Bill Dickson is a hard man to track down. For an entire hour I sat at the bar of the Barely Inn, waiting for the Yellow Pages absentee to arrive. During this time, incidentally, I spoke to the proprietor of the quaint, albeit rather empty hostelry about the weather characterising that particular afternoon. It was a dreary Monday. Before the morning could split its yolk, the clouds had involved themselves in a conspiratorial sabotage and, by the tenth chime, had gagged and dragged dear Sol to the sky’s nethermost region and, there, smothered him with grey-sheeted pillows. A heavy wheeze preceded the landlady’s nod of agreement. She was nice, though she would prove to be something of a hooter-hindrance with those congested lungs of hers.
Dickson arrived at 15:13. After bizarrely asserting that he had turned up ‘two minutes early,’ he sat down beside me, ordered a glass of red wine and pork scratchings, re-tied his shoelaces, smoothed the frown of his moustache, and then requested that we begin. He had come to talk about his new book on the ‘dangers of solipsism’, A Disconnect from Subject. True to my name, my interviewing technique is strictly William Shakespearean: the eyes are indeed windows to the soul. In my iris-y pursuit of any visceral and revealing parts of Dickson (an opaline flicker, a transmutable twitch), I saw staring at me a rebellious strand of my hair unfurled like a topsy-turvy question mark. I blew and it pirouetted upwards only to lose its footing and fall down to whence it came. I owed this slight embarrassment, dear reader, to the peculiarity of the inn being completely devoid of mirrors.
How I came to ascertain this fact requires an elucidation of my appetite, which I admit is ravenous. If uncatered, the belly rumbles to around a magnitude of six and becomes the drone, somewhat, to the all-too-familiar, tuba-heavy orchestra of flatulence. It is therefore both my personal and public duty to answer to its demands. Doubtless you have spotted within me a candid transparency—but you will fail in your search for any trace of blushing embarrassment. For how could I be embarrassed when you—smirking as you are at this welcome relatability—share my same contouring? ‘An artist’s best audience is the person he sees in the shaving mirror every morning’. Ergo, I can be quite confident of a sympathetic reception to the following anecdote.
Enter our antagonist: the beef and horseradish sandwich. Lovingly (though wheezily) arranged by the landlady, it was a thing of gastronomical beauty—far too elegant a treat for my wolfish chops. Alas, the gullet was soothed, the belly comfortably padded. But what was that? A faint itch began to swell on my left cheek; a sliver of horseradish sauce had escaped and sought refuge on the smooth of my face. Not satisfied by the valiant attempts of my blind hands and tongue, I dashed to the W.C.—and what did I see? Instead of my own reflection I was greeted by four cold grey walls with sad protrusions of sinks and hand dryers. It thus ensued that I found myself kneeling in front of the toilet basin, fingering and thumbing my rippling face until the landlady burst in, unsubtly guising remonstration with a raspy tone of concern. Yes, I was okay. No, I was not being sick. The sandwich was lovely—really, truly, honestly. It certainly had not been thirty minutes!
To return: there were times in the verbal tennis between me and Dickson when he would lapse into a searching reverie. (During one such moment—a sigh, a slow rotation of the wrist to look at his watch—a young waiter inflamed a pale fire in the corner of the room. It was a moment of delicious synchronicity. Just when a heavy exhale distended Dickson’s nostrils, a tangential beam of firelight reflected off of his raised time-piece, shot upwards and illuminated, as if under spotlight, the sudden descent of nasal discharge which proceeded to hang in pendular animation for the remainder of the interview.) I was well-equipped for Dickson’s frequent daydreams, however. It is my custom—refined from years of experience—to carry with me some madeleine cakes as an offering to coax my subjects out of their cogitative labyrinths. I find that it has a reverse Proustian effect. Rather than sending their minds through a planetarium of the past, the cakes’ sensory immediacy whiplashes my interviewees into the present moment where they find me, William Richardson, poised with pen on paper, my eyebrows raised in welcoming curiosity, and my lips curling into a wry smile to signify that I know that they have gotten lost on their subconscious yellow brick road. But Dickson declined my sweet offering.
I hope you will allow me, at this juncture, to make a parenthetical detour. An artist must from time to time wrench himself from his canvas and inspect its colourful totality. This is what I have just done. My peppermint tea, it seems, has not only cleansed my palate but so too my mind; and in the light of this fresh attention the flaws of my piece stick out like fingerprints on a window. I might have gone back to excise and insert but my Kerouacian spirit impels me to go on. Forgive me, reader.
Allow me to explain. Thus far my piece has been largely bereft of spatial paraphernalia, a costly mistake which I imagine is fogging the focus of your mind’s eye. An interviewer is, as they say, the people’s representative, and I wear that banner with pride. But I hope to erase the boundary between you and me; I wish for you to see what I see, hear what I hear, sit here with me, sit here as me, I daresay. And for that purpose I must situate you perfectly, and give you the colourful details and the background music of exactly where Dickson and I had our rip-roaring exchange.
Rectification and atonement. The Barely Inn, as I have mentioned only briefly, was but a vacuum, an empty space into which rushed nothing except the echoes of its landlady’s guttural spurts. For adornment, there was the odd painting unevenly hung: a crowd of dogs donning top hats sat around a table playing a card game—Snap, one presumes. On the adjacent wall, pierced by a low column of wood, hung a rather macabre acrylic of Siamese twins in a state of bother. One had its face contorted in revulsion, its neck wrung; as if attempting to desperately disconnect from his counterpart who, conversely, seemed rather content with the whole joined-at-the-hip thing. Despite a protrusion of thick paint on the latter’s left cheek that remained unchecked by the artist, the painting was rather impressive in its rendering of contrasting attitudes within a symmetrical form. Quite bizarre a painting to have in a family friendly pub, though–that landlady is quite the mystery. Everything else was pretty much bog-standard: anaemic wooden flooring, wooden chairs, wooden tables, wooden doors, marble bar, wooden beams. Piquant candelabra for garnish.
Now that I have set the stage for our little back and forth, it feels proper to produce the script. Via a little telepathy between my little dictaphone and desktop I can reproduce our conversation verbatim:
So your book yes you actually remind me of someone you no oh really yeah hmm yes really yeah but I can’t quite place it oh so yeah anyway your questions my questions yes about your book okay now as you say or as your blurb my blurb yes your blurb says you’re going off of my blurb yes have you not read yes no I have but yeah your blurb states that this is about I’m not sure blurbs are the best indicay but anyway your blurb says that this is about the dangers of soup seizure yes I guess it mostly is but there are other oh yes so on that note I have read a book by lasch oh really yeah I guess my book shares some similar yeah I thought it might have done hmm anyway dhgksf sgkhgfk mind her ksejhd excuse me so how does it relate culturally culturally yes as in do you expect a cultural impact I guess but of course mm you can never be sure sure sure but yeah I’m not sure if cultural impact hmm was what I intended okay okay okay so kbdh gho excuse me no that’s fine shgk sorry I’m just gonna poptothaloo okay.
Apparently my gadget cannot differentiate between the speech of William Richardson and that of Bill Dickson, but I trust that the intelligence of my reader will make the distinction. It has, at least, positioned you within our vibrational thrum. I am afraid the rest of the conversation has been lost—for what reason I remain unaware.
We were coming to the kernel of Dickson’s book when the Inn’s landlady exploded into another wheeze. As you can well observe, she acted as the discordant punctuation to our interview, and it was clear that Dickson—shuffling as he did out of his chair—sensed this. Under the pretext of picking his child up from school (who, according to my little Google search, does not exist) he left in a hurry, leaving me to foot the bill. It goes without saying that I made a note to self: never conduct interviews around those without well-oiled lungs.
*
Due to a technical difficulty, The Mirror has been unable to edit the text of William Richardson’s article. We have therefore outlined some of the printing errors below.
- First and foremost, we apologise sincerely to Dr. Benjamin Clark for our writer’s mistake in addressing him as Bill Dickson. We fully understand the tone of frustration in his response article, though we find the sentence “I imagine it was a Nabokovian shit that our wordy little idiot saw reflecting back at him in his toilet episode,” rather uncouth.
- As some Mirror readers have pointed out, William Richardson’s claim to years of experience is false. This is his second article since starting work with our paper—his first is a review of the Globe’s recent adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘A Fellow’ [insert hyperlink here, John]
- Our deepest condolences go out to the family of the late Mary McDonnell who tragically died from lung cancer a week after the article’s publication. Friends described her as ‘the proud and gentle owner’ of the Barley Inn, rather than the Barely Inn as the article states.
These errors will be corrected in due course.
Reece is a recent graduate of the University of Bristol, having studied English. He writes short stories and cultural opinion pieces.
