Years of working weekends, cashing in his holidays, dossing in loveless digs beside arterial roads or in vans to pocket his expenses. He’d earned it, kept on how soon he’d be in Lido di Jesolo, a linen suit for evenings;us lot wouldn’t exist. Back three days later, rubbing down skirting boards before we arrived. Couldn’t stand it:the kids, the heat, the wife.
The door is broken! The door is broken. A Polar wind squalls and flings it open.The bloke behind the fish fryer with a ragthrown over his shoulder tells me to leave it;wipe-clean menus skid across the floor.I’m always somewhere like this in winter. Trawlers queued at the Wyre light for an openberth before the Cod Wars. This place is broken.A Romany woman shouts; the door again. Men fishing, rummage in carrier bags for ragworm;an uprooted tree waits in the rising flotsam for high tide and a slow descent to the ocean floor.
We trudged the grounds of a country house under a featureless skyas stark trees bled out with morning rain and what light there was started to die, and every time you grabbed for my hand I felt a little thrill,unmentioned, ineffable. I’m glad to feel it still – I spent half a life being bad at that. And here we were, noses to wind,simply happy, which nobody is, but as close as I’ll ever find. And in came her message. And later that night I looked at it, then at her profile:smiley-faced. Husband gone. Three gorgeous kids. Was thinking of you!
There are no headless horsemen, White Ladiesor rattling chains in this ghost story;he died in the chair from black lung, coughing;the coal dust that did for him, and the fags. In life, he’d been a nasty piece of work; like those blokes at the pictures my grandmawarned me about in their fetid raincoats,Brylcreemed hair. We played Ouija and asked him:who are you? I’m a G. H. O. S. T.On Christmas eve we saw him; sports jacket,flannels, crouching over the gas meter.At night he seethed; smoking phantom Woodbines.Enough! I brayed. He slammed the cellar door,and threw a bin across the kitchen floor.
A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt when I approached a strong young American, hand Extended, smile applied. He took that hand and Had me floored. Saw it coming, Howell. Pinned beneath him, head against the concrete, I broke down, shamed in front of everyone. Of course they cheered, the lot of them. I know I got what I deserved. But how could I tell anyone What contempt I felt then for myself? It Was sickening. That was the end of my trick.
‘I Remember Arras’, a sequence in four parts corresponding numerically to the four stanzas of ‘Adlestrop’, imagines Edward Thomas as having survived the war and looking back on his experience in France. The sequence plays fast and loose with some bits and pieces drawn from Thomas’s writings, including his 1917 diary. I ARRASI remember Arras, more than the name; yes- terday here, too, was chilly and raw, no thaw yet why are we forgotten? Why do we forget? Place Victor Hugo. Shutters blown out. Rimbaud and Verlaine stopped there, claimed to be murderous criminals, just for the fun of getting arrested. Amid the gunfire (courage tested) I made out the sound of a wren chuckling as she soared out of her nest of prose.
After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to be there, midday. In the unkempt garden, we watch Stanway – 56, kids at uni, wife a pharmacist – chucking bricks. The wider the screen, he says, the bigger the bang. One of the lads promises an old black and white from his nana’s spare room, at last taking a real interest, can’t wait for next week.
Summer in the suburbs, Its wealth confined to a bedroom Where a tepid waft disturbs And strokes with silver gloom The long beast with demon eyes Who, stealthy as all cats, will come To tipple from the vase of the anemones.
My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded. I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded. The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra, Sagittarius pierced by his own arrow’s flight – are wounded. The snorting bull, on whose proud horns the Earth is caught, is heartsick. His heart, my heart, breaking at our plight, are wounded. I have no country, no land, not even a room the size of a grave. No sky. Centuries of starlight are wounded. My father gives me food/ gave me water: childhood’s homework. Beneath dust and blood, the pages are white, are wounded.
Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s place: pleasure, talk, a handshake, the deal. No choice to be made about right or wrong, ideals or love, one song over another. Buying and selling is Ferrari’s trade, attending to his business of the day, the rake-off on sex, liquor, hookahs.
In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.
Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to a wing mirror. Straight backed, stepping sideways around the high room, his eyes fixed on the mirror tilted just so, keen to pick us up on any skimping – beneath the cast iron water pipes and radiators. At his shoulder, the chargehand feigned laughter at his own remarks.
Placed on a pile tenderly as if to encourage brief sleep, or easily torn from a tiny fist – a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand companions and twice the number of unseeing eyes made of glass. No child parent came back to reclaim their mannequin infant, no sudden cry, no crouching down to draw them out from the dune. The hut where they were taken was cool and dark, on shelves they placed them head to toe layered like sardines to save space. The laundry girl was conscripted because she could knit and sew new outfits for the stripped naked; gowns, bows, sailor suits and blouses. The master made his selection; this one shall be a little SS man, a festive gift for my son back home, Christmas is for family as you know.
Metaphysics took my mindoff things. Now I’m coming to mysenses, An astronaut with his headin a washing machine. I stink, therefore I am.It’s a good start. The pure is sterile; thesterile is unclean. The stepwell smells like aswimmer’s towelling. That Euro coin’s aconsecrated host. It has travelled frombum-bags through tollgates To a church with apay-view Tintoretto. The tongue I clean with anold silver spoon Has tasted soda bread, thesalt of lithium, And the roll-on deodorantof a suicide. I take off my glasses tosee the blur better With Vaseline on the lens,muslin from Mosul. That Hindu airport cleanerclears to a gondolier. The heart hears. It beatsone billion times For the vole, for thedolphin, for the Down Syndrome, The Bishops of Rome.
You hide behind dark glasses in a privacy of thought that when you take them off looks much like wisdom or so one might suppose from the light returning with such concentration to your steady gaze. An eloquent silence hangs in the air between us as it seems to contemplate becoming speech but then the darkness clearly needs more time to make your mind up so the glasses go back on.
I’m not the kind to fidget, fray or fret.I’m truly a soul at peace – ask anyone!The savoir faire for which I’m widely knownhas optimised my odds in life’s roulette.Am I the underdog to back? You bet!With equal yin and yang, in union,I have a personal hotline to the Zone.I relish risk, I rise to every threat.I’ve had my share of darkness: when light fails, the surest step can miss the track. And yetthere dawns within me now a marvellous sunwhose rays enflame a pair of golden scales:a perfect equilibrium of regret –for all I’ve done and all I haven’t done.
In memory of David Best (1952–2021) I’ve savaged with my fork weed after weed. My lost hori-hori trowel, if it’s here – this is my hope – might smilingly appear again, old friend, from its green dungeon – freed! It’s heartbreaking to have the sheath alone, as if shrugged off by death, and not the blade, surely too bright to leave and lose in shade. But I forgot: weeds covet all we own, ruthlessly steal. Their truth, unearthed, is stark. I haven’t found my trowel. And now it’s dark.
He walked each day the same, Picking around Inside his broken, frameless mind For bits of comforting, Pushing his feet With care among free leaves On pavements his for the walking Where no one stopped him with talking : A hatless, witless man. He knew the shabby parts Picking around: The tree-wreck of a rusty car, Nettles and rags and flattened tins, The mouldy mats That leaned box-stiff and damp In ditches, his for the taking. Elsewhere some hand would be making New things to rot for him.
How sad are our misapprehensions. How much we are misunderstood Despite our best efforts, Despite the best of intentions. With the scribble of a smile we hope To address the matter in hand, Like a frank and forward glance, Like a speeded envelope. As with any double bluff, Any take-it-or-leave-it offer, A guess may well be right, A guess is good enough. Eyes required some sort of response Though they quickly turned away. You had a moment to reply. You had a moment once. Whatever it was, it was what it meant. Though it is pure conjecture now, Like a letter never opened, Like a letter never sent.
You need to do more formalised walking the doctor said. Why not buy one of those formalised walking devices that measures your tread? They’re good. I had one and loved it until I felt it was judging me. Then I stamped on it. I liked this doctor — Lebrun was his name. To some degree he was nondescript but now and again he would flare up with a blazing, fellow warmth. It made him hard to contradict. Or skipping, he added, placing one hand on my shoulder — if formalised walking gets you down, why not skip? Many believe jumping daily, with or without a rope, staves off melancholy. And keep a skipping journal but don’t write down anything about how much you skip or how long it took or how fast your heart was beating after. Scrap all that.