Free Jammy Dodger by Kevin Smith Page A

will suit yese better.’
    He didn’t smile. There was a hint of the whiskey drinker’s broken glitter in his eyes.
    â€˜Mr Mad Dog,’ I began.
    â€˜HEY … Just Mad Dog, you fucken tube.’
    â€˜Mad Dog, if you’ll just listen to me for a minute?’
    He paused. Focused his attention on me. Readjusted his grip on the gun.
    I took a deep breath.
    â€˜We’ve had some technical problems here – I won’t bore you with the details – but it’s resulted in a massive backlog. As you can see – ’ I waved at the drumlins of paper around us. ‘We’ve had a lot of submissions. But the fact is, we had just got to your work and, funny enough, it was due for discussion at today’s editorial meeting.’
    He leaned forward, his chin jutting.
    â€˜Do you really think,’ he said. ‘Mad Dog’s head buttons up the back?’
    â€˜I beg your pardon?’
    â€˜One more fucken lie out of you son and you’ll have trouble taking a piss let alone getting up the stairs.’
    â€˜No, I’m serious. We were very impressed – just on a first reading.’
    â€˜YOU ARE ON VERY THIN ICE SONNY JIM. DO NOT BULLSHIT ME OR I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL FUCK YOU UP!’
    I had the drowning sensation again. I can’t go on . How much of this could I get away with? What did it matter? There was no turning back. I’ll go on .
    â€˜No bullshit. Your stuff was top of our agenda and you were the first in line for a copyright check.’ A copyright check? This was risky stuff.
    â€˜I’m not going to ask you this again,’ He spoke very deliberately. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
    â€˜Yes I am. But let me just refresh my memory. Oliver, would you fetch Mr – I mean Mad Dog’s … material? I think you had it last.’
    Oliver, to his eternal credit, took this one squarely on the chin. He rose from his chair like an elderly man recovering from a haemorrhoid procedure and shuffled to the far corner of the room where he began scrabbling at the largest mound of envelopes.
    The rest of us were temporarily hypnotised by the sound of rain on glass.
    â€˜Artie, maybe you could give me a hand here?’ Oliver queried a few minutes later, his voice reedy, plaintive, as though he were calling across a roaring hillside. ‘The In-pile has got mixed up with the Out-pile again.’
    I looked at our captor. He swore and waved me away with his gun.
    I got to work on an adjacent stack, opening the envelopes as quickly and as quietly as I could. They all seemed to be from chancers whose work we rejected on a regular basis. Couldn’t these people take a hint? In one I discovered another snap from the topless poetess, this time holding a labrador puppy and staring sadly (it could have been reproach) into the lens. One of her hands was encircling the pup’s neck. Behind her, on a sofa was a bare-chested man wearing a cowboy hat.
    â€˜This is hopeless,’ Oliver whispered. ‘Laughing Boy’s going to go to town on us.’
    â€˜Just keep looking, it’s here somewhere,’ I muttered. I now dimly recalled frisbeeing a wad of hand-written horrors across the room a few months back that could have been by our man.
    Back at the table, Mad Dog had zeroed in on Winks: ‘ Stanford? What kind of nancy-boy fucken name is that ?’
    I started on another pile, a mixture of opened and unopened submissions. (‘ Sirs, Having resumed composing again after a recent breakdown  …’) Oliver was right, this was futile. We were headed for the Ministry of Silly Walks.
    â€˜Arts Council? Really? That’s very interesting …’ Mad Dog was saying. Good, they were getting on.
    I rifled through the next creative slagheap. Despite the terror of our predicament I found myself marvelling again at the number of souls putting pen to paper in a bid to be heard above the human fracas . And not