Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Cook was a large woman with big hands. She didn’t have a wart or a hairy mole; or severely scraped back hair; or an alarmingly loud voice, or anything like that; but she had a daughter. Her hands, you could tell, could ring the necks of oh-too-resistant chickens. I always remember her, knife in hand, flashing the steel, as she prepared the vegetables for the salt of her favourite savouries. And I remember, too, how her daughter would sometimes pick up that knife when it was fresh from slicing strawberries. The seeds and the ruby sweetness still fragranced the steel. And she would hold it up to her own throat. May she live forever young. Cook said I was not to worry, that her daughter just did it for attention, and it would be wrong to indulge her by taking her actions too seriously. The other staff - the Commis and the Skivvy - went to their tasks with extra grease when the daughter behaved like this. And whilst I stared at first, later I would look at the daughter carrying on only whilst I was shining the boots to a reflective gleam. You’ll judge me, I know, but I was only the cellar-boy, a newcomer, and it wasn’t my place to ask questions.

     I’m writing this now because I’ve been called up as a witness. In court. I don’t know that I’ll be able to tell the wigs anything of use. I’m not sure there’s anyone alive can speak with authority about what happened there. We didn’t know anything about the murders, us in the kitchen: that all happened upstairs. I never even met the Countess. Sorry, I’m assuming you’ve heard: Countess Bathory (my last employer) is on trial for mass murder. It’s over two years since I worked in her household; I don’t even know if the Cook will be called to testify.

     People will ask me about the blood and the bodies, I know. They’ll want evidence. To which I’ll answer: there was blood, yes, we worked in a kitchen, but bodies - I saw none; screams - I heard none. And the blood, well, you try slaughtering animals without spilling a drop. The carcasses would hang around for what seemed like forever. But as the Cook always used to say, ‘the Countess likes her meat well hung’. We’d have to keep Cook’s daughter locked in a trunk on slaughter day. She was almost hysterical. But, like everyone else, she’d eat the end-cuts from the Countess’ meat.

     Cook was a hard woman, yes, but I believed her when she said that she’d look after us. She used to call me her ‘boy’, her little ‘peach’. She used to help me with the shining sometimes; she’d never help Skivvy - whom she called ‘street-shite’ - so I felt quite privileged. She said she’d help me understand her ‘funny ways’ and, certainly, I got more compassion from her than anyone else in the kitchen. It was my first time away from home and I missed my family painfully. Cook helped me through; she would cut off the flesh from a puling chicken and smile at me in a motherly way that I found reassuring. She’d tell me about her work. She, more than anyone, I think, made me understand my position. She knew that everyone hated her - she really said that - but she felt it was her duty to keep the kitchen in order. She’d put her neck on the line, she said, so that we could be happy, so that we could live. And all she expected in return was obedience. I suppose she made a favourite of me. I like to think she enjoyed my company. Commis was always cleaning (she had scrubbed-red hands), and Skivvy, Skivvy was always slashing herself. So she treated me like a son for the short while I was there.

     I really didn’t talk to the daughter much. To be honest, she unnerved me a little. Tiny, she was, with a prayerful silence - except when she had one on her, and then you couldn’t shut her up. On these occasions, the Cook would usually give me a wry smile, then tell her to stop talking nonsense. And if that didn’t work there was always the trunk. One day, shortly before my mother fell ill, the daughter cornered me. As I remember, Cook was busy looking over the account books with the Housekeeper. They’d go to extraordinary lengths - it seemed to me to ‘balance’ the figures. Well, when the daughter saw that her mother was busy, she started whispering in my ear. I didn’t understand really what she was saying. Flesh, she said, spurted blood when pricked through with needles, and seeped down the ceiling like water running through a colander. Pigs - she was thinking about the slaughter again, of course could smell their own death. That’s all I can remember clearly: most of it was complete nonsense. We didn’t speak about it, of course, but I don’t quite think she was all there. When I asked the Skivvy about it later, all she said was ‘don’t ask questions’.

     I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to write so much, and none of it to any purpose. As I said, I was only with the Countess a few months; when my mother fell ill I stayed back to look after her. So I think my court testimony will be a bit of a dud. The main thing I can tell you about that place, really, is that everyone watched their own backs. I don’t think there’s anything sinister in that, I just think that’s the way it is when you live your life in service.