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

It was undoubtedly the finest sunset he’d ever seen. The sky was somehow infused with crimson that formed itself into the most wonderful shapes and patterns in a proud and glorious farewell to the day. He reflected how strange it was that all the city’s fumes, all that toxic produce of the city’s dying industries, could create something that the most gifted painter in his wildest dreams could only chase. And yet he had heard it was so: a fiery, bloody beauty born of man’s stubborn refusal to let go. Or so it seemed.

Tomas always tried to leave work as early as possible so that he could cycle across the park and out to his home in the suburbs while the sun was still blazing high in the sky. It flooded the apartment then, and almost succeeded in transforming it. He lived on the fifteenth floor of one of those blocks they built towards the end of the century when things were getting really bad. People didn’t joke about paper-thin walls by that stage: whole buildings were actually constructed from a heavy-duty water-resistant substance that was more like cardboard than anything else. Where Tomas lived, all the blocks were the same. It was one of the poorest districts and screamed its poverty at you. No patch of grass interrupted the insistent, endless pattern of tower block after tower block; no tree grew. When Tomas first moved in, he called it the Wasteland.

He found the apartment with Miranda and the child one evening in the autumn. They had to leave the place where they were living because it was making the child sick. They tried every door in three blocks before they found this apartment with its front door swinging open and no sign of occupation. They moved in, and Miranda stole a lock which Tomas fitted. They had a new home.

There was no furniture in the apartment but the views from it were breathtaking. They led a simple life, rarely speaking to each other but communicating in their different ways with the child. They slept on blankets on the floor and ate mostly out of tins. Some days there was running water. Mostly they hoped it wouldn’t go too long without raining. The child didn’t seem to mind the life, and Miranda rarely complained. She had known worse.

You could see for miles across the suburbs to the city itself. Tomas lay on a large cushion with a luke-warm beer in one hand, considering the view. The tower blocks stretched away in every direction, growing progressively smaller, but in every other respect indistinguishable from each other. They controlled the townscape and dwarfed all else. The abandoned playparks and shops burnt out or boarded up, bore witness to the city’s atrophy. Only occasionally did some vehicle disturb the grim tranquillity of the pock-marked roads. A great weight hung limply over the city, and above it all the afternoon declined, the slowly dying sun casting wild, bizarre ripples into the enveloping clouds. This was it. This was what Tomas had ridden home for so urgently. He sipped distractedly at his beer, and allowed the afternoon to slip gently away from him.

In the passage, the child’s toy bear lay prostrate in such a way that it could be seen through the letter-box. Tomas always left it there, hoping, that potential raiders would think twice about kicking the door down if they thought there was a child in the apartment. In any case, the tatty object, with its one glass eye and mindless smile, helped to remind Tomas of them while they were away. It was becoming increasingly easy to forget. Sometimes Tomas realised that whole days had gone by without his thinking about them once.

His thoughts drifted out to the sun. It was dying. With every little death it moved inexorably closer to the day when the light of reason would be extinguished for ever. On that day Apollo would crumple: another heart-attack victim.

Soon the moon would be up.

Tomas had sensed death as soon as they returned to the city, but he was anxious that the child should not know his fear. Miranda had sensed it, too; he was sure of that without ever discussing it with her. She felt death in every corner of the city, in every dark place in the apartment, in every bucket of rain water she collected. She felt it much more acutely than he did, and it was she who had taken the child quietly away into the country. A rest, she said, and Tomas impassively said good-bye, and kissed them both and went down in the lift with them. When he thought about the day they went, that was what he remembered: the lift was working.

He always threw the windows wide open when he got home from work, even now in the middle of an icy February. He needed to feel the sun on his face. The seeing alone could never be enough. Some days it almost felt the way it used to feel, and he seemed to remember moments when his life felt as if it was his own, as if he was in charge. But the perception was a dull one, locked away behind some heavy wooden door, deadened by the years. He seemed to remember beaches sometimes, and walking over hills with his friends, but it was more like some film he had half slept through once, ages before, than anything he had ever experienced.

He didn’t really like to think about time. It confused him. Sometimes the idea came into his head that things had been better, but since he was sure that no major event had happened in his lifetime, he felt quite confident that things must always have been as they were. It never occurred to him that the change had been effected so slowly, so carefully and yet so deliberately that only the most perceptive would realise it was happening. Remarkably, the state, with a fawning media in decline as its willing pawns, had succeeded in establishing a consensus that any form of opposition constituted disloyalty and a threat to stability. Tomas mostly found it less troublesome to go along with the consensus than oppose it. Only Miranda, her sorrow written deep in her eloquent brown eyes, saw and understood; and understood she could do nothing.

Tomas drained the dregs from his beer-can, and stretched contentedly. It was bitterly cold in the flat now. The sun would have set within half an hour. Already the moon was preparing to command the heavens. Below, a gang of urchins made the most of a strife-torn playground. The windows of all the ground floor flats were securely boarded up. A series of blind spectators witnessed the empty rituals of play. Not quite war; but not games either.