Between the Lines

Words were dust-sheets, blinds.
People dying randomly, for ‘want of breath’,
shadowed my bed-times.
Babies happened;
adults buried questions under bushes.

Nouns would have been too robust
for body-parts; they were
curt, homeless prepositions—‘inside’,
‘down there’, ‘behind’, ‘below’. No word
for what went on in darkness, overheard.

Underground, straining for language
that would let me out, I pressed to the radio,
read forbidden books. And once
visited Mr Cole. His seventeen
budgerigars praised God continually.

He loved all words, he said, though he used
few to force a kiss. All that summer
I longed to ask my mother, starved myself,
prayed, imagined skirts were getting tight,
hoped jumping down ten stairs would put it right.

My parents fought in other rooms,
their tight-lipped murmuring muffled
by flock wallpaper.
What was wrong, what they had to say
couldn’t be shared with me.

He crossed the threshold in a wordless
slam of doors. ‘Gone to live near work’
my mother said, before she tracked down
my diary, broke the lock, made me cut out
pages that guessed what silence was about.

2

Summer, light at five. I wake, cold,
steal up the attic stairs,
ease myself into Mrs Dowden’s bed,
her mumble settling to snores again.

In a tumbler, teeth enlarged by water;
her profile worrying, a shrunken mask.
Her body’s warm, though,
smells of soap and raisins.

I burrow in her arm’s deep flesh
forgetting, comforted. Finding out
with fingers that creep like stains
that nipples can be hard as pencil ends,

breasts spongy, vaster than a hand’s span;
and further down under the nightdress,
a coarseness, an absence;
not what I’d imagined.

3

Chum Larner, Old Contemptible,
badge on his lapel, barbered our hedges
for parade; nipped capers off nasturtiums,
their peppery juice evoking India,
the dysentery that wiped out his platoon,
‘But yer can’t kill orf a Cockney sparrer!’
His epic stories rattled gunshot,
showed me what dying meant.

The shed—tropical dusk, air thickened
by tarred twine, drying rosemary,
his onion sandwiches. Sitting on his knee
I’d shiver as he told about the ghost
of Major Armstrong’s fancy woman
who wandered the cantonment, crooning.
My mother stopped me going,
suspecting him, perhaps, of more than stories.

4

Upstairs was church,
a clock ticking somewhere
and my mother, a penitent,
breasting the stairs,
smile upside-down,
streak of tears
gone when I looked again.

No sound behind the door
I dawdled past on tip-toe,
where strangers were allowed
and where, wanting more than breath,
my grandmother was being dulled
by blue walls, too much sleep,
the brownish, disinfected smell;
by being too delicate to touch,
by no one singing to her,
by hunger, chafing her to bone.

5

‘. . . someone for you to play with.’
But I could tell she’d be
useless at throwing, or bricks,
no good at pretending.

‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Couldn’t they see
she was yellow, creased, spotty,
an unfinished frog, a leaky
croaky cry-for-nothing?

‘Be gentle now!’ But I was
doing what they said, playing.
My best doll’s bonnet
fitted her floppy beetroot head.

She smelled of powdered egg.
They warmed her vests.
She slept against my mother’s skin.
‘How do you like her?’ Send her back.