quite the place

September 12, 2017December 11, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

we ran a bar in Portugal
my husband won it in a card game
took some work, I can assure you
but we stuck at it, until it was quite the place

it had a lounge in the basement,
enamelled tiles of peacocks and stags
panelled snugs pierced like confessionals
chandeliers, candles of sandalwood

the restaurant was on the ground floor
mountains of fruit, flowers, and breads
a monastery altar, with gorgeous aquaria
so you could point the waiter to your fish

the guest rooms were all upstairs
sweetly scented, linens laundered
clawfoot tubs, filigree shutters
every window with a view of the sea

something happened, though
a war? coup? I don’t remember
we were persona non grata
sold it all for a centavo

Still, one doesn’t do it for the money
and in the end, isn’t it something like this trifle?
gaudy, perhaps, and rather too sweet
but it gets you through the soup

a matter of life and death

September 12, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I can see Jeremy through the window, sitting in an armchair in front of the television, his fingers laced across his bare chest, his eyes closed, the television bathing him in a flickering blue light. I watch for a moment, to make sure that he is actually breathing, and it’s not some animating trick of the light. But then he squeezes his eyes and wrinkles his nose, and adjusts the position of his head on the cushion. I tap on the window again.

Even though the screen is facing away from me, I can tell it’s an old David Niven film. That beautifully modulated, terribly sincere English accent. But you know, are you in love with anybody? No, no don’t answer that…

‘Jeremy? Jeremy! Can you come to the door? It’s Jim, from the hospital.’

He doesn’t respond. I knock again. When he seems to open one eye, I press my ID badge against the pane. It’s no use. He sinks back into what now appears to be a determined kind of sleep.

Not that I’m keen to go in. I’ve already been warned to wear shoe covers, and I can see through the window that the accounts of rotting food and piles of rubbish were no exaggeration. Anyway, even if I hadn’t seen the report, the windowsill would tell me all I needed to know. It’s littered with the husks of flies, lying on their backs with their legs crimped up, so large I’m guessing they just dropped from the air and died from sheer luxuriousness, whilst around them, hyperactive amongst the webby detritus on the windowsill, a multitude of jumpy, crawly things, sensing fresh blood, hurling themselves against the glass.

I take a step back, scratch my head, then try his mobile once again. I can hear it ringing somewhere amongst the trash, but it doesn’t rouse him anymore than my banging on the window.

Even though it looks from here as if he just doesn’t want to acknowledge my presence, I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s unwell with a hypo or something. But just as I try the handle of the door to see if it’s actually open, a woman coughs and says hello from the end of the path.

‘Have you come to see Jeremy?’

‘Yeah. I can see him sitting in his chair but he doesn’t seem to want to come to the door.’

‘I’m Sharon, his neighbour,’ she says, holding out her hand. ‘It’s probably down to me that you’ve been called.’

‘Oh?’

We chat in the cover of an overgrown buddleia.

‘We’ve been increasingly worried about Jezza,’ says Sharon. ‘He’s been on the slide for some time now, a good few years. Ever since Eric died. Then he lost his job, and things went from bad to worse. He hasn’t put a foot outside the house in eight months or more. If it wasn’t for us and number twenty, he’d have starved to death. He’s skin and bone as it is. And his house. Well, I mean, my god…’

‘I know. I can see through the window.’

‘It’s worse inside.’

‘I’ve got shoe covers.’

‘Yeah? I think you’re gonna need something more than shoe covers. You need one of them bio hazard suits you see in the films.’

She mimes one, holding her arms out to the side, rocking a little from side to side and puffing out her cheeks.

‘I could totally use it,’ I say. ‘But I’ll just have to make the shoe covers stretch.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘What does his doctor say?’

‘I mean – they have tried, bless ‘em. But it’s difficult. He was driving to the supermarket till recently.’

She turns to look at the wreck on the road outside the house, a mossy old Rover saloon, melting into its tires. ‘Mind you,’ she says, ‘I’m glad he’s done with all that. He was a menace. He used to go at five miles an hour, all the traffic building up behind him, going crazy. And he wouldn’t park so much as randomly stop and get out. It’s a shame. He used to be a nurse, funnily enough.’

I’m just about to ask Sharon some more questions when the front door opens and Jeremy pokes his head out.

‘Ah! Hello Jeremy!’ I say. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says in a voice as smooth and dry as grease-proof paper. I can see from here how emaciated he is, the ribs and bumps and hollows of his torso a testament to years of self-neglect. He opens the door wider and smiles unexpectedly, with a flare of yellowing stumps

‘How can I help?’ he says.

shed head

September 7, 2017March 9, 2018 ~ jim clayton ~ 8 Comments

I was thinking of writing a sequence of poems about Dad’s shed.

Okay. I know how lame that sounds. It’s not a subject that leaps up on the table with jazz hands. But honestly – there’s so much to say about that shed. It was so much more than a rickety old hut he knocked up one weekend. It became his place of retreat, his sanctuary. The one place he could be alone, and sit at his workbench with a cup of tea, and stare through the windows into the garden, and wonder how the hell he’d got there.

We’d started off in London, in a much smaller flat above a flower shop in Pimlico – which sounds ludicrously Ealing Studios, especially given the old woman who lived immediately below us, banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and running a pair of scissors down the prams in the hallway. When things got too much, Dad took a job that came with a house, at a printing works in Wisbech, Capital of the Fens, (I’m guessing when they awarded the title the only other place in the running was a cluster of apple shacks). The house was bigger than the London flat, but the kids kept coming – so relentlessly you’d think it was by some other, novel process, like vegetative budding – until we’d outgrown the new place but couldn’t afford anything else. So a three bedroomed house had to accommodate six children and two adults, and occasional visits from Grandma, sleeping on a zed-bed behind the sofa. If you imagine someone lifting the roof off, cramming us all in, then slamming the roof back on and sitting on it like the lid of an overfilled suitcase, arms and legs sticking out of the windows, you’d be close. If it wasn’t for the fact the garden backed onto woods, apple orchards and playing fields, we’d have gone completely insane.

So without anywhere else to go, the shed became Dad’s sacred retreat. And even though it was made of scavenged wood, with a door so thin if a wolf came by he wouldn’t need to huff and puff, he could force entry with one paw whilst innocently inspecting the nails on the other – in our minds it was something much more, something powerfully and spiritually aligned with the essence of Dad, as brightly as the rows of jars of odds and ends with their bolts and screws and panel pins and nails of every size, ingeniously fixed by their caps to the undersides of the shelves he’d put up, and his tools, sitting in their outlines like they’d burned their shapes onto the hardboard by sheer force of utility, and that single bulb hanging from the ceiling hook like a torturer’s light, with a rough tin shade cut from an oil can. All these things. So utterly DAD.

And then one day, he’s gone. The shed falls to ruin. And I drive over to pull it all down and throw it in a skip.

So maybe, somewhere amongst all the spiders and Pifco torches with the corroded points and the drawers filled with anonymous crap, maybe there is a poem or two to be salvaged.

But a sequence?

Speaking of poems about sheds

Here’s the latest:

There’s also a new post in ‘Voices’: Daisy D.

Thanks for reading!

sig

daisy d.

September 7, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

‘Are you alright with dogs?’ says Clara, throwing open the door anyway. It’s not a great risk, though. Daisy is the cutest dachshund I’ve ever seen. With her long, lugubrious expression and sad brown eyes, she could be a circuit judge passing sentence even though it breaks her heart to see, once again, what humanity has been reduced to.

‘Hello little one!’ I say, bending down to reach out my hand for her to sniff. She does so – with such a tragic air – then reverses so awkwardly you’d think she was being remotely controlled by someone in the next room with a poor view of the action. Somehow she manages it, though, and leads me through to the living room, her tiny legs making heavy weather of the three carpeted steps up to it.

Even if Clara hadn’t immediately explained her relation to Peggy, I would have known they were sisters. Whilst it’s apparent that Peggy is the one with all the health problems, still, they share the same square face, the same way of holding themselves, lightly upright, their hands just-so on the armrests of their chairs, the same level, mildly amused sparkle to their eyes.

I have to say, Daisy fits right in.

‘I don’t live here,’ says Clara, heading off any questions I might have on that front. ‘I make it over as often as I can, though. Which reminds me, Pegs – you’re almost out of washing tabs. I shall have to pop out and get you some more.’

‘Righto,’ says Peggy – and the matter settled to the satisfaction of both, they both turn to stare at me.

Daisy has temporarily absented herself from the room, but she soon comes bouncing back with something squeaky in her mouth – a well-chewed plastic hamburger – which she places neatly and carefully at my feet, and then backs up.

‘Who wants it?’ I say, picking it up and waving it in the air.

‘Well – Daisy, I should think,’ says Clara.

ken, cowboys & aliens

September 6, 2017September 6, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Ken has got one of his pipes on the go. In any other house it would stink the place up as comprehensively as a termite fumigation, but Ken is sitting in his usual seat by the open patio window, so most of it billows out harmlessly. As soon as he spots me striding across the lawn, he taps it out, and follows my progress towards him with a baleful air.

Ken has always reminded me of someone and it’s only now I realise who. At the very end of the closing credits of the first Star Trek series, after the stills of multi-coloured planetary landscapes, Kirk in some catacombs, or a ship coming in to dock – there was always a closing shot of a gaunt and quite terrifying figure in a robe, staring straight at you, as a Desilu production appeared on its forehead and the music thrilled to a conclusion.

That’s Ken.

To be fair, he’s friendlier than Balok, who, I only just learned, was actually a fearsome puppet used by cuddlier beings to test the friendliness of anyone coming to call. So whilst Balok’s slack-jawed, unblinking expression was designed to be scary, with Ken it’s more a symptom of his general bewilderment, and of the hours he spends sitting in his chair by the window smoking his pipe, watching old films on the TV.
‘How are you, Ken?’ I ask, struggling in through the window, past the drinks cabinet shaped like a globe, and a kitchen trolley stacked high with necessaries.
‘Terrible,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. What’s the worst thing, would you say?’
‘The worst thing?’
‘Yes. You know – are you in pain? D’you feel sick, dizzy…?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s just my bloomin’ memory.’
‘In what way?’
‘I can’t remember nothing. Not a thing.’
Carefully he places his smouldering pipe on the tray beside him, and folds his hands in his lap. ‘I’m old,’ he says. ‘I’m just one of them ones that goes on too long’
‘Well – let’s see what’s what,’ I say, putting my bag down and reaching for his folder. ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
‘No. I’m all right.’
‘Okay. So – I understand you had a fall this morning.’
‘Did I?’
‘Apparently. The ambulance came and picked you up. That’s why I’m here now. To see you’re okay.’
‘I don’t remember. If you say so.’
I scan through the notes and then put them aside.

There’s a western playing on the TV. No shoot-outs. Just some guys talking round a campfire, tipping their hats back, toeing the dirt, looking regretful.
‘Glenn Ford!’ says Ken, pointing at the set. ‘And there! That dodgy looking one, sneaking round the horses. Ernest Borgnine!’
He turns his sad eyes on me. ‘You see,’ he says. ‘The longer ago it was, the more chance I’ve got of remembering it.’
He reaches for his pipe, looks at me, then slowly puts it back again.
‘So I’d like you to explain to me if you can,’ he says. ‘Where’s the sense in that?’

genesis

September 6, 2017September 6, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

it was me
I did it
I destroyed Dad’s shed
(cut myself on a nail
goddammit
serves me right
blood all down my shirt
bloody shed murderer)

anyway, I had some right
being there at the begatting
forty years ago
Dad scavenging planks from pallets
at the printers where he worked
grimace & purpose of Noah
an eye on the sky
& a fiver for the lads
to drop it all round
and when he had enough
nailing them up, quick, ship-lap style
a couple of windows
real glass, putty of aniseed
speculative press in the corner
inviting a bridge of thumbs
across the divide

but now those hands
rest in the ground
empty as gloves
and here I am
bloodied and breathless in the ruined ribs of it all
the fucked felt, the fossilised tins
nails and screws and useless things
the wormy bench, the rusted saw
and look – a square of green rubber hermes
an offset image of Hermes
no doubt from the printing
of some catalogue
I take it inside
hold it up to a mirror
to read the backwards writing
only subsequently
do I become aware
of my face behind it
suddenly a lot like yours

growing disarray

September 3, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

only twice I saw my father cry
once, when he came home early from work
having quit his job
(there was a new manager;
they didn’t get on)
no doubt knowing his dream
of being a self-employed gardener, handyman,
anything other than a bloody printer’s clerk
was never going to happen, was it;
things were desperate
what with all these kids,
their constant squabbling,
getting through clothes & food
like nobody’s business;
but at least he didn’t piss his wages
up the wall like his father did,
coming home drunk,
fighting his eldest brother Ted,
throwing him down the stairs;
and what else could he do
the double-bed in the box room
a strip curtain for a door
(the normal door off
or you couldn’t get in or out),
the cost of school shoes, and everything else,
the weekly shop, the rent, electric, gas;
well – he’d just have to swallow his pride
there was nothing else for it, was there
he’d just have to go straight back
and apologise

once, watching the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show
the sketch in the Russian sled
where Ernie is in the back
singing ‘somewhere my love’ to Diane Solomon
and Eric is the driver
in a ridiculous hat and moustache
who keeps getting pulled out of his seat
by the horses
and climbing back up
over and over again
his hat on one side
his moustache hanging off
in growing disarray

leaping the loops

September 2, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

when Dad mowed the lawn
and I was a kid
I used to play a game
leaping the loops
made by the cable
as he walked up and down
‘Mind out!’
he’d shout
But I never did

These days, I’ve lost count
of all the electrical equipment I’ve seen:
sanders, drills,
computers, lathes,
compactors, fans.
The ventilator
Dad was on
before he was gone
from that particular machine

but you can over-think these things
so here are a few facts worth keeping:
there are no straight lines in nature;
energy can be neither created nor destroyed
but is interchangeable;
lawns get mown
when the grass has grown,
and loops are for leaping

his last tweet

August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I have no doubt his familiar was a jackdaw
he was so acquisitive, divergent,
distractable, odd.
increasingly he was living only
where he could see everything
and everything could see him
over time he built a chaotic but glittering nest
borrowing from other nests
stealing, more than once,
it has to be said
only to make his nest more beautiful
less obviously refractive
he died – suddenly, tragically off-cam –
from a strange but Snopes-verified condition:
multimediamegaly
the funeral cortege, I’m proud to reveal,
attracted almost a hundred followers

the mysterious mr manager

August 28, 2017March 9, 2018 ~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

There’s an elderly guy I see quite often over the woods. An intriguing character, neatly dressed in a shirt and tie, windcheater and slacks, carrying a shabby leather briefcase. It’s only when you look closer you can see the grimy shine to his clothes, and the kind of tan you get from being outside in all weathers, all year round. He has an odd, politely deranged look, like a manager who had a breakdown at the bank and ran off to live in the forest.

Earlier in the year I’d gone off the usual paths, looking for new things to photograph, and I’d come across an extemporary shelter, a tumble-down roundhouse made of scavenged rubbish bags, fallen timbers, tied together with garden string and Christmas tree lights. There was a shelf inside with a blue tin cup, a half-opened tin of pilchards, and a sleeping bag, rolled up and stashed out of the rain in a corner. It wouldn’t take much to image Mr Manager making all this, fussing with the string, tutting over the lights, then resting his head on his briefcase at night, lying awake in the dark, listening to the rustling in the undergrowth, or the pattering of the rain.

I don’t see Mr Manager all the time. When I do, he’s either sitting somewhere sunny or marching through the trees, talking to himself in that low and level way people do sometimes when their thoughts are breaking surface without them knowing. I always make a point of saying hello and waving, and although it’s taken a while, we’ve got to the point where he trusts me enough to smile and wave back.

Today when I saw him I was very tempted to go up and find out more. He was sitting on a fallen tree in one of his usual spots – a raised bank of grass overlooking the woods – and I was ambling along the bottom looking for mushrooms. I waved, and after a moment, he did, too. For a minute I thought I might walk up there and introduce myself, chat to him – about what, I wasn’t sure. Probably the weather, the time of year, the usual introductory stuff. I could ask him if he’d seen any fly agarics yet (that was one thing I was looking for today, although I have a feeling it might be too early in the season). And then in the way these things go, one thing would lead to another, and I could find out his story. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate, but something held me back. So I settled for a cheery ‘Good morning!’ and carried on.

I worried about it for a while. He could be a vulnerable adult, ‘fallen through the net’, at risk of self-neglect, dependent not just on the kindness of strangers, but on their professional conscience, their willingness to step in and make the necessary calls.

But then I pictured him sitting contentedly up on the grassy bank, sipping water from a bottle, looking around – about as happy as I was, (as far as I could tell), mooching around the young oaks at the fringe of the wood, looking for mushrooms.

And who was I kidding? It suited me better, not knowing the facts about Mr Manager. I was happier making up stories about his circumstances, happy one minute, sad the next. Which I suppose you could see as either a worrying dereliction of duty, a vote for individual self-determination, or a romantic vision of how a life could be lived, wholly outside the normal run of things, out in the woods, lying in the dark, listening to the rain.