Irwin Tom's Version

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-915568-44-1
Verlag: Dedalus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 218 Seiten

Tom's Version is a lament for the sixties and then a mad race towards old age and death. Hovering in background are the ghostly presences of St Ignatius of Loyola, St Joseph of Copertino, Robert Louis Stevenson and M.R. James. This is the story of a story that plays out in real life. Tom is a stock controller. Though management of the shelves kept him busy in the daytime, his nights were frightful. Again and again he dreamt of guns, conjuring tricks, car chases, burials, disinterments, Martian landscapes and Molly . Tom is new to the Story as it was known to the sinister crew who first appeared in The Ruins Have Been Cast. They make their reappearance in this new novel.... .Molly is a hoplophiliac, Quentin is the sort of person who knows what a hoplophiliac is (someone who likes the use of guns in sex), Lancelyn is terrified of women, Jaimie has committed murder in order to understand what it is like to be evil, Ferdie is a conjuror with bad breath, Bernard is an expert on ghost stories, Mortimer is a thug who works at the The Times Literary Supplement. But Tom is just so ordinary (apart from his visions of Fairyland).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Irwin, Robert

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO
Though it had not been easy for Tom to take time off, on the specified Thursday he made his way to Cranks. He was early and he would have liked a proper drink, but there was nothing on offer except dodgy-looking fruit-and-vegetable-juices. The seats were uncomfortable and the food on offer looked horribly healthy. Molly arrived a few minutes later. He had not noticed what she was wearing at the encounter group. Then, of course, most of the time she had been wearing nothing. But now, as she made her entrance, heads turned. She was wearing a broad-brimmed floppy scarlet hat, a red embroidered waistcoat over a white blouse and a black maxi skirt. Though she was certainly beautiful, Tom judged that she might have been born too late and that her beauty belonged to a past age. Her style, her luxuriant hair and slightly florid features suggested a grande dame of the nineteenth-century stage. She was beautiful, but not, he thought, as Maeve was beautiful. Molly scanned the room carefully before joining him at his table. They shook hands before going to the counter and they both collected mixed vegetable soup with a salad and a wholemeal roll on their trays. The salad had a lot of odd-looking red seeds in it and they had to ask, what they were. ‘Quinoa.’ The answer left them none the wiser, but with the quinoa problem unresolved, they cautiously began the conversation that should turn into a co-counselling session. ‘That blonde hair, that tan, that moustache — until you opened your mouth I’d guessed you were American, maybe Californian,’ she said. ‘You’re a surfer dude who just needed dark glasses to complete the outfit.’ ‘Well, no. I come from a small village in the south of Ireland.’ ‘What do you do for a living, Tom?’ ‘I supervise a warehouse in Nine Elms in south-east London,’ he said and enjoyed the look of disappointment on her face. ‘And you?’ ‘I was born in Guildford. I am with the sales department at Sotheby’s auction house. I used to sit at the reception desk, give directions, sell catalogues and stuff like that, but now they use me to greet prospective high-rolling bidders. Also they get me to pose for press photographers. I hold up a Flemish miniature or a Japanese vase and I have to look at it lovingly, as if I could imagine no greater happiness than to possess such an object.’ For both of them that meeting last week had been their first experience of an encounter group. What an oddly assembled gang of people, needy folk, perhaps the discards of society. They both agreed that Philip had seemed very nervous. It was probably his first time at being group leader and the slightest challenge to his authority seemed to worry him. As for the group exercises, it was a bit like being at primary school again, though there was also the unpleasant undercurrent of an adult truth game. What is the worst thing you have ever done? When did you last cry? Whom would you most like to kiss in this room? Sooner or later, if they kept turning up to that basement in St John’s Wood, these and similar questions would come up. One would have to be a real masochist to want to attend these sessions — The St John’s Wood Masochists Anonymous. It was easy for the two of them to agree on all this, but it was not co-counselling. So eventually Tom asked, ‘What was all that stuff about you being accursed and a hazard to all men?’ ‘Oh no, you first. Why did you leave Ireland and have you found fulfilment as a warehouse manager, or is it just possible that there’s something a teeny-weeny bit more exciting that you are ready for and that is why you have signed up for the group?’ How to reply? How much truth did this woman deserve? ‘I come from the village of Cashel in County Tipperary. It is, as I have said, in the south. As a boy, I played in the shadow of the medieval ruins of Cashel Mount. When childhood was over, I left the village to study law in Dublin. But the law did not suit me and besides Maeve remained in Cashel. It was Maeve who had introduced me to the poetry of W. B. Yeats and I am not sure that she did me any favours by that, for the poetry is now like a fever in my blood. “Irish poets learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made…” We were standing on the slope of Cashel Mount in a high wind and we were both shouting. I shouted that I had decided to become a poet. She laughed in my face and she told me that, now that I had failed at law, my best chance was to find employment as the local butcher’s boy. I remember her long red hair blowing across her face as she spoke and that she looked like a Celtic prophetess who was speaking from behind a veil. I told her that I would not return to Cashel except as a successful poet. Then she should kneel before me on this hillside and confess her error. I did not look back as I walked down to the village. Then I crossed over to England to prove myself…’ Molly interrupted, ‘Fine words! Or, to look at it another way, gobshite! And you are not a successful poet are you? And what are you? Thirty?’ ‘Almost.’ Molly was relentless, ‘But perhaps Maeve will be impressed, if she follows you over to England and finds you installed with your packing cases in your warehouse in south-east London.’ Tom hesitated, before continuing, ‘I suppose I do deserve your mockery. Yet I find that the warehouse is a blessed place, for it gives me the space and time that I need and I never feel quite alone in it, for I live with my memories of Cashel Rock, the village, the ruins and Maeve. And there is more, for it is my belief, my mad fancy perhaps, that somewhere in my warehouse, hidden behind the vast crates and packing cases, there is a door which opens onto a land of mists and, coming through the mists, the sound of fiddles and high-pitched laughter. I might hear the fiddle music and the laughter, but I can never find the door and I doubt I ever will.’ ‘Oh for God’s sake! Were you really hoping to stumble across laughing fiddlers hiding behind a pile of crates filled with machine tools, bananas, or whatever? That is so sodding fey! Give over!’ Tom put out his hands apologetically. ‘Lady, there is no need to jump down my throat. We may take it that I was speaking figuratively. Putting aside my fantasy of the mist behind the lost door, you should know that warehousing can be a thing of great beauty, for, though it is not commonly known, it is both a science and an art. A well-run warehouse shelters a wonderfully intricate display of three-dimensional geometry in motion. As in a tangram puzzle, everything has to fit precisely. The pallets are — hang on. You do know what a pallet is?’ ‘Yes, of course. We sometimes get stuff delivered on pallets at Sotheby’s.’ ‘OK, well then, the pallets are of standard sizes and they have their designated pallet racks stacked in colour-coded and numbered bays, and the forklifts that move backwards and forwards between them are eerily quiet in part of the slow-motion kinematics that is the life of the warehouse. But it is not just a matter of matching size to size, pallet to pallet rack, for the additional dimension is time and some of what has been delivered and stacked will be going out much sooner and maybe in greater quantities than stuff that the warehouse has taken in earlier. So, in the interest of efficiency, that is speed, it will need to be stacked closer to the docking doors, and the logistics of docking requires that the shortest pathways have to be plotted both for those deliveries that are destined to be stored for a long time and for those more recently arrived but scheduled to be going out soon. One could fancy that one is looking on the rearrangements of the molecular structures that form the stuff of the universe as one watches these blocks rising, falling and turning until they find their destined settings. Behind all the rise and fall of pallet blocks which are raised up or lifted down from their pallet racks, there are lifts echoing that rise and fall as they carry yet more blocks to be stored on the mezzanine. The inventories that must register all these movements look like complex algebraic equations. Their necessary calculations are abstract and yet they represent what is tangible and which has to serve human needs. We who work in such a place are its willing slaves. At least, that is when the place is busy, but, on a quiet day as the winter’s afternoon shadows spread across the floor, the place seems more like some pharaoh’s tomb with its attendant sarcophagi stacked all around me. Indeed, I should say…’ Molly interrupted again, ‘You manage all that? No, now I think about it, I am guessing that you are not really the manager are you? I can hear it in your voice that you are not so very grand.’ ‘To be honest, no, you are right. You have a good ear. I am more of a day-watchman, though I like to think of myself as doubling up as the warehouse’s poet in residence.’ She had listened stony-faced to his account of the mystic warehouse and by now it was obvious that she was impatient to talk about herself. He shrugged, ‘Your turn. Tell me about the men who were brought to ruin in your bed.’ ‘I’ll not be defined by the men I slept with! The hell with that! It is not what I want to talk about.’ ‘So if you don’t want to be defined by those men, why did you rush to tell the group about these ill-fated fellows? And what do you want to talk about?’ ‘Oh, I had to say something, but fucking is not that fucking important to me. So, to be brisk, the first man, no he was more of a boy really, is either in prison, just out of prison, or just about...