Poems 1960-2000 (23 page)

Ting-ting!
‘What’s in your pocket, sir?’

Ping!
Metal. Not coins or keys:

Sterotabs for the foreign water,

armour against one kind of disease. 

‘Aluminium: that’s what they are –

they set the machine off.’ That’s it, then:

out of the frying-pan into the fire;

here’s awful Alzheimer’s looming again. 

There wasn’t much point in throwing away

your aluminium pots and kettle

if whenever you go on holiday

your drinking water’s full of that metal. 

Which will you swallow: bacteria soup,

or a clanking cocktail of sinister granules

that’ll rust your mental circuitry up

and knot your brain-cells into tangles? 

Don’t bother to choose. You can’t abjure it,

the use of this stuff to “purify”.

At home the Water Board’s fallen for it:

don’t be surprised to see a ring of sky, 

grey and canny as a metal detector,

to hear, amidst an aerial hum,

tintinnabulations over the reservoir

warning you of dementia to come.

Somehow we manage it: to like our friends,

to tolerate not only their little ways

but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness:

‘Oh well,’ we smile, ‘it’s one of his funny days.’ 

Families, of course, are traditionally awful:

embarrassing parents, ghastly brothers, mad aunts

provide a useful training-ground to prepare us

for the pseudo-relations we acquire by chance. 

Why them, though? Why not the woman in the library

(grey hair, big mouth) who reminds us so of J?

Or the one on Budgen’s delicatessen counter

(shy smile, big nose) who strongly resembles K? 

– Just as the stout, untidy gent on the train

reading the
Mail on Sunday
through pebble specs

could, with somewhat sparser hair and a change

of reading-matter, be our good friend X. 

True, he isn’t; they aren’t; but why does it matter?

Wouldn’t they do as well as the friends we made

in the casual past, by being at school with them,

or living nextdoor, or learning the same trade? 

Well, no, they wouldn’t. Imagine sharing a tent

with one of these look-alikes, and finding she snored:

no go. Or listening for days on end while she dithered

about her appalling marriage: we’d be bored. 

Do we feel at all inclined to lend them money?

Or travel across a continent to stay

for a weekend with them? Or see them through an abortion,

a divorce, a gruelling court-case? No way. 

Let one of these impostors desert his wife

for a twenty-year-old, then rave all night about

her sensitivity and her gleaming thighs,

while guzzling all our whisky: we’d boot him out. 

And as for us, could we ring them up at midnight

when our man walked out on us, or our roof fell in?

Would they offer to pay our fare across the Atlantic

to visit them? The chances are pretty thin. 

Would they forgive our not admiring their novel,

or saying we couldn’t really take to their child,

or confessing that years ago we went to bed

with their husband? No, they wouldn’t: they’d go wild. 

Some things kindly strangers will put up with,

but we need to know exactly what they are:

it’s OK to break a glass, if we replace it,

but we mustn’t let our kids be sick in their car. 

Safer to stick with people who remember

how we ourselves, when we and they were nineteen,

threw up towards the end of a student party

on ethyl alcohol punch and methedrine. 

In some ways we’ve improved since then. In others

(we glance at the heavy jowls and thinning hair,

hoping we’re slightly better preserved than they are)

at least it’s a deterioration we share. 

It can’t be true to say that we chose our friends,

or surely we’d have gone for a different lot,

while they, confronted with us, might well have decided

that since it was up to them they’d rather not. 

But something keeps us hooked, now we’re together,

a link we’re not so daft as to disparage –

nearly as strong as blood-relationship

and far more permanent, thank God, than marriage.

Some of us are a little tired of hearing that cigarettes kill.

We’d like to warn you about another way of making yourself ill: 

we suggest that in view of AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, cystitis and NSU,

not to mention genital warts and cervical cancer and the proven connection between the two, 

if you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks

what you should give up is not smoking but sex. 

We’re sorry if you’re upset,

but think of the grisly things you might otherwise get. 

We can’t see much point in avoiding emphysema at sixty-five

if that’s an age at which you have conspicuously failed to arrive; 

and as for cancer, it is a depressing fact

that at least for women this disease is more likely to occur in the reproductive tract. 

We could name friends of ours who died that way, if you insist,

but we feel sure you can each provide your own list. 

You’ll notice we didn’t mention syphilis and gonorrhoea;

well, we have now, so don’t get the idea 

that just because of antibiotics quaint old clap and pox

are not still being generously spread around by men’s cocks. 

Some of us aren’t too keen on the thought of micro-organisms travelling up into our brain

and giving us General Paralysis of the Insane.

We’re opting out of one-night stands;

we’d rather have a cigarette in our hands. 

If it’s a choice between two objects of cylindrical shape

we go for the one that is seldom if ever guilty of rape. 

Cigarettes just lie there quietly in their packs

waiting until you call on one of them to help you relax. 

They aren’t moody; they don’t go in for sexual harassment and threats,

or worry about their performance as compared with that of other cigarettes, 

nor do they keep you awake all night telling you the story of their life,

beginning with their mother and going on until morning about their first wife. 

Above all, the residues they leave in your system are thoroughly sterilised and clean, 

which is more than can be said for the products of the human machine.

Altogether, we’ve come to the conclusion that sex is a drag.

Just give us a fag.

My name is Eliza Fraser.

I belong to some savages.

My job is to feed the baby

they have hung on my shoulder.

Its mother is lying sick

with no milk in her breasts,

and my own baby died:

it was born after the shipwreck.

It was born under water

in the ship's leaky longboat.

Three days I helped to bail,

then gave birth in the scuppers.

My poor James, the captain,

was crippled with thirst and sickness.

The men were all useless,

and no woman to call on.

I believe the First Mate,

Mr Brown, treated me kindly;

he consigned my dead infant

to its watery fate.

But now I have been given

a black child to suckle.

I have been made a wet-nurse,

a slave to savage women.

They taunt me and beat me.

They make me grub for lily-roots

and climb trees for honey.

They poke burning sticks at me.

They have rubbed me all over

with charcoal and lizard-grease

to protect me from sunburn.

It is my only cover.

I am as black as they are

and almost as naked,

with stringy vines for a loincloth

and feathers stuck in my hair.

They are trying to change me

into one of themselves.

My name is Eliza Fraser.

I pray God to save me.

Their men took my husband –

they dragged him into the forest –

but I still have my wedding-ring

concealed in my waistband.

My name is Eliza Fraser.

My home is in Stromness.

I have left my three children

in the care of the minister.

I am a strong woman.

My language is English.

My name is Eliza Fraser

and my age thirty-seven.

The ghosts came from the sea, the white ghosts.

One of them was a she-ghost, a white woman.

We took her to the camp, the white she-ghost.

She was white all over, white like the ancestors,

white like the bodies of dead people

when you scorch them in the fire and strip off the skin.

She was a ghost, but we don't know whose.

We asked her ‘Whose ghost are you?

Which ancestor has come back to us?'

She wouldn't say. She had forgotten our language.

She talked in a babble like the babble of birds,

that ghost from the sea, that white she-ghost.

She was covered with woven skins, but we stripped her;

she had hairs on her body, but we plucked them out;

we tried to make her look like a person.

She was stupid, though. She wouldn't learn.

We talked to her and she didn't listen.

We told her to go out and collect food, to dig for roots.

We told her to climb trees, to look for honey.

She couldn't, not even when we beat her.

She seems to have forgotten everything,

that ghost from the sea, that white woman.

We send her out for food every day

and she brings back a few bits, not enough for a child.

We have to throw her scraps, or she would starve.

All she is fit for is to suckle a baby,

that ancestor woman, that white ghost.

We have put her among the children until she learns.

I am a poor widow.

I do not own a farthing –

bereft in a shipwreck

of all but my wedding-ring.

     You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

     You own two trunks of finery

     and £400 subscribed

     by the citizens of Sydney.

I am a poor widow.

My fatherless children

are alone up in Orkney

while I beg for money.

The Lord Mayor of Liverpool,

the Lord Mayor of London,

the Colonial Secretary:

they will none of them help me.

     You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

     You are not even Mrs Fraser.

     You have another husband now –

     you married Captain Greene in Sydney.

I am a poor widow,

the victim of cannibals.

They killed my dear husband

on the shores of New Holland.

They skinned him and baked him;

they cut up his body

and gorged on his flesh

in their villainous gluttony.

Their hair is bright blue,

those abominable monsters;

it grows in blue tufts

on the tips of their shoulders…

     You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

     Your sad ordeals have quite unhinged you.

     You were a decent woman once,

     prickly with virtue. What has changed you?

     Tell us the truth, the truth, the truth!

     What really happened that deranged you?

Not easy to love Mrs Fraser.

Captain Fraser managed it, in his time –

hobbling on her arm, clutching his ulcer,

falling back to relieve his griping bowels;

and hauling timber, a slave to black masters:

‘Eliza, wilt thou help me with this tree? –

Because thou art now stronger than me.'

But they speared him, and she fainted, just that once.

Her children had to love her from a distance –

from Orkney to the far Antipodes,

or wherever she'd sailed off to with their father,

cosseting him with jellies for his gut:

‘I have received a letter from dear Mamma.

I am looking for her daily at Stromness.'

Daily they had no sight of Mrs Fraser –

who had secretly turned into Mrs Greene.

And Captain Greene? Did he contrive to love her?

He never saw her as her rescuers did:

‘Perfectly black, and crippled from her sufferings,

a mere skeleton, legs a mass of sores.'

He saw a widow, famous, with some money.

He saw the chance of more. He saw, perhaps,

a strangeness in her, gone beyond the strangeness

of anything he'd met on the seven seas.

I am not mad. I sit in my booth

on show for sixpence: ‘Only survivor'

(which is a lie) ‘of the
Stirling Castle

wrecked off New Holland' (which is the truth),

embroidering facts. There is no need

to exaggerate (but I do), to sit

showing my scars to gawping London.

I do it for money. This is not greed:

I am not greedy. I am not mad.

I have a husband. I am cared for.

But I wake in the nights howling, naked,

alone, and starving. All that I had

I lost once – all the silken stuff

of civilisation: clothes, possessions,

decency, liberty, my name;

and now I can never get enough

to replace it. There can never be

enough of anything in the world,

money or goods, to keep me warm

and fed and clothed and safe and free.