by Robert Power
Where is the voice hiding? Hearing voices, they say. Feeling voices, I say. Fearing voices, I say. But fuck off to voices, ridicule to voices, sarcasm to voices, I will say. You will not make me, you will not take me, you will not, will not. Dress; leave the house. Stay there, voice, in the cellar, or wherever you abide. To the park, touch the rough bark of the tree. Not to hang from, no thanks, but to embrace, admire.
A TEMPEST
The day unfolded on the kitchen floor. There, on the cold geometric tiles, the broken vase like pieces of Easter egg, stranded portions of turtle shells long since abandoned and the tide out. The water lying in little rock pools, mercury magnifying the black and white angles of the floor tiles. Red and purple petals swimming for life among the wreckage; olive-green stems pointing to the open door through which she had stormed, the baby crying in her wake.
WINGS
Alcohol gives you wings, but then it takes away the sky. He used to be an angel, so he is well qualified, well versed to know the truth. ‘And the wings too,’ he whispers to himself, lying in the gutter, not a star in sight, just a blanket of thick battleship blue cloud promising a deluge. I used to be Oscar Wilde, screams the poet in his soul. I could have been a contender, cries his best Marlon Brandon impersonation. The empty bottle beside him clatters on the cobblestones as his outflung arm sends it spinning. In a house somewhere, now long forgotten, an address he can no longer remember, the woman he once loved dearly, who loved him dearly back, sleeps fitfully in a large bed. In the room next to her, their two children dream the night through. When he opens his eyes he sees a huge drop of rain falling from way above: a bullet, a messenger. His wings unfold; he takes to the air, soaring above. ‘I used to be an angel,’ he sings.
PETS IN THE FAMILY
Pets didn’t flourish too well in our house. We had the goldfish that dissolved in murky, unoxygenated water. A hamster that grew a cancerous tumour on its back from so many hours running manically on its treadmill (trying, I think, to escape the madness of our family). And the pair of mice, supposedly both males but clearly not, that we kept in a mouldy wooden doll’s house my dad found on the street. They bred like rabbits (we never had one of those) and infested the house, until the poison my dad bought wiped them out. We found (and smelt) corpses for weeks afterwards. At least, when the opportunity arose, I was able to give a real-life example of geometric progression to my maths teacher.
Trailer was a dog. Like the poison for the mice, my dad bought Trailer from Petticoat Lane, a market in the East End of London, renowned in the 1960s as a place to buy dubious (often stolen) goods of all sorts. If someone ran off with your bike, you could do worse than head down to Petticoat Lane to see if you could buy it back.
Trailer did not have a dog’s life. At least not in the sense of man’s best friend, one of the family – just wag your tail, lick a hand and they’ll all dote on you forever. He was bought on a whim on the occasion of my older brother’s birthday. Whims (like moonlight flits) were common in our house. So the puppy Trailer (named by my mother) appeared with no preparation or forethought. There was no bowl (we used a saucer), no collar or lead (my dad’s thick leather belt served both purposes) and no notion of how he would be looked after. He lived in the backyard. I don’t remember anyone ever walking him. I do remember him wriggling in my arms as a puppy and my being horrified as I dropped him on the cobblestones of the alleyway at the back of our house. We fed him from a block of pressed horsemeat that my mum kept in the pantry. Looking back it must have been a sad and confusing time for him. The energy in our family home was unpredictable and we were all at work or school during the day.
Trailer’s end came shortly after our yearly one-week holiday to Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Clacton. My Uncle Michael had recently arrived from Dublin and was living in a boarding house not far away in Finsbury Park. He was twenty-one years old, liked a drink, and was clearly not well suited to be a dog minder. On the Saturday of our return the house was in chaos. The dog had been locked in for a week, unattended, neither watered nor fed. He appeared in the hallway, wide-eyed, weak and demented. The house reeked of urine and the sight in the parlour was one to behold. He’d clearly run amok in his state of high anxiety. Much was overturned, the highlight being the sofa that he had half eaten. It was a cheap one and its foam innards must have held some attraction or nutritional value. A few days later Trailer disappeared. My dad said he’d taken him to a farm. I remember liking the idea, but also wondering where might be the closest farm to Tottenham? Years later my dad admitted he’d driven into central London and let the dog out of the van, in the certainty he’d be too malnourished to find his way home. If Trailer had any sense, he’d have deliberately headed off in the opposite direction. I do remember crying that day (which happened to be my ninth birthday: our family’s timing for drama was always impeccable). Was I crying out of guilt? For something lost that I’d yet to find? I’m not sure. But I did cry.
DEFIANCE
His hands are bleeding. As he grasps and twists the pliant metal of the car’s windscreen wipers he can feel the warm stickiness of the blood on his palms. It is late at night, you might even call it the early hours, and the street is deserted. Then he looks up and sees a man at the upstairs bedroom of the house staring down, awakened by the odd sound of snapping and twisting. He sees this young man assaulting his car, breaking the wipers from the bonnet. The assailant looks up at the window lit from within. He stares back at the man, defiant in the anger of his vandalism in this neighbourhood of the swanky rich, encroaching on the streets of his birthright. These interlopers with their painted houses, double-glazed windows and flash new cars. He hears the man running down the stairs; the front door flies open.
‘Here,’ he shouts, tossing the bloodied windscreen wipers over the garden gate: arrows of desire, mangled, amputated ciphers, a witness to his outrage, a testimony to his loss.
Then he turns and runs for all he’s worth, back across the High Road and over the railway bridge to his home on the other side of the tracks.
MY DARLING SISTER
And later, when we both grow up, I write poetry to her and send the verses on rolled-up handmade parchment. I send them to her across oceans and seas in bottles of dark green glass. For you are my sister. You stand by the harbour wall, as my ship sails out of the estuary and heads for the open sea. I watch you from the deck as you shield your eyes from the ferocity of the sun. The diamond brooch flashes on your breast. I would know it was you even if the quayside were shrouded in mist. I can sense your love and care for me. I taste it on the spray of the ocean. Later on, as the night falls and the waves lap against the huge steel hull of the ship, I sit at the captain’s table and watch the lovers glide across the dance floor. In this glittering ballroom I am alone. I choose solitude and I am happy. For I see you as a reflection in the gilded mirror that runs the length of the cabin. You are my sister, my one and only, and that is enough.
RUSH
Over there. Rush. There is a candle. A candle. And an ink pen. Standing in the field. You. You. By the haystack. You can see it. Dark as it is. Between the knotted tree trunk and the old barn. Listen for the hoot of the owl. Once I saw a witch fly across the face of the moon. I did. I tell you so now, as the heart races at the memory and the image. And once, there was a moment when the world stood still for me. When I glimpsed a taste of peace. Listened on the wind for a whisper of quietude. And much of the branches bending to the storm. And often the howl of the hurricane. The gale. The indigo ink hurrying across the page. To the edge. Making progress. Making a mark, a sound, a sense.
SWIMMING NOT RUSSIAN ENOUGH
The picture in the colour supplement showed a baby swimming underwater. It was as if he were still in the womb. It was in a lake in Odessa and the tiny Russian baby had been dropped in the water by his father. No water wings, no lessons, no preparation. The commentary said this was a radical approach that had infants swimming in seconds. More photos of happy little faces and tiny pearls of air
bubbles. All so relaxed, so natural. So buoyant.
So today I’m at the indoor pool at Walthamstow, east London. It’s early morning, but late enough for the lap swimmers to have departed for work. There’s one elderly man puffing and panting a breaststroke in the deep end, doing widths. The long-haired lifeguard is chatting to the cleaner. She looks attractive so I figure he’ll be preoccupied. I take my six-week-old son into the shallow end and hold him above the water as if I’m John the Baptist. I look around to make sure no one is looking. Then I drop him unceremoniously into the water. He breaks the surface and begins to sink. Down he goes. Down, down. Down. Until he’s resting on the shiny tiles at the bottom of the pool. No movement, no happy face. No duck to water; no tiny bubbles. Clearly, he’s not Russian enough.
IDEATION
She was so tired of her parents telling her they were about to suicide (that is, kill each other, or one kill themselves independently of the other, or some other permutation of the verb). It had been a recurring theme since she was about ten. There had been attempts. Her father had tried to electrocute himself (he was an electrician) and her mother had gone down the barbiturate overdose route. Neither these nor other attempts had got very close to the goal. She had always been tolerant and understanding, though after three decades of it she’d become blasé and cynical. Only once did she lose her patience. She was walking along the road with her father to get some fish and chips when he declared that it was too much and he wanted to kill himself. Stopping in front of him, turning his shoulders so he faced her, she let fly.
‘Dad, you have been saying this since I was a kid. Here’s the deal. I will take you to the top of a very high building, find a way onto the roof, and I will talk you into jumping. Either take me up on my offer or please, please, stop saying this stuff.’
He looked sheepishly to the ground, scratching his eyebrow before he spoke.
‘Do you want cod or skate?’
PLACENTA
Shimmering the colours of the rainbow: the placenta, on the bottom shelf of the fridge. A temporary home among the yoghurts and free-range eggs, cheese and cartons of full-cream milk. There he had stroked it, the father. He had wetted his finger and tasted it. When he first saw it in the silver dish in the maternity ward he was awestruck: the sheen, the porcelain texture, the blues and greys and greens. When he asked if he could take it home the nurse just smiled: she’d seen and heard it all.
Now, every few hours he looks at it sitting in the bottom of the fridge. He licks it, chats to it, admires its beauty. His wife, busy with their baby boy, asks him what he intends to do with it. Next day they put the baby in the pram for his first outing to the park.
‘I have a plan,’ he says when they come back home.
‘The rain’s stopped,’ he shouts two days later. He puts the placenta in its plastic bag in the basket under the pram and the big soup spoon in his pocket. The baby is asleep when they get to the church railings that back onto the park. He digs a hole wide enough to place the placenta in the soft earth. He smears some of the oily juices on his legs, on the baby’s arms and on his wife’s cheek. Then he places the placenta in its new home. The hot summer sun overhead. He uses his hands to shovel the earth to fill the hole, then says a prayer. Finding a heavy stone nearby, he places it on top of the freshly dug soil. ‘In case a dog might try to dig it up,’ he explains. They look at each other, smiling, the happy new parents, and head off to the tearooms for a hot chocolate and a slice of cake. The placenta in its resting place outside the church walls. Deep in the earth. Not a pauper’s grave. Not a pauper. A pearl.
AMENDS
It would be some years later before I fully understood what he set out to do that Sunday afternoon in Ferry Meadows. He’d suggested a walk, just he and I. Father and adult son. It was a fine spring day and we strolled around the lake talking of this and that. He was telling me that since he’d been sober he wanted to make my mother’s life as pleasurable as he could. I think he actually said ‘to make up for all the bad times’. She’d always wanted to visit Britain’s stately homes, so most weekends they’d head off in the car to one country seat or another. This sure was a change from the week-long drinking binges that had finally brought my dad to his knees. The past two years of sobriety had transformed him: he seemed at peace and comfortable with this quiet and sane life. As we walked on past the boathouse he began to talk about how his drinking had affected us kids growing up, especially me, as I was the one who seemed to get stuck in the middle, who tried to make sense of the madness and chaos, who tried to help. He told me he was sorry for the hurt he’d caused me, for the way he had interfered in and damaged my relationships. I listened, but wasn’t sure how to respond, how to react. Looking back, I don’t know that I said anything at all. This was new territory for me, for us both. It wasn’t how things were done in our family. But what I do know, as we continued on our circling of the lake, is that moment had a quality of substance, a semblance of truth that was real and good and healing.
AFTER
When the time comes, when my time comes, you will be waiting for me. I know. Not in the way you once threatened, when you said you would come back to haunt me. No, I know it will not be like that, and that in your heart it was never what you intended. For the real you is different from the one who seeped from the dark. The real you is the father who will wait patiently to guide me onwards, just as you tried your best to do when I was young. It makes me think of my Balinese friend who knew he had to have a baby even though his wife could not conceive. He had to find a woman to get pregnant, his ancestors insisted on it, in his dreams, in his waking hours. They were waiting to return, to be reborn. Just as I know you will be there waiting, lovingly, dutifully, for me when the time comes, when my time comes.
FATHER HIMSELF
When he was a young boy, sitting in front of the TV with his two brothers, a show he really liked was Fred MacMurray’s My Three Sons. It wasn’t so much what happened that interested him, but rather the family itself. The three boys together, happy and playing, and the father with the pipe and the big black dog with the lolling tongue. So, many years later when his wife fell pregnant (where did she fall to?) everyone said to him, ‘Now that you already have two boys, you surely want a daughter.’ And he smiled and said, ‘Yes, but just so long as the baby’s healthy’ (which everyone said: five fingers, five toes). But in his heart he wanted a third son, like Fred MacMurray, like the TV.
His first was born breech in 1976, in one of the hottest summers on record. This was in the days when the men were left in the waiting room and the midwife came out and told them they had become a father. You could smoke cigarettes, and even a cigar in celebration, and so he did: both. The midwife led him to the nursery, where all the newborns were kept in plastic cots. He looked through the glass and without any help spotted his son: such blue eyes, such an alert look about him. And the father was subsumed with feelings of happiness and pride.
His second son came to earth a decade later. It was in The Mothers’ Salvation Army Hospital, and natural childbirth, with the father close at hand, was the order of the day. The deliverer was a neophyte student midwife who seemed overwhelmed by the event. Consequently, the commands to push were far too enthusiastic and the newborn was projected into being as if emerging from a theme-park water chute. But the dawn broke and the birds sang and there was a magic in the air of east London. The attendant father cut the cord with the words: ‘I now declare this baby open.’
The third boy was to hold off for fourteen more years. This time the father was positioned at the head end. Complications had led to a caesarean section, which had also resulted in the parents-to-be being given the choice of date (three days after the whitest of Christmases). The father crossed his fingers for a boy, and his wish was granted. As the surgeon held the baby aloft, the father looked over the canvas frame to the bottom half of the mother: a woman cut in half by a very poor magician. Across from the hospital was the glory of Hampstead Heath and the pond (w
here the father swam) encased in a sheet of ice that shimmered and spangled in the wintry sun.
And so, forty-odd years on, the father got his three sons who would grow into sensitive, intelligent, kind and thoughtful young men. The family dog would come later.
PHONE CALL
So you tried to call me on the day you died. You felt faint on the road and you asked a shopkeeper to bring you a chair. A week later, after your funeral, I was shown the spot where you sat: halfway between the beach and Our Lady of Merces (where I would lay you to rest). After a while someone helped you across the road to the cafe where you always ate. You drank some water and asked Olinda to walk you to the shop close by that rented out the phone. Olinda stayed by your side as you rang the number you had used a hundred times before. But you couldn’t get the number right. I was told you tried many times, but none was correct. Finally, you gave up, went back to your room and then, sometime later you died/passed away/passed over. All the while I was thousands of miles away in London, going about my daily business, oblivious to your attempts to reach me. I wonder what it was you would have said. Had you come to some particular realisation? While I was in India dealing with the police enquiry and making all the funeral arrangements my wife phoned me. She said a letter had arrived from you, posted the day you died. I told her not to open it. That I would read it when I returned home. When I finally read the note, scribbled and torn from the corner of a serviette, I wondered if what you wrote was what you had wanted to say on the phone. If you had got the number right. If we had spoken that one last time.
LOSS OF FAITH
We always prayed before eating. Not the wife, but me the husband. Just as the Scriptures commanded. I would speak. She would listen. She could say amen, but no more. We’d been in the Truth for eighteen months or so. Been married in the Kingdom Hall. Our son had been born. This particular night, before the prayer of thanks, we looked at each other. And we both knew. All that was so certain, no longer was. At least no longer for us. The appointed year had come and gone. There’d been no literal Armageddon. No Second Coming. We voiced the unspeakable. The loss of faith in that which we had held so true, so special. And so it came to pass. Nothing would be the same again. We’d need to carve out new paths. New ways. New destinies. No longer predetermined. Did I offer up a prayer that night? Maybe. But not out loud. Perhaps in silence. Aware for the first time of the presence of absence.