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

       I live here in my narrow red house on the south side of the Island. I can see the sea.  I can see the ridge.  I can’t see any other houses. I hear the wind batter the house. I hear the hiss of the surf at night. The only voice I hear is my own.
 
      I go quietly about my days. They are grey and smooth, or lit up and clear. I make thin porridge. I eat it from the wobbly saucepan, scrape the elastic skin from the bottom. I read and re-read the few books I have kept.  No fiction.  Books about places, landscapes.  I sink myself into a pool of silence.  Only the rooks and the wind  peck at its brink.  When my shoulders stiffen, I stand. I walk up the hill or I drift along the beach.  I watch the seafret curl up to the land.

       I am safe as -

       The hydrofoil foams and roars. The sound closes in on me, trying to squeeze me into a small space.  I am leaving the Island.  Only for a day. The first time in ten years.  The waves bark against the bows. The cold steel of the armrest burns my hand.  I clutch my old canvas rucksack against my chest.

       The broad shoulders of the young man next to me overhang my seat. My nostrils try to close against the sharp lemon perfume of the women in front. I am assailed, but I register the sensations methodically, then shut them out.

       I press myself back into the corner of my seat, against the window.  I watch the early morning sun clear the cloud.  Glitter on the water. A white yacht with a black sail. The old red buoy at Calshot Spit.  Beyond that the open sea.  Then the cranes glare down and the bulk of a moored tanker frowns.  The hydrofoil slows and circles.

       I don’t know what to expect, where to look.  I edge my way up the pontoon letting others hurry past.  Then I hear her voice.

       ‘Notdad, I’m over here!’   She doesn’t need to say any more. Her old name for me identified her instantly.  No one else has ever called me that.  She named me at the beginning, the day her mother and I moved in together and Ella came too. A self-contained seven-year old.  Close to her mum, not needing much from anyone else.  I liked that.  No room for love.  No room for jealousy.

       ‘You’re not my real dad’, she said, clear right from the start,  ‘so you can be my notdad’.  And she looked at me straight, not smiling, but not unfriendly either.

       It suited me.  Gave me an identity at the same time as leaving me comfortably invisible, just out of focus.

       ‘This is my notdad’, she’d tell a new friend, if I put my head round her door when they were playing in her bedroom.  Or, ‘Hello - it’s Notdad!’, on the rare occasions when I picked her up from school.

       She stands there now, slight, upright, dark fierce eyes. ‘I’m glad you came. I didn’t think you would’.

       I struggle to find my voice. Talk to myself all the time, but it’s different when there’s someone else there. I nod. Wait for her to continue. The journey, the strangeness of everything has numbed me.

       ‘We won’t go back yet’, she says.  Pauses.  ‘To Mum’s.  I need to talk to you first.  We’ll go and have a coffee’.

       She takes me to this little place, Cafe Hublot, on the pier. We sit outside.  A table by the railings, looking over the water. Maybe she senses that I’ve had enough of being enclosed on the hydrofoil. The coffee kicks in before I taste it.  Not smelt that pungency for years. Everything sharpens around me. The red and white lettering on the awning.  The shine on her short dark hair. The blueness of her shirt. The stains and magnified lines on her fingers from the clay she works with.

       We stare out to sea, not speaking at first.  The water looks gold in the sun, and solid as if you could walk on it. Which makes me remember.  Just for a second our eyes meet.   A glint of recognition.  A flicker of understanding.

       ‘It’s like the story’, she says.  ‘Like the one you told me the time we went to the beach’.

       The memory uncoils.

       The three of us didn’t often go out together.  Family outings were not my thing.  This must have been a special occasion, a concession on my part.   A birthday, perhaps - whose?   We’d had a picnic on one of those south coast beaches - Milford? - Barton-on-sea? - and sat on the shingle as the sun set and made a track across the sea.  I’d told a story about a girl who discovered that if you waded out towards that sun track, you could climb onto it and follow it.  Only you had to walk backwards and not speak to anyone.   I can’t remember where the track led or how the story ended, but Ella had listened intently and not said anything and refused to move till it was nearly dark.

       ‘Must be ten years’, she says.  She sips her coffee. ‘I was worried you wouldn’t get my letter.  I sent it care of the post office in the village, like you said.  But even if you got it, I wasn’t sure you’d come’.

  
       I am sitting in the back room.  My fingers clutch my mid-morning cup of tea and hoard the trickle of warmth.  My mind is a flat calm and the tug of the wind at the sash doesn’t disturb me, but the voices smash into it.  I back into the shadow away from the sunlit patch.  Two peering faces flatten against the glass.

       ‘Can’t see anyone - there’s nobody there’.

       Why should you be able to see anyone?  There’s almost no way of telling I am here. The thin ghost path trodden across the grass. A tideline of last year’s bracken, like washed-up seaweed, almost reaches the house.

       When I heft open the door, stiff with damp, and stumble out, a young man and woman are standing there, startled, but openly curious.

       They’ve been told, they say, that I’m still living here, and they’d promised they’d deliver the letter.

       ‘We’re sorry we disturbed you’. The young woman holds out the letter.

       I make myself reach out and take it at arm’s length.

       After they’ve hurried away I stand for a long time, staring at the footprints across the wet grass.

       Then I remember the letter. My name, printed clearly on the envelope, shocks me.  I tear it open.  One sheet of white paper.  She’d not known how to begin. So she started:

3 March

My mother’s ill. She’s not got long.  A few weeks maybe.  She keeps mentioning your name. I think she’d like to see you. After all this time. Could you come? Early next week. Tuesday. There’s a new fast ferry to the mainland. I expect you know. They run every half  hour. Mornings are her best time.  I could meet you on the pontoon at 10 o’clock. I’ll be there anyway - in case you decide to come - Ella.

       For the next few days I struggle to shut it all out, the faces, the letter, the scratchings of the past. But, even though I stuff the letter back in its envelope and shove it deep into my pocket, hoping it will lose its identity among the dry leaves and sea pebbles, I can’t forget it. The calm of my grey days is broken.  Time no longer stretches ahead, unmarked.  Tuesday draws a thick black line across my thoughts.

       ‘Notdad!’  Ella is almost laughing.  ‘I can’t seem to get through to you any other way. Never could.  I still don’t know what else to call you’.

       ‘Notdad does well enough’, I say.

       ‘Do you know - I’ve only got one photo with you in it?  It’s in the back garden.  I’m on my new bike, the one you and Mum gave me when I was nine and you’re disappearing into the house.  I can tell  it’s you though’.

       It must have been about that time that the idea of disappearing began to toss and turn in my head.  The dreams started long before I left.  Some nights deserts.   Some nights the white emptiness of a snow land.  Some nights a post aslant on a hillside which I mistake for a dark figure.

       ‘Do you remember the time I was really ill?’ Ella is asking. ‘I kept sicking up this pink medicine and sweating and having terrible nightmares about being crushed by lorries. You brought me drinks and sat by my bed and hummed songs.  I was nearly delirious - and you were almost like a real dad’.

       I remember.

       Ella watches a gull land on the railing then veer off across the metallic brilliance of the water. The sun glances off the surface. Sparks.  Her gaze swerves back to mine.

       ‘Now that I’m here’, I say,  ‘I’ll see her - if it helps’.

       ‘Helps who?  Helps what?  That’s what I have to tell you.  It’s too late.  She died on Sunday.  I couldn’t contact you’.

       What should I feel? Grief? Shock? Sadness? Their sideways shapes slide across my thoughts, I almost hear their thin, clear trails of music but all I catch is another wisp of memory. It’s not of the woman who has died, but the child Ella. She’s hiding somewhere in the old apple tree - and calling my name. The picture slips away before I can identify it.

       ‘I’m sorry’, I say.

       ‘You could come to the funeral.  I’d like that.   Monday afternoon. Three o’clock at St James’ parish church.  Remember? Will you come?’

       I nearly say no, I can’t, can’t do it, can’t risk it again.  But I think of the suntrack.  The flicker of connection.  A tiny scratching in my head that won’t quite go away.

       ‘I’ll let you know’, I say. ‘I’m glad to have seen you. I’ll be in touch’.

       Gorse flares at the foot of the ridge.   Puffs out heady coconut air. I climb slowly over the rough ground.   No path.  A clear sky, first light evening of spring.  Long view.  East to the jut of the landslip, west to the chalk Dorset cliffs and beyond.   A hare starts up under my nose, huge eyes.  I see a whisker twitch, like a memory.  Then it springs away across the hill.   Before I can blink, it’s out of sight.