Roy Fisher

The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap. For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus— —approach, development, climax, discard— and sound magnanimous. The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff— belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go— And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

The irritations of comfort— I visit as they rebuild the house from within: whitening, straightening, bracing the chimney-breast edges and forcing warmth, dryness and windows with views into the cottage below canal-level. For yes, there’s a canal, bringing cold reflections almost to the door, and beyond it the main line to Manchester, its grid of gantries pale against the upland and the sky; there’s a towpath pub, where the red- haired old landlady brings up the beer from the cellar slowly in a jug: there’s a chapel next door to the cottage, set up with a false front and a real boiler-house, and— rest, my mind—nearby there’s a small haulage contractor’s yard. Everything’s turned up here, except a certain complete cast-iron housefront, preserved and pinned to a blank wall in Ottawa. This comfort beckons. It won’t do. It beckons. Driving steadily through rain in a watertight car with the wipers going. It won’t do. It beckons.

I saw the garden where my aunt had died And her two children and a woman from next door; It was like a burst pod filled with clay. A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors; The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground, Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse Over the housetop and into the street beyond. Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer. Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there. When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care. Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces; My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years. And in his office notepad that was given me I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses. In his lifetime I had not known him well. These were the things I noticed at ten years of age: Those, and the four hearses outside our house, The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy. But my grandfather went home from the mortuary And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull, Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die. When my father came back from identifying the daughter He asked us to remind him of her mouth. We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’. These were marginal people I had met only rarely And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen; Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths. This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving; I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now. But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.

At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em- braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en- gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy- nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav- ily to the floor. A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif- fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance. She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey- white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap- idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines. A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling- ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness. In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen. In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur- faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with. Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau- tiful. Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and shaping heads, awakening eyes.

I’ve lived within half a mile of it for twenty years. West by the black iron weather-hen half-strangled with clematis on the garage roof I can locate it. Past a low ridge in the cliff face of a limestone dale there’s a cave in the bushes. When the old tigers were long since gone, leaving their teeth, the valley people would climb there with the dead they thought most useful; push them well in, take them out again, walk them around: ‘They’re coming! They’re coming’ We Malagasies love our second burials. We hire a band that comes in a van. Again with liquefaction almost done we hold our cherished ones in our arms. From the grave-clothes they fall in gobbets as dog-food falls from the can. We wrap them in fresh dry linen. They bless our lives with their happiness. Walk them around the valley. Drop here a finger for the god that is a rat or a raven, here a metatarsal to set under the hearth for luck. And what was luck? The afterlife back then was fairly long: nothing demented like for ever, nothing military. The afterlife would come to the party.