Licensed Premises, page 9
I see.
I mean at the end of the day they know it is not their own work.
Why do it then?
Well, there’s money to be made isn’t there? Places to be published, prizes to win, jobs in academia to go for.
I hadn’t thought about that.
People don’t, that’s half the problem. And then there’s the people who are doing this fairly, and maybe they miss out on that prize or that job in academia.
Well, you’ve won this prize haven’t you? I’m just wondering if you think your work as the poetry detective ultimately helped you win this prize?
I don’t understand.
Can’t have done you any harm?
There’s no connection between the two things as far as I’m aware.
But I mean, the title seems to suggest a connection.
That’s purely coincidental, I mean, if you read the titular poem of the collection, you’ll see that it’s an entirely euphonic celebration.
The Meadows
The man in the blue Transit sat behind the wheel looking out across the fields. He’d been coming every day for a week. The girl hadn’t been back since he saw her walking the dog the Monday before. It was the summer holidays and there were kids everywhere. He kept on drinking his coffee, having finished his sandwich. There was sweat on his brow and, as he looked out across the fields, he saw the girl skipping along, then throwing a stick for a brown dog with floppy ears. He had a Jack Russell that tear-arsed around the cabin of the Transit, kept him company when he was driving for work. He let out Teresa, and she immediately ran over to the dog with floppy ears, baiting it. The girl tried to get her dog on the lead and Transit van man came to the rescue, helped by getting Teresa on the lead. The girl said thanks, and he said that her dog looked thirsty. He had some water, thought her dog should have some. She hesitated slightly, then followed him up the hill to where the van was parked, watched as he opened the side door of the Transit. He started filling the dog bowl with water. When it was filled, he watched as the girl walked slowly forward with her dog still on the lead, and as the dog sipped slowly at the water he pushed her into the van, dog and all, and slid the door shut, locked it. The girl started screaming so he went round to the back of the van, climbed in that way, walked towards the girl, cornered her, made her stop. The dog was still growling so he kicked it in the ribs. It fell out of the back of the van. He taped up the girl’s mouth, tied her up, left her lying there on a mattress as he got out of the back, locked the door then climbed back in the cabin to drive off. He took a last look around the fields and there was nobody there except two lads playing football.
At the petrol station she listened as he put the petrol in and then when she heard him walking away she tried the side door of the blue Transit, backing up to the latch and pressing down on it with her bound hands. By some miracle it was open, and she used her foot to slide it across. The open side door was on the other side of the blue Transit, so she couldn’t be seen from the petrol station. She ran across the forecourt, crossed the main road, hid behind a bush in a field of wheat. She watched through the bush as the man came out. He was big, fat and bald, and he came waddling out of the petrol station and got in the blue Transit, before getting out again and closing the side door. He stood there looking around, then seemed to think better of it and got back in the blue Transit before driving off at speed down the A road.
The man got out of the blue Transit van and shut the garage door from inside, then went round to the side of the van and slid open the door and she wasn’t there. She wasn’t fucking there. He stood there looking at the empty space in the van. How hadn’t he noticed? This was a nightmare. He told himself to stay calm, thought back, how did she get out with the central locking? Had he left the door open? Why the fuck did he go for petrol with her in the back? It was like he’d been in a kind of daze, in denial of what he was doing, just acting normal like getting petrol. But where had she gone, why didn’t he notice she was not in the back? Why didn’t he check? He had been stupid, a fucking amateur.
He needed a different kind of van, one where he could see into the back from the driver’s seat, and more importantly he needed to fucking get rid of this van anyway, because the girl would remember the colour of it. He’d get a white van, get on Auto Trader or whatever, flog the blue van, get a white van, then he’d be a white van man among thousands of white van men. He was staring at the empty space in the back of the van, then he went for the hose, turned the brass tap on at the wall, rinsed down the back of the van, turned off the tap, listened to all the water dripping, clicked off the garage light, went back in the house, got a can of lager from the fridge.
There was one time before he could sell it when he got pulled over in the van for speeding, and the police did check in the back. But nothing came of it.
All he’d had to do was take his time, be patient, and then one day there she was, another little girl walking down the back path near the railway line. He walked from the van, grabbed her, held her mouth, dragged her across the meadows. Broad daylight, nobody around, took less than five minutes and this time he tied her hands and legs up, taped her mouth, locked the back of the van, didn’t go for petrol, drove home, put the van straight in the garage, closed the garage door.
His plan was to take her into the house, upstairs, into the bedroom, but in the back of the van he lost his temper, she wouldn’t shut up until he hit her in the face, and as she was lying there crying he did what he wanted.
Leaving the loud music on in the kitchen, he went down to the cellar, closed the door behind him and walked down the stone steps. He clicked on the light and then lifted the little white body down off the peg, lowering the crumpled limbs onto the cold stone floor.
Afterwards, he left her lying there while he unfurled various plastic sheets and lined them up together, and then he got the saw started and began cutting up her body into more manageable pieces. Once he’d done that, he started taping up the various plastic sheets with body parts in them, and when he’d taped up all the parts in plastic sheets he rested the packages against the wall in a neat line. Going to the opposite wall he turned on the little bronze wall tap, lifted the green hose and started spraying down the floor. Walking back over to the tap he turned it off, stood there listening to the dripping water and the muffled sound of loud music. He glanced up at the bare peg and walked back up the stone steps, clicked off the light and closed the cellar door behind him, before walking into the kitchen to turn off the stereo.
He got all the ingredients out of the cupboard, the ras el hanout, cumin, harissa, ground ginger, tin of chickpeas, chopped lamb, then got an onion and a few cloves of garlic, began chopping the onion while the olive oil warmed in the casserole dish. When all the ingredients were in the pot, he brought them to a simmer then turned the heat down and put the lid on the pot, and even with the lid on the pot soon the whole house was filled with the smell of the chorba. He left it as long as he could, almost an hour before spooning a big portion out into a bowl.
He came off the A road, took the roundabout past the Asda and then followed the road through the deserted centre of the village to the turn off up the hill. He climbed the steep gradient with his lights on full beam as there were no street lights now. He reached the brow of the hill, saw the bright city lights in the distance, and then went down the hill in the darkness and parked the van. He slid open the side door and picked up one of the packages of black plastic and tape, rested it against the side of the van, took out the spade then slid the door shut. He could see his own breath in the moonlight and was glad of the gloves. He struggled to lift the package then had it on his shoulder, grabbed the spade in his other hand and then walked the footpath in the moonlight before veering off under the trees, beneath where all the crows were nesting. He looked again at the pattern of trees, could see beyond them the lights of a farmhouse. He started digging, and when the hole was deep enough placed the package into it.
Carrying the spade, he met up with the moonlit footpath. Back in the van he started the engine, cranked up the heating, looked up and down the road, made his way back over the brow of the hill, but didn’t go back past the supermarket, instead taking the long way round, avoiding the centre of the village, where he knew there was CCTV, and driving in a long sweeping C around the hills before meeting up again with the A road which took him out of the countryside and back to the suburbs.
Reeks
1
On her first day this bloke comes in, starts reciting Howl. Best minds of my generation and all that.
What do you think of that then? This bloke, he has no hair, hardly any teeth, speaks rough as fuck, spits out the poetry.
Impressive, she says.
Here you are, here’s some more.
He carries on, right up until about halfway through.
You don’t hear that very often, she says.
We did poems at school, I never learned fuck all else but we did these poems at school and I realized I could remember them and then my wife introduced me to this poem and I read it and I remembered it, can do the whole thing if you give me a day to practice.
Don’t worry about it, love.
But Ginsberg, he’s one of the best. Have you got any more editions? I’ve had loads from here before. What’s your name?
Angela.
Okay, Ange, have I seen you before?
No, I’ve only just started.
Is the old fella around?
Erm, not at the moment, he might come in later. I think I’ve seen a really old copy of that just recently, she says, and looks through the wobbly pile of books on the desk behind her.
Here, what about this one, she says, holding a battered City Lights edition.
Na, got three of them! That’s what I’m saying!
Okay, she says, leafing through the book. As she does so, some pages fall out.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Well it’s fucked now!
Yes, well, we can keep this between us.
No good to any fucker now!
Yeah, you have to be a bit more careful with these old ones.
Fucked anyway, nobody would have had that one off you.
True she says, dropping it into a basket under the desk. She’ll put it in the shed later, and then recycling Raymond will take it after he’s used the bog.
The other person works downstairs is this lad Sebastian, and she knows straight away he is right up himself. You can’t give an opinion on anything without him disagreeing, and he’s aloof, looks down his nose at her. Thinks he knows everything when she is knocking sixty and he looks about fucking twelve. He is a fucking vegan and all, keeps banging on about it, only has oat milk cos proper milk is cruel on the cows. Farts like a bastard. He’s into music and literature and stuff, but is a snob about that as well, so that at first she thinks they might get on, but then after a while it’s just pleasantries, are you having a coffee, that kind of thing, but even then you can tell that when it’s his turn to brew up he doesn’t like having to make one for her. She starts telling him about her band and how they knew Siouxsie and the Banshees and that, but he doesn’t listen, just interrupts her and starts quoting fucking Greil Marcus and all these other music journos, doesn’t give her chance to tell him that she met fucking Greil Marcus back in the day. Goes on about Scott Walker and Syd Barrett and all. Sebastian also says he comes from Glasgow, must have been the fucking posh part then, tries to make out his working-class credentials but it’s a crock of shit.
Liam upstairs is a miserable old bastard, but she knows where she is with people like that. He reads Jack London. Lives quite near her and says he has this cabin he’s made in the garden and he’s always in there watching horror videos because he says they make him feel like he’s alive, and he’ll have his dog with him and he’ll smoke a bit of weed cos his Mrs won’t have it in the house. Liam says nobody is allowed in the cabin and she begins to wonder what he gets up to in there. But he isn’t a perv or a paedo or out, she isn’t saying that, she could tell he was alright and she was gonna get on with him fine.
She is still getting a bit of Universal Credit to supplement her part time work in the bookshop. She has a tiny bit of spare money to herself each week, so she can keep going to the café on her days off. They do nice coffee there and she can save on her heating, finds she’s not that often in the flat except just to get home in the evening and sleep, and in the bookshop she can get first pick of anything that comes in.
She’s picked up one or two great books, stuck them in her rucksack while nobody was looking. So far, she’s got a Debbie Harry biography, a book on Johnny Marr, the Dylan autobiography, and it’s a perk of the job seeing as though she’s on minimum wage. It’s a treat when she gets home and empties her rucksack and adds the second-hand books to the shelf. She’s got a whole row of books yet to read and it feels good, like having something in reserve. At night instead of putting on the TV and letting her brain go to mush she reads and gets enough of a creative boost to see her through three days in work which are a piece of piss anyway.
On a good day downstairs in the shop they’ll take a ton, but most days it’s more like twenty. Most of the profit is made from selling books online through Abe Books and Amazon.
When Angela gets home, she takes off her trainers, makes a brew of Moroccan tea that fills the flat with the aroma of mint, drinks the brew and then gets out of her work clothes to have a shower. After the shower she smells all clean like nice new linen and sits there on the couch, one leg stretched straight across to the coffee table. She opens a book, Rimbaud poetry, fucking genius weirdo, weird systems of colours, mind blowing stuff by a guy who wrote his best stuff as a teenager. Youth is wasted on the young, not in this fucking case cos the words are ace, and she’s lost in them until she gets hungry and it’s time for tea and she warms up the pot of aloo gobi, and has a roti with it, fills herself, makes some more tea, fruit tea this time, blackberry, settles down with the brew.
There’s never any decent looking people come in the shop, they’re all either sad lonely men or fat mums coming in after dropping their bin lids off at the nearby primary school. There’s one of the mums is pretty fit and Angela looks forward to her coming in, but men-wise there’s nothing, they all just fucking waffle on like men do, all hot air, not a fucking listener among them, so there’s no point even saying anything because when she does they don’t even seem to have heard it and just go on with their fucking monologues. That was the thing with her Colin, he listened, wasn’t a talker at all really. Spoke quietly and carried a big dick.
There’s a load of boxes dumped in the kid’s section cos a bloke came in the day before and donated a load of books, so she picks up one box and takes it to the counter before grabbing all the books out of the box and turning them face down in a pile. There’s the usual stink of dust and damp. One book at a time gets checked, the ISBN number typed in, unless it’s an obviously shitty book, although even then sometimes they can be worth a bit, you can’t always tell, and again she checks the price other booksellers have put the book at on Abe and Amazon. As usual, if it’s worth more than three quid she puts it on the system, adds it to the shop listings, makes it available online. Anything worth less she puts on the table in the shop, or in the shed for recycling Raymond. There’s a load of local history pamphlets, and they are worth ten and twenty quid each. It’s stuff that has a limited print run that’s valuable, not your bestsellers, your Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or your classics, that have been published year after year for decades. She types in the ISBN for another one of the local history booklets, Rivers of Manchester, sees it’s worth thirty quid and adds it to the online stock, before writing the catalogue number on a post-it note and sticking the note in the front of the book. All morning she does this, and there’s no customers, and there’s this sad fucking classical music on the radio that Sebastian likes, but soon enough it’s twelve and time for lunch. She’s got leftover curry that’s she’s put in a blue bowl that will go in the microwave, stinking the kitchen out, so she puts it in and waits two minutes before taking it out again, grabbing a fork and taking her food back behind the counter. If there is a busy time it’s at lunch, and as she sticks some of the curry into her mouth a guy comes round the corner with a pile of westerns, Larry McMurtry and that. She looks at the prices on them, tells him the total, but he’s half mutton, and instead of giving her money he puts a plastic bag on the counter and says he’s brought books back, so no money changes hands, the books are just swopped over. This bloke with the westerns says he is going in hospital, and it will give him something to read, so what can she do? She finishes her curry, eats an apple, puts the apple core in the bowl and puts it in the kitchen before getting another box of books and carrying on all afternoon pricing them up. There’s no sense in rushing, not on minimum fucking wage, and it’s like anything else, if she whizzes through them she’ll have fuck all else to do until more books come in, so she takes her time, drags it out, works smart not hard.
Middle of the afternoon this bloke comes to the counter with a novel.
Will you take a pound for that?
She looks at the price, pencilled on the flyleaf. It’s two fifty, she says.
I know but will you take a pound?
It’s in decent nick.
Come on, it’s only a small novel.
Well size isn’t relevant really.
Will you take a pound?
Erm … you can have it for one fifty.
Here’s a pound.
Oh, okay then. I’m not going to haggle over fifty p.
Great, he says, fishing a fiver out of his wallet.
Is it?
What?
Is it great? We wouldn’t last long in this business if everyone was as tight as you.
