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

    You can tell a lot about a man from his cell.  Even the bad, the unfortunate and the ugly can’t help but leave their mark on the walls they live between.  You get slobs here like anywhere else.  You get neurotic types with their trinkets all in place, collectors, fantasy artists, dope-heads, squaddies, and some that don’t seem to care for anything.  The kids have football teams and rock stars, and pictures of Mum and Dad, and photo-booth shots of their girlfriends.  Most of them have their pin-ups:  their cheap sprawling blondes that flaunt their sex like bitches on heat.  But I don’t go for any of that.  I have my picture of her and that’s it - in a frame I made in the workshops.  I don’t own much else, just the standard battery radio and a few good books and the usual clothes and day-to-day stuff.

    I think she’s beautiful, but I’d never be crass enough to say so like that, straight to her face.  You can tell from her look she’s an intelligent woman, and sensitive.  You can’t just blunder about with the emotions of a woman like that.  I think she’ll understand the way I’m thinking anyhow, from the way I’ll listen, the way I’ll be attentive.  She likes it when I smile, I can tell, though she doesn’t think I can see her reaction.  She thinks she can hide behind that faraway look.  That’s what attracted me first:  that thoughtful, patient, puzzled expression.  As if she’s got something on her mind that she’s never going to tell anyone.

    You can see that she’s posing for the picture:  her hands on the sofa-arm and on the seat, still and spread-out.  The long, languid fingers, and the dress spread too, all that material whispering when she moves.  But the painter doesn’t like it when she moves, so she tries not to budge.  She just sits there and thinks.  And I think maybe she likes the idea of being in a picture by a famous artist, but she’s not very happy.  Underneath there’s something that stops her.

    The thing is about happiness, you don’t ever know you’re happy until you think about it afterwards.  Maybe some people do, but I never did.  And then, when you’re inside, you start going through it again, day by day, incident by incident, every stupid little thing.  You know you’re not happy now, and you wonder if you’d realised when you were happy it would all have been different.

    I wrote to her a couple of times.  Nothing too personal, just the sort of note that friends write.  I thought maybe it would cheer her up.  Of course I never expected her to write back.  That would have been ridiculous, and embarrassing.  The screws read all your mail.  That’s one thing I never got over, the sort of slimy feeling you get knowing some screw’s been leering and laughing over your most intimate correspondence.  I know that a lot of my letters never got sent, and a lot of stuff that I should have received I never did.  But that’s the way it is.  I don’t worry about it.  I know she’ll be there, waiting.

    That’s what keeps me going.  You’ve got to be strong - in your mind.  You keep something and you never let them get at it.  Probation.  Psychologists.  Parole Board. Sometimes I wind them up - make believe I’m cuckoo.  One time I used to take in an invisible dog.  I’d tell him to sit and lie down and all that kind of stuff.  You could see it was getting to them.  They’d try to be really cool about it and ignore it, but you knew they were dying to say, ‘Why don’t you cut out all this shit?’  One of them blew his lid one day and really bawled and raved, but I just sat there and took it.  He even apologised in the end, but I kept looking him straight in the eyes, and after that he refused to see me any more.  He said there wasn’t anything he could do for me.  That was probably the most sensible thing he ever said.  Another time I went mute.  Refused to speak a word, to anyone.  I kept that up for twenty-seven months.  I did karate before I came in here, so they let me break stones.  It helped me to keep calm, to keep control.  It helped me not to go under in all that mindlessness.

    But in the end they have to let you go, unless you really are mad.  My karate teacher used to say, ‘All things short of eternity must end’.  And that’s what I fix my mind on.  That day when they open the door and tell me it’s time to go and collect my own clothes, and then I say goodbye to this little pit of purgatory and walk slowly, like a free man, along the corridors and through the bars and through the glass and beyond the mesh.  So many times I’ve done it - so many times it won’t be strange, just peaceful, like an awakening after a long, deep sleep.

    I know the rides I hitch.  I know how the notes feel in my hands when I pay for the ferry ticket.  I know the Routier place I stop at.  I know how the brandy scorches my throat.  I know how all those voices, French voices, drift around me and no one gives a damn who I am or where I’m going.  And there in Paris, in the dark-before-dawn, it’s cold and I wish I had a coat, but it doesn’t matter, I know I’ll get warm when the sun comes up.  And in the streets the cats are hopping across the gutters.  The sky’s all pink and smoky, and while the light starts to sharpen the roofs and the gables, the people are still shadows, slipping along, going their own ways.  The funny thing is, though I know all the boulevards like the back of my hand, I still have to look to find the Rue Franklin.

    The garden’s still sleepy, and cool at eight, but the sunlight’s bright on the gravel paths.  The trees are so leafy and thick you might never believe you were in a city at all once you’ve slipped through the gate.  The birds have stopped singing:  the world seems to wait.

    I place my hand on the linen cloth, and it feels good, so very good after all that plastic.  The dapples float on my skin and my face.  I can smell the bread in the basket, the wine in a glass that someone left, and even the skin of the peach at the top of the bowl of fruit.

    At last she comes out, and she’s wearing the whispering dress that laughs as she sits in the wicker chair by my side.  I find that I can’t take my eyes from her tiny waist and her hands as she pours  the coffee a maid’s just brought.  I panic a moment before I drink from a plain round bowl, but there’s nothing spilt.  Then I break the bread.  The silver knife is heavy and real in my hand.  I wonder perhaps I’ve gone dumb, but I love to listen, and all the words that she says I believe I can understand.

    When we walk on the garden paths I’m surprised again when she takes my hand and she speaks in English and says, ‘What you see in the painting is not what I am.  You see what my brother-in-law wanted to see, and you see what you want me to be yourself.  And maybe you see a part of the spirit of me that escaped’.

    For a while we are still, and I know if we were to kiss that it must be now, but we don’t.  We go back and sit together again on the slatted seat.

    And after a while I close my eyes.  The maid comes out and goes in again, and I hear her steps.  Somewhere away in the street I can hear young children shout, and I hear the sleeve of her dress go whispering as she touches my face.

    ‘Be lucky’, she says, in her strange accent.  As if she too in her way were a prisoner.  And suddenly it feels so good to sleep I begin to drift.  I’m so happy now, I can rest at last.  And I know that wherever I am and wherever she is when I wake, I shall keep the secret of this.