Undying

by Michel Faber

  your thighs, there’s even one who’s got

  that same concavity between her breasts.

  They file into our bedroom;

  stand waiting for my signal

  for the action to commence.

  I swing the wardrobe open wide.

  Your favourite clothes, a little musty now,

  are crammed inside.

  The women coo.

  The nearest says: ‘That skirt.’

  ‘That silky top: the one in blue.’

  The woman with your legs strips to her panties,

  pulls on your jeans. They’re a perfect fit.

  Another woman’s trying on a shirt.

  Your ochre camisole does wonders

  for the girl who’s shaped

  like you were in your curvy forties.

  She’ll need a darker bra, though, than her own.

  No problem. Somewhere on these shelves –

  ‘That hand-sewn dress, oh God, if you only knew

  how long I’ve searched –’

  ‘That knitted poncho with the turtleneck –’

  ‘Help me: this one fastens at the back –’

  The orgy lasts for minutes, hours, who can tell?

  A dozen females pleasuring themselves.

  Your wardrobe empties, every jacket, every shawl.

  Each garment bears the traces of your skin,

  and mine, because I loved the way you dressed,

  and let you know, with my caress.

  Our Cats No Longer Miss You

  After not much time at all,

  the animals’ vigil

  at the windowsill

  stops.

  Your voice is a flavour of food

  no longer brought home

  from the shops.

  You fail to mark your territory.

  All spaces are vacancies.

  Your smell goes stale

  and is replaced by soap, by dirt,

  by microwave emissions.

  These are the new conditions:

  bowls in fewer rooms,

  no sounds of laughter,

  one less hump under the duvet,

  lights switched on before dawn,

  less chance of tidbits from the table,

  mediocre stroking.

  The young one curries favour

  with the neighbours.

  The old one

  gets sick and dies.

  Eleven months is a big chunk

  of a cat’s allotted span.

  She suffers, in the end.

  A friend who came to your funeral

  digs the hole.

  It’s only small.

  The body, cradled in my hands,

  is scarcely bigger

  than your head.

  Tamarind

  Today I found a use for tamarind.

  You’d bought a pot of it, never got around to it.

  It sat there, sealed, ignored in favour

  of your more familiar standbys – coriander,

  cumin, garlic, ginger, cancer.

  I’ve been going through our cupboards.

  So many things are past their date.

  They won’t kill me. I call their bluff.

  You would have liked the trout I baked tonight.

  Tamarind is splendid stuff.

  I’m cleaning up this house.

  I’m cooking for myself. I’m losing weight.

  Recipe by recipe, I rid shelf after shelf

  of dried-out mushrooms. Jalapeño peppers,

  Blue Dragon corn cobs (rusty lid).

  Dusty egg noodles (Medium) stacked in piles.

  Powdered soup you bought in a Polish sklep

  in Shepherd’s Bush with wheelchair aisles.

  Ancient coconut milk. Nine rices.

  Bizarrely-shaped pastas. Yellow lentils,

  five bags full. A jar of pickled figs.

  Well, no, the figs went in the bin.

  I cannot find a use for everything.

  I’m restoring order. I’m on the case.

  Taking charge. Let me show you how.

  I’m not impulsive, wasteful, not like you.

  Nothing new will come into this place

  until I’ve worked through all that is here now.

  So many freedoms I can claim!

  See this vintage chutney? Don’t tell me

  it has possibilities. Into the trash it goes.

  And while we’re at it: the junk beneath the sink,

  the rubbish in the boiler room. Who needs

  a broken torch? A mouldy pair of gloves?

  The manual for a long-defunct machine?

  Stand aside, woman, and watch me clean.

  I make a judgement call on these old tubes of paint:

  they’ll never be unscrewed again.

  This vase is cracked. I toss it.

  Don’t complain. What made you think

  we’d ever spread this fertiliser in the garden?

  Grass grows regardless and, I’m sorry, but

  we really have too many towels,

  and too much medicine for your bowels.

  I’ll never read your self-help books.

  They’ve done what good they’re going to do.

  Bid them adieu.

  Stay silent. Utter not a peep

  defending all these things I cannot keep.

  I’ll determine what should still be left behind.

  I’ll sort through all your files, and at last

  give each of them a memorable name.

  Names that you could actually find!

  You’ll thank me

  when I’m done.

  Just try to keep in mind,

  as you stare from the wings, aghast

  at all the things I’ve binned:

  I’ve spared you the shame

  of once having wasted £1.99

  on tamarind.

  The 13th

  The first snowflakes fall.

  Thoughtless, weightless,

  they’ve come from nothing

  to line the world, to make the known

  unknown, to bring ephemeral change

  to all that was familiar.

  A million of them, soft and merciless,

  remake the landscape in their image.

  Each year we saw them come.

  Each year, we knew we’d be here when

  they’d gone.

  Solid as the landscape, you

  enjoyed their fleeting reign.

  They surrendered, melting, on your breast,

  bright twinkles on the wool that kept you warm,

  specks of wetness in your hair.

  Your boots crushed them underfoot,

  your camera froze them in time,

  long after they had vanished.

  Now it’s you who’s bodiless.

  So tentatively there,

  so insubstantial in the air

  that the snowflakes fall right through you.

  Now it’s you who’s powerless –

  beautiful as you are –

  to stay.

  The Moment Of Capture

  I wake, befuddled. I am not alone.

  There’s a body in my bedroom that is not my own.

  Breathing soft, so near to where I lie.

  Slim, petite and graceful, this guy is on his knees

  beside my luggage,

  fingers deep inside.

  Our eyes meet. In my fog of sleep, I fail

  to comprehend how we came to be

  together. Wide-eyed, he speaks to me

  in French, I struggle to translate,

  he rises to his dainty feet, turns tail.

  Too late, I spring up from my bed.

  I cruise the streets of Brussels, poke my head

  in each café that’s serving déjeuner

  in case I spot the thieving little scum.

  What’s French for ‘camera’? Appareil?

  Cette appareil – contene – images de ma femme –


  Ma femme est morte –

  Retournez – maintenant – s’il vous plaît.

  I get no chance to try my little spiel:

  that camera’s gone for good.

  (You in the sheepskin boots and furry hood:

  that was one. You in the garden: another.)

  I return to base. My hosts regret my loss.

  A fellow guest forgot to lock the door.

  This neighbourhood is thick with thieves.

  Such things have happened here before.

  Shall I speak to Belgium’s police?

  Describe my nondescript voleur?

  Describe the camera I lost?

  I don’t recall its make, its model or its cost.

  All I remember is you,

  on a bright day in the Highlands,

  holding still for me

  in the moment of capture,

  and that mechanical whirr

  as the gadget promised us

  this was forever.

  Clarification

  Nine months after your funeral,

  I finally track him down:

  your first husband.

  He was present at an earlier ceremony,

  wedded in The Truth, guiding your hand

  to sign his name and make it half your own.

  Faux-leather album, slightly mildewed,

  photos unglued and slipping free

  in the bottom drawer of seventies debris.

  I offer scans or copies; he declines.

  I doubt he would have flown

  twelve thousand miles to see

  you boxed and ready for disposal.

  By email, he is generous with his time.

  Four decades on, for no one’s benefit but mine,

  he leads me to the wreckage of your marriage.

  For you, it was a girlhood tale

  that you had long since ceased to tell.

  For him, it’s ancient history as well.

  For me, it’s gaps I need to fill.

  Greedy for his memories, I’m grateful

  as he feeds me morsels of your past.

  Your ears are surely burning.

  Safely faceless, he and I

  perform a most peculiar dance

  of forthrightness and tact.

  Husband to husband, kept separate

  by continents and fate, we span

  a windblown wire across your silent space.

  Weighing each word, I ask to be set straight.

  He’s in a different time-zone, so I wait.

  Each day I fear the answer will be no.

  Yet still we meet halfway.

  Me and this other man you lost,

  this man you thought no longer loved you.

  What a shame that I can’t let you know

  this is, in point of fact,

  not so.

  Well, We Made It

  Two old dears get on the train.

  They must be eighty, might be ninety,

  married more than half a century.

  He with hearing-aid and oatmeal cardigan,

  his flesh all bone and Adam’s apple.

  She with translucent skin, birdclaw-thin –

  breast cancer survivor, could well be,

  or just an elderly gamine.

  Briefly breathless,

  they locate their reservations

  and, once settled, calm their respirations.

  Having won a dozen battles

  in the war with tickets, toilets, turnstiles,

  heavy luggage, narrow aisles, overpasses,

  tricky schedules read with the wrong glasses,

  they reward themselves with ScotRail tea

  and a shortbread, shaped for two.

  The old man unlips his gnarly grin,

  leans forward, asks his wife,

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She smiles.

  My love, had you not died

  but lived another twenty, thirty years,

  these two old dears might have been us.

  Me, farting, manful as I lift your case

  up to where such things must go.

  You sparse-haired, blue-veined,

  a remnant of the beauty you once were.

  Fellow-travellers even so.

  How sweet – as sweet as shortbread on my tongue –

  to earn the pity of the young.

  Inverurie, 30 May 2015

  Unfamiliar road

  through landscape after rain,

  freshly revealed, hyper-real,

  and, on a hilltop, noble and absurd,

  a rusted metal whatnot

  that looks just like an animal.

  How you would have crowed!

  Mirth brings you back to life

  in that moment before the sight

  is buried under rising earth.

  Anniversary

  When your cancer’s sniper cells

  had scored direct hits on your legs, your arms,

  your feet, your hands, your neck, your thighs,

  their next objective was your eyes.

  The ambush must have happened in the night,

  while you were sleeping. I observed

  the aftermath. Your pupils, weakened and estranged.

  The TV, bolted to the wall on the far side

  of the room, was suddenly beyond your range,

  the news reduced to faceless voices

  and a flickering blur.

  I railed against the cruelty of this change.

  This punishment was undeserved.

  Muscle by muscle, you’d been robbed

  of all that might have lent you courage

  to endure.

  Meanwhile, on the screen above us,

  civil war in Syria, life on planet Earth.

  Though you could barely see,

  you knew those shapes were countless refugees.

  ‘I’m just one person,’ you reminded me.

  ‘Each of those Syrians has an equal worth.

  They want to live, they’ve lost their home, they’re scared.’

  Fuck the Syrians, I almost said.

  There’s gross unfairness in this room!

  But it was not my right to voice your rage.

  And twelve days later, you were dead.

  A year has passed since then, and there’s no sign

  that justice has the faintest chance to thrive.

  Last month, a bigot slaughtered worshippers

  in a church in Carolina, leaving only four alive.

  Last week, in Tunisia, a crowd of pensioners

  were murdered as they drowsed on holiday.

  Today’s the anniversary – not just of our tragedy,

  but of London’s bombing, 7 July 2005.

  What can I do to mark the passing of my wife?

  Your cancer killed you and yet not one person

  thought to call the BBC.

  No weeping passersby left wreaths outside the scene,

  no hacks accused the government

  of being slow to act.

  Your illness, with its crises flagging every stage,

  failed, even so, to win a Wikipedia page.

  In global terms, yours was an insignificant life.

  Your death a negligible fact.

  All I can do, in what remains of my brief time,

  is mention, to whoever cares to listen,

  that a woman once existed, who was kind

  and beautiful and brave, and I will not forget

  how the world was altered, beyond recognition,

  when we met.

  Come To Bed

  That last year or so

  we seldom slept together.

  There were three of us in our marriage.

  You, me, and your cancer.

  I would come and see

  how the two of you were getting on.

  If you fancied some breakfast

  after a long night together.

  Some lunch after a lie-in,

  some supper after
dusk

  as the curtains were drawing in.

  Later still, I would read to you.

  Bedtime stories.

  On bad days, all time was bedtime.

  Then I would retire

  to let you fail to sleep.

  You had your routine.

  Your stash of tissues under the pillow,

  your unsleeping pills,

  your immobile phone,

  your thin white scarf, your thicker pink one,

  your writing pads, your pens just there.

  Everything in reach

  but me.

  Now I lie in the bed that came from Australia.

  Old when I bought it, in a charity shop,

  this mattress loved our bodies, grateful

  as a Rescue pet, set for the long haul.

  We shipped it ten thousand miles,

  berthed it in your Highland paradise,

  braced our naked feet against its base

  countless times, man, bed and wife.

  This bed has doubled now in size

  and I am single, huddled, blanketed in harm.

  I am in danger of forgetting

  the feel of your fingers,

  the warmth of your belly against my back,

  the shape of your thigh under my palm.

  In danger of losing you

  forever to the other room.

  I have waited patiently, oh so patiently,

  before asking

  in my gentlest voice:

  Can I lure you away?

  Can I tempt you with our history?

  This mattress has missed you.

  Hollowed, it is fit for no one else.

  Oh, I know you are snug

  in your self-containment.

  I know you are settled,

  finally at ease

  in your ash.

  But please . . .

  Just for tonight . . .

  Just for one night . . .

  Sleep with me.

  Lucencies (2)

  You worked covertly,

  nurturing by stealth.

  You lifted people up,

  nudged them to transcend

  their limitations,

  in sickness and in health.

  Those you assisted looked around

  to thank you, but you’d hide.

  When your influence began to spread

  too far, you died. I still hear

  your whisper in my ear:

  ‘Let’s be going.’

  If I could scan this planet

  with X-rays that detect the presence

  of your timely interventions,

  I’m sure I’d find them

  in places you would not expect.

  You’re dead. I know. And it is not for me

  to show you death is not the end.

  But you left lucencies of grace

  secreted in the world,