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

He’s got the young collie with him in the van this morning. Excitable,
like young dogs are, jumping over the back of the passenger seat and barking at anything that moves. He’s old enough to know where they’re going though. He barks when they get to the pull-in at the end of the track, when they park in front of the sign that says Anglers Only. Michael likes the sign, just as he likes knowing that his permit is zipped tight into the inside pocket of his jacket. He’s never been asked to show it, but it’s there.
   
He unpacks his gear, shoulders the wooden box by its long canvas strap, takes the rods in his other hand. Ben runs down the bank, off to the water’s edge to get a sniff of the geese but he won’t go far. Michael follows him, jumps off the grass ledge onto the rocky shoreline. June, so the level’s low. The high water mark is a brown line of twigs and pinecones and other rubbish. They settle themselves down a couple of feet below it and Michael starts setting up the rods.

Ben barks. The first car of the day turning off the viaduct, going along the road on the far side of the reservoir, sun flashing off its windows. They watch it speed past, heading for the best parking space at the Visitor Centre. The noise of the revving engine echoes across the space of the water. Later there will be more trippers, doing their Sunday circuit of the reservoir with their dogs and bikes and pushchairs. Not here, though. Anglers Only.

The car disappears behind a plantation of spruce and Ben lies down again, head on paws. Michael stops what he’s doing to scratch him behind the ears. He’s a young dog. No long-term memory. Like all dogs maybe. There’s no way to know.

‘There’, she says, pointing at the far end of the lake below the thin line of the viaduct with the cars streaming across it.

He gets hold of the side of the leaflet she’s just dropped, that’s flapping in the wind. His trekking pole clatters onto the tarmac with a metallic sound. He leaves it there while she reads.

‘It says this part of the valley was flooded in 1954. The village was
demolished except for a few houses on the hillside. There was a final
service in the church the day they left.’

He looks at the smooth flat expanse of grey water in front of him. The pale shoreline on the farther side, empty except for a black beached boat and a couple of fishermen.

‘Sad’, he says.

She takes the leaflet in both hands again.

‘There’s a story that the church bell still rings.’

He laughs.

‘There would be. Come on, before somebody else gets to that seat.’

She looks down at the black and white photograph of a group of villagers standing in front of the church door. The men are bare-headed, their hats removed and held at their sides. You can’t see the spire, but the leaflet says there was one.

‘Why shouldn’t it ring?’

He laughs again and doesn’t answer. It’s one of those laughs with
words inside it.

Michael walks into the water until it laps just above the knee of his
waders. It’s a strange sensation. Like being in another dimension, looking down instead of up, all the life under your feet. He’s only a couple of yards out but already the stones of the beach are giving way to soft gravelly silt. He’ll start to sink if he stands still too long. Sometimes he thinks that if he walked far enough he’d feel grass under his feet, grass still growing on the flooded fields. And, at the deepest point, the rush of the river flowing in its old bed, pushing against the resistance of his legs. Moving water. Living water. Different to the peaty smoothness of the lake.

He can feel himself sinking gently into the silt and takes a step
backwards. Never let your mind go where your feet can’t follow, his Dad used to say. Brown silt clouds the water and obscures the stones. Small stones, just the right size for chucking.

‘Where’s our house now, Dad?’

He’s paddling, the gritty pebbles sharp on the soft soles of his feet. He turns and looks behind him. His father’s squatting down, choosing a stone, his face shaded by the peak of his cap. Funny how that cap never falls off no matter how much he bends his head. He gets up slowly, pushing himself upward with his hands against his knees. When he’s straight he raises his arm and chucks the stone far into the lake. There’s a solid, solemn plop. A pale ripple that doesn’t reach the shore. Michael waits, turns and looks back again. His father’s pointing, out over the reservoir.

‘Go and fetch it then.’

He laughs. It’s a dry laugh, with all the energy drained away. Michael never forgets the sound of it.

Slowly he backs off, step by step, toward the beach. The silt sucks at his waders. A brown cloudy trail follows him back to dry land and Ben, who’s sniffing round the waterline. The dog wags his tail, looks expectantly at him. He could throw a stick, but it would disturb the fish. 
   
The gravel crunches under his tread. Brittle, as if it was glass breaking. Don’t let your mind go where your feet can’t follow.

Nobody else has taken the seat, so they sit and eat biscuits and drink tea from their flask until it’s time to leave the tarmac for the old road. The brass plaque on the seat reads: In Memory of Frank and Doreen Page of Macclesfield, who loved this place.

‘I wonder if they knew the valley,’ she says, ‘Before as well as after.’

‘Unlikely,’ he says. ‘Not if it was drowned fifty years ago.’

They walk on for a couple of miles in silence. They’re on the far side of the lake now, with the reservoir between them and the tarmac road, the cars, the rush of people. They pass above the black boat left beached on the stones. Dust blows from the stony track and mists their legs. Although everything close to them is quiet, the drone of traffic from the viaduct ahead is beginning to be audible. The line of sycamores fringing the lane shades out the sun, conceals the few houses dotted around the hillside rising behind them. Where the shade is deepest the lane dips down towards reservoir level, curves gently around a bay and then emerges from the trees, pale and ramrod-straight.

Beside the lane in the dip there’s a patch of waste ground covered in nettles. Mossy stones protrude here and there from the green stems. They might be old gateposts or the parts of walls or buildings sunk into the ground. She stops to look. It’s dark under the trees, and the nettles are at least knee-high.

‘It looks like a graveyard,’ she says.

He stoops to see under the unlopped branches.

‘Might be. Hard to tell with all those nettles.’

The leaflet comes out again.

‘It doesn’t show where the graveyard was. And it doesn’t say what happened to the graves. There must have been graves, they must have dug the bodies up and buried them somewhere else.’

While she reads he goes on a few yards ahead, back into the sun,
looking through binoculars at the car park on the opposite side of the
lake. The cars flash on and off in the sunshine, as people arrive and leave and open and close doors. Like Morse Code. Alarming and perfectly logical.

‘It’s nearly full. Good job we were here early.’ She comes after him 

‘They must have done. Mustn’t they? Buried them somewhere else.’

He lowers the binoculars. The cars fade into the background, but the flashes remain.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘But where?’

Ben barks. He’s barking because Michael has caught a fish. The fish is a large blue carp with a gaping mouth, gasping in Michael’s hand. Michael is holding the fish out away from him, as if undecided whether to kill it, although he has never killed a fish, he couldn’t bear to be the one to end that strange alien palpitation, the way the fish inflates and flattens in his hand as it gasps. He removes the hook with shaking fingers and gently lowers the carp back into the water. He rarely has to do this. If it happened too often he might stop coming altogether. But his mother said you shouldn’t walk away, you mustn’t take your eye off what’s important because that’s when you lose it.

The fish gulps the water as if it was drinking and leaves Michael’s
hands. It’s a blue curve in the brown water and then nothing. He takes his hands from the water and it becomes glassy again, clear briefly to the pale pebbles on the bottom. She must have taken her eye off the church, but he never spotted it if she did. He can just remember her pulling him along the lane with the late Sunday bell ringing monotonously, dong, dong, dong, squeezing his hand with her white glove. And it’s warm through the glove, warm as it never is afterwards.

After she dies the gloves disappear somewhere. He finds coats and dresses and the butterfly scarf she always wore against the wind, but not the gloves.

A dull tiredness washes over him. He unhooks the rod from its stand and makes for the beach and his wooden box. He’ll take his lunch hour but Ben will get most of the sandwiches. The dog is standing in the shallows, wagging his tail, giving short sharp single barks. Across the reservoir the picnics are in full swing, smoke rising from barbecues, kids shrieking and running in and out of the water like they’re at the seaside All water’s the same to them. Just water.

The question hangs in the air. This time she doesn’t ask again.

She’s clambered over the fence beside the lane and gone down to
stand alone on the beach, to get closer to the water. The lake is blue and smooth, hardly lapping on the stones, its still body between her and the noise of people and traffic on the other side. There are pale sandy stones beneath her feet and she thinks of throwing one into the water but it would be the wrong kind of sound, the kind that’s drowning out what she wants to hear.

All the wrong things have sounds, all the wrong things are silent. If the noise would stop for a minute she’s sure she’d hear an echo of 1954, the scrape of someone shutting a gate for the last time, the straining on canvas ropes of a coffin dragged out of the ground. All feelings have echoes, no echo ever dies away.

Though she’d never say so to him.

A dog barks, somewhere close to. She turns and looks along the
shoreline. It’s a black and white collie, standing on the beach about fifty yards away. Next to the dog there’s a fisherman, rods on the shingle beside him, packing nets and shiny boxes into what looks like a tea-chest. He hangs over the chest like a heron, his cap pointing downward toward the water. He doesn’t look up from what he’s doing.

The dog doesn’t bark a second time. They’re nice dogs, those collies. It’s wagging its tail already.

She looks back up to the lane. He’s waiting, leaning on a fencepost.  She clambers slowly back up the bank.

‘Hear anything?’ he says.

She takes her trekking pole from his hand.

‘There was a dog. And a man fishing. Or rather putting his fishing
gear away.’

‘Maybe they’re not biting today.’

The lane ends about half a mile further on, at an old iron gate with a tumbledown wall on either side. There’s a pull-in for anglers just before the gate, the last place on the track for a car to turn round. Beyond the pull-in the wall trails itself over the grassy bank onto the lakeshore, loses itself in a scattering of stones sinking down into the water. The other side of the gate there’s a patch of tarmac and then the road carried over the viaduct, with a narrow path beside it for them to walk on. The sound and brilliance of the cars is like a bright hard waterfall engulfing them.

He goes ahead, to open the gate. She walks through and then stops, waiting for him to close it.