Page 89 of Rhymes with Metaphor
Chapter 21: The Deadline
The languorous spellof their stay in Wales was broken when, as they were eating breakfast on the patio of a café near the beach, Reg happened to glance at a newspaper on display at the newsagent next door.
“Shit!”said Reg and spat out his bacon.“Is that today’s date?”
Joel checked the newspaper, then his phone.“Yes.”
“My thesis is due inthree days!”
Which must be what all those texts from the chair he’d been ignoring for the past few days had been about.
“I thought you wrote it already,” said Joel.
“Yes, I’vewrittenit,” said Reg.“By hand.In pieces.Scattered all about my father’s house.I’ve got tofindthem, wherever they are.Then I’ve got to type them, and I can’t type properly.I’ll have to hire someone—someone who won’t mess up the formatting and who can work at short notice and—”
“I’ll do it,” said Joel.“I can type a hundred words a minute, and I won’t mess up your formatting.I’ll help you look for them—you left three in my bedroom at least.”
“Did I?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Reg.“Once I’ve written a poem, I cut the cord, fuck off, and forget, the way a bird abandons its eggs.”
“Sea turtles abandon their eggs.Birds incubate their eggs after they lay them.”
“You are an utterswot,” said Reg.
“A what?”
“A nerd,” said Reg.
“You’ve said that already.”
“It’s still true.”
The morning was spent trying to locate the poems Reg had written in Wales.They searched the house—happily, most were in his notebooks, with a couple in the dining room and one under the recliner in the front room.Joel found an accordion folder in the upstairs bedroom and filed them in that.Then they packed for their journey back to England.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t show you more of the place, cariad.But we’ve no time.”
Reg drove back to England as fast as he dared, and, as soon they got back, before he’d even unpacked, Reg started ransacking the house.
“How many poems are we looking for?”said Joel.
“How should I know?”
“You wrote them.”
“I didn’t take inventory.”
While Reg’s plan, if it could be called such, involved sacking the house, dishevelling each room’s contents before attacking the next, taking apart a chesterfield here, emptying the contents of a piano bench there, Joel insisted on a systematic examination of each room, a veritable fingertip forensic search for any evidence of poetry.
“But that’ll takehours,” said Reg.
“Your way will take hoursandwe might miss some.My way, we’ll find everything.”
In a reversal of roles, Joel was now the calm one, holding Reg back from the brink of hysteria.
After the predicted several hours, they managed to locate a good number of Reg’s poems, though Reg was worried one or two were still missing.“There’s one about...erm...an egg?Have we found that?”
