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

1.

     A week after the body of the civil servant had been flown back to Britain and buried, the newspaper received a letter from his mother. The contents of the letter caused much animated discussion amongst the senior members of staff.

     The Editor said that what was being suggested in the letter raised questions of the public interest which should outweigh all other considerations.

     Quite simply, he said, we have a duty to publish.

     The Health Editor said that the letter started a debate that would resound across the globe and that it was potentially the scoop of this millennium or any other. Others questioned the veracity of the correspondence. From left-field there was talk of cult involvement, of Situationists, of loners, publicity seekers and fascists and snobs. Good stories all.

     Not everyone was enthusiastic however. The News Editor agreed in principle with the portentous predictions of his colleagues but warned against getting carried away: as yet there was no actual evidence to back up what were after all, the wildly implausible and rather timidly-put claims of an old woman. Furthermore, such evidence would be well nigh impossible to obtain.

     The Political Editor was more forthright in his opposition to taking the matter any further.

     What if the allegations, such as they are, have some foundation? he asked. We would then have to advocate the most obvious solution to the problem. And burning books is the antithesis of all that this newspaper has ever stood for.

     It was left to the unfailingly pragmatic Features Editor to point out that - given the content of the paper’s pages over the previous three years - the story represented a conflict of interest of catastrophic proportions.

     If we run the story, he said, how can we expect to fill the paper a month down the line? What could we use that would leave us in the clear? It would be commercial suicide.

     In the end it was the ineffable logic of the Features Editor that won the day. The argument was over and nothing more was heard of the civil servant or his mother.

2.

     The civil servant was working as a Senior Executive Officer at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when the deaths were reported. Two British tourists had died on the same day on the island of Corfu. There were no suspicious circumstances but the Department felt there was a PR need to offer assistance to the authorities in their enquiries.

     As the civil servant was an unassuming man, not remotely given to rocking the boat or raising the level of the playing field at one end or flagging up anything that did not warrant a good flagging, he was the ideal candidate for the job and was quickly despatched to the island.

     Once there, he found little that was untoward. There was nothing other than the merest of circumstantial connections between the deaths. One of the dead was a man, the other a woman. The man was in his early thirties, the woman twenty-nine. She was a maths teacher, he was in IT. Both had been with their partners at the time of their death but although they had both been on beaches they were on opposite sides of the island. Both had been relaxing, reading books. They were not staying in the same hotels. Indeed, the only thing that seemed to be out of the ordinary was the confusion over the cause of death itself.

     What had happened had been confirmed and explained to the civil servant. Examinations of the deceased showed that in each case there had been a spontaneous weakening and failure of the electrical signals that pass through the cells of the brain. Because of this, the chemical reaction that stimulates the same electrical process in adjacent neurons had not been sparked into life. Thus, communication between the cells in the brain had seized-up; the brain had simply stopped working, shut down.

     Only one question remained. Why? At the autopsy, the heart and lungs of the dead were found to be in fine working order and there was no evidence of foul play. The coroner insisted that the condition was unprecedented, at least in people so divorced from any other symptoms of ill-health or old age.

     The initial police investigation had failed to unearth any further clues. Both of the victims had been in good physical shape. Although the man smoked moderately, the woman was known to be a keen gym-goer. Since arriving on the island neither of them had spent an inordinate length of time in the sun and only small amounts of alcohol had been consumed.

3.

     The civil servant was at a loss. Three days into his week away and he was no nearer finding out if there was any real need for his presence on the island. The authorities had closed the book on the deaths and the families concerned were not exactly kicking up a stink. There seemed little to kick against.

     He had spoken to the partners of the dead twice now, in an attempt to establish any common ground which may have been overlooked by the police. He had become briefly excited when he discovered that the two couples had arrived at Kerkira, the island’s capital, on the same flight on the same day. When he had visited them for a second time, his brain was alive with possibilities. Could the cause of death have been a rogue fig, bought from the same airport vendor and treated with the same potentially fatal combination of pesticides? A dodgy olive perhaps? For a moment of madness, the civil servant even speculated about the book connection.

     From talking to the relatives, he had established that both dead people had availed themselves of a three-books-for-the-price-of-two offer at Heathrow airport before boarding their flight to Greece. And by coincidence they had each chosen the same three books - Man, Woman, Boy; Turning into Mr Commitment and About a Thirtysomething - and had read two of them during the first three days of their holiday. Similarly, they were both about halfway through the third when they had met their end.

     Now the civil servant was not a man of culture but he knew of the power of television and film and art to shock. Was it not possible that books had the same power? Maybe, in extreme circumstances, certain combinations of words could cause such outraged excitement that people could actually read themselves to death?

     When shown the best-sellers in question he could certainly appreciate the compulsion to pick them up and begin reading. The colourful covers, with their occasionally garish, sometimes quirky juxtaposition of the mundane with the slightly out-of-the-ordinary, exerted a strangely compelling force. He even vowed to give the titles a try himself in the remaining three days of his secondment to the island. And yet.

     And yet...

     To his untrained eye, a flick through the contents revealed little that the civil servant would consider a shocking read. His opinion was backed up by the writing on the back covers which consisted of words like ‘bittersweet’ and ‘poignant’, ‘heartfelt’, ‘wryly amusing’ and ‘male confessional’, without ever implying that potentially lethal interpretations lurked between the lines.

     More pertinently - and even to a man of limited medical knowledge, this was the clincher - far from being excited or shocked to death, all the indications were that the fatalities had been caused by quite the opposite effect. And who had ever heard of such a thing?

     No, he concluded, there was nothing more to be done. The civil servant phoned his mother to keep her up to speed and set out about tracking down the books he had found so seductive. He found each of them easily enough, in a second-hand book store, barely dog-eared. Then he retired to his room and began to read.