by Sid Smith
And this was his journey home, through lives and deaths that conjured up his own.
First he was a fisherman on the river. He lived with his sister in a house on stilts, and they were chaste although they shared a bed. But the stilts rotted and the house fell over and they woke on the ceiling, which meant that anything was allowed.
Then he was a little boy in the mountains. He fell in the well and screamed, but his fat father thought it was a ghost and ran away so that he drowned.
Then he was a landlord’s son, and killed himself because his father was stupid. A drunk climbed into his room and the father heard him and put money under the door to placate his son’s ghost. The drunk stayed for months, singing and climbing in and out through the window until the father was a beggar.
Then he was a hunter in the forest. A tiger took his sister and he followed the blood trail to a castle and broke in and caught the tiger-lord with his coat off, grey as a rabbit, sitting with his legs crossed, his terrible smile in a bucket. His claw / Opened like a butcher’s drawer, but the hunter was brave and fast and killed the tiger and took his sister home but she was bored for ever.
He was a farmer’s son. He told his father, ‘Buy me an axe.’ The father bought an axe, but the son said, ‘Why should I cut wood? Buy me a spade.’ The father bought a spade, but the son said, ‘Why should I dig? Buy me an ox and plough.’ The father bought an ox and plough, but the son said, ‘Why should I plough? Buy me a horse to ride.’ So the father bought a good horse. Finally the son said, ‘Why should I work?’ So the father killed him with the axe, and buried him with the spade, and ploughed over his grave, and rode downriver on the fine horse.
He was a girl, relieving herself in the forest. A leech climbed inside her and popped out every night to sing and tell stories, so she couldn’t marry but it didn’t matter because the leech made her laugh.
He was a girl again, relieving herself in the forest. A spider jumped on her belly and itched so much that she married young. Every night she put the lamp out before she undressed, but one night the moon shone in and her husband saw the spider and tried to kill it. The spider bit the girl and escaped and the husband was left with the girl who was neither alive nor dead.
‘Please, Johnny,’ said Tom.
But Johnny was a little boy by a river. This was in Oxfordshire, where every spring the river floods. It swells across the plain so that river captains are confused and sail their ships over gardens and roads. Then the little boy would sit with his sister on their roof. When a ship sailed down their road the captain would shout, ‘Which way to the river?’ But the children only laughed, or else they lied because they wanted the ship to run aground. If they saw a ship jammed in a field or a garden, they ran to where the men were heaving on ropes or digging earth from under the keel or taking off goods to lighten the ship, because there was a chance to steal.
One year the flood came early and full. The children woke in the dark. They ran to the window, but fishes were kissing it. They went back to bed but the bed was wet. They ran up and down the landing, but the Thames was there / In silk slippers climbing the stair. They went to the roof, and all day they watched the town. People had rafts made of firewood, or they floated on doors. Old men who had bought their coffins paddled them with brooms through the streets or left them tethered to lamp posts while they visited the tea house, sitting on the teahouse roof and smoking their pipes and grinning at the children. But the river rose until the old men paddled away and the children were waist-deep on the roof. The boy held his sister’s hand until it was dark, but the river grew deeper and stronger and in the morning she’d disappeared.
The boy called and called across the flood. As the waters fell he climbed down through the house. There were minnows in her chamber pot and an eel in her bath, but the girl had gone. He followed a trail of smooth stones, like the stones in a stream. A thread seemed part of her clothes, and led him through reeds near Shilling-ford. The hem of her dress was shining over stones at Shiplake, but melted in his hand. Someone said / She crossed waist-deep at Maidenhead.
He walked downriver, searching under trees that wept across the water, afraid to look but he had to, wading through reeds and muddy shallows, leaning over bridges by the pretty riverside pubs. And a great fish / Spawned in his image under Chiswick Bridge, / Where Thames, a lissom country girl, / Comes to London’s corseted curves.
So he entered the city. He looked everywhere for the girl, although the women were lovely. He slept under Blackfriars Bridge, with the river’s kisses and sighs. He traced the Thames tributaries, that run now in sewers, and listened through tarmac to the Fleet, the Westbourne, and the Effra, which sing: ‘I am a hidden London river. / Where in a ditch I’d skip and bicker / Only the sick fat dead old / Notice a dip in the road.’
He grew ragged, looking for the girl, and thought that London was flooded. He saw masts passing stately behind buildings, and his sister at the far end of streets, crossing waist-deep, reflected in the water, two-faced like the Queen of Spades, her lower mouth / Working in the water with sneers and shouts.
He was old, and knew things were bad. He crossed the Whitechapel Road, along through Limehouse, up East India Dock Road, and came again to the river, where a Thames barge was breasting the waves. Familiar its figurehead / Watching over dividing depths!
So now he was sure. He walked downstream, because she was riding the river by day and lay on the waves at night, a billow her pillow. He walked past Greenwich Reach, leaving London, dipping a finger in the river, salty now, and night falling. He was tired, his eyes failing, the estuary very wide under the stars, the shining levels and the smell of the sea, but at last he saw her / Blaze on the brackish water, / Her face the moon / That broods above those tidal pools.
‘Enough,’ said Tom, but Johnny said:
I was a girl. I was walking to my wedding. I was crossing a forest, but there was a witch upside down in a tree, her skirt around her chin. She dropped on me and ate me. She took my clothes and walked to the wedding and pleased the groom in strange ways. She fell asleep with her mouth open and I called from her belly but the groom didn’t answer.
I was a girl and found a jewel that had fallen from the moon and hid it inside me and therefore couldn’t marry. But the jewel was poison and I shrivelled up and the villagers burned me.
I was born pregnant. My twin brother must have done it in the womb, and I had a tiny baby which became a tiny man that jumped from twin to twin like a flea, and lived in our trousers, poking its head out. We loved the little man, but then we were older and exiled him from our trousers and he died of grief.
I was the wise man to a king, but the king was murdered by his son, who took the throne and would have killed his sister but I turned her into a bird. The son said, ‘Where is my sister?’ I said, ‘She forgot her name and her home. She couldn’t speak. She hid from people. This morning she jumped from a cliff and rose to heaven.’ When it was safe I turned her back to a girl. We killed her brother and took the throne and were married, but she was always a bit birdy.
I was a rat-killer asleep on a dark road. I was woken by a queen under a silk umbrella and we sported together. She asked for my secrets and I said, ‘Well, I starve two rats in a box until one eats the other and gets a taste for rat and kills other rats. Or I sew up a rat’s bottom and it’s mad with pain and kills other rats.’ The queen said, ‘We’ll do the same to you,’ because actually she was the Queen of the Rats.
I was rich, and lived with my daughter in a fine house. One night I woke up shivering because my quilt had gone. I searched through the house and found the quilt on my daughter. This happened every night, so my daughter said, ‘At least wash the smelly thing.’ We washed the quilt and for two nights it stayed on my bed, but on the third night I woke up and went to my daughter’s room and her leg was around the quilt. I burned the quilt, but it stank as it burned. My daughter went to another town and I left the house and slept on leaves in the forest with only my snot for salt
.
I was a little boy and thought I was brave. One day a man and his little boy came to the river. The father and the little boy were identical, so the village women said, ‘Beware, because they are lizard people.’ But I remembered I was brave and played with the son along the riverbank. Then the man said, ‘Will you play with my daughter?’ The daughter was also identical, so I was afraid. But I thought, ‘If they are lizards I’ll run into the river and be safe.’ Then the father said, ‘Come to my house and eat.’ So I went into their house, which was a cave on the riverbank, and the brother and sister and father were smiling in the firelight. Then the father said, ‘This is my wife,’ and the wife was also identical. I ran into the river, but the brother and sister and mother dived after me. The father danced and laughed on the riverbank saying, ‘In fact we are crocodile people.’
I was a girl working on a hill and the wind followed me home. I went upstairs to my old husband, but the wind rattled the door. I went downstairs to bolt the door, but instead I went outside and the wind took me like a crowd.
I was an old man on my deathbed thinking, ‘At least I never got kicked in the bollocks.’
I lay in a cellar and thought about her drowned mouth, little vowel, thatched house, and how God gave her dough / One fold more. / (Though the seal / Never quite healed.) / With a rumble as of thunderstorms / London’s cunts had shut like stones. / Lord let me back / To her belly’s Welcome mat!
I had so little food that I only needed one chopstick and I asked for a pay rise and the boss said, ‘We already pay rice,’ so I came to London and my daughter met a white boy and I helped at the wedding: when I said, ‘Stand,’ the boy stood, and when I said, ‘Crap,’ the boy clapped and everyone was happy, so happy.
Johnny is making toast or being toasted. He wears a linen suit, flames in the pockets. He opens his jacket and his fancy waistcoat is flames. His hair lifts in the updraught and is licked off by flames. He looks at Tom and flames come from his smile.
Tom says, ‘We’re both tired,’ but Johnny is a boy on a roof with his sister. In the morning the flood has taken her so he searches downstream and finds a body among reeds. He stands pointing and shouting but people run away. Then they creep back and take the body to a chapel, the boy following. But his sister walks in weeping and he sees that actually he’s a ghost and the body is his own and fish ate his precious parts.
So he leaves the chapel. He walks on till he’s lost in London. He looks for clues in pavement cracks, streetlight flickerings, beer spills and car dents, and the twitches, squints, limps, and shoe-scuffs of passers-by, with only his anger for a guide. He’s easily distracted, and follows sirens, a tourist bus with music, police horses, a man in a green hat. For days he’s lost in the suburbs and comes to the limits of London, a cold wind over the fields, and turns back through Hookers Road and Pimp Hall Park, along Butcher Row, Organ Lane, Bleeding Heart Yard, Cutthroat Alley, World’s End Lane, downhill like water till he finds the river. He’s so broken that only ghosts can see him. They’re milling clueless on the Embankment. They grab his sleeve and say, ‘Up empty elevator shafts, / Floating to closed doors, we weep and tap.’
He tries to pull free, but they carry him along, saying, ‘We wander walls and floors / In the Tube’s cylindrical corridors.’
They are the lost dead of London. He listens while they sing: ‘We ride / Escalator undersides, / Are weary baffled cold / On single-decker buses, upstairs alone, / And can’t get home.’
He sings with them: ‘Snoring town, / We’ll rise through your dreams like the drowned!’
Whose hair fills the quilt – On the bed in the house that Jack built? – Why does water flow so slow – From the big sink on the second floor? – And the room of whose shoes? – And why by the bath the dentist’s tools? – And damp as a pubic pad – Whence this wad in the shower trap? – Nevertheless – Spying a spider in the bridal bed – Oh, his dilemma of disgust – The live spider or the spider crushed!
Tom is a little boy. He’s playing in a park and finds a house and sees a window among the ivy. On tiptoes he peeks inside and sees an old Chinaman reading. The old man looks up, surprised. Tom is frightened of his evil face, and runs down the side of the house and sees a door under the ivy. He hesitates, then reaches up and turns the handle. He goes down a dark passage and comes to a room.
Perhaps it’s the old Chinaman’s room because there’s a book on the table. It’s big and heavy, but little Tom pushes it open. It’s full of horrible stories about twins and fathers and the chopping-off of bollocks. After an unknown time Tom shuts the book. He squints through rheumy old eyes. There’s a little boy at the window.
Whenever he wanders Wapping strand – Mussels squirt on either hand. – At Greenwich Reach this dapper walker – Opens oysters underwater. – He strolls alone the South-end shore – And liquid spills from the winkle stalls. – He winks, now, and tips his cap – And shapes stir on the fish-shop slab – To watch Jack pass, – Flat faces pressing the glass.
Tom and Johnny are living through stories, faster and faster:
A woman touches herself so often that her finger becomes a cock, and a man is the same only opposite and one day they shake hands . . .
A farmer is so lonely that he marries his shears, but on their wedding night . . .
Twins are joined at the groin and the surgeon must choose who gets the dick and he shows them pictures of cars, handbags, shoes, power tools, but . . .
A girl plays with her baby brother and thinks that his dick is an extra length of gut and likes to see it stretch up for bits of meat, so when he’s a man . . .
A boy wants to fly and a witch says that his precious parts hold him down . . .
A man has a sex change because he loves women, a slave to the shape / Badged on their belly like the ace of spades, / Or the ace of hearts / If they’re redheads, pale as playing cards . . .
A wizard wants a woman but she rejects him so he jumps on her until she bursts and becomes a man . . .
A wizard wants a woman but she rejects him so he tears off her husband’s parts and rapes him and jumps on him till he’s a man again and the man sleeps with his wife but comes with the wizard’s seed . . .
A couple tell the gods, ‘We’ve done everything in bed so in the next life we want to swap sex.’ They jump from a cliff and in the next life the woman is burst and the man’s parts are rotted off . . .
A man walks round a highland and comes back to his village on the wrong side. He spills his food, and can’t find his wife’s precious part, and lets men find his . . .
A man is so broken that he can see ghosts. He runs through London saying, ‘A Chinaman wants to cut off my bollocks because I love his daughter . . .’
A man is so broken that only ghosts can see him. He runs through London saying, ‘A Chinaman wants to cut off my bollocks so he can marry me . . .’
A man dreams about a dead man so often that the man comes back and says, ‘You woke me . . .’
A man dreams about a girl but her dead brother comes back and says, ‘It was me in your dreams and you didn’t know because my parts were cut off or burned off or rotted off . . .’
My heart exposed – Is chambered like a Chinese word. – My guts depict – The names of God in Arab script. – I’m a monochrome tome – Trailing a Playboy centrefold, – A page from Gray’s – But in a state of nature, though, without the names. – ‘Look!’ – Says Jack: ‘Here is my book. – I leave behind a – Bible for the finder.’
Johnny is in Brixton looking for Tom. The first pub is ankle-deep in water and the gents is in the basement, the steps going down under water. The next is warm and dry but the flood outside is mooning against the windows. The third is flooded but outside is dry so when Johnny opens the door the water carries him out.
He goes to the squat. He opens the front door, water behind it like letters, and follows the water to the basement steps. The basement is full of water but he goes down anyway. No Tom. He walks to the Tube and goes wit
h the water down the steps, the platform sticky with water, the train pushing a bow-wave, then under the river, aquarium windows, to surface at Ken-nington. He comes out of the Tube and there’s the van.
Johnny says:
On my last night alive I heard you and May through the wall, then the cooks taking you to the pool hall. I slept late, and in the morning Mac wanted to do it again. I was crying and the bed was squeaking but he didn’t care. Then Dad’s fist on the door.
I cried for hours, and in the end there was only May. I knocked on the wall. I went to her door and knocked again. Finally I went in.
She was sitting on the bed, gripping the mattress. She said, ‘You did it with Tom, didn’t you.’
‘Never,’ I said.
‘Liar. Both of you.’ Bright eyes, like she was enjoying it.
I said, ‘No. Really,’ but she was watching me. When we were young I could lie to her. But not any more, thanks to you.
I said, ‘Did you tell Dad? Just now? About Mac?’
‘You and my boyfriend.’ Almost happy.
The rest of that day: me in my room, May bouncing up and down the stairs, practically singing. And Dad kept banging on the door and I’m saying, ‘Go away,’ though after all what did it matter?
It got dark. I heard you downstairs, then you went off on the bike, and it seemed like I had no one to talk to and nowhere to go. A bit like you, actually, Tom.
