you stopped me
on the promenade
politely asked me
for a picture
of you both
in front of
the observation tower
back to back!
umbrellas like weapons!
comedy hero pose!
there! great! done!
thanks so much!
excitedly taking back
your spongebob iphone
and waving it
in the air
marking the change
perhaps, from digital
truth to fiction,
happy tourists to
last couple standing
sword and spear
at the ready
behind you, the
red rippled sea
above, a vast
murmuration of dragons
wheeling on the
tower’s ruined spindle
calling and falling
in co-operative patterns
no-one could possibly
fake. Could they?
Author: jim clayton
the sarcophagus in the room
I knew I’d seen him before. He’s the father of someone I used to work with in the ambulance.
‘How’s Gracia? It’s a shame we lost touch.’
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Same as ever.’
‘Tell her I said hi.’
‘I will.’
So how’s her daughter, Lily?’
‘D’you mean Sofia?’
‘That’s it. Sofia. How’s Sofia?’
‘She’s fifteen now.’
‘Is she? Fifteen! Where does the time go?’
‘If I knew I’d go there, too.’
‘Is Gracia still in the ambulance?’
‘Nah. She works in a surgery. She’s a practice nurse.’
‘A practice nurse! That’s great!’
‘She likes it.’
I close the yellow folder, put it to one side, then pause a moment to chew the fat, hooking my hands around my knee, rocking forwards and back.
‘That must’ve been when I met you for the first time. Fifteen years ago, at Sofia’s first birthday party.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘In a function room over a swimming pool.’
‘I think it was at the Buddhist centre.’
‘Was it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Didn’t Gracia’s husband work in the fashion trade? Wasn’t he a buyer or something like that?’
‘He’s a dentist.’
‘A dentist?’
‘But they’re not together any more.’
‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’
He sighs and pulls his cardigan more tightly around him, even though the room is stiflingly hot.
‘I’m glad I’m on the mend,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a cruise coming up in a couple of months.’
‘Have you? How lovely! Where’re you going? Somewhere warm?’
‘Egypt.’
‘Great! I’d love to go to Egypt. The Valley of the Kings and all that.’
‘I’ve always been fascinated by the Ancient Egyptians. As you probably guessed when you walked in the door.’
I glance round the room – mostly at a well-stocked bookcase to his left, crammed with Egyptian art and history books, each shelf lined with a selection of soapstone figurines, cats and bulls and miniature obelisks, and on the very top shelf, either end of a row of smaller books with golden and black hieroglyphs on the spines, two pharaoh head bookends cast in resin.
‘I see what you mean!’
‘Not that,’ he says, ‘That!’ and nods to my right.
And for the first time I see it – a life-size replica of King Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus, standing floor to ceiling, brilliantly lit by four spots.
‘Oh!’ I say. ‘Wow! I totally missed it!
‘He takes a deep breath, sighs and shakes his head.
‘Well. Hidden in plain sight, then,’ he says. and folds his arms. ‘All done?’
commuter
I saw you on the drive to work
a buzzard on a fallen tree
perched on the raw stump of it
the cut where the chainsaw bit
and the tree crashed off to the side
you seemed so settled and sure
I thought maybe it was you
who’d felled the oak
and were resting from your labour
in that flashing second
I wondered if you saw me
perhaps before I reached the end of the road
you’d be shaking the rage from your metalled wings
leaping up, reaching out, flying again
hooked beak
burning eye
heading for the city
head to head
‘Shall I take my shoes off?’
‘No! Why? Why would you take your shoes off?’
‘I don’t know. It’s what I’d do at home…’
‘Are you at home?’
‘No.’
‘Is it raining outside?’
‘No.’
‘Then leave your shoes on and stop making such a fuss.’
‘Okay.’
Masha turns round in the narrow hallway and shuffles ahead of me down the hallway. I feel uneasy, like I’m being led into a cave by a ferocious old bear I’ve accidentally woken from hibernation.
‘Where shall I sit?’ I ask her, stepping into a bright and clinically tidy room.
‘Not in my chair!’ she says. ‘The sofa – perhaps.’
I put my bags down, take my jacket off.
‘There!’ I say. ‘That’s better!’
Masha sits on the edge of her armchair. She’d be an extraordinary figure in any circumstance – her hair dyed a rich, autumnal red and swept back off her head into something like a horn; her face slack and mournful – but illuminated as she is by the sunlight sparkling in through the window behind her, she seems hardly real at all, more like a brilliant, cartoon illustration from an article about a lonely clown. She reaches for a box of tissues, takes one out and starts folding it on her lap, over and over and over, into a tight little pad. I half expect her to reach for a pair of scissors, make a few adept snips, and unfold it to reveal a chain-word. грустный, perhaps. несчастье
‘How are you today?’ I say, throwing my hands wide, smiling as warmly as I can.
‘How do you think I am?’ she says. ‘Terrible. I am terrible.’
‘Oh! I’m very sorry to hear that.’
‘You’re sorry. Everyone is sorry. But no-one does a thing to help. So I am left here on my own, with nowhere to go, and nothing to do.’
And now I learn what the pad is for. She starts to cry – not an open sobbing so much as a discreet overflow of tears, oozing out through the myriad folds of her face, like her sadness was a water table of misfortune, high after a particularly long and inclement season.
Masha has a chronic condition that surgery hasn’t helped. She’s been in and out of hospital over the past few years, enduring several interventions that haven’t worked. This would be hard enough in itself, but the way Masha describes her experiences, it’s difficult to resist the feeling that her rather blunt way of talking has only made things worse.
‘…. an Asian consultant, he appeared at the bottom of the bed with a nurse, and he talked and talked without looking at me once, and at the end of all this nonsense he said Does that answer your question? So I said no it does not answer my question. I did not understand a single word you said. And I looked at the nurse, and she just clamped her mouth shut, like this… and shook her head from side to side, like this… and then they both went away. Later on I could hear them all talking about me in the office, because my bed was at the end of the ward. When the nurse passed my bed again I called her over. I told her I heard everything she said, and how she was a disgrace to her profession, and if I was in charge she could be sure I would throw her out, and good riddance. And she cried then, and everyone made a big fuss about it, but I’m not afraid of saying when something is wrong. Like yesterday, when I telephoned the hospital to find out why I had been forgotten, and the woman who answered the phone, she asked me what my problem was, and I told her I would not talk to her about it because what was she? A doctor? No – she was a silly little taker of messages who had no business asking intimate questions about someone’s health. And please would she fetch a manager, because I would not be spoken to in such a manner….’
And all the while Masha talks, she punctuates her sentences with a little dab of the tissue to the end of her nose.
She talks at great length. Her tone is curiously unsettling – self-assertive to the point of hostile, but with the occasional upward inflection that’s pitiful, almost childlike. She lists all the dreadful things that have happened to her, from rude reception staff and patronising community nurses to incompetent paramedics.
‘My sister said to me before I came to this country, she said Masha? You will find yourself in trouble over there. But I have never been afraid to speak the truth. I will not dress a thing up just so that people can feel okay.’
Masha pulls a fresh tissue from the box, and I take advantage of the pause to ask if she has any family nearby. She nods to a framed photo on the sideboard. It’s a photo of a young woman, forehead to forehead with a horse. On the left of the picture is the enormous eye of the horse; on the right, the young woman, her eyes closed, her left hand pressed affectionately to the angle of the horse’s jaw.
‘My niece, perhaps,’ says Masha, smoothing out the tissue on her lap and starting to fold it as meticulously as the first. ‘But she is busy.’
annie and the clocks
It’s hard to ignore the ticking of the clocks. Annie’s back room is crowded with them – a longcase over in the corner, something like a rickety old school clock on the wall, an ornate mantel clock on the sideboard, and an alarm clock on top of the fridge. I’m even conscious of the ticking of my fob watch, the smallest component in this dizzying syncopation of tocks and clicks and ticks. It feels as if I’m not just marking Annie’s pulse, but the passage of Time itself.
‘Alright?’ she says.
‘Fine’ I reply, releasing her wrist. ‘So far, so good.’
There’s a line of toys on the chair facing us: teddy bears of varying heights and condition, a rag doll, and squatting at the front, the monkey from the PG Tips adverts.
‘Quite an audience,’ I say, writing down the results.
‘Keeping an eye on you,’ she says, rolling down her sleeve. ‘So watch out!’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Seventy year or more. We came just after Lily died.’
‘Oh. Sorry to hear that. Who was Lily?’
‘Lily was our little girl. She died just before her seventh birthday.’
‘That’s awful. What happened?’
‘We couldn’t wake her up one morning. I knew something was terribly wrong, so I scooped her up and ran with her to the hospital. There was nothing they could do, though. We were too late.’
‘What did she die of?’
‘They didn’t say.’
‘Didn’t they do a post mortem?’
‘No. We never did find out. But now I know what it was. I’ve watched enough of them real-life hospital programmes. She died of a bleed on the brain.’
‘Had she had a fall or banged her head?’
‘No. Not that we ever knew. It was probably just something she was born with.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Well.’
Annie reaches forward and sets the monkey a little more upright, arranging his arms neatly in his lap, and patting his head.
‘We had to move,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t have any more children. But we did alright. Eventually. And now Harold’s gone I don’t know what to do with myself.’
She smiles.
‘The thing is – I’m tired and I just want to go n’all. I’m ninety-four and not a sausage out of place. My nephews and nieces, I know what they’re thinking. They see me shuffling around this empty old house and they think what a waste! Not that I blame them. Truth is – I completely agree! It’s all gone on too long. If you ask my honest opinion, it’s high time I went!’
a pocket full of pits
Jack is sitting at the kitchen table, the bright morning sunshine intensifying the yellows and greens of his tracksuit, and the silvery lustre of his magnificent, Edwardian, handlebar moustache.
‘You don’t look ninety-five’ I tell him. ‘If you’d have said seventy-five, maybe’
‘Who do I make the cheque out to?’ he asks, then takes a sip of tea. ‘No – really – that’s most awfully kind of you to say so,’ he adds, carefully sweeping his moustache for drips, once to the left and once to the right.
There’s a helium balloon tied to the corner of his chair.
‘Happy Birthday for the other day!’ I tell him.
‘Thank you,’ says Jack, closing his eyes and nodding. ‘D’you know – the funny thing is – I never really celebrated birthdays. They used to pass me by, quite unnoticed.’
‘That’s a shame’
‘It just never seemed that important to me. Perhaps that’s why I’ve reached this preposterous age. I lost track of how old I was sometime around thirty.’
‘Well – whatever the reason, I’m very impressed. I hope I’m as good when I get to ninety-five. If I ever do.’
‘Oh – you’ll be fine,’ he says, finishing off the tea and wiping his moustache again. ‘Of course, there are no guarantees.’
‘Did you score any good presents?’
‘Do you know I can’t remember!’ he says, then folds his arms and leans back. ‘I tell you one birthday present I do remember, though. The best one I ever had. No doubt you’ll think me quite daft.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was nineteen-forty one. I was eighteen or thereabouts. On a warship somewhere in the Atlantic. Well – one of the chaps got wind of the fact it was my birthday. Why didn’t you tell us he said. We’d have made a fuss. And he hurried off. The next thing I knew, he’d come back with an enormous tin of plums. Greengages, in syrup. He’d been to the kitchen, you see, and made a fuss about it being my birthday and so on, and that’s all they had spare. So we took the plums up on deck, to the sunniest spot we could find. And we sat down and we ate them with our fingers, one after the other. It doesn’t sound like much, but it meant the world to me.’
‘I like plums.’
‘Yes, well, there were rather a lot,’ he says. ‘You’d have been alright.’
‘That reminds me of a story about my Uncle John,’ I tell him. ‘He’d been fighting in Italy when he got captured and thrown in a POW camp.’
‘That’s a shame’ says Jack. ‘Was he a marine?’
‘No. Regular army. Anyway, the story goes he escaped from the camp and fought with the partisans.’
‘Good man!’
‘Yeah – but the thing is, when I asked Auntie Ollie about it, she said that wasn’t what happened at all. She said he shacked up with a farmer’s daughter and finished the war picking peaches. It’s a shame I don’t get the chance to see her more often. She’s all the way down in Exmouth.’
Jack looks startled.
‘I heard the exact same story!’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes! My wife comes from Devon. One of those villages where you can’t walk five paces without bumping into a second cousin or what have you. Now, Rachel’s brother – one of her brothers – he disappeared in the war and they all thought the worst. But then he turned up in the Woolpack with nothing more than a grin and a pocket full of peach pits.’
Jack strokes his moustache, then slaps the table.
‘I’ll bet you a pound to a pinch of snuff it was the same farm!’ he says.
sold
Rachel brings her tea over and sits with me.
‘What’ve you been up to?’ I ask her.
‘House hunting’ she says.
‘How’s that going?’
‘Terrible. I had the worst day the other day. I saw nine houses.’
‘Nine?’
‘I know. I just booked out the entire morning and went’
‘Did Ben go?’
‘Ben? No! He can’t stand it. But you play to your strengths. I’m what you might call the triage nurse in this relationship, especially as far as houses go. I sift out the crap. Which is all of them.’
‘It’s a thing, that’s for sure.’
‘I had the weirdest estate agent show me round. She was only young. About twenty, I’d guess, her hair all piled up. And she had this heavy makeup that stopped at her chin, circling her features, which made her look a bit like a giant egg. I couldn’t help asking about it. I do it like that so I don’t get raped she said’
‘What a thing to say!’
‘I know! She was wearing an extraordinary outfit. White fur jacket split at the sides, bright pantaloon trousers and leather boots. Although she was barefoot when I met her at the office. She was sitting on a chair digging her toes into the carpet. Mmm she said. Feel that!’
‘Weird!’
‘That’s not the half of it. When we got into the car she said she knew right off we’d get along because she gets a feeling about people. She said she thought I was a florist, and when I said I was a nurse, she said yeah, I’m not surprised, because you totally look like one. And anyway, she said, I’m just glad you’re not like the usual stiffs I have to show round.’
‘Wow!’
‘And then there were the houses. Honestly, Jim – it was like a roll call for the damned. The first one was a bungalow right the other side of town, down by the river. I mean literally by the river. On the flood plain. Don’t worry, she said. It only floods when it’s tidal. What – you mean like twice a day? I said. You’re up some steps so you’re good, she said. Anyway, it’s an unadopted road, which people love. It means you can do what you want with it. I reckon it’s more that the council know it floods and have washed their hands, I said, but she ignored that and showed me round. A dismal, lightless hole that should’ve been condemned, let alone put on the market. No? she said – okay – I’ll show you some more.
The next one was worse. It had this terrible atmosphere, creepy and sad, like someone had died or been murdered. I asked her if anyone was living there at the moment because I couldn’t tell. There was a mattress on the floor, and the sheets were thrown back, odd things scattered about. She said yeah, a woman and her kid. She’s getting divorced or something. Honestly, Jim – I wanted to start taking some details so I could call social services. I mean – it was getting a bit like work. Anyway, that was no good, so we drove over to the next house and out of the blue she asked me if liked macaroni cheese? I said yep, love it. I said we’re vegetarian, so we have macaroni cheese quite a lot. Have you tried it with bacon on the top? she said, because that is the absolute nuts. And I said well…no, because we’re vegetarian. So she said did I know why Muslims don’t eat bacon? I said I thought there was something in the Quran about it, and she said yeah – it’s because they eat their own shit.
The next house she showed me had an enormous crack right down the middle. I mean huge, like if you slammed the door it would fall apart in two halves. Oh that? she said. That’s just subsidence. I sold a house exactly like this the other day for four-fifty. Then she laughed and said there’s no way they’ll be able to resell. I wanted to say to her – you do know that’s not a good story to be telling me in this situation, right? But what was the point?
The last house she showed me belonged to this elderly couple. The estate agent stayed outside stomping up and down having some huge argument on her phone whilst I looked round. It was run-down, like all the others, but of course I was going through the rooms making lots of encouraging noises like you do. Oh – I love what you’ve done in the bathroom. Those brown tiles are really so, I don’t know, quirky – kind of thing. The elderly guy followed behind me the whole time, breathing down my neck, which was unnerving. Every time I turned round he was right in my face, smiling. I went into the bedroom and there was this enormous cactus in a pot. I mean gigantic – the same height as me. I turned round and there he was, smiling away. I can see you like my phallic cactus he said. And that’s when the estate agent came in. What d’you think, she said, clapping her hands. Sold?’
stuck
we tried to get to there
we really did
but the motorway was shut
and we got royally stuck
in a tailback
that merged in turn
ineffective
as a fucked zip
I watched the jam ahead
simmering into oblivion
the queue behind
slowly replacing the bones of my back
with a line of tiny replica cars
and a tiny replica me
hand to wheel, to brow, to wheel
(caption on box:
the man who missed the funeral)
‘There’s no way we’re gonna make it’
you said
calling ahead
‘Don’t worry’ you said
‘Lots of people are in the same boat’
I wish it had been a boat
we might have had some hope
of getting round
that unholy fuck-up
I wound the window down
breathed the sharp and careless air
and tried to think outside the bollocks
the pattern of shadows on that crash barrier
for instance
now – I wouldn’t have seen THAT
if there hadn’t been a diesel spillage
closing all three lanes
and diverting everything
through someone’s garden
I thought about you
how you took your coffee
how you used to smoke
screwing up your eyes
your head on one side
reaching for a tap of ash
like a declaration of victory
Cuss oukhtel hayat!
You tell me!
What CAN you make of it?
Apple pie?
the comfort of fossils
there’s a monument over the playing fields
to a doctor who found a bone
(I’m simplifying, of course
there’s so much more to say
about the world of Victorian scientists,
how they would squabble like lizards
over the fossilised remains of – well – lizards)
the doctor got a few things wrong, poor chap
he thought the bone was some kind of horn
when it was actually a thumb
but it’s difficult when everyone down in the quarry
thinks you’re completely insane, and
no-one has any idea what you’re talking about
because Jurassic World
won’t be available to rent online
for another two hundred years
looking back it gives me great comfort
to think of the iguanodon
whose thumb (not horn) it was
wading up to its chops in the soupy delta
about where the rugby pitch now is
swiping up a half ton of weed
and methodically chewing
as it watches pterosaurs
wheel and turn in a planeless sky
what do dreams even MEAN?
I keep a dream diary
(have I lost you already?)
this was the entry for last night:
I’m in an ancient forest
desperate to take a picture
the trees there are big
skin like saltwater crocs
I almost break a leg
scrabbling round the roots
suddenly there’s a shadow
I think maybe bear or deer
I hold the camera ready
turns out it’s the ranger
on a horse, sneaking up
‘hold it buster’ he cries
I run, the ranger
shouting obscenities
as I duck under a fence
cut to the next scene
I have to get some sick people to hospital
in an ambulance you steer with your mind
and two bent sticks
I don’t do too bad
turns out, it’s like dowsing
I just have to remember
what thirsty feels like
and it takes me straight there
in a crazy, sawtooth line
through the hooting snarl-ups
to the cooler with no cups
back of the ER
jim clayton 