The Gas Fridge
What else
in 1980s bedsit land
but 1960s
furniture? Earlier even.
Items I
had not seen since pre-fab
parlours,
great aunts' kitchens.
Then,
unexpectedly,
where I
prepared for finals
and for
unemployment, a gas fridge.
Half the
height of ours at home,
it fed,
like cooker and gas fire,
on the
50p coins I pressed and turned
into the
meter every second day.
It showed
its life by a pilot-light,
blue and
awkward behind its back.
To ignite
it I would stoop and drop
match
after lighted match
down its
fissured tube, hope
that they
would reach and catch
before
they fizzled out.
I could
waste half a precious box
before I
found the knack.
Who would
have thought
that
Einstein patented the spell
that
drove ammonia around
those
cooling pipes without a sound?
A pity
then no patent way
to keep
the pilot light from going out
in Mrs
Hossey's redbrick bedsits.
'No blacks, lovey, no coloureds.'
Just two
pints of Stones
in The
Little Park on my 21st
birthday.
The Sheffield drifting
in the
South Atlantic, charred
and
stricken. Boys my own age
between her decks, burning.
Love nor money
Buggered
if I’d do it. The wet patrol
behind
the Ice Rink with cans, glass
and
last night’s condoms. The meters
forced
and jammed, the aggro, appeals
and the
associated guilt from fly-by-nights
and
cowboy-clampers.
He
takes a pride, winds times and regulations
to
trigger-point for rapid response
on his
slow, meticulous rounds.
He
knows where the regulars park,
how
they will fake passes or squeeze
and
hide behind a transit. He’ll lie in wait
or set
a trap, vary the rhythm of his rounds,
watch
for our return, then funnel
into
our wing mirrors as we pull away.
At
last, his coup-de-grace, the prize he
boasts
of at
our Christmas truce, less wary now
with
sherry in his pencil-free and steady hand –
the
time he booked the Lord Mayor’s car,
half-a-foot
beyond the line. He’d warned
the
chauffeur more than once, so peeled
the
notice from its backing strip, like wadding
for a
gun-shot wound, smoothed the packet
livid
on the polished glass, and despite
all
head-office threats and calls to cancel,
made it
stick.
The Awning
His wife
and daughter arrive too late
for the
lunchtime rush. Traffic held them up.
They set-to
with knives and aprons
as he juggles
Cheshire brie in ciabatta,
the
coffee, the cash, the change.
The guy
in the suit with the Chinese partner
pays for
their cappuccinos and commends
them. A
gaggle of older women wait
as another
examines the crafts, mugs, cards.
Outside,
couples sit and sip their drinks,
as the
awning, striped and bright, sifts
the
sunlight, stirs in the breeze.
At day’s
end it will refuse to retract
into its
case and he’ll refuse to pay
the
fitters their final instalment.
But now,
striped and bright and filtering
sunshine,
it flaps and buckles and stirs,
casts
colours onto faces in the shade.
Mercy Cadby, her mark
i.m.
of my maternal ancestor, Mercy Cadby 1751 – 1812, her five sons and her
daughter who died in infancy.
‘The Examination of
Mercy Cadby, Rogue and Vagabond ...’
Parish Relief record,
July 1783
There, in facsimile, the scratch Mercy Cadby made
to fix a future for herself and children from each parish
they passed through, hand-to-mouth, on their wet trek
from Westminster to The Devize.
Mercy Cadby, destitute.
Shared blood and sentiment
make the resonance more acute,
her ragged cross more eloquent.
Across the sea, a flint flashing in a steel pan,
draws a volley in return.
The world turns upside down,
and in its revolution pulls Mercy’s sons around.
Such that one can plant his Peninsula pension
into an Australian inn, turning in for sovereigns
the highwaymen he overhears plotting in their cups.
That another can abscond on active service
and from Canandaigua County write one last letter home.
Pleased with the price of corn, praising all there is to
praise
about Old England – save for its government –
making his own way, making his own name,
no bishop, no king, no mark of Cain.
Prescription
I wipe
the world clear
with my
orange, lint-free cloth,
snap it
back into a box embossed
with
the name of my optician
to
remind me of his single source of light.
I’ll
reach for the hem of my shirt,
for
tissue or collar to wipe away
the
grease or dab each speck
until
all is bright, true and vari-focussed.
No
myopia among the Inuit
until
Europeans brought them books and pens
and
fewer words for snow.
How
much we owe
each
wonder lens,
each
hinge and tiny screw.
Without
them we are like Hubble scratched –
or
scream stranded on the Odessa Steps,
as
helpless as Piggy before Beelzebub,
abandoned
to the razored night.
Fluellen,
taken
In
an alternative history, Henry V loses Agincourt and Shakespeare’s Fluellen is
taken prisoner
You’re
a Welshman? What kind of plea is that, Monsieur?
We have
some of our own, flown here when Glyndwr
melted
like a wisp. Same thick-set brow, same stoop,
their
fat tongues coiled around loose vowels,
and
clashing consonants. Their nostrils flare like yours
at the
scent of toasted cheese.
We know
what poison nestles in your pack –
quills,
twine, a pound of goose-grease.
You
wear a Monmouth cap like all the rest.
We must
dock two digits from your right-hand
so you
may not draw your string against us,
nor
raise them splayed behind your Prince’s back.
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