Life Goes On

by Alan Sillitoe

  That, I explained to Dismal (in case he didn’t know), is the name we road-busters give to a cop car with yellow and red streaks on its side. In the mirror I saw him yawn, bored out of his canine mind, but contented at the same time, while I got us mile by mile along the wonderful flarepath, also keeping a lookout for any jam sandwich drifting up on the starboard bow. If it never got light we would steam happily and forever along this lit-up dual carriageway through the enchanted Land of the Midlands at night.

  No such luck. ‘Down, Dismal!’

  A blue flash worked overtime behind, as if to push me forward because I had strayed onto a runway at London Airport and a 747 was coming in to land. I looked at my speed, but the needle was pegged at sixty. Mad Jack had gone into the distance, so they weren’t chasing him. The game was up. ‘Get down, you melancholy bastard, or you’ll give me away, and you’ll be confined to barracks for fourteen days.’

  He flopped off the seat, then began to howl at the flashing light, his perfect silhouette unmistakable even from a satellite wheeling in space. There was nothing I could do except stay calm, get ahead, whistle a tune, and wait for the four cops inside their Rover to overtake and slow down till I had to stop as well.

  Dismal looked into their car. What other evidence did they need? They swung side-on, and I glimpsed their faces: fresh young lads out on patrol, the cream of the Staffordshire force, who seemed amused when Dismal flattened himself at the window as if pleading to be taken back to his air-conditioned kennel and ten pounds of gristle a day. I had looked after the ungrateful hound like my only begotten son, when I should have left him to live on raw rat and cold water at Peppercorn Cottage.

  The jam sandwich slid ahead and was lost in other traffic. It seemed obvious, as Dismal lay on the seat and sobbed himself to sleep (or maybe it was indigestion after scoffing fish and chips, lemonade, chocky bars, several dishes of tea and three Eccles cakes), that they had got my number, if not my name and, radio communications being what they were, could afford to wait in a darker spot a few miles ahead, or pass me on to some of their more boisterous mates in Northamptonshire when I turned south for London.

  But at this late stage I began to consider whether they really were after me. One of the coppers who had raided Peppercorn Cottage, on going in to search the dresser, had called out that there were only four boxes. At the time I thought maybe the rats had eaten one, but then the inspector answered that there should be five, and I was so numbed by their presence that it never occurred to me to wonder how he could have known what number there were. My brain, if it could be called one, spun like a millwheel. Questions came along on a conveyer belt like cars with one door missing. Who told them there were five boxes? There had been ten, until Peter and John – Peter and John, my arse! – paddled away with their half share in the canoe. The police had parked at the top of the slope and no doubt trained their binoculars to watch them paddling away, and only then came down to frighten the guts out of me and make off with the other five handipacks.

  The only explanation was that the lads who had pinned me against the wall at Peppercorn Cottage hadn’t been policemen at all. If they had, they would have left no roadblock unmanned to get their purloined dog back to base. To lie, perjure, resist arrest, even steal and murder, or hijack one of their cars and drive it the wrong way up and down the M1 shouting obscene defiance through their radio so that even the policewomen operators back at base shivered with rage and horror, was all part of the game, but to drive off with a superbly trained and well-nurtured poodle was asking for trouble. The fact was that the Peppercorn Cottage task force had been as much hoaxers as those two canoeists who had made off with their share of the loot half an hour before.

  I turned left at the Cross-in-Hand roundabout for Lutterworth, and went over the M1 knowing that soon I would have to find a suitable parking place and bed down for a few hours, unless I wasn’t to nod off at the wheel and wake up to find a policeman at my hospital traction-cot threatening to turn off my life-support machine if I didn’t talk.

  There was never anywhere to stop on the twisting arterial lane without fear of being hit from behind, so I drove on, always expecting to see something interesting around the next corner, such as trestle tables under colourful medieval awnings, laden with real food served by nubile wenches. Instead, I barged into a grim pub, and was stared at by drinkers who went silent at my advent. Even the one-armed bandit, a coin already in and the handle pulled, stopped working while the surly and ulcerous landlord asked what I wanted. I debated taking Dismal a tin of beer, but settled on lemonade, a bag of onion crisps and some peanuts. He certainly appreciated the attention I paid him, but it wasn’t every day that I had a fully paid up member of the police force in my car.

  Rain slowed me down, and the hypnotic rhythm of the wipers lulled me perilously. I rubbed my eyes so hard I almost mashed them back into my head and lost the sight of them altogether. When I switched off the engine and headlights beyond Corby, the sound of rain pounding on the roof was comforting. ‘Dismal,’ I said, ‘we’re on the loose. You’ve been abandoned by the world, but I’ll look after you. As for me, if I survive explaining to Lord Moggerhanger how I let his precious packages slip through my fingers to the wrong people, I’ll live forever, or for as long as makes no difference.’

  A passing car lit up our habitation. Dismal yawned, and I let us both out, hoping dog piss wouldn’t burn the rubber off the tyres. We farted, and got back inside. Dismal slept on the spare seat in front, while I stretched my legs in the back.

  Twelve

  Dismal’s tongue felt like wet pumice on the back of my neck, and I came out of sleep as from a near fatal wound that needed a decent period of convalescence before I could consider myself halfway ready for the front line. I pushed him away. ‘It’s too early. Leave me alone.’

  Crimson rags of cloud did not inspire me to be on the move, and for springtime it was as cold as winter. I lit a cigarette, glad I didn’t have to share it with anyone, though Dismal looked as if expecting a puff. We weren’t in the trenches yet, so I refused. To get him out of his sulk I threw a few scraps onto a sheet of newspaper and while he gobbled I looked at the map and listened to the weather forecast, which again was rattled off so quickly that I understood nothing, though perhaps I didn’t want to, because today would be the day of reckoning, and the future state of the heavens seemed irrelevant. No matter how much I dawdled down the A1, I would be face to face with Moggerhanger by the end of it.

  I was happy in a manic and probably dangerous kind of way, as I walked along the road breathing deeply. To the wonder of passing motorists I trotted back to the car and jumped up and down a hundred times to get my sluggish blood flowing. Rummaging in the boot, I found a length of rope. Did Moggerhanger keep it so as to hang himself when news of his financial collapse came over on Radio Two? Or was it to strangle somebody else who had displeased him by losing a valuable consignment of drugs? I looped it through Dismal’s collar and took him for a walk, but it was too muddy underfoot to go far. He saw a rabbit, and almost pulled me face-down among the primroses and wood sorrel. A pigeon broke cover and climbed over the sheen of a bank of bluebells.

  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 le
ast 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?’

  ‘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.’