Counting Backwards Read online

  I decided to be buried there too, beside him. My heart grew easier then. I felt no more estrangement from him.

  As I turned the pages of my sketchbook, a cruel truth hit me like a blow. The reason I could not paint was not so much my cares for the invalid, as my fear that I would never paint well enough. Here I was in Rome, the heart of the painted world. Here were my masters all around me. Nothing I achieved could ever equal one of Bernini’s marble coils.

  The noise of the fountain grew louder. It was drowning me. It told to give up, stop pretending that there was merit in my pitiful daubs or in the travelling scholarship I’d been so proud to win. Rome would wash me away, as it had washed away a thousand others, leaving no trace. I seized hold of the leaves of my sketchbook, meaning to rip them out so that no one would ever guess the contemptible folly of my ambitions.

  At that moment I felt a touch on my shoulder. A clasp, a warm, wordless, brotherly clasp. The fingers gripped my shoulder and then shook it a little, consolingly, encouragingly.

  I knew straightaway that it was him. God knows how he had dragged himself out of that bed and come to find me. I could not imagine how he’d guessed at my anguish. I said nothing. His clasp was enough. After a moment the grip of the hand tightened, and then left me.

  He was going back to bed, I thought. But there were no retreating footsteps. I looked over my shoulder. No one was there. He could not possibly have moved so fast. I hurried to the bedroom and there he was, deeply asleep. I stared at his face and I knew that he was dying, not weeks or months in the future, but now. How had I not recognised it before?

  I sat down by the bed. My sketchbook was still in my hand. I got up again, noiselessly, and fetched what I needed from the little room. I was ready to draw him now.

  The noise of the fountain. The sound of a pencil moving. His breath. A long, dragging pause. Another breath. You can live an entire life between one breath and the next. That’s where my life was spent, in one night, in one room. The rest is memory.

  Dis

  The obvious story, my darling,

  is that Dis caught you

  into his dark kingdom.

  I don’t know where I was

  when he seared the grass

  with winter footprints.

  If your mother was not there

  whose hand could hold you

  when he opened the earth for you?

  I see your fingers

  twist in your lap

  as you keep mute.

  You will not eat the seeds.

  You know what he offers you.

  They glow softly, like coral

  in the blue vaults of this hell

  where I am only a shadow

  squeaking its anguish.

  Let me take your place in the dark.

  Dis knows you have eaten nothing

  of his gifts, his pomegranates.

  For months he’s kept you,

  whispering ‘Your mother

  never loved you as I love you.’

  Part your hands, my darling.

  Let me pour into them

  salt and grain.

  Newgate

  Beneath the bulk of the block the bins

  sweat with a week’s refuse.

  In the concrete corridor lines of lockers

  gape, hiding a man who’s

  back-to-the-wall, intent

  as the last words of his sentence

  lock together, his own jigsaw

  starting to make sense.

  He tunes up a stifle of terror

  in the girl he’s got by the throat

  while she claws at his fingers.

  He’s bored. He flicks the remote.

  He’s had enough of all this noise

  and endless interference –

  lights going out, pupils pinpoints.

  Why can’t they let him be as he is?

  Far away a bin lid drops down

  and the arches of Newgate tighten

  as dead men walk through them

  on the way to their dying.

  What architect first squinnied

  to fix this perspective? Getting it right

  meant waiting for the reaction

  when it came into sight.

  Now they are breathing. Now

  guards shovel the quicklime.

  Now the girl uncurls from her sofa,

  and takes the rubbish down.

  The guards whistle, nonchalant

  as the prison van backs up.

  Even now the soiled dark of the cell

  even now the thrash of the girl.

  At Ease

  When I was four at the feet

  of my grandpa and my great-uncle

  we heard how well Frank had done

  all those years with his war pension.

  He got the better of them.

  They doled it when he was young

  mustard-gassed and not likely to live

  long enough to do more than dint it –

  but he married on it.

  That was in the Great War

  when my grandpa kept order

  in the burning Dardanelles.

  You wouldn’t guess how many flowers

  grew in those brown hills.

  For a month they bled anemones

  then they were blue with hyacinths –

  little wild ones, not like these.

  Harbinger

  Small, polished shield-bearer

  abacus of early days

  and harbinger of life’s happiness

  that the world offers

  things scarlet and spotted

  to alight, hasping and unhasping

  unlikely wings,

  that there can be three or thousands

  but not a plague of ladybirds

  no, a benediction of ladybirds

  to enamel the weeds.

  Small, polished shield-bearer

  abacus of early days,

  harbinger of life’s happiness.

  The Hyacinths

  Pressed in the soil’s black web, nursed by the rough

  offhand embrace of frost, the hyacinths

  turn in their sleep. Such blunt stabbings

  against the paperiness of ancient skin,

  such cell-memory, igniting

  a slow fuse laid in the ground.

  Pressed in the soil’s black web, rocked back to sleep

  by the storm that tugs at the holly tree’s roots

  the hyacinths know they are listening

  to the west wind that kills them,

  but they are safe, having given themselves to darkness.

  All they desire is not to flower.

  Hyacinths, when I see you forced from the soil

  glossy and over-talkative

  with your loud scent and demand for attention

  I will put you back to sleep, forking

  the long-fibred darkness over you.

  The Night Workers

  All you who are awake in the dark of the night,

  all you companions of the one lit window

  in the knuckled-down row of sleeping houses,

  all you who think nothing of the midnight hour

  but by three or four have done your work

  and are on the way home, stopping

  at traffic lights, even though there is no one

  but you in either direction. How different the dark is

  when day is coming; you know all this.

  All you who have kept awake through the dark of the night

  and now go homeward; you, charged with the hospital’s

  vending-machine coffee; you working all night at Tesco,

  you cleaners and night-club toilet attendants,

  all you wearily waiting for buses

  driven by more of you, men who paint lines

  in the quiet of night, women with babies

  roused out of their sleep so often

  they’ve given up and stand by their windows


  watching the fog of pure neon

  weaken at the rainy dawn’s coming.

  Agapanthus above Porthmeor

  (for Patrick and Alexa)

  Blue against blue; blue into deeper blue.

  Skeins of light at the horizon

  and the flower here, touchable,

  a blue that gathers to it

  the sky, the sea.

  Tender, exotic,

  the agapanthus was not born here

  but it belongs here

  with its own essence of blue

  echoing the sea’s deep stripes.

  You pause on the hill, breathless

  and look back at the silk of the horizon

  at the wide miles you have climbed

  to be together, here

  and wanting nothing.

  Blue against blue, blue into deeper blue.

  This is the day of the agapanthus,

  of flower-filled sureness.

  Love is here, touchable,

  gathering our lives to it.

  Visible and Invisible

  (for Jane)

  That dream when we were young,

  that hunt for the magic

  which might make it happen:

  invisibility.

  Such glittering cloaks

  such eagerly swallowed

  rose-petal potions

  but we stayed solid and sunlit

  jumping on our own shadows

  defeated by ourselves.

  We didn’t know how easy

  the trick would turn out to be.

  All you do is let the years pass

  and quietly on its own it happens.

  You only have to let the airy cloak of years

  fall on your shoulders.

  The Snowfield

  No matter how wide the snowfield

  you don’t walk in your own footprints –

  each day the apparent freedom

  narrows, sun greases

  your steps to ice

  until the steep track glistens beneath you

  and you dare not go on

  but stand trembling

  bruised, struggling to balance,

  you stand trembling as night comes on

  on the wicked lip of the hill that stands

  between you and home.

  Lemon tree in November

  (for Kurt and Caroline Jackson)

  Dark, present, scattering night,

  the blows of the wind

  on the upturned hull of home

  the stub of the lighthouse wiped out

  the land crouched

  our lemon tree

  shaking its leaves

  in the wet garden

  the palm at the window

  hissing, rattling

  as the lighthouse beam

  buds and grows

  on a gnarl of foam.

  Dark, present, scattering night

  with the curtains bulging

  and the wind again

  on the upturned hull of home.

  Bildad

  The dark, present, scattering night,

  the thick stub of the light-house folded

  and put away like linen

  but still the bud of its light opening

  over a gnarl of foam,

  such an oncoming

  dark in the garden

  the slim leaves of the lemon tree

  quite gone,

  its structure hung

  by the light of its fruit.

  Palm leaves hiss

  in the rough hands of the wind,

  that wind again

  kneading the air as it wants –

  The more the decades

  the less we belong,

  tangential as thistle

  while the wind booms

  seizing the chimneys

  lifting the curl

  of our ill-made sunroof.

  Untouchable

  the wind does what it wants

  playing harmonica

  on the upturned hull of home:

  such quaintness

  to build a house here,

  to slip a bribe to the rock

  not to open under it

  and pay the sea to turn back.

  Tonight the ravaging of cliffs

  is the hunger of pack-animals

  jostling for place,

  hunting the man named Job

  in the land of Uz

  whose imagination painted him

  a righteous kingdom

  where he washed his steps with butter.

  But the wind answered him

  and naked, Job said, I came

  and naked will return

  as he sat on the ground.

  The wind scours our faces with stars.

  We wriggle like children

  eyes screwed up tight,

  our quaint imaginations

  busy planting lemons

  lulled by the ear-drowse

  and zing of bees.

  There is a cup, blue, full to the brim

  with tea. There is catnip

  and the brief shade of an olive tree.

  Outside, a dusty road, and from time to time

  walkers, who greet each other with silence

  or a curt nod which affirms

  the rubric of the stranger

  and we are all strangers here.

  At the far side of the earth’s curve

  waiting to flood our habitations

  there is always the night

  borne on a wind beyond imagination

  and not to be troubled with,

  a wind that chases its load of stars

  like dust beneath the broom,

  There is the dark, present, scattering night,

  the thick stub of the light-house folded

  and put away like linen,

  the bud of its light blocked

  by the bulk of a new roof.

  Bildad said: how can he be clean

  that is born of a woman?

  And so answers a mob of men

  hunting down a girl

  with a wind of sticks and stones

  as they strip her and beat her

  from town to town

  assisted by bicycles

  and mobile phones.

  I trouble myself with the snipping of catnip.

  If I sit on the ground

  it will comfort no one

  and rake no spittle from the wind.

  Skulking

  A heap of cloud

  skulks over the roofs

  like the summit of a bully’s ambition –

  the short dark days of winter

  dear to me

  as a bully to his mother.

  Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street

  I know them by their shoes –

  clean kid on a Sunday,

  work-boots on Mondays

  chipping sparks from the pavement,

  or skittery dance shoes

  going to the Palais on a Saturday –

  the cuff-cuff-cuff of too many lives –

  Barclays Bank, St Ives

  Old men with sticks and courteous greeting

  who have learned the goodness of days

  and give freely the hours it takes

  to reach the fathomless depth of the pipe’s tamped bowl

  or the corolla of that daffodil

  damply unfolding, or a toothless smile from a pushchair

  that irradiates the granite morning.

  One of them puts out a finger

  dark with work and nicotine

  to touch the blooming cheek of a great-granddaughter.

  How close they are to the rim of the earth

  while the cashpoint zizzes out figures

  and the young go up and down the street with backpacks,

  their eyes justified and full of purpose.

  Playing Her Pieces

  (for Thomas Hardy in 1912)

  He takes the temperature of his heart.


  O feverish instrument that played so crazily

  with such wild fingers and still struck

  dead on the note,

  is it cool yet? Does it stand apart

  like a man civilly bowing a woman

  whom he no longer loves

  through a door he will not enter?

  O feverish instrument of art,

  he kneels beside the body of his love

  to wash his hands between her ribs

  where the blood throbbed.

  Look at her playing her pieces. Start

  her song again, the one that wearied him

  as her dull flesh wearied him, her stiff

  intransigent difficultness –

  all of it laved now. Let his fingers part

  as her soul slips through them –

  O feverish instrument, let

  the man sit and write.

  Pianist, 103,

  looks at the morning

  where she will play

  from nine to one

  and says how beautiful

  each note, each sun.

  Such scales of suffering –