by Fleur Adcock
Her thigh-bones, longer than a giraffe’s,
are lying steeped in a swamp, or smashed
in a midden, with her unstrung vertebrae.
Our predecessors hunted and ate her,
gobbled her up: as we’d have done
in their place; as we’re gobbling the world.
Creosote
What is it, what is it? Quick: that whiff,
that black smell – black that’s really brown,
sharp that’s really oily and yet rough,
a tang of splinters burning the tongue,
almost as drunkening as hot tar
or cowshit, a wonderful ringing pong.
It’s fence-posts, timber yards, the woodshed;
it bundles you into the Baby Austin
and rushes you back to early childhood.
It’s Uncle’s farm; it’s the outside dunny;
it’s flies and heat; or it’s boats and rope
and the salt-cracked slipway down from the jetty.
It’s brushes oozing with sloshy stain;
it’s a tin at the back of the shed: open it,
snort it ! You can’t: the lid’s stuck on.
Central Time
‘The time is nearly one o’clock,
or half past twelve in Adelaide’ –
where the accents aren’t quite so…Australian
as in the other states, the ones
that were settled (not their fault, of course)
by convicts. We had Systematic
Colonisation, and Colonel Light,
and the City of Adelaide Plan. We have the Park Lands.
It’s time for the news at 1.30 –
one o’clock Central Time in Adelaide.
It’s early days in Hobart Town,
and Maggie May has been transported
(not such fun as it sounds, poor lass)
to toil upon Van Diemen’s cruel shore.
It’s 1830 or thereabouts
(1800 in Adelaide?
No, no, this is going too far –
as she might have said herself at the time).
The time is three o’clock, etc.
The time is passing.
You’re tuned to ABC Radio.
We’ll be bringing you that programme shortly.
It’s five o’clock in Adelaide
and Maggie May has found her way
to a massage parlour in Gouger Street.
The Red Light Zone (as we don’t call it)
extends from the West Park Lands to Light Square
(named for the Colonel, not the Zone).
The Colonel’s in two minds about it;
his fine Eurasian face is troubled.
The Colonel’s an anomaly.
There are plenty of those in Adelaide.
Meanwhile, back in Van Diemen’s Land,
a butcher bird sings coloratura
in the courtyard of the Richmond Gaol
as tourists file through with their cameras,
wondering how to photograph
a Dark Cell for solitary
from the inside, with the door shut.
Look, they had them for women too!
It’s half past eight in Adelaide
and 4 a.m. in Liverpool.
Maggie May wants to ring Lime Street.
You mean they don’t have STD?
But I thought this was the New World.
They don’t have GMT either;
or BST, as they call it now,
whenever now is.
It is now
half past ten in Adelaide,
and in the Park Lands a nasty man
is cutting up a teenage boy
and cramming him into a plastic bag.
In Gouger Street another man,
equally nasty but less wicked,
has taken his wife to a performance
of Wagner at the Opera Theatre
and is strolling with her to their car
past the massage parlour
where something like five hours ago
Maggie May gave him a hand-job.
The Colonel’s brooding over his notebooks,
and lying under his stone, and standing
on his plinth on Montefiore Hill.
Maggie May is still on the phone,
arguing with the operator,
trying to get through to Lime Street.
It’s the future she wants,
or the past back. Some of it.
You’re listening to ABC FM:
12.30 Eastern Standard Time –
twelve midnight in Adelaide.
And now, to take us through the night,
Music to Keep the Days Apart.
The Breakfast Program
May: autumn. In more or less recognisable
weather, more or less recognisable birds
are greeting the dawn. On 5CL the newsreader
has been allotted (after the lead story
on whether the Treasurer might or still might not
cancel the promised tax-cuts) two minutes
to tell us about whatever it is today –
chemical weapons, radioactive rain,
one of those messy bits of northern gloom
from the places where gloom’s made (not here, not here!).
He tells us; then the baby-talking presenter
(curious how some Australian women
never get to sound older than fifteen)
contrives a soothing link: ‘Grim news indeed,’
she ad-libs cosily. ‘Much worse, of course,
if you live in Europe’ – writing off a hemisphere.
From the Demolition Zone
Come, literature, and salve our wounds:
bring dressings, antibiotics, morphine;
bring syringes, oxygen, plasma.
(Saline solution we have already.)
We’re injured, but we mustn’t say so;
it hurts, but we mustn’t tell you where.
Clear-eyed literature, diagnostician,
be our nurse and our paramedic.
Hold your stethoscope to our hearts
and tell us what you hear us murmuring.
Scan us; but do it quietly, like
the quiet seep of our secret bleeding.
When we lie awake in the night
cold and shaking, clenching our teeth,
be the steady hand on our pulse,
the skilful presence checking our symptoms.
You know what we’re afraid of saying
in case they hear us. Say it for us.
On the Way to the Castle
It would be rude to look out of the car windows
at the colourful peasants authentically pursuing
their traditional activities in the timeless landscape
while the editor is talking to us.
He is telling us about the new initiatives
his magazine has adopted as a result
of the Leader’s inspiring speech at the last Party Congress.
He is speaking very slowly (as does the Leader,
whom we have seen on our hotel television),
and my eyes are politely fixed on his little moustache:
as long as it keeps moving they will have to stay there;
but when he pauses for the interpreter’s turn
my duty is remitted, and I can look out of the windows.
I am not ignoring the interpreter’s translation
but she has become our friend: I do not feel compelled
by courtesy to keep my eyes on her lipstick.
What’s more, the editor has been reciting his speech
at so measured a pace and with such clarity
that I can understand it in his own language;
and in any case, I have heard it before.
This on-off pattern of switching concentration
between the editor’s moustache and the sights we are passing
gives me a p
atchy impression of the local agriculture.
Hordes of head-scarved and dark-capped figures
move through fields of this and that, carrying implements,
or bending and stretching, or loading things on to carts.
I missed most of a village, during the bit about the print-run,
but the translation granted me a roadful of quaint sheep.
Now the peasants are bent over what looks like bare earth
with occasional clusters of dry vegetation.
It is a potato field; they are grubbing for potatoes.
There are dozens of them – of peasants, that is:
the potatoes themselves are not actually visible.
As a spectacle, this is not notably picturesque,
but I should like to examine it for a little longer.
The sky has turned black; it is beginning to rain.
The editor has thought of something else he wishes to tell us
about the magazine’s history.
Once again, eyes back to his official moustache
(under which is unofficial mouth looks vulnerable).
The editor is a kind man.
He is taking us on an interesting excursion,
in an expensive taxi, during his busy working day.
It has all been carefully planned for our pleasure
Quite possibly he wants to shield us from the fact
that this rain is weeks or months too late;
that the harvest is variously scorched, parched and withered;
that the potatoes for which the peasants are fossicking
have the size and the consistency of bullets
Romania
Suddenly it’s gone public; it rushed out
into the light like a train out of a tunnel.
People I’ve met are faces in the government,
shouting on television, looking older.
The country sizzles with freedom. The air-waves
tingle. The telephone lines are all jammed.
I can't get through to my friends. Are they safe? They’re safe,
but I need to hear it from them. Instead
I’ll play the secret tape I made in the orchard
two years ago, at Ciorogîla.
We’re talking in two languages, mine and theirs,
laughing, interrupting each other;
the geese in the peasants’ yard next door
are barking like dogs; the children are squawking,
chasing each other, picking fruit;
the little boy brings me a flower and a carrot.
We’re drinking must – blood-pink, frothy –
and a drop of unofficial tuica:
‘What do the peasants drink in your country? –
Oh, I forgot, you don’t have peasants.’
It’s dusk. The crickets have started up:
Zing-zing, zing-zing, like telephones
over the static. Did it really happen?
Is it possible? ‘Da, da!’ say the geese.
December 1989
Causes
The Farm
(in memory of Fiona Lodge)
Fiona’s parents need her today –
they’re old; one’s ill, and slipping away –
but Fiona won’t be by the bed:
she’s dead.
She went for a working holiday
years ago, on a farm that lay
just down the coast from St Bee’s Head
in Cumbria, next to – need I say?
A name to dread.
She was always very fond of the farm
with its rough, authentic rural charm,
and the fields she tramped, and the lambs she fed
with youthful pride.
Her family saw no cause for alarm –
how could it do her any harm
working there in the countryside?
It would help to build her up, they said.
But it secretly broke her down instead,
until she died.
There was a leak, if you recall,
at Windscale in the fifties. No?
Well, it was thirty years ago;
but these things are slow.
And no matter what the authorities said
about there being no risk at all
from the installations at Calder Hall,
buckets of radiation spread,
and people are dead.
That farm became a hazardous place –
though to look at it you wouldn’t know;
but cancers can take years to grow
(or leukaemia, in Fiona’s case),
and as often as not they win the race,
however slow.
Before long most of us will know
people who’ve died in a similar way.
We’re not aware of it today,
and nor are they,
but another twenty years or so
will sort out who are the ones to go.
We’ll be able to mark them on a chart,
a retrospective map to show
where the source of their destruction lay.
That’s the easy part.
But where’s the next lot going to start?
At Windscale, Hinkley Point, Dounreay,
Dungeness, Sizewell, Druridge Bay?
Who can say?
Aluminium
Ting-ting! ‘What’s in your pocket, sir?’
Ping! Metal. Not coins or keys:
Sterotabs for the foreign water,
armour against one kind of disease.
‘Aluminium: that’s what they are –
they set the machine off.’ That’s it, then:
out of the frying-pan into the fire;
here’s awful Alzheimer’s looming again.
There wasn’t much point in throwing away
your aluminium pots and kettle
if whenever you go on holiday
your drinking water’s full of that metal.
Which will you swallow: bacteria soup,
or a clanking cocktail of sinister granules
that’ll rust your mental circuitry up
and knot your brain-cells into tangles?
Don’t bother to choose. You can’t abjure it,
the use of this stuff to “purify”.
At home the Water Board’s fallen for it:
don’t be surprised to see a ring of sky,
grey and canny as a metal detector,
to hear, amidst an aerial hum,
tintinnabulations over the reservoir
warning you of dementia to come.
A Hymn to Friendship
Somehow we manage it: to like our friends,
to tolerate not only their little ways
but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness:
‘Oh well,’ we smile, ‘it’s one of his funny days.’
Families, of course, are traditionally awful:
embarrassing parents, ghastly brothers, mad aunts
provide a useful training-ground to prepare us
for the pseudo-relations we acquire by chance.
Why them, though? Why not the woman in the library
(grey hair, big mouth) who reminds us so of J?
Or the one on Budgen’s delicatessen counter
(shy smile, big nose) who strongly resembles K?
– Just as the stout, untidy gent on the train
reading the Mail on Sunday through pebble specs
could, with somewhat sparser hair and a change
of reading-matter, be our good friend X.
True, he isn’t; they aren’t; but why does it matter?
Wouldn’t they do as well as the friends we made
in the casual past, by being at school with them,
or living nextdoor, or learning the same trade?
Well, no, they wouldn’t. Imagine sharing a tent
with one of these look-alikes, and finding she snored:
no
go. Or listening for days on end while she dithered
about her appalling marriage: we’d be bored.
Do we feel at all inclined to lend them money?
Or travel across a continent to stay
for a weekend with them? Or see them through an abortion,
a divorce, a gruelling court-case? No way.
Let one of these impostors desert his wife
for a twenty-year-old, then rave all night about
her sensitivity and her gleaming thighs,
while guzzling all our whisky: we’d boot him out.
And as for us, could we ring them up at midnight
when our man walked out on us, or our roof fell in?
Would they offer to pay our fare across the Atlantic
to visit them? The chances are pretty thin.
Would they forgive our not admiring their novel,
or saying we couldn’t really take to their child,
or confessing that years ago we went to bed
with their husband? No, they wouldn’t: they’d go wild.
Some things kindly strangers will put up with,
but we need to know exactly what they are:
it’s OK to break a glass, if we replace it,
but we mustn’t let our kids be sick in their car.
Safer to stick with people who remember
how we ourselves, when we and they were nineteen,
threw up towards the end of a student party
on ethyl alcohol punch and methedrine.
In some ways we’ve improved since then. In others
(we glance at the heavy jowls and thinning hair,
hoping we’re slightly better preserved than they are)
at least it’s a deterioration we share.
It can’t be true to say that we chose our friends,