Poems 1960-2000 (20 page)

The barbers' shop has gone anonymous:

white paint, glossy as Brilliantine

(‘The Perfect Hairdressing') has covered

Jim's and Alfred's friendly monickers. 

GENTLEMENS HAIRD
in chaste blue Roman

glorifies pure form. The man

on the ladder lays a scarlet slash

of marking-tape for the next upright. 

Below him Jim and Alfred are still

in business. Alfred munches a pie

and dusts the crumbs from his grey moustache

over the racing-page. A gentleman 

tilts his head under Jim's clippers.

In the window the Durex poster,

the one with the motorbike, has faded

to pale northern shades of sea. 

An hour later the ladder's gone

and purity's been deposed: the lettering's

denser now, the Roman caps

blocked in with three-dimensional grey. 

The word ‘Styling' in shapeless cursive

wriggles above the open door.

Swaddled and perched on Alfred's chair

a tiny Greek boy squeals and squeals. 

The queue’s right out through the glass doors

to the street: Thursday, pension day.

They built this Post Office too small.

Of course, the previous one was smaller –

a tiny prefab, next to the betting-shop,

says the man who’s just arrived;

and the present one, at which we’re queuing,

was cherry trees in front of a church.

The church was where the supermarket is:

‘My wife and I got married in that church,’

the man says. ‘We hold hands sometimes

when we’re standing waiting at the checkout –

have a little moment together!’ He laughs.

The queue shuffles forward a step.

Three members of it silently vow

never to grow old in this suburb;

one vows never to grow old at all.

‘I first met her over there,’ the man says,

‘on that corner where the bank is now.

The other corner was Williams Brothers –

remember Williams Brothers? They gave you tokens,

tin money, like, for your dividend.’

The woman in front of him remembers.

She nods, and swivels her loose lower denture,

remembering Williams Brothers’ metal tokens,

and the marble slab on the cheese-counter,

and the carved mahogany booth where you went to pay.

The boy in front of her is chewing gum;

his jaws rotate with the same motion

as hers: to and fro, to and fro.

‘
YOU ARE NOW WALKING IN THE ROAD
.

The lines marked out with sticky tape

are where the kerb is going to be

under the traffic-scheme proposals.

This tree will go. The flower-beds

and seats outside the supermarket

will go. The pavements will be narrowed

to make room for six lanes of traffic.’ 

We are now walking in the road

with a few banners and some leaflets

and forms to sign for a petition.

The Council will ignore them all.

The Council wants a monster junction

with traffic-islands, metal railings,

computer-managed lights and crossings,

and lots and lots of lanes of traffic. 

We are still walking in the road.

It seems a long time since we started,

and most of us are getting older

(the ones who aren’t, of course, are dead).

This borough has the highest number

of pensioners in Greater London.

Perhaps the junction, with its modern

split-second lights, will cut them down. 

But while we’re walking in the road

others are driving. At our backs

we hear the roar of heavy traffic

churning from Finchley to Westminster;

and over it, from a loudspeaker,

a stern, conceited female voice

with artificial vowels exhorts us:

‘Come with us into the nineties!’ 

We three in our dark decent clothes,

unlike ourselves, more like the three

witches, we say, crouched over the only

ashtray, smoke floating into our hair, 

wait. An hour; another hour.

If you stand up and walk ten steps

to the glass doors you can see her there

in the witness box, a Joan of Arc, 

straight, still, her neck slender,

her lips moving from time to time

in reply to voices we can’t hear:

‘I put it to you…I should like to suggest…’ 

It’s her small child who is at stake.

His future hangs from these black-clad

proceedings, these ferretings under her sober

dress, under our skirts and dresses 

to sniff out corruption: ‘I put it to you

that in fact your husband…that my client…

that you yourself initiated the violence…

that your hysteria…’ She sits like marble. 

We pace the corridors, peep at the distance

from door to witness box (two steps up,

remember, be careful not to trip

when the time comes) and imagine them there, 

the ones we can’t see. A man in a wig

and black robes. Two other men

in lesser wigs and gowns. More men

in dark suits. We sit down together, 

shake the smoke from our hair, pass round

more cigarettes (to be held carefully

so as not to smirch our own meek versions

of their clothing), and wait to be called.

Goodbye, sweet symmetry. Goodbye, sweet world

of mirror-images and matching halves,

where animals have usually four legs

and people nearly always two;

where birds and bats and butterflies and bees

have balanced wings, and even flies

can fly straight if they try. Goodbye

to one-a-side for eyes and ears and arms

and breasts and balls and shoulder-blades

and hands; goodbye to the straight line

drawn down the central spine,

making us double in a world

where oddness is acceptable only

under the sea, for the lop-sided lobster,

the wonky oyster, the creepily rotated

flatfish with both eyes over one gill;

goodbye to the sweet certitudes of our

mammalian order, where to be

born with one eye or three thumbs

points to not being human. It will come. 

In the next world, when this one’s gone skew-whiff,

we shall be algae or lichen, things

we’ve hardly even needed to pronounce.

If the flounder still exists it will be king.

You count the fingers first: it’s traditional.

(You assume the doctor counted them too,

when he lifted up the slimy surprise

with its long dark pointed head and its father’s nose

at 2.13 a.m. – ‘Look at the clock!’

said Sister: ‘Remember the time: 2.13.’) 

Next day the head’s turned pink and round;

the nose is a blob. You fumble under the gown

your mother embroidered with a sprig of daisies,

as she embroidered your own Viyella gowns

when you were a baby. You fish out

curly triangular feet. You count the toes. 

‘There’s just one little thing,’ says Sister:

‘His ears – they don’t quite match. One

has an extra whorl in it. No one will notice.’

You notice like mad. You keep on noticing.

Then you hear a rumour: a woman in the next ward

has had a stillbirth. Or was it something worse? 

You lie there, bleeding gratefully.

You’ve won the Nobel Prize, and the VC,

and the State Lottery, and gone to heaven.

Feed-time comes. They bring your bundle –

the right one: it’s him all right.

You count his eyelashes: the ideal number. 

You take him home. He learns to walk.

From time to time you eye him,

nonchalantly, from each side.

He has an admirable nose.

No one ever notices his ears. No one

ever stands on both sides of him at once.

He grows up. He has beautiful children. 

When the Americans were bombing Libya

(that time when it looked as if this was it at last,

the match in the petrol-tank which will flare sooner or later,

and the whole lot was about to go up) 

Gregory turned on the television during dinner

and Elizabeth asked the children to be quiet

because this was important, we needed to watch the news –

‘It might be the beginning of the end,’ she said. 

Oliver, who was seven, said ‘But I’m too young to die!’

Lily, who was five, said ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t!’

Oliver said ‘I know! Let’s get under the table!’

Lily said, ‘Yes, let’s get under the table!’ 

So they got under the table, and wriggled around our legs

making the dishes rattle, and we didn’t stop them

because we were busy straining to hear the news

and watching the fat bombers filling the screen. 

It was a noisy ten minutes, one way and another.

Julia, who was fifteen months, chuckled in her high chair,

banging her spoon for her wonderful brother and sister,

and sang ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice’.

The worst thing that can happen –

to let the child go;

but you must not say so

or else it may happen. 

The stranger looms in the way

holding an olive-twig.

The child’s not very big;

he is beginning to cry. 

How can you stand by?

A cloud crushes the hill.

Everything stands still.

Everything moves away. 

The stranger is still a stranger

but the child is not your child.

Too soon, before he’s old,

he may become a stranger. 

He is his own child.

He has a way to go.

Others have lived it through:

watch, and turn cold.

When I got up that morning I had no father.

I know that now. I didn’t suspect it then.

They drove me through the tangle of Manchester

to the station, and I pointed to a sign: 

‘Hulme’ it said – though all I saw was a rubbled

wasteland, a walled-off dereliction. ‘Hulme –

that’s where they lived,’ I said, ‘my father’s people.

It’s nowhere now.’ I coughed in the traffic fumes. 

Hulme and Medlock. A quarter of a mile

to nowhere, to the names of some nothing streets

beatified in my family history file,

addresses on birth and marriage certificates: 

Back Clarence Street, Hulme; King Street (but which one?);

One-in-Four Court, Chorlton-upon-Medlock.

Meanwhile at home on my answering machine

a message from New Zealand: please ring back. 

In his day it was factory smoke, not petrol,

that choked the air and wouldn’t let him eat

until, the first day out from Liverpool,

sea air and toast unlocked his appetite. 

He took up eating then, at the age of ten –

too late to cancel out the malnutrition

of years and generations. A small man,

though a tough one. He’ll have needed a small coffin. 

I didn’t see it; he went to it so suddenly,

too soon, with both his daughters so far away:

a box of ashes in Karori Cemetery,

a waft of smoke in the clean Wellington sky. 

Even from here it catches in my throat

as I puzzle over the Manchester street-plan,

checking the index, magnifying the net

of close-meshed streets in M2 and M1. 

Not all the city’s motorways and high-rise.

There must be roads that I can walk along

and know they walked there, even if their houses

have vanished like the cobble-stones – that throng 

of Adcocks, Eggingtons, Joynsons, Lamberts, Listers.

I’ll go to look for where they were born and bred.

I’ll go next month; we’ll both go, I and my sister.

We’ll tell him about it, when he stops being dead.

A postcard from my father’s childhood –

the one nobody photographed or painted;

the one we never had, my sister and I.

Such feeble daughters – couldn’t milk a cow

(watched it now and then, but no one taught us).

How could we hold our heads up, having never

pressed them into the warm flank of a beast

and lured the milk down? Hiss, hiss, in a bucket:

routine, that’s all. Not ours. That one missed us. 

His later childhood, I should say;

not his second childhood – that he evaded

by dying – and his first was Manchester.

But out there in the bush, from the age of ten,

in charge of milking, rounding up the herd,

combing the misty fringes of the forest

(as he would have had to learn not to call it)

at dawn, and again after school, for stragglers;

cursing them; bailing them up; it was no childhood. 

A talent-spotting teacher saved him.

The small neat smiling boy (I’m guessing)

evolved into a small neat professor.

He could have spent his life wreathed in cow-breath,

a slave to endlessly refilling udders,

companion of heifers, midwife at their calvings,

judicious pronouncer on milk-yields and mastitis,

survivor of the bull he bipped on the nose

(‘Tell us again, Daddy!’) as it charged him. 

All his cattle: I drive them back

into the mist, into the dawn haze

where they can look romantic; where they must

have wandered now for sixty or seventy years.

Off they go, then, tripping over the tree-roots,

pulling up short to lip at a tasty twig,

bumping into each other, stumbling off again

into the bush. He never much liked them.

He’ll never need to rustle them back again.