We started with those modest six cans but found we had drunk them by 11:30 and so Chris cracked out the bottle of Glenfiddich that had been sitting in his bag since Christmas, a gift from his dad that had looked for a long time as though it might never get opened. We only had mugs to drink it from and were liberal in our measures, we gave Jay one too, pressed it on him though he just sat there holding it.
We are going to see a socialist Government I said to him. First truly socialist government this country has ever had. Let's drink to that!
He lifted the mug as I knocked mine back, sniffed it, lowered it again. Got any Coke?he asked.
Bartleby! Chris said. It’s a Bartleby from the boy Jay
What?
Bartleby. He would prefer not to, he said. Then he went through a pile of books he had stacked up under the kitchen table, looking for something he couldn’t find and instead pulled out a book a contemporary American poetry.
It’s not in that I said as he opened it and scanned the content list intently. Mellville didn't write poetry.
You sure? Captain my captain?
That’s Whitman.
He laughed and mock comically slapped a hand to his forehead.
Give us a recital while you’re there, I said. He read the first few lines of Song of Myself.
Nah, let's have a bit of Lowell. I pulled the book from him. I had read short stories of my own publicly once or twice and fancied I had a convincing manner. We started to drink more as we read and got carried away, went through poems we knew well, some we had never read before, started pulling different editions out of the piles and striding around the small kitchen declaiming, getting sillier the further we moved back in time affecting what we imagined were the voices of seventeenth century courtiers, doing Larkin in a bluff Yorkshire accent, until we got bored and it was 2 in the morning and we went off to what passed for our beds. We’ll tidy all this up in the morning! The empty cans and the scattered books, like we were teenagers still, students, pissed and enthused by the dizzy other worlds and states of being that poetry revealed to us.
Sail on until the calm of morning I was repeating over and over to myself as I got down on the single mattress on the floor. Where was that from? It hardly mattered. Satisfaction, cheap and golden as the whiskey we had downed flooded through me. I had beaten out my exile, I had not succumbed, the world had changed around me and would deliver me home. All the years of being told I was an idiot for still clinging onto all that old stuff redeemed.
Sail on, sail on.... and the sun waking me a few hours later, early, thirsty too, still repeating the phrase to myself over and over. That morning, soft and radiant with beginnings so that even tidying up was undertaken with a new sense of ease with each other. We tried to figure out how in our daze we had managed to lose or misplace the book of contemporary American poetry and could only conclude that Jay had taken it for some reason of his own. Perhaps we had inspired him.
Among the books I found my copy of Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, and paused for a moment, so that's where it had gone. He was always borrowing books without asking me, Chris. A bad habit. I didn't care generally and had got rid of most of them anyway, but this one had sentimental value, Ayako had bought it for me and we had read it together during a Summer back in London, staying in the residence of the school I was working in. Rather than start an argument or recriminate I took it discretely back into my own room, hid it, ridiculously, under my pillow, tried not to think of her.
Checked my phone to distract myself. Nick Bascombe was inviting me for a celebratory lunch time drink. Well, why not? Days like these came once in a lifetime.
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