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

The recreation room of the sanatorium was full of people, as always. Everyone was sitting still and waiting for health.

     People didn’t talk because they were afraid the other person would tell them the story of his illness — or cast doubt on the treatment.

     It was unspeakably dreary and boring, and the insipid moral maxims pasted in shiny black letters on white cardboard gave me a feeling of nausea.

     At a table facing me sat a little boy whom I kept watching, because otherwise I should have had to put my head in an even more uncomfortable position.

     Tastelessly dressed, he looked infinitely stupid with his low forehead. His mother had attached white lace trimmings to his velvet sleeves and breeches.

. . . . .

     Time was weighing upon all of us — sucking us out like a polyp. I shouldn’t have been surprised If suddenly these people, without any so-called cause, had jumped up like one man with a howl of rage and smashed everything — tables, windows, lamps — in their frenzy.

     Why I didn’t do so myself was really incomprehensible to me; probably it was fear that prevented me, fear that the others wouldn’t join in and I should shamefacedly have to sit down again.

     Then I looked at the white lace trimmings again and felt that the boredom had become even more agonizing and oppressive. I had the feeling that I was holding a big grey rubber ball in my mouth and that it was getting bigger and bigger and growing into my brain.

     At such moments of tedium, curiously enough, even the thought of any change is a torment.

     The boy was putting away dominoes in a box and then taking them out again with feverish anxiety, in order to put them back differently. You see, not a domino was left and yet the box wasn’t quite full, as he had hoped; there was a whole row missing to bring them level with the edge.

     Finally he tugged at his mother’s arm, pointed in wild despair at this assymetry and uttered only the words: Mummy, Mummy!’

     His mother had just been talking to a neighbour about domestic servants and similar serious matters that move the hearts of women, and now looked at the box with lustreless eyes — like a rocking hourse.

     ‘Put the dominoes in diagonally,’ she said.

     A ray of hope flashed across the childs face — and again he went to work with lustful slowness.

     Again an eternity passed.

     Beside me a newspaper rustled.

     Again my eyes were caught by the moral maxims — and I felt close to madness.

     Now! — Now! — The feeling came over me from outside, jumped on my head like an executioner.

     I stared at the boy — it had come to me from him. The box was now full, but there was one domino left over!

     The boy quickly dragged his mother from her chair. She had been talking about servants again and she stood up and said: ‘We’re going to bed now, you’ve been playing long enough.’

     The boy didn’t make a sound; he merely stared around with crazed eyes — the wildest despair I have ever seen.

     I turned in my chair and dug my nails Into the palms of my hands: it had infected me.

     The two of them left and I saw that it was raining outside. How long I went on sitting there I don’t know. I dreamed of all the gloomy events of my life; they gased at each other with black domino-eyes, as though looking for something undefined, and I tried to fit them into a green coffin — but every time there were too many or two few of them.