. Do you want to come to my reading tonight? I need all the audience I can get, but don’t bring the dog. They’ve had plenty of advance warning at the centre, so there’ll be lots of fab women lined up to meet me. I sometimes end with two, and copulate to the rhythm of coryambics. “Them Greeks knew a thing or two, but you never reach the end of an ode/come in the middle of a line/like dying out of life/halfway through.”’
He scribbled on a piece of paper, unable to speak for a few minutes. I was tempted to tip him onto the next layby, but unfortunately I’d promised him breakfast. When he looked up he was snuffling with emotion: ‘Is it far to The Rabid Puker?’
‘I don’t know.’ The sky in front was covered in broken jigsaw shapes, pieces of white and crimson cloud, with blue between. The light was orange and ominous. A car behind tried to tailgate me, but I pulled away with ease. Delphick snorted, a dead cigarette stuck to his lower lip.
I got the tank filled at the petrol station, then followed Delphick into the plastic dining palace. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ll start with a double whisky,’ he said. ‘I’ve been perished all night.’
‘You’ll have the basic meal, and pay for your own extras.’
He picked up the menu card. ‘Bingo Breakfast, love.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Full house.’
‘Make it three.’ Dismal had stayed in the car. Delphick grabbed the waitress’s wrist. She was a lovely young blonde with a fine figure but a very sarky mouth. ‘Do you want to buy a poem for fifty bob?’ he said.
‘You must be joking.’
He wouldn’t let go. ‘They make a lovely birthday pressie. Or a thoughtful wedding gift.’
‘If you don’t leave me alone I’ll call the manager. I hate this job.’ She looked at me. ‘Tell the tramp to let me go.’
‘Let her go.’
‘Bollocks,’ he said.
She glared, as if I was worse than him. ‘I wish people like you hadn’t got such soft hearts. You’re allus picking deadbeats up and bringing ’em here for a feed. I can’t understand what you get out of it. Makes you feel good, does it? Why don’t you leave the dirty old bastard to die on the hard shoulder?’
Delphick’s eyes softened with tenderness, but he had an iron grip.
‘Look, crumb,’ she said, ‘stop it, or I’ll call the manager.’