The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘For instance – where were you born?’

  ‘Siberia. A little town called Bratsk. A few buildings and a hydro-electric dam. That’s all there is.’

  ‘You came to this country as a child?’

  ‘A teenager.’

  ‘Your English is wonderful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Why did your family come here?’

  ‘My father was a scientist. He had wanted to defect to the West for years. He was always in trouble with the authorities. That’s why we ended up in Bratsk. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, he came here. Brought us all with him. He’s dead now.’

  ‘Did you have a happy childhood?’

  Vera leaned back and sighed heavily. ‘This isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation.’

  ‘OK, I’m sorry. It’s just that you have a really interesting background. And you never talk about it.’

  ‘Backgrounds are complicated, like I said.’

  ‘Mine isn’t . . .’

  She didn’t pick up the cue to ask him about his, and they were silent for a while. Arnold looked out of the window at the double-deckers nudging into the parking bays, the exhausted-looking passengers lining up at their doors. He watched as ten, fifteen, twenty or more people disappeared into the gaping mouth of the bus. Then marvelled at how they seemed to filter themselves, some going upstairs, others remaining on the lower deck.

  ‘Vera, I must ask you – does it trouble you that I am a heathen?’

  Her answer shocked him.

  ‘Yes, a little bit.’

  He didn’t know what to say. He had been expecting the opposite response. Then she said, ‘Though that is an interesting word you use to describe yourself. The heathens had their gods.’

  ‘I was trying to be funny. I’m an atheist really. Is that worse?’

  ‘Yes, because there’s no hope for you.’

  He laughed. There was the faintest sparkle of irony in her voice. He wasn’t sure that she was serious.

  ‘You know I will never believe in God, for as long as I live?’

  ‘I wonder how you can know that.’

  ‘All I’m saying is – if you are thinking of asking me to come along to your church . . .’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  She looked troubled, and turned her face downwards towards her empty plate. She had finished her food, all that was left on the plate was the chop bone, curled like a bass clef, picked clean.

  He wondered if he’d offended her.

  ‘It must be difficult for you, with what’s happening between us. All I’ve done is been a bastard, but you’ve sinned.’

  He felt a little more confident now that he could say things like this. After a long silence she said, ‘I suppose I have faith in Him that there is a purpose to all of this.’

  ‘Surely your Church regards marriage as sacred.’

  ‘I don’t know, Arnold. The Christian God is a God of love. Perhaps it is love that is the sacred thing.’

  He thought that was a beautiful thing to say, and stayed quiet, so the words would hang in the air for as long as possible. Then, after another long silence, and very quietly, ‘Yes, perhaps it is.’

  Before they could meet again, the sewing evening intervened. Arnold would normally have done his vanishing act even before the women arrived, but this week he decided to remain as a presence. He hung around as the women entered and chatted, as the bowls of olives and nuts were put out and the drinks distributed. He sat at the dining table while the women filled the lounge, unfolding their stitched fabrics, showing them to each other. One woman was making bridesmaids’ dresses for a friend’s daughter’s wedding. Peach silk with puffed shoulders and a square neckline. Another was making a set of dungarees profligate with pockets. Arnold intruded on a conversation with praise for someone’s needlework. The comments were taken in good, if puzzled spirit by the needleworker, though he sensed he was testing the patience of this group by lingering as he did. It slowly became evident that Vera wasn’t attending this evening.

  ‘Isn’t it time for you to retire discreetly?’ asked the woman with the highlighted hair, who always seemed to resent Arnold’s presence more strongly than the others.

  He wanted to ask where Vera was but remained silent. He looked at the group now, in the absence of Vera, and it seemed a tawdry thing, a coven of seamstresses, fiddling with hooks and catches. A fussy little posse of haberdashers unpicking and plucking at things. They bared their teeth to break a line of button thread or to loosen an overtightened stitch. He suddenly felt an urge to bear down on this little gathering as though it was an illegal sit-in or protest, to shake a can of pepper spray and let them have it full in their painted faces, spray it so hard their hair flew. He wanted to march through them and trample their delicate lacework, wield a batten and crack some skulls, rip their frocks. Make them get the hell out of his house. Shocked by the violence of his vision, and the sense of delight in it that he tried to fight back, he left the room unnoticed, and went to his study, not bothering to listen in.

  7

  As the weeks had gone on, to avoid arousing suspicion, Arnold and Vera saw as little of each other as they could, aside from their weekly lovemaking sessions at her house. He had managed to reduce by small degrees his ferrying role, and so was only occasionally in the playground, and if he was, he stood apart from Vera. They communicated by text only, and these were kept brief and cryptic, so that if either’s phone fell into the wrong hands, nothing obviously incriminating would be evident.

  It made the weekly meetings all the more important and longed for. This approaching Wednesday would be the last before the half term, and Arnold balked at the thought of even a week’s absence from Vera.

  He was in his office at work, a space he shared with six other members of staff, though there were rarely more than two in the room at the same time, and had just returned from giving a plenary lecture on form in poetry. He took out his mobile phone as he sat at his desk and read the latest message from Vera, ‘look fwd 2 poetry workshop, 2day 1.15’. They had taken to using the language of creative writing as a code. He was about to text back ‘have got new poems 2 show you’, when he received a phone call from Polly.

  ‘Sorry to bother you sweetie but do you think you could come over to the shop?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ He should have said immediately that he had a lecture, but she seemed to know that he hadn’t. He wondered if she had already spoken to the departmental secretary to check his availability.

  ‘Well, something rather odd’s happening here. There’s a young man outside the shop, wearing a suit made of paper, and he’s causing a disturbance. I’ve called the police, but all they can do is ask him to move on. But then he comes back. He’s not actually doing anything illegal.’

  ‘Did you say he was wearing a suit made of paper . . . ?’

  ‘Yes. I think he’s someone we – or you – turned down for the press. I don’t really understand why he’s so upset. He was hanging around yesterday and the day before. But now he’s actually trying to stop people coming into the shop.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘He has mentioned you, by name. He seems to bear a grudge? I think you may have written some harsh comments on his rejection slip, or on his manuscript. He doesn’t make a lot of sense when I try and talk to him.’

  ‘So you want me to come over and apologize to him? Is that what you’re asking?’

  ‘Maybe if you just talked to him. It’s you he wants to see, I think.’

  ‘Now? Right now?’

  ‘I’m losing custom, Arnold. He is turning people away, they are afraid to come in the shop. As I said, the police can’t do anything. He keeps coming back.’

  It was something Arnold had long dreaded happening. The Papyrus Press had, over the five years of its operation, been surprisingly successful. Some well-respected but mostly forgotten poets had had their names revived through their efforts. They had discover
ed some brilliant unknowns who had gone on to publish with major imprints. At the same time, they had attracted a fair number of the desperate and the unhinged. He had twice received letters from solicitors accusing him of publishing their client’s poems under someone else’s name, and a policeman turned up at the shop once, a little apologetically informing a puzzled Polly that he was enquiring after some poems that had been reported missing. They were obliged to investigate, he told her. But so far, no rejected poet had themselves turned up at the shop to complain about their treatment by the Papyrus Press. Some innate sense of dignity and modesty prevented even the most desperate from doing that. He was glad, because the last thing he wanted was to confront some of the people behind the worst of the poetry they were sent.

  Even as he gathered up his papers and left the office he was working out his timings. If he was quick and could find a good parking space he could deal with this incident at Papyrus and still have time to get across town to Vera’s house. He texted her, warning her that the poetry workshop might be a little late. Those precious minutes. Each one mattered. A minute with Vera’s body was worth an hour in the real world. She texted him back with the words he’d used to Polly – is there something wrong? Nothing wrong, just a hiccup.

  Polly’s shop was in the old quarter of town, not far from the cathedral, in a pedestrianized Elizabethan street with boutique shops, mostly selling arts and crafts, vintage clothes or fine foods. It was an area popular with street performers; there had been a recent trend for living statues, people dressed as monuments and standing still, as if paralysed, for hours on end, so the protestor dressed in paper didn’t look particularly out of place, though he did look striking. A tall, youngish man, thin and wispy. The paper was curled around his torso and limbs in sections and plates Sellotaped together, with elaborately hinged joints, like a suit of armour. It had few creases or tears, he looked immaculate and fresh, a blank sheet straight from the writing cabinet, new and tempting. He looked both powerful and fragile at the same time. The bright white paper made his skin look grey in comparison, his lips too red, his teeth yellowy. But he was handsome, exquisite, even. He was giving out leaflets. A few passers-by had stopped to watch, thinking him to be a street entertainer.

  When Arnold came closer he saw that the paper the boy was dressed in wasn’t blank but had been written on, in tight, narrow handwriting too small to read. It looked as though he was covered in poems.

  Whenever anyone approached the shop the young man stepped in front of them and made an attempt to block their way. If the person insisted on going in the shop he would let them pass, but he was clearly deterring some, who backed off, not wanting a public confrontation with someone who appeared to be mad. Arnold could see the problem. The man was surely doing something illegal, the police should have acted.

  He went forward and made his own attempt to enter the shop. The young man barred his way, as he would anyone else, and held out a leaflet.

  ‘Would you like something to read, sir?’

  Arnold took the leaflet and glanced at it. It was something handwritten and photocopied, in small script, hardly decipherable. The man went on. ‘It’s all there, sir. Free to you. But the people in there refused to publish it.’

  Arnold didn’t say anything and tried moving around the young man and gain entrance to the shop. The man shifted sideways and continued to block him.

  ‘Are you trying to stop me entering this shop?’

  ‘No,’ the young man said, a little shocked by Arnold’s tone, and stepped neatly aside.

  Arnold passed through. There were some people in the shop and Polly was busy with them. She had not seen Arnold’s confrontation with the paper boy and he was disappointed by this. He browsed the tables where paper was laid out in reams of different colours and textures, some of it so thick and rough it was more like some sort of fabric. He looked again at the leaflet the boy had given him. Tiny handwriting; neurotic, cramped, shrunken. He realized that it was a poem, but not just one poem, several poems, some written at right angles to fit into every inch of space on the leaflet, a mosaic of text. But none of it was readable.

  ‘There you are,’ said Polly, having dealt with the customer, and speaking to him as if he’d been hiding. ‘Haven’t you seen him yet?’

  ‘Of course I’ve seen him. He was blocking the door.’

  ‘Well did you say anything to him?’

  ‘I just asked him to move aside, and he did.’

  ‘He’s got no right to stand outside my door turning customers away.’

  ‘He looks pretty harmless.’

  ‘To you, maybe, but you’re a man.’

  ‘The police can’t do anything?’

  ‘They tell him to move on, and so he moves on. Then he comes back.’

  ‘He’s a wisp of a thing. Looks like he could get blown away.’

  Another customer was trying to get into the shop, the boy was blocking her path, pushing his leaflets onto her, talking into her face. She gave up and went away.

  ‘Look what he’s doing. It can’t go on like this. You’ve got to talk to him.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Offer to have another look at his poems, perhaps?’

  ‘And then what? Publish them?’

  ‘Maybe. It depends.’

  ‘We’re not going to be bullied into publishing some lunatic’s poetry. And if we reject him again, he’ll just come back and carry on doing what he’s doing now.’

  ‘Perhaps if you reject him in a more sympathetic way than you did last time, he might calm down.’

  ‘How did I reject him last time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘Do you know what his name is?’

  ‘It’s on these leaflets, look . . .’

  He looked at the leaflet. The writing of the poems themselves was too small to decipher, but the name was larger, in block capitals. M A R T I N G U E R R E.

  ‘Obviously that can’t be his real name,’ said Polly.

  The name triggered something in Arnold’s memory. Among the forty or fifty submissions they received every month, this name, if nothing else, had enabled the poet to stand out from the rest.

  ‘I think I remember him,’ said Arnold, ‘but I can’t remember his poems, or what I wrote on them.’

  A customer had made it past the poet and into the shop, and Polly attended to her, leaving Arnold to think.

  He was at a loss for how to approach the man. When he rehearsed in his mind what he should say, he found himself taking the role of a nightclub bouncer, or hefty security guard, pushing the young poet firmly out of the way, locking him into a half-nelson when he offered resistance. Well, that was surely not the way, yet what else? The admonishing headmaster, telling the young poet not to be silly? Then, as he approached the door and the young man beyond it, dressed in a suit of his poems, he realized there was only one way to deal with him, and that was to read him.

  ‘Some of these lines are quite beautiful, but you might have used a bigger hand,’ he said, bending to peer at the boy’s paper torso, on which were written dozens of sonnets. The boy made no reply, and looked a little uncomfortable with the close attention. Arnold was evidently the first person to attempt reading what was written on the paper suit. ‘Why did you write them in such small lettering?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘It’s just my normal handwriting.’

  ‘But you wanted to make a display of them, in public.’

  ‘No. I just wanted to wear them.’

  Arnold straightened himself. He was touched by what felt like a very pure form of honesty in what the boy had said. ‘You are angry with us for turning down the poems you sent us. I’m sorry. We . . .’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘OK. But you’re not happy . . .’

  ‘Why do you keep saying what I’m feeling?’

  ‘I’m just trying to apologize to you.’

  The boy laughed, but with wha
t seemed genuine humour.

  ‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry if we upset you, I may have written some comments . . .’

  The boy’s expression suddenly became serious, as though stunned by a sudden moment of revelation. ‘Are you Arnold Proctor?’

  ‘Yes, I run the press here . . .’

  ‘I loved you.’

  ‘Oh.’ The comment completely silenced Arnold.

  ‘Your poems are beautiful.’

  ‘You’ve read my book?’

  ‘It’s in the college library. I keep taking it out. I’m the only one.’

  ‘You’re at the university?’

  ‘The art school.’

  A moment of silence, again Arnold felt wrong-footed. If the boy had been at the university he could have found common ground, but the art school was unknown territory to him. He wasn’t even sure he knew there was an art school in the city.

  ‘You had no right to write those things on my poems.’

  ‘Were they very bad, the things I wrote?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they were, you had no right to write on them. I sent them to you as a poet, not as a student. I know how to write poems.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such confidence. Where does it come from?’

  The boy didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, ‘If you are true to your feelings, then the poems will write themselves.’

  Arnold hadn’t the heart to challenge this assertion, even though it seemed to stab at him, personally.

  ‘Can we have a talk, somewhere more private?’

  Arnold had gently begun guiding the boy away from the shop, placing a hand on his papered elbow and turning him around. He was light and fragile beneath the paper, hardly a sense of a body there at all. He offered no resistance to being manoeuvred, and in fact yielded too readily to Arnold’s guidance. It felt to Arnold as though he was stealing a child.

  ‘I don’t want any tea,’ the boy said, as they walked along the High Street, Arnold’s hand still on the boy’s papered elbow. Beneath his hand he could feel warmth within the paper. It was an unnerving sensation, like feeling a gift-wrapped present that contained something alive. ‘I only drink coffee. Fair-trade coffee.’