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

The mirror had a bevelled edge, so that by tilting it carefully he could cut his eye in half quite painlessly. Now he had three eyes and a harelip. He squared the mirror, made a cruel gesture with his mouth, then put his hand down the front of his trousers to see if he had more hair than Falkirk yet. Suddenly he noticed some flecks of scurf that must have fallen on the mirror when he was combing his parting. He began to worry about that instead.

     The waiting was intolerable. And yet he knew it shouldn’t be. The bed was a secure island where he was immune from time. That was why before going back to school, or before going to the dance as now, he would set aside a whole hour for lying on his bed. It was a rational device for delaying fear. When he panicked, and he had been panicking for more than a week, he could say to himself, ‘There is still the hour. There is no excuse for worrying before the hour.’ The stratagem never worked, but he still enforced it rigidly because the hour was the time for thinking.

     Now he felt silly lying on the bed in his blue suit and his ridiculous patent-leather shoes with silver buckles. He strained his ears to hear his mother backing the car out of the garage; all the time his breathing coming faster.

     The other thought came back.

     He bit his lip and cut his eye in half again with the mirror. He rather wished the down would disappear altogether. Last term had been bad enough. Their voices were still in his ears like trapped bees.

     ‘Morton has a forest!’ ‘With a waterfall in it!’ ‘Morton! Morton! Morton!’ ‘Look at the Jelly Roll!’

     ‘I’m precocious,’ he said carefully, and aloud to the ceiling, turning away wearily from the sound of their voices.

     He wondered dazedly whether the term after next at his new school everyone would have hairy Dings and it wouldn’t matter so much. What if his trousers fell off tonight and all the girls at the dance started shouting . . . He reversed the mirror quickly, and as an additional safeguard closed his eyes, so that he wasn’t. But it was not an easy thing to pretend: in no time at all he was again.

     Then what about the doctor at last term’s medical inspection? He was still wondering about that.

     ‘Stand up straight much?’ the doctor asked, and he began tapping his teeth with the tongue-depressor he had in his hand.

     Peter drew himself to attention and said, ‘Sir?’ They had to call him that; it was good manners.

     ‘Play about a bit?’ the doctor said. He seemed absent-mindedly to be cleanbig his teeth with the tongue-depressor now; then he stopped that and looked at his fingernails.

     ‘Football practice.’ Peter shrugged. ‘And camp-fires in the woods mostly.’

     Then he left the room for the next boy, wondering why the matron who was usually helping the doctor had disappeared.

     They were backing out the car. He panicked. Leaping off the bed he scrabbled through his drawers. He must have something in his pocket to show people. To talk about. He grabbed his bullet.

     Then he saw his hairbrush. At school boys hit their chests with hairbrushes to look like measles. His hand hovered over the brush. His father would see through it though. It might start him on one of those speeches about, ‘When I was a shy lad, Peter-son.’ Then his mother would say, ‘You’re a very pretty little boy, darling, people love you. Be brave, lamb.’

     He shuddered, feeling weaker than ever, and made a tough, twisted face into the mirror. He felt its contours carefully, and determined to keep it there all evening. No; he couldn’t because he loved Rosemary.

     Suddenly he knew he had been thinking about the Ding and the scurf in his hair so as not to have to think of her. His legs might melt away if he thought about her now. They couldn’t make him go to the dance though if he suddenly had to walk on his knuckles like the pavement artist outside the National Gallery. He thought about Rosemary, but her picture wouldn’t come into his mind. He watched his legs in their sharp trousers, but they only shook like the cotton sails of a Firefly when the wind veered.

     In the car he said nothing. His mother was going on to one of her dotty parties, so she was practising dotty remarks on him. She was practising smoking cigarettes too, because she only smoked them at parties.

     He had to be casual; even bored about the dance. If his mother knew about Rosemary he would probably have to wear a paper-bag over his head for the rest of his life; if he didn’t fall through the floor of the car first and get crushed. He thought about that sort of death for a moment or two.

     His fingers moved from pocket to pocket of the stiff new suit until they found the live bullet. If he held it against his head and prayed, or scratched the tiny soft pimple of lead, it might go off. ‘Peter is dead,’ his mother would have to say. ‘If there are spare sausages and things I expect Rosemary will like them cold for lunch tomorrow.’

     He thought about Rosemary’s house. It didn’t seem to have a real existence in a real place like his flannel in the bathroom, or his bicycle in the shed. He wondered how his mother would find it. Anyway, she didn’t seem to be able to keep a car going in a straight line for very long, as other cars he’d been in managed to do. He lurched against the car door, but the bullet didn’t go off.

     ‘Tipsy taxi,’ his mother called happily.

     Peter was thrown forward. If he wasn’t being pushed about by people he was being bounced around inside cars like a rag doll. Everyone else had the power. He began to feel limp, exhausted, calmer; almost to enjoy alternately having his head banged against the windscreen, and his neck dislocated on the back of the seat. He was a punch-drunk boxer sticking it out. No; a Christian being thrown to the lions.

     He tried to feel himself dancing with Rosemary. Or rather to feel himself stumbling clumsily after her as she led him with movements light as an angel. The lurching of the car had dazed his brain. Perhaps this year, dancing with her, he would get that strange feeling he got that time when he crashed down on the tiny drip Hunter in the rugger match and somehow just hadn’t wanted to get up again, or let go of him, though the whistle was blowing furiously.

     Peter jerked suddenly upright in the car with his face on fire and his hands shaking. The shock of the idea raised a lump in his throat like a mole-hill thrown up in an instant of time. There did seem to be something alive and scratching there too. He was in love with Rosemary. It would be dirty to think of hugging her, whilst a kiss . . .

     He wanted to go to the lavatory, and laid his hand on his mother’s arm. She was wrestling with the steering-wheel like Tarzan with the Wolf Girl and didn’t notice. He forgot all about the lavatory, and instead decided that if there would be any time in his whole life when he could convert a try from the twenty-five yard line it was this very second. Of course it would be with the Baby Game rugger ball, not one of the full size ones.

     He was beginning to hear the music of the first Paul Jones in his head now. He knew it would leave him facing Rosemary, but that he would immediately seize one of the forty fat ugly girls who stood each side of her. Probably he would start to sulk in the middle of the dance and have to pretend to be very interested in the pattern of the wallpaper. Perhaps they would think he was an artist. The whole thing might be bearable if her mother didn’t sit there all the time on the sofa like a queen with silver hair. She watched him too. And her father could be just like his and say things like, ‘Your playing fields flood last term? My youngest lad’s did, you know. Now do pull yourself together and dance with the girls. Come along! Want a spot of whisky? Ho! Ho! Ho!’

     Peter found that he was out of the car with unfamiliar gravel under his feet. His mother wasn’t kissing him. There was light in a great glass house; shadows moving with music and laughter. Now a brighter rectangle of light appeared in the centre of the confusion and he was stumbling towards the open door.

     Rosemary’s mother was holding out her long hand like the branch of a willow tree over the river. Her hair couldn’t really be thunder-sky blue. Peter took the drooping hand, and looked at her just long enough to be polite, and to see if she was really like she always seemed to be in his dream. She said something, and then somehow willed him in to the dance room.

     Music and movement was all round him, bumping against the walls. He was snatched in to a revolving chain of boys; not, though, before he had had time to notice that they all had real dinner jackets.

     The music stopped. In the inner circle of girls Rosemary was facing him exactly. She smiled. So he did. Then he shifted his feet and looked at the floor. Now he was doing it; taking one of the fat ugly girls on her left. He thought he saw Rosemary lift her chin in a funny way. But he knew she must like one of the boys on his either side better than him. He couldn’t just take her like that straight away.

     ‘How old are you?’ the fat girl asked. ‘Thirteen,’ said Peter.

     ‘You must be one of Rosemary’s friends not Jane’s then.’ The girl was looking at his suit now. ‘I have a little sister who crashes my parties and asks kids of her own age,’ she added.

     ‘How old are you?’ Peter asked stiffly.

     The fat girl stared at him; pulling him around the floor as if he were a sack of something. ‘You don’t ask a girl things like that.’

     Peter was exasperated. ‘Well how do you know how old they are?’

     ‘That is just the point,’ the girl said carefully. ‘It isn’t intended that the male should know.’

     Then she let go of Peter promptly, though the music hadn’t stopped.

     The music began again, and he was dragged into the revolving circle of ‘males’ inside which the smaller circle of girls was spinning in the opposite direction.

     This time Rosemary was nowhere to be seen and an ugly thin girl grabbed him with more haste than was really polite. Peter determined to get in first.

     ‘Where do you go to school?’ he asked, pretending to be interested and sort of intense the way his mother was at her dotty parties.

     The ugly thin girl told him. ‘Why’s it called a ladies’ college?’ he said. This time he actually was intrigued. ‘Are you very — are you grown up, I mean. At Cheltenham university?’

     The girl just giggled and pressed him nearer to her breasts. Peter swallowed twice very quickly. Then the music stopped again and he began to think there was something unsatisfactory about a succession of brief relationships that were imposed and dissolved wholly at the discretion of a loud gramophone record.

     He caught a glimpse of Rosemary and at once fell into a trance. It occurred to him that now he had seen her the vision might be made to last another year, and so there was no reason why he should stay at the dance any longer. He recognized that the greater part of him always shied at reality. He was happier with the dream. When he saw the Cutty Sark at Greenwich he spent far longer looking at the postcard he’d bought of the ship. After the business in the rugger match, he lay on his stomach with his hands cupped round his neck just thinking, when he knew that other boys would have picked a fight with Hunter to get the feeling again, and that it was what he should be doing.

     Lying quite still on the school bed with his eyes shut his whole body wanted to sneeze. After a time, when it wouldn’t, he’d got bored. He ate a whole box of liquorice allsorts and then turned back to the wonder of Bilbo Baggins, though he did once pause to take comfort from the lightness with which the Hobbit wore the curse of his having hair on his feet.

     Peter found himself clapping; making slow, neat pops with his hands whilst he beamed in the appreciative way one did at the ugly thin girl. The clapping was somehow important, and an art. One seemed to be clapping something many miles away, without expectation of notice, and with an almost deliberate disinterest, while one looked dazed with pleasure. He decided the clapping was unreal because no one could know certainly what it was for.

     The gramophone scraped for a second and then burst into the circular tune again. Peter smiled at the girl with a terrible parody of tragic parting. As he allowed himself to be welded into the chain of boys, he was suddenly struck by the dishonesty of the processes his mother called ‘being sociable’. Really he was very nasty. But he knew he wouldn’t change and that as the party continued he’d reach the height of precocious sophistication. He was a fraud.

     The boy on his left jerked his arm violently in time with the music; determined on making the circle revolve faster. He had hair on his chin and one of those silk bands round his stomach. Peter thrust his own jaw out in distaste and made a dry line with his mouth.

     It was the ugly thin girl again. ‘You’re Peter Morton,’ she said like the Spanish Inquisition in the Senior History broadcast.

     Peter nodded, so as not to be seen talking to her since Rosemary was floating past gazing dreamily over the shoulder of a red-haired boy. It was silent sympathy.

     ‘Were you at the Foresters’?’ the ugly thin girl asked.

     ‘No,’ said Peter. It was safe now.

     The girl seemed to like squashing him against her breasts like a baby.

     ‘It wasn’t much good,’ she said quickly.

     Peter wondered what it was. If someone kicked you and said ‘sorry’ you said, ‘It’s quite all right.’ He was never able to say that without wondering immediately afterwards what the ‘it’ was. Was it the part kicked, or some impersonal self within him on whose behalf he was giving assurances? Either way ‘it’ seemed wrong.

     ‘I suppose this is a quickstep?’ he said earnestly, though having no possibility of knowing.

     The girl pretended to listen. ‘I think so. Yes, yes it is.’

     Peter nodded wisely. Of course it made no difference to his basic step. One more second must surely reveal the fact to the girl.

     ‘I say, look; let’s stop — shall we?’ he said with a sudden burst of confidence. He could feel the punctuation of his words in his mouth, and decided they were adult. He smiled naturally, then modified his lips to show he was in command.

     ‘Thought I saw some drinks over there. Probably only squash,
though —’ He finished the sentence by raising his eyebrows.

     ‘Yes, lovely!’ the ugly thin girl said, bouncing on her toes with a thrilled movement. ‘All right!’

     Peter led her imperiously through the dancers; stopping with exaggerated deference, and his arm out like a point policeman, to let Rosemary sweep by. The ugly girl’s words still rang in his ears, sounding the last retreat to his shyness.

     He clinked his lemon squash against hers. It was in wine glasses, and he felt his spirits rising to the pitch that was intolerable in his father. He dropped his hand into his pocket and stared into the girl’s eyes with a puzzled frown.

     ‘What on earth is this!’ he muttered slowly. She was gazing at him with a sort of empty wondering look like a puppy waiting to be fed, so he deliberately fumbled in his pocket for some moments before pulling out the bullet.

     ‘Good Lord!’ he said reverently.

     ‘Whatever is it?’ The ugly thin girl was excited.

     ‘A bullet,’ Peter said. ‘My father’s a stuffy colonel you know.’

     The girl gasped. ‘Was it fired at him?’

     ‘Oh, dear me no,’ Peter said, capturing the adult cadence quite naturally now. ‘If it had been fired the bullet part would be separate from this brass cartridge part.’

     ‘It’s — alive?’ The ugly thin girl found the right word proudly.

     ‘Oh yes,’ Peter said. He began tossing it absently from hand to hand like a cricket ball.

     ‘What’s that grey bullet part made of?’

     ‘Lead — Or and alloy,’ Peter corrected himself. He went on quickly in case she should ask what an alloy was. ‘Of course it’s a Russian bullet so it can’t be fired from an English gun. Do you want another drink?’

     The ugly thin girl shook her head, still gazing at the bullet. With his confidence at its height Peter dropped the bullet back into his pocket and looked deliberately round the walls at the oil portraits of Rosemary, her two older sisters, and her two little brothers. He had started to speak before he realized that his confidence wasn’t so firm as to stop his voice quavering, and it sounded a bit too casual. ‘Which of the pictures of the Jennings children do you like best?’ he asked, knowing even as he spoke that the word ‘children’ was there to make the whole question what was called ‘academic’.

     ‘They’re awfully nice, aren’t they,’ the ugly thin girl said; then appealed to him. ‘Which do you like?’

     ‘Rose —’ Peter started to say; but the mole was throwing up a mountain in his throat, and the heat of the room had done something to his ears. ‘Robin, I think,’ he said.

     The word hung there before him; quite dud, like a cricket ball that had bounced off his gloves. For a second it was his failure made visible; then suddenly he was angry.

     ‘God, it’s ruddy hot in here,’ he hissed, affecting to cast a wary glance at her mother to emphasize the outrageousness of the remark. The ladies’ college girl looked frightened, which was good.

     ‘It is a bit,’ she said, and at that moment a boy with spots came up and lugged her away like a country milk-can.

     Peter was left leaning on his hands against the wall behind him. He rather wished they would leave sweaty marks on the wallpaper, but remembered he was in love with Rosemary. He began to sulk. The music raged around him like an enemy whose intention of martyring Morton only bored and revolted him. But why was he afraid of speaking her name? Intuitively he knew it was something to do with magic. There had been the time at school when secretly he had boasted to his best friend that he was in love. ‘What’s her name?’ Wrigley had asked. But though they were eighty miles away from Rosemary at school, and Wrigley lived two hundred miles away from her, Peter had been quite unable to tell him.

     Now he was sulking like a Baby Game drip with a size six cricket bat and shoes instead of proper canvas boots. He was doing nothing. Yet, for almost as long as he could remember, Rosemary had been in his mind like a strange, warm and opaque disc of colour. Or rather her picture had always been near to his mind, because like the patch of sunshine reflected from a mirror it danced and played across his vision but was too elusive for him to seize and hold still. Then sometimes the dancing patch would play steadily upon his imagination, almost blinding him with its beauty. Always it did so at the most unexpected times; when he was struggling with his tie before chapel, or squaring up to a rising ball. Then he would make an exquisite knot and feel warm and no longer alone, or else try for a six and get clean bowled.

     With his eyes hypnotized by the electric-blue gleam reflected off the silver buckles of his shoes, Peter began to sense that her mother must be looking at him. ‘John dear,’ she’d be whispering, ‘do go and do something about the Morton boy. Rosemary was right; we should never have asked him at all.’ Peter scowled. Surrendering himself to the blue fire consuming his shoes, he prayed it might burn him up like an atom bomb.

     Peter looked up, and sure enough her mother, who was sitting on the sofa in the corner of the room, was beckoning to him. He started towards her, staying close to the wall and being bumped by the spinning dancers. She was going to be motherly. The ultimate humiliation. As he approached his depression deepened. Yet all Rosemary’s family were strange and fascinating, and her mother particularly because of his dream, so he recognized in his depression only the degree of his removal from the dance, and all present reality.

     ‘Hallo,’ he said, finding some withered crinkle of the smile Rosemary’s mother deserved.

     Mrs Jennings patted the cushion beside her and said, ‘Peter!’ as if they’d just met at the North Pole.

     Peter sat; remembering to hitch up the unfamiliar long trousers.

     ‘Do tell me how you are getting on at school. Rosemary was so glad you could come,’ Mrs Jennings said.

     Peter wondered what he should reply to first, and decided only the first remark was a real question.

     ‘Oh, tolerably, don’t you know,’ he said. ‘Sort of not bad, I mean.’ It was a desperate breakdown of his adult phrasing and he felt it sorely. Instantly on the offensive, he threw himself blindly at the impossible peaks of adult accomplishment. ‘Rosemary looks very lovely tonight,’ he said simply.

     ‘Why, Peter! How charming.’ Mrs Jennings’s voice seemed to be shrieking all round him as if he were shut in the Parrot House at Regent’s Park. She began to sway from side to side on the sofa, gripping the cushions with her hands, and looking this way and that for someone to tell how charming he was, as if anxious to hand out hot chestnuts before they got cold.

     Peter flushed scarlet; but his embarrassment seemed only to lend him a new desperation. Inconsequently, the thought came to him that now he could convert that try from fifty yards, though still of course with the Baby Game ball. He got violently to his feet, smiling at Mrs Jennings, and at the same time became aware that the music had stopped and that Rosemary was standing all alone by the mantelpiece.

     He crossed the room, slowing his step only when it occurred to him that his haste might be considered impolite.

     Rosemary was turning towards him. She was really there: in soft colours, and with shining eyes, that were more extraordinary, and more strange, even than when the dancing phantom of her that lived with him stood still for a second in his mind. Peter smiled almost ruefully, and as the music started, took hold of her carefully like a figure of glass. ‘I still can’t really do it properly,’ he said, beginning to follow her movements.

     ‘You’re much better, Peter!’ Rosemary was shocked. ‘I remembered you only liked doing waltzes, and now you’ve asked me for the very first one.’

     ‘Yes. That’s it,’ Peter said quickly. He felt vaguely that angels had leapt to Morton’s aid. Then he remembered the Paul Jones and knew it. ‘Those Paul Joneses are very muddled always aren’t they,’ he added, settling the question beyond doubt.

     Rosemary said nothing, but just smiled right into him. Dreaming, she gazed away again. She could do that. Talk a bit, then dream; look happy all the time, yet with a tragic sort of sadness Peter knew. And always she was natural. That was it. She would drift through everything as she drifted about in his mind. Peter swallowed. The mole was at work.

     ‘Would you like to stop?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid I’m not good. Would you like a drink?’ It wasn’t like giving the ugly thin girl orders, and the adult punctuation just didn’t matter. ‘I mean I know they’re your drinks,’ he stumbled on, ‘but as I’m with you I can offer you one. And that’s all right — isn’t it?’

     In his anxiety he found he was violently throwing his head from side to side as he spoke. Slipping strangely towards the ceiling, so that he was coldly watching the idiot Morton, he wondered why he had to talk to her gently as if she were a baby; and whether perhaps he were not really a drip. When he spoke to her his every gesture expressed his awe, until it became a gross and pathetic parody of attention. From the ceiling the other Morton said, ‘Yes, Pathetic!’ with a very nasty sneer indeed.

     ‘I’d love one, Peter,’ Rosemary said.

     Leading Rosemary dazed but triumphantly through the dancers Peter wondered about the occasions when he was called by his Christian name. There were his family who didn’t count, and there was his headmaster who called Morton Peter with an injured look in his eyes after giving him six whacks with the cricket bat. This new category was quite strange though.

     Peter stared at Rosemary sipping her drink, trying to make sense of this unreal person doing this physical thing, and trying to make the picture stick in his mind so that he would remember it forever. ‘Didn’t I see you near here on a bicycle just before Christmas?’ Rosemary asked.

     Peter felt he was turning into a snowman as he remembered the dream. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it can have been me.’

     Rosemary nodded; beginning to look far away again.

     ‘How’s your dog?’ Peter said. The question was to tell her that he knew and cared a lot about her dog.

     ‘Oh, Shem was run over!’ Rosemary smiled, but was looking at something many miles away. ‘It was terribly sad, because we’d had him for so long you see.’

     Peter felt the adult phrases in his mouth. They were as silly as his mother’s hats. He bit deeply into his lip, and taking a gulp of his orange squash without knowing why, tasted the blood. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I do see.’

     Peter drank his orange slowly, following Rosemary sip for sip, not daring now to break the respectful sequence. He said nothing because there was nothing to say, and because she was with him.

     He became aware that the music had stopped, and that people were popping their hands together in that polite way, and were drifting about in looser movements that were not governed by the thudding dance band. But they had no part in the world where he stood with Rosemary.

     A figure was moving towards them. Peter saw that it was the youth with the blue bruised chin and the silk cummerbund. He was all teeth and bow-tie, and Peter stiffened instinctively.

     The youth turned his back on Peter; sweeping a low bow before Rosemary.

     ‘Miss Rosemary Jennings!’ he said. ‘Might I conceivably have the pleasure of this dance?’

     Without a word to Peter, Rosemary was gone. She was still smiling.

     Peter felt his nails cutting into his palms. The mole in his throat must choke him. He looked towards the french-window and knew there must be room behind its heavy curtain, against the cold misted glass; away from them all. It was the other side of her mother though. He looked at his watch, but knew that two hours was too long to hide in the lavatory. They might think he had fainted and break the door down with an axe.

     He walked out of the drawing-room door, keeping his step very casual. There was nothing in the hall except the row of dead coats on pegs, and smells and noises coming from the kitchen. He exulted because now the music was muffled behind him, but then he panicked thinking they might have locked the front door to stop people running away.

     They hadn’t. He closed it softly behind him; and then he was running with the sharp Christmas darkness cutting his eyes, and the tears turning to an icy hardness on his cheeks like streaks of balsa cement.

     After a long time he slowed down. His chest was red hot. He began to think about buses and money, but he had nothing except the bullet in his pocket. He realized he was lost. He was in a strange lane with telegraph poles threatening to topple down on him like cabers in the Highland Games, and crouching bushes whispering, ‘Morton! Morton! Morton!’

     Steadily he began to follow the lane, not caring where it led him. Even if he got home he would be awake for hours with the music still in his ears, and Rosemary still in his eyes. Then, when he did fall asleep, he knew he would have the dream again.

     He would be coming down the hill behind their house on his bicycle, and have to lift his bicycle over the stile that really wasn’t there. As he struggled her mother would come out of the front door and just stand looking at him. She would be beautiful, shining like an angel, and he would feel terribly ashamed.

     Then he would wake up crying like that drip Hunter when he had one of his nightmares.