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

     She held me tight, I held her tighter; I kissed her sweet, she kissed me sweeter. With a song at my lips and the dark dazzling my eyes I poured my hand (my free hand) over the flowers of her frock, remembering their colours, watching how they felt. I ventured to the bare edge of her legs, tottered at the brink, tried a tentative finger-tip, then away, plunging and diving along the cool ripples of her thighs, floating down to the shallows of her calves, then climbing refreshed and emboldened up to the flowery way to her neck and the topmost thrill of her cold tinkling zip.

     Then a pause.

     ‘How very pleasant.’ (It was me.)

     ‘Mmmm.’

     ‘Isn’t it good?’

     ‘Norwegian wood.’

     Back again, back to the beck of her neck, then down went her zip, thump thump went my heart, and in went my careful hand - careful over the small of her back, the curve of her spine, feeling her fine white skin (carefully pictured in the dark), her fine white bottom, and her finer whiter bra’ strap. Finger finger went my finger. Plunge plunge went my tongue. On on came the light. (‘Ha ha’ said the clown.) Bang bang — two heads hit Lewis Buckley’s very fine floor. Bang bang — the stars flew away, the ceiling flew back. Mrs Buckley (the second) looked out from her many still youthful bodies.

     No one came in.

     The floor felt very hard.

     ‘Someone leant on the switch.’ (She, getting up.)

     My mind started to pick up the pieces.

     ‘Let’s go . . .’ (Me, still fixing the holes.)

     ‘To San Fransisco?’

     ‘. . . to bed.’ (Me, one last chance.)

     She stood, back to me, zip zipped unzippably up.

     ‘Hey!’ (Me, anguished.) ‘I just undid that.’

     She smiled at me. So did painted Shirley.

     ‘Let’s go back,’ said cool-headed Carol, hair growing in cascades, ‘and see what’s going on.’

     ‘Sure,’ said high-and-dry I, ‘okay, why not,’ smiling back the painted smile.

     She took my hand, so lately immersed in the quiet of her underwear, and led me back across the wastes of Lewis Buckley’s floor to Lewis Buckley’s kitchen. We entered. She turned off the studio light, pushing with her finger the studio light switch that Lewis Buckley kept on the wall by the door. It was the third of June by the record player. We moved across the kitchen, past Di and Don and Andrea and Lewis, and past succulent Shirley and Pauline who was looking sick, past Billy Joe MacAlister who’d just jumped off the Tallahachi Bridge (and was looking even sicker), and into the hall where we found an empty stair and sat down together, me and magical Carol, three steps up and a dozen to go.

     She spoke.

     ‘Have you heard from Frances?’

     Frances. The name hit me like a thundercloud. My Frances.

     A week had come and gone since we cried our last goodbyes in a grimy suburb in south London, since I left her waiting at the gate of her highly reputable second-choice college. A week, through lonely Sunday, Monday Monday, ruby Tuesday, until here I was, another Saturday night, and here were the probing lips of cruel-tongued Carol pushing me back through time to that melancholy afternoon, the muddv waters of New Cross, and, mercifully, to the five letters she’d written to me over the gap that seemed like a lifetime.

     Frances.

     ‘Oh yes, yes. She seems to be settling in well.’

     ‘She’s living in, is she?’ pursued the relentless lips, bringing back the drab little room, scene of our last touching embraces, a lovers’ concerto to traffic accompaniment.

     ‘Yes, she’s got a room in a sort of annexe, a house really, with four other art students — the house, that is, not the room.’

     Dirty old city, dirty streets, alone in the city, a waste land away.

     — Mrs Firbank gave me a bundle of luncheon vouchers, rneal tickets, money for weekend meals and a bag of sugar — she had written. I fought back the tears.

     . . . concrete and clay beneath my feet begin to crumble . . . chanted the record player . . . but love will never die . . .
No indeed.

     ‘It must be strange, being apart after so long together, said Carol, arm around my waist. ‘How long is it? About a year now?’

     A little year. Scarcely any time, really — a smile, a laugh, a tear. Look around and it’s gone. Brief as a summer sunbeam, elusive as a butterfly.

     ‘Closer to fifteen months, actually’ (through the crumbling concrete, the tumbling mountains). ‘It was early summer last year we started going together’ (repeat chorus . . . my love and I will be in love eternally, that’s the way, that’s the way it’s gonna be).

     A little fifteen months, so short a time — and yet what a transformation. Me, from an awkward adolescent (at least, I didn’t. feel awkward at the time, but looking back I felt it on behalf of myself), hard, unemotional, but lacking — ah, the something inside that was always denied — from that to what I was now, a man (at least, a man give or take a year or two) with a heart. I was fulfilled, complete, and above all I was experienced. I’d found somebody to love. It was all I needed.

     And then there’d been the summer, our holiday together driving to Wales and back, posing as husband and wife, she wearing my ring (3/6 from Woolworth’s and already going green), sleeping together in strange sheets. Yes, that had been very fine. A flood of images washed across my mind — eating bread and cheese on a golden roadside in Gloucestershire, surprised by jet aeroplanes at Rhosn eigr, seeing ‘Rattle of a Simple Man’ at Rhyl, me being sick the same evening after too much rum and blackcurrant, and then, nearly home, seeing the banners, ‘Good Luck Kent’, before the Gilette Cup Final. A good summer, full of memories, but, always, looking back, an underlying hint of emptiness, the promise of parting at autumn.

     ‘And when do you go?’

     It was Carol again, speaking now over a Waterloo Sunset, then we danced out to San Fransisco with flowers in our hair, then over the bridge of sighs to Itchycoo Park, and all the time the room was growing hotter, and more and more bodies were drifting in from the kitchen, and the music blew into our minds, tumbling and whirling our thoughts and our heads and our minds until we couldn’t remember who we were or what we were doing.

     . . . she’s a wonderful lady and she’s mine all mine . . . hammered the noise, so we waded to the kitchen and poured grain wine into our mouths from the grain wine bottle . . . why don’t you cut your hair? why don’t you live up there? why don’t you do what I do? . . . and then splashed back to the rolling ‘Good Vibrations’, clambered the ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, then blind into ‘Creeque Alley’. Images exoloded inside me — Pauline was throwing up into the fruit bowl and the bananas and the pears took off and rocketed round the room scattering sparkly spangles of many-coloured vomit, sexy Shirley was plastered naked to the wall, an enormous paint brush dripping gold and silver oils as it homed in on her just thirty thighs, Lewis skipping the light fandango with a huge carrot, the record player trying to snap the stockings off the stocking girl as she turned cartwheels across the floor. And so it was that suddenly, as the sea of white faces pulled around me, I realised I felt sick.

     I was cold. I clammed. I groped my way past seaweed sticky Carol, I oozed through Don and Dan and Andrea and Di, I retched wet and cool through the hall, I landed heavy on the toilet floor and heaved at the porcelain. Then it was over. I slid out and lay on the stairs. The music boomed, grinding my brain, dashing it raw against the sides of my skull. I picked up my head and crawled up the stairs. The music thundered after. I fell into a bedroom and closed the door. The music banged on the outside, streamed underneath. I climbed onto the bed, lost my head in the pillows. The music trickled around my feet, lapped at my legs, and lay still. I went to sleep.