Undying: A Love Story Read online

  Now my internet is down

  precisely at the time I must locate

  and contact anyone who ever cared.

  It’s up to me to set a date

  for them to come and see you burned.

  Some are up for it and others aren’t.

  Some can travel when others can’t.

  Some can make it, but only after

  you need to vacate

  your temporary accommodation.

  Some need assistance with their fare.

  Some cannot bear to share a space

  with current partners of their exes.

  Some have a problem

  with the absence of religion.

  I must negotiate, I must behave with grace.

  I’m scared, it’s all been left too late, I wish

  that we could handle this

  together.

  You Were Ugly

  You were ugly, at the end.

  You knew it and I knew it.

  Bald, bloated, piggy-eyed,

  your flaccid arms bruised black,

  your belly mildewed with malignancies,

  your vulva and eyelids hairless,

  your pupils crossed and sightless,

  your breasts weighing down your heartbeat,

  your bedbound body seventy-five kilos

  of spoiling meat.

  Now, choosing photos for your funeral,

  I see again how beautiful you were.

  How routinely, ravishingly lovely,

  how graceful in the flesh,

  how happy in your skin.

  I called you Gorgeous at the end.

  All lovers have names for each other

  that are not their names.

  Gorgeous was mine for you.

  It wasn’t true,

  in those days before you finally

  let yourself go.

  You knew it and I knew it.

  You were ugly.

  But not now.

  Not now.

  Your Ashes

  Your ashes are heavy.

  More than I thought.

  I carry the shopping bag,

  the canister the funeral director

  supplied, towards the train

  along the main street, cafés, chain stores,

  footsore tourists with bags like mine

  containing bottles of spirits

  lighter than your remains.

  I feel like I bought

  too much.

  You Loved To Dance

  In a previous life

  in impractical shoes,

  you loved to dance.

  Sometimes all night,

  embraced by sound and light

  and maybe by my predecessors:

  slinky steppers, snazzy dressers.

  Mainly you danced with female friends –

  women I would have liked

  to invite to your farewell.

  I phoned their phantom numbers

  gleaned from address books in forgotten drawers.

  Google chewed names, chased spoors.

  But they could not be found,

  these chums who beamed into your face

  as you flung your youthful limbs around.

  So no one at your funeral ever saw

  you in that state of mindless grace,

  under a mirror ball, twirling on the floor.

  I was no dancer;

  you knew that from the start.

  My feet securely stowed under the desk,

  I databased the avant-garde.

  I hated disco, and rejected as grotesque

  the party fodder in the charts.

  You should have left me to my Art,

  put on your high heels and whirled free.

  But then, God help you, in mid-spin,

  you fell.

  Fell hard, for me.

  We danced so rarely that I can recall

  each time we did it, and to what.

  Twice in the mouldy flat where we first met.

  Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark –

  ‘Dead Girls’ – not many couples dance to that.

  I played you Severed Heads; you took it

  in your stride.

  ‘Those frequencies!’ you cried. ‘They’re uterine!’

  German electronica? ‘Divine!’

  I brought my sounds to where you lived,

  out in suburbia, where your neighbours dozed

  to Barry Manilow, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac . . .

  I spoiled their barbeques with my cassette

  of Dirtdish by Wiseblood. You cranked it up,

  adored its crude industrial attack. The noise,

  to me, was pure aesthetics and, to you, pure sex.

  You liked the way I moved in bed

  but, looking back, I fret –

  Maybe you were less impressed

  with how I moved when I was fully dressed.

  In 1991, we danced again.

  In Hegyeshalom, a hundred miles from Budapest,

  dog-tired, our bellies stuffed with palacsinta,

  we stood to leave the tavern, suitcases in hand,

  but then were serenaded by the band.

  They’d asked our country, and misheard

  ‘Australia’ as ‘Italia’, and so

  to violin, accordion and goodwill,

  we smooched to some old continental ditty.

  I showed them how men dance in a big city.

  I’m sure they’re smirking still.

  Come the new millennium,

  what with one thing and another,

  we danced just one more time:

  at our wedding, in a crowd of revellers

  assembled in a Polish seaside town.

  I did my best to lay my hang-ups down

  and shake my tight teetotal ass.

  And you know what? It was a blast.

  Then ten years passed.

  A thousand chances that we didn’t take.

  And then, when you got ill

  the drugs played havoc on your feet;

  you stopped responding to the beat.

  Our wedding dance would prove our last.

  Half a dozen dances in a quarter-century.

  I doubt you thought that that was all there’d be.

  Frustrated? Bless your heart. You never said.

  You made the most of meagre chances.

  I wish sometimes you’d had a gigolo,

  to take you where I could not go.

  I dance sometimes, alone, to Severed Heads.

  Rubbing It In

  For seventy-five months

  I slowed my pace,

  a fraction more each week,

  to stay in step with you.

  At first, I walked more or less

  normally, like a healthy man

  with a headache or tight shoes.

  Incrementally, I cut

  the span of my stride,

  always maintaining eye contact,

  or distracted your attention

  to the road ahead,

  so you wouldn’t notice

  what was happening to my tread.

  The more chemotherapy you had,

  the more I handicapped myself.

  At your side, I mimed an easeful motion

  while conjuring chains around my feet.

  We moved, eventually, like the Myeloma Twins.

  We tortoised to the outskirts of the room,

  climbed the distant summit of the stairs,

  voyaged to the far end of the street.

  Towards the end, when I would inch with you

  to the Ultima Thule of the hospital loo,

  I’d ceased to pretend.

  Today, I jumped on a mountain bike

  and cycled eight miles, to get something done,

  goddamn it, in a hurry.

  It was easy.

  A shameful lapse of tact.

  Flaunting the fact

  that I don’t have what you’ve got.

  For
cing you to swallow

  that I’m alive

  and you’re not.

  Restraining Order

  Unshaven, shabby and unwashed,

  I haunt the place where we last slept

  together, and refuse to leave.

  Why no one calls the cops to move

  me on, I do not understand.

  Surely someone will lay a hand

  on my clammy shoulder, and say

  ‘Nothing more to see.’

  In the beginning, all that love

  was awfully romantic in its way,

  but now the novelty’s worn thin

  and normalcy is overdue.

  This loyalty to what’s dead and gone,

  this clinging to what’s no longer

  mine; it’s borderline obsessed.

  Give it a rest.

  A polite suggestion, buddy:

  Give her some space. Steer clear

  of where you think she ought to be.

  She won’t be there. Instead, why not

  give some thought to personal hygiene.

  Adopt a healthier diet. Keep well-hydrated.

  Find other topics of conversation.

  Maybe join a group of folk like you,

  to talk things through.

  By all means take some time

  to grieve, but don’t let it become

  excessive. Accept the situation:

  you’ve lost her. Try not to be

  possessive.

  Account Holder

  The helpline man

  refuses to help

  because I am not you.

  He needs – by letter – proof

  that you are dead, he needs

  to see your name and your disease

  and the date your suffering ended

  so that our bills can be amended

  to be mine instead, all mine,

  and then and only then

  will the helpline men

  let me go ahead

  and wait in the queue

  and listen, listen, listen,

  holding on for that hush

  when the music stops

  and a voice, at last, will ask

  how they can be

  of assistance.

  Don’t Hesitate To Ask

  So many of the people I’ve

  informed that she is dead

  have said

  ‘If there’s anything

  we can do, anything at all,

  don’t hesitate to ask.’

  Well,

  actually,

  since you offer,

  yes:

  Would you mind driving me

  headlong through the universe

  at ten million miles an hour,

  scattering stars like trashcans

  scorching the sky?

  Put your foot to the floor,

  crash right through the gate of Fate,

  trespass galaxies, straight over

  black holes and supernovas

  to the hideout of God.

  Wait for me while I break

  down the boardroom door

  and drag the high and mighty fucker

  out of his conference with Eternity,

  his summit on the Mysteries Of Life,

  and get him to explain to me

  why it was so necessary

  to torture and humiliate

  and finally exterminate

  my wife.

  But no.

  These things I do not say

  because I know

  that by ‘anything at all’

  you mean

  a cup of tea

  or a lift into town,

  if you’re going

  that way

  anyway.

  They Say

  They say –

  they who have done this grieving thing

  before me –

  they say, in time, the sharp recall

  of horrors fades away, leaving

  room for gentler, happier, further-distant

  glows of reminiscence.

  Others say –

  I will forget your face.

  Bring the years on.

  Watch this space.

  Please Leave All Baggage On Board

  Bewildered, meek, I lift my magazine

  to let the hostess check I’m safely clasped.

  Around her neck, the sleek transparent tube

  of an oxygen mask, so similar to an IV line.

  Her life jacket’s just for Show And Tell;

  her spiel about emergencies has passed

  unnoticed in our massive metal shell. Sit tight,

  and once we have permission we’ll be on our way.

  Enjoy this flight. Tomorrow we’ll be in the USA.

  The plane crawls forward, picks up speed, and then

  heaves off the ground. This is the moment when

  we’d take each other’s hand, and gently squeeze:

  another journey formally begun. Seated at my side,

  a stranger with vermilion claws.

  Her gaze implores the crew. They make her wait.

  Oh, how she longs to medicate herself with wine.

  Much later, in the ghostly light, she’ll lay

  her lacquered hair against my arm

  and sleep, consoled at last, as, by remote control,

  this raft of bodies is dispatched towards its goal.

  The Sorrento Hotel Invites You To Help Conserve Water

  I leave this hotel room the way I found it;

  the bed so neat and spotless, it’s as though

  nobody slept here, nothing happened, and instead

  the guest just paced around it, fully dressed

  and, at the shrouded window, sat and traced

  the slow disintegration of the view.

  The maids will love me: all they’ll need to do

  is smooth the sheets a little, set the pillow straight,

  replace a plastic trinket of shampoo.

  But late last night, if you’d been here with me,

  after we’d talked about the food, the town,

  the petty details of the day, and laid

  our jetlagged bodies down to rest, I guarantee

  we would have turned to face each other

  and, in a heartbeat, been each other’s lover

  and this huge bed, this monument of kitsch

  would have been joyously unmade,

  the pillows crushed, the quilt pulled down,

  the blankets pitched onto the floor,

  the sheets all churned and christened

  with our smell.

  And, in the morning, cleaning personnel would wheel

  their trolley in, survey the scene, and understand

  this bedroom held a woman and her man.

  Wake-up call. You’re dead another day.

  The hotel hopes I have enjoyed my stay.

  Dolmades

  My stroll in Central Park

  was safely unremarkable. It rained,

  the children never ventured from their homes,

  the autumn colours gloomed to monochrome.

  The birds were just like any birds you’d seen

  a thousand times before, the squirrels

  standard issue, and the dogs

  constrained by their indentured walkers,

  heads down, trained, routine.

  Nothing to move you, nothing to spark

  a flash of rapture, and no scene of pathos

  to provide you with a fruture reverie.

  Nothing gained, if you’d been lent another year

  to come here on this New York trip with me.

  The subway – always full of risk

  of some transcendent incident,

  some spate of oddness to provoke

  your love of people – played it cool,

  stayed untransporting, free of wild event.

  Just trains and passengers,

  brisk and destination-bent.


  OK, there was that busker, pitched at 59th,

  right near the exit, wet, and blowing

  ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’’ on the clarinet.

  But on your scale of one to ten

  I bet he would have scored a two, a three at most –

  too slick, too low on poignancy, too knowing

  to plant in you a fond ‘Remember when . . .?’

  More good luck: none of my hosts

  have cats. No mogs to bring you to your knees

  with helpless, let-me-be-your-mum desire

  Unless I count the pictures – thumbnail glows –

  displayed by Maya, on her phone,

  of absent Ollie posing in her other home.

  But no, I think this sight would not have made

  a deep impression; you’d have praised him, I suppose,

  but then forgotten fast

  this gadget glimpse, not meant to last.

  And so my first adventure, after you, goes on.

  Before I know it, I’ve survived this city,

  shaken hands, attended dinners, struck no one

  as a pathetic wreck; I’ve laughed; been witty,

  never once collapsed, or been undone

  by grief, by pity, by regret.

  Incredible how, on the taxi ride

  to catch my onward flight,

  life pulls out all the stops to spare me pain.

  The driver’s nice, but has a spiel

  to which you would have been immune, I feel.

  In any case, had you been there, you might

  have snoozed (as you so often did in cars)

  and missed his anecdotes about the mayor

  who gave LaGuardia its name.

  I’m sure you’d not have thanked your stars

  you came.

  Not looked at me and squeezed my hand

  as if to say ‘How lovely that my life contained

  this precious moment too!’

  Now, at the airport, I relax.

  I’ve made it, I’ve escaped intact.

  Security’s all smiles, they wave me through,

  they let me keep my razor, I retrieve my shoes,

  my wallet, keys, I’m good to go.

  Perhaps, now that I’m nowhere that I know,

  four thousand miles from where I lost you,

  I will find that distance tricks the mind

  and leaves the longing stranded in a far-off place.

  Look: I’m moving on

  to the departure lounge, where I will wait,

  dog-tired, at my appointed gate,

  penned in a space so soulless even you

  would see no merit in it. No, come on, admit it:

  it’s just as well you didn’t make it.

  You’re better off not being here.

  To fill the empty minutes till it’s time,

  I stand perusing airport food – the usual fare: