Читать книгу Vulgar Things - Lee Rourke - Страница 24

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.