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

     They tell me Katie has been ill.  I am worried about my five-year-old.  I go to the old farmhouse where she was born;  Sal and I lived there together once, we moved in after the honeymoon.  Since the split-up Sal and Katie live there alone.

     It is like returning to a first school and looking through the railings at the cracked playground.  One hears the shrill voices, piercing but empty.

     I ramble along the river-bank, knee-high in weed, and through the boatyard.  The old mill has been converted to studio flats with fresh weatherboard and baskets of flowers.

     Pondering on Sal’s rejection I come back late with a handful of bluebells.  Crossing the footbridge, I am enveloped by a buzz of insects and shamble across the last field, holding the bluebells aloft.  The flowers are still whole when I reach the yard.

     The yard is wide but rough and patched with moss.  The farmhouse has four good rooms, alongside and above the kitchen, which forms the centrepoint.  Disuse has hollowed the other rooms, they are empty and damp.

     The farmhouse reflects Sal.  She is touched with neglect too, although an inner core refuses to give up.

     I pretend my brief visit shows my continuing need for her.  In reality I am concerned for Katie who loves the farmhouse but pines with a sense of loss.

     The kitchen door is open as I cross the yard and I smell the toast.  Sal always had a penchant for farmhouse teas, mounds of fresh-cut sandwiches with toasted muffins.  The kitchen is T-shaped with a stone floor and a pine table under the lattice window.

     ‘Hello!  Where are you?’  I call my ex-wife, not using her name;  she has lost another man since I left and we two are well and truly strangers.  ‘Are you there?’  I lay the bluebells on the kitchen table.  Little but the cruet there, only the faint smell of toast in the air.  The curtains are drawn against the afternoon sun. Sal dislikes strong light, it gives her a head.  As I step back from the lattice, something strikes me in the depth of the silence.  No slopping of Sal’s mules on
the stone, no cooing or gurgling from Katie.  Such quiet signals an exodus.

     ‘Hello’, I call again, but there is no answer.  In the garden fetching cress or parsley for the sandwiches, I think.  But there are no sandwiches and I can see the empty garden from the window.  It is a wilderness too since Ben, Sal’s second partner, died;  only a few raspberry bushes and herbs.

     Still the silence.  I test its quality by standing quite still. Have they gone out at this hour with the light failing and the storm coming up?  When I look in the lean-to their bikes are both there.

     Why has Katie done this?  She never runs off.  I go back and search through the rooms still in use.  Nothing unusual.  The old double bedroom Sal has given me is empty except for my bag and the mattress laid out on the floor.  ‘Sal!’  I call sharply.  ‘Sal, where are you?’  I look in her room, wondering if she and Katie are resting.  But I know they won’t be there.

     They are not in the house.  Katie’s room is empty too.  I am perturbed, hoping this will prove to be some joke.  But Sal is not disposed for joking.

     I cross the landing past the chest where I once kept a few books and past the pressed flowers that Sal framed and hung on the wall.  The chest with its split lid adds a sombre note;  I imagine Katie shut up tight in there and even step forward to open it, then gesture in irritation and hurry down the stairs.

     From the passage I emerge into the kitchen.  Abandonment has swelled it to a great hall.  But surely it must tell me where Sal and Katie have gone.  On the telephone pad a note about a library book, in the window seat a piece of knitting.  Outside single spots of rain descend like missiles, then comes a flood with the force of summer hail.  Where can they be?  I remember the tumbling garden house where I was once trapped in a cloudburst.  Are they there?

     As I pass under the lintel and turn on to the garden path, the rain relents.  I stand quite still, staring about me.  Sal and Katie would not stay in the rainswept garden.  I see nothing of Sal’s silver-blonde hair or Katie’s pink frock.  Behind a row of beanpoles stands the garden house, which has lost one post.   Are they in there?

     I pull the hanging thorns aside, and stare into the dimness. Nothing.  Then I hear a whimper.  Sal crouches on the floorboards with hidden face, rolled like a hedgehog.

     ‘Sal’, I say softly so as not to scare her.  ‘What has happened?  I have been looking everywhere’.  She turns her face to me;  her cheek is scratched and bloody and the knees she clasps are spattered with mud. ‘Where is Katie?’

     For moments I am filled with questioning.  I cannot grasp the change in her.  One foot is caked with slime and her skirt is torn.  She has never let herself go so far.  Sal is in a state - and Katie?

     ‘For God’s sake, Sal’, I say, and hearing my own voice I find the strength to try and lift her up.  But she is unresponsive, staring with strange eyes, alive but not seeming to breathe.

     ‘Sal, you must tell me.  Where is Katie?  What has happened?’

     I am sure now some intruder was here.  Has he run off with Katie?  Is she even now bleeding?

     ‘Sal, in heaven’s name help me.  Say something!  Where is Katie?’

     No sound from her lips.  She cannot speak.  She wrestles with some terrible image.
      

     Thoughts will not crystallise.  They are set in stone.  Sal does not seem badly injured but what of Katie?  I must find her - her and the one who did this.  They are not in the garden.  They - if he has not yet run away - must be in the house.

     As I sprint back down the path I think, who did this?  What kind of man attacks a defenceless woman?  Who takes a child?

     In the kitchen I call the police.  My fingers shake and I can barely handle the telephone.  They are coming in a few minutes, they say, with a medic.  I must hold on.  Emptiness follows that call.  Exhaustion.  I am shocked at hearing a human voice again.  I stand with my chin on my breast and my fingertips touch the plaster wall.  Then a speartip of anger, sharp and piercing, thrusts up inside me, followed by the hot blubber of rage.

     It didn’t happen in the garden.  Sal and Katie would have been in the kitchen.  My thoughts are sharp again, controlled.  Sal must have run outside to fetch help because someone came in and snatched the child.  I grasp a carver from the stand and make for the passage.  I must look more carefully through the house.  I must be certain.  Upstairs the unused rooms are still unsearched.

     A chill has come to me.  I am no longer panicky or frantic.  In the passageway, always so dim, I thrust the knife through the curtain covering a broom cupboard.  But what if Katie were there?  I sweep the curtain aside.  Nothing.  At least the gesture gives me courage.

     Haste kills my fear.  I take the stairs in my stride and race across the landing.  Into a disused room opposite Sal’s, my feet crunching over rubbish.  The draught whistles through a broken pane.  That is all.  Another room and another.  Haste kills fear.  Noise kills it too.  I yell to him to come out.  Then up the narrow back stairs to the attic.  It is hot and dark up there.  Empty.  And there is no one.

     I shout to give myself courage.

     ‘Come out, you devil!  Katie!  Kate!’

     I wield the knife with a force that would sever a hand.  Not the faintest echo comes.  They - he - has taken Katie away.

     Returning across the landing with my useless knife I see on the wall a photograph of men harvesting on the farm, and despite my fears I recall the Easter when Sal’s mother called to tell me Sal’s new man was no more.  A chopping machine had taken his hand off and he had died under anaesthetic.  For nights I dreamed of the blood.  The machines all have guards but Ben took them off to save time, always being in a hurry.

     As I stand there, half-listening for the police car, I see a book lying beside the chest and a fearful picture rushes through my mind. I drop the knife with a clatter and hurry downstairs.  The book is too familiar - an old illustrated Shakespeare from which I recall a print of the dead Ophelia lying in a stream.  The face is not at all like Katie’s yet something strikes a chord.  Is it the garlands round Ophelia’s brow that Katie also loves to weave?  I see the willows and the mud and think of the slime on Sal’s foot.  Katie is not in the house nor in the garden.  But there are places beyond.

     I hurry back along the path.  At the garden house Sal has pulled herself to her feet.  She stands blinking among the roses, frightened to move, like an animal with a shattered leg.  I must go gently with her.  I want to dig my fingers into her flesh and make her tell me where Katie is but I know any threat will only deepen her trauma.  She is in full shock and cocooned in forgetfulness.

     ‘Sal’, I ask gently, ‘who was in the house?  Tell me what happened’. I direct all my will to her mind, trying to force a reaction.  ‘I can’t find Katie.  Where is Katie?’

     She gives me the sweetest smile.  It is like the day of our wedding.

     ‘I have looked all over the house’, I say, ‘and in the garden.  Katie has gone.  I can’t find her.  You must speak.  You must help me’.

     My impatience is too pressing.  Her smile fades;  she looks at me harshly.

     ‘A father is still a husband’, she says.  ‘You think too much of the child.  She cannot replace a wife’.

     ‘You must listen, Sal’.  I feel my strength petering out.

     ‘There are three of us now.  You must not switch your love from me to her.  You must extend it to both of us’.

     ‘No, Sal’.

     ‘Remember our marriage vows.  The child must be punished for taking your love away from me’.

     I am drained.  Wearily I rest against a post, wishing to coil up as Sal did in the dimness of the garden house.  My hand shakes as I take out a handkerchief to wipe my eyes and I see Sal stretch a hand out in reconciliation, but have turned already on to the path, stumbling through weed and bramble, on, on to the brook, and there, with an angel’s peace on her china face, Katie lying on her back in the water.

     The police are sounding their siren, running round the side of the house.  I croak out a reply they cannot hear.  But they have found Sal and are hurrying along to me.  I turn away as they haul Katie from the water.

     ‘The book’, I say.

     They work on Katie as the medic comes along and they do not hear me. ‘The book’.  Katie is on the bank with the medic bending over her.  I know he cannot save her.

     ‘She killed her own child’, one of the men says.  ‘But why?’

     Not until the ambulance has gone and we talk in the kitchen do they begin to understand.  I tell them of Katie’s birth and Sal’s sense of being no longer loved.  I tell them of the fights and of Ben who seemed like a true love and who lived with Sal in my place until he was taken away from her.

     I tell them how I worried about Katie and returned to the place of a broken happiness.