Roddy Lumsden

You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly makes you laugh like mules. Chances dance off your wrists, each day ready, sprites in your bones and spite not yet swollen, not yet set. You gather handful after miracle handful, seeing straight, reaching the lighthouse in record time, pockets brim with scimitar things. Now is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm. Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick twins, carried on your backs, each vow new to touch and each mistake a broken biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines without levers, easy in bowel and lung. One cartwheel over the quicksand curve of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

A word you can’t quite say without itching, flinching; it’s not easy to ignore its squirming appetite, stay your primal juddering. And yes, at night, each microbe gurns in the salty sea of gut and gullet, born again, boldly eats as you ate it, brews its own queasy tea of proto-raunch which it will quickly sate, birthing wanderlusting vigors, as yet unknown to microscience. They sashay, set out for the toes or gape through your eyes at your drooping lids, your fat bunch of keys, at this internal motel’s boss, bellhop, lackey, sat in the throne of his slumber, a mercy seat.

For the first time, I listen to a lost and secret recording of us making love near-on ten years ago. I recognize your voice, your sounds, though if I knew no better, I could be any man in any room. After, the rising sounds of rising and of dressing and once as you step up close to the deck, perhaps to pick up shoes, you sing the chorus of Sunday Morning. I call on you to hurry and we leave. It does not end then; the tape rolls on. A few late cars which sigh by might have passed us walking away triumphant, unaware we’ve left behind this mop and mow mechanism of silence to which we may never return.

These years lift over coldly now: Aprils and Augusts are gifted to ice, or sprawl into mid-summers or year ends—pillars of lesser standing. Still come no replies to boyish queries, how the belly sleeper buoys, begins again, becomes poor soul or bull of appetite; why when the pearls drop, no spool dares connect the ripples.

When I hurt you and cast you off, that was buccaneer work: the sky must have turned on the Bay that day and spat. We’d tarried on corners, we’d dallied on sofas, we were in progress, do you see? Yet stormcloud bruises bloomed where once we touched. The walls swam under minty fever; we failed to reach the long, low sleep of conquerors. Since I played wrong and you did too, since we were wrong, we need apologies; for your part in this sorry slip of hearts, you should walk on Golden Hill at night alone; for mine I will hang with my enemies, out on the long shore, our brigand bodies impaled on the horns of our failures, the cold day casting draughts through our brinkled bones.

For once, I felt wanted, dead or alive, the day my fame outgrew the Famous Five. There came a time I could give no more to the other guys in the Gang of Four and I felt the dead weight fall from me when I unyoked the clowns of the Crucial Three. I considered all this as I boarded the bus to quit the town not big enough for both of us. One eye didn’t seem so much to leave behind as I sped to my job in the kingdom of the blind.

Skipping out from the major international cocktail party with my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist, I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i.e., men. Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves. Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talk as the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh, so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimps from doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs, dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared, with not enough tentacles to count the capes and stoles, fine bespoke pashminas, silk snoods, at least one vicuña suit, tainted with gold thread. I’d seen down a Blenheim, two Lime Rickeys and was eyeing a gamine mixologist who was straining out Savoy Royales when my raddled nemesis limped over to announce she had encountered my latest screed, all four foot eleven of her tortoiseishly quivering, a nubbin of cream cheese on her whiskery lip and her good eye withering my borrowed companionette as she leaned on air. I am not a man who has not known the turmoil women offer, the gift you accept of their wit, the way you’d slip a hand into a gloveful of cockroaches, comply with a last-minute call to join a seal cull. Tanya, I pouted, I am awed and honored you opened a window in your schedule even to glance at my inconsequential outpourings. At which point she clattered out a scoffing gibe so sour you couldn’t blend it with a chemistry set from Hamley’s and, seizing my escort by her neat wrist, we tore out onto Jermyn Street, along which I performed a sort of shuffle, one eye on the book and one on m’lady’s competition-standard backside as she led us to the Ritz.

With refreshments and some modesty and home-drawn maps, the ladies of the parish are marshaling the plans in hand, devising the occasions, in softest pencil: the Day of Hearsay, Leeway Week, the Maybe Pageant, a hustings on the word nearby. Half-promised rain roosts in some clouds a mile out, gradual weather making gradual notes on the green, the well, the monument, the mayor's yard where dogs purr on elastic. Everything taken by the smooth handle then, or about to be, hiatus sharp in humble fashion. A small boy spins one wheel of an upturned bike, the pond rises, full of skimmed stones on somehow days, not Spring, not Summer yet. Engagements are announced in the Chronicle, a nine-yard putt falls short. Dark cattle amble on the angles of Flat Field. The ladies close their plotting books and fill pink teacups, there or thereabouts.

Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap then back to the village with a lame cat twisting and woeful in her cage. Bread these days isn't baked to last: how sad those posh loaves thudding off in pine breadbins all around the Heath: soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day or two, then binned or thrown to foxes, loaves just an inch of gloom below the caged birds you notice in corners of those same mansions when you seek the past, dinking their mirrors, dipping once in a while for a sip of milk.

...one begins, ungratefully, to long for the contrasting tone of some honest, unironic misery, confident that when it arrives Roddy Lumsden will have the technical resources to handle it. Neil Powell, TLS I’m trying to string together three words which I hate more than I hate myself: gobsmacked, hubby and...when I realise that words no longer count for much at all. And that’s me back down, head on the floor. It’s like Cathal Coughlan goes in his song: till I’ve seen how low I can go. It’s like what my ancestor told me in a dream: You’ll be a sponge for the pain of others. It’s like what I told the lassie from the local paper: I do not suffer for my art, I just suffer. And face it, while we’re at it, it’s like what curly Shona said that night at Graffiti when all the gang were gathered for the show: how she reckoned I would be the first to die, or the time I slipped back from the bogs in Bo’s to hear my best friend tell a stranger girl who’d been sweet in my company,mind how you go with Roddy, he’s damaged goods, you know.