The World's Wife
Page 4
of cups and plates,
her clearing of clutter,
her regional patter,
were just what needed –
hungover and wrecked as I was from a night on the batter.
Never again!
I needed to clean up my act,
get fitter,
cut out the booze and the fags and the sex.
Yes. And as for the latter,
it was time to turf out the blighter,
the beater or biter,
who’d come like a lamb to the slaughter
to Salome’s bed.
In the mirror, I saw my eyes glitter.
I flung back the sticky red sheets,
and there, like I said – and ain’t life a bitch –
was his head on a platter.
Eurydice
Girls, I was dead and down
in the Underworld, a shade,
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
where words had to come to an end.
And end they did there,
last words,
famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.
So imagine me there,
unavailable,
out of this world,
then picture my face in that place
of Eternal Repose,
in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe
from the kind of a man
who follows her round
writing poems,
hovers about
while she reads them,
calls her His Muse,
and once sulked for a night and a day
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face
when I heard –
Ye Gods –
a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death’s door.
Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre
and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.
Things were different back then.
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee, silver tears.
Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself
than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess, etc., etc.
In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers,
usually male,
and what you doubtless know of my tale
is the deal.
Orpheus strutted his stuff.
The bloodless ghosts were in tears.
Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years.
Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers.
The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.
Like it or not,
I must follow him back to our life –
Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife –
to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,
octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,
elegies, limericks, villanelles,
histories, myths . . .
He’d been told that he mustn’t look back
or turn round,
but walk steadily upwards,
myself right behind him,
out of the Underworld
into the upper air that for me was the past.
He’d been warned
that one look would lose me
for ever and ever.
So we walked, we walked.
Nobody talked.
Girls, forget what you’ve read.
It happened like this –
I did everything in my power
to make him look back.
What did I have to do, I said,
to make him see we were through?
I was dead. Deceased.
I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.
Past my sell-by date . . .
I stretched out my hand
to touch him once
on the back of his neck.
Please let me stay.
But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.
It was an uphill schlep
from death to life
and with every step
I willed him to turn.
I was thinking of filching the poem
out of his cloak,
when inspiration finally struck.
I stopped, thrilled.
He was a yard in front.
My voice shook when I spoke –
Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece.
I’d love to hear it again . . .
He was smiling modestly
when he turned,
when he turned and he looked at me.
What else?
I noticed he hadn’t shaved.
I waved once and was gone.
The dead are so talented.
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake
near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
The Kray Sisters
There go the twins! geezers would say
when we walked down the frog and toad
in our Savile Row whistle and flutes, tailored
to flatter our thr’penny bits, which were big,
like our East End hearts. No one could tell us apart,
except when one twin wore glasses or shades
over two of our four mince pies. Oh, London, London,
London Town, made for a girl and her double
to swagger around; or be driven at speed
in the back of an Austin Princess, black,
up West to a club; to order up bubbly, the best,
in a bucket of ice. Garland singing that night. Nice.
Childhood. When we were God Forbids, we lived
with our grandmother – God Rest Her Soul – a tough suffragette
who’d knocked out a Grand National horse, name of
Ballytown Boy, with one punch, in front of the King,
for the cause. She was known round our manor thereafter
as Cannonball Vi. By the time we were six,
we were sat at her skirts, inhaling the juniper fumes
of her Vera Lynn; hearing the stories of Emmeline’s Army
before and after the ’14 war. Diamond ladies,
they were, those birds who fought for the Vote, salt
of the earth. And maybe this marked us for ever,
because of the loss of our mother, who died giving birth
to the pair of unusual us. Straight up, we knew,
even then, what we wanted to be; had, you could say,
a vocation. We wanted respect for the way
we entered a bar, or handled a car, or shrivelled
a hard-on with simply a menacing look, a threatening word
in a hairy ear, a knee in the orchestra stalls. Belles
of the balls. Queens of the Smoke. We dreamed it all,
trudging for miles, holding the hand of the past, learning
the map of the city under our feet; clocking the boozers,
back alleys, mews, the churches and bridges, the parks,
the Underground stations, the grand hotels where Vita and Violet,
pin-ups of ours, had given it wallop. We stared from Hungerford Bridge
as the lights of London tarted up the old Thames. All right,
we made our mistakes in those early years. We were so
ft
when we should have been hard; enrolled a few girls
in the firm who were well out of order – two of them
getting Engaged; a third sneaking back up the Mile End Road
every night to be some plonker’s wife. Rule Number One –
A boyfriend’s for Christmas, not just for life.
But we learned – and our twenty-first birthday saw us installed
in the first of our clubs, Ballbreakers, just off
Evering Road. The word got around and about
that any woman in trouble could come to the Krays,
no questions asked, for Protection. We’d soon earned the clout
and the dosh and respect for a move, Piccadilly way,
to a classier gaff – to the club at the heart of our legend,
Prickteasers. We admit, bang to rights, that the fruits
of feminism – fact – made us rich, feared, famous,
friends of the stars. Have a good butcher’s at these –
there we for ever are in glamorous black-and-white,
assertively staring out next to Germaine, Bardot,
Twiggy and Lulu, Dusty and Yoko, Bassey, Babs,
Sandy, Diana Dors. And London was safer then
on account of us. Look at the letters we get –
Dear Twins, them were the Good Old Days when you ruled
the streets. There was none of this mugging old ladies
or touching young girls. We hear what’s being said.
Remember us at our peak, in our prime, dressed to kill
and swaggering in to our club, stroke of twelve,
the evening we’d leaned on Sinatra to sing for free.
There was always a bit of a buzz when we entered, stopping
at favoured tables, giving a nod or a wink, buying someone
a drink, lighting a fag, lending an ear. That particular night
something electric, trembling, blue, crackled the air. Leave us both there,
spotlit, strong, at the top of our world, with Sinatra drawling And here’s
a song for the twins, then opening her beautiful throat to take
it away. These boots are made for walking, and that’s
just what they’ll do. One of these days these boots
are gonna walk all over you. Are you ready, boots? Start walkin’ . . .
Elvis’s Twin Sister
Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?
Elvis is alive and she’s female: Madonna
In the convent, y’all,
I tend the gardens,
watch things grow,
pray for the immortal soul
of rock ’n’ roll.
They call me
Sister Presley here.
The Reverend Mother
digs the way I move my hips
just like my brother.
Gregorian chant
drifts out across the herbs,
Pascha nostrum immolatus est . . .
I wear a simple habit,
darkish hues,
a wimple with a novice-sewn
lace band, a rosary,
a chain of keys,
a pair of good and sturdy
blue suede shoes.
I think of it
as Graceland here,
a land of grace.
It puts my trademark slow lopsided smile
back on my face.
Lawdy.
I’m alive and well.
Long time since I walked
down Lonely Street
towards Heartbreak Hotel.
Pope Joan
After I learned to transubstantiate
unleavened bread
into the sacred host
and swung the burning frankincense
till blue-green snakes of smoke
coiled round the hem of my robe
and swayed through those fervent crowds,
high up in a papal chair,
blessing and blessing the air,
nearer to heaven
than cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests,
being Vicar of Rome,
having made the Vatican my home,
like the best of men,
in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti amen,
but twice as virtuous as them,
I came to believe
that I did not believe a word,
so I tell you now,
daughters or brides of the Lord,
that the closest I felt
to the power of God
was the sense of a hand
lifting me, flinging me down,
lifting me, flinging me down,
as my baby pushed out
from between my legs
where I lay in the road
in my miracle,
not a man or a pope at all.
Penelope
At first, I looked along the road
hoping to see him saunter home
among the olive trees,
a whistle for the dog
who mourned him with his warm head on my knees.
Six months of this
and then I noticed that whole days had passed
without my noticing.
I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread,
thinking to amuse myself,
but found a lifetime’s industry instead.
I sewed a girl
under a single star – cross-stitch, silver silk –
running after childhood’s bouncing ball.
I chose between three greens for the grass;
a smoky pink, a shadow’s grey
to show a snapdragon gargling a bee.
I threaded walnut brown for a tree,
my thimble like an acorn
pushing up through umber soil.
Beneath the shade
I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace
with heroism’s boy
and lost myself completely
in a wild embroidery of love, lust, loss, lessons learnt;
then watched him sail away
into the loose gold stitching of the sun.
And when the others came to take his place,
disturb my peace,
I played for time.
I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,
did my work by day, at night unpicked it.
I knew which hour of the dark the moon
would start to fray,
I stitched it.
Grey threads and brown
pursued my needle’s leaping fish
to form a river that would never reach the sea.
I tricked it. I was picking out
the smile of a woman at the centre
of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,
most certainly not waiting,
when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the door.
I licked my scarlet thread
and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle’s eye once more.
Mrs Beast
These myths going round, these legends, fairytales,
I’ll put them straight; so when you stare
into my face – Helen’s face, Cleopatra’s,
Queen of Sheba’s, Juliet’s – then, deeper,
gaze into my eyes – Nefertiti’s, Mona Lisa’s,
Garbo’s eyes – think again. The Little Mermaid slit
her shining, silver tail in two, rubbed salt
into that stinking wound, got up and walked,
in agony, in fishnet tights, stood up and smiled, waltzed,
all for a Prince, a pretty boy, a charming one
who’d dump her in the end, chuck her, throw her overboard.
I could have told her – look, love, I should know,
they’re bastards when they’re Princes.
What you want to do is find yourself a Beast. The sex
is better. Myself, I came to the House of the Beast
no longer a girl, knowing my own mind,
my own gold stashed in the bank,
my own black horse at the gates
ready to carry me off at one wrong word,
one false move, one dirty look.
But the Beast fell to his knees at the door
to kiss my glove with his mongrel lips – good –
showed by the tears in his bloodshot eyes
that he knew he was blessed – better –
didn’t try to conceal his erection,
size of a mule’s – best. And the Beast
watched me open, decant and quaff
a bottle of Château Margaux ’54,
the year of my birth, before he lifted a paw.
I’ll tell you more. Stripped of his muslin shirt
and his corduroys, he steamed in his pelt,
ugly as sin. He had the grunts, the groans, the yelps,
the breath of a goat. I had the language, girls.
The lady says Do this. Harder. The lady says
Do that. Faster. The lady says That’s not where I meant.
At last it all made sense. The pig in my bed
was invited. And if his snout and trotters fouled
my damask sheets, why, then, he’d wash them. Twice.
Meantime, here was his horrid leather tongue
to scour in between my toes. Here
were his hooked and yellowy claws to pick my nose,
if I wanted that. Or to scratch my back
till it bled. Here was his bullock’s head
to sing off-key all night where I couldn’t hear.
Here was a bit of him like a horse, a ram,
an ape, a wolf, a dog, a donkey, dragon, dinosaur.
Need I say more? On my Poker nights, the Beast
kept out of sight. We were a hard school, tough as fuck,
all of us beautiful and rich – the Woman
who Married a Minotaur, Goldilocks, the Bride
of the Bearded Lesbian, Frau Yellow Dwarf, et Moi.
I watched those wonderful women shuffle and deal –
Five and Seven Card Stud, Sidewinder, Hold ’Em, Draw –
I watched them bet and raise and call. One night,
a head-to-head between Frau Yellow Dwarf and Bearded’s Bride
was over the biggest pot I’d seen in my puff.
The Frau had the Queen of Clubs on the baize
and Bearded the Queen of Spades. Final card. Queen each.
Frau Yellow raised. Bearded raised. Goldilocks’ eyes
were glued to the pot as though porridge bubbled there.
The Minotaur’s wife lit a stinking cheroot. Me,
I noticed the Frau’s hand shook as she placed her chips.
Bearded raised her a final time, then stared,
stared so hard you felt your dress would melt
if she blinked. I held my breath. Frau Yellow
swallowed hard, then called. Sure enough, Bearded flipped