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

I wonder if I will ever get used to the heat here in the tropics, so different from those parching summer days at home. Here it carries a suffusion of moisture which permeates everything, even the breezes which reach me from the bay in the afternoon. The fronds of the palm trees scratch languidly at the windows of my flat as if they too want to escape it and are begging for asylum indoors. Here everything is pervaded by moisture. There is a quiet insanity in the lush greenness of the garden with its nodding shaded ferns and the flitting perfume of frangipanni.

Every afternoon, the storm clouds build up in the east, great, domineering brutes, the emperors of water vapour which hold sway over our relief. Every afternoon they rumble at us, telling us of their power, how, if they chose, they could drench us with cooling rain and replenish us, how they could make the gutters run with torrents and the trees thrash in ecstasy. Every afternoon they grumble and move away, the curmudgeonly wardens of our discomfort. The locals call this overture to the monsoon, ‘the build-up’. They assure me it will rain soon.

Work provides relief. The surgery is air-conditioned and the transition from the humid heat outside to the clinical coolness inside is so extreme that I sometimes feel I am being prepared for some experiment, like a voyage into space, for which unseen scientists require a controlled environment. This illusion extends beyond the mere matter of my physical comfort. Only at work do I feel my life as a whole is under any form of control. The discipline of work and its inherent requirement that I concentrate on the needs of my patients prises me away from the mirror of self-contemplation and from that distorted image of myself that it reflects.

Alastair almost pushes me out of the building some afternoons. He wants to lock up the surgery and go home or have a drink at the sailing club. A kind and capable man, he would not understand crises of personal direction. Alastair is a cheerful, robust hedonist who cannot understand why I am so conscientious, poring over the medical journals in the fading light. I am a locum, here only for six months, with no prospect of my staying beyond that date and no reason to impress him beyond mere competence. He would not understand that I stay at the surgery quite simply because I do not want to go home and view myself in that distorting mirror of my mind.

The flat which Alastair has provided for me is pleasant. I can even escape the heat and humidity; the bedroom has an air-conditioner. But there is more to stifle me than the oppressive heat of the tropics. I am a doctor and could advise others in my situation. I could comfort a patient, offer sage advice. Find a social life, take up a hobby, a programme of exercise. Why can I not take my own advice? Because He appears, slips behind that mirror in my mind so that I see myself, misshapen with jealousy while He laughs imp-like at my shoulder. I cannot voice his name, even inwardly. They tell me here that amongst Aboriginal people, it is tabu to speak the name of a dead person. They refer to the dead obliquely, as ‘that person’ or ‘the other person.’ I have to refer to Him in this way, it is the only way I can finally kill him off in my mind.

The metaphor of the mirror fails me because although my image in it was distorted, at least it was whole. What is truly distressing is to find how little remains of me. Now I have left home - for this ‘fresh start’ - I find He has stolen most of me, burgled me through his squalid infidelity. So much of me was really just a mirage, brought about by our relationship, by our friends, by the house and garden. A shimmering image, like a mirage which evaporates when approached. My soul was mulch for the camellias, food for the spotted doves, manure to fertilise his infidelity. Now I have only a few limp threads of tissue to call myself. Medically, I know this is nonsense. I must discard self-pity, toss it to the side of me. I must pull myself together, do something with those limp threads. But I find no comfort in logic, no shelter in knowledge.

I wonder when the cat will visit this evening. It is a lean tropical stray, a dull grey short-hair with a faint tabby pattern. It discovered me within a week of my arrival and mewed at me plaintively. At first ignored it but it reached out to me. A neighbour told me that its owners had moved away and left it. We have desertion in common, the cat and I. So I put down water for it. Then I bought milk; I don’t drink it myself. The next stage was scraps from my kitchen, then I bought food for it. I don’t know whether it gets food from anywhere else but after two weeks, it looks healthier. In spite of the enervating humidity, a sheen is returning to its coat. Its call is stronger, less plaintive and the animal is bolder, rubbing and brushing against me, walking between my legs and elevating its naughty tail under my sarong. I have asked Alastair if he minds me keeping the cat but of course he doesn’t. Alastair does not create problems; he just does not understand why I would want to keep a cat. To him, it is something incomprehensible other people do, like going to concerts or visiting art galleries.

I have not yet thought about what I will do with the cat when I leave here. I must give him a name. He was male once; there is scar tissue as a memento of his tomhood. Will I ever be ready to go home or am I now destined to wander, searching, in my own personal diaspora? Will my life consist of a locum here and a contract there, my mail forwarded from one post office box to another, my number always the mobile phone? Will my luggage include a cat in a pet-pack? My mother writes to say she misses me, that she looks forward to my return to Adelaide hut she does not realise that she is no longer communicating with the same person as she was a year ago. This person is smaller and more fragile; there are parts missing, even some parts with structural significance.

My mother does not understand my emotional bifurcation. I miss home passionately, my friends, the familiar places. I miss the jacarandas and the ash-trees; the vines twisted along the verandahs of the shops; the elegant boutiques; the pavement cafes with gaudy umbrellas. t have images of people: a teenager darting across the road in the rain; the woman from the florist delivering a posy on an autumn day; old people walking their dogs down the side-streets; the stone cottages peeping demurely, so rustic they would be out of place in any other city. Yet I also shy from it. Home was also the place where I was subjected to savage surgery which resulted in the amputation of the greater part of myself.

There is no security more fragile than that provided by love. I said that aloud to the cat the other night when he was reclining on the chair after his meal. He raised his head and mewed almost silently. I am not anthropomorphic but it is almost as if he agreed with me. Perhaps he has managed to salvage parts of me and has brought them here. I know this is unscientific rot but science does not console me, dammit! I need something spiritual. Perhaps I need to devise my own personal animistic cult. I no longer have a religion. I rejected Christianity because I could not uphold the perversion of its founder’s life that it had become. My apostasy saddened my mother. I am afraid that now, Mother, I am even further from the church. It has failed me again. It did not prepare me for the consequences of a gross and lasting infidelity. Perhaps t will find solace in my Cat Spirit.

I dread the weekends and the loneliness. This is a friendly city but to embrace friendliness you have to be able to reach out to it. I am like the sea-anemones in the rock-pools at low tide, a mere blob of matter, unable to extend myself. Some mornings I feel so fragile that the slightest incident will reduce me to tears. Last weekend I dropped the top off my toothpaste and it rolled out of reach into the drain on the bathroom floor. I burst into tears, quite unable to put the incident into proportion. As I dried my eyes I saw myself in the mirror and saw a person uncared for. My eyes were puffy and my hair, once lustrous and chestnut, was now straggling and unkempt. I must learn to love myself again.

When I am in this state, I surprise myself if I am able to complete a transaction successfully, buy a newspaper, order and pay for a coffee, extract a number from a phone book. This morning I walked to the bakery to buy a fresh loaf. I gave my order and the young woman just stood there, staring at me. I was twisted by panic, thinking: Oh! she doesn’t understand me! What have I said? Did I stand there and give voice to some terrible revelation, did something spill out of my mind? Suddenly she came to life and said: I’m sorry, I was day-dreaming. I was so relieved I wanted to embrace her, to say that I understood.

I wondered what had happened to her.

Having the cat around helps me. In the same way as I have to concentrate on the needs of patients when I am at work, I attend to the needs of the cat when I am at home. I am rewarded by his placid acceptance of life. I feed him and he soothes me simply by licking his chops, grooming himself and leaping onto my chair to curl up to sleep. If I stroke him he purrs and the immediacy of the result reassures me that I am able to influence some course of events, no matter how small.

Last night I had a dream but remember only a fragment, a brief vision of our house with a glimpse of the busy road at the end of the street where He and I used to live. I recall nothing of the action of the dream or the characters except one thing. I saw the cat walking across the road and squeezing under the gate. In the morning, I woke up calm and rested in a way I hadn’t been for weeks. The cat had crawled under the gate. He had reclaimed home for me. Whatever had happened to me there he had re-established my right to call it home.

Today, for the first time, he has not left my flat all day.