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

In the glass that separated the courtyard from the shop there was an
imperfection, which, though not large, not immediately noticeable, distorted the faces of those wallet fumblers and purse hunters who crossed the courtyard to stand at the counter to pay for petrol, papers, drinks and a wide selection of hot and cold snacks, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

She discovered it on her first shift, that quiet afternoon time she came
to identify with office workers, diligent digesters of vacuum-packed
sandwiches and Cornish pasties, retired beneath their strip-lit ceilings. Henry was the manager, scrubbing self-consciously at his comb-over as he limped her through her duties. ‘Every day I want inside and out cleaned. Only takes a minute so no excuse.’ Outside at the start of the shift, inside when the city sun had set behind the high-rise blocks and the reinforced doors of the service station were secured, night-time safely locked away beyond.

She didn’t stop when he returned to see how she was doing, and because she didn’t he paused, reverted to the briskness she could see more suited his personality, which in turn set her more at ease because neither of them had to pretend any more. ‘A minute,’ he said sniffily, ‘then straight back inside.’ Taking his own advice he went to sit at the till, a pretender to detached observation of her work — not her face, not her breasts moving beneath her nameplate, a plastic coracle called Janie, rising and falling upon the sea of her regulation turquoise bib. Beneath the imperfection in the glass his face buckled. She swabbed at his eyes.

                                               *

Washing-up liquid onto a damp cloth first for the exterior, then dried
with another; a careful squeeze of polish onto a third piece of finer material. Ten full minutes of firm swabbing then she sits back on her haunches. The aquarium after its weekly purge is a glittering ark she doesn’t want to touch for fear of leaving oily fingerprints behind. Carefully, as though its edges are the electrified perimeter of a military compound, she re-stores to the aquarium its carpet of moss and woodchip, its gnarled wooden furniture. In the corner of the room, a hibernating animal beneath the first prodding finger of Spring, the cardboard box twitches.

                                                  *

‘Pump three,’ they said. ‘Pump five. One. Three. Four. Two. Four. Five,’ they said.

And in return: ‘Twenty pounds three pence. Ten pounds. Thirty- three thirty-nine.’

They went over slightly and she couldn’t help but enjoy the look on
their faces. A matter of pence and most were wry, humorous and
embarrassed, or they could give a shit, but even the ones who thought she was laughing could do nothing. If they got angry, what could they do? Behind two inches of reinforced glass she stood and looked at them. They swore, they called her a bitch and her intelligence and parentage into question. She just looked. At other times she jerked her head up to the ceiling of the courtyard just outside the booth. The cameras usually calmed them down.

Henry preferred to deal with customers. ‘Customers prefer a superior, Jane,’ he told her. He always called her Jane. ‘Saves trouble right from the off if they’re dealing with a superior.’ He acted like a servant with them. He meant superior to her.

‘Fifty pounds, please.’

‘What?’ And they always talked as though there weren’t a microphone rigged up, staring through the glass and raising their voices as though they were deaf or she was, but their voices were tinnily clear and she knew hers would be too. Some got offended, all concerned no one talks face to face any more, everything was filtered and they couldn’t understand why, like they were patients in quarantine who didn’t yet feel ill.

                                                 *

Caracol surpassed the others, a swan amongst ducks, his shell of burnished gold with flecks of aquamarine and shavings of the skyest blue.

‘We’ve got a snail problem,’ said Kim once during the time they spent with the Turners. A malicious smile for her older sister. Forever afterwards when they argued this was the threat.

‘Then this is what you need,’ said the old man, creaking down to the
level of his leeks and onions. ‘Finish them off soon as you like.’ He shook a sprinkling of powder blue pellets a from a tin into his gnarled hand and onto the turned earth of the allotment as though feeding a great soft creature through its gills. She never discovered if Kim really had pocketed some as she swore she had.

‘And do they work, Mr. Turner?’ All the poison of the slug pellets times twenty in Kim’s voice.

‘Wouldn’t buy them else, girl.’

‘They’re big ones though, Mr. Turner, would they be strong enough?’

‘Kill a dog,’ Mr. Turner said. He straightened, joints cricking, looking abashed. ‘But the police agreed, like they said. An accident.’

                                                 *

Because of the imperfection she never stopped cleaning. It was important for her to see clearly, she just had to make sure she kept her head still when she spoke to customers.

‘Pump three.’

She took the note round with her ninety degrees to the till, blinking
long so when she turned back she could look at the customer straight on. But it was no good: the woman’s face pulsed, her forehead expanded and her eyes popped according to the imperfection. Janie shovelled the change into the trough under the glass, feeling that weak nausea like looking at someone with cuts.

Henry stepped up to the counter and turned on the courtyard mike,
directing his prissy tones at a drunk stumbling in off the street. ‘Put that cigarette out please, sir. Lot more hazardous to your health in a petrol station.’

                                                   *

Depending on shifts, the toilets had to be cleaned twice a day: mirror, bowl, seat, urinal, swab the floor. Non-paying customers paid no mind to the laminated sign on the door warning them away, because of course buying goods makes everyone piss more accurately. Henry showed her where the cleaning products were and stood behind her as she set to work. She saw him in the mirror smoothing his thinning hair down over his forehead. After a while, able to think of nothing more seductive than a mild criticism, he left.

                                                    *

She peers into the aquarium. How do the snails see her? A monstrous being with rattling nails from whom a suprasonic noise emanates, pressing itself close to the edge of their world, delivering food and departing. Their sun, a hissing filament, still shines above them; they still glide stickily over their organic mess of an earth, which never moves except when she gets home or Mum bursts in, panicked, to check her eldest is still in her room, she hasn’t died, run away, been kidnapped, abducted by whoever for whatever purpose. Janie must be their God.

                                                    *

Because she’s younger and prettier and it’s her prerogative, Kim is the wild one. She has a boyfriend, one of the baggy-clothed youths from the tower block opposite who is, like all of them, bored to violence. His name is Chat. As in Creole for cat, he says. Janie deliberately mispronounces it whenever she’s unfortunate enough to meet him. As in another word for meaningless conversation. As in past participle of shit.

It must have been Kim’s decision to stop. She watches Chat filling up his tint-windowed car and she’s counting the swaggering steps it takes him to reach the window when she sees her sister’s head pop out of the passenger window.

‘Discount, girl! You give us a discount.’ The music, bass-heavy, is spilling like water from the car, as though it had been drowned or sunk, one of those burned-out leaking shells hauled sporadically from the river.

‘No discount.’

Chat dips and swings away from the window, playing up to one of his friends who isn’t there, though he isn’t smiling. ‘Damn, girl — that’s your sister in my car.’

‘Twenty-two pounds thirty-nine.’

‘Motherfucker.’

‘Twenty-two thirty-nine.’

His eyes through the glass pulse and grow, moving all over his face.

‘Give me one of them chocolate bars,’ he says.

A single coin slides into the cash trough behind her as she turns for
the confectionery aisle, the word bitch clattering in with it.

                                                  *

Once a month she picks up the snails to clean their shells. There are five of them; Caracol, the biggest and most beautiful, she keeps till last every time. She reaches in and gently lifts him out, applies unguents to his gold aquamarine sky-blue shell and polishes it until it shines.

Caracol is an Amazonian giant whose people pluck snails from rivers
and from beneath the shelter of vast spreading leaves and salt them and wrap them in the same leaves and bake them in coals and chew them like food.

Antennae testing the air he emerges from his shell. She calls his name
and he turns languidly in the direction of her tapping fingers.

                                                   *

The Turners were friends of her grandmother and remained close to the family after the old woman died. When her mother’s boyfriend left it was to the elderly couple that Janie placed the second call of the night, then spent the minutes it took them to cross from their block gathering up and washing down the plughole the dull pills Mum had spilled around her.

Within minutes of the ambulance crew’s arrival they too were hammering on the door and asking ‘What happened? What happened?’

She and Kim spent a fortnight with them while Mum was in hospital. In the bathroom of the Turners’ too-small flat was a collection of seashells, white winding crystalline newels racked above the bathtub, glittering exoskeletons dulled by the steam from the shower.

At the end of the two weeks Mum came back and they moved home. She was somehow different, a mechanism sent for repair and returned, not fixed, just broken in a different way.

                                                     *

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact Janie’s older, because she’s had to take responsibility for the family upon herself, a shake-up in the old order. Perhaps that has nothing to do with it. She’s at a loss.

‘You give us a discount, Janie!’

She ignores her sister, shakes her head at Chat. ‘Twenty-two thirty-nine.’

His head throbs in the glass as he eats his chocolate bar, screws up the wrapper, lets it drop, glittering in the harsh glare of the courtyard.

                                                     *

‘Lend me some.’

‘Lend yourself.’ She had just fed Caracol and the others and had work in twenty minutes. Kim stood in the doorway wielding the wheedling tone that usually netted her cash from some inexperienced fool. ‘Let Chat — ‘

‘Chat. His name’s Chat.’ Sha, she says. Sha.

‘Let him lend you.’ The snails hauled their soggy rippling bulks towards the food.

‘Just ten, Janie.’

‘No.’

‘Christ, man, just ten! I’ll pay you back!’

‘Why don’t you work for it?’ She turned around and the light of the
aquarium washed over her sister’s face. ‘Why don’t you?’

The slam of the door rocked the room. Those less brave furled in
their antennae and shrank. Her vast and proud glutton continued to feast.

                                               *

‘My change?’ Chat rattles a ringed hand against the glass. He’s getting angry, she can feel him building himself up for a confrontation.

Janie isn’t worried. She nods up at the cameras. ‘You haven’t paid for the petrol.’

He pauses, looks at her. ‘How much you say?’

‘Twenty-two thirty-nine. Still.’

He pulls out a roll of notes. Drug money, she thinks immediately, wondering what test you use to discover what malign substances have impregnated the paper. ‘Then I’ll give you this.’ A leering smile as he skins a five from the roll. ‘And take everything in change.’

‘This isn’t. I told you.’

‘You understand me? Because look.’ He jerks his chin in the direction of the car, where Kim is mouthing the words to the song haemorrhaging from the stereo, haemorrhaging the words to the song. She tried to make amends before leaving the flat this evening but her sister was still spitting vitriol as the front door closed and she didn’t get a chance. ‘You hear what I’m saying?’ He comes closer, ugly and glitched behind the glass, some peculiar interference in the message he’s trying to relay to her. ‘She may never get out of that car.’ She hears what he’s saying, replays his voice saying everything so she won’t have to hear him saying it again. And Kim in the car, haemorrhaging music.

And after all it’s the same movement for a twenty-pence piece. She
turns and watches herself doing it, not simply her tiny monochrome image in the security screen at the back of the shop but this her doing it, turning the key, pressing the button. The till drawer pops open. She tries to pretend it’s change she’s handing out, because it feels no different, stuffing the bundle of notes through the trough. They’re oiled, they slide through so easily.

Chat smiles, an underwater ripple. ‘Good.’ His voice through the glass is like it’s been cut from some cheap metal, hammered flat. ‘And of course.’ He nods up.

She understands and nods back but he’s already gone, sauntering back to the car. Kim sings out: ‘Discount!’ once more and she hears them pull out of the courtyard and power away. The till drawer opens again and closes again on a single five pound note.

                                                    *

On her way home at the end of the shift she cracks the videotape in
half with her foot and slings it over the wall next to the riverbank. A pale light is beginning to spread across the sky, the tower blocks rising starkly like so many broken teeth from the mouth of the city. She kids herself she can see the window of their flat as she walks. Mum’s asleep in front of a flickering box of white noise and teeming, swarming bugs. She turns it off, instinctively checking the carpet and her mother’s limp hand for the bottle with the childproof cap, tucking a blanket over the snoring figure. The television screen as it dies is streaked with dust and Kim’s not yet home.

The dull thermostatic buzz of the dozing aquarium soothes her. As
she enters her room the familiar wash of light makes her feel once again like she’s bathing in it. dipped her face into warm water.

‘Caracol.’ And she’s on her knees tapping the side of the aquarium
because she really needs to see him, oblivious, unperturbed, untouchable. ‘Caracol,’ she says again. There’s no movement. Through the shining glass the scattering of pellets looks like nothing so harmless as powder blue mould.