Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(27)

But a thesis was not about why you appreciated your subject: in academia, he’d come to understand, that kind of thing should be reserved for social chit-chat. You had to cook up something more focused. Tin’s central hypothesis revolved around the difficulties of satire in an age lacking in shared moral standards, which Martial’s age did, in spades: he’d moved to Rome when Nero was in power. Indeed, was Martial a true satirist or just a smutty gossip, as some commentators had claimed? Tin intended to defend his hero against this charge: there was so much more to Martial, he would say, than cocks and boy-f*cking and sluts and fart jokes! Though he would not of course use those crude vernacular terms in his thesis. And he’d do his own translations, updating the diction to fit Martial’s well-crafted slang, though the filthiest of the epigrams were prudently to be avoided: their time had not yet come.

“You imitate youth, Laetinus, by dyeing your hair. Presto! Yesterday a swan, you’re now a raven. But you can’t fool everyone: Proserpina spots your grey hair. And she’ll yank your stupid disguise right off your head!” This was the tone he sought in his translations – contemporary, punchy, not stilted. He used to spend a week over one or two lines. But he doesn’t do that any more, because who cares?

He’d received a grant for his doctoral studies, though it wasn’t large. Jorrie told him Classics was surely going to disappear very soon, and then how would he earn his living? He should have gone into Design, because he would have made a killing. But, said Tin, a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

“Money talks,” said Jorrie, who despite her bohemian leanings wanted to have lots of it. She had no intention of toiling away in some tedious, soul-grinding factotum job, overworked and underpaid and a prey to oafs and thugs, the way their mother had. Her nascent vision involved flashy cars and vacations in the Caribbean and a closetful of figure-hugging fabrics. She hadn’t articulated that vision yet, not out loud, but Tin could see it coming.

“Yes,” said Tin. “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.” Martial could have said that. Possibly Martial did say it. He would have to check. Aureo hamo piscari. To fish with a golden hook.



The barbers on the ground floor of Tin’s building were three elderly misanthropic Italian brothers who did not know what the world was coming to except that it was bad. The shop had a rack of girlie magazines featuring police stories and pictures of hookers with enormous bosoms, which was what men were supposed to like. These magazines made Tin feel queasy – the spectre of Mother Maeve hovered rakishly above anything to do with black brassieres – but he got his hair cut there anyway as a goodwill gesture and leafed through the magazines while he waited. It didn’t do to be too openly gay then, and anyway he was still deciding; and the Italian barbers were his landlords and needed to be buttered up.

He’d had to make it clear to them, however, that Jorrie was his twin sister, not a girlfriend of loose character. Despite their stash of lurid magazines, which they probably viewed as professional equipment, they were puritanical about any unsanctioned goings-on in their rental accommodations. They thought Tin was a fine, upstanding scholarly youth, called him The Professor, and kept asking him when he was going to get married. “I’m too poor,” Tin would say. Or “I’m waiting for the right girl.” Sage nods from the barbershop trio: both excuses were acceptable to them.

So when Jorrie would arrive on her infrequent visits, the Italian barbers would wave to her through the window and smile in their triste way. How nice that The Professor had such an exemplary sister. It was what a family should be like.



When the Dark Lady issue of The Dirt came out, Jorrie could hardly wait to share her Musehood with Tin. She’d galloped up the stairs, waving her hot-off-the-mimeo Dirt, and plumped herself down in his wicker basket chair.

“Look at this!” she’d said, thrusting the stapled pages at him while sweeping back her long dark hair with one hand. She had a swatch of red-and-ochre block-printed cloth wound around her trim waist, and a necklace of – What were those? Cow’s teeth? – dangling over her scoop-necked peasant blouse. Her eyes were shining, her bangles were jangling. “Seven poems! About me!”

She was so guileless. She was so avid. If Tin hadn’t been her brother, if he’d been straight, he would have run a mile; but away from her or towards her? She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

“You can’t be in a poem,” he’d said, crossly, because this infatuation of hers was worrying him. She was bound to cut herself on it: she was a clumsy girl, not skilful with edged tools. “Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.”

“Nitpicker. You know what I mean.”

Tin sighed, and at her insistence he sat down at his rickety third-hand pedestal table with the mug of tea he’d just made for himself and read the poems. “Jorrie,” he said. “These poems are not about you.”

Her face fell. “Yes, they are! They have to be! It’s definitely my …”

“They’re only about part of you.” The lower part, he did not say.