“Hello there, Benedict. What can I get you?”
Ben looked round appraisingly at the establishment’s half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose.
He cleared his throat theatrically before he spoke.
“Who’ll buy a pint of bitter for a published poet and a national treasure? Ah ha ha.”
Nobody looked up. One or two half-smiled but they were a distinct minority. Oh well. Sometimes it worked, if there was someone in who knew him, say Dave Turvey hunched up gentlemanly in one corner with his feathered hat on, looking like an autumn day in the bohemian quarter of Dodge City, somebody like that. On this particular Bad Friday morning, though, Dave’s usual seat was empty, and with great reluctance Ben dredged up the ten-pound note out of his pocket to deposit on the bar, as a down payment on the pint of John Smith’s that he one day hoped to call his own. Farewell, then, sepia Darwin. Farewell green and crimson 3D hummingbird transfixed by swirling patterns in the Hypnoscope. Farewell, my crumpled little friend of this half-hour now gone for good. I hardly knew ye. Ah ha ha.
Once served, he let himself be drawn into the plush curve of the side-seats, taking with him in one hand his filmy, frosted fistful, getting on eight quid in change balled in the other. Hello to slate-blue Elizth. Fry and what looked like a nineteenth-century battered woman’s refuge except for the disapproving spectre of John Lennon, sneering from the left of frame. This was quite possibly a fancy-dress campaigner representing Dads For Justice. With the fiver were two pound coins and some shrapnel. Grimacing, he shook his head. It wasn’t just that Benedict missed the old money, all the farthings, half-crowns, florins, tanners, though of course he did. But what he missed more, though, was being able to refer to pre-decimal coinage without sounding like an old dear who’d confused her bus pass with her kidney donor card. He was surprisingly self-conscious on the subject of self-parody.
He swigged the first half of his pint, plunging indulgently in the olfactory swim of memory and association, cheese and pickled onions, Park Drive packs of five pink in a green pub ashtray, standing next to his old man at the Black Lion’s diseased and possibly Precambrian urinal trough with a six-year-old’s sense of privilege. The rapidly successive mouthfuls were diluted gulps of vanished fields, the high-tech recreation of fondly imagined but extinct rusticity. He put down the half-empty glass, trying to kid himself that it was still half full, and wiped almost four decades of oral tradition from his smacking lips onto his pinstripe cuff.
He lifted up the canvas satchel’s flap, where it was set on the warm cushioning beside him, and pulled out A Northamptonshire Garland from within. Lacking Dave Turvey and a poetry discussion with the living, Benedict thought that he might as well strike up a conversation with the dead. The cheap and chunky hardback came out of the bag with its rear cover uppermost. In an ornate gold frame against a deep red background rubbed with cobblers’ wax was Thomas Grimshaw’s 1840s portrait of John Clare. The picture never looked quite right to Benedict, especially the outsized moonrise of the brow. If not for the brown topiary of hair and whisker fringing the great oval, it might be a man’s face painted on an Easter egg. A Humpty Dumpty with his mess of yolk and shell spread on the lawns of Andrew’s Hospital, and no one there to put him back together.
Clare stood posed uncomfortably before a non-specific rural blur, a leafy lane at Helpston, Glinton, anywhere, just after sunset or conceivably just prior to dawn, one thumb hooked statesmanlike upon his coat’s lapel. He looked off to the right, turning towards the shadows with a faintly worried smile, the corners of the mouth twitched up in an uncertain greeting, with the slightest wince of apprehension already apparent in those disappointed eyes. Was that, Benedict wondered, where he’d got it from, his own characteristically amused, forlorn expression? There were similarities, he fancied, between him and his enduring lifelong hero. John Clare had a fair old beak on him, not wholly different from Ben’s own, at least to judge from Grimshaw’s portrait. There were the sad eyes, the faltering smile, even the neckerchief. If someone were only to shave Ben’s head and feed him up a bit, he could be stepping out of the dry ice fumes on Stars In Their Eyes, one thumb snagged in his jacket, madhouse burrs caught in his sideburns. Tonight, Matthew, I will be the peasant poet. Ah ha ha.
Beneath the owlish likeness in the cover’s lower right was pasted a discoloured slug, fired from a price-gun fifteen years ago: VOLUME1 BOOKSHOPS, £6.00. To his consternation, for a moment Benedict could not even remember quite where VOLUME1 had been located. Had that been where Waterstone’s was now? There’d been that many bookshops in Northampton once, you’d be hard pressed to get around them all within a single day; mostly become estate agents and wine-bars. In Ben’s youth, even big stores like Adnitt’s had their book departments. There’d been trays of one-and-thrupenny paperbacks in both the upper and the lower branch of Woolworth’s, and there’d been a rash of second-hand dives shading into junkshops with invariably consumptive elderly proprietors, with yellow-covered 1960s pornographic classics glimpsed through dusty glass in unlit windows. Jaundiced Aubrey Beardsley nudes enrobed with Technicolor slapped Hank Janson sluts, a bit of sauce to liven up the casserole of Dennis Wheatley, Simenon and Alistair MacLean. Those grubby, spittle-lacquered archives, where had they all gone?
He raised his glass for a commemorative sip, a sip being approximately half a gill with eight sips to the pint. Taking the pack of Bensons and a street-bought three-for-a-quid lighter from his shoulder bag he gripped one of the cigarettes between eternally-wry lips, lighting it with the stick of liquid-centred amethyst. Ben squinted through the first blue puffs of smoke across the lounge bar. This had filled up, although not with anyone he recognised. Off somewhere to his left, a burbling audial cascade of virtual coins was punctuated with stabs from a science-fiction zither. Sighing non-specifically, he opened the anthology of local poets to its John Clare section, where he hoped that “Clock-a-Clay”, written from the perspective of a ladybird, might prove an antidote to the contemporary flash and jangle that he felt so alienated from. The miniaturist imagery was certainly transporting, though disastrously he couldn’t help but read on to the poem that was reproduced immediately after, which was Clare’s asylum-penned “I Am”.
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange — nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
That was entirely too close to the nerve, instantly sinking Benedict’s half-decent mood, already holed below its waterline. He shoved the book back in his satchel, downing the three sips remaining in his pint and purchasing another one before he knew he’d done it. This relieved him of his small-change buffer and exposed his queen, Elizth. Fry, precariously. Her rainy turquoise eyes stared out of the remaining note into his own, with something of his mother’s look of worried resignation when she gazed appraisingly on Ben and Ben’s unjustly punished liver.
The next thing he knew, it was mid-day. He was emerging from the narrow barroom of the Shipman’s, basically a passageway that had a pub where most people have coatpegs, into Drum Lane. Down the alley on his right he could see All Saints’ Church across the road, with on his left the waning bustle of the Market Square. Elizth. Fry, apparently, had left him for another man, most probably a landlord. He lugubriously noted that he still had custody of several little ones, silver and copper orphans to the sum of eighty-seven pence. A bubbling protest from his long-drowned instincts for self-preservation told him he should probably invest this in a pasty. Turning right he made his way down the perpetual shadow-channel of Drum Lane, towards the bakery opposite All Saints’ in Mercer’s Row.