David Harsent

Rough music in the lane, the love child lapped in blood and safe at her breast, the pain echoed in wood on wood, steel on steel, as they come, the women in their blacks, to hound her from house and home, bands of bitches and claques of crones with their pots and pans, their hooks and ladles and bowls, to beat outside in the street, to stand at her window and howl, while the child takes a taste of green milk and “the dead of night” is all she has of her own and the music goes on and on.

Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight. The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost, yourself  in memory perhaps, might well set foot up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight. • Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.

REVERSALS There are graves under the houses and houses under the graves and linking the three a broad stone staircase where the dead go up and the living go down. They pass one another wordlessly which might mean they don’t know, or else they’re pretending not to know. You can smell the orange grove on the hill; you can hear children bowling barrel hoops down the street. Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring. Their secrets cloud the water. Later they walk back through an avenue of   cypresses, carrying the jug like a bastard child. TRAPPED In the house across the street, in a room directly opposite his, was a long mirror. When he looked out of   his window, he would see himself   in the room like a thief caught in a trap. He threw a stone. His neighbor ran in to the sound of   breaking glass, then came to the window and shouted across: “Thank God for that: whenever I looked in my mirror there you were, doing something shifty behind my back.” The first man turned away. The long mirror in his room brought him face to face with his neighbor, knife in hand. THE ACCUSED Just as he locked the door, as he pocketed the key, as he glanced over his shoulder, they arrested him. They tortured him until they tired of   it. “Look,” they said, “the key is your key, the house is your house, we accept that now; but why did you put the key in your pocket as if to hide it from us?” They let him go, but his name is still on a list.

Consider the rip for a mouth, the rip in the crotch, the hank of hair, consider the flair for ill-fortune, the empty stare, the done deal with sorrow, the rich and rare nest-egg of dreams, the share and share alike in matters of loss, the payments in kind, the liking for blind bets, for truth or dare; consider the threadbare get up, the make-up beyond repair, the tin-tack teeth, consider the dungeon voice wanting nothing more than bare house-room, and nothing less than hand-in-glove, a pigeon pair given over to make and mend, to touch and go, to wear and tear, and all it takes is this: forswear flint and fire, stay silent, be white on white, live in dead air.

They weighed the human soul — twenty-one grams — a tremor on the air becoming trance, becoming nimbus. No. It is a deadweight, a plummet, drawing down to its harbor beside the heart. It is Breath and Word, they said. No. It is pig-iron and salt. The dying feel its slow lift as riddance, a bar of darkness hoisting against the light. Something shifted under his skin, it puckered, as might a worm going slither-and-tuck close to the nape of his neck, then up past the cheekbone and onto the sill of his eye to gorge on the image trapped there, the last of her, the last lost thing before the sky grew dark and all the windows closed. The dead are given permission to walk among us. They smile dead smiles, they have no need for speech. The familiar goes for nothing. Each evening they hold up to our windows their silent, smiling children. Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room which can’t be seen but can be known, white being one thing in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival, and the soul’s song across that windless landscape, unheard; by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare. Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees. A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light. You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match. Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals, shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds: a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes. He was wearing a dead man’s coat: knee-length, snug, the lining rich shot silk in midnight blue. “As I thought,” she said, “a perfect fit. Of course, you look nothing like him, nor do you have that rangy, loose-limbed stride or straightness of back.” One side-pocket was sewn up, in the other, a letter. He threw it away as he left. Music at every turn, music by accident, a voice between the phrases, between the notes, calling, calling, and this not song but touchstone, blind bargain, last chance. Dust-devil, derecho, twister, cyclone, clean sweep, she is locked-off in this and the place is dark the way a pebble is dark at its center ... then her prophecy-in-song, eyes wide open in sleep, his hand across her mouth. What they did to him was unwatchable; what they did lay far beyond belief — daytime terrors, waking dreamtime, the lock-up, breeze-block walls, chain-drag, the Black & Decker kicking in: winged creatures, they sing as they work. Dust and shadow, come back to that, come back with a heavy heart. Is there nothing more: is that what you heard yourself say? Children in the garden, the headlong rush, the wolf pack between trees and snowfall under moonlight: the story you told is the story you were told: snow and a frost-moon, as clear, as pitiless. He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers, to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day: cloud low to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that. Slow sacrament of cheese and olive oil and bread, the creep of sundown-sunlight on the wall. “How safe do you feel at times like this?” Laughing, he bared his teeth. A thing flew in at the open window, bird or bat. “It’s like looking at clear water through clouded glass.” They were far off from anywhere. A salted seam, just fool’s gold, leavings of a dream wherein you give a true report of who you were, of what you could become. In rainfall you’re invisible, in sunlight the same, that’s all the dream gives up: a sense of place and sudden banishment.

Deep reaches of sleep until the unforeseen moment, like fugue, like petit mal, some kind of sign, a touch from a joker’s finger, to let him know what’s right, what’s wrong with the dream-within-a-dream. A sudden, slight shift in the order of things and all the past undone. He left what was left of himself in her care that night. • They went to the river and dropped their clothes on the bank. She struck out. He followed in the long, slow vee of her wake. She could sound and surface, bringing back with her what other lovers had dumped: hotel bill, gimcrack ring, a four-square shot from the photo booth. Later, they dipped their bottles and drank. She looked at him and laughed. “You think you’re safe? You’re not.” • In this, her fool is deaf and dumb and twirling a pink parasol. In this he’s doing a chicken dance. He turns away and puckers up for a kiss. He’s their stalker, familiar, spy, his slippy grin is all lipstick and green teeth. Words to the wise, or coffin-laugh, or catcall. In this, he watches from cover, maestro of the deadfall. He goose-steps them out of the tunnel of love and into the house of glass.

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . . So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . . Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

RED The skim on the surface of your soup, or the cut on your plate in the Café des Anges, juices swamping the willow-pattern skiff as she dabs her mouth with her napkin, your blind, blind date, leaving a smudge, lipstick-and-gore, though there’s still a worm of gristle in the gap between her teeth. Mood music, candlelight, wine, low voices in a world of harm, the creature brought down, hindquarters heavy, hind legs broken by the dogs, its head held up, eyes wide, the tangle and drag as a gralloch knife unpegs the bulk, all slippage and seepage, and the way she thumbs a morsel into your mouth, or smiles your smile back at you, lets you know that everything’s just as it seems, then back at the small hotel, she strips off quicker than you might have hoped, pink as a new-skinned cat, all too eager to have you by heart. Her cry tells you nothing new.