PENGUIN BOOKS
THE WHITE STUFF
Simon Armitage was born in west Yorkshire in 1963. Widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, he is also a playwright, travel writer, song lyricist and has written extensively for television and radio. He has published nine volumes of poetry including The Dead Sea Poems and the one-thousand-line poem ‘Willing Time’, commissioned by the New Millennium Experience Company. His most recent collections are The Universal House Doctor and Travelling Songs both published by Faber in 2002. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, and the Whitbread Poesy Award. He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles. His dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA. Currently teaching at the Manchester Metropolitan University, he has also taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa. He has worked as a probation officer, shelf stacker, reviewer, poetry editor and lathe operator. His Penguin books include his first full-length book of prose, All Points North, and his novels Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004). He lives in Huddersfield with his wife and daughter.
The White Stuff
SIMON ARMITAGE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Viking 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
1
Copyright © Simon Armitage, 2004
All rights reserved
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978-0-14-193809-7
IN THE BEGINNING
The Sperm Test
It is not one test, but many. To begin with, the man must abstain from sexual activity for at least seventy-two hours but no longer than a week. It is a test of self-restraint.
At lunchtime on the chosen day he drives from his place of work to the peace, comfort and safety of his own home. But builders are at work. Builders are dry-lining the kitchen wall, listening to Radio 1, whistling, tramping in and out and up and down for electricity, water, coffee with sugar. At this point the man has second thoughts, but the idea of a further period of abstinence concentrates his mind. It is a test of time. With container in hand, he locks himself in the innermost room - a toilet without windows - and settles to the task. He is well practised, for sure, something of an expert even, though the pressure of wanting to do well cannot be ignored, and right now he will confess to ignorance and doubts. He has no memory of actually measuring his output and nothing but anecdotal evidence as to the productivity of others. A teaspoonful, didn’t somebody once say? In which case, why the big brown pot? A soup spoon, perhaps? A fruit spoon? This mental calibration of domestic cutlery in no way helps him towards his objective, though it has, in fact, assisted in blanking out the noises of manly builders from down below.
Eventually, miraculously, it happens. The amount seems reasonable. Not too stingy, not too flash. It sits in the pot like mother-of-pearl in its fluid state. Steam clouds the container when the lid is replaced. Memories of insects caught in boxes and bottles come to mind, pricking holes in jam-jar lids so a beetle or snail might breathe. The container is blood-warm in the man’s hand.
The next stage is a driving test. There’s a twenty-minute time limit to reach the local infirmary. After washing his hands and making plausible small talk with the workmen (‘When you’ve got to go you’ve got to go!’), the man accelerates down the hill towards town and enters the ring road. The traffic is heavy. Normally a reliable motorist, he makes mistakes. The plastic container, now tucked in his left armpit, proves a hindrance to driver-related manoeuvres, and the digital clock on the dashboard adds on time penalties for violations. He has not been requested to transport his sample in that particular cavity, but common logic and folklore inform him that cold air might kill off a few million or so of the little critters, whereas body temperature will keep them alive and active and make for a respectable score. It is a case of lateral thinking. During a hill-start involving use of the handbrake, the pot slides down inside his shirt, where it has to stay until the long, straight urban clearway offers the opportunity of one-handed steering and retrieval.
At the hospital the man double-parks in the ambulance bay before entering the maze of corridors, the pot of liquid crystal cooling minute by minute. It is a map-reading test, and a test of language. How to find the way to the correct room without asking. How to ask without using the S word. How to say ‘sperm’ without turning beetroot red. There’s a bell at the side of the hatch which must be rung. He rings it again, and then again, before reading the handwritten note to the side, stating The Department of Urinary Medicine is open all day except on Tuesday, when it will close at 2 p.m. The man scans the week-to-view diary in his brain for the day of the week. It is Tuesday. He looks down at his watch, where the hour hand cowers behind the minute hand in the vicinity often past two. He keeps his finger on the button, the button that makes the bell ring in a faraway room, until nobody comes. Then he walks in a controlled rage back to his car, and sits for a while, and burns.
Of course, he’s tempted to hurl the container of cold and expired substance from the vehicle window as he sweeps back along the urban clearway. But this is sperm. His sperm. It is a test of pride. He returns to his house, blusters past the workmen in their lumberjack shirts and Timberland boots, and washes out the pot in the bathroom sink with hot water and a finger. It will dry on the bathroom radiator. It will, as they say, come in again.
∗
It is a month later. The man now looks on the previous episode as a dress-rehearsal It is a memory test. It is a Monday or a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday when he rings the bell The nurse who opens the hatch looks down at the brown plastic pot, a quarter full with the slow-moving balm of silver, mercury, graphite, latex, frog spawn, whatever, and asks, ‘Is it urine or sperm?’
The man also looks down at the pot, then back at the nurse, then back at the pot, then back at the nurse, and replies, ‘It’s sperm.’
The deposit is made. He withdraws from the hospital, free to resu
me sexual intercourse and await his results by post.
Results, when they arrive, are meaningless to the layman, and easily mistaken for population statistics in the Third World or light-year distances to the nearest stars. But the man observes the word NORMAL stamped beneath the astronomical number and is satisfied. Content. Relieved.
That is not the end of the test. What follows is a test of courage, a test of spunk. It begins six months down the line, at seven in the morning, when the woman stands in the bedroom doorway holding a tissue between her legs, saying, ‘I’m bleeding.’ On a mobile phone, an emergency doctor explains how this can be quite normal, even at twelve weeks, but the test continues at midday, when the blood begins again, and this time it is not red but brown. Not red but brown. Pulling books out from under the bed and checking The Fountain of Health for the meaning of brown blood is a test of understanding. A comprehension test.
In the car, making the drive to the hospital, the woman says, ‘I’m frightened,’ and far the man this is a test of strength. The trick is to stay calm. To give reassurance. To say there is absolutely nothing to worry about. To drive carefully. To tolerate the pay-and-display machine in the hospital car park which demands money for the privilege of the visit. To be patient with the receptionist behind the slotted window who needs forms to befitted out in capital letters.
In a cubicle, a nurse with a pierced nose asks questions and takes notes. A junior doctor and his student enter the room to take measurements, either by inflating a blue hoop around the woman’s biceps or by putting a thermometer in her ear, or by making other insertions. In their over-size white coats, the medics stand like two boys in their dressing gowns, ready for bed. They could be trailing teddy bears behind them, sucking their thumbs, except the words they use are adult words. For grown-ups only. Not for little ears.
It is not the end of the test. It is ‘hard to tell’. It is ‘too early to say’. More tests need to be done. The woman will stay overnight, the man will go home, come back with a nightie and toothbrush, go home again.
The twelve hours that follow are a test of stamina, patience and faith. Alone in the house, the man moves between rooms. Thinks between phone calls. Flits between chairs. He sleeps between dreams, dreams between sleep. If it is bad for him, it is worse for her. Between drinks he tells himself this. It is a waiting game, an endurance test, a test of nerve. Next morning when the alarm goes off it might as well talk to the wall, because the man is long gone: down the hill, on to the ring road, the underpass, the clearway, and into the car park. CLAMPERS AT WORK. THIS IS A TOW-AWAY ZONE.
In a glass-fronted room off the ward, behind a pink-grey curtain, a sonographer spoons a dollop of clear gel on to the woman’s stomach and guides what looks like a computer mouse from side to side, up and down, sometimes pressing hard into the flesh, sometimes easing back. It is a screen test now. On the monitor, a vague, grainy picture comes and goes. The man smiles at the woman, who cannot see the screen, and reads the expression of the sonographer, a lady in her thirties, pregnant, who bites her lip as she stares at the image in front of her eyes but never blinks. There will have to be another type of scan, another insertion, another doctor, private discussions. Then a consultant to ask both the man and the woman to take a seat. Please. Screens are pulled back, equipment wheeled away. ‘Please sit down.’
The next step is a multiple choice. Choice A: get rid now, because there is no pulse, no heartbeat, and it is very tiny indeed, and its bones are not bones at all but uncalcified strips of malformed cartilage. It probably died two weeks ago, and no baby ever came back from the dead. Choice B: wait for a week, during which time the pregnancy will abort naturally, possibly, but not necessarily at a convenient time. In other words, no choice at all. This is not the end of the test. Ten minutes later, in a private room, the woman turns to the man and says to him, ‘You won’t leave me now, will you?’ It is a lie-detector test. A test of the truth.
Flowers pile up on the doorstep the next day. Neither the woman nor the man will answer the bell. The woman stares out of the window and says, ‘I want my baby back.’ Time will pass - that’s what everyone says. The future is somewhere over the next hill, like the sky, but arrives every day full of clouds from the past. Night follows day. From the window, the woman stares and stares. The man waits. However it is for him, it is worse for her. It is a test of guts now, the acid test. It is a test of balls, a blood test, and a test of heart.
TAURUS (20 April-20 May)
1
The flat roof of Sconford and Tilden County Primary and Infant School was littered with pop bottles, Ribena cartons, sweet packets, half-bricks and several shoes. The roof itself was in need of repair. In three separate places the bitumen had bubbled and cracked, and from the water tank to the air vent a large fissure had opened up that reminded Felix of one of those mid-ocean trenches in a geography textbook. Not that any of this would have been apparent to the parents, teachers and former pupils beneath it in the glass-fronted reception area, lifting glasses of sherry to their mouths and circling around a huge platter of crisps and snacks. From his position on top of the slide, Felix had an unobstructed view of the whole school. Squeezing the record button with his thumb, he panned slowly from left to right, taking in the crowd of adults lining all four sides of the playground and the decorated podium with its row of empty chairs, then swung the camera high towards the school flag flapping in the breeze. From the flagpole, he followed a strip of lightning-conductor down the brick wall, then along a line of blue and white bunting tied to a handle inside the louvre window over the main entrance. Through the glass, the culminating moment of this long sequence should have been a face. Abbie’s face, under her new lilac hat, smiling and chatting with some long-lost friend or raising her amber-coloured drink to the air, toasting the sunlight. But the image was fuzzy and blurred, and when it finally resolved, the subject of the auto-focus turned out to be a shockingly large pumpkin lanced with dozens of cocktail sticks loaded with either a cube of cheese or a silver-skin onion. Opening up the shot to take in the rest of the table, Felix was struck by the colour of the food, how it all seemed to come from the same part of the spectrum. Brown bread sandwiches, yellow crisps, Twiglets, corn footballs and other rusty-looking nibbles, a choice of cheeses, cocktail sausages, quarters of scotch egg (luminous yellow yolks encrusted with brown sausage meat and orange breadcrumbs), peanuts, pastries and an assortment of other more exotic footstuffs such as bhajis and goujons, all battered and tanned. Paul Corley, a boy in the church choir, had been allergic to all things orange. He could never eat anything at birthday parties and nearly died when Martin Piggot made him swallow a piece of tangerine peel after Evensong. Felix was still remembering the breathless and gurgling Paul Corley, flat on his back in the vestry with his lips swelling and his eyes bulging in their sockets, when the doors of the school flew open. By the time he’d pulled back with the zoom and readjusted his line of vision, the first half a dozen mini-astronauts in spray-painted silver wellies and crash helmets covered in tin foil had already entered the playground and were walking with slow, exaggerated strides around their cardboard rocket. Space, it emerged, was the theme for the whole display. No sooner had the first years departed to the sound of ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ than out came a similar number of second years to the tune of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. And so it went on, until every year group in the school had enacted a scene from some distant corner of the universe to a soundtrack which included ‘Rocket Man’, ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, Queen’s ‘Flash’, the theme from Star Trek and Duran Duran’s ‘Planet Earth’. Felix filmed the performances but only a snippet from each. He knew from experience the tedium of the over-long home video, and in any case he was saving the battery for the main event.
It was getting towards midday, with the sun at its highest and brightest, when the last space cadets filed back into the school through the side door and Mr Fellows, in a tie and short-sleeved shirt, walked to
wards the hopscotch pattern painted in yellow on the grey concrete. Feedback howled between microphone and speakers, causing some of the children to stick their fingers in their ears and three pigeons to lift from the rungs of the monkey bars and head for a telegraph pole across the road. After the technical adjustments had been made, Mr Fellows cleared his throat and gave his opening address. Still at the top of the slide, but standing now with one leg hooked around the handrail, Felix had a privileged view of the whole proceedings, and even though the wind dragged at his amplified voice, the words of Sconford and Tilden’s head teacher were audible and dear.
‘Thank you so much for attending our celebrations here today, and as well as thanking all the children of the school for a display that really was out of this world, could we also show our appreciation to our music and drama teacher, Miss Swann, who has worked tirelessly on this project for several months.’
There was generous applause, then cheering and even a couple of wolf whistles, as a young woman in a pair of tight red trousers and a blouse that didn’t quite reach her navel gave a theatrical curtsy and disappeared back into the crowd.
‘And so on to what I can safely say is my favourite moment in the whole school year. The crowning of the May Queen has been an annual event at this school for over thirty years. In just a moment, our current Queen, Eliza Hardison, will be taking her throne. But this year is special. The powers that be insist that, at sixty-five, this will be my last year as headmaster of Sconford and Tilden, even if in my own mind I’m still the eager, energetic and, er… handsome young man that I was all those years ago.’
There was more applause, and another wolf whistle, this time from Miss Swann herself.
‘To mark this occasion, we’ve looked high and low, far and wide, and are delighted to bring you a parade of all those darling buds that have blossomed and bloomed into true beauties since the year they were first crowned. So without further ado, from 1972, please welcome our very first May Queen, Christine Woodhouse, formerly Christine Tummings.’
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