Was it for this, p.1
Was It for This, page 1
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A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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for my mother
TENANTS
… but as
Fishes glide, leaving no print where they pass,
Nor making sound …
14 June 2017
00:54 BST
1.
To think of an event, a thing that happened,
To understand how vague it was,
How confused, uneventful, out of time.
To see the silver pencil in the sky
And hear the whistle of a V2 bomb.
Old women running out with not much on,
It was the last year of the war and they were tired.
To touch their wagging plaits of fine grey hair
And watch the renovation of the tower,
Built in the emptiness the bombs had cleared,
Where blouses flagged along the washing line.
*
John Lewis was being built. Cranes snapped
Like nutcrackers on little nubs of sky
Or slowly dipped their jibs in courteous lines.
The markets faltered, penthouses were passed
Between the agencies, and even when the monies
Were exchanged remained unoccupied,
The views they might afford unseen, unshown.
Work stopped on digging double basements out,
Especially in the streets that ran due north.
Some of the laminated fakebrick walls blew down,
Exposing missing house parts, cellars gone,
The chunky yellow lumps of London clay
Which, after being machine-regurgitated,
Looked like scone dough, fine crumbs of butter-flour.
*
We watched a video of a beehive being cleaned out in spring.
Somewhere in Arkansas a man was hacking jaggedly,
Scraping with a blunt and shiny metal tool,
Ripping at rotten comb, the cells perforated, sunken,
Ropey with the shaggy clumped detritus of the bees,
Pitiful he said, tugging soft handfuls of it loose.
It looked like that grey stuff inside the hoover,
Or rockwool in the attic that you emptied with your mother,
The house being sold.
*
On dry grey days we went to Holland Park.
The little children’s playground was revamped.
It cost a million pounds and looked the same.
I sat down on a bench, beside my pram,
Ignoring any email that came in,
Unravelling a racetrack from a Chelsea bun,
The baby on my lap, for safety sniffing him,
Addicted to his warm, sweet yeasty smell,
The buttered popcorn of the breastmilk nappies.
I was absconding from the life that I had had,
Committed to being small, nutlike, enshelled.
My phone was turned to silent so the calls just flashed.
I threw some sozzled raisins to the birds.
Some of the pigeons slept, their heads tucked in,
Little steelwool scourers for the sink.
The others gulped at crumbs besides the bins,
As a child made blowball from a stale baguette.
Some picked the breast meat off a fallen crow,
The cavity they left was smooth and clean,
Like something you could use to scoop ice cream.
*
The baby cinema was mostly empty, the coffee counter closed,
The custom of free bourbon biscuits was disused.
The few remaining babies were less lusty, cowed,
And because the room was still, sound ricocheted around
As the stooped experimental ghost, sheeted in white,
With large, skewed bloodhound holes cut out across the eyes
Grabbed bowls and plates out of the dated dark pine cupboards
And hurled them at the wall, watching his family eat their supper.
A whirling discus thrower, speeding up, until his hands met air.
And then he stood remorsefully, regarding the porcelain splinters,
The milk pooling on terracotta and, underneath the table,
The improbably entire half plate his wife picked up and cradled,
Like a piece of terra rubra found at Verulamium,
Pinned to another piece in a small countryside museum.
*
If you can make yourself into a nut, I thought,
Like the one that older boy lobs round the slide,
The peanuts rattling in their woody skin …
If you can make yourself into a nut, unshelled,
i.e. cased in your own space and fibrous brown,
Pitted with crevices, lunar reservoirs …
If you can make yourself into a nut.
If you can Marie Kondo everything.
Fold vertically, give things away.
Be less.
2.
Meanwhile, the smell of acetone in public places
And terror in the eyes of a police horse,
The rider lying thrown. Leaflets explained:
These are normal operations designed
To sabotage hostile reconnaissance.
We may use sniffer dogs or arms,
The operation could last for any length of time,
Involving various asset types and numbers.
The aim is principally counter-terrorist.
If you see officers patrolling @LondonTransport
Remember #TogetherWeveGotItCovered.
*
My days contracted to a mile by pram.
Most mornings I spent in the pharmacy
Or nursing in the French patisserie,
Now boarded up and in receivership,
Where the spy found naked in a North Face holdall
Was known to sit and drink Americano,
Meet visitors. Maybe a Russian couple.
Numerous reconstructions were attempted
By experts in confinement and contortionists.
The bag was found inside a bathtub, locked.
A parachutist tried 300 times but couldn’t fit,
The second expert got inside but couldn’t pull the zip.
A self-shot video showed the decomposing man
Swaying from behind in high-heeled boots,
Brushing the dust from cherry patent leather.
I watched the other mothers at the counter.
They waited, one arm rocking a closed pram,
Or dancing slowly on stiff hips, cupping a warm
Full nappy in a sling. They say it isn’t tar
That black stuff she’s still bringing up.
Who knows. The surgery is always closed,
Or else you stand with the speaker function on,
Picking the Rorschach blots of limestone off your tea,
Passed between a frizzled Lennon song
And you’re seventh in the queue, please hold.
The pharmacist was always slurping something,
His mugs said Daddy or Keep Calm and Carry On.
I asked him what was safe to use on eczema,
He said E45 and rang a huge tub up.
But what would happen in the case of fire, I asked,
Making my hands flat, flammable, the residues on clothes.
*
During the past MONTH have the following concerned you:
Flying, seeing blood, injections, heights, being locked in, dying?
If so, it may be helpful to give details in the box below.
I wrote down Soviet-era nerve agents, nail bombs, the fire.
Then I watched his gaze move past me to the pavement,
A man was wheeling lemons, greenish, knobbly, down a ramp.
He piled the boxes badly on the pallet truck, some open,
A lemon rolled between two yellow lines.
My homework for next time was writing out my birth story,
For many of his clients it was a turning point in therapy.
Because what happened in the world is never absolute,
Because it wasn’t me myself, because no story is the truth,
He would encourage me to visualise it on TV.
I might be sitting on a sheepskin rug drinking a rooibos tea,
Reading a magazine, painting my nails Chanel Le Vernis.
The point was to be watching from a space outside my body,
Not even looking at the documentary of my life on screen,
Until I picked up the remote and pressed FF and RW
And watched it whizzing by in random snapshot silhouettes
Bisected by a thin white line that jumped, a glitch effect.
The point was for it all to be unreal, dissociated from me,
Just this thing on VHS I’d seen so many times it bored me.
*
Halfway through a heatwave, soon the solstice.
The milk sweats, dawn at 5, bad sleep again,
That cloistered smell – old water, dying flowers –
Then
This fire in Kensington, are you OK?
I’d heard the helicopters in the night,
Scooping the baby from the bassinet,
And up again to change my clothes and pad,
Sweat-chilled, the lochia golden now,
The texture of a custard dim-sum bun.
But I’d imagined them on railway lines,
The suicide’s ambivalence, a joy-ride,
The suspect slipping in the tangled junction.
To the extent, that is, that I had thought at all,
Cocooned, minutely logging feeds,
Self-made servant of my selfish genes,
A mile away.
Downstairs I watched the fire all morning on TV:
Fine spray of metalworking sparks,
The upper windows blown out clean to holes
And, lower down, the water jets’ neat
Ornamental arcs, trained metres short.
People standing on the forecourt with
Only the things they were standing in.
The sulphurous smoke, a thick wedge
Thinning northwards, debris everywhere,
The trees never more magnificent.
At night (because there might be toxic fumes
Because the baby ought to stay at home),
I went by car to drop off baby things:
Pampers size 0, wet wipes, unworn vests.
They said that at this time there was no room.
*
Now when I walked into that street, walked north
It stood it was just there.
A blackened shell or husk, the papers said,
A blackened skeleton. A mausoleum.
Our disgrace.
What I saw was still changing daily,
The texture crinkled, corrugated, lacy,
Sometimes close-worked and intricate,
Like the feathery boa round the window-panes,
But also stubbled, coppery, distressed,
Fine hessian hairs on just-ripe blackberries.
And all the widows that you saw in Greece
just sitting
All the mascara shades the drugstore has
From very black to blackest black black pearl
new death is onyx.
Hands in their laps a line of women sitting
Outside the kafeneion by the port.
There, by the stone slab with the fishheads on.
3.
Dogs throw themselves against the fence,
The slip road turning grey,
And by the windows residents
Still kneel at dawn to pray,
Or look out with their backpacks on
Towards the nodding cranes
The tin sheds and the holding stacks
In empty space of planes.
Part of each driver driving on,
Another part stays put,
Effusing over building ground
As fine exhaust and soot.
*
Before the fire, the firemen weren’t informed
That rainscreen cladding might be flammable,
Or that the staircase had been breached by drilling,
Which meant that smoke dense with particulate
Leapt choking up the only exit route,
Warping the melted plastic safety lights,
As water sluiced and fell in useless panes
And hoses tangled on the floor and melted,
Prising ajar the fire-resistant doors
That families had plugged with bits of cloth.
In the case of the deceased, we can compare
The point at which the person was recovered
To that person’s origin within the tower,
Thereby mapping their movement as a vector.
There was a pattern of upwards migration,
Fifteen residents climbed up to the 23rd floor,
Joining the eleven people already there,
A decision that was invariably fatal,
Some started hanging sheets, some jumped.
I felt the body glancing on my back,
A fireman said, I saw the leg pop off.
It sprang off with its slipper on, it ran.
Firefighting operations were exceptional,
Dynamic risk assessment became requisite:
By 1am, ‘Stay Put’ should have been obsolete.
But this report is avowedly provisional.
We await further evidentiary material.
*
Dreams people had: dreams of a dream
Of sleepwalking in air,
Of pickling limes and aubergine
And driving east for Uber,
I went to Westfield to buy oil
To put into her hair
I charged the phone and made a call
I walked into a fire,
I watched him get the hamster out
And put it on her knee,
The sheets of fire were long and white
And fell down as debris.
I saw the father giving up,
The television on,
As Pedro Pony stayed asleep,
And Peppa started crying,
And then he started soaking towels
And pushed her, shoving down
Into the smell like nothing else,
And ran and fell and ran.
Outside they pinned him to the floor,
And someone put a line in.
I dreamed about an open door,
The smell of lamb and cumin.
But in the footage on TV
As the whiteness billowed higher,
I saw someone who looked like me
Just waving at a window.
*
In the burned-out tower dawn happens in an instant,
Like dye fluorescing through a leaf’s venation,
Or the route out of a crowded cinema at night,
A blazing EXIT HERE illumination.
4.
If you can think about the stencilled words
Above the fire-resistant cot he had just built,
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Do you know how loved you are?
If you can think about the child whose favourite song
Was run, run, as fast as you can,
You can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man,
And see the kitchen as it was, the fridge,
The saffron crumbling in the stewing fish,
And then the rectangle of ash it is …
If you can hear the bombs that razed the site,
Old women running out with not much on,
It was the last year of the war and they were tired,
And touch their wagging, greasy braids of hair …
You’ll see the vacancy it always was,
The eagerness with which all things disperse.
*
When we were children there was never snow, it didn’t come,
Or if it came it was a few flakes from the classroom window,
Already losing structure by the time you crossed the room
And set the fine unbroken red-tipped pencil-shaving down.
That was the first year of the snow, the first year in the tower,
The first year he came round, you met him at the ground,
Your fingers brushed his fumbling on the button for the floor,
Then tea in the new mugs, two spoons of demerara sugar.
His fingers traced out something on your hand, a tickly line,
A rising feeling everywhere and then he lay you down,
Your neck was in the beanbag, the blue corduroy was soft,
That sandy sound, his palm finding your waist and hips.
One of your little brother’s fireman stickers on the rug,
You peeled it off and balled it up, the sky was looking ill,
The sickly colour of a sponge cake taken out too soon,
A heartbeat getting harder underskin, his skin or yours.
The trains had vanished on the track, your pulses tightening
And narrowing, a feeling of being winched and winching in,
Distance diminished in the sky, the yellowness was gone,
A rush of blood him you a gulp the body swallowing.
And then the snow: to start with pixelated, clean,
Then puffy and distressed like rockwool ceiling insulation,
A lining from the inside or a kind of household cladding,
A whiteness waiting to be written on by brightness.
