LITMIR.BIZ

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sort he ever seemed to have. ‘Good enough wouldn’t leave well enough alone. What is that from?’ read one jotting. ‘Donkeys are actually very smart! A film about a clever donkey – donkey that saves the world? Beresford to direct?’ Further down he read: ‘The mating of frogs can last for days!!!’ (the multiple exclamation marks possibly reflecting youthful optimism).

      It was highly likely that this practice of jotting down random quotes and thoughts was the genesis of his adult addiction to anecdotes. Janet had often complained how difficult it was to have a conversation with him because he constantly slewed off into irrelevant anecdotes and arcane historical facts.

      ‘You’re a conversational lucky dip,’ she had once said. ‘A human fortune cookie constantly dispensing gratuitous observational tidbits.’

      ‘I always thought it was tit-bits’, he had replied, only to have her shake her head in despair.

      ‘You’ve just done it again!’ she said.

      ‘I can’t help it. I free associate,’ he said defensively.

      ‘Yes. Except with people,’ she replied and walked away.

      It was true, he reflected. His brain was like the Dead Sea Scrolls, a wealth of historical information existing only in hundreds of tiny fragments. At the same time he believed this was justified. The great theories of history such as Marxism were, in his opinion, delusions. There were no fundamental principles or mechanisms, no underlying forces shaping human destiny, no kind of plan. History was just a succession of random, bizarre events. His own life was proof of that.

      This view was immediately supported when he wrenched open another box to find it contained the research materials for his almost-seminal paper ‘The Social Impact of the Great Lisbon Earthquake’ – a perfect example of the unpredictable nature of history. It was also supported by the fact that all the expensively acquired source materials had turned out to be useless because they were in Portuguese, which he did not speak.

      The next box turned out to be a collection of bric-a-brac inherited from his mother Avis. He picked up an envelope that contained black-and-white photos of his mother as a young woman, mostly with people he didn’t know. One showed her in a long dress beside his father, who was in evening attire, seemingly at a ball. He recalled that they liked to go dancing. In another, she stood beside a man Grafton did not recognise but who, for some reason, looked familiar. He dropped the envelope back into the box and opened another.

      Here he found a collection of old magazines from the mid-fifties called, innocently enough, Photo, but which were clearly not intended exclusively for camera enthusiasts. They were full of black-and-white photos of young women in underwear, posed in what were regarded in those days as seductive positions, smiling sweetly. There were no seductive glowers in those days. Pin-up girls radiated cheerfulness.

      He recalled he had found these in the garage when he was about fourteen and never knew where they came from. He wondered if they had been his father’s, although that didn’t seem likely. Despite the forbidden nature of these publications, the tameness of the images was extraordinary. Christ, he thought, this is what we fantasised about in those days? The women were wearing panties and bras, sometimes with the straps seductively undone, or coyly turned away showing a bare back with just the tiniest lunette of clutched side-boob. Still, he recalled, it was a valuable find, for though he spent a considerable amount of time in the newsagent in Hawthorn Road glancing obliquely at the Penthouse and Playboy magazines, he had never had the nerve to actually take one to the counter. Even if he had, he was pretty sure his school uniform would have barred him from buying it.

      The next box contained a collection of his childhood books. There were his Just William books about a cheeky and resourceful English schoolboy – a character resembling his own juvenile self not in the least – and comics featuring Rupert Bear, who was a kind of ursine equivalent of William. There was also a faded copy of a Chinese story called The Good Luck Horse about a horse that caused trouble and was called the Bad Luck Horse until he stopped a war and became a Good Luck Horse.

      Beneath these, he found a small book of poetry, hand-typed and hand-bound in what was clearly an early attempt at desktop or, more likely, kitchen-table publishing. He opened it and was confronted by a long, ambitious poem about his high school days that was in no small way influenced by Dylan Thomas. It was called ‘Under Forrest Hill.’ He scanned a few lines:

      Mr Pellegrino, hair akimbo, tie askew

      Ash lapelled, flies cross-buttoned,

      Squints through sellotaped spectacles,

      Labelling the cilium and the centrosome

      With a dwindling nub of chalk,

      While outside, beyond the asphalt

      A thousand cicadas drag their fingernails

      Down the blackboards of the plane trees.

      In the hundred-not-out heat

      Sweating in a back corner Stiffy Morrison,

      Squirming in his too-tight trousers

      Draws breasts on his biology book,

      And quickly turns them into eyes,

      While dreaming of the laminated lamington-laden tuckshop,

      Piled with pies, sausage rolls, vanilla slice,

      And sucking ichor from a tetrahedral block of ice.

      ‘Jubbly’ he whispers in a trance, all unaware,

      Provoking laughter and the teacher’s stare.

      Shit, thought Grafton, and flicked over to find another poem. This was also clearly heavily influenced by a well-known poet and was called ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Roof-rack.’ He began to read:

      Let us go then you and I

      Where tiled roofs lie beneath the sky

      And smell of sausages and chops

      Where the green bus to Moorabbin stops.

      And there shall be a time on Sunday morn

      To effect the mowing of a lawn

      Precisely trimmed around its edge

      And then the clipping of the hedge.

      For I have seen the Hills hoists and hose’s coil.

      I have measured out my life in 2-stroke oil

      I should have been a pair of garden shears

      Clipping a privet hedge in Georgian years.

      At the grocer’s the women come and go

      Talking of tea and Iced VoVos.

      And somehow there will be a way

      To vacuum the venetians in the blue EK.

      And do I dare, have I the right

      To ask one ‘Is it rubbish night?’

      ‘Double shit,’ said Grafton out loud. ‘What was I thinking?’ He chanced to take one more look a little further in and struck something that seemed to have been from a Sylvia Plath period.

      Death, death, death, death

      Death, death, death, death.

      The dead dark sun of winter

      Sucks life from the leprous lily,

      My bones scream. The kiss

      Of daylight flays the skin

      From my lipless, eyeless face.

      My mind is an Auschwitz …

      ‘Holy fuck!’ he exclaimed. He couldn’t even remember having a Sylvia Plath period and hoped that it was mercifully brief. He looked at the cover of the book and saw that its title was Derivations.

      Oh well. Poets never make money anyway. He closed the box.

      It

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