The Hat-Stand Union Read online

  CAROLINE BIRD

  The Hat-Stand Union

  For my Mum

  Acknowledgements

  ‘The Fun Palace’ was commissioned by Winning Words as part of the Art in the Park programme for the London Olympics 2012.

  ‘Public Detectives’ was first published in Joining Music with Reason (Waywiser Press, 2010), an anthology edited by Christopher Ricks.

  Versions of ‘Hey Las Vegas’ and ‘Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church’ were first published online by Poetry International, and ‘Break-up Party’ was published in Fourteen.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1 Mystery Tears

  Sealing Wax

  Username: specialgirl2345

  Mothers

  Snow Hotel

  Unacceptable Language

  Mystery Tears

  Method Acting

  The Dry Well

  A Dialogue between Artist and Muse

  Hey Las Vegas

  Genesis

  9 Possible Reasons for Throwing a Cat into a Wheelie Bin

  Day Room

  Faith

  Dolores

  There Once Was A Boy Named Bosh

  Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church

  The Only People in Paradise

  Fantasy Role-Play

  Empty Nest

  Spat

  How the Wild Horse Stopped Me

  The Island Woman of Coma Dawn

  2 The Truth about Camelot

  Prologue

  I A Confident Local Youth

  II Some Last Words

  III Urchin Who Is Stalking Guinevere’s Scullery Maid

  IV Camelot Estate Agent

  V Exiled Journalist Disguised as Shrub

  VI Arthur’s Crab-Boy Vision Faces Scalpel Practicalities

  VII Crab Quotes

  VIII You

  IX Raving King Speech

  X Lancelot’s Poetry Reading in Smoky Bar

  XI Arthur, Arthur, Arthur…

  XII A Disgruntled Knight

  3 Sea Bed

  Damage

  This Was All About Me

  2:19 to Whitstable

  Break-up Party

  Two Cents

  Run

  Sea Bed

  Public Detectives

  Facts

  To Whom It May Concern

  Screening

  The Promises

  Say When

  Kissing

  What Shall We Do With Your Subconscious?

  Limerence

  Medicine

  Izzy

  Conqueror

  Atheism

  I’m Sorry This Poem Is So Painful

  The Stock Exchange

  The Last House

  The Fun Palace

  Marriage of Equals

  Corine

  About the Author

  Also by Caroline Bird from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  1

  Mystery Tears

  Everything I touch is turning to gold – well, not real gold.

  – Frank Kuppner

  Sealing Wax

  Sometimes I think of you,

  my funny prodigy

  and, like an ashtray on a Bible,

  I pose here defeated,

  singing ‘Lust’s most sacred impulse

  is error!’ to a lean, dark and handsome

  hat-stand. I find my head is able

  to process a lifetime of gin, carping

  ‘My abuser can be so capricious!’ at social workers.

  My phone-line is coy as the pale string

  unspooling from the back-

  end of a goldfish, elsewhere in an empty house.

  Sometimes, my stable friend,

  I think of you and whether

  your bedroom was warm through the winter

  and who’s spreading vapour rub on your chest.

  Username: specialgirl2345

  Some people call me The Ash Woman,

  or Gjest Haraldes, the royal jailbird, and I’ve been

  compared to Peter Christen Baardsen, the philandering

  pianist. I have never been to Oslo. I have never set foot

  in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. In fact, I’ve never been

  to Norway. But some people call me Codeine the Wanderer.

  Some people call me Duchess Mary Adelaide of Speck

  or Queen Maud of Lancaster Gardens, I arouse deep rushes

  of ceremonialism in women of low rank. In campfire songs

  I am named the cult of Vesta. I’m not a cult. I’m a small person.

  I rarely leave my room. But some crooners call me Smack the Wife.

  Some people call me The Red-Handed Virgin, Sheeba of Dorwich,

  Jack the Lamp. They say I had a morganatic marriage to a hobo,

  he was buried with his trolley and I didn’t inherit one tin-can.

  In folklore, I’ve become Nay Winkatmen – the very standoffish

  prostitute. I am not the saviour of modern thatching

  the locals of Wrafton near Brauton in North Devon think I am.

  The Jewish Rastafarians call me Shrunken MC

  for the beatific cakewalk of what used to be – in my youth –

  the Crystal Methodist Church, some people call me Rabbi Marley.

  I am not religious. I have no guiding star. Yet the Vatican engraved

  Child of Jilted Joseph on an apostle spoon, jammed it in my sorbet.

  My equestrian statue in northwestern Kazakhstan, facing

  the Ural Mountains, remains nameless and free-roaming.

  Some radio journalists are convinced I am the author of the quote

  ‘Bliss was it that dawn to be alive’ and then committed suicide.

  They call me Irony Jane. I can’t remember the last time

  I combed my hair, let alone spoke, but the paparazzi call me

  The Flash Gazelle. Farmers call me Baby Burdock

  and, as a newborn, I was baptised by the silent movie ghost

  of Leopoldine Konstantin who mouthed the words

  Dear Elvina, thus I’ve met you once before

  subsiding with the harpsichord into the floor.

  Mothers

  I thought I was the child in this scenario.

  I played the child and you loved me.

  I did a grumpy face when the university

  took Mr Teddy Rag-Ears,

  I got words muddled like, ‘I stood very truck

  as the still went through me.’

  But then today

  my future child called me on the telephone

  and said, in a squeaky voice, ‘My mum is dying,

  can you come over, I need someone to talk to.’

  I didn’t know where my future child lived.

  I had a feeling she was called Bertha

  which disappointed me.

  ‘I live in south east west London,’ she said,

  ‘Where the spies and the cleaners live.

  It’s spotless and seemingly empty.’

  On the way over, a terrible pain ripped

  through my stomach and I distantly

  remembered a woman from my

  adulthood I hadn’t seen since

  that bed-wetting dream.

  I passed glass conservatories on Bertha’s street.

  They were acting as gallows for hanging plants.

  ‘I like that image,’ says Bertha, knotting the ties

  on my hospital gown, shooing me out: ‘I told you

  no more running away from hospital, didn’t I?’

  Bertha, I went straight back. It’s disappeared –

 
all except the scout-hut used for art therapy

  that whiffs a bit. This is my picture of mummy:

  that is a tree because she’s in a forest, those are

  mummy’s pink gloves and that’s an axe.

  Snow Hotel

  I

  ‘It is time for us to get out of Switzerland’

  you announced and I couldn’t have agreed more

  since we were not in Switzerland and my feet

  were suffering in the clogs. My right hand

  had been shot away in Bavaria and I refused

  to employ my left hand for personal reasons.

  We had moved to the fifth storey of the hotel.

  Your chauffeur sang a message up the drain-pipe:

  ‘There are many exciting opportunities arising

  in the glove compartment,’ which was code for

  ‘Love has vanished from the world, better jump.’

  I pulled the rip-cord of my winter parachute,

  waved in the brusque air, like a strangely lovely

  fevered shiver. People were still on the streets.

  It was quite funny the way they’d carried on speaking,

  standing outside burger joints, re-enacting a chat,

  puffing on a ‘fag’, pretending to breathe – you have

  never seen smoke so tremulous in its falling lace.

  II

  The following week you were passing moist-eyed

  beside the once beleaguered lime chapel, moaning

  about being typecast, ‘I never even cry. My eyes just

  get moist. Moist is the extent of my emotional range.

  It’s such a joke.’ A guileless portico stuck to the face

  of a filthy building dripped with rain: everything

  was begging for love (women, harbours, plastic,

  grapes, nuclear power plants, gym teachers) and

  black tooth-marks were frosting the unused joints

  of my left hand (which was not my helping hand,

  although my right hand was declared a saint after it

  was chopped off in Bulgaria) as your lips shaped out

  ‘The sixth storey of the hotel would suit us perfectly.’

  I had a suspicion we were crossing into Switzerland.

  Unacceptable Language

  Any similarity to persons living or dead is

  purely coincidental, apart from Andy, you cunt,

  there was never a house in St Tropez. Do you

  realise Greta used a toasted sandwich machine

  to straighten her hair? As for Sue, she can sod

  off back to Norwich, all she ever did was whine

  and moan about her abusive parents: so they hit

  her with a bath loofah? Jemima was murdered

  by those toffs, she swears she wasn’t, but I’ve

  seen her blue and bloated head buried in their

  books. Gorgeously unclean, the twins are really

  just one woman called Angela: some evenings

  she thumbs me like a Holy Bible or Koran

  or whatever, but mostly lies about stupid things

  like can-openers or where the treasure is. Saul,

  what were you thinking? She gained a degree

  in avoidance addiction: seduce, revel and flee.

  Jean needs a married man. She’s not like you, Saul.

  Where’s your backbone, Florence? Being gay,

  shouldn’t you curb your racism? Perhaps rivers

  don’t flow like that, perhaps Dominic was right:

  that baby belonged to nobody, it was a hoax,

  a hoax in a pram to beguile him into empathy.

  Empathy? That’s a consumer tool if ever there

  was a Mecca, which there isn’t, otherwise what

  are we doing in the supermarket? Meet me in

  Greenwich village, Delilah, and we’ll recreate

  the sixties. Burn this bra. Is that right? No, burn

  this chair. Is that right? What are we supposed to

  burn again? I arrived for the revolution with my

  lunchbox. There were sheep. You people promised

  to be my loud generation. I regret everything.

  Derek is a contented dentist.

  Mystery Tears

  A poem about hysteria

  You could order them from China over the Internet.

  The website showed a grainy picture of Vivien Leigh

  in Streetcar Named Desire.

  It was two vials for twenty euros

  and they were packaged like AA batteries.

  They first became popular on the young German art scene –

  thin boys would tap a few drops into their eyes then

  paint their girlfriends legs akimbo and faces cramped

  with wisdom, in the style of the Weimar Republic. It was

  sexy. They weren’t like artificial Hollywood tears,

  they had a sticky, salty texture

  and a staggered release system. One minute,

  you’re sitting at the dinner table eating a perfectly nice steak

  then you’re crying until you’re sick in a plant-pot.

  My partner sadly became addicted to Mystery Tears.

  A thousand pounds went in a week

  and everything I did provoked despair.

  She loved the trickling sensation.

  ‘It’s so romantic,’ she said, ‘and yet I feel nothing.’

  She started labelling her stash with names like

  For Another and Things I Dare Not Tell.

  She alternated vials, sometimes

  cried all night.

  She had bottles sent by special delivery marked

  Not Enough. A dealer sold her stuff cut with

  Fairy Liquid, street-name: River of Sorrow.

  Our flat shook and dampened. I never

  touched it. Each day she woke up

  calmer and calmer.

  Method Acting

  (sorry, Chekhov)

  I was Nina from The Seagull

  while everyone was just getting on with their lives.

  ‘I am a seagull – no – no, I am an actress’

  I’d say, then I’d weep. I was politely asked

  to leave several Early Learning Centres.

  There was no lake to wander by

  so I drifted about by the fish counter in Tesco.

  ‘Am I much changed?’ I asked the woman.

  She could not reply. ‘Your hair-net

  is the most melancholy thing I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

  I meant it as a compliment. I was asked to leave.

  ‘God take pity on homeless wanderers,’ I’d say

  to a parked Land Rover, then I’d weep.

  There was a young theatre director who loved me.

  He stood like a beggar by the pick and mix section

  of Cineworld. ‘Why do you say that you have kissed

  the ground I walk on?’ I’d say, ‘Would you kiss

  the gridded stairs of an escalator? Would you kiss

  a red stain on the floor of a crisis shelter?’

  Once, in a summer pub – ‘The Swan’ perhaps

  in Stratford or ‘The Seagull’, no, that’s not right –

  an older man squeezed lemon on my scampi.

  Oh, older men! ‘Your life is beautiful,’ I said.

  He drank his bitter ale like Agamemnon.

  He told me a knock knock joke. My head reeled.

  ‘To one out of a million,’ I flirted, ‘comes

  a bright destiny full of interest and meaning.’

  ‘You are very young and very kind,’ he laughed.

  I forgot all about my Cineworld boy.

  My spirit grew. My face thinned.

  Years later, in a peasant-class carriage

  of Virgin Rail, I tried to recreate that joke.

  It was something about an interrupting sheep,

  an interrupting seagull – no – no, that’s not what I meant.


  My gestures were heavy and crude.

  I cried Scwark instead of baaaaaaa. The pain!

  The peasants pursued me with compliments but

  I knew, by then, I was not golden. Some people

  are built for greatness: they can tell a knock knock joke

  with torrents through the heart. Have you forgotten,

  Constantine, our childhood days of paper-rounds

  and swiped milk-bottles? A kestrel for a knave…

  A seagull – and yet – no.

  ‘I love him. I love him to despair,’

  I told the chemist. She gave me Strepsils.

  Sometimes, I was beside myself with the possibility of fame.

  I stood in Dixons and smiled, pointing at the shiny laptops.

  I imagined I had been employed in a Dixons’ advert.

  I imagined I was on a television screen

  with a million people watching.

  My older man knew the managers of many department stores.

  They did not want me for their adverts.

  Not with my hollow eyes.

  I started to dream, every night, of my Cineworld boy.

  I dreamt he handed me a hotdog without recognition.

  His eyelids were swollen like closed mussel shells.

  Minutes after, I’d hear a popcorn machine explode

  in a back room, grey butter everywhere. I am a seagull.

  I am definitely a seagull. I saw Trigorin one last time

  through the French windows. He was as handsome

  and unapproachable as that first day. Still telling the same

  knock knock joke, the same inspiration endlessly.