As the weeks had gone on, to avoid arousing suspicion, Arnold and Vera saw as little of each other as they could, aside from their weekly lovemaking sessions at her house. He had managed to reduce by small degrees his ferrying role, and so was only occasionally in the playground, and if he was, he stood apart from Vera. They communicated by text only, and these were kept brief and cryptic, so that if either’s phone fell into the wrong hands, nothing obviously incriminating would be evident.
It made the weekly meetings all the more important and longed for. This approaching Wednesday would be the last before the half term, and Arnold balked at the thought of even a week’s absence from Vera.
He was in his office at work, a space he shared with six other members of staff, though there were rarely more than two in the room at the same time, and had just returned from giving a plenary lecture on form in poetry. He took out his mobile phone as he sat at his desk and read the latest message from Vera, ‘look fwd 2 poetry workshop, 2day 1.15’. They had taken to using the language of creative writing as a code. He was about to text back ‘have got new poems 2 show you’, when he received a phone call from Polly.
‘Sorry to bother you sweetie but do you think you could come over to the shop?’
‘Is something wrong?’ He should have said immediately that he had a lecture, but she seemed to know that he hadn’t. He wondered if she had already spoken to the departmental secretary to check his availability.
‘Well, something rather odd’s happening here. There’s a young man outside the shop, wearing a suit made of paper, and he’s causing a disturbance. I’ve called the police, but all they can do is ask him to move on. But then he comes back. He’s not actually doing anything illegal.’
‘Did you say he was wearing a suit made of paper . . . ?’
‘Yes. I think he’s someone we – or you – turned down for the press. I don’t really understand why he’s so upset. He was hanging around yesterday and the day before. But now he’s actually trying to stop people coming into the shop.’
‘And what do you want me to do about it?’
‘He has mentioned you, by name. He seems to bear a grudge? I think you may have written some harsh comments on his rejection slip, or on his manuscript. He doesn’t make a lot of sense when I try and talk to him.’
‘So you want me to come over and apologize to him? Is that what you’re asking?’
‘Maybe if you just talked to him. It’s you he wants to see, I think.’
‘Now? Right now?’
‘I’m losing custom, Arnold. He is turning people away, they are afraid to come in the shop. As I said, the police can’t do anything. He keeps coming back.’
It was something Arnold had long dreaded happening. The Papyrus Press had, over the five years of its operation, been surprisingly successful. Some well-respected but mostly forgotten poets had had their names revived through their efforts. They had discovered some brilliant unknowns who had gone on to publish with major imprints. At the same time, they had attracted a fair number of the desperate and the unhinged. He had twice received letters from solicitors accusing him of publishing their client’s poems under someone else’s name, and a policeman turned up at the shop once, a little apologetically informing a puzzled Polly that he was enquiring after some poems that had been reported missing. They were obliged to investigate, he told her. But so far, no rejected poet had themselves turned up at the shop to complain about their treatment by the Papyrus Press. Some innate sense of dignity and modesty prevented even the most desperate from doing that. He was glad, because the last thing he wanted was to confront some of the people behind the worst of the poetry they were sent.
Even as he gathered up his papers and left the office he was working out his timings. If he was quick and could find a good parking space he could deal with this incident at Papyrus and still have time to get across town to Vera’s house. He texted her, warning her that the poetry workshop might be a little late. Those precious minutes. Each one mattered. A minute with Vera’s body was worth an hour in the real world. She texted him back with the words he’d used to Polly – is there something wrong? Nothing wrong, just a hiccup.
Polly’s shop was in the old quarter of town, not far from the cathedral, in a pedestrianized Elizabethan street with boutique shops, mostly selling arts and crafts, vintage clothes or fine foods. It was an area popular with street performers; there had been a recent trend for living statues, people dressed as monuments and standing still, as if paralysed, for hours on end, so the protestor dressed in paper didn’t look particularly out of place, though he did look striking. A tall, youngish man, thin and wispy. The paper was curled around his torso and limbs in sections and plates Sellotaped together, with elaborately hinged joints, like a suit of armour. It had few creases or tears, he looked immaculate and fresh, a blank sheet straight from the writing cabinet, new and tempting. He looked both powerful and fragile at the same time. The bright white paper made his skin look grey in comparison, his lips too red, his teeth yellowy. But he was handsome, exquisite, even. He was giving out leaflets. A few passers-by had stopped to watch, thinking him to be a street entertainer.
When Arnold came closer he saw that the paper the boy was dressed in wasn’t blank but had been written on, in tight, narrow handwriting too small to read. It looked as though he was covered in poems.
Whenever anyone approached the shop the young man stepped in front of them and made an attempt to block their way. If the person insisted on going in the shop he would let them pass, but he was clearly deterring some, who backed off, not wanting a public confrontation with someone who appeared to be mad. Arnold could see the problem. The man was surely doing something illegal, the police should have acted.
He went forward and made his own attempt to enter the shop. The young man barred his way, as he would anyone else, and held out a leaflet.
‘Would you like something to read, sir?’
Arnold took the leaflet and glanced at it. It was something handwritten and photocopied, in small script, hardly decipherable. The man went on. ‘It’s all there, sir. Free to you. But the people in there refused to publish it.’
Arnold didn’t say anything and tried moving around the young man and gain entrance to the shop. The man shifted sideways and continued to block him.
‘Are you trying to stop me entering this shop?’
‘No,’ the young man said, a little shocked by Arnold’s tone, and stepped neatly aside.
Arnold passed through. There were some people in the shop and Polly was busy with them. She had not seen Arnold’s confrontation with the paper boy and he was disappointed by this. He browsed the tables where paper was laid out in reams of different colours and textures, some of it so thick and rough it was more like some sort of fabric. He looked again at the leaflet the boy had given him. Tiny handwriting; neurotic, cramped, shrunken. He realized that it was a poem, but not just one poem, several poems, some written at right angles to fit into every inch of space on the leaflet, a mosaic of text. But none of it was readable.
‘There you are,’ said Polly, having dealt with the customer, and speaking to him as if he’d been hiding. ‘Haven’t you seen him yet?’
‘Of course I’ve seen him. He was blocking the door.’
‘Well did you say anything to him?’
‘I just asked him to move aside, and he did.’
‘He’s got no right to stand outside my door turning customers away.’
‘He looks pretty harmless.’
‘To you, maybe, but you’re a man.’
‘The police can’t do anything?’
‘They tell him to move on, and so he moves on. Then he comes back.’
‘He’s a wisp of a thing. Looks like he could get blown away.’
Another customer was trying to get into the shop, the boy was blocking her path, pushing his leaflets onto her, talking into her face. She gave up and went away.
‘Look what he’s doing. It can’t go on like this. You’ve got to talk to him.’
‘What am I supposed to say to him?’
‘I don’t know. Offer to have another look at his poems, perhaps?’
‘And then what? Publish them?’
‘Maybe. It depends.’
‘We’re not going to be bullied into publishing some lunatic’s poetry. And if we reject him again, he’ll just come back and carry on doing what he’s doing now.’
‘Perhaps if you reject him in a more sympathetic way than you did last time, he might calm down.’
‘How did I reject him last time?’
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘Do you know what his name is?’
‘It’s on these leaflets, look . . .’
He looked at the leaflet. The writing of the poems themselves was too small to decipher, but the name was larger, in block capitals. M A R T I N G U E R R E.
‘Obviously that can’t be his real name,’ said Polly.
The name triggered something in Arnold’s memory. Among the forty or fifty submissions they received every month, this name, if nothing else, had enabled the poet to stand out from the rest.
‘I think I remember him,’ said Arnold, ‘but I can’t remember his poems, or what I wrote on them.’
A customer had made it past the poet and into the shop, and Polly attended to her, leaving Arnold to think.
He was at a loss for how to approach the man. When he rehearsed in his mind what he should say, he found himself taking the role of a nightclub bouncer, or hefty security guard, pushing the young poet firmly out of the way, locking him into a half-nelson when he offered resistance. Well, that was surely not the way, yet what else? The admonishing headmaster, telling the young poet not to be silly? Then, as he approached the door and the young man beyond it, dressed in a suit of his poems, he realized there was only one way to deal with him, and that was to read him.
‘Some of these lines are quite beautiful, but you might have used a bigger hand,’ he said, bending to peer at the boy’s paper torso, on which were written dozens of sonnets. The boy made no reply, and looked a little uncomfortable with the close attention. Arnold was evidently the first person to attempt reading what was written on the paper suit. ‘Why did you write them in such small lettering?’
The boy shrugged. ‘It’s just my normal handwriting.’
‘But you wanted to make a display of them, in public.’
‘No. I just wanted to wear them.’
Arnold straightened himself. He was touched by what felt like a very pure form of honesty in what the boy had said. ‘You are angry with us for turning down the poems you sent us. I’m sorry. We . . .’
‘I’m not angry.’
‘OK. But you’re not happy . . .’
‘Why do you keep saying what I’m feeling?’
‘I’m just trying to apologize to you.’
The boy laughed, but with what seemed genuine humour.
‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry if we upset you, I may have written some comments . . .’
The boy’s expression suddenly became serious, as though stunned by a sudden moment of revelation. ‘Are you Arnold Proctor?’
‘Yes, I run the press here . . .’
‘I loved you.’
‘Oh.’ The comment completely silenced Arnold.
‘Your poems are beautiful.’
‘You’ve read my book?’
‘It’s in the college library. I keep taking it out. I’m the only one.’
‘You’re at the university?’
‘The art school.’
A moment of silence, again Arnold felt wrong-footed. If the boy had been at the university he could have found common ground, but the art school was unknown territory to him. He wasn’t even sure he knew there was an art school in the city.
‘You had no right to write those things on my poems.’
‘Were they very bad, the things I wrote?’
‘It doesn’t matter what they were, you had no right to write on them. I sent them to you as a poet, not as a student. I know how to write poems.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Such confidence. Where does it come from?’
The boy didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, ‘If you are true to your feelings, then the poems will write themselves.’
Arnold hadn’t the heart to challenge this assertion, even though it seemed to stab at him, personally.
‘Can we have a talk, somewhere more private?’
Arnold had gently begun guiding the boy away from the shop, placing a hand on his papered elbow and turning him around. He was light and fragile beneath the paper, hardly a sense of a body there at all. He offered no resistance to being manoeuvred, and in fact yielded too readily to Arnold’s guidance. It felt to Arnold as though he was stealing a child.
‘I don’t want any tea,’ the boy said, as they walked along the High Street, Arnold’s hand still on the boy’s papered elbow. Beneath his hand he could feel warmth within the paper. It was an unnerving sensation, like feeling a gift-wrapped present that contained something alive. ‘I only drink coffee. Fair-trade coffee.’
Arnold knew of a place, five minutes down the High Street, left near the cathedral, that had been open only a few weeks, a place that served coffee with an earnestness that he thought the boy might appreciate. It sold specially imported coffee directly from growers. The tables were rough wooden desks. The boy’s appearance drew looks of surprise from the other customers, and some laughter. A table of young women kept turning and sniggering. The waitress recommended Rwandan red bourbon, which arrived at their table in pretty blue cups. The boy looked awkward, embarrassed. Sitting opposite each other, Arnold could examine him closely. He was extraordinarily beautiful, like a martyr in a Renaissance painting. At the same time he looked as though he had been thrust into an adult body before he was ready for it, not knowing what to do with his facial hair, which grew both long and short about his jowls. There was an electrical sensitivity to his face, the lips occasionally fluttered, the eyes sparked, glowed and dimmed repeatedly. Now and then he took deep breaths, as if trying to contain an emotion that was overspilling.
‘I loved the Papyrus Press,’ he said, almost the first words he’s spoken since they left the shop.
Arnold didn’t say anything but smiled at what he took to be a sort of compliment. The boy went on, ‘They publish books using their own paper, hand-made by the woman in there. She produces special paper for each book.’
Arnold chose not to remind him that he knew this already, as husband of the paper-maker and editor of the press. The boy had this curious ability to detach himself from commonly accepted knowledge. ‘My poems are all about paper. They would fit in so well.’
He lifted the cup of black coffee to his lips, frowning. When he took a sip, he shuddered, grimaced.
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘What’s the matter? Too strong?’
‘It’s got no sugar in it.’
‘They said we had to have it without sugar.’
‘I can’t drink coffee without sugar.’
‘That’s the way we’re supposed to drink it, the woman said.’
‘So we have to do what she says?’
Arnold saw that he would have to try and get some sugar – he called to the waitress, ‘Could we have some sugar? Please?’
‘It does corrupt the flavour – we do recommend . . .’
‘I understand that, but at the same time, we would like some sugar.’
‘Of course.’ Now it was the waitress who looked a little hurt, behind her smile. She returned, after what seemed too long a pause, with a little bowl of brown sugar cubes.
The boy looked at them sulkily. Arnold suspected he was going to ask for white sugar. Instead he picked one up and put it in his coffee, performing the action clumsily so that the coffee splashed over the edge of his cup and dripped down the side.
‘So what sort of things do you paint?’
The boy shook his head slightly, as if unable to believe the stupidity of his question.
‘I don’t paint things.’
‘You’re a sculptor?’
The boy sat back and blew air from his lips exasperatedly.
‘I just make things with paper. Paper is the important thing.’
‘That paper suit looks like a work of art to me.’
The boy flexed his arms and contemplated the smooth working of paper hinges.
‘My girlfriend did it for me. She’s in the fashion department.’
Arnold felt a strong sense of relief when he discovered that the boy had a girlfriend.
The boy drank his coffee again, he didn’t grimace this time, but still wasn’t satisfied.
‘It needs milk,’ he said, in a strangely cold little voice.
‘It’s fine without. You’ve got sugar . . .’
‘It needs milk. I can’t drink it without milk.’
Arnold didn’t think to wonder why it was incumbent upon him to make the request for milk. The boy who’d staged a one-person street protest should have been quite capable of making the demand, but he was deliberately placing the onus on him as a sort of authority figure. You’ve brought me here, he seemed to be saying, so you sort out my coffee. Arnold called the waitress over again.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again, could we have some milk for this young man’s coffee . . .’
‘Milk?’
‘Yes, please.’
The waitress couldn’t hide her disappointment, as she nodded and turned away. The boy called after her:
‘Warm milk.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’d like warm milk – hot milk, please.’
The waitress looked back at Arnold, as if she needed confirmation of this request, then back at the boy, then at the barista behind the bar, before walking off.
‘They bring a little jug of freezing milk, the coffee will be turned stone cold. It’s already cooled down a lot. Wasn’t exactly scalding when it arrived.’
So now the boy was some sort of coffee connoisseur, thought Arnold, as he persisted with his own milkless cup.
‘So what do your parents think about it?’
‘About what?’
‘About you and art school. Do they approve?’
‘They don’t understand what I’m doing. They understand if they think I am learning how to design things. But I keep telling them I’m not doing that. I don’t want to design things.’
‘What do your parents do?’
‘What’s the point of talking about them?’
‘I’m just interested.’
‘Well I’m not.’
‘No?’
The boy shrugged, and then made an effort to explain, ‘My mother’s just – she’s just a mother. The guy she lives with – I don’t really know what he does to be honest.’
‘What about your father?’
‘He pissed off when I was ten. I’ve stopped thinking about him.’
Just a little while ago, Arnold was thinking, the young man before him had been a child. He tried to imagine the child he had been, in a toy-rich world, unconcerned about the publishing of poems, doted on, then sent into turmoil by the parental split-up. He wondered how much that episode had been responsible for the fragility of the thing that sat before him now, how easily it had replaced the perkiness and enthusiasm of the child with a talent for drawing with this thing of pain and nerves.
He felt a sudden urge to feed the boy. The thinness of him, visible beneath the paper shell, was shocking. He was as thin as a letter.
‘Do you want something to eat, Martin?’
‘I don’t think they do food here.’
‘There were some cakes on the counter.’
The boy shook his head in a slightly embarrassed way, as though Arnold had mentioned something he shouldn’t have. Martin spoke as if to cover this embarrassment. ‘I don’t need any advice about how to live my life.’
‘I wasn’t going to offer you any.’
‘And I don’t need any advice about how to write poems.’
‘The same, I wasn’t going to give you any.’
‘Then what’s the point of us talking?’
‘I wanted you to send me your poems again. Send me the manuscript. I want to have another look.’
‘Are you serious? After what you wrote on them, do you seriously think I would entrust them to you again?’
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.’
He noticed a subtle change in Martin’s demeanour. The brittleness had softened slightly. He had dropped his guard, despite his defiant words. Arnold had unashamedly touched the most sensitive part of him.
‘I’ve got better things to do with them,’ the boy said.
‘I don’t doubt that. All I’m asking for is the chance to read them again. I’m not saying I am going to publish them, we publish very little anyway. But I am only asking because I think I may have made a big mistake the first time I read them. And reading you – the poems you are wearing, even though your handwriting is terribly small, I can see there are some very beautiful things there.’
Arnold, who hadn’t thought about her for well over an hour, suddenly realized that, had this boy not intervened, he would, at this moment, be fucking Vera in her husband’s bed. He felt a surge of guilt, the origin of which was the innocent presence of Martin, the boy. Arnold kept thinking of him as a boy but he was a young man, out in the world, away from his parents. Yet he had a childishness to him that was so easy to probe and manipulate, heartbreakingly so. A pureness of conscience that made Arnold wince when he considered the state of his own conscience.
‘I don’t know,’ the boy said. ‘I feel like you’re just going to trick me, or something.’
Arnold moved his chair in readiness for departing. ‘Will you think about it?’ The boy gave a very small nod, barely more than a twitch of the head. ‘Do you want me to give you a lift anywhere? What about I take you to your college?’
‘No, I don’t want to go there, not today.’
‘Home then?’
Martin agreed, in a dazed, blurry kind of way. He didn’t seem to know what had hit him. Even his paper suit was beginning to tear.
They walked out of the cafe together and then to the multi-storey where Arnold’s car was parked. He drove him out to the western quarter, where all the grand houses had been converted into student bedsits and house-shares, the odd world that he had once inhabited, though in a different city, with kebab shops on every corner, charity shops everywhere, second-hand record shops. It was a part of town he rarely visited, to avoid the extra-mural encounters that could turn into out-of-hours tutorials. He had once gone in a pub round about here, when he was new to the city and to the job, a pub which had seemed charmingly peaceful and relaxed at first, but by the time he had finished his first pint he was surrounded by students, many of them his own, and they all thought it amazing and funny that their lecturer was in the pub that they regarded as their territory. He had tried his best to be friendly, and they worked hard at catching him off guard, and tried to get him drunk, and even offered him drugs, and in the end he had to do his best to make an inconspicuous exit. Now, driving under the boy’s direction, he felt a strange sense of envy, for the old ground of studenthood, with its easy come easy go atmosphere. He parked outside a shabby Edwardian terrace.
‘You could give me your poems now, if you like,’ said Arnold. ‘Are they in there? Do you have them?’
The boy hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I need to think about it. What to do with them. You hurt me very bad. I don’t know if I should give them to you again.’
‘But,’ Arnold tried to moderate his tone, he was becoming a little frustrated, ‘in that case why were you picketing the shop? It looked to me like you were demanding to be reconsidered.’
‘No, I was just trying to draw attention to an injustice.’
‘But you do realize, don’t you, that you can’t just demand to be published, it doesn’t work like that.’
‘My poems have to be published, it’s vital. And they should have been published by Papyrus. They are the only publishers who understand paper. And Papyrus can only publish them if they love them, like I loved yours.’
The conversation went on like this for a little while as they sat in the car. He managed, in the end, to extract from Martin a commitment to send Arnold his poems. Arnold for his part said he couldn’t promise anything, but that he would give them more time and consideration than perhaps he had done previously. In the meantime, he asked Martin to end his one-person protest outside Papyrus.
The boy was out of the car now, his paper costume disintegrating, a loop of card that had clad an arm came unstuck and blew back in through the car window. The big sheet of cartridge that wrapped his torso had split. There was just bare skin beneath. The boy bent down to speak through the window.
‘You can’t make me do anything. I don’t have to do what you say.’ He uttered these words in such a tight voice it was like an act of ventriloquism, his lips hardly moving. He turned and walked to the house, a rambling building with overgrown privet almost blocking the path. He didn’t go in by the front door but disappeared round the side.
Arnold looked at his watch. If he drove back to Vera’s now, he would have about thirty minutes before she would have to leave to pick up her littlest. They would not have time to make love, but he could spend at least a few minutes in her company, talking. But the traffic was bad and the minutes ticked away in his car. He gave up and went home.