Authors: Fleur Adcock
I wish to apologise for being mangled.
It was the romantic temperament
that did for me. I could stand rejection –
so grand, ‘the stone the builders rejected…’ –
but not acceptance. ‘Alas,’ I said
(a word I use), ‘alas, I am taken
up, or in, or out of myself :
shall I never be solitary?’
Acceptance fell on me like a sandbag.
My bones crack. It squelches out of them.
Ah, acceptance! Leave me under this stone.
Less like an aircraft than a kettle,
this van, the way the floor buzzes
tinnily over its boiling wheels,
rolling me south.
Sounds flick backwards
in a travelling cauldron of noise. I lie
on the metal floor, hearing their voices
whirring like mechanical flies
over the seething burr of the engine.
They won’t hear if I talk to myself;
whatever I say they can’t hear me.
I say ‘Illness is a kind of failure.’
I say ‘Northumbrian rose quartz.’
The accidents are never happening :
they are too imaginable to be true.
The driver knows his car is still on the road,
heading for Durham in the rain.
The mother knows her baby is just asleep,
curled up with his cuddly blanket, waiting
to be lifted and fed: there’s no such thing as cot-death.
The rescue party digging all night in the dunes
can’t believe the tunnel has really collapsed:
the children have somehow gone to their Auntie’s house;
she has lent them their cousins’ pyjamas, they are sitting
giggling together in the big spare room,
pretending to try and spill each other’s cocoa.
I’m still too young to remember how
I learned to mind a team of horses,
to plough and harrow: not a knack
you’d lose easily, once you had it.
It was in the Great War, that much
remembered age. I was a landgirl
in my puttees and boots and breeches
and a round hat like a felt halo.
We didn’t mind the lads laughing:
let them while they could, we thought,
they hadn’t long. But it seemed long –
hay-making, and apple-picking,
and storing all those scented things
in sneezy dimness in the barn.
Then Jack turned seventeen and went,
and I knew Ted would go soon.
He went the week of Candlemas.
After that it was all weather:
frosts and rains and spring and summer,
and the long days growing longer.
It rained for the potato harvest.
The front of my smock hung heavy
with claggy mud, from kneeling in it
mining for strays. Round segments
chopped clean off by the blade
flashed white as severed kneecaps.
I grubbed for whole ones, baby skulls
to fill my sack again and again.
When the pain came, it wouldn’t
stop. I couldn’t stand. I dropped
the sack and sank into a trench.
Ethel found me doubled up.
Mr Gregson took me home,
jolting on the back of the wagon.
I tossed and writhed on my hard bed,
my head hunched into the bolster,
dreaming of how if just for once,
for half an hour, the knobbly mattress
could turn into a billow of clouds
I might be able to get to sleep.
In the interests of economy
I am not going to tell you
what happened between the time
when they checked into the hotel
with its acres of tiled bathrooms
(but the bidet in theirs was cracked)
and the morning two days later
when he awoke to find her gone.
After he had read her note
and done the brief things he could do
he found himself crossing the square
to the Orthodox Cathedral.
The dark icon by the door
was patched with lumpy silver islands
nailed to the Virgin’s robes; they looked
like flattened-out Monopoly tokens,
he thought: a boot, and something like
a heart, and a pair of wings, and something
oblong. They were hard to see
in the brown light, but he peered at them
for several minutes, leaning over
the scarved head of an old woman
on her knees there, blocking his view;
who prayed and prayed and wouldn’t move.
The ones not in the catalogue:
little sketches, done in her garden – this
head of a child (the same child
we saw in the picnic scene, remember?)
And trees, of course, and grasses,
and a study of hawthorn berries.
Doodles, unfinished drafts: look
at this chestnut leaf, abandoned in mid-
stroke – a telephone-call, perhaps;
a visitor; some interruption.
She may have been happier,
or happy longer, or at least more often…
but that’s presumption. Let’s move on:
grasses again; a group of stones
from her rockery, done in charcoal; and this
not quite completed pencil sketch of
a tiger lily, the springy crown
of petals curved back on itself
right to the stem, the long electric
stamens almost still vibrating.
They asked me ‘Are you sitting down?
Right? This is Universal Lotteries,’
they said. ‘You’ve won the top prize,
the Ultra-super Global Special.
What would you do with a million pounds?
Or, actually, with more than a million –
not that it makes a lot of difference
once you’re a millionaire.’ And they laughed.
‘Are you OK?’ they asked – ‘Still there?
Come on, now, tell us, how does it feel?’
I said ‘I just…I can’t believe it! ’
They said ‘That’s what they all say.
What else? Go on, tell us about it.’
I said ‘I feel the top of my head
has floated off, out through the window,
revolving like a flying saucer.’
‘That’s unusual,’ they said. ‘Go on.’
I said ‘I’m finding it hard to talk.
My throat’s gone dry, my nose is tingling.
I think I’m going to sneeze – or cry.’
‘That’s right,’ they said, ‘don’t be ashamed
of giving way to your emotions.
It isn’t every day you hear
you’re going to get a million pounds.
Relax, now, have a little cry;
we’ll give you a moment…’ ‘Hang on!’ I said.
‘I haven’t bought a lottery ticket
for years and years. And what did you say
the company’s called?’ They laughed again.
‘Not to worry about a ticket.
We’re Universal. We operate
a Retrospective Chances Module.
Nearly everyone’s bought a ticket
in some lottery or another,
once at least. We buy up the files,
feed the names into our computer,
and see who the lucky person is.’
‘Well, that’s incredible,’ I said.
‘It’s marvellous. I still can’t quite…
I’ll believe it when I see the cheque.’
‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there’s no cheque.’
‘But the money?’ ‘We don’t deal in money.
Experiences are what we deal in.
You’ve had a great experience, right?
Exciting? Something you’ll remember?
That’s your prize. So congratulations
from all of us at Universal.
Have a nice day!’ And the line went dead.
Here is a hole full of men shouting
‘I don’t love you. I loved you once
but I don’t now. I went off you,
or I was frightened, or my wife was pregnant,
or I found I preferred men instead.’
What can I say to that kind of talk?
‘Thank you for being honest, you
who were so shifty when it happened,
pretending you were suddenly busy
with your new job or your new conscience.’
I chuck them a shovelful of earth
to make them blink for a bit, to smirch
their green eyes and their long lashes
or their brown eyes…Pretty bastards:
the rain will wash their bawling faces
and I bear them little enough ill will.
Now on to the next hole,
covered and fairly well stamped down,
full of the men whom I stopped loving
and didn’t always tell at the time –
being, I found, rather busy
with my new man or my new freedom.
These are quiet and unaccusing,
cuddled up with their subsequent ladies,
hardly unsettling the bumpy ground.
Eat their own hair, sheep do,
nibbling away under the snow, under their bellies –
calling it wool makes it no more palatable.
What else is there to do in the big drifts,
forced against a wall of wet stone?
But let me have your hair to nibble
before we are in winter; and the thong
of dark seeds you wear at your neck;
and for my tongue the salt on your skin to gobble.
The young are walking on the riverbank,
arms around each other’s waists and shoulders,
pretending to be looking at the waterlilies
and what might be a nest of some kind, over
there, which two who are clamped together
mouth to mouth have forgotten about.
The others, making courteous detours
around them, talk, stop talking, kiss.
They can see no one older than themselves.
It’s their river. They’ve got all day.
Seeing’s not everything. At this very
moment the middle-aged are kissing
in the backs of taxis, on the way
to airports and stations. Their mouths and tongues
are soft and powerful and as moist as ever.
Their hands are not inside each other’s clothes
(because of the driver) but locked so tightly
together that it hurts: it may leave marks
on their not of course youthful skin, which they won’t
notice. They too may have futures.
You see your nextdoor neighbour from above,
from an upstairs window, and he reminds you
of your ex-lover, who is bald on top,
which you had forgotten. At ground level
there is no resemblance. Next time you chat
with your nextdoor neighbour, you are relieved
to find that you don’t fancy him.
A week later you meet your ex-lover
at a party, after more than a year.
He reminds you (although only slightly)
of your nextdoor neighbour. He has a paunch
like your neighbour’s before he went on that diet.
You remember how much you despise him.
He behaves as if he’s pleased to see you.
When you leave (a little earlier
than you’d intended, to get away)
he gives you a kiss which is more than neighbourly
and says he’ll ring you. He seems to mean it.
How odd! But you are quite relieved
to find that you don’t fancy him.
Unless you do? Or why that sudden
something, once you get outside
in the air? Why are your legs prancing
so cheerfully along the pavement?
And what exactly have you just remembered?
You go home cursing chemistry.
There was never just one book for the desert island,
one perfectly tissue-typed aesthetic match,
that wouldn’t drive you crazy within six months;
just as there was never one all-purpose
ideal outfit, unquestionably right
for wearing at the ball on the
Titanic
and also in the lifeboat afterwards.
And never,
a fortiori
, just one man;
if it’s not their conversation or their habits
(more irritating, even, than your own –
and who would you wish those on?) it’s their bodies:
two-thirds of them get fatter by the minute,
the bony ones turn out to be psychopaths,
and the few in the middle range go bald.
Somehow you’ll end up there, on the island,
in your old jeans and that comic dressing-gown
one of the fast-fatteners always laughed at,
with a blank notebook (all you’ve brought to read)
and a sea-and-sun-proof crate of cigarettes;
but with nobody, thank God, to lecture you
on how he managed to give them up.
This is the front door. You can just see
the number on it, there behind the piano,
between the young man with the fierce expression
and the one with the axe, who’s trying not to laugh.
Those furry-headed plants beside the step
are Michaelmas daisies, as perhaps you’ve guessed,
although they’re not in colour; and the path
is tiled in red and black, like a Dutch interior.
But the photograph, of course, is black and white.
The piano also sported black and white
when it was whole (look, you can see its ribcage,
the wiry harp inside it, a spread wing).
The young men are playing Laurel and Hardy
(though both are tall, and neither of them is fat,
and one of them is actually a pianist):
they are committing a pianocide.
It wasn’t really much of a piano:
warped and fungoid, grossly out of tune –
facts they have not imparted to the wincing
passers-by, whom you will have to imagine.
You will also have to imagine, if you dare,
the jangling chords of axe-blow, saw-stroke, screeching
timber, wires twanged in a terminal
appassionato. This is a silent picture.
Laurel and Hardy will complete their show:
the wires, released from their frame, will thrash and tangle
and be tamed into a ball; the varnished panels
will be sawn stacks of boards and blocks and kindling.
Later the mother will come home for Christmas.
The fire will purr and tinkle in the grate,
a chromatic harmony of tones; and somewhere
there’ll be a muffled sack of snarling keys.