Book With No Name

Chapter 1

THE MAN WHO HATED AMERICANS

I first met Paddy Woods in the grounds of a scruffy housing estate in suburban London. He was standing atop a grass bank reciting poetry to an audience of one. He was also very drunk and kept sliding down the bank, much to the amusement of his spellbound audience – a child of around seven.

‘Here’, he said to me as I tried to skirt around him when he slipped one more time, ‘where are you going with my whiskey?’, grabbing the bottle of Teachers I was holding by the neck and clutching it to his rather muddy grey jumper. Momentarily surprised, I allowed him to accomplish this task unhindered. I contemplated for a moment whether or not to wrest it back from hin, but decided against it.

He fell down again. This time I picked him up.

‘Good man...good man yourself’, he said, showing no inclination to let go of my bottle. I soon established that he lived in one of the flats on the estate. Eventually, by half dragging half carrying him, I got him back to his abode.

‘Have a drink’, he invited, savaging the top of the bottle. He poured the golden liquid into two tin cups that he plucked from a plastic basin that lay festering on the draining board. Barely fit for human habitation was how I saw the room. The living area was littered with books and papers, the debris and the piled up junk of everyday living visible everywhere. A couple of old typewriters faced each other at opposite ends of a pock-marked dining table, both primed with blank sheets of paper.

‘I hate bloody Americans...don’t you?’ don’t you said suddenly.

I hadn’t really thought about it; they weren’t my favourite race admittedly, but I bore them no particular grudge. I nodded my head noncommittally.

‘Especially American women’, he added, helping himself to another generous slug of my Teachers.

I guessed that he had suffered an unhappy relationship with a female from Uncle Sam’s fair land. Perhaps she had left him and the drink was the result. Or perhaps it was the cause.

‘I’m a writer, you know’, he said, as if that explained everything. The mess, the drunkenness, the general squalor.

‘Oh, I see’, I said, betraying an interest despite myself. ‘So am I...well...I want to be...’

‘What have you written?’ He almost bit me head off

‘Well...nothing really...I’m just thinking about it’.

‘Thinking about it!’, he roared at me. ‘The difference between writers and those who want to write is that writers write, and those who want sit on their arses and think about it’. He bounded to the table where the typewriters sat. ‘Look at these!’ he shouted. He grabbed a bundle of typescript and flung them to the floor. ‘That’s writing. Five pages every day. I’ve written more stories than Ray Bradbury – and all of them better than his...’ He attacked the whiskey bottle again.

‘You’re a published writer then?’ I enquired.

‘Published my foot! I’ve had so many rejections I could paper this room with them. Do you know how many stories Bradbury wrote before he got published?’

‘No’

‘Well, neither do I. But it was hundreds. Maybe as many as five hundred. And look at him now. You know what he said about writing? ‘You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. And he said this about inspiration; ‘My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down -- everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off’.

‘I read Fahrenheit 400 a while ago. I thought it was...cool’

‘I thought it was...hot myself’. He laughed at his little joke. ‘That was the only science fiction book he ever wrote, you know’.

‘I thought his stuff was all science fiction’.

Nah. All his other books were fantasy. He said so himself. Science fiction is a depiction of the real, fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. Remember that when you are a real writer’. He laughed mirthlessly, ‘The greatest story I ever wrote was stolen by a Yankee viper masquerading as my friend. She even sold the film rights to one of her countrymen’.

As he spoke he was rummaging through a stack of paper. ‘Ah! Listen to this. “She was a looker alright. No doubt about it. As soon as she stepped off the train I could see it. Her auburn hair, wavy but not ostentatious if you get my drift, fluttered ever so slightly as she looked around her. Her height alone set her apart from everyone else – a six-footer at least and statuesque to go with it – but it was something else, something less tangible that had my pulse quickening. There was - I reached for the word - a wantonness about her. Yeah, that was it I decided. No luggage either. That was good. Well, better without than with anyway. Less for me to dispose of afterwards. She was looking for someone and the wave of her hand suggested she had found him or her. I switched my gaze quickly towards the exit barrier and found a middle-aged man returning her wave. She hurried towards him and kissed him perfunctorily on one cheek. Though I had never met this man I knew his face from countless magazines and newspapers, and numerous appearances on television. A mover and shaker, you could say. They disappeared quickly, headed for his chauffeur-driven limousine I imagined. I wasn’t too concerned about tailing them. I knew their destination”.

The opening lines to the greatest story I ever wrote – and she fucking stole them’.

‘But...she couldn’t do that!’ I protested.

‘Oh yes she could – especially when I sold it to her for a few hundred dollars. Lock, stock and barrel’.

I looked at him incredulously. ‘What...copyright and all?’

‘The whole shebang’. He looked at the half-empty bottle, ‘whiskey is a good friend but a terrible master. And anyway, it was only words’. He waved his hand at the room. ‘I’ve got millions of them here’. He tapped his forehead with a forefinger, ‘and here’.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I asked tentatively.

He looked at me for a long time before answering. ‘From all around me, my friend. Listen to the stories inside of you. Look into the snake pit. Remember your dreams – and talk to them’. Then he lay down on the shabby mattress, clutching the whiskey bottle to his chest. ‘Now, my friend, I must sleep...’ The voice petered out and he began to snore.

I couldn’t resist taking a peek at some of his writing as he slept, and when I left I took one of his stories with me. I read it later that night and thought it was brilliant.

...................

The next time I saw him he was famous, and married to the Yankee viper. It must have been about a year and a half after our first encounter and I was still trying to write -unsuccessfully.

He was being interviewed on one of those trendy art programmes on TV, and being lauded as the next James Joyce.

‘There was only one Joyce’, he told the interviewer, ‘and there will only be one Paddy Woods’.

It emerged that his new book about to be made into a film, and was already high in the best seller lists. His lovely American wife (close up of her nostrils) was collaborating on the film script with him, and when it was finished they were planning to retire to a remote spot in the West of Ireland and have ten children.

The interviewer then asked him how he became a writer.

‘Here’s the story’, he said. ‘I was born in a box in a backroom in Limerick city. My mother never knew my father, and used to beg in the streets so we wouldn’t starve. When it was too cold she would wrap up an old plastic doll in a shawl and pretend it was me. She wasn’t much of anything but she cared about me. There were men who came and went, but mostly we were alone. When I was about seven she got very fat. Through my child’s eyes I saw her get bigger and fatter as the weeks went by. And the bigger she got the uglier she looked. Then she got sick and took to her bed. The doctor came, and when she was well again she wasn’t fat anymore. With memories like that how could I not be a writer?’

What happened to your mother?’ the interviewer asked.

‘She died when I was fifteen. The hard life...and too much booze’. He blessed himself. ‘Thank God I never touch the stuff myself’.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The Paddy Woods I had met was weaned on whiskey!’

................................

It was to be nearly two years before I saw him in the flesh again. I had taken myself off to the writers weeks at Listowel in the faint hope that some of its literary eminence might rub off on me. I still had not written anything. Paddy was still famous. – another book – and was a guest of the organisers. I was surprised that he remembered me.

‘The man who wanted to write’, he said, ‘did you like what you saw in the snake pit?’ If that wasn’t a Teachers he was knocking back then it was a fair imitation of one to me!

‘I saw you on TV a while ago’, I said, by way of letting him know that he wasn’t fooling me.

‘Ah yes’, he said, raising his glass. ‘It’s the real stuff alright. Sure I couldn’t write my five pages a day without it’. He looked around, ‘and if you’re looking for the Yankee hoor you won’t find her either’.

‘I’m curious’, I replied.

He ordered a refill before answering me then began to elaborate. ‘When they stole my story – and steal it they did, for I was legless when I signed it away – and made it into a film they didn’t realise it was going to be such a huge success. It was tailor-made for a sequel, but they couldn’t get a writer to write a satisfactory one. You see, it wasn’t just a story – it was my story. It was me. Only I could write their sequel’.

‘To cut a long story short, I wrote the sequel – I already had it written to be honest – and took them for a lot of money. Then I told the hoor that I had five more stories like that, only better, and that she would have to marry me to get hold of them. To my surprise she did!’ He was watching me all the time, ‘We got married in Reno for ten dollars one weekend’. He laughed heartily, ‘they tell me that it costs thirty dollars to get a divorce there- - but they say it’s quick’.

I was fascinated. I didn’t know if it was the truth he was telling or if it was a pack of lies. Maybe he didn’t know himself.

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, one night after the sequel flopped – which I had made sure it would – I bought three bottles of Teachers and poured two of them over all my unpublished work. Then I set the lot alight in her presence. ‘What are you doing?’ she screeched at me. ‘I know, it such a waste of good whiskey’, I laughed. Then I sat down and watched it burn, downing half the remaining bottle in the process. I haven’t seen her since, thank God’.

‘But why burn all your work?’

He laughed. ‘For years everything I wrote was rejected. Suddenly I am famous and any old rubbish I submit will be published. If it wasn’t good enough then, why should it be good enough now? I can always write the same stories again – only better’. He ordered another whiskey, ‘beside, I don’t need the money now’.

‘All that stuff about your mother, and not drinking, what was that in aid of? I asked.

‘Everything I said about my mother was true, God rest her. As for the drinking, I didn’t want the world to know that I was just another drunken bum. When you found me that first day I was on my way out. I was a bottle a day man’. He swirled the liquid around in his glass, ‘nowadays I can control it’.

‘Perhaps you saved my life, I don’t know. But when I woke up on that damp mattress with your empty bottle beside me, something clicked’. He looked long and hard at me then stared to leave. He turned and his parting words still stick in my mind; ‘Oh, I knew it was your whiskey – but we both got what we wanted. I got the whiskey, you got the story’.

He then placed a box of matches in my hand. ‘You might need these later. Adios’.

When he had gone I still couldn’t figure out whether he was referring to the story he had told me or the one I had stolen.

When I got back home I burnt it.

End

MONEY FROM AMERICA

Lardy stood hunched, a knife in his hand. A hosepipe lay coiled at his feet. He lifted the severed piece. It was a length that would stretch comfortably from the exhaust pipe to the interior of the car.

People of thought he was mad but he knew he wasn’t. A bit eccentric maybe - and it was an impression that he did little to discourage. Jack knew different, dear brother Jack now lying drunk and senseless on the kitchen floor.

All their lives they had dared each other. I can milk more cows than you, I can sow more barley than you, I can chop more firewood than you, I can drink more whiskey than you. Not when it’s laced with sleeping powder you can’t brother Jack!

He pushed the hosepipe over the exhaust and secured it with a piece of wire which he twisted tightly to hold it in place. The other end he poked through a small hole in the floor of the Cortina behind the rear seat. He sealed around the hole with a fistful of mud scraped from his Wellingtons boots.

Leave this place, would you Jack?

He opened the passenger seat and wound down the seat until it was fully reclined. The communicating door between the kitchen and workshop was already ajar. Jack was snoring as he lifted him under the armpits and dragged him down the two stone steps to the workshop floor.

Sixty years I’ve spent here Jack. Man and boy. And I intend to die here

He paused to get his breath back and caught his reflection in the cracked mirror that lay against the workshop bench. They were an unlikely pair: him with his grime-blackened face, his dog-eared beret, and his tattered bits of clothing. And Jack with his clean-shaven chin, his corduroy trousers and his brown brogues.

That’s what America could have done for you, Lardy, he said to himself.

He dragged Jack a little closer to the car. Until now it hadn’t bothered him that Jack had chosen to make his life in the US , while he toiled on the land in the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains. Sure, he came back to the farm every summer for a couple of weeks. And every month there was a crisp new fifty dollar bill in the post.

And each time the postman waved the letter under his nose, he grinned. ‘More money from America, Lardy’. Lardy wondered how he knew.

Did you think money from America kept this place going brother Jack?

Now he was expected to live by the sea with a few acres of sand for company. And in a caravan too; he wasn’t grand enough to live in the house with them!

Life’s not fai, is it brother Jack? I did the work and you got the farm

He stopped suddenly – listening. He could hear Molly Kehoe roaring up his boreen in her exhaust-free Landrover. Hairy Molly as everyone called her, because of some facial hair that sprouted under her lower lip. He shook his head; the woman was a menace in that wagon of hers. Always losing pigs from it, and wasn’t too bothered about the fact either. He recalled that one had landed on the bonnet of a Garda car once, and when the young garda had brought a summons round later she had called him a ‘galivanised bastard’.

He beat her into the kitchen by a couple of seconds. She brought with her her own distinctive fragrance – pig slurry. Not a man to be bothered by the odours of the world – he was known in the village as the polecat himself– he still reckoned that the smell pigs generated was one of the vilest.

Funnily, he had never thought of Molly as a woman. But she must have been one once. Before Barney had made her a widow by falling into his own pig trough in a drunken stupor - and was almost devoured by the pigs. Since then pigs had been her life. ‘Swine’, she was heard to mutter for years afterwards, ‘and I am not referring to pigs’.

Having entered the kitchen she proceeded to stumble over the mutilated remains of a tree lying on the floor near the fire.

‘I see you’re nearly out of turf again, Lardy, she said, peering at him through the smoke. She handed him a couple of books. ‘There you are. Somethin’ to keep ya busy during the long nights. Shoot Out At Medicine Bow is the best. Plenty of shootin’ and killin...’ She looks around. ‘Where’s The Yank then?’

‘Gone out’, he muttered, wondering what she was after.

‘Gone to see the solicitors, I suppose’, she said, helping herself to the remains of Jack’s whiskey. It sank without a murmur. ‘God, ‘tis great traipsing round the countryside we’ve had since the place went up for sale. I’ve seen fellas in collars and ties, up in the hills, measuring and marking, stepping this way and that, looking at you through them funny looking cameras they carry around. You’d think they were prospecting for gold. Wouldn’t that be something? Our very own Klondyke in the foothills of the Comeraghs!’ She put on a western drawl, ‘thar’s gold in them thar hills!’

‘They were prospecting. Well, testin’ anyway’

‘You’re joken me!’

‘They were looking for silver, I think. Not gold. I could have told them they wouldn’t find anything. There’s nothing but rocks out there’. He placed the books on top of the TV set. ‘I’ll look at these later. Do you know what the latest scheme is? To turn the place into an ostrich farm’.

‘Ostriches! Sure there’s no sand...’

‘I’m tellin’ ya. A fella came down from Cork, had a look around, and said it was ideal for raisin’ ostriches’.

‘Ya can’t be up to those Corkmen. They know which side their bread is buttered on’. She looked at him for a moment, ‘What will you do when Jack sells this place...live in a tar-barrel like the Bishop?’

Lardy remembered The Bishop only too well; he had gone to school with him. Years later something had happened and he had cracked up. He had taken to wearing a dog collar – a real one – hence the nickname. Sometimes late at night he even howled like a dog. He left his bit of land and took to roaming the neighbourhood on a bicycle, an old rusty contraption that had once seen service as a postman’s transport. He towed his life behind him in a tiny two-wheeled buggy attached to the rear carrier. He slept in ditches in plastic fertiliser bags, and later in a tar-barrel, which he crawled into late at night. Molly had eventually taken pity on him and built him a one-roomed wooden shack at the bottom of her paddock. There, he had cremated himself in be one night, along with a packet of Woodbine cigarettes.

Lardy had witnessed the Bishop’s funeral pyre that fateful night and thought it was a bonfire – the local football team celebrating their victory that day in the county championship. He was about to relate this tale to Molly when a commotion from the workshop stopped him. Aghast, he watched as Jack crawled up the workshop steps.

‘I thought you said gone out’, Molly shook her head, ‘passed out more like’.

‘My gawd’, Jack moaned, ‘I feel terrible. What kind of shit did you put in that whiskey Laurence? Some of your goddamn poteen I suppose’. Then he noticed their guest. ‘How ya doin’ Molly?’

‘Tip top Jack, tip top’, she replied. Another mouthful of the whiskey disappeared. ‘Nuthin’ wrong with this stuff’.

Jack crawled to a chair and flopped into it. ‘Last thing I recall I was sittin’ right here – so how come I wind up on the cold stone floor in the garage?’ He looked at Lardy but got no reply.

‘But not stone-cold sober, eh Jack!’

‘Nope’. He chuckled, ‘Can’t take it anymore, I guess. Gettin’ too old’.

‘It comes to us all, boy. I heartell you’re gettin’ yourself a wife’

He looked surprised for a moment. ‘That’s right Molly. All those years I thought I could do without one...I was wrong...you can’t beat a good woman’.

‘Some do’, Molly muttered to herself. ‘And here I was all the time, only waitin’ for the call’

‘Hell Molly, you never shouted loud enough!’

‘Oh, I shouted alright Jack Carey – you just weren’t listenin’’ By now she was moving about in her clothes, as if something was irritating her. She felt for something inside her cardigan then pulled out two letters and handed them to Jack. ‘I nearly forgot. These came for you this morning’.

‘Hell Molly, you ought to charge that postie mileage. You make more deliveries here than he does.’

‘I was comin’ over this way anyway’. She indicated the letters. ‘More money from America I suppose. Begod it’s a great place, no doubt’.

‘That’s the last of them Molly. No more money from America – as you call it. All my investments are on this side of the water now’.

‘You’ll be buyin’ that place in Tramore then?’

‘You know sumptin’ Molly’, Jack looked at Lardy then laughed, ‘if people travelled as fast as news around this place we’d all be meetin’ ourselves coming back! But what the hell, it’s no big deal anyhow, yes, I’ll be buying’.

‘What’s New York like? I always dreamed of going to New York’.

Jack smiled. ‘Big. The Big Apple, they call it. The biggest apple there ever was. A man could lose himself there quite easily. Or a woman – if she had a mind to’.

‘You managed it for thirty years Jack’.

He shook his head. ‘Not quite Molly. Oh, I tried, but I never quite managed it’.

‘Would I like it there?’

‘Hell, I don’t know’. A pause. ‘Yeah. I guess so’.

‘Won’t it be a shame about the farm though...leaving it all behind?’ She turned to Lardy. ‘How about you Lardy...will you miss it?’

‘We won’t miss it’, Jack answered. ‘We’re too old for these hills. It’s time to put our feet up...eh Laurence?’

Lardy didn’t say anything. He was thinking My feet are fine where they are. It’s her, Miss Snotty Nose from Bray. Too grand to live on a farm. Too refined. He had read some of her letters when Jack had been away in Town for the day. Darling Jack, Of course I will marry you. But we can’t live on a farm. I am not cut out for that kind of life, you must realise that. A place by the sea, a guest house, or a small hotel, perhaps. What with the proceeds from my place and your farm we should manage nicely... and later in the letter... of course there is the problem of your brother...from what you tell me he can’t possibly live in the house with us...a mobile home seems the best solution

Jack wrapped an arm round his shoulder. ‘A little bit of heaven by the sea, you’ll enjoy that, won’t you, Laurence?’

Lardy could only nod. Inside he was thinking; if that nosey old sow hadn’t turned up you would already be on your way to heaven. Or hell. And I could stay on here. What had she come for anyway?

He had his answer when she emptied her glass and indicated her imminent departure ; ‘I only came over to borrow your chainsaw’.

‘No problem’, Jack replied, already on his way towards the garage. ‘I’ll go and get it for you. It’s in the boot of the car’.

End

GEORGE

I first made George’s acquaintance in Ladbroke Grove when he veered from a side road and rode straight in front of me, begging to be knocked down. I managed to disoblige him and nearly demolished a plate-glass butcher’s window in the process. The blood-stained vendor froze in the act of removing a leg of mutton from the window display when he saw my half ton of mechanised metal glaring down at him from a distance of six inches. George merely raised his hat in acknowledgement and continued on his leisurely way.

Once seen, George was unlikely to be forgotten. His shiny, moon-shaped face was partitioned by a handlebar moustache that just failed to reach his ears, and was adorned by a tiny pork-pie hat that perched precariously on his non-stick dome. He sat emperor-straight on the high-framed bicycle, arms outstretched to reach the handlebars, rigid from the legs upward.

‘You damned lunatic!’ I yelled at his retreating back, and, leaving the butcher still frozen in wide-eyed awe, gave chase.

He might not have been much of a cyclist but as a gentleman he had few peers. He doffed his hat at every female we passed, and the less-than-friendly response didn’t seem to bother him unduly. We turned into the Harrow Road and he eventually noticed my shaking fist.

‘I could have killed you back there’, I raged when we had come to a halt. ‘Why don’t you look where you are going?’

He smiled serenely back at me. ‘A navigational misjudgement, sir. I do apologise’.

‘Navigational misjudgement...!’

He peered closely at me. ‘It’s Mr Adams, isn’t it?’

I racked my brain for some long-forgotten acquaintance with this madman.

‘You own a gallery in the Portobello Road and you specialise in old prints, am I correct?’

I nodded my head.

‘I, too, am a lover of old prints. In fact I have a collection of them. I am apt to wander around shops and galleries in pursuit of my pleasure and have passed your premises on many occasions’.

The discovery that we both shared the same passion awakened my interest in him. A love of the arts excused many conditions; perhaps it wasn’t madness that afflicted him but merely eccentricity.

‘You have never been in my gallery. I would surely have remembered you...’

George fiddled with his garish dicky bow. ‘Embarrassment Mr Adams. You see I mainly visit these, ah...emporiums with a view to selling one or two of my treasures. The needs of the body you see...man cannot live on fresh air alone’.

‘But I am just as likely to buy your wares as the next gallery’.

‘My paltry offerings would hardly interest you. It is obvious from your window display that you cater for the top end of the market’.

I laughed. ‘My dear fellow it’s all a question of putting the ‘best wine’ in the window. Behind the facade is as much junk as the next chap. I would be perfectly willing to look at your offerings. I may not buy them of course...’

He indicated the cardboard box lashed to his rear carrier. ‘I was on my way to do some negotiating now. Would you care to look through these?’

I agreed and we adjourned to a nearby cafe for refreshments. I grimaced when I saw the interior; tables and chairs courtesy of the Salvation Army, walls the colour of old parchment.

The assistant behind the counter could have been twenty or thirty; hard to say without resort to a scraper.

‘What’s it today Van Gogh?’ she asked George

‘Two coffees, my dear’.

‘ ‘Ark at him. My dear! Who’s payin’?’

I proffered the correct money for the coffees.

‘Just as well. ‘e never ‘as two pennies to rub together’.

George took a sip of his coffee. ‘We artists have to suffer for our art, my dear. Poverty figures large in that suffering’.

‘Artist!’ She turned to me. ‘ Van Gogh of Kensal Green’. She shook her head, ‘Mad as an ‘atter’.

Over the coffees I rummaged through the contents of the box. I never expect too much in my game so I am rarely disappointed. This occasion was no exception. The majority had clearly been taken from old books. There were plate numbers on many of them, sequential, which meant they had come from the same book.

Quite a number of them were black and white – or at least they had been until somebody had tried to colour them in. This was a practice that was becoming more widespread; tart up an old print, stick it in a poncey frame and knock it out for thirty quid down the Bayswater road on a Sunday morning.

George had been watching me as I worked my way down through the pile. ‘Well’, he spoke as I put the last one down, ‘can you use any of them?’

I couldn’t. Not personally. But I knew somebody who could.

‘I’ll give you a quid each for them’, I said, prepared to double my offer if need be.

Much to my surprise George accepted the offer. .A couple of minutes later the box was firmly on my side of the table and he was shoving four tenners in his waistcoat pocket.

The waitress had been hovering in the background all this time and within minutes of our transaction she was standing by George’s side.

‘You can pay your bill now’, she shrilled. ‘We’re not a bleedin’ charity you know’.

George doffed his hat. ‘Certainly m’dear. Very kind of you to let me run up so much. How much does it come to?’

‘Eight pounds, fifty pee’.

He presented her with one of the tenners from his waistcoat pocket. ‘There you are my dear. Keep the change’.

That flustered her momentarily and gave me a chance to study her more closely. Pity about the muck on her face, I thought. She had nice eyes, sparkling like spring water on a sunny day.

‘Sold you some of his rubbish then ‘as he?’ She returned my gaze. ‘Well, there’s plenty more where that came from’. She began clearing the table. ‘He’s barmy you know. Painting, painting...all night long’.

George seemed embarrassed by her outburst. ‘Yes...well I do tend to work late at night. Can’t sleep you see...’ His voice trailed off for a moment then revived again. ‘Perhaps you could call round some evening and appraise more of my collection?’

I told him I would be delighted to and we arranged a time a few days hence. He then doffed his hat to both of us and was gone

.......

How describe George’s house? Once inside, the only way was upwards. Downstairs was barricaded with boxes and bins, bits of old bicycles, stacks of mouldy books, picture frames, broken vases and sundry other items too numerous to mention. There was an enormous bellows lying across the doorway leading to the downstairs rooms. Of the door itself there was no sign. The room in the background was the scene of even greater devastation; it was if a dustcart had emptied its contents in the middle of it. I could hear a cat mewing among the debris.

George waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the accumulated junk. ‘I don’t live downstairs any longer. When one lives alone a couple of rooms are ample – and cheaper to heat of course’.

I followed him up the stairs and couldn’t see much improvement in the conditions up there. It consisted to two rooms and a bathroom and toilet. The toilet housed one of those enormous cast-iron baths with splayed legs that always reminded me of a Sphinx.

The bedroom contained two mattresses stacked together with a mound of blankets heaped on top. The rest of the space was taken up with more of the same junk from downstairs.

But it was the living room that impressed me most. Everything that George needed to survive was crammed in here. A tiny gas ring stood on a rickety cabinet, bubbling away, taking the chill off the air. Beneath it, cooking utensils and foodstuffs fought for breathing space on the bulging shelves. I could see a plastic container of something or other with a furry green substance growing on top of it. In the centre of the room stood a wobbly table. It was laden down with paints, brushes, palettes and knives. There were a couple of paint-spattered bentwood chairs nearby and a paraffin heater that smelled like a diesel engine. The only other item of furniture was a small mahogany sideboard that held a collection of figurines- all flawed in some way – and a silver-framed photograph of a young woman from a bygone era.

There was also an easel, with a painting resting on it. It appeared unfinished; a landscape or seascape of some sort. Its background was a blend of crimson and gold that might have been an inferno. It had the hazy, misty look about it that is often associated with Turner. None of his genius however.

‘Admiring my Turner, eh? Well, my attempt at it’, George said somewhat sheepishly.

‘A very difficult man to copy our Mr Turner. Still, you seem to have captured the...mirage effect’, I replied noncommittally.

His face lit up like a child’s. ‘D’you think so?’ He stood back a little, his hands on his hips. ‘Yes, I see what you mean’.

We were silent for a moment then he remarked casually.’ It’s the voices, you know’.

‘’Voices?’ I heard myself saying.

‘Oh yes. Sometimes I am lying there at night and they come to me. I have to get up and paint then. Often through the night...’

‘They tell you to paint...Turner, these voices?’

‘Of course. Always Turner. Never anybody else’.

By this time I should have concluded that he was a raving lunatic, but it never occurred to me. Afterwards it puzzled me, yet somehow it didn’t seem out of place. He told me how the voices had first come to him years ago, and how he had been painting to their specification ever since. He was convinced it was Turner speaking to him. He had tried to sell them or place them in auctions but without success. There must have been a couple of dozen paintings in all, and when he had removed the dirty dust-sheet and let me view the pile I could understand why the dealers had laughed at his claim that they were the work of Turner.

I told him that I wasn’t interested in his paintings, didn’t fancy Turner that much, and he seemed to accept that. What intrigued me were the piles of prints scattered about the room. There must have been hundreds of them. He was very reticent about where they came from. I collected them over the years. Where from? Books, just books. Where are the books now? Who knows? Lost. Thrown away. In the end I was no wiser.

I tried a different approach. ‘Have you always lived on your own?’

‘I was married once’, he eventually replied. ‘’But it all seems like a dream now. A bad dream...’ He indicated the sideboard and the silver-framed photograph. ‘My dear wife. My lovely wife...’ and a fog settled over his face.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died’, he replied simply. His hand forestalled any condolences on my part. ‘It was all a long time ago. All forgotten now’. His hand waved vaguely around the room. ‘She wouldn’t have liked any of this. Not my Marjorie’.

I tried to draw him out some more but he had said all he was going to say on the subject for the present. I ended up parting with fifty pounds, and acquired another box of prints and a raging curiosity.

......

George’s voices got louder as time passed. Over the months I made regular visits to his house, and not always to buy. This old man, faintly ridiculous-looking, who painted badly and held conversations with Turner, had got me going. It wasn’t madness that possessed him, I decided, but fanaticism. You could see it in his eyes when he spoke about Turner – there was fire raging in there. Despite his obsession he was very articulate and could converse knowledgably on a wide range of subjects. When I mentioned Universities however he shook his head and remarked in his sometimes pompous manner that his education was gained in ‘the public libraries of London’.

He was now spending most of his time at his painting, and once finished the canvas would be hawked around from shop to shop, gallery to gallery, in the hope that somebody, somewhere, would accept it for the masterpiece he believed it to be.

Despite my constant probing I never learned much about his background or what made him tick. Why I should be interested I had no idea, but I knew that my curiosity would not be denied. Conversations with other gallery and junk-shop owners soon established that he was well-known all over London. I learned that he had been touting his prints around the Capital for more than thirty years, selling them everywhere from the Embankment to outside Madame Tussaud’s.

‘How come I haven’t come across him before?’ I asked one acquaintance.

‘Probably because you haven’t been in the Smoke too long’, was his reply. He’s been out of circulation for a while. To be honest I thought he was dead’.

He was delighted to learn that George was still very much alive, and when I related the tale of the Turners he laughed.

‘Of course. It makes sense now. I’d heard stories of a few piss-poor copies floating about’.

Another friend thought his wife might have been an artist herself. He seemed to think that she had died mysteriously but couldn’t elaborate any further. Another still came up with the name of Tanner Daly, a totter who had spent all his life knocking on doors in the Notting Hill and Queens Park area, and who had been friendly with George.

A few days later I was in the cafe again, this time on my own. Rita, the counter assistant had shown definite signs of wanting to further our acquaintance so I asked her out for a drink. Later that evening, her hair fluffed up and her plump knees shining above six-inch stilettos, I wondered what I was letting myself in for. When we had exhausted the usual small talk – I told her how my wife had run off with my accountant and how happy they were somewhere in Spain and she told me how her boyfriend had dumped her for her best friend – the talk turned back to George. I asked her if she had ever heard of Tanner Daly.

‘Course I have. Everybody knows Tanner. Anyway, he’s family – he’s my dad’s uncle.

When I mentioned the possibility of him and George being friends she wasn’t so sure.

‘I suppose they might have. I never remember him talking about him though. Maybe when he was totting. But he packed that up more than twenty years ago – when he bought the caff’.

‘The cafe you work in? He owns that?’ She nodded her head. ‘Do you think I could talk to him?’

‘Not at the caff you can’t. He hasn’t been there for ten years. But if you fancy a drive tomorrow you can come with me when I visit him’.

Later on, after we had generated some heat in the back seat of my Mercedes, she told me he rented out the cafe to her family. That way he got an income in his old age and they got a living out of it. She laughed when I asked how he had got his nickname.

‘Tanner? Whenever he bought anything he’d say ‘I’ll give you a tanner for it missus’. That’s all he ever paid for anything, he reckoned’.

The following day found us somewhere round the back of Wembley High Street, at the Eagles Old Peoples’ home. God preserve me from old age I thought as we waited at reception. The signs of decay were everywhere. All about me shapeless bundles were lolling about in armchairs; one old man’s mouth was half-open and his dribble was falling unheeded on his sleeve. There were conversations going on, but with themselves and not each other. By the time Tanner had been found I was wishing I hadn’t come. Small and wiry-looking, the veins bulging on his hands and neck, he was almost invisible in the large tub-chair that housed him in a corner of the TV room.

‘Oh, it’s you’, he said when he saw Rita. ‘Is it Christmas then?’

‘Give over, Tanner’, she laughed. ‘It’s only a few weeks since I saw you. And dad comes to see you nearly every week, don’t he’.

‘Yeah. Worse luck the miserable bleeder’. He turned to me, ‘did you bring anything to drink? Don’t give it to me. Slip it into that green vase on the table over there by the window. Worse than the bloody Gestapo they are around here...’

‘I’m sorry...’ I began, wondering what he was on about.

‘Take no notice of ‘im’, Rita interrupted. ‘He plays that game every time I come here’. I could see Tanner chuckling away. ‘Adam’s here to talk to you about George. He paints and sells pictures. Adam thought you might’a known him once’.

‘Old George. Yeah, I knew him. Still do. Comes around now and then. Always brings me a drop and a few smokes...’ He paused, ‘you sure you ain’t got anything?’

I shook my head then remembered the couple of cigars in my inside pocket. They disappeared from my hand before I had time to offer them to him.

‘When did you first meet George?, I asked him.

‘A long time ago. Now, was it before the war or after? Must’a been after I suppose. He was supposed to help me with the knocking but in the end I couldn’t afford him’.

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. He couldn’t keep his trap shut when I was haggling over a deal. Always encouraging me to pay more’.

‘You fell out?’

‘Nah. We never did. Just went our separate ways. Any old books or prints I got I put his way. He was like a bleedin’ magpie as I recall’.

‘So you supplied his books over the years?’

Her shook his head. ‘Only some of them. Very few in the end I would say’.

‘So where did he get them from?’

‘I couldn’t say’.

Or wouldn’t say. There was little else to be learned; it appeared his periods of lucidity were fairly short-lived. When we left he was searching for the bottle I had supposedly hidden from him and muttering about rats.

It was George himself who provided the answers by getting himself killed a few weeks later. Failing to get any response to my repeated knocking, and seeing lights on all over the house, I gained entry by means of the key I had remembered hanging on a length of string behind the door-flap. There was no sign of him upstairs and it was only when I began searching the ground-floor rooms that I discovered the open trapdoor behind the stairs. George was lying at the bottom of some makeshift steps.

He had been dead for several days, his head surrounded by a pool of dark, caked blood. There were several dead rats nearby and his cat was sitting close to the body – as if on guard.

The cavern where he lay was illuminated as a bleak, windowless tomb, but not damp or mildewed. The room was large, oblong in shape, and seemed to be an original feature of the house that had not been completed. Its contents stunned me or a moment; books, stacks upon stacks of them heaped high. There were more than thirty columns of them, each the height of myself, and each pile having a year number attached near the top. All were chronologically arranged, starting with the previous year and working their way backwards.

I picked a few of the books at random. They were all library books, each bearing the stamps of a local authority in the London area. I eased a few more from the centre of several piles. The same. A quick calculation told me there were more than six thousand books in the cellar.

One wall was taken up with a rough-hewn timber shelving system. Ten carefully-wrapped canvasses filled the shelves. Their quality was unmistakable; not Turner, but definitely not George’s inept dabbling. I found a couple of portraits amongst them; one was certainly George as a plump young man; the other was of a young woman with a mane of flame-red hair. On the back of this was scrawled ‘ self-portrait 1952’. All were signed. Marjorie’.

In a small roll-top desk I found a couple of leather-bound journals. All the books were catalogued inside; the libraries they had been taken from, the dates, the number of prints removed from each book. There were also several cuttings, preserved in plastic wrapping, but yellowed. I read one

‘Promising artist Marjorie Andover was found dead yesterday in the cellars of Willesden Green Library, having been accidently locked down there over the bank holiday weekend. The doctor said she probably died of fright. Her husband George, who had been frantically searching for her all weekend, said she was pathologically afraid of the dark and even slept with a light on. A library spokesman said she had been allowed down in the cellars to view some old art books that had been stored down there because of lack of space upstairs. Later, the caretaker had seen the cellar lights on, called down and got no reply, and had locked the cellar door and switched the lights off from above. The lights couldn’t be turned back on again from below’.

The story went on to describe how she had shredded her fingernails trying to claw her way out, and that some of her flesh had been gnawed at by rats.

They buried George today in Kensal Green cemetery. I was the only mourner. Rita couldn’t come as she was busy at the cafe. What will happen to the house and its contents I haven’t the foggiest; it seems that Marjorie was an orphan and no trace of any relative of George can be found. It was quite amusing to hear the interested parties argue about whose jurisdiction the books came under; the police reckoned they were the libraries problem, while the libraries maintained they were the proceeds of crime and should be held by the police. Nobody wants the problem of George’s books.

Me, I have a problem too. Before I called the police I removed Marjorie’s pictures from the basement. All ten of them. They are now adorning the walls of my flat above the gallery, looking like a million dollars. Well, ten million to be exact.

The name bothered me you see so I wired a gallery owner I knew in New York for information. ‘Yes’, the information came back, ‘Marjorie Andover’s work is very well known over here. The last known example of her work sold about twenty years ago for one hundred thousand dollars. A new find at this time might easily make one million’’

The easy thing to do would be to claim that George had sold them to me. But I can’t. You see there was also another item in the roll-top desk that I overlooked. George’s will. And an inventory of Marjorie’s paintings, together with instructions that they be donated to the National Gallery. The representative from the gallery had a good laugh when he inspected the paintings I had put in their place – ten of George’s Turners – and said he was now convinced that there was not a single painting of Marjorie’s unaccounted for.

Ten million dollars...George couldn’t have known. Or could he?

end

SOME COWBOY

Johnjo’s greatest treasure was a bone-handled imitation Colt forty-five that his uncle sent him from Manchester for his twelfth birthday, together with a real leather holster and a tin star. He made himself a mask and some silver bullets and drove the neighbourhood crazy with his shouts of ‘hi-ho silver’ and ‘Kemo Sabe’. ( he never found out what this last expression meant but it sounded good) He was devastated the day Mick O’ Shea took the gun off him and broke the trigger trying to show how fast he was on the draw. He made several subsequent attempts to break a number of Mick bones with a hurley, but a catalogue of painful minor injuries of his own forced him to abandon the idea.

Without cowboy comics he would probably have been illiterate. He devoured them, slowly piecing the words in the balloons together and eventually making sense of them. Comics were his limit though; when it came to reading and writing in the classroom he wasn’t really interested. He camouflaged this to a degree by cajoling, bribing and sometimes by threatening. As a result, the teachers were never quite sure whether he was stupid or just plain lazy. There was however a quality he possessed which went unnoticed in the classroom; he possessed a native cunning which is sometimes better than intelligence. He found out early in life what a valuable commodity money was, and after school he would be found doing odd jobs for anybody willing to pay him for his efforts. He never spent his money foolishly either; in fact he never spent it at all except to pay someone a few pennies to do his homework for him.

He couldn’t wait to leave school. When he was fourteen, without a certificate to his name, he took a job with a local farmer for a couple of pounds a week. He fed cattle, cleaned drains, trimmed hedges, and gave his his mother half his wages every week. His sad-eyed mother who was still waiting for the return of his father from Liverpool ten years after he caught the boat-train to his own particular hell. He saved diligently for three years – then his mother caught pneumonia and died. He used most of his savings to give her a decent funeral.

A week later he was in London. It’s streets weren’t paved with gold as he had thought, but with solid concrete. This proved no obstacle to a lad with broad shoulders, and who could wield a pick and shovel like Cuchullian wielded his hurley. Digging holes and pulling cable made a man of him he said – mind you it had killed many a man too he later admitted.

He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, his only extravagance being cowboy gear. Soon he was a familiar sight on London’s building sites, with his ten-gallon hats, his fancy leather boots, and his real- cotton shirts imported from America. By now he had two ambitions in life; one was to own his own tipper truck, the other to visit Nashville and see The Grand Ole Opry.

He loved country music and in time his collection of country albums occupied most of his leisure hours. Patsy Cline, Flatt and Scruggs, Waylon Jennings, he had them all, their dulcet tones lovingly preserved in their dust-free, scratch-free jackets as if they were works of art. He became a country groupie and hung about pubs like The Nashville Rooms and The Red Cow, making the acquaintance of the likes of George Hamilton the Fourth and Tex Withers. Tex was a particular favourite of his, particularly as he arrived at some of the venues riding a white horse right up to the stage! Johnjo was fascinated by his tales of being a native American Indian, who had been abandoned in a Texas reservation by his mother, and who had subsequently somehow made his way to Clapton . He even bought himself a guitar and learned a few chords. Sometimes, when Tex was on stage, he was invited up to sing a song or two, for he had no mean voice himself

All this time he nurtured his desire to go to Nashville. He planned to spend at least three months there, and be a cowboy to his heart’s content. Maybe he might even get to sing a few songs along the way! He was in no hurry; if it took ten years to realise his dream then so be it.

In five years he had acquired his own tipper lorry. It was then that he began his reign of terror on the streets of London. He became known as the fly-tip king. London was full of derelict sites waiting for someone like Jonjo to come along and fill them up. Jonjo was only too happy to oblige. He didn’t believe in paying good money to dump on official sites when he could do it elsewhere for nothing. He filled London full of rubbish wherever and whenever he could. Time was money, he was fond of saying and reconnoitring in his spare time ensured him a constant – and convenient - network of locations for his activities. A certain amount of subterfuge was often required because his ‘nose’ for suitable sites was soon common knowledge with other would-be fly-tippers.

It was this obsession with secrecy that almost caused his downfall. One morning, in his hurry to get away from his chosen location, he hadn’t made sure that the tipper body had been fully lowered by the hydraulic rams, only discovering his omission when he smacked into a low railway bridge – the impact sending him clean through the windscreen and depositing him on a grassy bank ten yards away. He used up most of his ten lives that day – walking away with hardly a scratch, and causing more damage to the bridge than his beloved truck. Thankfully it was a quiet country lane outside Barnet, and he managed to drive the lorry away before anyone was the wiser.

He wasn’t so lucky in love though. She was a green-eyed colleen from Limerick – by way of Kilburn – and she caught his eye on the darkened perimeter of the Galtymore club in Cricklewood one night. Something about her drew him straight away, and from the very first glance he was a goner. Afterwards, when he tried to analyse what it was all he could say was ‘it was the look of her, the way she looked’.

Her name was Marie and she worked at a Cricklewood factory, soldering bits of wire on printed circuits for car radios. It was his first real entanglement with the opposite sex, and he wasn’t too sure what the rules of engagement were. Back home in Ballysteen, at the local hops, to get a girl to dance you first had to pass the interview. She sized you up from head to toe then looked inquiringly at her friend. If the head nodded the answer was yes, if it shook then you might as well forget it, wild horses wouldn’t get her on the floor with you.

Old habits die hard, he discovered. Marie’s answer to his tentative inquiry as to whether she was dancing was a rather disdainful ‘I’m waiting for my friend’. Not sure how to react he replied ‘I’ll wait with you’, which made her laugh. When her friend returned he must have got the nod, for she danced with him most of the night. Then she disappeared.

He didn’t see her again for a couple of weeks. A couple of frantic weeks. Then one night she was at The Galtymore again. This time he made sure he didn’t lose her by keeping her and her friend well supplied with drinks in between their sessions on the dance floor. He even got them a taxi home, and though his only reward was a peck on the cheek, he went to bed ecstatic.

Marie kept her legs together for as long as she reasonably could; and by the time he prized them open it was already too late. By that time he had already showered her with presents, wined her and dined her, and bought her a five hundred pounds engagement ring. They talked about getting married, and he dragged her around Wembley in the long evenings inspecting run-down houses. She persuaded him to open a joint bank account and he paid most of his money into it. Then she cleaned him out.

It took about three months. He only found out when a cheque he had paid for fitting a new gearbox to his tipper truck bounced. By that time she had hopped it.

He never did get to Nashville. Somehow it didn’t seem that important any longer. And he never succumbed to a woman’s wiles again. He became even more determined, worked harder and fly-tipped on a scale never seen in the Capital before. A lot of people wanted to catch him at it but they never did. ‘They’ll have to get up early in the morning to catch me’ he boasted. In a few more years he had several more trucks on the road, and Mick O’Shea, his old school foe was driving one of them. He still referred to Jonjo as ‘The Lone Ranger’.

In the years that followed he acquired a fleet of trucks. He gave up fly-tipping and became legit. Mick was now his right hand man and ran the operation with an iron fist. Jonjo allowed himself only one pleasure – and that was two weeks holiday every year in his old home in Ballysteen. There, he visited his mother’s grave, cleaned it and put fresh flowers on it, and cursed his father over the occasional whiskey which he now allowed himself. In between times he reconstructed the derelict homestead and spent most of his days in solitude there.

One night, maudlin with drink, he recounted to Mick O’Shea the fiasco with Marie. Several weeks later Mick had a story of his own to tell; ‘A fella I know from Limerick knew that woman of yours, and he reckons she’s not too bright. Certainly not bright enough to clean you out on your own. I found out she was crazy about an English bastard called Tim Reed before she met you, but he had dumped her. The story goes that he was heard boasting in certain pubs around Shepherds Bush about how she had come crawling back to him , and how he had gotten her to clean out a ‘stupid Paddy’ for him. The story also goes than when he got his hands on the money he threw her out again’.

The news didn’t seem to upset Jonjo too much, but unknown to anybody he went and hired a private detective. It cost a lot of money but he reckoned it was money well spent. Reed, he learned, was still frequenting his old haunts, and never seemed stuck for female company. They were attracted to him like flies to shit. One night as he staggered home – alone for a change – Jonjo emerged from the shadows of a church graveyard and laid into him with a hurley. He was sure he heard his skull crack from one of the blows – but he didn’t care. And he never bothered to find out if Reed had survived the beating. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’, was all he said to himself..

Shortly after this he tired of all the trucking. He presented Mick O’Shea with two of his finest vehicles, and sold the rest of the business for nearly a million quid. He returned to Ireland, bought a run-down roadhouse a few miles outside Ballysteen, and spent a fortune converting it into a country-and-western nite-spot. He named it the Nashville Rooster and filled the countryside with the sound of bluegrass and Cajun music. Soon he was pulling in the crowds, and money was rolling in faster than it had ever done.

One night Marie turned up. She had a young boy with flaming red hair in tow. The twelve year interval hadn’t treated her too kindly.

If Jonjo was surprised he didn’t show it.

‘You should have stuck with me, girl’, he waved a hand expansively. ‘All this could have been yours. You backed a loser in that Tim Reed’. He watched her eyes widen in surprise. ‘Oh yes, I know all about that piss artist. He’d pass blood before he’d pass a pub’. He shook his head at her. ‘And you gave my money to that wanker’.

She didn’t say anything but he could see the pain in her eyes. He marvelled at her nerve in coming here.

‘Give me a drink, Jonjo’, she spoke finally. ‘For old times sake. I can’t say I am sorry for what I did to you because it would only be empty words. I never meant for it to turn out the way it did, though. You must believe that...’ Her voice trailed off.

The boy had wandered off to watch a game of pool. Jonjo studied him for a moment before picking up a glass and jabbing it at an optic. ‘That’s what you used to like’, he said, placing the drink before her. He waited until she had wrinkled her nose the way he remembered then lick her top lip before taking a sip, before he spoke again.

‘What do you want? he asked harshly.

She sipped some more, watching him all the time with those forlorn eyes of hers, the look that had bamboozled them all those years ago still shining defiantly across the bar counter at him.

‘I thought you might like to see our son’, she said softly.

Jonjo clenched his fists hard and pushed his left knee against the wooden counter to brace himself. Being told he had a son was the last thing he had expected.

‘I don’t believe you’, he spoke eventually.

‘For God’s sake’, she hissed, ‘you’re not stupid. Look at him; same hair, same jaw-line, same eyes...of course he’s yours. If you never again do anything for me, do something for him. Give him a start in life’.

‘You never said anything...at the time’.

‘I didn’t know, did I? Not until ...afterwards’.

‘Not until you done a runner’, he was almost shouting now. ‘Well, you mean nothing to me...he means nothing to me. Take him away and leave me alone’.

She didn’t speak to him again. She slowly drained her glass, wiping her lips – caressing almost – with her middle finger and sucking the residue in that endearing way he remembered. Then she flicked her hair back with a casual sweep of the same hand and called the boy to her.

‘Say goodbye to the man, Johnny’.

‘Goodbye Sir’. The boy extended his hand, ‘nice to meet you’.

Jonjo watched them retreat. There were tears in his eyes. Why should he believe her? Why should he believe a word she said? It was a gimmick...a trick to con him out of his money. Just like the last time.

End.

‘

TALES FROM THE BLACK LION

Tom O’Brien

You know when you’re sitting in the bar having a quiet pint, wanting nothing more than to be left alone, and yer man walks in?

The big man, the hard case. Tattoos on his forehead, a bird on his arm he’s trying to impress so much he’s floating 18 inches off the ground.

He’s John Wayne in hush puppies, the chest stuck out and the belly sucked in, eyes staring down the bar like it’s high noon in Dodge City and not five past nine on a damp Friday night in Walthamstow

The message is clear: ‘This is my woman, stay away from her or there’ll be trouble.’

I’m the nearest so the message is clearest to me. Not that I’m bothered. The war-paint is still wet, and the ‘made in Romford’ tag is still attached to her ear – not my type by a long shot!

Ground rules established, he orders a pint for himself and a pint for her and they park themselves on stools adjacent to mine. Half his drink disappears in one slug and they begin to talk.

Well, he does. Non-stop. About trucks. Great big trucks. Enormous trucks. Bloody boring trucks. At first I think Scania is his wife and I cast covert glances at his companion to see how she is taking it. Never talk in reverential terms about another woman to the woman you are with – I learned that early in life.

My bar-stool neighbour obviously hasn’t grasped this, and I can see that while he may be having an orgasm about his beloved Scania, his companion isn’t.

When I eventually twig who (or what) Scania is I realise it’s not antipathy towards another female that’s troubling her, but boredom. He’s boring the pants off her.

She is clearly trying to maintain an interest, nodding and smiling at suitable intervals, but when his gaze is averted I can see the look in her eyes. Boring, the message says, this is b-o-r-i-n-g.

She wants to dance, she wants to party, you can see it in her body language, and all this clot want to do is talk about trucks.

While all this is going on Dick comes in. I say Dick, but he could be Tom or Harry for all I know. Everyone calls him Dick for reasons...well, let’s say they have to do with a certain part of his anatomy and his tight-fitting jeans.

Now, Dick like to stand where the light is ‘kind’ to him, which – surprise surprise – isn’t a million miles from where our truck-driving man is holding court.

Most of the local talent know about Dick and pay little heed to him, but females who haven’t seen him before do find their eyes irresistibly drawn to him. I can see this one is no exception.

Busily explaining the finer points of jack-knifing, trucker-man doesn’t notice her switch in allegiance for a while, but the change in his voice, like an engine on full revs running out of gas, soon tells its tale. He stutters to a halt and stares at what she is staring.

‘When you’ve finished binning his gear stick maybe you’d care to listen to me for a while’, he says to her, softly though, like he was taunting her. ‘I mean it’s what you’re paid for, innit?’ Then he turns to Dick. ‘I’d get that lanced if I were you, mate. You can get it done on the National Health I believe’.

Bang goes my hopes of a quiet pint, I think, picking up my drink and moving back a few paces. Out of the corner of my eye I see the guvner stick his head around the corner and just as quickly withdraw it.

She starts first, the Romford doll, pouring the remains of her pint over truck-man’s head, screeching: ‘Ere, ‘ave that on me!’

She turns to the now-gaping bar-counter audience and flicks her hair back. ‘Listen to him for another minute goin’ on about trucks? No thanks. I’d rather sleep in a ditch.’

The she was gone, the only trace she had existed at all the sound of her high heels on the pavement outside.

Our collective sighs had barely subsided when Dick sticks out his chest and fixes his eyes on the now-dripping stranger.

Dick does weight-training and bouncing in his spare time...the types that’s big in muscle power but small in the brain department, if you get what I mean...and now he’s flexing those muscles and beckoning his antagonist towards him.

‘Come on, let’s see how tough you are. I bet I can handle you with one hand behind my back’.

He doesn’t get a chance to get either hand in that position because truck-man is off his stool in a flash and launches a mighty boot in the direction of his groin. Dick is still falling when he is out the door and legging it after his girl.

Several of us help Dick to his feet and he staggers off to the jacks to recover. Now that things have quietened down the guvner emerges and carries out an inspection.

Satisfied that nothing has been broken, he stoops down and picks up something limp-looking from the floor. ‘Anyone fancy a banana?’ he asks casually.

That’s the sort of a place my local is.

end

��_([��Ys