came: the pulsing starfish of a child’s hand, swimming
and swimming and coming to settle on my upturned
palm.
The English Astronaut
He splashed down in rough seas off Spurn Point.
I watched through a coin-op telescope jammed
with a lollipop stick as a trawler fished him out
of the waves and ferried him back to Mission
Control on a trading estate near the Humber Bridge.
He spoke with a mild voice: yes, it was good to be
home; he’d missed his wife, the kids, couldn’t wait
for a shave and a hot bath. “Are there any more
questions?” No, there were not.
I followed him in his Honda Accord to a Little
Chef on the A1, took the table opposite, watched
him order the all-day breakfast and a pot of tea.
“You need to go outside to do that,” said the
waitress when he lit a cigarette. He read the paper,
started the crossword, poked at the black pudding
with his fork. Then he stared through the window
for long unbroken minutes at a time, but only at the
busy road, never the sky. And his face was not the
moon. And his hands were not the hands of a man
who had held between finger and thumb the blue
planet, and lifted it up to his watchmaker’s eye.
Hop In, Dennis
A man was hitching a lift on the slip road of the A16 just
outside Calais. Despite his sharp, chiselled features and a
certain desperation to his body language, I felt compelled
to pick him up, so I pulled across and rolled down the
window. He stuck his face in the car and said, “I am
Dennis Bergkamp, player of football for Arsenal. Tonight
we have game in Luxembourg but because I am fear of
flying I am travel overland. Then I have big argument with
chauffeur and here he drops me. Can you help?” “Hop in,
Dennis,” I said. He threw his kit in the back and buckled
up next to me. “So what was the barney about?” I asked
him. Dennis sighed and shook his classical-looking head.
“He was ignoramus. He was dismissive of great Dutch
master Vermeer and says Rembrandt was homosexual.”
“Well you’ll hear no such complaints from me,” I assured
him. We motored along and the landscape just zipped by.
And despite some of the niggles and tetchiness which crept
into Dennis’s game during the latter part of his career, he
was a perfect gentleman and the complete travelling
companion. For example, he limited himself to no more
than four wine gums from the bag which gaped open
between us, and was witty and illuminating without ever
resorting to name-dropping or dressing-room gossip.
Near the Belgian border a note of tiredness entered
Dennis’s voice, so to soothe him to sleep I skipped from
Classic Rock to Easy Listening. It wasn’t until we were
approaching the outskirts of the city that he stirred and
looked at his Rolex. “It will sure be a tight one,” he said.
“Why don’t you get changed in the car and I’ll drop you
off at the ground?” I suggested. “Good plan,” he said, and
wriggled into the back. In the corner of my eye he was a
contortion of red and white, like Santa Claus in a badger
trap, though of course I afforded him complete privacy,
because like most professionally trained drivers I use only
the wing mirrors, never the rear view. Pretty swiftly he
dropped into the seat beside me, being careful not to
scratch the console with his studs. “Here’s the stadium,” I
said, turning into a crowded boulevard awash with flags
and scarves. Dennis jogged away towards a turnstile,
through which the brilliance of the floodlights shone
like the light from a distant galaxy.
And it’s now that I have to confess that Mr. Bergkamp was
only one of dozens of Dennises to have found their way
into the passenger seat of my mid-range saloon. Dennis
Healey, Dennis Hopper, Dennis Potter, Dennis Lillee, the
underrated record producer Dennis Bovell, and many,
many more. I once drove Dennis Thatcher from Leicester
Forest East service station to Ludlow races and he wasn’t a
moment’s bother, though I did have to ask him to refrain
from smoking, and of course not to breathe one word about
the woman who introduced rabies to South Yorkshire.
Upon Opening the Chest Freezer
From the last snowfall of winter to settle on
the hills Damien likes to roll up a ginormous
snowball then store it in the chest freezer in
the pantry for one of his little stunts. Come
high summer, in that thin membrane of night
which divides one long day from the next,
he’ll drive out in the van and deposit his
snowball at a bus stop or crossroads or at the
door of a parish church. Then from a discreet
distance, using the telescopic lens, he’ll snap
away with the Nikon, documenting the
awestruck citizenry who swarm around his
miracle of meteorology, who look upon such
mighty works bewildered and amazed.
Damien, I’m through playing housewife to your
“art” and this brief story-poem is to tell you
I’m leaving. I’m gaffer-taping it to the inside
of the freezer lid; if you’re reading it, you’re
staring into the steaming abyss where nothing
remains but a packet of boneless chicken thighs
and a scattering of petis pois, as hard as bullets
and bruised purple by frost. At first it was just
a scoop here and a scraping there, slush puppies
for next door’s kids, a lemon sorbet after the
Sunday roast, an ice pack once in a while for my
tired flesh, then margaritas for that gaggle of
sycophants you rolled home with one night,
until the day dawned when there wasn’t so
much as a snowflake left. And I need for you
now to lean into the void and feel for yourself
the true scald of Antarctica’s breath.
Seeing Stars
A young, sweet-looking couple came into my pharmacy.
The woman said, “I’d like this hairbrush, please. Oh, and
a packet of sugar-free chewing gum. Oh, and I’ll take one
of these as well,” she added, pointing to a pregnancy-
testing kit on the counter. I slipped it into a paper bag, and
as I was handing back her change I winked at her and said,
“Fingers crossed!” “What did you say?” asked the man.
“I was just wishing you luck,” I said. “Why don’t you
mind your own business, pal,” he hissed. “Or is it giving
you a big hard-on, thinking about my girl dropping her
knickers and pissing on one of those plastic sticks?” A boom-
ing, cavernous emptiness expanded inside me—I felt like
Gaping Ghyll on the one day of the year they open it
up to the public. “You’re right, sir,” I said. “I’ve
overstepped the mark. I’m normally a model of discretion
and tact, but not only have I embarrassed you and your
good lady, I’ve brought shame on the ancient art of the
apothecary.
Please, by way of recompense, choose
something and take it, free of charge.” The man said,
“Give me some speed.” “Er, I was thinking more like a
packet of corn plasters or a pair of nail scissors. What
about one of these barley sugar sticks—they’re very good for
nausea?” “Just get me the amphetamine sulphate,” he
fumed. Then the woman said, “Yeah, and I’ll take a few
grams of heroin. The pure stuff you give to people in
exquisite pain. And you can throw in a syringe while
you’re at it.” “But think of the baby,” I blurted out.
When people have received a blow to the head they often
talk about “seeing stars,” and as a man of science I have
always been careful to avoid the casual use of metaphor
and hyperbole. But I saw stars that day. Whole galaxies of
stars, and planets orbiting around them, each one capable of
sustaining life as we know it. I waved from the porthole of
my interstellar rocket as I hurtled past, and from inside
their watery cocoons millions of helpless half-formed
creatures with doughy faces and pink translucent fingers
waved back.
Last Words
C was bitten on her ring finger by a teensy orange spider
hiding inside a washed-and-ready-to-eat packet of sliced
courgettes imported from Kenya. The finger swelled and
tightened; how could the epidermis stretch so far without
tearing apart? But the real problem was in her toes: pretty
soon she lost all feeling in her feet and dropped to the
floor, and moment by moment the numbness increased
as if molten lead were flowing through her veins to her
lower limbs. However, her mind remained clear, and with
great foresight she thumped the leg of the kitchen table
with the outside of her fist, causing the telephone handset
to jump from the docking station and fall safely into the
hairy tartan blanket in the wicker dog basket. She called
her brother, Sandy. Sandy’s voice said, “Hi, I’m at the golf
course, leave a message.” She called her mother. Her
mother said, “Forget the spider, where’s that pastry brush I
lent you, and the silver candlesticks you borrowed to
impress that boss of yours at one of your fancy-pants dinner
parties? Where will it all end, C? It’ll be the melon baller
next, then the ice cream scoop, and soon I’ll have nothing.
Do you hear me? Nothing. God knows I didn’t bring you
up to be a thief but you have a problem with honesty, C,
you really do. Did you find a man yet? Now leave me
alone, I can hear the nurse coming.” C’s dog padded over
and licked her chin, then went back into the living room to
watch daytime TV.
C lay on the tiles on the kitchen floor for a few cold, quiet
minutes, considering the ever after. Then with her good
hand she punched a long, random number into the keypad,
eleven or twelve digits. After a lot of clicking and
crackling, it rang. “Who is this?” said a man. “My name’s
C and I’m dying from a spider bite,” she said, and described
the incident with the insect and the pre-packed salad
vegetables. The man said, “I’m dying too. I’ve been adrift
in an inflated inner tube in the Indian Ocean for six days
now, and the end is near. I think a shark took my leg but I
daren’t look.” “Why don’t you call for help?” she asked.
“Why don’t you?” he replied. His name was Dean. They
chatted for a while, not caring a hoot about the cost of
premium-rate international calls during peak periods. “Is it
dark there?” C wanted to know. “Yes. Are you married?”
asked Dean. C replied, “I’ve had no luck with men, even
though I’m a lovely person and I’ve taken good care of my
body.” “What’s your best feature?” “My laugh,” said C,
laughing. “And my lips, which have never received the
attention they deserve.” The poison had reached as far as
her windpipe and was tightening around her throat. Dean
said, “Do you think we could have made it together?” “I
think so,” she whispered. “I don’t like courgettes,” Dean
joked, and those were his last words. “I would have done
broccoli instead,” she breathed, “or even cauliflower.
Whatever you asked for I would have made.”
There was a horrible pause as we sat there wondering
whether or not to applaud, then the curtains closed.
My Difference
I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my
difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as
much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my
difference doesn’t cut much ice. He wants me to dress my
difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it
on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May
Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your
difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my
difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse
and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of
dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in
mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a
crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he
shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)
about a set of twins whose differences were swapped at
birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the
wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal
Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and
who met in later life only to discover that their differences
were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference
in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and
reverse over with the ride-on mower, thus making my
difference very different indeed, or auction my difference in
the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”
in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into
the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of
creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference
without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening
any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his
difference with a pair of pinking shears. He’s talking about
such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of
the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed
officers and rendered down into potting compost or
wallpaper paste, or set fire to his difference on primetime
national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter
how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to
me it makes all the difference in the world, he looks at me
with an expression of complete and undisguised and
irreversible indifference.
The Accident
Leo burnt his hand very badly on a jet of steam
which hissed from his toasted pitta bread as he
opened it up with a knife. The visiting nurse said,
“Are you sure you haven’t been beating up your
wife?�
� “Excuse me?” said Leo. “Are you sure you
didn’t sustain this injury during the course of
physically assaulting your wife?” questioned the
nurse. Leo was shocked. “It’s a burn,” he said.
“Of course it’s a burn, but who’s to say she
wasn’t defending herself with a steam iron or a
frying pan? Do you cook your own meals, sir, or
do you insist on your wife doing the housework?”
Leo was flabbergasted. “I’m not even married,”
he said. “Yeah, right, and I’m the Angel of the
North,” she said, throwing him a roll of lint as she
barged out of the house and slammed the door
behind her.
Leo really wasn’t married. His friends were
married. Both of them. One was even divorced.
But Leo was a bachelor and not at all happy with
the situation. Bachelor—the word tasted like
diesel in his mouth. However, that night in the
pub he met Jacqueline, a young blind woman
from York, and they talked for a while on the
subject of Easter Island, about which neither of
them knew anything, and after an hour they were
still talking, and a few moments later their knees
touched under the wooden table. For him it was
like a parachute opening. For her it was like
something involving an artichoke. He lifted his
hopelessly bandaged hand to within a millimetre
of her cheek and said, “Jacqueline, I’ll never hurt
you. I wouldn’t do that. Everything’s going to be
all right from now on and you’re safe. Jackie, I
love you. Do you understand?”
Aviators
They’d overbooked the plane. “At this moment in time,”
announced the agent at the counter, “Rainbow Airlines
is offering one hundred pounds or a free return flight to
any passenger willing to stand down.” A small man in a
cheap suit and Bart Simpson socks scratched his ankle.
“One hundred and fifty pounds,” she announced, fifteen
minutes later. Nobody moved. “Two hundred?” From
nowhere, this neat-looking chap in a blue flannel jacket
and shiny shoes loomed over the desk and said, “I’ll take
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