(published 'The Tome' 1990)
Self-exorcise would be tantamount to suicide, but I really have no choice. I am unable to forget the sounds: they ring inside my head, the echoes garbed in bone. The sounds mean more than what is actually heard: each blown-up ratchet of noise a relentless ritual I cannot shake off: like a child castigated for not forgetting the poem which had once been learnt so painstakingly.
The garden shed leans towards the house. The weekend guests have departed, leaving me nothing but time... and a large rambling edifice of a home that I cannot ever hope to fill with merely my own meagre existence. The newspapers are still delivered, each one too much to read. One organ boasts a headline too tasteless for belief: 'FOOTBALL FANS RECALL THEIR DEAD.' I have crazy, unforgiveable visions of corpses between those still alive, hanging like filled washing from the bannered scarves... pitiful jerking puppets amid the swaying chants.
In disgust, I throw the paper into the fireplace, wishing it were not such a sticky spring.
There had been a girl staying with us at the weekend. I'm sure she must have left her spirit behind, to test me with taunts. I had criticized her enjoyment of modern paintings. In fact, I must have fancied her, because I felt the uncontrollable need to monopolise her company, even if it were to argue the toss about Mondrian and Klee.
Her face was blotched with too much sun - the garden here gets it the whole day round, as if on some shuttling equator. Perhaps, at night, I dream the vertical sun...
I told her that a blown-up colour photograph of her face would not look out of place on one of the Tate Gallery walls, between a Bacon and a Braque.
Needless to say, she did not relish my chat-up line. Now that Sunday's gone, along with all the guests, I move from room to room, only to find her spirit has gone to the next one along.
The sounds live on . . . in the cellars . . . in the attic... even in the boarded-up rooms. It's as if I'm my own past. I can't shake it off. And sounds mean more than words.
I speak to her now, in the same voice as she spoke to me: the timbre raised one notch: the meaning down: the passions dulled.
'You're a pillock, Tom Jackson...'
The cutting edge was only to be expected, following my ill-considered remarks about her face. I meant them kindly, however. But the words came out in cruel order. I thought she liked modern art. Why was she so upset, then, about her face being compared with it?
Reaching the top of the house (or the nearest to the top, without removing shutters), I gaze down into the garden where she once sat... amongst all those others whose names I now forget. The garden shed's shadow moves. The sun stays still, like the moment.
My smalls I've hung on the line twitch sporadically, as if gathering themselves for some form of life as separates.
I speak in her voice the words I can never forget other than by speaking them:
'I loved you once, I loved you never,
We are ghosts of endless weather.
But as our love was squeezed between,
It became a ball above, a ball unseen.'
Hearing another's fumble at the shutter, I leave for yet another room. The sounds are joy, the sounds are pain, and who can hope interpret them? Like all modern art, the meaning is lost and so, thankfully, purged.
