No 73.
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He lives alone at No. 73.
A long time ago it used to be a big grand house , now it’s broken into bedsits with one large flat on the ground floor.The place is all red brick which gets stone hot in the summer. Maybe it holds the heat, like him. Once he was handsome and strong, the girls loved his big smile and straight back, now he’s curved like a weeping branch, bent from creeping years and the weight of things.
His room is small and damp. The Persian carpet and boudoir lamp look quixotic but the place still smells of mildew and dirty clothes. He takes his washing to a laundrette in the small town where the lady running the machines eyes him suspiciously. She’s wary of people who sweat a lot. Even on cold days he has a fine film covering his brow and in summer she can smell his flesh. He never wears a coat. Some weeks will go by and he’ll sport a bushy beard advancing with the days, a day later he’ll be shaven clean, his mouth will be reborn and become the center of his face before the whole cycle begins again.
I met him gradually. Each day he’d walk past the shop and wave if I was at the window. If I was out in the street he’d say a quiet hello as he rushed past, always in a hurry, always carrying a cotton bag . One day he stopped to talk.
‘You look different today’ I said,
‘It’s my birthday, I had a shave, I had a hair cut, I’m 60 today’ he replied.
‘Happy Birthday. It suits you, you don’t look 60′.
Close up his skin was smooth, fleshy and thick. His brow was high and wet, his eyes drooped, they looked resigned. ‘What’s your name?’ he said, ‘I’m Len’.
‘I’m Isabelle’.
‘Nice to meet you’ he said, ‘I’m late now, I have to be there in 12 minutes’ and he started walking away quickly.
And so the ritual advanced a little. Each morning as he rushed past it would be ‘Morning Isabelle’, through glass or eye to eye. Each evening on his way home a quick smile and wave, his stoop seemed to press against the cold wind or bow to the sunshine.
Have you ever heard of the expression like a bull in a china shop ? Well, one day it seemed that almost happened.
Instead of rushing past and waving, Len pushed through the door. I can only describe him as frantic, agitated until movement was constant. He rushed to the back of the shop and picked up a bowler hat. ‘I’ll have this’ he said, barely noticing it in his hand. He put it on the counter and his eyes ran around the shop .
‘I need a carpet, I’ll have that one up there’ and he pointed to a large rug rolled and propped in the corner, half way up the stairs.
‘It’s a hundred and fifty quid’ I said.
‘I’ll take it’ he said, ‘can you deliver?’.
‘It’s a huge carpet, about 14 feet square, do you know what size you need?’
‘Oh maybe it’s too big then, have you any others?’
‘There’s one upstairs, hanging over the banister, that’s smaller and it’s eighty quid.’
‘I’ll take it’ he said without going up the stairs to look. All this unnerved me. He carried on rushing around the shop, he smelt fierce. Like a thing burnt. He picked up a 1950’s hardback copy of Heidi, a meat cleaver and an old willow pattern meat plate. The steel clattered against the thick of the plate, it didn’t break.
‘I need a lamp too, that one looks nice’, his eyes rested for seconds on a wooden lamp with a 1920’s glass shade patterned with tiny China men in frail boats and coolie hats. ‘And you can put everything in that big trunk’, he gestured to a Victorian tin travelling trunk bashed from a life of baggage.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to say, you can’t buy these things, you have barely looked at them, are you sure you really want them, are you sure you actually need them ? I couldn’t say you’re shaking and sweating, you look like you’re having a manic episode. I didn’t say, I want to calm you down.
Instead I said, ‘I can deliver them all tomorrow if you want. Where do you live ?’
‘No 73′ he said and I knew just which house he meant. Victorian splendour but oh how the mighty have fallen.
‘It comes to £224 all together’ I said, ‘call it £200′.
He fumbled with sticky hands in his trouser pocket and pulled out rolls of money scrumpled and grubby. He gave me £300. ‘That’s £100 too much’ I said and handed him five damp twenties back, ‘come tomorrow at 5 and we’ll take all this back to your place’.
The yellow painted walls of his room made me sadder than yellow ever has before but the China-men cast a softer glow and made the olid milk bottles and the mould on plates seem like potions and experiments in progress. We emptied the trunk and Len filled it with the plastic scatter of cd’s about the floor. The bowler hat went on the mantelpiece and the cleaver and meat plate added to the piles of washing up. He was happy.
I have never sold him a thing since.
These days he seems calmer and sometimes comes in to talk. I have learnt about his acid trips and belief in aura’s, a place like heaven with bright lights in corners and his baby that died a long time ago. The beard still comes and goes, the bag is always the same. He likes his lamp and carpet. I sometimes wonder if he eats his meals off a huge Victorian meat plate or if the story of illicit love just rests at the bottom of the washing up pile.
I struggle in prose, get caught up in commas or
become a mass of metaphors
which mix and rot
like milk and straw.
I see spathes of grass
rather than a field.
A clutter of the minuscule
they wear me down
in complicated overload and sensory over-dose.
Each night time
for balance
I walk through
fields close to dusk
where everything is
gentle blurred.
It’s easier on the eye
and monochromes my mind.
I always thought by hanging was the hardest way, a ritual which involves detailed attention to be successful. In the barn , coils as thick as my wrist are musty weighted ropes, the home of spiders and in summer months a perch for horseflies overblown from the heat of stinking fields of rape. It’s a cooler place in here where the air always hangs and the straw and trampled feet of generations are always silent. I close my eyes and it could be yesterday or last week or 4 years ago. The dry sweet smell tricks me into thinking I should live in here, it would be ages before they found me, before they took me away. I imagine white lights and antiseptic men, their mouths brutal scissors ready to lance my swollen underbelly . I am not fit for their words or dedication. Comfort comes with sleep and repetition , 47 steps to the hut of imperial geese whose hisses sound like an ancient horrow , a music from the depths of hell, their gleaming beaks hidden with serrations stealthy as deceit. It’s 208 big strides to the dilapidated wall where the cows are gentle. They are solid and patient as I empty sacks of hay. They steam my face with an innocents breath, their eyes the least accusatory of any thing I’ve seen. Then just 50 paces past is the pony, a broad and humble pit girl with matted mane. She feels like my sister; she walks her field alone on this cold morning when spring feels so far away and my hands are carved like death. I am counted-measured-wrapped-up in myself until I cannot look beyond the blades to see whole fields; until a rook is a single ink black feather multiplied only in afterthought and this is ever my downfall, warped in a solipsism , in a place where the arguments are heated as I narrate and berate whoever I am, buried behind a stultifying need to please.
Tonight I want to be light. Clear-bright. To be swept from soot to diamonds. To tread barefoot away from stony ground, to widdershin spin.
I need a drink to lift the spirit, to dizzy me into abandon and magnify the physical. I want to feel astounded. A month of abstinence has left me ravenous. And a long time ago or so it seems I looked forward to Saturdays, before the days began to merge. So give me a liquid to pin me in the here and now, to seduce my mouth and gloss my tongue , let thought transform into sense o r y. Open me up and topple me away from myself.
Tonight I’ll light the fire with the wood I foraged from a slope copper strewn with discs of beech-leaf . One quick-cold-shot of Okowita and I’ll split logs in the chill of evening. Teeth bared, nipples taut, my breath will bear ghosts. The wood will echo with the crack of metal splicing soft thickness and the rooks will cling tight to their trees. Not even they will stop me tonight. Warmed within I’ll stack a pile next to the stove and watch the smell of Winter coil its xylem dampness into the room. I’ll take newspaper pages and roll and twist them into bracelets for burning. Yesterdays stories will become todays firebrand as I gulp a second viscous shot. Stoly from the freezer, a slip-trickle to my throat, cold into hot as I cackle saltpeter and start the fire. Inky words will catch and flame, licking twigs, rioting red. And when the fire begins to roar, a third shot will put real heat in my blood and sparks in my eyes.
Watch me burn as I teeth sink into red lip fullness and eyeglint in the fireshadow. Watch me twist and trepak spin, arms flying, a double sycamore seed, hair flaying, shoulder whipping until the fire-dance brings sweet muscle burn. The wooden ceiling will creak, the stone floor will be hard against back and cheek. It will not give. Lick my salty skin, suck the flesh from my bones and grab my hair in frenzied knots. Tonight I will not submit, you must fight me for your contact. I want the back of your hand rather than soft palm sentiment. Tonight, I will not come quietly.
” We live as we dream – alone “
I had a stark strange dream the other night. I dreamt while in a different bed in another town by the side of a busy road with the wet-orange glow of a phosphorescent street light seeping through a deep red blind. The effect was womb-like and honeyed and yet my dream was spartan and bare like a cold flag floor beside a draughty door. It seems that when I am away from home my dreams take on epic proportions, I have noticed this before.
I wasn’t embodied in the dream, I was merely hugely an eye, watching scenes unfold, staring wide and marvelling at the unravelling before me which peculiarly seemed to be inside me too.
Imagine a cold and colourless place washed out grey like a winters sky. A place of blue paleness, of eye-whites and broken birdshell. A place where sound seemed to carry smallness, metallic and pinpointing in large open spaces. A gaping place stretched like loneliness. The streets were wide and cobbled, the buildings were paint-peeled wooden. I had a sense that I was dead already. I looked down the street and then I looked down from above as if I were the Sun. I heard metal on stone and I saw a cart. Open and raddled it was pulled by a horse who knew the way, pulled deliberately and with a slow intent towards a place I couldn’t see. In the cart were two people, a young girl with a pale face and dark hair and an old women, laid on her back, dead and cold in her stillness. The girl looked up and through me, relucent and with a just formed smile, open to innocence as slowly and from everywhere the sky spilled white feathers. They fell as if they were snow and everyday. They fell against her eyes in a gentle assault. It seemed as if they fell in recognition, of the girl, of the dead women, of the moment. Quietly the cart began to fill with feathers, calamus and wisps of down gathered like fallen curls and the air thickened softly like a silenced howl.
When I awoke bizarrely my thoughts went straight to the rooks who circle each night and morning by my house beside the wood. Their incongruity struck me. In flight they flow shoal like, dipping invisible currents and soaring against the setting sun. On land they strut crudeness across my lawn, reduced to absurdity when they leave their element.
I wasn’t scared, I wanted to go back and see what happened, I thought of dying and of this poem….
Tendrils heading skyward
in a window sill rush until.
I want to kiss their tips ,
breathe on them to grow for summers sweet fullness
spilling heady scented into earthy evenings
as the sun dims and thick air blurs the edges of the wood.
A supplicants fingers reaching for
that other place
and their pushing feels like gaps in words
or the space between lines until
each thing is separate
in itself
and becomes a poem.
One night I found
some warm words
skin thick like heated milk.
I wrapped them around me
lapping up a fonted empathy
while they murmured
gentleness in my ears
stoke stroking a fuzziness
of hair cells and nuzzling
as if I had a newborns crown.
With tiny gestures in slow caresses
they built a shield,
a layer of comforts
placating like a blanket,
creamy covering insecurity
and banishing dark-rotted thoughts.
But when morning came
as I stretched back into my life
the world felt as sharp as ever.
I still gaped empty
like astonishment and wondered
how I ever got this far so raw.
