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

Danielle from Toulouse. Rachel from outside Birmingham. To hear the first-mentioned properly in your ear, Toulouse rhymes closely with, practically is: to lose. Nothing vies to rhyme with Birmingham, unless you count Nottingham.
   
Stories aren’t supposed to begin twice. But (a jesting voice says, softly throaty) this may not be one of those stories.

Angels

Danielle from Toulouse. Rachel from outside Birmingham. A choice
between them would be obvious. I met Danielle from Toulouse seven years ago on a visit to France. Rachel is my wife. We live outside Birmingham. We have a house and two boys and a cupboard full of cereals and a drive full of weeds; we live the familiar tale of a couple starting out young and optimistic to end up no longer happy. Neither of us. But while I may have failed with Rachel, I’m not a slacker. I try to improve the situation, at least that with Danielle. I have two projects I pursue. One is obviously Danielle, for whom, just to lose my hands in her hair, which is shining and raven-black, I would do all manner of bold things. Or rather, things which she would love me, want me for. If only I knew what those things were. But I work at this, continually.

My second project is eccentric, but so what, are lives to have no flavour? I study angels – with or without their jesting voices in my ear. I study them the way other people study plants, or Tibetan tracts, or ergonometrics or young people and violence. There is no such thing as angel studies but this does not mean they cannot be studied. The source material is infinite, and there is a great deal to be discovered and known I suppose people shy away from the subject because they think there are no angels, but I’m not one of them and what can I do about them, nothing.

Nonetheless it is not easy to give a coherent account of angels, what they are like and what they do, as it would involve endless ifs and buts. Besides, they have to be taken on their own terms. But I can make certain points about them. First and perhaps most important – apart from the fact they don’t die as we do – they are not good; not, you might say, angelic. (Heaven and hell they regard as human inventions; they appear to move in what we would regard as a mixture of the two, a netherworld.) While not one jot malicious, they delight in all kinds of trickery. You need only look at their cheeky, rascally faces in pictures by Filippino Lippi or Sandro Botticelli. To continue this list of points, they are supremely confident of themselves. Nothing can shock or surprise them, but actually
hearing things come from the mouths of humans often bemuses them.
As for their own utterings, they may at any moment speak out with a
needling remark, a joke at the expense of someone (often another angel), or will use a profanity. There is nothing they dare not say, for they know no fear.

The next curious feature about angels, already alluded to, is that they know everything. This includes knowing what other angels have seen and heard. I go to one of their assembly points, for example, to talk about my problems with Danielle (for my projects are closely connected). I tell Martin, say, a secret thought which I have told no one. The next time I go to the assembly point Martin is not there but Joley (Clive, DJ Lucas, they are by no means all bound up in affairs to do with religion or theology) – Joley knows exactly what I said at the session before. As for these names, I should add straight away that angels are not male or female in the sense that they have corporeal intercourse (they neither occupy space nor are they enclosed by it); they use names to help humans deal with them.
(They don’t use them among themselves, what for? They  ommunicate instantaneously, it seems, without words or signs, in a kind of telepathy, where words or names or individuals play no role.)

Occasionally they summon enough common concentration to perform an act, which of course is what we know them for. They hold the four corners of the earth to stop it blowing away; their armies have razed cities. But their most famous act was the Annunciation, where it was up to the angels to deliver a baby from nowhere to a virgin who had no inseminating husband and did not even look pregnant. Set to perform this logical contortion of producing a child without a father, they carried off the act extraordinarily well, indeed perfectly. I promise not to go greatly into the details of my studies, but if you take the angel Botticelli showed in his great fresco now in the Uffizi gallery – as he flies towards
Mary’s chambers on a great wind with his white wings and his arms
folded, his feet not touching the ground, and more swiftly than this wind delivers the child into its mother’s waiting arms; the invisible babe in turn passing a great medieval bed with one pillow nicely puffed up, the work of another angel; and with Joseph whisked well out of sight by a third angel, and all the animals and kings and shepherds also out of sight, so fully attended to by other angels it doesn’t occur to you to even think of them – you realise the true métier of angels is in fact organisation.

I therefore hoped I might acquire their help in untying the knot of
unrequited desire that gets wrapped around my throat, my chest, my
everything, whenever I see Danielle. I have approached them many times. Martin, whom I see most often, and has possibly assigned himself to me, is not fazed at hearing my pleas for the umpteenth time. His feet don’t fidget and the only movement he makes is a graceful gesture of touching the blue collar or the armbands that adorn his simple grey garments. Another reason I am fortunate to have Martin is that he also initiates conversations, something which my investigations tell me is very, very rare in angelic – angelic circles, I say for want of a better word. 

Tell me your predicament, he says. Well, it is simple enough. Rachel from outside Birmingham and I have reached the end of our common road. Not only do we do nothing about the cereals in the cupboard or the weeds in the driveway, we don’t even bother talking about them any more. Meanwhile I have met and desire Danielle from Toulouse. But Danielle from Toulouse does not desire me.

And?

Well to be honest, Martin, I could tell after five minutes of our first
meeting à deux that she and I weren’t quite clicking. I knew, just as quickly, that I wanted us to click; she, meanwhile, wanted to tell me about her new apartment in Toulouse. In the crucial sixth minute a small, usually hidden part of me, deep down in some traumatised crevice, wanted to burst into tears. Nonetheless I kept listening to Danielle – who was well away explaining how acheter un appartement was not necessarily better than louer – with lips of untrembling steel. (If nothing else, I can keep my nerve. And sometimes, if you assume things are going to succeed, they
do.) However, there I was in the foyer of the Hotel Cluny, listening to what it was like to have such a cramped salle de bains in a mansarde in Toulouse, assuming it would somehow work out with Danielle and simultaneously in my heart knowing fully that it wouldn’t. She sat flicking her black so-French hair, regaling me with its metallic gleams, its shiny copper and unknown heavy metals (angels delight in things that glitter and shine). Sat and talked, as casual as I was uptight. For her nothing was at stake, while I was paralysed, cloven into two creatures (it must work: it can’t) like a worm, two worms.
   
Despite going everywhere carrying this seething discrepancy between what I want (everything) and what I will get (nothing), Danielle and I get on well. We talk non-stop, do things together. For example, last New Year’s Eve we spent hours criss-crossing the Boulevard St Michel looking for streets we had never been down before and both thinking this a fine thing to do. Right, said Martin, we do things like that too, tell me more.

Well, at a certain moment, in the darker depths of St Germain, I
wondered if I might take her arm. She had been making no move to take mine. I thought, maybe she’s just shy like me and she’s waiting for me to make a move. So I took her arm and God the shock in her face, the sudden voltage I must have been applying. Her head twitched. Did I say shock? It was fear.

Fear, repeated an angel in a robe that looked and softly crinkled like cellophane.

It was fear, he repeated: fear of adultery. Adultery? Very messy, he added, making his companions giggle.

He had nonetheless hit a nail on the head, as they tend to.Adultery.
  
Adultery, said the youngest angel. As in adult?

By now there was a hovering row of angels.

Complications, went on the angel in the cellophane. Deceptions. Lies. Mistakes. Lipstick on your collar.

My hand moved up to check – to bright peals of laughter. They played at looking at each other’s collars and their own.

Look, I told them, I don’t know quite where I go wrong with her. It is as if she has a door that is locked and I can’t find the key.

They looked at one another, smirking. When they continued to
exchange these smirks it created a groundswell of sound, but faint, like xylophones in a next-door house.

Go on, said Martin.

Or I have a closed something, I said, but Danielle is oblivious to me torturing myself and is not even looking for the key.

Keys, keys, they tittered as the xylophones died away. They mimed keys and opening locks, as if at a seminar for lockpickers. Supreme as they are at performing mime, they put their hands together to make the shapes of locks, while other hands dived through the keyholes like swimming fish.

They all ceased these japes at precisely the same instant.

Well, I continued, it has even occurred to me that the key (titters)
could be sex itself If only she would sleep with me the doors would unlock and we would both be free.

I doubt that, said Martin. She doesn’t want you. There isn’t anything you can do about that. If we were to bother checking, we could fly through an almost infinite number of cases of human relations, affairs, but taking any dozen is sufficient, and clearly, there is no formula for human attraction. No recipe for creating desire. And nothing you can do which will –

– galvanise, said another cellophaned angel.

– galvanise Danielle into wanting you.

But couldn’t you galvanise her for me?

No, said Martin. After all we are not a –

– consortium.

– consortium for arranging rape.

No, I said.

Consortium, the youngest angel repeated.

You people have a saying, this angel went on: Don’t take No for an answer. But it is a perfectly good answer. All the angels grinned.

But (I said, knowing the nigh-futility of arguing with them) what about my Yes? Can’t she do something useful with my Yes?
   
No, said Martin, she can’t.

There was a terrible clue in all this – because angels know everything, about all people, at all ages of the world. Between them they know every birth and death, every joy and illness, everything, from how the world began to the mechanics of children’s birthday parties to the price of butter to how the same world will end. So Martin already knows the outcome of my affair with Danielle from Toulouse. I hear him telling me it will never work. But this is where angels and humans fundamentally differ – I have tried explaining to him, we humans have hopes, and that without these we would be lost. We would be idiots wandering blindly in a purposeless universe, searching for nothing. We would soon crawl into corners and shrivel into dry twigs.

This talk demonstrates another vital aspect about angels, which I hope will eventually work to my advantage. So bear with me. Hop lightly with my thoughts, as they do, until all our feet together touch the ground.

Angels’ expressions are human, but their movements are their own  You can tell an angel by the beauty of their feet, the way they become parted or come together, and the unusual way they hold another’s hand (they hold by their fingers and don’t close their hands). But, and here is an essential point, they do not exist in physical space, so don’t imagine you will ever really see one. And yet they exist; they exist in our minds. The point being: In our minds is where they are. And this leads them to take a basic general stance towards humans. Once we cease to exist, and the light of the last mind is doused, they will cease too (dying as stars that fall and burn out on some street, a street of importance to the last mind they
were assigned to). So they have an interest in our procreation. (This,
incidentally, partly explains their fascination in the experiment of childbirth without the participation of a human male.) Basically apolitical creatures, they take sides on the question of having children, tending to favour and support family set-ups at the expense of situations like mine, where all I want is Danielle.
   
Penetrating all these facts with human logic, I soon saw it might be
possible for Martin and I to do the human thing and make a deal. Nothing scheming on my part, exactly, because he follows all my thoughts instantly Indeed he knows them before I have them.

To further ingratiate myself with him and the gathering of fluctuating comings-and-goings, with their strange pink and yellow mists, ephemeral lights like brief crackling sparklers, their neat hovering like hummingbirds and sudden gentle somersaults, I told Martin a foolish story that made them all laugh. Human endeavours, particularly the order or the way in which people go about things, bemuse angels no end. Humans are a bottomless pit of jokey material. So this is what happened.

Danielle from Toulouse, whom I see roughly once a year, had been emailing me about visiting me while I stayed overnight in Paris. This sounded highly promising and, typical of humans with highly promising prospects, instead of relaxing and savouring a delicious sense of anticipation, I did the perverse thing and lay awake at night, feverishly imagining that this time she would desire me. Night after night I went without sleep, depleting my energy for the days ahead. I convinced myself she had forgotten whatever it was about me that disturbed her, and imagined her boyfriend had died in various tragic accidents (the sort of things I would like Martin to organise for me), hit by a shower of asteroids, lightning, a plunging scaffolding pole.

I was back at the Hotel Cluny. Danielle called and said she wanted to come. (I waited in vain for her to mention a terrible accident involving Pierre.) She would come all the way from Toulouse. Just to see me. That’s an hour and a half each way, and it costs many euros. So in Paris too I lay awake, going through the following scenarios.

Danielle arrived at the door and after shedding her scarf and loosening her thick black hair she kissed me full on the mouth, for a long time, unstoppably, passionately, responding to my responses, holding me, feeling me little by little, whispering French words of desire in my ear, not letting her bag drop to the floor until I promised to take her in the very ways she kept whispering about so deliciously.

All right, this didn’t happen. But I imagined that after an aperitif, a
cup of coffee, after one of those mysterious, unpredictable moments
when, say, I happened to turn away and she looked at my broad shoulders and realised she desired me too, we would slowly move to the bedroom, a room with nude studies, a pair of Taoist books, big-leaved plants and other sexual suggestives. We would undress slowly, I would realise how splendid she was and she would kiss me for a long time, passionately, responding to my responses, feeling me little by little, whispering words of desire in my ear, not letting me move until I promised to take her in all the ways she was telling me, I did as she bid and we lay there and both trembled as I entered her.

But hold it there. In whatever I do I am a responsible person.

There is no forgetting aids, or as they say in France, la sida. I trusted her. Danielle had a ver y sensible side. She was a nursery school headmistress. But I had no idea what her boyfriend was like, or what he might have been up to. Other than the fact that Pierre too lived in Toulouse (and hopefully might therefore also be about to lose), and had been born in Luxembourg (bestowing on him the dangerousness of the unknown), he was a blank. For my part, I knew what Rachel had been up to. Nothing. Except our twice-yearly, out-of-the-blue excursion into sex (Martin sniggered). But Rachel had no one else, she had lost interest in sex per se, to the point where it was impossible to imagine any man on earth reviving her interest. And when, where? She never goes anywhere. Once
she stayed with her brother in Bromsgrove for a night, and I phoned her and she was there. But Pierre? Pierre was used to looking to all points of the compass through having been in Luxembourg. He had a whole Mediterranean down south. He had the whole world to roam in.

I had to buy condoms.

As every man knows, this is not so simple. The theory is simple. Breeze into a chemist’s and say, “Hello, can I have a packet of condoms. Good quality.” Next: “How much are they?” To be totally matter-of-fact a person should then be ready to say, Hm, that’s expensive, I’ll have to think about that. And leave the shop, empty-handed, for another shop. 

Pie-in-the-sky (phrases like this make them tinkle with laughter). In the real world, first of all, ninety-nine percent of all chemist’s are staffed by women; mainly young women, who don’t like you buying these items and will make things as tough for you as they can. You enter the shop (not any shop, you look round and round for one with a single man at the counter), I’ll begin again, you enter the shop with an over-the-trenches mentality, your demeanour borrowed from the atmosphere of a morgue for sloths. Somehow your lead jaw creaks open. You realise you have the sheer guts of a snowflake and the volume level of the last sloth to be brought in. You take whatever’s offered, pay five hundred pounds for a packet of three and try to reach the door before your bandy sloth-legs crumple under you.

In Paree the problems multiply. You lack the command of the language possessed by a two year old. You will have to repeat yourself. You will have to speak up and be spoken to as if you are deaf. And what is the French for condom? Le salop, the all-female staff will say. CONDOMS. Salop.

And yet, suddenly off the rue St Jacques I came across a shop with packets of Durex Elite préservatives on shelves by the window. A man was serving a customer. Peering in, I saw the prices surely included return trips to the moon, thus precluding any strategy of buying shampoo, a new toothbrush maybe, a box of tissues, and tacking the packet onto the end of the purchase. But if nothing else, I am a person who confronts situations.

A group of angels blew a white mist around my feet until I could no longer see them. When I looked up from the mist, they were gone. You went in, said Martin.

I stepped inside, accepting the fact the buzzer on the door stuck no matter what I did with the door. When I turned back to the counter the man had disappeared and a woman reminding me of Rachel stepped forward. But I was going to get this packet, going to get it, the woman whose straight gaze reminded me of Rachel looked at me as if I was Jacques le Ripper, but I was going to get it, no matter how difficult it was to make myself understood over the noise of the buzzer. Raquel left the counter to try and fix the buzzer and the shop filled behind me, but no matter, I told my hand what to do and I put a fifty-euro note on the counter, she held it suspiciously to the light, that was fine with me, she flicked it loudly with a fingernail so everyone looked our way, that was fine by me, she held the packet up too, if she called the management that was fine, I was going to demand this packet as a right, she was going to get the police but that was fine too, they wouldn’t make it in time, I was determined, the cash register rang up the sale, I would even wait for the receipt so I could come back and complain about the quality of the product, the hell I would, I was back in the street with my prize and I did not get run down by a moped the very next moment and the end of this
story is that Danielle still didn’t want me, neither she nor I got close to putting on a Durex Elite, she never even entered the room the préservatives were in and I had risked shame and paramedics and half a lifetime’s savings for –

Nothing, Martin interrupted.

Strange word, said the youngest angel: nothing.

The end of this story was met by a kind of ooo-ooo ooo-ooo, like infant owls singing a sea shanty, as Martin and the others swayed gently over the ground and grinned, even though they had known what I was going to say. I can’t explain it better, but the way they grinned at one another was like the way we humans toast one another with glasses of drink. Préservatives, they kept saying, préservatives. What was it I wanted to preserve? And why? I should use what it was, not preserve it. I might help create another human, stretching out the lives of several angels. OK, I said, but how do I create this human if Danielle doesn’t want me? Ah, ah, that had them thinking.

The next time I was at the assembly point Martin and many of the
usual crowd must have been elsewhere. I suppose they have difficulties being everywhere at once, and someone may have needed them more. There were many pipe-cleaner vapour trails hovering, indicating many comings and goings. Anyway, Alexander was there. Alexander, an angel more serious than most, has a very attractive, peaceable nature. If I may indulge my knowledge for a moment, I can tell you his brown wings are made of a fascinating composite of birds’ feathers and insects’ wings. He wore lightweight, petrol green robes with red cord at the neck and silvery sparkling hems. They like unobtrusive hues set off by a dash of bright colour.

Alexander said immediately he would arrange two nights with Danielle and after these I would have to end all contact to her and return to Rachel outside Birmingham. Alternatively, I could continue as before, which would mean nothing would change. There was no need for me to make up my mind because everyone already knew I would agree to the angels’ proposition. I could decide, of course, and let everyone know of my decision once I reached it. But it would all come to the same thing.

It’s a good deal, added Alexander. She does not desire you. To change this is a –

– challenge.

– what you would call a challenge. To change what she desires, we have to offer her something which is equally impossible. Normally impossible. But as long as it is a wonder and not a miracle, we can do it.  We are glad to do it. We will not tell you what this is. All I can tell you is it is something extraordinary. We have studied what will come of all this, and she will be very happy. For her at least, we are sure of a harmonious outcome.

Altogether harmonious, said Martin appearing suddenly.

Cellophane rustled behind him.

I told them how much I appreciated their help.

All of them except Martin vanished.

By way of a signal, he said, I was to watch the sky in the west for a star to fall in a long tumble down the heavens.

A date was set for the week after next. He promised they would not spy on us. They had no need, as they had seen it all before. Indeed, like film directors looking at their rushes, some of them had seen the very scenes already. But I hadn’t, and as we touched fingers on our pact I said to Martin: agreed, I am ready for these two nights with Danielle from Toulouse, and all the finality that will follow.