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

     Excuse me. I am having trouble with this word. Its spelling, even its meaning and derivation, elude me. Do not think I haven’t made enquiries, I have been most assiduous. Only yesterday, for example, I asked my friend Herbert, who had never heard of it; I asked the porter, Fred, who looked incredulously at me and Mrs Smith, who cleans the corridor, and tittered; I even asked Ruth. None of this was any help, which was a pity, because it is a word that I am beginning to find increasingly necessary.

     Let me explain. You will notice what is wrong in a minute. Especially if I talk to you long enough. I saw Mrs Smith wielding a broom outside my room. She giggled and said, “You don’t half come out with things.” Downstairs in the main entrance I encountered Fred, puffed up in his uniform, who said, “Come off it.” But I thought he looked uncomfortable when I asked him. Later, in the afternoon, Herbert was quite simply short with me. “Are you being serious?” he asked, “I haven’t got time for these frivolities.” Frivolities indeed, he didn’t fool me one little bit. By this time I was beginning to have my suspicions. When I asked Ruth that evening she began talking about something else. But that was before I told her about the eggs. Afterwards, of course, it was impossible to get back to the subject.

     Anyway, to get the chronology straight, after consulting Mrs Smith and Fred, I went out into the day and noticed, for the first time, that something was wrong with it. Cars were rushing past, the shops were open. A man with cycle clips wearing a red beret trundled past. His chain needed oiling. And then I noticed an open Volkswagen witha Swedish number plate. A man was driving. A girl sat next to him shaking her hair in the breeze. He had a long horse-like face with a Russian moustache. Like the man in the shop, where I later went to buy the shoes. I said to him, “Funny sort of day, isn’t it?” He merely looked glum and said, “Try these, they’re a wider fitting,” and went off. An odd reaction, I thought; he must have noticed something and is keeping it to himself. I paid for the shoes and said no more.

     In the street I could not identify what was wrong. I walked along the pavement, thinking about my avocado plant and disorientated by so many strange faces, by the cars grinding their gears at the traffic lights, the double decker buses that looked top heavy. The office blocks reared up into the sky at unnatural angles, craning over the street. There were nacreous fumes in the air, my chest was clogged. Bl…gh, I said to myself and immediately felt better. It was the second time that day I had used the word - the first had been on getting up in the morning and stubbing my toe on an unexpected shoe. Later, my interview with Herbert proved unproductive, he was too busy to be entertaining, too involved manipulating his stocks and shares to listen to my complaints. I had always sensed that Herbert had his limitations.

     Later still, I saw Ruth and told her that I had broken the eggs she asked me to buy. She became angry and rounded on me. “I can’t rely on you for anything,” she raged. Her attack was so unjustified that, coming as the climax to an uneasy day, I got angry too. We shouted at each other. After all, why should anyone rely on anyone else for anything at all? It was the first time in our brief relationship that Ruth had showed her fangs. So, having reached a stalemate in our emotional responses, I thought, Why not a gambit? Why not, indeed? I decided to walk out. I said “Don’t think I’m coming back, because I’m not.” In the corridor, amazed at myself, I said the word to myself again, for the third time that day. I hissed it nastily and again it proved itself to be totally inadequate for the occasion.

     This morning I took down my dictionary. I opened it at BLA - that much at least I was certain of. On the page I discovered only:

BLAB, v.i. & t. (-bb-). Be indiscreet
in talk, let things out; let out
(secret). (     )

Nothing in fact for BL double A. But those last empty brackets were ominous, I felt. Undeterred, I tried a different spelling, with one A only, and found:

BLAE’BERRY (bla-), n. (north.).
Bilberry. (BLUE)
BLAIN, n. Inflamed sore. (E)

But tucked in between these two was:

BLAGUE (-agh), n. Humbug,
claptrap. (F wd)

     Even this, so near in sound to what I required, was yet too distant from what I meant. I required an interpretation with a note more menace, redolent of a more ambiguous dissatisfaction, a more intense ennui. Humbug yes, claptrap even, but these were only minor shades of meaning implicit in my use of the word. Or so I believed. Well, mine was only the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. I had no doubt that the Complete version would be more helpful. Only slightly disappointed, I cleaned the kitchen. thinking about etymology, sound changes. Grimm’s Law. I- mutation, and so on. I washed the draining board. A good cook always cleans his surfaces. I read that somewhere. The avocado plant was looking very sick, its leaves drooped so despairingly. Deprived of light, as I thought. All I could do to help was offer it some water and watch its inevitable decline.

     Overnight, they had altered the street. I noticed that the grocery shop opposite had been repainted. Two men were taking down their ladder. Bright green woodwork with words like “Provisions for all the Family” and “We aim to please You” picked out on it in white gloss. And a new window display of cauliflowers, cabbages, mushrooms and tins of things, artistically arranged, just to confuse the issue. Well, I thought. I am not that easily unnerved, they will have to do better than this. I have inner resources of my own. Like five ordinary shares in the Manchester Ship Canal Company that bring in 85 pence a year, or my great uncle’s chain of steam rollers. I thought I saw an open Volkswagen far off down the street with a man and a woman riding in it. There was no sign of a cyclist in a red beret, even though I kept myself alert for his reappearance. A blue exhaust haze rose up from street level to a height of approximately seven feet. I began to dislike all the faces that I saw hurrying past me. The buildings were even taller than yesterday, even more tilted and menacing.

     Of course, I had hoped to fool Ruth by my sudden exit. She had seemed impressed by my anger, finding that I could shout louder and longer than she could. But it was not a fair way to test a relationship. When I slammed the door behind me, was she impressed by that? I thought, I’ll wait downstairs and see what happens, but already I was beginning to regret my impetuosity.

     Going down the street, wearing my new shoes. Although I peered hard I could not see that salesman anywhere inside the shoe shop. Hiding, I believed, that’s what. I walked past the supermarket, the chemist’s, the pet store, three newsagents’ (or was it four?), a bakery, a jewellery store, two more shoe shops, a bank, a cafe and a bookstore. I began to feel slightly dizzy. I had a sensation of walking, but of making no progress. The profusion of goods in windows and people and buildings was almost too much for me. Quantity, whatever the quality, becomes meaningless after a time. Ahead was half a mile of exactly similar office blocks reaching into the sky, the sun glinting weakly on their concrete tops. Down below, the street grew darker the further it stretched, deprived of light. I walked, thinking of my friend Eric, who sat at a large desk in one of those blocks, surrounded by orderly piles of A4 paper, covered with neatly typed words. Shall I buy a cat and grow my hair long? I wondered. Eric would no doubt disapprove, it would offend his sense of order and custom.

     Should I even buy a new avocado plant, or would that be considered callous before the old one was well and truly dead? Perhaps Ruth would be happy with this outcome, perhaps not. I stopped at a funeral parlour window and tried out the word on my reflection. Bl…gh, I said to myself several times. Nobody noticed what I was doing. The array of headstones in the shop made me think of my friend Henry, dead these two years, run over by a bus at Gatwick airport after his Spanish holiday. I should have gone with him. Or was it Heathrow?

     I don’t know how long I waited on the cold steps. It was certainly longer than I expected. Eventually Ruth came down, looking pleased and not surprised, to see me there. “there you are,” she said. “Yes,” I answered, deciding to be honest, “I was waiting for you to come down.” Her expression cahnaged immediately. “Oh you were, were you?” she said. “You bastard,” she said tearfully, “I loathe you, go away” and fled back up the stairs. Perhaps I had gone too far; perhaps honesty, in some circumstances, is not a wise policy.

     At lunch the man at the table next to mine squinted all through his steak and kidney pie at a newspaper folded into four. He burped after his tea. I smiled at the waitress but all she would say was, “Do you want any sweet?” I detected something malevolent about her. her eyes would not meet mine directly. I toyed with my food, thinking about Helen last seen one evening in a pub off Fleet Street several years ago. She said it would not work and left me there alone. Is she married now, I wondered, has she a refrigerator, a colour television and an automatic washer? For a moment I was genuinely concerned about her. I finished my ham and peas. He was still glaring at his folded square of newsprint. I went to the cashier’s desk. “Lovely day,” I said, insincerely. The cashier glared at me, she was probably a friend of the shoe salesman. Maybe they were all in it together, she and him and the waitress. She pressed a button savagely and my change rattled into a metal cup. I took it in my hand. Bl…gh, I said silently.

     There was no Volkswagen in the street, no cyclist in a beret. At least for the moment. I looked down the street and watched half a mile of traffic lights changing at once. Now they were red. I waited. When they all turned green I noticed how the dimensions of the street altered, how suddenly the whole world appeared quite different. I was aware of a gathering constriction in the atmosphere around me as I walked, thinking about my friend Paul, up there ahead in another of those buildings. He would be picking up the telephone, giving orders, and looking pleased when he had finished and the receiver was replaced. Was he thinking about his wife Mary cutting herself a sandwich for lunch? I wondered if I should go and see her. She was a lovely girl, very unappreciated, who collected stamps and liked horses. Perhaps she would understand.

     In the park people lay like dead fish on the grass with hats or newspapers over their faces. Hiding from something, obviously. Old men smoked on benches, women in scarves pushed prams along the asphalt paths, children played on the swings. By a rhododendron bush I hesitated and looked at the office towers poking their snouts above the trees behind me. Is this how it will all end? I found myself wondering. The constriction was getting worse every minute. Bl…gh, I said aloud, Bl…gh. But for once there was no apparent effect. I sat down on a bench to consider all this and tried to breathe.

     Time must have passed I opened my eyes and saw that the grass was empty, the sky was darkening. I could hear the distant roar of traffic going home. Should I too go home, prepare myself a little something and telephone a friend? Or should I see Ruth, who would by now be sitting in her armchair with her evening crossword puzzle, sizing up her budgerigar in its cage on her yellow wall? Perhaps she saw through my staged departure and did not care. Bl…gh, I tried again. If only I could spell that word I felt that so many other things would be revealed to me.

     Am I boring you with all this? Would you prefer another topic or shall I tempt you witth what happened to my friend Richard in Teignmouth last summer? That would not interest you? There is, of course, the question of my avocado plant. By now it was probably dead or at least experiencing its death agonies. There was something definitely amiss with a world in which such things could happen. But watching the faces that I passed I could see that they did not notice that there was anything wrong. What an unenviable position to be in, I thought, cast up here among these buidings like an old kipper on a beach, unwanted and overcured. But they had not beaten me yet, I told myself. I still had cards to play.

     Cautiously rounding a corner, I could see no cyclist anywhere. Bl…gh. Perhaps I should ask Ruth again, maybe she had not heard my question before, being too intent on the broken eggs. She would be up there, trapped in her room alone with her goldfish and her knitting, the four prints of old maps unobtrusively framed on the wall above her sideboard, the green rush mat behind her kitchen door. The newspaper man held out a paper to me. “How have you been today?” I tried him out as he took my money. He glanced at me with some suspicion and grunted, handing me my change. “It’s not been a pretty kind of day, has it?” I asked. “Mustn’t grumble,” he muttered and stood back, casting his eyes up and down the street as if for help. Not him too, I thought to myself, no one is safe. He thrust a paper at a passing man. “Late edition,” he called out. But I did not care to stay, I moved on saying Bl…gh to myself. After all, what did I care for any of this?

     Going up in the lift. I read that the police were hunting a killer of four. Bus fares were going up again, and one lone voice was bewailing the site of a new office block. Well, I thought, he’s spoken out of turn, they will stifle him soon enough. A Vicar had been seized by the customs authorities for possessing contraband. It was lonely in the lift but I felt safe there. No cyclists, no Volkswagens, no suspicious eyes. Paul would be back with Mary now, I thought, talking about his day. She will have just come in from the garden, carrying flowers to place in pots around their living room. They are just about to switch on the television. Eric will have shut his files and picked up his hat. It was too late now for me to buy a new avocado plant. Because it was too late to do anything I became filled with regret for so many things. I imagined gazing at Ruth’s print above her fireplace: ‘The Abbey under the Oaks’ by Caspar David Friedrich, now in the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. In the past,that had always given me a touch of comfort. Had Ruth forgiven me, could we start again? Bl…gh, Bl…gh.

     Just before I pressed her bell, I wondered about tomorrow. Would it be the same as today or should I make a quick killing with my Canal shares and blow the money on something really spectacular? Like an automatic compass, a month in the country? I heard Ruth’s feet approaching heavily, unaware that it was me beyond the door, ready for another little game. I shall ask her to spell Bl…gh for me, I decided, to settle the matter once and for all.

     As she reached the door, I was aware of thoughts flitting to and from in my mind..... the enemy, bright green gloss, a kipper on the shore, a red beret, clean surfaces, streets like seas, days merging together in a tight little knot of incomprehension. The handle began to turn; and I watched, fascinated, slipping imperceptibly into a cavernous hole, without an end in sight.