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

THE JOB DID NOT suit him. The hours were all right, but the view from the train on the way to work was not. The mates were all right, but the reflection of himself he got back from them was not. The opportunity for overtime was all right, but the fact that the works clock, the monster, was permanently out of order was not. He decided to let the job last him one day and no longer. The overtime for that day he forwent.

     There was one job, which came very much later, when his health was better, too, that looked as if it were going to suit him. It was easy work. In this case the mates were criminals who boasted of the number of their crimes. He could not, however, form a clear picture - there were so many obscenities intermixed. Sometimes he would listen to the obscenities alone, for it was obvious he was never going to-get a clear picture of each dingy event. The job itself was full of play - practical joking, that is. The factory seemed built from plans that were a practical joke in themselves: staircases ran vertically up chimneys; assembly belts led straight into fan belts or even into personal belts; fitters became managers upon pulling acceptable managerial faces, and the owners, of which there were three, with beautiful manners, lived in the Black Forest and administered a variety of international funds.

     He gave up the job in the end, though, because of gambling losses on the shop floor. The card game responsible was tearaway pontoon, a senseless and ruinous development from pontoon proper.

     When he was not in the mood for jobwork of any sort he did other work: he would buy such things as recorders (one and six apiece) and play on them to bus queues. He did not entertain them, but they provided him with money because they were embarrassed. Finally the bus inspectors got together and objected to the practices (the embarrassment, the payment) as delaying ingress to standees in the rush hour.

     He had two names: one was difficult to pronounce (Bewilthforth) and supposed to be of Welsh origin, and the other was Trump. He was uncertain whether Trump was the surname, but it probably was.

     There was a woman who used regularly to choke with rage whenever she saw Bewilthforth (she called him that; she followed a firm preference) submit to an insult from anyone.

     “It’s a wicked, wicked …..”

     “O Saxgotha. It happens to people all the time. He who affronts me one minute is affronted himself the next, round the corner even.”

     Once he felt himself go, morally. This was when he was on the point of asking Saxgotha whether she admired him for his fortitude in the face.

     “Go on. In the face of what?”

     “It’s funny, but I can’t finish without letting myself go, morally.”

     “You’re right. One has to be strict with one’s self, God knows.”

     “Then you admire me for being right?”

     “Don’t pin me down.”

     “But am I strict enough?”

     “You’re asking me to judge.”

     “Judge. Judge I want you to.”

     This was nowhere near the truth. He did not want Saxgotha to judge him but to withstand him.

     “I feel so strong. I might hurt you in case you judged badly of me.”

     “Strong?”

     She did not believe the male sex, even the best of its representatives, to be endowed with such strength.

     “I couldn’t bear to hurt you.”

     She was certainly not prepared to judge him.

     This conversation preceded but did not cause a few years’ solitude for each of them. He became a stylite and went to live on the top of a post office early warning system tower, the tallest of its kind in the world, where he fasted much of the time, simultaneously confirming himself in his love for Saxgotha, who for her part took a course In baby linen design and was constantly being waylaid by her instructor, the troubled mind of whom was gradually, prematurely, deteriorating, till at last the moment arrived when he could not begin to remember what a baby was, or linen, though the strange fact remained that he still knew what design meant and even everything that it connoted. Saxgotha was glad that the instructor’s physical state was deteriorating, too. She could not resist writing long letters to Trump, addressing him as “dear Bewilthforth”, and always ending up with the words “so many things happening all at once I am in a whirl”, and often raising the question of seduction.

     Down on the ground once more - ground with a greater spread of asphalt per square acre than when he went up the tower - Trump decided that before he should be ritually, that is, under a form of words, a sort of spell, reunited with Saxgotha, he must first meet other women, and if need be get to know them.

     There were any number of women, it turned out, who without realising It had reserved for themselves, in their principally visual minds, just such a picture as Trump presented to the eye. He was, accordingly, more than half a conqueror before he had even made one move. Not that he had from the beginning intended conquest. But he did sometimes wonder what women in general, going so far as to include Saxgotha in the speculation, wanted of him, with all that insistence of theirs.

     “Do you love?”

     “Whom do you love?”

     “Say you love me.”

     “Do you love that one?”

     “Do you love the stink of that?”

     “How could you submit to the shame of that?”

     “Take me instead of that.”

     “No. I meant: Take me on an excursion with you.”

     Trump had no mind to be the hero of a romance. He would have accepted the part, though, had it been offered, of the old man in Macbeth. Few words to have to memorise; prodigies to shudder over. Life on the post office tower had conditioned him to look for the onset of prodigies. If he had not gone up or had stayed there only a fraction of the time, he would have regarded Saxgotha as (what she was not) an uncomplicated woman to be sent out to work and pulled open twice a week.

     The fact was that the longer he put off the reunion with her the more fearful and prodigy-conscious he became at the thought of Saxgotha.

     The preliminaries to her talked incessantly, as has been shown, of love, stink and shame, and there was another subject of which they were fond - that of money - and Trump made a practice of holding back the little he had in the form of russet notes, placing them at old pagan shrines in the countryside to which he would arrange for pilgrimages of all the eager women of his acquaintance to be sent, to walk the distance at a devout, and therefore necessarily slow, pace, thereby ensuring that the supply of russet notes did not run out too son. He half hoped that a saline well would bubble up from the soil and turn the modest pilgrimages into a mass movement for which he could disclaim all responsibility.

     When he finally saw Saxgotha again, there had been no plans laid beforehand - impossible: she was coming Out from behind some bushes In one of the municipal parks - he did not know what to say. So he let her start the conversation.

     “What did my letters to you make you think about?”

     Answering this question was as hard as framing one of his own. But he said “They made me think about my next job.” This was partly true, but Saxgotha was not pleased with the answer.

     “You mean they indirectly made you think about your next job.”

     “I began to wonder as to its nature.”

     “You wanted to be busy again?”

     “What with the constant mention of whirl ....“

     “You wanted whirl for yourself?”

     “I did.”

     “That’s why you came back to earth in the end?”

     “Yes.”

     “But you also came back to earth in the end because you loved me?”

     “I knew there would be good whirl as well as bad, but nevertheless….”

     “And what did you want your next job to be?”

     “Observance.”

     “That’s not a job.”

     “A man could make it one.”

     “But observance of what?”

     “The law.”

     “What law?”

     Trump almost said “The law of nature.”

     Saxgotha asked again, but agreeably, “What law?”

     Trump changed the subject, but only for a little while; for presently Saxgotha was bringing up civil law and common law and company law, and there was scant pretext enough to refer to any of these.

     What Saxgotha wanted was for Trump to commit himself to the observance of certain rites - not of law at all, of any description; but Saxgotha’s idea of rites was of something very much like lovemaking. Still, she was unwilling to speak up in favour of rites or lovemaking till Trump had given her her cue to do so.

     She waited and waited. The cue did not come.

     At last she said “Many men lust after me, as my letters probably showed. All the time you were up that tower men pressed their attentions on me past bearing.” She said again “Past bearing.” For she used the device of repetition as a means of popularising her point of view among her lovers, even among her friends.

     Trump concluded that Saxgotha could not bear any man to lust after her except himself. He did not say anything, though.

     “I’ll need a job of some sort, that’s clear,” he said when they were both Out of the park and on the stairs of the house in which she was living.

     “You won’t earn.”

     “Oh, I won’t prosper, unless…..”

     “I was going to say you wouldn’t earn anything these days simply by observing ... what?”

     “The law.”

     “I was going to say there was no money in observing the law.”

     “I’ll work in factories, offices and so forth then; and break the law at every opportunity.”

     If he had only mentioned rites or lovemaking somewhere at this point, Saxgotha would not have become, as she did, very angry with Trump.

     “If you break the law you’ll go to prison, and that will be no bloody better for me than your being up that bleeding tower.” (She carefully avoided any allusion to a bloody tower so as not to identify herself with executed personages.) “And anyway if you work in factories or offices…..” 

     “Or busk. I can always busk.”

     “Even if you busk instead, that won’t be the same as religion.” (She meant religion, like rites, to equal lovemaking.) “Wouldn’t you sooner yield yourself up to some religion than thrash about in a factory or an office or on a pavement?’

     “We’ll see what the labour exchange has to say to religion as an alternative.”

     “To fit in with your temperament, Bewilthforth, make it the observance of religion.”

     “A religion that nobody knows about. That would be good.”

     “A religion that nobody could put into words.” She was less angry, scarcely so at all now. “That would be lovely!”

     Later, at the labour exchange nearby, Trump inquired into the possibility of the observance of religion (failing that, the observance of law) as a fulltime job.

     “For you, or for somebody very dear to you?” asked the official who had agreed to see him for a moment.

     “For myself.”

     “It wouldn’t explain the way you were passing the time. Now would it, really?”

     Trump said he thought it would explain a great deal.

     “Only on the level of hairsplitting” The official’s temper was as violent as Saxgotha’s, but for all that less truly passionate, for the official was bored, and Saxgotha had never been bored, with Trump.

     But before the official could bid Trump a good morning, simultaneously hoping that the circumstances of it would be deeply unhappy for him, Trump asked an unexpected question. “Do you respond to women?”

     “It depends on which sort.”

     “I could have meant the street sort.”

     “Oh, no”

     Trump would have liked to know what it was he was expected to say next. Probably something to confirm the official in his good opinion, mixed with a certain mistrust, of the treacherous borderland which lay between his own scrotal and anal regions. But how could Trump have known a thing about that?

     As it happened Trump did not have to say anything, for the official was called away to attend, not altogether heedfully, to the claim from a redfaced little man by the name of Blackflag that he was unable to work for his living because his wife Edie insisted on carezzas lasting twenty-four flours at a time.

     On leaving the labour exchange, Trump suddenly felt a sense of history rushing up at him - for there, In the gutter before him, lay a crumpled sheet dated 17th January 1893; part of a letter from the Prime Minister of the day to his foreign secretary trying hard not to accept that semi-suicidal man’s offer of resignation.

     Trump was not to know that this was classified information, and that even to poke his fingers between the letter’s folds was - and there could be no argument about it - a breach of the Regulatory Hush Bill. He read the following words, not understanding much:

recognising how fond you and my beloved Squisita have become of one another. Bring this pickle to the boil,Cyrus, and I swear to you that not one syllable of reproof will escape my lips. You see, my dear fellow, I have fathomed, as no other man could fathom, the awfulness of sweet Squisita’ s requirements. In that knowledge, therefore, and with the appropriate dread - for dread belongs in such a context, believe me - hasten the precipitation of the crisis in your liaison by (to everyone’s astonishment) CLINGING TO OFFICE. You have simply no conception of the kindness you will be doing me, apart from any . . .

     Trump told himself that all this was really none of his business, but he turned over the page to see what was written on the back. The date. And the conclusion, first of all:

... benefit you will be conferring upon yourself trusty, faithful, unremovable Cyrus. By the by, I noted a perpetual harping in your letter to me (I think it was the last you sent me, but it seems to be the burden of most of your cheerless ‘correspondence) on the subject of your approaching end. Have you marked it in your diary? Be a good soul and look it up there, as you are bound not to have kept it in your somewhat incontinent memory. Obviously I shall have need of such information: you surely realise that at this particular hour, with the North Sea threatening our Dogger Straits bases, I cannot afford to have a nobody pacing the corridors of your over-commodious office in the shoes of such a one as your exemplary, incredibly loyal self. To be candid with you, my eye has lighted on - but I fear I should breed tolerably bad blood between two most estimable colleagues were I to divulge his name. I am sure you will sympathise with me in my tragic dilemma, Cyrus. I lay aside my pen and take you, metaphorically, by the hand. Squisita I am sure will join me in this gesture. We are three of a kind, I fancy. Forgive me: I am too much moved to continue. Yours very sincerely, Frederick.

     Trump had never seen such beautiful handwriting. Nor, for that matter, such tough paper