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

     Mother had instructed my sister and me to visit our neighbours because ‘you shouldn’t just think of yourselves’. So we were sitting in the musty sunless house next door, peeling some tangerines Mr Ratctiffe had given us.

     His wife was an old lady with blue hair and she had a strange son who she called Charles the 2nd. I’d heard my parents talking about lack of oxygen to his brain at birth, which I decided must account for his naive, outlandish manner and why he always stuttered. It was hard not to laugh when Charles asked us ‘D,d,d, do you like s,s,s,singing?’ We ended up singing Gary Glitter songs behind the sofa, because we were my about doing it in front of them. And then Laura went and wet her pants from laughing too much, so we didn’t want to come out in case they guessed.

     Charles the 1st and Charles the 2nd was confusing, because in school the older you got, the higher your classroom number was. So we settled for calling the father and son Old Charles and Young Charles.

     That Christmas I made a card for my neighbours. It was a picture of Santa Claus with a Cotton wool nose liberally coated in red glitter. Old Charles wrote back, quite formally, declaring it was the nicest card he’d ever received and that it reminded him of a one-eyed teacher he’d known at school. This was because the teacher also had a red nose like someone famous called George Bernard Shaw, and in both cases it was because they enjoyed drinking.

     My mother said it would improve my brain and character if I looked up George Bernard Shaw in an encyclopedia, but instead my father sent me round with a bottle of whisky, accompanied by my brothers. Young Charles made a great show of being very grown up. He kept insisting he liked his whisky shaken, not stirred and began stuttering when my older brother said that you only did that with martini, because he’d seen it in a James Bond film.

     Mrs Ratcliffe showed us a picture of ‘A Merry Monarch’ in their dining room. ‘Don’t you think it looks a bit like Charles the 2nd?’ she asked. I thought it was horrible, but told her it was probably what they called a masterpiece. Yes,’ she said, ‘but of course it’s not the real one, you know,’ which didn’t seeme to make sense, because there were hundreds of these pictures in a shop in town.

     For some reason or another, we never went next door again, although we would always say hello if we saw Young Charles pottering about his car in the street. His father used to smile at us as he absorbed himself in the greenhouse where he grew yellow tomatoes. Mrs Ratcliffe waved and called out cheerily whenever she went to pick her washing up off the grass, where it was left to imbibe ‘wholesome outdoor smells’.

     Sometimes Laura and I would let our guinea pigs loose outside so that they escaped into the Ratcliffe’s garden. Charles would have to chase them with his spade, so he could shovel them up and hand the squalling creatures back over the fence into our mischevious hands. At night we laughed into our pillows as we pressed an old stethoscope against the bedroom wall to listen to Charles groaning in his sleep or swearing shakily at the dog.

     After a few years, Mrs Ratcliffe began to go senile and took the dog out at strange hours. I was coming back from a party one night when I saw a bent, old woman stumbling awkwardly over the frosted patches on the pavement. As I drew closer, she suddenly fell and I recognized my neighbour. Then she clumsily pulled herself up against a garden wall. Rushing to help her, she didn’t seem to know who I was until I spoke her name.

     ‘Please call me Marilyn,’ she said between little cries for breath. ‘You’ll find people have names, as you get older.’ I was disappointed by the inadequate name - ‘Marilyn’ became obscenely glamorous as I watched her stamping her feet before going through the front door.

     Then a couple of years ago, we heard that Old Charles had suffered a stroke and Marilyn had been admitted to a rest home because she couldn’t cope. Young Charles took the dog for walks round the block and tended the greenhouse every day until his father was sufficiently recovered to do so. Marilyn came home, but now there were always shouts and sounds of crying through the walls, because she had gone slightly insane.

     One day the paper boy delivered their paper to our house, so I took it round and felt quite frightened when Young Charles threw open the door before I had time to knock. He stood in front of me, staring wildly, without saying a word.

     ‘Your paper got sent to the wrong house,’ I explained nervously and he took it, then slammed the door. The noise was getting worse and my mother felt that she ought to go round before ‘something terrible happened’. I remembered the stethoscope against the wall, but suddenly it was no longer funny. A fife that held so much sadness intruded upon my world and I did not want to share or listen to it.

     Things grew quieter for a while and then as the festive season drew nearer, people started putting Christmas trees up in their living rooms. There was a holly wreath on the Ratcliffe’s front door, but the only sign of life behind their windows was an occasional flicker across the room from the television set.

     Two days after Christmas, Laura and I were sitting getting drunk. We were making plans for a New Year party, which were becoming more excessive with each drink. My mother was fingering her way through a difficult version of ‘White Christmas’ on the piano. The doorbell rang and Laura staggered up to answer it. Young Charles stepped into the half, shivering, and his eyes grew wide and began to water. ‘Can I speak to your mum please’, he said. ‘It’s my dad. He’s just died.’

     I looked at him and Laura and had to go into the kitchen, because at once I had an irrepressible urge to laugh. The situation seemed unreal. It was terrible. I heard my mother saying kind words and went through to help him calm down. A glass of whisky was put on the table in front of him and I wanted to say, ‘It’s shaken, not stirred, isn’t it?’ to make everything all right again. But Charles didn’t drink it, because suddenly he had taken hold of my mother’s hand and wouldn’t let go. Then he began to cry. His breath came in hoarse, difficult gasps, while tears crept down through the wrinkles in his face. I felt it was the most awful thing I had known, Charles’s hopeless distress gripped my heart because everything had changed and he was no longer ‘Young’.

     I had to go outside and feel the cold nip at me while I smoked a cigarette. Next door, the light from a window cast a dim, yellow shadow across the grass. There was no wind and the cold hugged the night in suspense unil the silence became unbearable. I stared into the lighted room and saw ‘The Merry Monarch’ on the wall which Marilyn thought looked a bit like Charles.

     Inside, my parents were gently talking to him. I heard my mother say. ‘But he seemed so happy. If anything, we thought it would be your mother who’d go first. And didn’t he have that lovely holiday in Belgium to look forward to?’

     We had forgotten to pull the curtains and against the black shroud of night, the scene reflected a distorted image in the window-panes. Beyond Charles’s trembling figure in the armchair, I could see the constant light of white winter stars so clearly, it was as though the immediate light in the room was a faded version by comparison. It could never strive to shine as brightly in the solid darkness outside.

     At last we took him home to Marilyn and Rosie the dog. The wreath on their front door seemed like a pathetic tribute to Old Charles. My parents sat up talking while Laura and I went to bed. As I lay warmly drowsy, contemplating the dark, I heard Charles going out to check the greenhouse and felt so very empty and sad.

     Yet what had startled me that night wasn’t my neighbour’s tears, his grief, or his wild, mad look. But in desperately fumbling for The Right Thing To Say, I realized we had all overlooked an indisputable fact - that Charles the 2nd had not stumbled over a single word. Throughout the entire conversation, his speech had been as clear as day. His stutter was gone.