will be its beauty … How many words have I written? How many hours have I slaved away over each page? The rest I’ve burned, the stuff I hate, all of it … I start all over, again and again and again … I will start again at a later date, after I’ve lived, when I have absorbed more anguish, when the time is right.
[He gets up out of his armchair and roots about for things in the room off-camera. His voice fades, but is still just about audible.]
Where is it? Where is it? I put it here. I put it here fucking yesterday. Where the fuck is it? Fuck. Where the fuck … Ah … Fuck, here it is. Fuck … Fuck it …
[He reappears in front of the camera, sitting back down in his armchair.]
So … this is all I retrieved, what a fucking mess, saved from the flames. What did I burn it for, a good two hundred pages of this shit? This is all I have left …
[He waves a manuscript at the camera.]
I don’t need it. I’m going to tear it all up now for you and start all over again … Every word will be different from this, this attempt is useless, nothing will be the same …
[He tears up as many of the pages as he can in front of the camera, throwing it over his head like confetti.]
See! See! … See! … The nuclear fallout … a nuclear fallout of my own creation … destroyer of worlds … I am become death, destroyer of words hahah! Ha! … My wishes fluctuate, and my desires conflict, they tear me apart … The outer man struggles with the inner … There he is again, old Petrarch talking for me, I can’t help myself … maybe he’s my inner man? It’s definitely not Virgil, as much as I love him, I just cannot get to grips with him … he wrote for an audience … I don’t know who mine is … Who are you? Who the fuck are you? Ah, the watchful eye of the moralist watching his own, his every move … move … move … fucking flies, fucking things … get to fuck …
[He tries to swat a fly.]
One side of Petrarch, it seems to me, which found classical culture more engaging than that of … the age, yes the age … in which he was born, was as we have seen, articulated in his first eclogue where … what’s his fucking name? … Fuck, yes, Silvis, he declares the poetry of Homer and Virgil superior to that of the psalms … that’d be a serious thing to say back in his day … a new morality drawn up in these men. Who wrote these words? … I didn’t … I sure as fuck didn’t. I’m just a riff man, like Wilko Johnson … I’m the conduit … I move shapes in time, I create the vibrations, I alter them, to make sounds … I repeat, repeat, repeat … Ha! …
[He cracks up into laughter.]
I stop the tape right there. It’s too much to take, he’d obviously been drinking and it’s difficult to watch. All I know is that, before I do anything with his belongings, I will have to watch more of these recordings.
vulgar things
I walk across to the Lobster Smack to see Mr Buchanan about the key he mentioned over breakfast at the Labworth. I feel quite apprehensive, like he’d made some kind of mistake and the keys were meant for someone else and not me. Maybe Cal? I put this down to having just viewed the tape. I’m rattled by it, that’s for sure, Uncle Rey’s words, and his face, younger but still ravaged. His piercing eyes, grey, like the sky, and that strong, forceful voice of his. It rattles through me in bursts and fragments: ‘I can’t write it without their words’. It strikes me as odd that he was trying to write a book, he’d never mentioned it, and I don’t think of him as a literary man. It must have been his secret, one of his many secrets, something he battled with all his life, something personal to him and no one else. ‘My desires conflict, they tear me apart …’. What on earth does he mean? Desires? The night sky? The island? Sitting alone in the Lobster Smack? Living in that wretched caravan for the majority of his life? It doesn’t make sense to me, he didn’t seem like the type of man who might have battled with his own desires. He just seemed like a man who endured life alone, and all that it threw his way. Then I remember how he ended it, his life. Some form of desire must have caused him to do that. I can’t explain it to myself any other way. There’s no other way around it.
Mr Buchanan is standing behind the bar when I enter the pub. He greets me, like it’s the first time he’s set eyes on me today, with a broad smile. I walk over to him.
‘The key, young Jon …’
‘Yes, Mr Buchanan, the key … Is that all right?’
‘Only if you call me by my name like everyone else does …’
‘Oh, yes … Robbie … Sorry Robbie …’
‘Come with me …’
I follow him into his office again. He opens the drawer in his desk and hands me an envelope.
‘I remember the day he gave me this, he said: “It goes to Jon. No one else. Not Cal, or any of the others. I don’t care how long you have to wait until Jon turns up, just make sure he receives this.” You know, I’d never heard him speak in such a tone before, all sombre, stern, even authoritative, like his life depended on it … Of course, I had no idea that … you know … That he was ill, or … you know, what he did …’
‘Thanks.’
‘That’s okay. Just take the envelope.’
‘Thanks, Robbie.’
‘Seems good that I played some part in his final wishes …’
‘Yes … wishes, yes.’
I walk out of his office after shaking Mr Buchanan’s hand and booking a table for dinner that evening in the restaurant section of the pub.
‘It’s on me, young Jon … The meal’s on me.’
I put the envelope in my pocket and walk back to Uncle Rey’s caravan. I sit myself down in his armchair, the same one I’d just watched him in, and open the envelope. There’s a key inside, just like Mr Buchanan said there was, and a small note:
Jon, maybe you’ve found out already and all this makes sense to you? I don’t know. Well, my finger points down from the sky at you nevertheless: Big Yellow Storage, Airborne Close, SS9 4EN. Rey.
Why had he chosen me? Found out what? In my perplexity I drop the key. It falls to the left of the armchair. I reach down blindly to see if I can feel it, but I can’t. I lean over, spotting it immediately. It has landed on what looks like a manuscript. I pick up the key and then the manuscript. I thumb through its typed-up pages, maybe about 300–350 of them, double spaced, about 90,000 words or so. I put the key back in the envelope and into my pocket. I hold the manuscript up. There’s a title on the front page:
VULGAR THINGS
By
Rey Michaels
I read through bits at random. I’m shaking a little. I’m not sure what it is I’m reading. I’m not sure if it’s a novel, a memoir, or some form of literary criticism about Virgil’s Aeneid. I settle on a rewriting of it, just like he says in his tapes, or some form of appropriation; great swathes of Aeneid have been retyped, it seems, retyped verbatim, interspersed with commentary and fictionalised fragments, photographs, charts and drawings. It’s littered with solecisms and cliché, and seems slapdash. I fall back into his armchair. I decide that I will attempt to edit it, to see if it can be deciphered. I set it down on the coffee table, clearing the bottles of cider I’d drunk last night. I sit back in the armchair and stare at it: it makes no sense to me. I’m even doubtful it made sense to Uncle Rey.
feel like walking
I drag myself up and walk back into the bedroom. There’s only one way to try to make sense of it. I select another of his tapes and slot it into the machine after