conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Joyce, Mike, Wilson entitled The Ruffian on the Stair.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ruffian on the Stair: Mike and Joyce are a poor London couple living in a bedsit.\nMike is a self-described "derelict", ex-boxer Roman Catholic thug from Donegal, who—despite claiming the dole—has a sideline as a proto-white van man, running people down for cash.\nJoyce is an ex-prostitute, and a Protestant from London.\nOne day while Joyce is alone, a young and attractive man named Wilson arrives, asking for a room.\nDuring the conversation, he terrifies and threatens her, demanding to know where Mike\'s gun is.\nIt becomes clear that he has been watching the flat for some time.\nNevertheless, he leaves without harming her, despite having found and aimed the gun at her head.\nMike returns, and a distraught Joyce relates the story.\nTypically, Mike tells Joyce she\'s overreacting and actually sympathizes with the young man, much to Joyce\'s astonishment and aggravation.\nThe next day, when Joyce is left alone with her thoughts, a series of sudden, violent noises emanate from the stairs outside their apartment door and the rest of the building (including broken windows, a broken lock, and the sound of a man urinating on the floorboards).\nShe pleads loudly for the perpetrator to stop, which they finally do by the end of the scene but not after a prolonged aural torture for Joyce.\nNaturally, she assumes it is Wilson, and, upon relating this incident to Mike, she is met with a similar lack of support.\nWhen Wilson does turn up again, he charms Mike using a claimed Irish ancestry, religious conviction, and his own considerable personal charms.\nDuring the conversation, the audience learns that Mike\'s last "job" was to kill Wilson\'s beloved elder brother Frank, with whom Wilson had been engaged in an incestuous affair.\nWilson is damaged, grief-stricken, and after revenge; an unusual revenge, however, as he seeks to be shot by Mike ("I don\'t wanna be injured.\nI want to be dead") in order to rejoin Frank.\nTo goad Mike into the killing, he claims to be having sex with Joyce, and to have known her since her days as a prostitute; in fact, it was Frank who had sex with Joyce (and other women) during his relationship with Wilson.\nThe following day, Mike leaves the flat wracked with jealousy, despite Joyce\'s protestations of innocence.\nWilson arrives again, removing his trousers and wedging the door shut, in order that Mike—upon his return—will think that he\'s having sex with Joyce.\nAs Joyce points out, the situation is absurd; Wilson is "only a little boy" (the script suggests he\'s 18), and to make the situation more ridiculous, Mike doesn\'t come home when expected.\nWilson sadly concludes that he\'s failed at this just like everything else, and moves to get dressed; moved, however, Joyce puts her arms around him.\nIt\'s at this point that Mike returns.\nEnraged, he shoots twice, killing Wilson with the second shot.\nWilson survives long enough to reiterate his wish to be buried with Frank, then collapses.\nMike and Joyce are both horrified by what has happened, but Joyce recovers quickly, planning what they\'ll tell the police.\nSuddenly, they notice that the first shot from Mike\'s gun knocked over Joyce\'s goldfish bowl, killing the fish inside.\nBoth of them are far more upset about the goldfish than the dead boy, and thus the play ends.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'The Ruffian on the Stair
  The poem was set in Syria during the Roman Empire, and its narrator is Creon, a worldly-wise soldier-philosopher'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ruffian on the Stair
  The poem was set in Syria during the Roman Empire, and its narrator is Creon, a worldly-wise soldier-philosopher. Creon relates how Esdras, a naive young provincial scholar, comes up to Antioch in search of a teacher. While listening to the various philosophers in the market-place, Esdras spots Cleoma, a 'lascivious handmaid' of Simeon, a celebrated Magus. Enslaved by Cleoma, Esdras through her finds his way to Simeon, who becomes his guru.
  Esdras soon becomes disillusioned with the Magus, who he sees is a manipulative sensualist, using his powers to dupe rich fools into parting with their money. Part of Simeon the Magus's racket is procuring young men, through drugs and blackmail, to cater for the 'unholy loves' of his wealthy followers. To Esdras's dismay, he learns that the Magus is using his love for Cleoma to groom him for the attentions of Lollius, a rich and foolish Roman sensualist, who's a member of the Magus's circle. Faced with the Magus's machinations, Esdras feels powerless – his attraction to his guru's creature, Cleoma, is too strong – to avoid the loathsome role being prepared for him.
  Rivers goes on in his poem to explain how, meanwhile, the slave Silas, an 'unclean minion' of the Magus, and Cleoma's lover, conspires with other disgruntled dependants of the Magus to kill him, planning to incriminate the hapless Esdras, whom Silas hates on account of his rivalry for Cleoma's favours.
  With all of this going on, the narrator, Creon, who's an occasional sitter-in at the Magus's more legitimate lectures, gets to know Esdras, in whom he finds the Ideal Friend he's been seeking all his life – 'In our One, there is neither Thee nor Me.' Creon soon sees through the way the Magus, Silas and Cleoma are using Esdras for their respective ends, and pities his young friend as 'the Seer, who cannot see...'
  The poem goes on to describe how Creon uncovers Silas's plot to destroy his master and put the blame on Esdras, and late one night, follows two members of the band of plotters to a 'low tavern' in the Bactrian Quarter, where they've already lured the Magus. Muffling himself in his cloak, Creon awaits developments outside the tavern, but to his alarm, two other plotters arrive, shouting and singing like revellers, while propping between them a drugged Esdras. The 'revellers' shout for girls, and drag the seemingly drunk Esdras upstairs.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was agreed, then, that next morning, Saturday, Liliane would take me to Dieppe to look up Bernard Marti, who'd spent VE Day in London with Carrie Bugle's son Philippe, my present host's grandfather. As well as helping out my French, Liliane – a friend of the Marti family – could help smooth down any feathers still ruffled by the visit of Barre-impersonator Ramier, who'd pinched the old man's 1955 London postcard from Philippe Barre. After we'd made our visit in Dieppe, I could go on from there farther south to Niort.
  Once we'd arrived in Dieppe, Liliane led me to the upper flat of a narrow, shabby building off the rattling fish market on the Ile du Pollet in the port's inner basin. Bernard Marti's daughter was a stout lady, just on the wrong side of seventy, and came out on to the landing in response to Liliane's ring at the doorbell. Before she showed any sign of inviting us in, she said that we had to understand that her father was ninety-six years old, and things had come to a pretty pass when people took advantage of a man of that age... She was obviously referring to the Tintin-quiffed conman Ramier's visit, and the affair of the purloined VE Day postcard.
  But Liliane's reassurances, along with the flowers and the Rivesalte, at last mollified the lady to the extent of her inviting us in. On the strict understanding, she was careful to point out, that the visit was to last no more than five minutes, and that she was to be there in the room throughout.
  We were ushered into a stuffy little bedroom, full of hideous modernique French furniture of the last-decade-but-five-or-six. Under the tall, single window was an armchair with a shrunken old man in a jacket and zipped-up pullover in it. His bare skull was blotched and yellow, and the middle ground of the waxen face was occupied boldly by a thick white moustache. The knot-veined, bluish right hand was tapping a Zagazig cigarette-paper carton incessantly on the wooden armrest of the chair. The old soldier turned dim, pale eyes on us, and looked blankly as, uninvited, we sat down on the edge of the bed nearest to him.
  The lady in the doorway shot us a meaningful look, before telling her father that they'd turn up somewhere later, no doubt...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Reet then paused in her narrative to reach over to the plastic bag and take out the package, which was wrapped round with stout, dirty brown paper and bound with yellowed twine.
  With hesitation in her eyes, Reet handed me the painting, and I smiled, as I fancy someone might smile who's just had a limb blown off, but doesn't immediately take it in. I then gave a sort of croak before reading out the inscription on the little bone plaque at the bottom of the frame.
  In the painting I saw the staircase, leading up to the door – ajar – of the tenant, Madam Life, who wasn't in the picture. Above the landing was the stairhead window, edged with narrow, rectangular panes of alternate crimson and blue, the window modelled on that over the pub in Hackney, where in 1893 the Ruffian, Laurence Victor Pidgeon – the Vickybird – had in real life murdered his employer, Mrs Bella Nye. Rawbeck had held this knowledge, like a sword of Damocles, over the Vickybird's head, until he'd freed himself by cutting the artist's throat in the very same room suggested in the painting I was looking at.
  But above all, I now knew what had lain behind my grandfather's eagerness to recover the painting, after the Vickybird had stolen it from him and sold it to the Paris dealer, Carbonero, in 1899. As I beheld the hatchet face of the Ruffian – the Vickybird – as he stared out, grinning malevolently from the sombre canvas, halfway up the stairs, I understood that the picture cast doubt on my grandfather's paternity of his son – my father – A.H. And I knew why the little boy in the Jersey lane had identified me immediately from the painting, which had lain so long in his grandad's shed. In the painting, one of the Vickybird's eyes was brown and the other green. My search for my grandfather was over.