by Fleur Adcock
recurrent horror makes its call upon me:
I dream one of my sons is lost or dead,
or that I am trapped in a tunnel underground;
but my scream is enough to recall me to my bed.
Sometimes, indeed, I congratulate myself
on the nice precision of my observation:
on having seen so vividly a certain
colour; having felt the sharp sensation
of cold water on my hands; the exact taste
of wine or peppermints. I take a pride
in finding all my senses operative
even in sleep. So, with nothing to hide,
I amble through my latest entertainment
again, in the bath or going to work,
idly amused at what the night has offered;
unless this is a day when a sick jerk
recalls to me a sudden different vision:
I see myself inspecting the vast slit
of a sagging whore; making love with a hunchbacked
hermaphrodite; eating worms or shit;
or rapt upon necrophily or incest.
And whatever loathsome images I see
are just as vivid as the pleasant others.
I flush and shudder: my God, was that me?
Did I invent so ludicrously revolting
a scene? And if so, how could I forget
until this instant? And why now remember?
Furthermore (and more disturbing yet)
are all my other forgotten dreams like these?
Do I, for hours of my innocent nights,
wallow content and charmed through verminous muck,
rollick in the embraces of such frights?
And are the comic or harmless fantasies
I wake with merely a deceiving guard,
as one might put a Hans Andersen cover
on a volume of the writings of De Sade?
Enough, enough. Bring back those easy pictures,
Tibet or antelopes, a seemly lover,
or even the black tunnel. For the rest,
I do not care to know. Replace the cover.
Gas
1
You recognise a body by its blemishes:
moles and birthmarks, scars, tattoos, oddly formed earlobes.
The present examination must be managed
in darkness, and by touch alone. That should suffice.
Starting at the head, then, there is a small hairless
scar on the left eyebrow; the bridge of the nose flat;
crowded lower teeth, and a chipped upper canine
(the lips part to let my fingers explore); a mole
on the right side of the neck.
No need to go on:
I know it all. But as I draw away, a hand
grips mine: a hand whose thumb bends back as mine does, whose
third finger bears the torn nail I broke in the door
last Thursday; and I feel these fingers check the scar
on my knuckle, measure my wrist’s circumference,
move on gently exploring towards my elbow…
2
It was gas, we think.
Insects and reptiles survived it
and most of the birds;
also the larger mammals – grown
cattle, a few sheep,
horses, the landlord’s Alsatian
(I shall miss the cats)
and, in this village, about a
fifth of the people.
It culled scientifically
within a fixed range,
sparing the insignificant
and the chosen strong.
It let us sleep for fourteen hours
and wake, not caring
whether we woke or not, in a
soft antiseptic
silence. There was a faint odour
of furniture-wax.
We know now, of course, more or less
what happened, but then
it was rather puzzling: to wake
from a thick dark sleep
lying on the carpeted floor
in the saloon bar
of the Coach and Horses; to sense
others lying near,
very still; and nearest to me
this new second self.
3
I had one history until today:
now I shall have two.
No matter how nicely she may contrive
to do what I do
there are two hearts now for our identical
blood to pass through.
Nothing can change her. Whether she walks by my side
like a silly twin
or dyes her hair, adopts a new accent,
disguises her skin
with make-up and suntan, she cannot alter
the creature within.
She sees with my imperfect vision, she wears
my fingerprints; she is made
from me. If she should break the bones I gave her,
if disease should invade
her replicas of my limbs and organs,
which of us is betrayed?
4
How was she torn out of me? Was it the
urgent wrench of birth, a matter of hard
breathless shoving (but there is no blood) or
Eve from Adam’s rib, quick and surgical
(but there is no scar) or did I burgeon
with fleshy buds along my limbs, growing
a new substance from that gas I drank in,
to double myself ? Did I perform the
amoeba’s trick of separating into
two loose amorphous halves, a heart in each?
Or was my skin slipped off like the skin of
a peanut, to reveal two neat sections,
face to face and identical, within?
Yes, we had better say it was like this:
for if it was birth, which was the mother?
Since both have equal rights to our past, she
might justly claim to have created me.
5
It is the sixth day
now, and nothing much has happened.
Those of us who are
double (all the living ones) go
about our business.
The two Mrs Hudsons bake bread
in the pub kitchen
and contrive meals from what is left –
few shops are open.
The two Patricks serve in the bar
(Bill Hudson is dead).
I and my new sister stay here –
it seems easiest –
and help with the housework; sometimes
we go for walks, or
play darts or chess, finding ourselves
not as evenly
matched as we might have expected:
our capacity
is equal, but our moods vary.
These things occupy
the nights – none of us needs sleep now.
Only the dead sleep
laid out in all the beds upstairs.
They do not decay,
(some effect of the gas) and this
seemed a practical
and not irreverent means of
dealing with them. My
dead friend from London
and a housemaid from the hotel
lie in the bedroom
where we two go to change our clothes.
This evening when we
had done our hair before dinner
we combed and arranged
theirs too.
6
Saturday night in the bar; eight couples
fill it well enough: twin schoolteachers, two
of the young man from the garage, four girls
from the shop next door, some lads from the farms.
These woodenly try to chat up the girls,
but without heart. There is no sex now, when
each has his undeniable partner,
and no eyes o
r hands for any other.
Division, not union, is the way we
must reproduce now. Nor can one think with
desire or even curiosity
of one’s identical other. How lust
for what is utterly familiar?
How place an auto-erotic hand on
a thigh which matches one’s own? So we chat
about local events: the twin calves born,
it seems, on every farm; the corpse
in a well, and the water quite unspoiled;
the Post Office reopened, but with no
telephone links to places further than
the next town – just as there are no programmes
on television or radio, and
the single newspaper that we have seen
(a local one) contained only poems.
No one cares much for communication
outside this circle. I am forgetting
my work in London, my old concerns (we
laugh about the unpaid rent, the office
unmanned, the overdue library books).
They did a good job, whoever they were.
7
Two patterns of leaves above me: laurel
rather low, on my right,
and high on my left sycamore; a sky
pale grey: dawn or twilight.
Dew on my face, and on the gravel path
on which I am lying.
That scent of wax in the air, and a few
birds beginning to sing.
My mind is hazed by a long sleep – the first
for days. But I can tell
how it has been: the gas caught us walking
on this path, and we fell.
I feel a crystal, carolling lightness.
Beside me I can see
my newest self. It has happened again:
division, more of me.
Four, perhaps? We two stand up together,
dazed, euphoric, and go
to seek out our matching others, knowing
that they should be two, now.
My partner had been walking, I recall,
a little way ahead.
We find her. But there is only one. I
look upon myself, dead.
8
This is becoming ridiculous:
the gas visits us regularly,
dealing out death or duplication.
I am eight people now – and four dead
(these propped up against the trees in the
gardens, by the gravel walk). We eight
have inherited the pub, and shall,
if we continue to display our
qualities of durability,
inherit the village, God help us.
I see my image everywhere –
feeding the hens, hoeing the spinach,
peeling the potatoes, devising
a clever dish with cabbage and eggs.
I am responsible with and for
all. If B (we go by letters now)
forgets to light the fire, I likewise
have forgotten. If C breaks a cup
we all broke it. I am eight people,
a kind of octopus or spider,
and I cannot say it pleases me.
Sitting through our long sleepless nights, we
no longer play chess or poker (eight
identical hands, in which only
the cards are different). Now, instead,
we plan our death. Not quite suicide,
but a childish game: when the gas comes
(we can predict the time within a
margin of two days) we shall take care
to be in dangerous places. I can
see us all, wading in the river
for hours, taking long baths, finding
ladders and climbing to paint windows
on the third storey. It will be fun –
something, at last, to entertain us.
9
Winter. The village is silent –
no lights in the windows, and
a corpse in every snowdrift.
The electricity failed
months ago. We have chopped down half
the orchard for firewood,
and live on the apples we picked
in autumn. (That was a fine
harvest-day: three of us fell down
from high trees when the gas came.)
One way and another, in fact,
we are reduced now to two –
it can never be one alone,
for the survivor always
wakes with a twin.
We have great hopes
of the snow. At this moment
she is standing outside in it
like Socrates. We work shifts,
two hours each. But this evening
when gas-time will be closer
we are going to take blankets
and make up beds in the snow –
as if we were still capable
of sleep. And indeed, it may
come to us there: our only sleep.
10
Come, gentle gas
I lie and look at the night.
The stars look normal enough –
it has nothing to do with them –
and no new satellite
or comet has shown itself.
There is nothing up there to blame.
Come from wherever
She is quiet by my side.
I cannot see her breath
in the frost-purified air.
I would say she had died
if so natural a death
were possible now, here.
Come with what death there is
You have killed almost a score
of the bodies you made
from my basic design.
I offer you two more.
Let the mould be destroyed:
it is no longer mine.
Come, then, secret scented double-dealing gas.
We are cold: come and warm us.
We are tired: come and lull us.
Complete us.
Come. Please.
THE SCENIC ROUTE
(1974)
The Bullaun
‘Drink water from the hollow in the stone…’
This was it, then – the cure for madness:
a rock with two round cavities, filled with rain;
a thing I’d read about once, and needed then,
but since forgotten. I didn’t expect it here –
not having read the guidebook;
not having planned, even, to be in Antrim.
‘There’s a round tower, isn’t there?’ I’d asked.
The friendly woman in the post office
gave me directions: ‘Up there past the station,
keep left, on a way further – it’s a fair bit –
and have you been to Lough Neagh yet?’ I walked –
it wasn’t more than a mile – to the stone phallus
rising above its fuzz of beech trees
in the municipal gardens. And beside it,
this. I circled around them,
backing away over wet grass and beechmast,
aiming the camera (since I had it with me,
since I was playing tourist this afternoon)
and saw two little boys pelting across.
‘Take our photo! Take our photo! Please!’
We talked it over for a bit –
how I couldn’t produce one then and there;
but could I send it to them with the postman?
Well, could they give me their addresses?
Kevin Tierney and Declan McCallion,
Tobergill Gardens. I wrote, they stood and smiled,
I clicked, and waved goodbye, and went.
Two miles away, an hour later,
heading dutifully through the damp golf-course
to Lough Neagh, I thought about the rock,
wanting it. Not for my o
wn salvation;
hardly at all for me: for sick Belfast,
for the gunmen and the slogan-writers,
for the poor crazy girl I met in the station,
for Kevin and Declan, who would soon mistrust
all camera-carrying strangers. But of course
the thing’s already theirs: a monument,
a functionless, archaic, pitted stone
and a few mouthfuls of black rainwater.
Please Identify Yourself
British, more or less; Anglican, of a kind.
In Cookstown I dodge the less urgent question
when a friendly Ulsterbus driver raises it;
‘You’re not a Moneymore girl yourself ?’ he asks,
deadpan. I make a cowardly retrogression,
slip ten years back. ‘No, I’m from New Zealand.’
‘Are you now? Well, that’s a coincidence:
the priest at Moneymore’s a New Zealander.’
And there’s the second question, unspoken.
Unanswered.
I go to Moneymore
anonymously, and stare at all three churches.
In Belfast, though, where sides have to be taken,
I stop compromising – not that you’d guess,
seeing me hatless there among the hatted,
neutral voyeur among the shining faces
in the glossy Martyrs’ Memorial Free Church.
The man himself is cheerleader in the pulpit
for crusader choruses: we’re laved in blood,
marshalled in ranks. I chant the nursery tunes
and mentally cross myself. You can’t stir me
with evangelistic hymns, Dr Paisley:
I know them. Nor with your computer-planned
sermon – Babylon, Revelation, whispers
of popery, slams at the IRA, more blood.
I scrawl incredulous notes under my hymnbook
and burn with Catholicism.
Later
hacking along the Lower Falls Road
against a gale, in my clerical black coat,
I meet a bright gust of tinselly children
in beads and lipstick and their mothers’ dresses
for Hallowe’en; who chatter and surround me.
Over-reacting once again (a custom