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

Billy can hear the sea in the distance. It’s not a roar, but something
grumbling. It sounds especially wretched because now, an hour after
sunset, no-one is taking any notice of it, certainly not the rest of them up at the house. Below the marching pines, waves are flaying Breakers’ Point against their will and he imagines that the retreating surf is the blood of the headland, seeping into the mist.
   
The garden – a lawn really, with a concrete path at the side and some wind-bent bushes – slopes towards the water. The man who sold them the house said it would make a fine terrace, though why he hadn’t created one in the twenty years he’d been there was a mystery. Perhaps he had no money to pay anyone to do it. He seemed odd – spindly and slightly overbalanced, like his shrubs – and dressed as if to go out to somewhere official. His mind seemed to be elsewhere, certainly not on gardening. Billy notices how the cusp of the lawn, the middle section which bears the brunt of the wind off the sea, is parched. His father said the man was going into a home. That’s perhaps why he was dressed up, Billy thinks. For the journey. There were two other men with him who said a few words to his father and mother before taking away their prisoner. In the
empty garage, there’s a light patch on the floor where the man’s car, a grey Riley Elf, once stood, and in the middle of it a pool of oil still being soaked up by a scattering of sawdust.

Billy reaches the bottom of the lawn, where deep steps take him to a sloping buttress of stones medalled with ochre lichen. In front of him the pines loom. The way ahead looks steep but it isn’t: with care, it is possible to descend to the coastal path. There’s a stupid gate on to this path with nothing either side of it, so that the garden really extends to the cliffs edge above the Devil’s Whirlpool and its boiling water. But Billy knows this from a previous visit with the estate agent.

Now, he’s more interested in the garden next door. Unlike the one behind him, in front of his new home, it has been planted with palms and other bushes in different shades of green, and this effort to stall the runaway land has made the grass look healthier. Here and there are dark sculptures – some freestanding, others on plinths – which look as if they have been hauled up from the whirlpool, plundered from the Devil. Some have holes in them, others resemble human forms not quite come into being from their stony tombs. Also, an effort has been made to encompass the first twelve feet of falling land in the area of the pines, in this case more densely planted, and it is here, in the half-light, that Billy sees a real human figure start walking away, like something wild revealing its camouflage by the meanest of movement. He gets the impression that he has been watched. He can hear twigs cracking faintly underfoot and what sounds like whistling and singing becoming softer and softer. Then, through a hole in one of the sculptures, a tiny silhouette appears and stops for a few seconds before vanishing over the brow of the land.
   
“Billy!” his mother shouts. “Tea’s ready. Spencer’s here.”

He can see her on the upper horizon where the lawn starts its seaward curve. Everything about her is billowing, like a flag in a gale – her long brown hair, her dress, her woolly cardigan. It is as if she has come not to retrieve him but to form an alliance with him against some enemy not yet visible behind her. Because of this, he rushes up the hill so that she can see that he has heard her summons, at which point she turns and heads back to the house.

For Spencer’s benefit, they arrived in time to see the sunset. Spencer was late, but in any case the spectacle fizzled out in a bank of cloud moving up the channel. The anti-climax brought darkness forward by an hour and now the lathering sea below the garden is growing ominous. Billy doesn’t mind admitting fear of the dark, of the shadows, but he wishes it wouldn’t change things so that he is forced to choose. Behind him, the waves are wilful and flinging their spume madly, and Breaker’s Point is revelling in its penance.

Spencer Lockwood probably hates him – ever since he came home early from school that afternoon with the sniffles and found Spencer and Meryl playing horse and rider in her bedroom. This was in the other house. Spencer was angry: he stood silently above him, zipping his trousers. “Don’t you dare say anything,” Meryl said. She smelled funny, and the wet rats’ tails of her hair swung and brushed against his cheek. They were going to get married once Spencer started teaching. Billy thinks he wouldn’t fancy being in Spencer Lockwood’s class, not after he’d caught him shagging his sister. As the house wobbles closer, he chants under his breath, “Shagger Lockwood, Shagger Lockwood.” He spots Spencer’s
car, a sky-blue sports job, parked at a crazy angle, as if about to shoot off any minute towards the Devil’s Whirlpool. He imagines the car spinning in the water and Spencer, trouserless, threatening him unavailingly as he sinks deeper, going round and round like a blurred Catherine Wheel.
  
“And what have you been up to?” Meryl asks. Spencer, his mouth full of chocolate Kup Cake, smirks at him as he passes.

He ignores his sister’s inquiry by walking away, so that his own question floats free for anyone to answer: “Who lives next door?”

His father is standing near the table, taking a stethoscope apart.
Already, there’s a sign nailed to the gate: Roderick Mahon, MD, BCh. Billy has never heard anyone except his mother call him Roderick, only Roddy – Dr Roddy Mahon. His mother calls him Roderick when she’s uptight and impatient, which has been pretty often of late.

“Her name is Alice Westerway,” his father says. “She’s a composer.” He supplies the information indifferently, as though already the woman has entered his circle and, in due course, will be introduced to the new doctor’s thirteen-year-old son.

“I’ve seen her,” Billy says. “She’s creepy. What do you mean, a composer?”

“What do you think he means?” Spencer asks.

They are all like this, never telling him anything, always expecting him to give an answer so that he can prove that either he is not stupid or they are superior or both.

“She writes music,” his mother says, passing by on one of her motherly tasks. He senses that she doesn’t like these games the others play with him. She brings them to a close before they can get properly started.

By ‘music’ his mother probably means the gramophone records his father plays in the evenings. Mostly it sounds gloomy – when it’s not rattling the walls. He has seen his mother go up to the hi-fi without being asked and turn the volume down. His father never complains about this: it’s as if he has simply forgotten to do it himself, though he never says ‘Thank you’. Spencer likes traditional jazz. When he talks about it, his father remains silent, nodding as spittle slides down his pipe stem. ‘Trad’ jazz is always muffled, and comes from Meryl’s bedroom when Spencer is visiting.

A few days later, Dr Mahon calls Billy to the living room. On the radio is a piece of music by Alice Westerway called ‘Ocean Murmurs’. As Billy listens, his father stares at him, looking puzzled, before starting to make a repeated figure eight with his right palm. It sounds to Billy like the music he hears at the cinema, except now there’s no-one in the clinches, no galleon with Gregory Peck aboard, no pictures whatever, except his father towering over him in a trance. When the music ends, ghostly people begin to clap.

“I expect she wrote it after listening to the sea down below,” his father says. Billy is expected to accept this opinion as the last word, for his father picks up The Cornishman and hides behind it, as he always does when there is no more to be said – about anything. Smoke signals rise above the newspaper.

Billy’s bedroom window overlooks Alice Westerway’s garden. For hours, he never sees her, though lights go on in the house at night. She has an old car that sinks down at the back: Spencer says the springs have gone. When she starts the engine, it farts clouds of grey smoke. She never goes out after dark. He wonders whether she will become one of his father’s patients.

“Your father cannot go collecting people like butterflies,” his mother explains when he asks. “But if she wants to be on daddy’s list, I expect he will accept her.” He has heard them talking about patients after surgery or after his father has had to rush out late at night following a phone call. His mother does most of it while his father rests his head in his hands. He thinks of his grandmother at these times, how she used to ask him if he had lost his tongue. She must have said it a lot to his father as well, when he was a boy.

And he is thinking of it when Meryl announces that she and Spencer are getting married. He feels this should be a happy moment but Spencer stands in the background fidgeting and looking serious. Later, from his room upstairs, Billy can hear his father’s raised voice as an argument starts below. His mother runs up the stairs and slams a door behind her. Tip-toeing towards it, he can hear her sobbing. Then, from the landing, he sees his father rushing to the front door. As he fumbles with the knob and eventually pulls the door open, Alice Westerway is standing there. She is small, like a Jenny wren, and her bony hands are clasped in front of her chest.

“I did knock,” Billy hears her say. “But…”

“That’s all right,” his father says. “What can I do for you?”

Billy doesn’t hear the next bit but his mother, now standing behind him, does and trots down the stairs. They escort Alice Westerway into the front room, leaving Meryl and Spencer in the hall to wonder what’s up.

It turns out that Alice Westerway has chest pains. Billy’s father told her not to worry, it was probably indigestion, a spot of acid in the tummy. But her visit has had a calming affect. Afterwards, he sees his mother, his father, his sister and Spencer sitting around the dining-room table, talking. They look like four people in a restaurant, waiting to be served. From his bedroom wido w, he can see Alice Westerway’s house in darkness. He tries to stare through the gloom. And within seconds, the lights come on, almost as if he had willed it. Spencer and Meryl walk arm in arm to the car. As it moves off, the back wheels spin on the gravel, sending a hail of stones into the shrubbery.

The next morning, a Saturday, Billy’s mother asks him if he would like Alice Westerway to teach him to play the piano. His father is smoking his pipe in the corner, his face turned towards them to catch the reply.

“But we haven’t got a piano,” Billy says.

“We’ll buy one,” his father explains. “That’s not a problem.”

It’s always like this: his mother asking the questions, trying to draw things out of him, while his father stands aside, blocking his exits.

“OK,” Billy says, and as he does so his father slides a record out of its sleeve, taking care to hold it only in the middle, and places it two-handed on the turntable. His father sits and watches him as the LP – piano music – is playing. He won’t say anything. Billy   sometimes imagines Spencer and his father having a battle with their gramophones, firing jazz and classical music at each other, except that neither would give in, both would retreat and play their music to themselves.

Billy spends Sunday morning thinking about his mother’s offer. But the weather is so good that it slips his mind as he plays in the garden. Meryl and Spencer are spending the weekend at Spencer’s parents’ home in Plymouth. Mr and Mrs Lockwood came for a meal one day, at the other house. Mr Lockwood wore a cap, which he rolled up and stuffed in his jacket pocket. Arms outstretched, Billy is dive-bombing Nazis on the ridge where the garden begins its descent. As he banks to the right, he spies his mother at the front upstairs window. She is looking for her paints. “Be careful,” she shouts, above his father’s music.

After lunch, Dr Roddy Mahon clicks shut his black box of tricks and walks down the lane towards Alice Westerway’s house. It is built of grey stone and slate tiles, and the terracotta chimneystack wears a coronet of splashed seagull shit. It seems to Billy that the house is carved from rock that has always been there, whereas their own house, their new house, perched higher at the end of the lane and with its brown pebble-dash, bow windows and thick ornamental tiled roof, is out of place. Alice Westerway’s house invites the wind and the rain and the sea’s quiet murmur, while their own sends it away to pester some other place, Mr and Mrs Lockwood’s perhaps. As a boy, Spencer would climb into the loft of his house and walk fifty yards in opposite directions above the bedroom ceilings of the neighbours, all twenty-five of them, including Mr Bamford, a jolly chap who lived on his own and later put his head in
the oven. Billy’s father has already been into the loft of their new house with a torch. “Come on up and have a look, Billy,” he shouted through the black trap door in a voice like God’s.

It is his mother who breaks the news brought back by his father.
“I’m sorry, Billy,” she says, bending on one knee and adjusting his
shirt collar even though it needs no attention. “Mrs Westerway doesn’t give lessons, only to older pupils.”

He’s noticed how grown-ups say one thing and then say the opposite straight after.

“How old?” he asks.

His father listens to what his mother has to say but has begun cutting old burnt tobacco from inside the bowl of his pipe. It drops into his free hand like apple peel. If he didn’t have to do it he would be able to answer Billy’s questions himself But for some reason he is angry. He refers to their neighbour as ‘that Westerway woman’.

“Much older,” his mother explains. “Much older and much cleverer. She is also very busy.”

After this, he regards Alice Westerway, despite her frailty, as someone who has spurned him. He feels sorry for his father, who has had to bring the bad news and hand it to his mother. The other news he brings is that Alice Westerway is taking Milk of Magnesia and has become one of his father’s butterflies. Billy hopes she does not start knocking at their door every whipstitch as Mrs Berryman did at their other house. Mrs Berryman needed the doctor once a fortnight but there was nothing wrong with her, unlike his Uncle Trevor, who had everything wrong with him but refused to see one. Sometimes, these things make his head buzz.

Now that Spencer is not there to see it – he is probably with Meryl, placing his hand gently on her stomach, because babies at this stage are just tadpoles – the sun begins its dazzling fall into the sea. It will soon be time for dinner. Mr and Mrs Lockwood will have had their dinner six hours earlier and washed up the tea things, and will be listening to hymns on the radio, Mrs Lockwood singing along quietly so as not to disturb her husband. Billy’s mother has found her watercolours in one of the packingcases and is in the top window, painting the sunset and the gold glitter it has cast on the water. Downstairs, his father’s face is screwed up with the pain of listening to more music. From Alice Westerway’s open French windows comes the piano sounds he will never be taught.
   
And he wonders how long the Devil has been down there behind him, stirring up trouble in the green waters as the ocean moans its disapproval.