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

Marlborough Towers, Leeds 1
It’s mid-January and Harry Barton’s halfway through the mince and onions when he can’t see the point any more. The old black curtain goes down, suddenly, and shows him how it is. What he is. Not that the mince is vile. More Oxo than meat, but he’s used to that. Fanny doesn’t trust raw ingredients. He pauses to check she’s near enough to notice. She is.

‘Filth!’

He shoves the plate away with the back of his hand. It catches on the grooves of the table top and some of the tinned peas spill. All water anyway. They’re off on round one.

‘Why?’ she squawks. ‘What’s up with it?’

He’s still got the knife and fork in his hands so he brings them together, thumb to thumb like a stunted prayer, and chucks them after the plate. They splash mince in a rewardingly wide spray.

‘Now look what you’ve done. Clear that lot up you dirty bugger!’

‘You’ve no bloody idea, Fanny Barton. Not a single bloody clue.’

His tongue lingers against the roof of his mouth making it sound like ‘bllleddy’. He lifts his hands to push back his hair. He’s doing things hands together: ritual. The hair-push sets her off again. Clack, clack. He reaches into pockets for smokes and lays them out: Old Holborn tin, Rizlas, matches. Her volume rises.

‘And you promised Rachel you wouldn’t do that! Your granddaughter.’

Sometimes she lands on just the right spot to twist the knife. Course he doesn’t want to let Rachel down, but she isn’t here to know is she? With sweet Fanny Adams hacking like a Sten gun and this – this feeling – well, Rachel would see he needs a prop. A diversion.She must know by now that man is weak. He strokes his goatee – the wise professor. Fan hates that. His dithery right hand spoils it for him, but Fanny doesn’t know that, yet. She bloats with self-righteousness.

‘Ha! You can’t though, can you, Puffing Billy?’

His weakness is her strength. He slams his hands on the table and jangles the knife drawer.

‘Go on. Puff puff. Light up. Let her down. You don’t worry me with your bashing and crashing.’

Yellow fat is already congealing around the mince. It’s a plate of her vomit, chunked and reheated. She can stick the bloody lot. He stands. She twitters, as she has twittered at him for sixty-odd years (except that bit in the army). He leans over the barricade of smokes and picks up the plate, avoiding the grease. She’s yapping about waste and ingratitude when he hurls the plate and contents as close to her head as he can get it.

‘Don’t you throw things at me, you dirty pig!’

He scoops up the smokes. She flinches, as if she’s thinking he’ll throw them too. Oh no, no, no. They go back in the pockets. He turns and over goes the kitchen chair. She’ll think it part of the performance, but it isn’t. He’s sick of it all. Her. The floor show. Himself.

‘Here. Take that,you old bugger.’ She’s grabbed the tea towel and is flicking it round his arse. ‘Making all this fuss when I cook you a good dinner. Stall-fed you are, Harry Barton.’

He gets out of the kitchen. She’s still calling.

‘Don’t expect me to cook you anything else. You’ve shit your ‘ole full now, and that’s swearing.’

***

Cissie watches him go, that dirty pig. She leans to collect the kitchen chair from where it landed on the lino: her knees don’t bend any more. He’s an ungrateful pig, no, rude, no – an ignorant oaf. She’ll call him that next time: ‘Ignorant oaf’. Or should it be ‘hignorant’? John will tell her, but she’s best off sticking to ‘rude’ until then.

She mops sloppily at the gravy and peas with an old tea towel. Mother wouldn’t think much of peas dropped on the floor, but Mother isn’t here to know, not since 1960 – unless she’s watching from somewhere up there, in which case she shouldn’t be so nosey, and should go and spy on that rude pig instead. There’s no call for you to get shirty with me, Frances my girl she’d be saying. I told you what he was from the off, and you’d only yourself to blame for what happened – what goes up, must come down.

She must have said that a thousand times or more, never tired: What goes up, must come down. Sex was always dirty to Mother; dirty, regrettable, and involving a man – and men were even dirtier than sex. Then Cissie had gone and had John, a boy! She’d almost been frightened to tell Mother when he popped out.

John was a mucky little bugger from day one, but her father, now he was never dirty, never insulting, never pushed over chairs or threw plates. He was quiet, deliberate and just adored Mother. Still, he was, and little, but ever so strong – had to be, working on the drays, humping barrels and driving horses. That was physical work in them days, man’s work. ‘Poor Cissie’ he’d say, when things went wrong for her as they did as soon as that rude oaf came on the scene. Poor little Cissie. Funny how she could hear him now, saying that, 60 years on and like yesterday.

Well, he’d been right, she was poor, is poor, it had never changed in all the years. She’d never gone up anywhere, just stayed down, always down, with Harry bloody Barton. He’d laughed at ‘Prissie Cissie’ and her Portland Street ways, and renamed her ‘Fanny’, the commonest version of the name Father and Mother gave her: Frances, after Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mother’s favourite author. Cissie liked to connect herself rather with Judy Garland – Frances Gunn, born three years before her, also in October. That’s why she’d called the little lass Judy – but that was much later on. Then Fanny got shortened to plain Fan – and that’s all she did: fan backwards and forwards with his tempers, making him comfortable. Not that she’d ever had one herself to flap and make eyes over. They said in Japan they were used as weapons – that were more like it.

Cissie dries her hands on another tea towel – and that’s grubby and tea-stained too, Mother – and pushes at the hair grips putting the Marcel wave back into her Eton crop. The steam in the kitchen makes it drop out, but she’s got to bother hasn’t she? Well bugger it (swearing again) he’s gone off, so why shouldn’t she? She swivels her apron round to reach the tie; such a fiddle now with arthritis. She’ll go up the Headrow and look at Schofield’s window, maybe Lewis’s then down the market for a bit of argy-bargy with the barrow lads.

***

Harry halves his roll-up with a single drag. It hangs now, spent, still smoking, and lodged between lips – ah, if only. Sitting on the low chair outside the bathroom, a hair catches in his trouser fold, pulling at his balls. He lazily massages his tackle, shifts it around. Trouser legs jut out from his calves, over thin white leg stems, white-haired, planted in grey socks on splayed brown suede shoes.

Not much to see from here. A few trees through the bedroom window. Straight ahead Fanny’s hung John’s Art College diploma piece, his Black Christ. Christ! In the corridor? She’s no bloody clue. Should be in the room. A niggle from years back reminds him he’d been asked to hang it up for her and never got round to it. Or was it that he’d forbidden religious icons in the flat? Who had hung it then?

Maybe John himself – he’s always had funny ideas about how his stuff should be seen. Not noticed it before. It must have been there years.

Another suck. Smoke oozes from his lips, ears, nose: a pan leaking its boil in all directions. He coughs extravagantly and hauls himself back onto his feet. Arse too bony for this chair. He might just go and lie down. Tool about a bit – with her. Think of her hair, that long, red switch of flame as he’d seen it the first time they – . She’d let it right down against her navy serge coat. Dark red on dark blue, a burner flame for his welding torch. Hot.

‘I’m off into town.’ Fanny calls from the kitchen.

The creak and strain of the mattress springs. It could be her, perching prim and neat in her uniform: a nurse, for Christ’s sake! A fucking nurse! It doesn’t get more perfect does it?

‘I’ll get a few chops, shall I?’

He slips a brace from each shoulder and drops his trousers, leans to hang them over the bed end. He turns and stubs his toe on a large book beside the bed.

‘Have you gone deaf?’

Collected Works of Shelley. Big enough for a door stop. Sheets cool on bare legs. Chilly.

‘Yes, yes. Go on. Take your time.’

He’ll warm up soon. Just keep focus.

‘Well, that’s nice I must say. Idle sod. You’ve smoked one of those things: I can smell it, you know. You’ll set yourself alight.’

‘Piss off, Fan.’

She does. He hears the clatter of her lipstick top on the table by the door, no doubt applying coral red to a furious compressed mouth, smudging coloured fat into all those age-channels. The wheel squeaks on her shopping trolley. The door slams. She’s gone. He’s alone. With her. He watches her bend over his bed to tuck in the sheets and leans forward to run his finger up her thigh and over her stocking tops. Oh Christ. He might even bring it off this time.

Leeds City Station: 1944
From Garforth on, Harry leant from the train window, despite the belches of smoke and sparks, his tab end clenched. Fields of cows and crops were long gone, tucked behind Cross Gates and Killingbeck Hospital. Harry squinted into the slow approach to City Station, the heart of lovely Leeds’ November smog. Beneath him thousands of sleepers were flung away with each judder of the train’s wheels. Each wooden slab a dead oak, a tree coffin, ridden over, used and ignored. Their biggest tribute: an occasional flush from the passenger toilets. To this favour, lady, you must come.

The rest of the carriage crowded him to get off, pushing to join the crush of passengers boarding at platform 8.

‘Come on, Dolly Daydreams – some of us want to get us teas.’

‘Ignoramus,’ he muttered into the pins and needles in his arm. He shrugged his dinner-box up his shoulder and faced the crowd.

‘Hello, Harry.’

It was her. She stood a little apart on the platform, but there she stood. She was there.

‘I saw you coming in, hanging out the window – you must be cold.’

‘Helen.’

She drew him out of the crush towards the tea stand, then let go. He grinned at her his daft lad face. She smiled making the gas lamps sparkle; fireworks bursting from each glass casing.

‘Let’s warm you up, shall we?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’ His fingers caught the bump of her suspender.

‘Now then, cheeky.’

‘That’s good. I’ll take cheeky. Didn’t think I’d see you tonight.’

He was talking too much, jabbering.

‘Late shift. Matron asked if I would.’

‘But – late shift finishes at 9?’

‘Ended up she’d double covered so –’

‘You’re free.’

She nodded. A strand of red hair curled snugly into her white collar. To be there. To rest, there.

‘An hour. Next train is ten past seven’

‘An hour.’

‘Can’t go far.’

Harry looked wildly round the rush hour melee: snowflakes caught in cross-currents. Where the hell? He couldn’t go anywhere near Portland Street, and a pub was out. There was the City Square shelter – but what if they had a raid?

‘Come on. Down here.’

As a kid Harry and his gang had made the station their own, knew every ventilation duct, every gutter, every rat trap. It wasn’t so long ago.

‘Didn’t you want to go somewhere warm, Harry?’

She was looking doubtful. Hell. Don’t let her walk away.

‘It’s alright – it won’t be mucky. It’s just – all these people around.’

Would she see? Would she think he was going to jump her? Was he going to jump her? He wouldn’t, she was too good. She raised her eyebrows. Maybe that’s what she wanted: a jump. Nice girls sometimes did.

‘I can’t snag these stockings.’

‘You won’t. Promise.’

Christ she was Picture Post. Don’t think about the stockings. He glanced round, no one looking their way. He held out a hand. She took it. He led her off the end of the platform.

‘Lunatic!’ she smiled.

They picked across the single track to a fire escape on Neville Street. Only a few steps, and then – the Dark Arches. That was private, and near.

‘What on earth – Harry?’

‘Just a few steps.’

‘You’d better catch me if I drop.’

He caught her. In the shadows, his fingers could skim her eyebrows and round her ears, and land poised and spread to float on the waves of her red hair, glowing and glittering with passing buses, trams. He turned away to control himself, indicating a sooty cavern.

‘We could – underneath the Arches.’

‘No time. Harry, let’s –’

She pulled him back against the blackened brick. A train juddered overhead. His nose against hers. Her lashes stroking his cheek, pulling every nerve to his skin. Close. Sweet.

Marlborough Towers, Leeds 1
Harry sits bolt upright. There’s a long buzz on the front door bell.

‘Hang on!’ His head reels: nicotine, sleep, and the rest.

Maybe he’s going crackers. Maybe there wasn’t a buzz. No there it is again: a whine. He swings his legs out of bed and staggers to the hall. His enormous underpants – Fan always buys the biggest – brush against his thighs; big, gaping, unfilled, leg holes. He fumbles with the telephone and holds it to his ear.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Granddad. Rachel.’

‘Rachel? Well I’ll be – come on up.’

He presses the catch-release to let her through the outer doors, and returns the phone to its cradle. In the bedroom he clambers into his trousers, braces slapping his shoulders, dithery fingers bungling the buttons. Come on. She’s stood in the vestibule, waiting for him to open the door. Christ, Rachel, what a sight for sore eyes. He’s stirred – who wouldn’t be? Fabulous bust, bit of firm flab pushing over her waistband pulling your eyes to her jewelled belly button, and saucy shorts like show-girls’ knickers and fishnet tights – in January! She grins and lights up the dull hallway. If there’s a God up there, protect her from bastards like me.

‘Rachel, love. What a surprise. Come in.’