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PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

(Honno Fiction 2005)

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JANUARY


1


'You know who this is'.
The removal man stops in his tracks and stares at me. He's carrying a cardboard crate full of crockery. He's got another job in two hours. It's not a good time for my mother-in-law to start telling him he knows who I am.
Gill nods towards me, watching his reaction. She's wearing her little smile. Her 'I'm about to tell you something that'll knock you for six' smile. I stand there in the hall, scrunched newspaper in one hand, a bedside lamp in the other, trying to look like someone worth knowing. Trying to look like my mother. The removal man looks blank. His cardboard crate is slipping. Gill delivers her punchline:
'This is Marian Westwood's daughter.'
The removal man adjusts his grip on the crate and searches for clues. He assesses my woolly hair, my acne-scarred cheeks, the stains on my sweatshirt, the bagging knees of my jeans. He says,
'Well, I'll be buggered. Where d'you want this lot?'
He hasn't got the foggiest idea who Marian Westwood might be. I could hug him.

At six that evening the removal man and his mate finally finish unloading, three hours late. He has to ring the office and arrange another van for the next client. I give him all the cash from my purse as a tip. He twitches his head in the direction of the hospital, making his jowls tremble.
'Nice neighbours' he says. 'Catch me living next to that lot.' He leans against the bannister and seems ready for a chat. 'They've just shut that evil bastard in there, haven't they? The Face-Slasher? Saw it in the paper.' He lets the coins dribble out of his hand into his overall pocket. 'Nurse, are you?'
I shake my head.
'No, I'm not on the staff.' The removal man looks slightly alarmed. 'My mother-in-law used to work there' I say, to reassure him, but he's suddenly eager to go.

When they've gone I rest against my new front door and look at the fallout of boxes and bags and heaped coats on the floor. I wonder whether the Face-Slasher had any belongings to unpack when he moved in up the road. Gill is in the living room, ferreting through a crate.
'I told you to do a big chuck-out before packing up' she calls. She appears at the door, wiping her glasses on her shirt.
'Can't find the kettle. Didn't you put it on top?'
'Forgot. Sorry.'
'Ne-ver mind!' she sings, extending the last vowel with an impressive vibrato. 'We'll nip across to my place for tea.'

My life has stalled. Three months ago it was mayhem; unpaid bills, unopened envelopes, unsold stock multiplying across every surface and into every space. Our business in a state of collapse, my husband in a state of denial. Life lurched and staggered from one day to the next. One morning Bobby sat drinking coffee among the detritus and said,
'I've got a few ideas. Contacts. I might go and chase them up... Gareth,' he called over his shoulder, 'do you want a lift to school?'
He drove our son to the school gate, called goodbye and U-turned away, narrowly missing a bus. That afternoon Gareth came home on the tube.
'Didn't Dad pick you up, then?' I asked, but my son doesn't bother answering stupid questions. Bobby didn't come back. He phoned late that night and told me not to worry.
'It's all going very well' he said.
'What's going very well?'
'We're going to be fine' said Bobby.
'I'm on the move,' he said. 'I'll phone you when I can.' Then he said 'Don't worry' again.
So I didn't. I didn't throw his belongings into the street, or report him missing, or send out a search party. Why would I? We were going to be fine. But each day that Bobby didn't return lost a bit more momentum. Sounds stretched and slowed to a growl. Blood settled and congealed in my veins. I sat on my bed or at the table while hours passed around me. My limbs forgot to respond to my brain, then my brain forgot how to instruct them. After 10 days Gareth phoned his grandmother and asked her what to do. Gill took charge. She spoke to the creditors. She spoke to valuers and agents. She put a deposit on a cottage that was up for rent on the hospital estate. She arranged for Gareth's transfer to another school. She rang me with a progress report.
'But his A-levels... ' I whined. 'He can't change schools now... '
'Gareth will cope' announced Gill. Gareth wasn't the problem.

As she opens the door to her house, Gill says,
'Don't bother to take off your shoes. The place is a mess.'
Until she says that it hasn't occurred to me to take off my shoes. I check the soles of my disintegrating trainers and wonder what to do. If I start fumbling with the laces now she'll lose her patience altogether. I keep them on.
But of course Gill's place is never a mess. It's comfortable, mildly shabby, stylishly cluttered, but never a mess. Bigger than my new home, but designed along the same lines: one long sitting room and a kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. A huge armchair bleached with sunspots gulps me up in the corner. Gill bustles into the kitchen, door-keys jangling.
'I don't know why you gave that guy such a huge tip' she comments. 'They weren't up to much if you ask me'.
I hate the way she says 'guy'.
'We'll start on the crates tomorrow' she calls from the kitchen. 'Get things straight for Gareth. Three days-should be plenty of time'.
Gareth is staying with his friend Zek. Short for Ezekiel. His parents aren't particularly religious, apparently; they just fancied the name. They're good people, decent, sympathetic. They offered to let Gareth lodge with them for the last two years of school, but Gareth turned them down.
I lever myself upright as Gill brings the tea. It's piping hot but soothing; my muscles begin to relax. I ache all over from physical effort - a refreshing change, after months of stagnation. Maybe Gill was right, and this move was the sensible thing to do. Maybe I'll get used to it. After all, Gill has lived here for years, even after retiring, and seems almost fond of the place. Bobby had an uncle, a bit of a wild card, who spent some time here many years ago. I suppose that gives it a sort of family feel.
'Gareth will be fine' says Gill, imagining she's read my mind. 'Term will kick off soon and before you know it he'll be in the swing of it-new crowd, new girls, new vices to try.'
She makes it sound perfectly normal. As she keeps pointing out, we're better off here than surrounded by uncharted cranks and their nasty habits, masked by the city scrum. Here, at least, the criminals are under triple lock.
Sorry - not criminals. Patients. Gill corrects me every time. These are troubled people. Not monsters. And besides I never need to set eyes on any one of them.


THE PIER GLASS

(Honno Fiction 2001)

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PART ONE





They'll tell you that poetry and vision are the same. It isn't true. I was set to poetry before I could walk. It was my trade and my burden. It seeped into my blood and bones, through the long, red reflections of my instructor's lash. I built verses in the grate. I plucked rhymes from the chickens. I twisted and arched my tongue around the Themes and Adjectives, until they came trotting together at my command. I learned to howl odes and dirges across hushed halls and drunken brawls, as I learned to stop crying for my mother.
My gift of prophecy came much later.
I can't mark the day it came, exactly. My memory of events is a little confused. I know it was summer. I know it was cold - it was the damp, early cold, and the ache between my eyes, that coaxed me out of my dream. I lay there, cramped and weary, hoping to sink back into sleep. I shifted, creaking, on the loose-strung bed. Or hissing on the straw-covered floor, maybe. Or feeling for the sacking that had rucked itself into a wedge in the small of my back. I don't know. I've slept in so many corners and sung under so many roofs. Fire-lit parlours, latticed with shadow and harpstring. Bare, dripping outbuildings, in among the spit and the dogshit. I've eaten roast venison and mutton cawl. I've tasted good claret and spluttered over bad ale. I've rested among linen and lavender, and settled among the retainers' grunts and farts. I can't recall, precisely, the time or the place.
But I can remember the dream.
It was the usual dream: the scene that had thrilled and plagued me night after night, for months.
A modest hearth. Logs crackling in the heat. I'm performing - telling tales; brave heroes, impossible tasks, magical creatures, all cascade from my mouth and whirl around my head, bright as stars, mingling with stray smoke from the fire. An angel with flame-gold hair flies after them, catching at them, turning and diving, chirruping and laughing.
I knew where this was - in a farmhouse, on a hill overlooking my birthplace. I had been welcomed there one infernal evening, the previous winter. The young farmer and his family took me in from the rain, and I repaid them with my best and longest stories. While his wife tucked their younger children into a crib and a truckle bed, one daughter - shy, wary - hid behind the settle. I began to spin my web. A terrible curse; a woman who became a bird; a potion that revived the dead.
And it caught her up.
Gradually she crept closer. Her eyes grew wider. She was no more than eight or nine summers old, with hair the colour of an autumn sun. She had invaded my sleep ever since.
So yes, I remember my dream. But when it slithered away, and I opened my eyes on that momentous day in August, where was I? I can only guess. The chances are that I breathed in the stink of sweat and stale vomit as I sat, swaying, among the ranked and mumbling heaps. I probably stood up, careful not to knock against these bellied thugs who sleep with their swords, and picked my way out into the open.
And now it doesn't matter where I was, or which verses had earned my supper there. Because the morning mist cleared, and the sharp, green, dank air slapped me awake, and the smell of grass and elderflower and sheep-shit and fresh running water was as vivid as the angel in my dream. I looked out across sodden black hills and shifting oakwoods. Words were already jostling, unbidden, into my head. Sent by the devil to gabble across the peace. In another part of my mind I searched for a suitable tunnel into the woods, where I could go and relieve my groaning guts. And beyond all that, beyond everything, a low melody: the first, whispered traces of a promise. The beginning of my first vision.
As I stood there, fighting the words and the nausea, the ground dropped away under my feet, and I rose like a kite. My insides seemed to lag behind as I soared - over the courtyard, the retainers' hall, the manor house. The oakwoods shrank away beneath me. I flew on, with no body, no breath to anchor me. I saw the accelerating retreat of mountains, heather, grass and rock, roads and walls, a shepherd and his pinprick flock, cringeing hamlets, glass rivers - all appearing and vanishing like spirits within my view. And then, snaking across the fields below, a slow, silent beast, glinting with blade and musket, warty with carts and horses, flicking its tongue of thread-thin banners.
An army on the march.
I saw the soldiers, far below. I saw one face among them, turned upwards to trace my flight. I saw myself.
This was my new-found talent: to condense the world, to squeeze space and time into the little circles of my eyes.
I have never deluded myself. As a poet I was not one of the big boys. Never a Guto'r Glyn or a Dafydd ab bloody Edmwnd. I could walk the skin off my feet, kiss a hundred arses, flatter a thousand fools. But I would never be cwtched and moithered in sheep's wool, or stuffed with sweetmeats at the table of some preening friend of the King's. I could work a crowd, mind. I could sing of our Great Dead Leaders, of the Glories Yet to Come, of Hiraeth - spinning out the first syllable, biting off the last, wringing the tears from crab-faced soldiers and milky lordlings alike. I knew my business, and I knew my audience. I could sneer at the Mad Boar Richard, or swoon over the Avenging Tudor Angel as required for my patriotic host Dafydd ap Ednyfed ap Cadwaladr ap Einion ap Maredudd. And in the morning I could bow to the same respectable host, address him as David Meredith Esquire and wish him well in his bid for a decent English title. And believe me, my words were as genuine in sunlight as they were in torchlight.
I had my craft. It carried me from day to day, and that was all I demanded of it. But on that summer morning, at that nameless hall, I was given the glimpse of another life. I swear to you by all that's sacred: I had seen the rippling, scaly back of Tudor's army. And as I soared noiselessly over it, I had seen my own face, squinting up at the clouds.
A henchman's voice brought me spiralling back down to earth. He'd come clanking out to piss in the corner. He hunched his back, and swilled his phlegm around a bit, and then said, Had I heard the latest? Word was that Tudur had left his Breton nest and landed somewhere near Aberdaugleddau, and was on his way north to fight the King.
I tell you, my flesh sparkled: icy drops along my fingertips and up the back of my neck.
He said, from what he'd heard, it was a sorry showing - just a handful of poltroons who'd make poor meat for the King's dogs. (This from a man who, only hours before, had roared himself hoarse with ecstasy, as I pleaded with Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, to release our land from slavery and our hearts from sorrow.) He said, Their heads may get to London, but only on stakes. On any other day I would have agreed with him. I'd done my battle-crying the previous night, and been fed and watered for it: there was no call for passion in the chilly dawn. But that day was different. I was no longer merely a poet. I was a seer. I knew where my future lay and I was going to claim it.
By the time dusk fell, I had walked as far as Cefn-y-Bont. The sun set. Great bards sang praises in the warmth of back-country palaces, and grew a bit fatter cooing for their Tudor saviour. Well, let them weave their verses. I'd done with that. I was beginning to taste life. I panted like a lover as I followed the route I'd mapped out, that morning, from the sky. I licked my scabby lips and ignored my churning stomach. I scrambled up a track, pausing to watch a hail of rubble clatter away from my feet and bounce with the stream over a ridge and into the darkening valley below.





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