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

She closed her eyes and waited. If she waited long enough the whole world might disappear. Soon she began swaying, feeling her body lose its bearings in the vacuum of black, and then the odd sensation of imminent falling, like when you are on the verge of sleep and find that every muscle abruptly leaps into a spasm to save you from a sudden fall. A fall that would never have happened. She opened her eyes.

From the shadows the dark, moist trees rose high into the air, far above blotting out the brightness of the day with their leaves. As hardly any sun could penetrate, the peaty ground had still not dried out and it made the air softly damp and smell richly of earth and moss. Despite the heat of summer outside, it was soothingly cool in the wood, although the coolness turned to chill if you lingered too long. It was a shelter from the daylight, a retreat in which to contemplate the chaotic colour beyond. She cradled the swell of her stomach, comforting the child that lay within.

‘Lynn?’ In the hugeness of the wood her husband’s voice sounded small and empty.

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘I wondered. where you’d got to.’

‘I was just resting. I think I’d better sit down for a moment.’ ‘Come here.’

‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’

There was a snap of twigs and the crackling of curling, dry leaves underfoot. On the floor of the wood it was a constant autumn with the coppery leaves of previous years lying thick over the ground. It added to the sense of cloistered isolation in this place. Time seemed to cling to the dim light and ignore the perpetual motion of the seasons in the outer world. It was a permanence which was reassuring, there would always be this static, no matter what. From behind a sprawl of holly up the sloping path to her right, Lynn’s husband emerged. She saw his black, wavy hair and strong, white hands and noticed how he was dwarfed by the trees round about him.

‘I thought you said you wanted to come here to talk,’ he said, walking towards her.

‘I do.’

Lynn made her way to the nearby stile which marked the entrance to the wood, and sank down on the foot rest. Her husband looked at her with irritation.

‘You can’t sit there. Someone might want to come through.’

‘But I have to sit down, my legs are beginning to ache.’

‘Well, if you’d kept up with me you could have sat on the fallen tree that’s at the top of that slope there.’ He glanced back to where he had come from.

She pulled herself up and stood facing him, her eyes exactly on a level with his. Far away the shrill voice of a woman called out.

‘Well, show me where it is, then,’ Lynn said quietly.

He immediately turned and led the way up, stepping swiftly along the path while she laboured behind him. Half-way she paused for breath and looked over her shoulder. A large grey dog was squeezing under the stile, and it bounded down the other path, shimmering among the rare dapples of light. She followed it with her eyes until it was lost from sight among the shady vegetation, and then continued up the slope. Her husband was brushing the trunk of the fallen tree with his hand when she reached the top, but he stopped when he saw her.

‘This is it, ‘ he said, stepping back from it.

She sat down on the smooth bark and put her hands together in her lap. They were only a few dozen yards away from an expanse of open field. Framed by the darkness which surrounded them both, it seemed like a window on the world outside, and in comparison to the enveloping gloom of the wood the sky and pasture appeared all the more brilliant and luminous.

‘I want to try and do the right thing,’ she began falteringly.

‘And what’s so right about creating all this turmoil?’

‘Sometimes doing the right thing does create turmoil.’

‘I see. So you’ll put our lives into chaos just so that you can do ‘the right thing’.’

‘Please...’

‘What?’

‘You sound so cold and unfeeling.’

‘Well, you make me feel that way with the ludicrous things you say. Face your responsibilities for once. You’re going to be a mother soon, and you’re acting like a child.’

‘I thought it was going to turn out all right, ‘ she said slowly, tears behind her voice. ‘I would never have dreamt of going ahead with this if I hadn’t thought that. We seemed so close when we got back together again and now...’

‘But that’s entirely because of you!’ he rounded on her. ‘Your attitude has pushed me away. I’ve always made it absolutely clear to you, I’ve never lied, but you always want more. I’ve told you. I can’t give you more, I’m not the sort of person who can. My work comes first. You knew that when you married me.’

‘You know I want you to succeed in your work.’

‘You say that, but you’re always demanding something. You said you had to have a baby..’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t say anything of the kind. We discussed it together.. We both agreed.’

‘You didn’t have to say ‘had to’, the pressure was there without you saying anything. If our relationship is worthwhile it should have been able to take my saying, look, I’d like to think about it, I don’t want to be rushed into anything as permanent as that without considering it carefully.’

‘Well why didn’t you say that?’

‘Because I thought you’d give me one of your Lynn silences every time I got home from work.’

The more she listened to him, the more what she wanted to say to him was driven from her mind. She needed silence to think, but each silence was soon filled by her husband’s voice. She watched as he stood, arms folded, looking at the field but not seeing it. She followed the lines of his face and realised that his lips were pressed together slightly as though to protect him from feeling too deeply. She dared not try and look him in the eye for his expression would be like a wall. Her gaze would not be able to penetrate that intimidating stare. He would close himself off in dark secrecy and make her feel as if they were merely strangers. She remembered the child inside her.

‘Why are we falling out like this?’ Lynn almost whispered to herself.

‘You’ve always got to be treated differently from anyone else.’ He seemed not to have heard her. ‘I’ve always got to think before I even speak. I can’t say it that way, Lynn will get upset. I can’t mention that, Lynn will get in a mood. And when I try to talk to you, you often clam up and won’t say anything. I’m supposed to be a goddamn mind-reader as well.’

He had stopped looking at the field and was now glaring at her. His eyes were a very dark grey in all the shadow. They were almost black. She remembered how, in the spring when they had just come back together again, it had been an unusually warm day and so they had lunched outside at a pub on crisp glistening salad arranged on paper plates, and the pale gold of white wine. Then walked over the heath, watching people sunbathing in the unexpected warmth and contemplating the pure, fragmentary green of the new leaves.. The colour of his eyes had been the bluest sort of grey there was..

‘Sometimes you remind me very much of a girlfriend I once had. She was..’

‘I don’t want to hear!’ Lynn burst out more loudly than she had intended. Her fingers had leapt to her temples.

‘All right, but it’s relevant to..’

‘I don’t want to hear!’ She was standing up, very straight, the muscles in her neck tense.

‘Here it is again.’

‘What?’

‘A perfect example of you getting upset for no reason and causing turmoil.’

She said nothing.

‘How many months has it been now?’ he asked unexpectedly.

She sensed him isolating himself from her, considering an idea that would make her afraid. ‘Fourteen weeks.’

‘Is that all? I thought it was much longer. Only fourteen weeks. That’s the answer then, isn’t it?’

Lynn wrapped her arms across her belly; protecting.

‘I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault,’ he continued. ‘Some people just bring out the worst in each other, that’s all. I knew a couple that split up because one of them couldn’t stand the swearing of the other. We have to stop making excuses for why it hasn’t worked. We’ve both tried.’

She felt the living flesh inside her, a part of both of themselves joined together to make something more than themselves. Initiated in a time of hope, it was now slowly growing in trust. A trust that could soon be betrayed. She sat down and stretched her hand along the cold tree trunk. It was like touching a huge, stiff corpse. Dead wood.

A child was howling down in the fields bordering the wood. A piercing, undying scream that faded rhythmically into the distance with the jolt of each running step. For a fraction of a heartbeat she almost believed it had come from within. She automatically looked into her husband’s eyes. His face looked as white as hers felt.. The shriek had left a silence in its wake that haunted the space around them.

She had made an immense effort to hold back her emotions so that she would not anger him, and it had prevented her from speaking truthfully. Sincerity over deeply felt things inevitably brought tears. She let her chin sink down to her chest so that the pale arch of her neck showed in the green obscurity. The shelter of the wood had become oppressive; its dark embrace was now claustrophobic.

‘I don’t want it to go wrong,’ she whispered and tears, warm in the chill of the air, brimmed in her eyes and flashed momentarily before running down her cheeks. Her husband was sitting beside her. He was talking softly to her.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes you are perfectly rational and I feel I can relate to you and at other times you behave as if everything has to be on all your terms.’

‘But if it’s not on any of my terms, then that means it must be on all of yours.’

‘You have to accept me how I am.’

‘I see. It has to be totally on your terms.’

He answered quickly.. ‘No.’

It seemed such a long while since she had touched him that she took hold of his hand. She thought he might draw it away but he did not. He continued talking, not looking at her, his hand in hers, describing how they’d met, their first friendship, what he had assumed, what he had expected. He spoke in a detached tone, almost impersonally. Yet though she heard his words, she paid no heed to them and ignored the darts of hurt that they released. Occasionally he would hold her hand a little tighter as if to make the contact more complete, and then lessen his grip again. In a strange way, he seemed almost unaware that they were holding hands at all.

She lifted her head. ‘I know you’ll find it hard to believe but I do understand more than you realise. we’ve had so many arguments in the past and in a way it has made us understand each other more than if nothing had ever gone wrong. We can get on well together. We’ve too much in common not to.’

‘We’d better get back to the car,’ she heard him saying.

‘All the way back through the wood again?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

The path to the car was the one the dog had taken and it plunged them into the heart of the wood, threading a way under the sombre roof of tree-tops. Imprisoned among the clammy trunks, they picked their way over dead branches, brushed past the twigs and leaves, pushed back the sharp briars. The journey was long and arduous, the air heavy with humidity.. Her legs were beginning to ache again and the weight of the child inside her slowed her pace. Lynn thought they had stayed too long in this dark refuge. It had diminished all sensations.

They continued blindly, immersed in the shadow. Till suddenly there were gleams of day ahead. Broken glimpses between the broken barricades of oak and sycamore. Patches of colour; glints of’ light. Lynn’s step quickened until she was walking beside her husband. He glanced at her briefly, then looked away, and she couldn’t help but wonder what it meant as together they came out blinking into the sunshine.