Die Happy by J. M. Gregson Page B

anxiety rose as he prepared himself for the latest episode in this other trade he needed to sustain his status and credibility as a full-time poet. Perhaps he should have accepted the man’s suggestion and met him earlier. He wouldn’t have had the time to get nervous then. But there was no real need to be nervous, was there? Perhaps he just wasn’t a natural lawbreaker. Poets were supposed to make their own rules and go their own way. Yet even at school he hadn’t been as happy as the others had been when breaking the stupid little rules.
    He felt better as darkness finally crept in over the Gloucestershire countryside and better still once he was in the city. Here the lighting in the streets seemed to bring the night in so much more swiftly than in the fields and the hedgerows outside. He parked the old Focus some streets away from his rendezvous. A vehicle parked regularly in the same place could excite suspicion. That was the advice he had been given when he started to deal. Perhaps he was, after all, a conformist at heart. Philip Larkin had wrestled with thoughts like that, so he was in good poetic company.
    The White Hart wasn’t near the docks. He didn’t like the pub where he met his supplier and he didn’t like his journey to and from it. He had chosen to meet his biggest customer in a more central and respectable tavern, much used by the middle classes for a drink after work. At this time in the evening it housed a more cosmopolitan group; the increasing number of tourists was another sign that the year was advancing. This ancient inn was almost in the centre of Gloucester and the streets around it were peopled more thickly than those near the dockside rendezvous where he bought his supplies. Sometimes there was safety in numbers.
    The man he was meeting was a young solicitor – older than Sam, but still no more than twenty-five. Paul Martin was his name. You didn’t use names more than you had to in this trade, and Sam hoped that the client still didn’t know his. Anonymity was a key to safety in this lucrative but dangerous commerce.
    The White Hart had numerous small alcoves, which dated from an earlier age. They were much appreciated by lovers and by anyone with a conversation they wished to conceal from a wider public. Sam glanced up at the illuminated sign depicting a young white stag and slipped quickly into the pub. It was nine thirty-five.
    He found his man immediately, sipping nervously at a gin and tonic in the same niche they had used last time. Paul Martin said edgily, ‘You took your time. I’ve been here for twenty minutes.’
    â€˜Your own choice, that. Nine thirty, I said. I arrived here precisely five minutes after that, as planned. The customer must always be there before his supplier. Rule of the game. You don’t hang around any longer than you need to, when you’re carrying more than you can claim is for your own use.’
    â€˜All right. Let’s get this done as quickly as possible, then.’ Martin leaned forward to see a little more of the lounge bar of the pub, twisting his face first right and then left, to see if they were being observed.
    â€˜You’re drawing attention to us. You should be acting as if you’d nothing to fear, as if what we’re doing was the most natural thing in the world.’ But Sam was secretly reassured. The man was more naïve and unpractised than he was in the situation.
    â€˜Let’s get it over with quickly then.’ The man looked into Sam’s face and repeated himself nervously. Though he was in his mid-twenties, he clutched notes in his closed fist, like a small child impatient to buy the sweets he had been promised much earlier. Something for the poet in that image, Sam thought automatically. The material for verse was all around you, in life’s rich ironies as abundantly as in its tragedies. But you must keep your senses alive to the richness and the absurdity of