"Sort of grumpy this evening, aren't we, Dad?"
"Not at all. Would you like wine with your cornflakes, Mo?" I asked.
"Yes please."
I poured three glasses. I didn't like the way Sarah was looking at me. "Dad, why don't you bring your girlfriend here?"
"Oh, that would be nice. She could see you guys in your nightware mopping up milk with breadsticks."
"Ooooo," went Mo.
"Are we crowding you, Dad?"
"Look, a lot seems to be happening, that's all. Are you sure he didn't leave a name?"
"Who?"
I gave up, took the rest of the bottle into the living room and went to put some Tangerine Dream on the turntable. Someone had been going through my vinyl collection—Mo, I suspected. The album sleeves were out of order and though I felt an irrational burst of annoyance I managed to avoid making a fool of myself over it. It wasn't about the sequence of the discs, it was that my life was being put out of order on every front. I was emotionally stretched. I felt an unseen hand reaching into my little world and messing up my kitchen and moving Jazz-Rock-Fusion A-E and putting it in Electronic-Trance G-M after replacing it with Blues-R'n'B P-S. Just for a laugh.
I wanted to return to my orderly world, with my debts squared, with my wine collection and my record collection and the bed corners all turned down. And then again the biggest threat to this world was not Mo at my records or Sarah dumping her laundry, nor the police at my door, nor the threat of the bailiffs chasing up on my defaulted loan: it was Yasmin
I felt like John Barleycorn: I was being ploughed, harrowed, sown, harvested at the knee, threshed, winnowed and ground between stones. The sudden intrusion of Yasmin into of my life had left me reeling. As indeed had the "friendly" visit from Commander Morrison and the fact that I'd been exposed for lying to the Security Services. A further trouble to me was the paranoia riding on my certainty that someone was onto us about the forged books. Now that Lucy had left Stinx I despaired of him ever coming through with the forgeries. Normally he was a rock, but I thought his binge-drinking—quite apart from sabotaging the forgery project—might lead him to talk about our modest operation to the wrong person. Then there was the fact that my son hated me. Added to all this, I had Sarah and Mo turning day into night and habitually leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube. Oh yes, I almost forgot: there was also the small matter of the proliferation of demons.
This is when they come, when you are feeling like a wounded stag at bay. These are the anxieties upon which they attend. I looked around the room for my old demon. I sensed he was close. But he wasn't there yet.
I poured wine on the thought. And still more wine. I don't know whether I dreamed this or just thought it, but I saw myself as a circus plate-spinner. As we all know, those fabulous plate-spinners cheat by engineering dimples into the underside of the plates to keep them aloft; in my dream the dimples had inverted into nipples and I couldn't even get the plates started.
Meanwhile in real life one of those spinning plates was about to come crashing down. "Wake up, Dad. There's someone on the phone for you. Wake up."
It was Sarah, shaking me. She was holding the telephone, her hand muffling the mouthpiece. I must have fallen asleep in the chair. For a moment I didn't know where I was. I had to glance around the room to pull my senses together. "Whisit?" I managed to slur.
"It's that guy who's been trying to get hold of you."
"Wassewant?"
"Talk to him and you'll find out!" Sarah held the phone out to me.
"Hello?" I said, looking at Sarah.
"Am I talking to William Heaney?"
"You are."
"My name's Mathew Stokes. I'm calling from the
Sunday Observer
."
"Yes."
"We have a story and we'd like to give you a chance to comment on it before we run it."
"Comment?" Sarah was hovering, searching my face. I shooed her out of the room with a gesture. "Hold on a moment." For good measure I closed the door on her, because I knew she'd be trying to listen. "Comment on what?"
"It's about your publishing activities, Mr. Heaney."
Right, this it: we're finally knackered,
I thought. I went straight into denial mode. "My publishing? That sounds interesting."
"We've pretty much got the full story. You can say nothing or you can put your own side of things."
"May I say nothing?" Somehow I'd become Oscar Wilde.
"You can. This is a courtesy; a chance to get your side in."
"My side? My side of what?"
"Look, there's no point you pretending. The story is going to run whatever you say. We've got a statement from Michael Ellis. You're not going to deny you know him. And though Jaz Singh is refusing to say anything, we know that he's a regular drinking friend of yours. In fact—"
"What has Ellis said, exactly?"
"He's behind the original allegation. We investigated and now we have proof."
"Proof. What proof? What proof do you have?"
"We found some discarded manuscripts in your handwriting. Actually we still have them."
"What the bloody hell are you gibbering about? What handwriting? What allegations?"
Matt Stokes sighed at the other end of the line. Like he was very, very tired. "Michael Ellis alerted us to the fact that you are the actual author of Jaz Singh's poetry."
I almost dropped the telephone.
I'd thought this was about forged antiquarian books! Whereas it was about this other game. The thing I never gave a moment's thought. I was torn between manufacturing a few sobs to make a clean confession or switching lanes into a new track of complete denial. I opted for the latter. "Yes, and I'm the author of that new Shakespeare folio that just turned up. Plus a couple of William Blake engravings"
"You're going to flatly deny it all?"
"You seem to know more about it than I do."
"Look, Mr. Heaney, we have the manuscripts in your handwriting. We got them from your rubbish bin."
"You've been going through my rubbish? This gets better and better!"
"Look, you haven't done anything illegal. You've just conned a few people who are too far up their own arses anyway. Off the record, I suggest you claim it was a literary hoax. There's a long tradition of this sort of thing. It's almost a genre in itself. And the fact is we're going to run this story in the Arts Review section whether you like it or not. It would be a much better story, both for you and for me, if you were to fill it out. Offer a cheeky grin, sort of thing."
"I'm not big on cheeky grins. Give me a minute will you?"
I needed to think. After a few seconds I asked the journalist if he'd spoken to Jaz. He said he had, just a few moments before calling me, and that Jaz had refused to comment. I asked if he would promise not to run anything until I'd got back to him. He told me he'd give me to the end of the week, but no longer.
I made a call to Jaz but his line was engaged. I was able to leave a voicemail asking him to call me back. I went back into the kitchen. Sarah and Mo looked at me expectantly. There seemed to be no point keeping it from them.
"So let me get this straight . . . " Sarah kept saying.
"I've got one of his books!" Mo told me.
"Tell me you didn't pay good money for it."
"Yeh, Jaz Singh, he's like, really cool with all the students right now. Ultra-hip. Totally. I mean he's a genius. What I mean is, his poems . . . those poems . . . your poems . . . are really
really
good."
"Oh, for God's sake, Mo, it's gibberish."
"No they're like . . . hot . . . and very cool."
"They can't be both hot and cool, now, can they? They're crap. I should know: I write them."
"So let me get this straight . . . "
"They're not crap!" Mo said. His eyes had gone moist with earnestness. "All that stuff about demons sitting just behind your emotions, it's, it's . . . "
"Mo! Stop, please! I come home, I open a bottle of wine and when I've finished the bottle there's another shit poem ready to give to Jaz. It's a joke."
He wasn't having it. "No way." He shook his head very slowly. "No fucking way."
"Look, I wrote the fucking things! I'm the ultimate living authority on them! They're crap if I say they are!"
"Just let me get this straight . . . " said Sarah.
The telephone rang and the front doorbell went at the same time. It was Jaz in both cases. I mean, I answered the door while Sarah got the phone, and there was Jaz speaking to Sarah on his mobile phone, somewhat pointlessly instructing her to tell me that he was at the door. "We've been blown open," he said, patting me on the shoulder and stepping into the hall.
We all regrouped in the kitchen, which everyone seemed to think the proper place for a crisis. I opened another bottle. Jaz drank a glass straight down, as if it were Lucozade. Mo stared hard at Jaz. He couldn't get his head round the fact that he was meeting someone who had been an idol up until five minutes ago. But who wasn't any longer
"Thank the b'jesus," I said to Jaz. "At first I thought it was about the books."
"Right. Right." He dragged his hand slowly across his face, as if he were washing it.
"What books?" Sarah wanted to know.
"We need to get a story together, Jaz. There's no other way out."
"I'll be a laughing stock," he said.
"No, we'll put a spin on it. That's what government ministers do all the time."
"You once told me that spin is the same as lies," Sarah said brusquely.
"Yes. We're going to lie. We say the poems were written jointly. We say that, because poets prefer the company of their own misery, there has never been a tradition of collaborative poetry, and we've sought to change that. We claim the poems would never have been taken seriously as such. And since I'm a rather retiring person, I wanted no truck with the demon of fame so I was happy for Jaz to take on the persona of the poet. We say that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did much the same thing."
"Is that true?" Mo asked.
"Who cares if it's true?" I said.
We all drank more wine, and with my kitchen cabinet to advise me, we constructed a written statement. Mo contributed a travel phobia for me. Sarah got some books out and checked that Ezra Pound had indeed chopped Eliot's whining verse at least in half before it saw the light of day. Jaz, who had changed the title of one of the early poems, was eager to describe that as a process in which I wrote the first draft and he the second. By the end of the evening I actually started to believe the whole farrago.
When we'd got our statement together I tried calling the journalist but I reached an automated switchboard. I guessed that he'd gone home. So I emailed our statement to an address he'd given me, and then I went to bed, leaving Jaz to drink more wine and chill with the kiddiewinks into the early hours.
"You haven't heard from Stinx, have you?" I asked Jaz before retiring. I was starting to sound desperate.
"Not a peep."
Jaz had his photo printed in the papers a lot more than I did. Why not—he's much more handsome. I had a photo taken outside my house with me looking wistful and suburban. It was in the Arts pages of the
Observer.
If you look closely you might be able to make out the shadow of a new demon manifesting in the corner of the shot. Well, it's either that or just a normal shadow because the photographer came late in the afternoon when the sun was going down. No one noticed either way.
Jazz had a few performance dates cancelled and one or two people seemed to think they'd been made a fool of. I didn't see how that worked: as far as I was concerned they were already fools when they initially went giddy over my doggerel. On the other hand, if they'd argued the case for it being good poetry originally I'd have thought they'd want to maintain their position.
I confessed all to Yasmin. All about the poetry scam, I mean; not the other stuff, for God's sake.
"Is that all?" she said. "I thought you were about to tell me something important."
The worse thing for me was that I became associated with the poems I'd written. The last thing I wanted at my time of life was to be taken for a poet. It was deeply embarrassing. Especially when it came to the content of the explicitly sexual ones. Val in the office wouldn't look at me for two days. I suspect she'd read somewhere the one about secretaries who wear plaid skirts. Which she often did.
Well, at least we finally knew what all the snooping was about. What with my habit of lying to the police, the last thing we wanted was for
them
to come and ask me about forging antiquarian books, and at least that threat seemed to have cleared.
But to keep this plate spinning I desperately needed to find Stinx again to speed up the operation. I also needed to see the detestable Ellis before he lost interest. My problem lay in contacting him when I had no progress to report on
Pride and Prejudice.
I couldn't exactly call him to say that I had nothing to report, so I decided to let him in on one or two other gems that had appeared on the scene. A nice little first edition of Dickens, I thought. Maybe
A
Christmas Carol
. Or perhaps Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
. Maybe something from the lucrative children's market
I didn't exactly rub my hands at the thought of seeing him. Something else was gnawing at me about that bastard Ellis. He'd put the
Sunday Observer
on to us, the little shit. I couldn't think what his motives were, apart from jealousy. Jaz after all was the poetry world's pin-up boy, and Ellis was never going to be more than an also-ran with a big hooter. No, I owed Brother Ellis a visit.
I also owed a visit to Antonia at GoPoint. I anticipated that she might have already got through the last donation, and anyway, with only a few days to go before Christmas I liked the idea of a seasonal announcement that there might be more to come later.
I was seeing Yasmin pretty much every evening after work by now. We would eat early, stroll by the Thames and stop for a drink. That's as far as the evenings went and it did puzzle me as to why she hung in there, but she seemed content not to push it. The idea that she might be Ellis's spy did still trouble me, but I so relished every minute spent with her that I pushed that notion to one side. Anyway, because my evenings were crowded with her I took a long lunch-break during which I was set on seeing Antonia and Ellis both.