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

The casino welcomed us with a courtesy mist and a cold suck in through the doors. To the bathroom first, and by our various methods, the ‘ice’ was ingested and we were ready to roll with the highest. Clap, clap, strong chest and push through the casino like a beautiful bull. Tango legs magic. Force-field on, baby.

We hummed in a shoal to the Black Jack D. The sight of the table made me want to shimmy, but this was too ridiculous even for Vegas, even for me. So I did it. We seated ourselves in a smile, golden legs hugging under the table, nudging naughty creases, silent rules on a wire between us. We were a horseshoe of five long and true friends tempered by vice. Settled there, the blossom of want opens up in us together. “What do we need?” I ask and answers were strung along the abacus. “Drinks please and oh, cigarettes,” I add, as if they really had been an afterthought. She made us feel as if we belonged, the waitress with her sun-packed head, cocked attentively. She brought the goods without question and the whole transaction was unsullied by the indignity of payment. We drank our tequila from glasses the size of soup bowls. Tequila’s not for tasting, Mama, but no-one had told Vegas. It was grandée crystal, all the way.

Topped up with our razor-cold friend, we paddled around the tables at flamingo speed, wading in the gaudy water watching others’ motives. I couldn’t stop my grin from spreading at the roulette wheel, with its long-winded spiel and its tiny ending. I tried to make meaning out of the odds and the even odder; tried to believe that logic had launched the mass of chips splayed in, on and teetering between probabilities, but was too aware of the uncertainty, of the last-minute shuffling, stirring exaggerated clouds of hope amongst the gamers.

We waded and found we were back at the curve of the Black Jack table. We squeezed hands and I pulled the guts out of my cigarette; I wanted to eat it. The waitress was beckoned, and, may I say, with five-star aplomb. I congratulated Cissy on this and hands were squeezed anew. I think some of us kissed but that’s not for the tables. Ilich (Kiev), the place of his birth printed in a parenthetic apology, let us know toute de suite. “Five gin and tonics please.” A nod was all that was needed for a tray to appear, held steady by the upturned roots of experience. We plucked them off like peaches. Pass me that slinky motherfucker, dude, I’m going to bite through the glass.

I drained the tube as I pulled at the baize for a hit; a self-ward smudge of the fingers. “Hit me,” I told Ilich (Kiev). His manicured fingers slunk soapily around my card and flipped a gorgeous Queen for my dapper little Ace! Twenty-one Mama! I knew it! …. and looking on down, there ain’t nothing Ilich or anybody else can do about it!!! No doubling down, no five card stupidness, just pure Vingt-un flowing straight through me. I pulled in the chips to my breast, placed one between my teeth,“My little ones,” I fool; made us laugh like alarms. Was I ever feeling it now. I waved my hand in a no-go halo over my place at the table. Nothing needed. The ice was giving me its lovely slow licks inside. I looked at the others and they nodded at me with one love.

We sashayed off the stools, leaving Ilich to smooth himself. We talked in each others’ faces like these were the last things worth saying. We were decimating the place with our presence. People were felled as we walked past, as if we had chainsaws jutting from our knees; gliding through the crowds like fuckable yachts. We docked at the craps table to regroup, told the table they better get ready to roll forever. Everyone loved us and it pulled out feathers of mischief in me. I dropped my hands down, leg up crooked, making for a baseball pitch for the amusement of the table. Knee lifted counter-slantwise, I shook them up, I shook them down…..

“Hey! No hands under the table!”

A man grabbed my wrists and with his big-wigged face in mine, shouted too loud and caused bubbles of yellow chemical to enter my blood. He turned my shoulders one-eighty, slowly, clumsily, like a clockwork key in his wooden paws. He gave me a careful push and I wobbled unsteadily afloat. He had cut through our collective steam just like that, chopped the rope clean through like sugar cane. Banished from the island we began to flounder, treading water, we noticed that people were looking at us in a no good way. Their masks were hurting our eyes. We needed more of something… tequila! But, we would “have to pay,” we weren’t gaming. Oh, that was bitter. The bubbles pricked through in dozens.

So we tried to recreate the hover we’d had all evening talking about twenty-one and looking pretty sweet but the tequila lay in a slick on top of our confidence, its $9 ticket stuck in my throat. We no longer had the skill to net the highs and the jokes had long since run adrift. We tried to ignore each others’ white knuckles but it was plain from the fat lulls, the speech in arrears, that we were all holding down the flaps of panic.

*

We are lolling in a stairwell when Cissy goes white. I mean ice white, Mama. She closes her eyes and says that she’s OK, but she can see with her eyes closed. My brain bucks my heart into forced march and I insist that we go and walk somewhere. Because I can see too, even when the shutters are down but if I admit it, I’ll implode, so I leave it out and I wish she would too. And though we try to deny it through our movements and our careering, the ice has turned to slush and is dirty spiky and mean to us. There’s no more left and so we can’t restore the cold snap and so we try to drink but every glass contains a clock-weight of fear and I can feel it swinging into dread in my gut. It does not take a genius to know that we’ve drifted too far to be rescued and that we don’t belong anymore. We are at sea. There is no-one to talk us round, no moorings that can take our weight, no attention to reassure us, no booze haven, just jagged stacks and the wide, wide open. The limo driver never mentioned this.

And then Mimi decides she can’t breathe and that her heart is going to burst. We try to go outside and there’s heat and light and we rear and run in like kids within range of a sprinkler. We make our way to the toilet but there are people in there. She’s right, her heart is at full steam and she has to lie down, she puffs in shallow bursts,“not just racing though,I mean whirring,like,not even individual beats.” She asks for a doctor and my brain jack-knifes a refusal and this reflects in the way my knees snap to standing. So we stand up and lean and sit down and smoke and try to breathe without effort. We meander impotently in small arcs around Mimi on the floor, her head under a footstool and as I walk around her waxy body I know that this isn’t quite right, like an inverted face, it is and isn’t natural but I can’t figure out what’s up.

And now we are four. Sonia is no longer here; has slipped from the present as if she had never set foot in it. She must have gone home, musn’t she? We try not to let the fear slop up the portholes but we can see it writ large Mama, we’re leaking. There go our moments of purity, she’s taken a fifth of our strength and the bubbles are getting longer. I know it’s desperation, but I start to try to plug the holes with the funnies. And no-one is laughing least of all me and I can’t seem to step on the coat-tail of the last punch-line. I’m bludgeoning us all with a nonsense club. I want to bail us out but I am digging spurs into the belly of the nightmare. I’m losing the perspective I need to accurately subitize the positives and it’s showing. Horribly.

From nowhere, a security guy asks us what’s going on with Mimi. He may as well have stabbed me. At the point of his interrogative blade I am disembowelled, have no more resistance to the reality that’s suffocating us. But I cannot give in. I stuff my guts back in and I try to fake myself but my face doesn’t fit me anymore and my mouth is playing all the wrong notes, so I have to make the moves. I get Mimi up and, however disgracefully, it pushes him a safe distance, outside the nimbus of interference. But he is listening and waiting and one of the others is crying now and I would really rather she didn’t.

*

The lift doors open and I wince as if someone is showing me my life on film. We enter the box. Not good. Mimi is hanging off of me like a loaded vine and the others absurdly face a corner each. I’m surrounded by mirrors and then mirrors of mirrors. There are people in here too. Daytime people. And they, with their families of reflections, cannot decide at which of us to stare the hardest. Under this heinous scrutiny I can feel my skin peeling back to expose what I really think about. I’m losing it, and my voice winds up; it’s the electric light that provokes me, the canned day taking my panic to a new temperature. I’m being scalded by their focus. I try not to beg, but choke out,“Don’t look at me I’m hideous,” and they don’t say a word, not a change in the air, even though we all know I’m right. By the twentieth floor, Mimi’s breathing like a freight train, not too beautiful, I can tell you. They must be deaf. They just stand there in their tea-set whiteness, reflecting us all. Pie pieces on their way from the pool. Skittles who refuse to be bowled over.

We spew onto the thirty-third floor, much higher than any of us should be. Mimi is panting and the crying remains throughout on the periphery (who is doing that?). I make it to our suite down the corridor, the length of which almost makes me retch. The regularity of the shapes down this illuminated throat make it seem organic. I try to blink the thought away. The number on our door has borne digits in our absence, twins? triplets? it seems we are now living in a telephone book. I bungle us into the room and the relief melts Cissy’s legs so that she lays in the mouth of the door. Inside the room, it smells of us in anticipation, of yesterday, before all this. My last efforts make medicine of the light, I rip back the leaden curtains and sluice the room with it; try to flush the night out of our wounds. I get Mimi on the bed and she, perhaps at the sudden insistence of the light, ceases to communicate in any way.

I place her like a scroll on the edge of the bed. I lay head to toe with her plank and past her webbed foot send my eye from the relative gloom of our cell, through the shallow u of her deformity, out onto a white hot world. The silver shimmer tests my belief as I lie shivering in this super-sized air-con liner, sailing through the sand. The ultra-chrome of the desert day does not compute well and lends a shoulder to the petrol film of hallucinations that are threatening to swim over me. Mama, from this height, I do not need to see wonders of the world. Everywhere my eye slinks I see bastardised structures. The heat has made soft work of the structural rules of ancient cultures and has bubbled up monsters, Eurasian hybrids, blisters of buildings, fit for no place. Were I capable, I’d close the curtains but at that moment, I am more afraid of the world behind my eyes than the circus of frying metal and sand which, I am trying to accept, is in front of me. I am stuck to the bed. My instruments have stopped listening to my intent and only the fairground of my consciousness is a symptom of any kind of animation.

*

I am ashamed that I don’t know when I last thought about it, but I suddenly realise that Sonia is not here. Neither do I know when the crying stopped but it must have done and in its wake, I do not feel relieved. I think Mimi has become very cold, but I can’t be sure, even though she is here beside me. The cold has shut me up, shut me down, frozen my sails. I can’t breathe properly and under this crush, this polar-paw of guilt, I don’t even struggle. I know I have a long way to go and even though I am waiting for nothing, I know I have no way out but to wait. This moment then this moment. No-one speaks or moves during these last wide blocks of light. Meanwhile, the sun stealthily carves a raised eyebrow in the sky, too blue for words.