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

       If I were to die in my sleep, God forbid I be discovered with my legs apart, for that would be a very unseemly way to enter Heaven.  

       And before Beatrice Laux considered who it was might find her in such a pose, the sole remaining occupant of number 50, Rue Jacob in the eleventh Arrondissement slipped into a fitful shallow sleep.

       6 a.m. and the open window on to the narrow street made her bedroom even more airless, slowing the drift of ghost moths over her uncovered body, towards her night light. The concierge awoke, alarmed at her wilfully splayed thighs and the consequences of such vulnerability. What if one of these creatures should find her in between? What if she were host to little white things with brown heads wriggling around inside her?  Merde!

       Still keeping her knees close, she sat on the side of the bed to compose herself.   Heavy boned, heavy muscled despite the shortages, in the same mould as the cows from her native Limousin, she pulled on a pair of red knitted chaussettes and stood up.

       Even that small effort had made her sweat and her glasses began to glide down her nose.

       What it is to live in the city. Too many things, all breathing at once.  Even the stones. There’s not enough air for it all  

       Down the flight of marble steps - the only cool things in that coffin of a stairwell, to the kitchen that adjoined what in busier, more fruitful days had been her office. Now a shrine of rusty keys, yellowed ledgers and a calendar curling up over Monet’s Floods at Marly.

       She poured lemonade and a soupcon of sugar into a mug with a faded view of Karlsruhe on the side.

       Sweet and sour.  Such is life, n’est-ce pas?  The celibataire had drunk from nothing else since that Christmas, and only her lips had ever touched it. Her one souvenir, and now as she opened the front door to stand for a moment in the silent street, and free all the echoes trapped in that tall empty house, she realised she was not alone.

       Holy Mother of God!

       Something lay slumped between her bicycle and two geranium pots, as though it had been there some time. She retreated and pulled the three bolts across, her big heart pumping fear.

       Proof enough if she needed it.

       Once at Confession, she’d told Father Christophe that God always gave her a good reason to wake up.  A kind of sixth sense.  But the priest had paused to choose his words, then suggested that rather than the Almighty being vigilant, it was more likely her conscience stirring.

       After that, she’d felt his ministrations were something she could do without, and that was the last time she’d ever set foot in St. Joseph and All Angels, preferring instead to keep her thoughts to herself.

       She peered at the figure outside through the lace curtain speckled with dead flies, and saw a head emerge from the covers. A man’s head, shaved, beginning to darken, and when it turned, she saw eyes sunken like a dog’s.

       Jesus help us.

       Beatrice Laux sprang back. Her breath locked in her throat. Who was this? A tramp? But why her door when there were plenty of others as far as the Pere Lachaise? So why had he chosen number 50? Her ten letting rooms had been empty for more than a year, the tariff for electricity reduced because of her changed circumstances. Perhaps someone’s told him there’d always been rooms and it was cheap. Maybe that’s what  he wants. Maybe....  

       Her mind, sharp as a bird in winter, recalled the good days of ten times eighty francs, when she could afford the Germans’ stockings and bottles of rose water for the Dances de The at the Royale. And now, a bit extra wouldn’t come amiss. She’d be able to manage the fare to Les Bordes, see her cousin and take in some proper air at last.

       ‘Monsieur?’ She tapped on the glass. ‘Are you looking for a room by any chance?’

       At first, the man who couldn’t have been any more than thirty, simply stared.  She could see the whites above his eyes as though he’d suffered a blow to the head. Then his lips.

       Oh mercy!

       Toulouse Lautrec all over again, she thought. Once, one of the lodgers told her about the artist’s disease of the lips and how for disguise, he’d grown a huge beard. But this stranger had no beard, besides, his mouth was quite blue.

       ‘I’m cheaper than anyone else round here, if that’s your problem’.

       He began to stir, stiffly at first, and she noticed how one of his legs dragged, rigid at the knee. Brown serge coat, brown trousers and shoes worn through on the ball of each foot. No luggage.

       Now that is odd. He’s obviously been walking a long way. How can he turn down a bed? Ninety-five a week? A hundred? 

       With each second the possibilities grew.

       Beatrice Laux forgot about her night-dress which bore giveaway stains of neglect at both the front and the back. She was already sniffing the heady scents of Limousin and thinking how late August would be a good time to go.

       ‘Monsieur, may I take your name?’

       The ledger creaked open and she turned to a new page, past the faint lists of ships in the night and those who’d stayed hidden a little longer.

       ‘Joseph’. He’d followed her in and stood looking down on her unmade hair.

       ‘That’s the same as my church’, she said.

       ‘So what about all the angels, then?’

       The woman looked round unnerved. Those lips truly were terrible, like split bilberries and his tongue with a strange life of its own, kept escaping.

       ‘I don’t know what you mean. Your surname please, Monsieur’. But her fingers gripped the pencil so it could scarcely move.

       ‘Weiss. As in Leopold Weiss and Hannah Weiss’.

       Leopold Weiss? Hannah Weiss? No, no. There were so many, and I’m getting old ....

       ‘W.E.I.S.S.’  He uttered each letter with the same sonority as the Savoyarde up on the Sacre Coeur.

       ‘I’ve got that. Thank you. Right, I’ll show you to your accommodation’. She scraped back her stool and headed for the stairs. ‘I can see you’ve brought nothing with you, so you can have a towel and soap for the next ten days, and sheets will be changed from bottom to top every twenty’. She cleaned the key for room 4 on her stomach, leaving wounds of sienna resembling the Shroud of Turin.

       ‘Now how would you like to pay? I normally ask for a month in advance, plus 500 for any damage ....’

       ‘You owe me, Mademoiselle.  I’m the one that’s damaged’.

       ‘Pardon?’ A shiver passed through her, despite the cloying heat, and as she climbed, she felt the young man’s breath on her calves. Franz Sieck all over again, except he’d brought her a rose the first time. To match her mouth, he’d said. And his smile had seemed like a miracle amongst the tanks and boots of a life under siege. A miracle she’d forgotten since her girlhood at Les Bordes.

       Then his hand had brushed her leg, and because she’d stopped, feeling the sudden lurch of desire, he’d moved it higher. Warmth at last in that winter house of whispers behind its doors. Ground his knuckles against her flesh like a pestle on the harvest. Her very own Grim Reaper, firm with lust. And love. Or so she’d thought.

       ‘Here we are’.

       Room 4 overlooked the Rue St. Solve at the rear, and immediately she opened the shutters the new sunlight devoured all its dingy possessions.

       ‘I’ll just put a duster over it.  It’s been some time you see’.

       The visitor watched the red socks pad over to the dressing table which she wiped. Then in a cupboard nearby, she cranked the lavatory chain to a sluggish flush and ran a finger along the seat.

       ‘This sun does want to make everything look worse. I’m sorry, Monsieur Weiss’.

       ‘Are you? Are you really?’

       Instinct drove her to the door, but he held her fast with gaunt quarrying hands. Her breasts milkless but still full, almost to her waist.

       ‘Look at me, Mademoiselle Laux’.

       ‘How did you know my name?’  Oh sweet Mary help me!

       She saw tributaries of blood travel his eyes and an ear pressed to low relief, the colour she remembered of flesh long after death.

       ‘You are well known in our circles, Mademoiselle. To us you are worse than an Untouchable. On the 25th May 1944 you passed our names to the Werhmacht.  What did they pay you, the Bosch?’

       His bones on hers, her strength losing to him, and the sun all the while bleaching her pale. As pale as Franz had made her. As pale as their child she could never love or ever allow to live.

       ‘It’s me who’s paid, Monsieur Weiss. Believe me’.

       As she left him, the bell in the clocher of St. Joseph’s tolling out the hour, was suddenly overlaid by an eerie shofar from the Marais, prolonged and defiant in its intensity. Then Beatrice Laux quietly took herself downstairs for a second lemonade.