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

    My Dad used to say to me, ‘pray to God but row away from the rocks’.  Perhaps he was only half serious but I reckon it’s about the best advice I’ve ever been given and I carry it with me all the time.  It’s such a strong image - bursting every muscle, pulling through a mighty tempest and making it, just making it, the rowing and the praying together.  And God looking down, a great old face in the sky, peering through a cleft in the banked-up clouds, not helping exactly, well yes helping, but not too much, not so you’d notice, so you did it yourself, and you have to believe, not know.  But I do know.  Somewhere in the centre I know.  I’ve done my praying and tonight I row away from the rocks.

    Bit like that other one, I suppose - ‘God helps those who help themselves’.  But that has a mean-spirited feel to it like ‘charity begins at home’.  And no pictures, no tempest to row against.

    There’s a storm coming now.  So far only distant rumbles and a brightening of the sky low down, but I’m quite certain it’s coming this way.  It’s taken a long time.  You could sense the heat and weight of it all through the evening, a kind of heavy quiet.

    I’m sitting up in the cramped space between George’s straight back and the caravan wall, the curtain a little open, looking out and down over the dark valley.  I can see almost nothing except when the approaching lightning shows the shape of the mountains rising to right and left and throws long shadows of trees and fences across the fields.  I can feel the thunderclouds rolling and piling their way up the valley, tense, charged-up and over-burdened, ready to burst.  Like me.  But I sit very still and wait.

    The wind is picking up and breathing against the caravan.  Slow, heavy drops begin to fall.  I thank God George is such a heavy sleeper.  I don’t want him to wake up yet.  Not yet.  I look down at his mean, skinny body and think about his mean, skinny mind and find nothing I can love or even pity.  Once I was grateful, then I had a little tolerant affection, then nothing.  Now, oh now, much worse than nothing.  I draw my knees up slowly, pull my arms through the sleeves of my nightie and hug myself, naked, in my own small space.

    My life feels like an hour-glass.  When I reach back and try to catch the shape of my childhood, I’m sure it was wide open and full of promise.  I’m sure I looked up and about me - confident, happy.  But along the way I got scared and shut down all my hopes.  For years my life has got smaller and tighter, so narrow the grains of spirit can barely pass through.

    Easy to see how it happened - it’s a common enough story.  So many women I’ve met have gone up the aisle knowing it was a mistake even as they did it.  I’d had this wonderful love affair, my Rosebud I suppose, my pure and perfect moment.  We were still at school, bursting all day with the need to be alone together.  One winter night we couldn’t find anywhere private and warm, so we broke into the school and slept together on the chemistry lab floor.  It was everything - love, adventure, rebellion, danger.  Suppressed giggles, spooky shapes of taps and tubes and Bunsen burners and holding still when you think you’ve heard somebody coming and wondering how late you dare risk going home.

    Well, everything to me.  But not for him.  Just then, yes, I’m certain of it.  I couldn’t bear to doubt it.  But not everything for always like I thought it was.  After he went off to do his man things out in the world, I was left behind with the leftover boys who couldn’t get away.  I didn’t cry or beg or chase, I just lost all desire and said yes to George as soon as I’d told him he could ask.  I knew he’d not leave, and just then that was all I could be bothered to want.

    So we did the big church wedding thing and everyone was happy for me, not wondering if I was happy for me.  Like thousands before me I said ‘I do’ in disappointment and resignation, to the sound of doors closing and a feeling of fighting for breath.  I’d put too many eggs in the one basket - I know that now, but then it seemed my fate.  I’d fallen for the all-or-nothing romantic dream.  I didn’t know then about pulling away from your fate.  I hadn’t discovered the praying either.  I was the same as most girls in those days.  We didn’t know how to say ‘no’.  For that matter we weren’t so great at ‘yes’.  But we were pretty good at ‘OK’ and ‘if you like’.  Why didn’t Dad stop me?  Because I told him I was all right.  Dad.  Wish I could tell you I got the message in the end.

    A louder rumble of thunder - much closer to the flash.  The storm will soon be overhead.  My throat is so tight and dry, the air can barely pass through.  The moment of absolute constriction is almost here.  A single line of events that must be followed unswervingly.  The first fine stream of grains leading through.  And after, opening out into the wide spaces beyond.  The breath will come more easily, and I’ll tumble out into the rest of my life.

    But hold on, not quite yet.  I look at George, innocent in sleep, illuminated for an instant.  He dreams his pale innocent dreams in his neat, regular sleep.  There he lies, fettered and controlled, even in unconsciousness, unaware of his guilt, or the scale of his punishment.  I silently read him his indictment.  That you were small and tight in everything you did and said, that you did snicker instead of laugh, that you did tut-tut and shake your head rather than cry, that you liked instead of loved, got cross instead of raged, that you never did anything pungent, rich or intense your whole shrivelled life.  And worse - that you did knowingly try to make me the same, calling it being grown-up and not a silly girl, that you saw yourself as my teacher so that I should be grateful to be saved from my immature female notions.

    Will I be able to speak? Oh yes, I’ll manage now.  I feel good after that - clear about what I’m doing.  The rain is beating down, the lightning is fiercely bright and the thunder close behind. Sorry George, too late for a defence now, George.  Too many years.  I stroke the sides of my throat to ease the pressure.

    ‘George’.

    He stirs.

    ‘George!’

    ‘What is it now?’  I’m so glad he said ‘now’. Makes it a lot easier.  One last tiny wound in the death of a thousand cuts of anything I ever felt for this man.

    ‘There’s something wrong’.

    I’d thought carefully about precisely what to say.  George doesn’t permit anything to be wrong in his tidy little life.  His whole existence is ordered, planned, compartmentalised;  work, leisure, family, with no messy overlapping.  Everything he does is well within his capabilities, so failure’s out of the question.  When he plays cricket he never dives for a catch that’s beyond his reach or goes for a risky second run.  He never applies for a post he can’t be sure of getting.  George plays safe, lives safe, checks and double-checks, arrives too early,  reaches too low.  So nothing could be wrong, could it?

    ‘What do you mean, wrong?’  asks George.

    ‘I felt the caravan move, I’m sure I did.  It’s quite a storm, you know’.

    ‘Yes, I know it’s quite a storm, I’ve managed to work that out for myself, but I was very careful blocking the wheels.  We couldn’t possibly have moved’.

    ‘But the wind’s very strong and we’re on top of a hill.  You really ought to check’.

    The other trigger word.  I’m playing my part well - and so is God.  Lightning and thunder are almost simultaneous, the rain is torrential and the wind is gusting erratically.  A powerful blast rocks the caravan a little.  It is enough.

    ‘All right, I’ll look, but you know I always do these things properly’.

    ‘It’s for the best, I’m sure’.

    George reaches for his trousers - he knows precisely where they are - and pulls them on.  I can’t see anything between the flashes, but I know the exact order in which he does these things.  He puts on his shoes and ties them, pulls his jumper over his pyjama top and, because he’s on holiday and these things are correct then, puts on the cheerful bobble hat I knitted him for Christmas.

    I feel a little looser, freer in my throat.

    ‘Be careful, won’t you?’

    ‘Of course I will, don’t you worry yourself about that’.

    And there he is, frozen in the doorway by a single flash, wind tugging his clothes, and those words.  How suitable they are.  Poor little woman, what a fuss she makes.  What a fine chap I’ve been to rescue her from herself.  Grounds for an appeal?  A reprieve?  Sorry, George, you’re on your own in this one.  You see, this is the highest court of them all, and yours is the only life in the scales.  Anyway, it wasn’t for me that you stayed.  You were loyal to convenience, a homemaker, meals on the table, a balancing shape at dos, the rhythms of annual holidays in the caravan, a silent weekly exercise, and the great rhythms of births, marriages and deaths, Christmas, christenings and funerals.  You were loyal to your place in the pattern, not me.

    George closes the door.  I think maybe ten seconds will be enough.  I slowly lie down, unbending and spreading across the bed. The wind falls, there is a pause, a taking in of breath and .... God reaches down.  It is the most stupendous experience of my life. The light is so bright I imagine I can see through the caravan walls, the sound is so huge I’m nearly stunned and the electricity leaves my heart racing and my skin alive.  The echo of the explosion flutters in my belly.  Afterwards I see lime-green shapes swimming before my eyes, my ears are whistling, my limbs are damp and twitching.  It’s almost more than I can bear but the moment passes and I soon begin to feel wonderful.  I have been brushed by the hem of God’s cloak as he passed.

    I lie in the afterglow, at peace with God and myself, thinking about the mighty punishment inflicted on George.  His sin was not living the life he’d been given.  He’d never felt the unfiltered joy I feel now.  He’d never lived life for the sake of living it.  But God had understood.  He knows intensity and living on the edge. Anyone who makes this heap of triumph and disaster must love simply being fully alive and doesn’t worry too much about making mistakes. So together we seared George from the world.  A tiny act of domestic hygiene, but oh, such style!

    But there are one or two things I need to do before I go to sleep. The storm has passed, so I peel off my nightie and slip outside, naked as the day I am reborn.  The air is warm and clean and the sodden grass as I curl my toes into it feels .... just lovely.  I lift my arms to the sky, raise my head higher than I’ve raised it in an age, and pray to God, giving thanks for my deliverance.  There is already the merest hint of dawn behind the mountain.  I fumble around for a few moments and take some things inside.  I light an oil lamp, make coffee, sit on the bed and run through the list.  I’ve detached the aerial from the chassis and the metal steps, pulled out George’s belt with the metal strip along the inside and, not the pleasantest of jobs, removed his hat. That’s it.  In the morning I’ll contact the police.  I’ll not act distraught - that would be sinful.  My behaviour will appear tasteless but no more.  This, after all, was the perfect murder.  No telltale callouses on the hands, but I think the rowing has gone very well indeed.  I sit in the still after the storm, sipping my coffee, the lamplight soft on my skin, carefully with tweezers drawing the copper threads from the charred remains of the bobble hat.