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

     While he was touring the States, Bob decided to ‘phone me once a week. A rather exaggerated way of showing his concern or affection, I can’t help thinking. I may be unfair to him. I dislike these tong-distance calls. They usually leave me suspended in mid-air, with a feeling of confusion or depression. I prefer a clear-cut separation, with news exchanged by letter. But I’ve never told Bob so, for fear of hurting him. He doesn’t always call quite regularly either, and then I become restless and begin to speculate what could be stopping him.

     I often wonder what it would be like if we stayed apart altogether, though it’s no more than a thought. At present I certainly still need more time on my own — and without having to give any reason for this to anyone, or even to myself. So much for this subject.

     And what’s next? I woke up at 5 o’clock this morning, unable to go back to sleep. It’s pitch dark. The ticking of my clock is irritating me. Thinking about painting: I have some new ideas at the back of my mind, but hate to work on them by artificial light. Perhaps I shall make a start later.

     What time would it be in America now? 10 o’clock at night? Depends which part of it of course. America is big. Big, big, big. Silly echo in my head. San Francisco has a different time from New York. Three hours earlier or later? I can’t make it out.

     Anyway, I’m pretty sure Bob would still be up. He might have gone to the theatre — or might be having a late meal somewhere. Alone? I hope not, for his sake. But that’s up to him, why even bother to think about it? We’ve come to a working understanding about such things long ago. May be a tacit understanding only. But what’s the difference?

     Come to think of it, he might one day run into Julia. There’s quite a possibly that she might have gone to the U.S.A. And I can well imagine that she could appeal to Bob, in one of his somewhat crazy moments.

     Naturally she would have the tiger with her. She would never move anywhere without it. She’s keeping it next to her skin, most intimately, all the time, the metal warm from her own body heat.

     At night it sleeps in her bed with her, between her legs. It hardly ever cools down. She even takes it into her bath. Occasionally she punishes herself, by holding it under the cold tap, then pressing the icy metal against herself. Or she gets it almost hotter than she can bear it. At certain angles she can feel the hard edges cutting into her. This pain sharpens her pleasure.

     Come to think of it, Bob is never going to have anything to do with her. Why should he?

     She has now turned the key twice in the lock of her hotel room door and put the chain across also. You have to do this in New York, even in the Mater’s Hotel with a reception clerk on duty day and night. But with 25 apartments on 25 floors, you can never be sure.

     That’s why she is sleeping restlessly. The noise of the running water from the neighbouring apartment makes her jump. Any noise makes her jump.

     The man by the window on the opposite side of the light-shaft is watching her through his binoculars. Every movement. Congratulating himself that she’d forgotten to pull down the blinds the night before. For the last twenty minutes he has been standing with his belly pressed hard against the hot radiator. Now she is turning over, her hands under her bed clothes searching for something. What is she searching for? She is pressing her head into her pillow. He can no longer see her properly, the light has suddenly changed. He is cursing. Besides, the radiator has become unbearably hot. He is turning away, but has every intention of keeping an eye on her just the same.

     Ten minutes later he can see her walking about the room in her nightdress — or is it her petticoat? Before he can decide which it is, she has gone into the bathroom. He shrugs his shoulders.

     He leaves late for work but doesn’t even check the time on his watch.

     In front of the hotel entrance he sees her again. She is getting into a taxi. ‘To the Greyhound Bus Station, 42nd Street’.

     But only I am following her, registering every move she makes. She has her ticket stamped at the station counter and lines up for the bus to Washington. She looks around anxiously before climbing the three steps, her overnight bag in her hand. She chooses the first seat by the door, and looks around again before settling in the corner by the window, the bag placed by her feet. She is grinning to herself. She leaves the Greyhound Station at 10. 1 a.m. precisely.

     Route: direction Baltimore. Speed limit 60. She closes her eyes. She hates the industrial district which stretches along on either side of the highway, mile after mile. She visibly relaxes when the bus enters an area of forests and lakes. She always loves the country, gardens, growing things. According to George, one of her redeeming features . . . . . But why did he hate her so much? What happened between them?

     MD Route 316. Pleasant peaceful countryside, getting hillier, foliage more colourful. Could be in the Ardennes. But it isn’t. She had to get away much further. Why? To hide the tiger? To contact her mother? She may not know it herself.

     Reduce speed, pay toil 1/2 mile.

     She winces.

     Every time the bus slows down she becomes restless.

     Havre de Grace. The road has narrowed from ten to two lanes. An enormously long bridge. She stares into the wide stream below, begins to count the islands . . . . .

     Chapel Road. Holiday Inn. Maryland Restaurant. Fuel.

     MD Route 22.

     Stepney Road.

     She has closed her eyes, slumped forward. Her right hand clutching the tiger in the bag by her feet.

     I’m growing tired of observing her constantly. To hell with her and her tiger.

     12.20. Friendship Airport. She, too, has seen the sign.

     Brief stop. Opportunity to return home to base. Wherever that might be. But she closes her eyes again.

     12.25. Washington 27 miles. Sign: No Hitchhiking.

     She grins. Now she is burying her face in her hands. Detached from everything around her. Even from her tiger.

     I hate her.

     I dozed off, woke up, and it’s still pitch dark. I think I dreamed about Bella. Can’t remember much about it though. She was a child, but her skin was wrinkled. She wore a large pink bow in her hair. White hair with cork-screw curls. I stretched out my hand to touch it. I said: ‘Is it silk?’ she stepped back, frowning at me: ‘Don’t you crumple my bow’.

     ‘I wasn’t going to crumple it, you idiot’. I heard myself say. ‘I was going to straighten it out. Don’t you know when someone wants to help you?’ — That seems all I can remember.

     I’m thinking: What helps the helped, helps the helper. And why not? Still this need to question every darn thing just now. Why did I encourage Bella to dictate the story of her life to me? Did I want to know more about her, share her past? God forbid. A narrow little old life. But she enjoys going back to this past of hers just the same. Searching out the highlights. Then bothered by a bad conscience: ‘I really mustn’t indulge so much in my past, Clara, dear. It’s all wrong’.

     ‘Why is it all wrong, if you enjoy going back into the past? I think our ideas about time are quite fictitious anyway. We invented time, just as we invented religion. It’s all man made’.

     ‘But we didn’t make up day or night, nor the seasons. And some of us are young and others are old. That’s not our invention

     ‘I’m not even so sure about that’.

     ‘Clara, perhaps you really don’t change. You always come out with these these . . . . . original ideas. I still remember clearly when we were sitting at the dining-room table in your parents’ house, trying to catch up on the school work you’d missed through that kidney infection. You playing with the little curl at the end of your long plaits, your big brown eyes consistently questioning everything. ‘Why do parallels meet in infinity? How can they meet in infinity? What is infinity?’

     ‘You still remember that? And you could never give me an adequate answer.’

     ‘I’m sorry’.

     ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve come to enjoy collecting unanswered questions’.

     ‘But what is this business about time you don’t believe in, Clara?’

     ‘I don’t really know. I suppose it’s just a feeling. But a strong feeling. I keep looking at so many of my experiences, pictures of my past. And whenever I do, I find them practically unchanged. They’re lined up next to each other as though they were always there, having come into existence simultaneously. I do not feel the past any less than the present or the future’.

     ‘But you don’t know the future’.

     ‘No, not always. But it’s not nearly as unpredictable as most people seem to think. Anyway, I feel it is there, simply regulated by this time invention of ours, which makes us pick up experiences in a certain order’.

     Then you would have no free choice, would you?’

     ‘My choice is certainly limited. The way I see it, events enter into consciousness when they are released by what we call time. Rather like dreams in our sleeping lives. One day we might conceive all this quite differently.’

     She shakes her head. ‘Not during my lifetime’.

     ‘Nor during mine. In any case I’m only talking about my personal feelings or fantasies, I’m well aware of that. But there’s something puzzling me all the time which I can’t fathom. If I had the mind of an Einstein I might develop an appropriate theory. Unless all this is simply an attempt to keep alive those past experiences which continue to have a particular significance for me today’.

     ‘I shouldn’t have thought you would have this need, Clara. I can understand our Mrs. Friedmann holding on to her past. But why should you have to do it? You have so much to live for and concentrate on in the present.

     I shrug my shoulders. ‘I sometimes think I should like to see all the major events making up my life being spread out on a giant map, so that I could fly over it to keep in touch with all these areas at will. After all, they remain part of me which I need’.

     I can well imagine Bella looking at me puzzled. Perhaps this would be a more suitable conversation to have with George. ‘In what direction would you want to move first?’ he might ask me. ‘Come on, you must have some idea’.

     ‘I might go to East Berlin’.

     ‘East Berlin? Why?’

     ‘I went back there after the war, a few years ago’.

     ‘So did I’.

     ‘You did? I didn’t know.

     ‘No, why should you know? We’ve hardly told each other anything about our lives’.

     ‘D’you want to hear about mine?’

     He shrugs his shoulders in his typical way. ‘Why these polite questions? D’you need an invitation to talk to me? About East Berlin?’

     ‘It’s probably a bore’.

     I can hear him laugh. ‘You don’t change, Clara. You always called things a bore which preoccupied you deeply, which meant a lot to you. Your best painting at school you called a bore. I shall never forget it. A bore! It’s your way of saying you can’t bear it. You couldn’t bear looking at the painting. It was too violent probably. For once you were honest. You said what you felt, without words, just with colours, the only way one can say these things. Then you called it a bore’.

     ‘I’m sorry’.

     He puts his hands over his ears. He’s shouting: ‘Don’t!’

     ‘You don’t want me to talk, George?’

     ‘I don’t want you to apologise. And I don’t want you to apologise that you did apologise’.

     I nod. This is what I want to hear. I have tears in my eyes and let them run down my face. I shall look ugly. George won’t mind me looking ugly. ‘Picasso painted a woman crying. I cry very easily, George, it doesn’t mean much’.

     He shakes his head. ‘Are you trying to apologise for your tears too?’

     ‘No, not apologise, just trying to explain. It’s the way I feel things. I . . . . . I register with tears. I . . . . . I’m not really sad, it simply comes over me. It’s the way I am’.

     ‘I understand. You don’t have to explain to me’.

     ‘I . . . . . I went to East Berlin. To see it, I suppose. Why does one go to these places? And I took my daughters. I wanted to show them where I came from. Sometimes it’s good to see things with your own eyes. I’m not sorry I went. It’s just that I keep seeing it again. The people I knew weren’t there anymore, naturally. The war was over. There wasn’t any blood. The streets were clean and calm. There weren’t many people and not many cars. The old cobblestones were still there. And I knew my way about. I . . . . . I don’t know why I’m suddenly so sad talking about it. The past is the past. It is over. The suffering is over. The people are no longer there. The children have all gone. Taken away. A few may have survived, they couldn’t all . . . . . I . . . . . I used to live near there for a time, you know. I knew so many of them. I was still there when their fathers were deported to Poland, where they’d once come from. Yes, at that time people had come from Poland — not from Asia. And they didn’t look different from any of the people around them, not much different at all . . . . . When we were walking through the Artilleriestrasse I suddenly remembered the synagogue I used to go to. I still knew the house number even. You can’t see it from the street, you have to cross a courtyard at the back before you come to it. The caretaker allowed us in, as a special favour. I wanted to show my daughters the synagogue. I don’t know why. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in religion either, you know. I would never want to take it away from anyone of course. It’s part of some people, it’s their way of life. But I think religion discourages you from relying on yourself. It gives you something to hold on to when you should learn to walk on your own . . . . . It certainly belonged to my past. This synagogue . . . . . we used to go there on all the holidays. And once a year the children went around singing, with flags in their hands, being given sweets and goodies by the grown-ups, following the men who were chosen to carry in their arms the Torah-scrolls, to celebrate Simchath Thorah. I think I must have loved this place more than I realised . . . . .’ Again I can see it before me as clearly as ever. ‘The marble walls and pillars were still there’, I continue to tell him. ‘and the rubble was still there. And the bullet marks were still there. The caretaker pointed them out to us. And I could still feel the fear and despair, because this was the collecting centre before deportation. But in the building in front, the mikwe had remained almost undamaged and was being used, once in a while, for the special cleansing ceremony before a wedding, which a few couples came to celebrate there even now, just to show that some had managed to survive and to carry on the creed, I imagine’.

     ‘And where else did you go?’

     ‘To all kinds of places which I’d known as a child. Some I could hardly recognise and some were almost unchanged. Just a bit older and a bit smaller. Like people. Outside the Jewish old-age home they had built a memorial. With seats and rose-beds. I sat there for a while with my daughters. A pigeon came flapping along and dropped down dead, right in front of the inscription for the victims who’d been murdered there. A passerby picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket’.

     I can see George shaking his head in amazement. ‘His Mitagessen’, he says. Then he adds: ‘And it’s all still haunting you, and I believe you’re almost glad it does’.

     ‘No, I’m not glad, but maybe I’m clinging to it. At times. Perhaps it’s better than just emptiness. I don’t know . . . . .’

     I like imaginary conversations between myself and someone I know well. Or someone I would like to know well. They can be as good as real ones. Perhaps better. After a time I may even forget what was imaginary and what wasn’t. This isn’t as confusing as it might sound. Rather like solving a chess problem on one’s own. Quite often I manage to see things more clearly afterwards, and can even put them out of my mind, not always for good, but that may be asking too much.

     Later in my loft, preparing to work on my painting, I suddenly see a woman’s face quite distinctly before me. I don’t know her name, but I believe I may have seen her on the platform of St. John’s Wood Underground Station one evening, sitting on a bench.

     She had a lovely oval face, with big dark eyes. And beautiful hands. Her hair was dull, hanging down in tangles, and she looked neglected and disturbed. But her face was still beautiful.

     When I saw her in the station she was quite silent, watching the people and trains go past. Now I can hear her talking from behind a closed door. She doesn’t know I’m listening to her. It’s just chance that I’m passing this door and stopped to listen. Her voice is soft except for, once in a while, when it reaches screeching pitch. Then she quickly clears her throat as though this worries her too. There are moments when I begin to wonder whether she doesn’t sense that I’m listening to her from behind the door; or whether she may be secretly hoping for someone to listen to her, even if she didn’t see a face.

     ‘I only like talking to myself’, I hear her say clearly. ‘No one understands me as I understand myself. Don’t you, dear?’ She addresses herself. ‘We don’t have to worry about a little bit of deafness either. We know when we are well-off too. No stranger to interfere. Just cosy, I with myself. And I’m never going to let myself down, or even tell myself off. Ah well, I do sometimes forget how well-off I am, I suppose. That’s when I find myself thinking that they really gave me a life sentence in solitary instead of killing me off with all the others  There are these moments, here and again. But mostly I have peace and quiet now and I have enough to eat and drink. I have my little pension, even if it doesn’t go very far, at least it’s regular. And I’ve got my health. Well, near enough. It’s all relative of course. It’s my memory which isn’t the same. It gets so blurred. And I hardly ever remember my dreams. Those beautiful dreams I used to have, I wonder where they’ve all gone to. It was nice having things happen to me in my sleep, even if they weren’t always quite so good, maybe, but then I would wake up, and that would be good too. Well, perhaps not always all that good either, I can’t really remember. Still, I always have my own company, my own company. And there are all those growing things of course, outside in the parks. I’ve got all that to watch and enjoy. Quite for free. And there’s fresh bread and cheese and an apple. I never grow tired of enjoying that. And even a bit of butter and my milk. Then the cat comes and shares it. Makes me cry that cat sometimes. It’s so soft and gentle and grateful for its drop of milk. Where are you, Pussy? Come on, I can hear you outside the door. Come on, don’t be shy. Not with me . . . . .’

     Now the woman and the cat begin to leave traces on my canvas which only I shall be able to identify. And I, too, may forget what passed through my mind when I mixed the paints which I’ve just used.