Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody

They had only just carved out a bit of time together and now she was planning to work in the evenings as well as during the day.
    â€˜What’s the point in me being here,’ she said, ‘when you go to bed at nine o’clock?’
    â€˜Well, why don’t you join me?’ he said. ‘It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures, lying in bed and reading.’
    â€˜I read enough books to last me a lifetime when I was in publicity,’ she said. ‘One of life’s great pleasures for me is not having to read.’
    â€˜Well, what about poetry?’ he said. ‘You told me the first time we met that you loved poetry but you never had time to read it. Now you have time.’
    His words hit a nerve and she lashed out, irrationally. ‘Well, why don’t you bloody well write some, then? What do you do in that study all day anyway, apart from smoking yourself to death?’
    He rose to his feet. The TV remote was in his hand and he hurled it to the floor, creating a small explosion of bat- teries and plastic shards.
    â€˜Is that what you want?’ he said. ‘Your own private scribe beavering away in the back room, producing volumes of adoring verse?’
    â€˜Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t care what you write about.’
    â€˜I’ve told you a thousand times,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work like that. It isn’t something you can turn on and off like a radio. I can’t sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and come up with a poem.’
    She bent to pick up a battery that had come to rest against her foot. He went on, ‘In any case, the whole idea is egregious. A private club, exclusive to the book industry and all its slimy parasites. What are you going to call this one? No Riffraff?’
    There was an instant when they might both have laughed and let it drop, but neither of them did, and the opportunity passed.
    â€˜And which are you?’ she said. ‘Industry or parasite?’ When he didn’t answer, she did it for him. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’re neither. You’re a poet, and therefore superior. In this world but not of it. Is that the way?’
    He kicked the eviscerated remote and walked out of the house.
    {1 8 }
    It is the only other time he has done it. On that occasion he did not prevent his feet from carrying him to his local. He spent the whole evening on a high stool telling the barman, and anyone else who would listen, that he was married to Maggie Thatcher; a woman who only needed three hours’ sleep a night and was a jumped-up shopkeeper. He railed against the economic system, the publishing fraternity, the media, the organic sector. He scoffed chicken-flavoured crisps and pork scratchings, both of which he detested, just to prove his street credentials. He bought Woodbines and smoked them, and picked bitter tobacco strands from between his teeth. He drank pints of stout all evening, even though they never kept it cold enough in that pub and had no idea how to pull it anyway. Closing time found him reverting to his roots and expounding the evils of Catholicism and quoting from his first publication, The Blue Virgin . Out on the street it took him a while to remember where he was and how to get home, but he found his way and found his key and found, in the end, the hole it was meant to fit into.
    She was waiting up for him in the living room but he went straight past and up the stairs and emptied his bladder, which seemed to take an hour, and then collapsed on top of the bed in the spare room. When he woke in the morning she had already gone out to work.
    His breakout took him to Ireland, where he spent a few weeks in Dublin, renewing old acquaintances and reminding the organisers of courses and festivals and radio programs of his existence. Then he visited the family home in Tipperary, which his older brother had inherited and had, by then, turned into a health spa. The house had been