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

Even now there were sights that could stop her in the street, make her catch her breath, take her somewhere else. Today, outside the
greengrocer’s, it was a fig pouting in a frill of paper, cocooned with its companions in a tissue-lined box. It recalled the fig-trees of her childhood: supple grey branches stretching like open arms, scattering tear drops of fruit; the skins splitting as they hit the ground; seeds spurting into the dust. And the tree’s roots like fingers clawing in search of water.
    As she faltered in front of the display another image superimposed
itself: the figure of Mehmet suddenly sprawling, segments of his brain
trickling from the open wound, the seepage of blood. She could still see his legs jerking, his fingers clawing in search of life. She shook her head rapidly as if to clear a screen. If only she could buy the fig, cram its intense sweetness into her mouth, she might obliterate the sudden rush of pain. But she hadn’t time.
    Today of all days, she could not be late.

    Ria was never late for work. She never allowed herself to laze in bed, soaking up the comfort of warm sheets and the pattern of light through the blinds. She never lingered over coffee with Colin or let Sam’s teenage sloth prevent any of them from leaving the house on time. She never blew in to the office at half past ten in a gale of sour breath, cursing a hangover. More often she was the first to arrive. She welcomed the silent pause before the start of a fresh day: transparent set squares lined up on the drawing boards, tall black leather stools waiting to sigh under a person’s weight, the red light blinking noiselessly on the answer-phone, the throb of computers.
    Susie was the next to stumble through the door, balanced on
precariously high heels. ‘When are they’re going to tell you?’ she asked.
    ‘I think this afternoon.’
    Susie spun in her swivel chair, pushed connections into the
switchboard and a fresh piece of gum into her cheek. Her nicotine
dependency was at a fragile stage. She still needed to play with an unlit cigarette, running her fingers down its slim white shaft, lifting it to her lips, even sniffing like a dog for the scent of tobacco. ‘You should get it,’ she said confidently.
    ‘I should?’
    ‘You work so bloody hard for a start.’
    Ria wasn’t sure that was what mattered. Perhaps what mattered wasn’t the ability to design the perfect living space, or calculate load bearings with accurate precision. What mattered was being one of them, sliding into a familiar recognisable identity.
    According to Susie: ‘They shouldn’t have taken him on the first place. Letting him just breeze in like that.’ The son of a friend of a friend.
    Another pair of hands is always useful, they’d said. But Ria’s hands - brisk, neat, swift - were the busy ones. Mark lounged, rarely bothered to unfold himself to his full height. He leaned casually over desks; his tie alone could start conversations; he charmed clients on the phone.
    Ria wasn’t sure how to use charm. She didn’t flirt. She had no talent for putting people at their ease. When she tried to repeat a joke she’d heard, it fell awkwardly from her tongue. Some things she could learn: words, phrases, idioms, though the meanings often eluded her. Numbers were more reliable: neat rows of figures indicating weights and stresses, square metres and cubic capacity. She measured out her life in the units of time - days, weeks, months, years - since she had fled to England.
    ‘How long does it take to be an architect?’ she had asked Colin, early in their relationship.
    ‘At least seven years. Why?’
    ‘It’s what I want to do.’
    He made a noise like a ship in fog. ‘Really?’
    ‘Yes. I want to make buildings.
     As an engineer, Colin’s view of architects was mixed and not always respectful.
    ‘Quite an ambition,’ he murmered.
    At the time they had been lying naked in his bed. His hands had been roaming her body with the fascination of an explorer discovering new territory and Ria felt that he was not taking her seriously. She wound her fingers around a curl of his chest hair and pulled until his eyes watered. ‘You must marry me first,’ she said.
    He’d sat up abruptly, white-faced. ‘I can’t. It’s too soon.’
    She wouldn’t beg; she stated flatly: ‘Else I cannot do the course.’
    She was lucky to have been taken on by the practice to complete her training. It was good practice, large, well-run for the most part, with prestigious clients and a supply of commissions. The office was on the top floor of a converted warehouse, lofty, open-plan, humming with concentration. Expensive blinds shaded the windows; an ice-machine sat next to the water-cooler. Conditions were civilised for those who had to work late. Regrettably only one of the trainees could be offered a permanent position. The final decision would be made by the end of the day.
    At twelve thirty, Mark’s shadow loomed across Ria’s calculations. Her pencil slipped and the lead snapped.
    ‘Coming out for a bit?’ he said.
    ‘You and me?’
    ‘We can keep an eye on each other. No dirty tricks. Only teasing,’ he added when she frowned.
    Sometimes, over the past six months, they had been alone together in the office, working back to back. But here, in the pub, face to face, was a first. He had shaved unevenly, she noticed. His hair lingered on his collar, a little too long. She liked a man to be clean-limbed, strong, purposeful, like an ideal building. Mark sprawled acorss two chairs, clinked his glass against hers.
    ‘I just wanted to say, no hard feelings, yeah?’
    ‘No hard feelings?’
    ‘Whatever happens. I mean, really they should create two positions shouldn’t they? You the designer and me the developer, say. Think what a team we’d make. Shame, still...’
    ‘You know something, don’t you?’ He’d already been told, she was sure of it.
    ‘Sweet FA. Promise. I’m still hoping of course. Not because I want to do you down, but I could do with the dosh. I mean, you’re married aren’t you?
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Family?’
    ‘A son.’
    ‘Well,’ said Mark, ‘There you go.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘You’ve got it all on a plate haven’t you? Whatever happens, you’ve a husband to support you, and a nice cosy life sorted...’
    ‘Cosy,’ said Ria in a voice like steel splitting. ‘How?’
He took a long smooth swallow. ‘Well excuse me for jumping to
conclusions. Didn’t realise you were having marriage problems.’
    ‘I’m not.’
    He set down his lager, jingled the change in his pockets ‘Look here, Maria,’ he began.
    ‘Daria.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m not Maria, I’m Daria.’
    ‘Shit. You mean all this time I’ve been using your wrong fucking
name?’
    ‘Everybody calls me Ria. It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘Turkish name, is it?
    Her mouth tightened. ‘I am now British.’
    He ripped open a packet of peanuts, nearly choked as they clustered in his gullet. ‘How many more times am I going to put my foot in it? You must have been here ages.’
    ‘Nearly ten years.’
    ‘You’re not one of those refugees then?’
    ‘That’s exactly what I am.’
    ‘Oh. Ever been back?’
    She shook her head. In theory of course, with Colin’s ring on her
finger and a shiny new passport, she could travel home as a tourist, mingle with other holiday makers in the white dust of earlier civilisations, sunbathe in a scooped hollow of soft yellow sand. In practice the weight of memories, of relations persecuted and scattered made the prospect of such a journey unimaginable.
    ‘Course, I can see it might be difficult.’ His ears, she noticed as he
shifted uneasily, had begun to glow red. Innocence jostled with insensitivity because he had never been denied anything, never been threatened by anything more dangerous than an unsymphathetic bank manager.
    ‘It never goes away.’ Ria said suddenly and so quietly she might have been talking to herself. Mark had to bend forward to listen. ‘You think the ghosts are buried but they’re simply waiting for you to make a mistake. To fail.’
    ‘Jeez,’ he said, nodding grimly. ‘Failure. Tell me about it! I had to do so many re-sits...’
    A puddle of liquid trickled towards the edge of the table and she
moved to avoid its overspill. Trying to explain herself always caused her intense discomfort. She stood up. ‘Thanks for the drink. I think I should go back now.’
    Mark shrugged, gave her a sly wink. ‘Trying to get out of your round are you?’
    ‘No of course not, but...’
    ‘I’ve got stuff to do anyhow. Appointments.’ Then, as she turned, he couldn’t resist calling after her: ‘Short lunch hours queer it for the rest of us. Haven’t you cottoned onto that yet?
    Actually she had. Susie had taken her aside early on and suggested she at least go out to get a sandwhich. Even if she wasn’t hungry. But Susie, delicately parting the froth on her cappuccino, hadn’t spent two years swabbing school corridors with a mop, swirling bleach beneath tables and chairs. While the other cleaners gossiped and let ash from their cigarettes drip into their zinc buckets, Ria had raced through her chores, emptying bins, running a damp cloth along window sills and white boards, so that she wouldn’t be late for her A level evening class.

    Ria was never late for her class, but once she missed it altogether.
Once she found a small boy huddled in a corner of the junior library,
looking through books so quietly that nobody had noticed he was still there. His mother was in hospital, he told Ria, in a high expressionless voice. He should have been collected by a childminder. Somehow he had lost her.
    I’ll take you to your home,’ said Ria, since she couldn’t risk going to the police and didn’t know what else to do. The child had a key attached to his belt and had learnt his address off by heart.
    The hallway of the house was dark and silent but she instantly
recognised the sense of impermanence. Like herself, the boy and his father were merely camping, waiting to be moved on. Perhaps for this reason she hadn’t sought help from the neighbours. She’d boiled the kettle for tea and sat with the boy on a bean bag in front of the television until his father came home.
    Colin arrived directly from the hospice where he had been watching his wife dissolve before his eyes: her flesh dwindling, clumps of her hair shed on the bolster, bones poking through the frail tissue of her skin. His son jumped up to cling to his legs. Pinned to the spot, Colin said wearily: ‘What’s going on?’
    ‘I have to go,’ said Ria, thinking that she might make the second half of her maths class.
    He stretched a hand into the space between them. ‘No please stay. Eat with us.’
    He tried to order a pizza but became so confused by the different
varieties that the child took over. ‘Christ I’m sorry,’ said Colin. ‘These days I just don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Where I’m supposed to be. What anything is called. What did you say your name was?’
    ‘Daria.’
    ‘And you know Sam from school. You’re a teacher? Classroom
assistant?’
    She was leaning against the wall, her hands behind her back. He
couldn’t see how the bleach had roughened them. ‘I clean.’
    A man whose wife is dying doesn’t inhabit the same world as other men. Ria, whose hair was abundant and black, who had rescued his son, who had given up her time to wait for him, was a saviour as far as he was concerned. After the funeral he had begun, cautiously, to seek her out. After the first kiss, when his mouth had, clumsily, fixed on to hers, they had both recognised the signs of revival: like rain falling on plants that had been wilted and scorched.
    Colin didn’t understand the odd looks that came his way when news of his re-marriage finally broke. A successful professional with his first wife newly buried isn’t supposed to rush into wedlock with a school cleaner. An illegal immigrant. She’s taking advantage of your grief, he was told. Using you to become legally resident. Within three years she’ll be suing for divorce.
    Ria closed her ears to rumour and bent her head over her studies.
How long does it take to become an architect? To win approval of a
husband’s friends? How long does it take to rebuild a life?
    She sat at her computer screen, the mouse circling between her
fingers, melting a doorway here, turning a staircase there. One day she planned to build her own house. Their present one was a compromise. A traditional semi, empty of memories, but solid enough to satisfy Colin, who was quick to spot cracks in the brickwork for the unnatural slope of a lintel. Ria’s ideal home would be elegant and full of light, with windows from floor to ceiling. The sheer audacity of it made her gasp. Every view out allows a view in. The sense of exposure - when nothing more than a sheet of glass separates you from the world - could be terrifying. Would she
ever gain such confidence?
    She couldn’t concentrate. The screensaver zigzagged before her eyes, teasing her with its coloured loops and squiggles. She ceased to see it. She saw only the darkness of the room where she’d been sleeping when men in boots had stormed through the door and rounded up her family. She felt the creeping grey dawn. Felt the cold muzzle of the revolver at her neck as they were lined up against the wall outside. The hands that groped between her legs - to pick out the males, they claimed, flashing sour grins, in case any were disguised as women. The punch in the stomach that winded her
so she fell to the ground, unable to stop her youngest brother streaking away. Fourteen year old Mehmet, who could run as fast as a mountain goat, failed to escape the bullet that exploded in the back of his head.
    A red mist suffused her eyelids. Sam was now the same age as
Mehmet. Sam, tripping over his untied laces, communicating in grunts and squeaks: a boy on the cusp of manhood. A boy who would give her a second chance, a boy she’d protect with her last breath. She would build her house in a green field bordered by woods. Through their glass wall they would watch rabbits and birds. Maybe a deer would vault across their line of vision. A cool damp rain would refresh the air. No dust, no glare, no fear. Nothing to hide.
   ‘Where on earth have you been?’ hissed Susie, as Mark finally ambled back in, hard hat tucked under his arm.
    ‘Just a few site visits, you know, chasing builders,’ he said with a smirk. Hunched at his desk he began to fire off a flurry of emails.
    The hands of the clock moved slowly. At four the door of the inner chamber, the bosses’ office, opened and Ria and Mark were called intogether. Susie smiled encouragingly and flashed thumbs-up.
    ‘You first mate,’ said Mark, with an exaggerated sweep of his arm.
    ‘It’s only a job,’ Colin had tried to reassure her. ‘Plenty of others
around.’ But to Ria it was much more than that: work is identity. Identity has to be fought for.
    The practice was run by a triumvirate: two men and a woman. The woman, Helen, had been delegated the task of hiring and firing. Her fingers drummed on the files that contained their last appraisals. ‘Do sit down, both of you,’ she said.
    Ria sat, expectantly. Mark stayed back, out of her line of vision.
    ‘I suppose you could say there’s good news and bad news.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Our financial situation is not quite as secure as we would like.’ Three sleek cars occupied the contracted parking spaces. Various children wore quality blazers of private schools. Rambling stone farmhouses in the French countryside were being extensively re-modelled. ‘At this juncture it’s not going to be easy for us to afford another member of staff - although of course we do need to spread an ever-increasing workload. I can’t, for instance, promise any pay increases.’ Helen put the tips of her fingers
together as though in prayer. ‘ Another option might be to keep both of you on part-time. I wonder how you would react to that?’
    Ria’s response stuck in her throat. She was greedy, that was the
trouble. Look at the way she had grabbed Colin without thinking of the reactions of his friends. And now she longed for a real job, not one that would relegate her to convenient dogsbody, dispensable when the cash flow stuttered. She had no right to want so much, she knew. Her hands knotted themselves together. She kept her head bowed, trying to swallow the obstruction.
    Behind her, Mark said, ‘No’
    ‘No?’
    ‘It wouldn’t work and it wouldn’t be fair on either of us.’
    ‘Do you agree, Ria?’
    With some difficulty, Ria nodded.
    ‘’Then I suppose I should put you out of your misery.’
    Mark jumped up; his head poked out of his shirt collar and bobbed about alarmingly. ‘No need, he said. ‘Got myself fixed up this afternoon. Give it to Ria.’
    Ria caught her breath. So that’s what he’d been doing. He wouldn’t choose to demean himself by staying on as cheap labour. Clever Mark had used the contacts he’d already acquired to leapfrog into a better position elsewhere. Would she always be one step behind?
    ‘Actually I was going to,’ Helen said. She turned to Ria. ‘We value your contribution very highly you know. Opinion was very much in your favour. I hope you’ll be able to accept the terms offered.’
    Ria had clung to her heart’s dream for over seven years. Whatever the circumstances, she wasn’t going to throw it away now.
‘I’ll get Susie to draw you up a permanent contract,’ said Helen. ‘Welcome to the team.’
    Susie was chomping a piece of nicotine gum as her fingers flew over the keyboard. When Mark and Ria re-entered the general office her hands slowed down but her jaw continued to move rhythmically. Unable to talk and chew at the same time, she lifted her eyebrows in query.
    Ria said, ‘I’m staying.’
    Susie punched the air.
    Mark gave a rueful grin - ‘Good to know I’m so popular’ - and began tossing his personal belongings into his briefcase. Suddenly it occurred to Ria he might not have been telling the truth about his prospects. Perhaps the offer he claimed he’d secured was little more than a vague promise. See, the slope of his shoulders seemed to say, I have tried to help you, I’m not all bad.
    ‘Hey,’ said Susie, forcing her jaws apart. ‘Lighten up.’
    Ria went back to her desk. By degrees, as she pulled open each drawer and realised that both the space and everything in it was now hers to keep, her spirits began to rise and her smile to crack her face. It was a bit like learning to walk. She was still following the line of the wall; she hadn’t yet reached the stage where she could let go and run with abandon. But maybe this was the beginning.
    The greengrocer was packing up as she passed the shop on her way home. Nobody had bought any of his figs. She watched him lift the box from the display and before he could carry it inside she said quickly: ‘How much?’
    ‘How many d’you want love?’
    ‘All of them.’
    ‘What the whole box?’
    ‘Yes.’ It was ridiculously extravagant but, after all, she was a greedy person. She would bottle them in syrup as her mother used to, spiced with cinnamon and cloves. Then, in the depths of a cold dark winter, she could reach into a jar of glistening fruits and pull one out, perfectly preserved.
    It was awkward carrying the box through the streets and she began to wonder why she had succumbed to such a futile fanciful impulse. Then, when she finally set the figs on the kitchen table, they looked so perfect, so inviting, she decided she’d prefer to eat them fresh in any case. She glanced into the sitting room where Sam was doing his homework in front of the television. He was sitting cross-legged copying out French vocabulary, presenting her with stiff spikes of gelled hair and the tender exposed nape of his neck.
    Back at the table she threaded her figs on to the bamboo skewers she used for kebabs and carefully constucted a pyramid of deep velvety purple, displaying just a hint of the moist red flesh within. This was to be the centrepiece of her celebration meal.
    Sam, constantly hungry, came looking for food while she was
preparing the rest of the dinner. ‘ Wow, Ria,’ he said in admiration. ‘That’s a beast. What is it?’
    ‘You have never eaten a fig?’
    ‘I dunno. Have I?’ He walked around the table. ‘Anyway, how d’you get them to balance like that, without squashing the ones at the bottom of the pile?’
    Ria laughed, rested her hand on his shoulder. He was as tall as she; soon he would reach his father’s height. ‘I can do this because I am an architect.’ she said.