Two hundred and seven words. 16
hat was it that made her reach for poetry (poetry being the extra suit of a tarocky pack, but only in the sense of a suit pulled on over a shirt and underwear and socks, not in the sense of one dealt or handled, one with a sleeve up which to hide aces in a bald attempt to carve victory over muteness, a costume once sharply tailored, now worn from being worn) if not the vanity that thunder could be parlayed, if not the sense that the long road had a slight bend, the merest elbow, that marked the cut-off point between two worlds, where – no matter which way she was facing, no matter in which direction she was travelling – the wind changed direction and resisted her, bearing with it a slight taint and taste, a step from safety to anxiety, a moment when she realised her fingers were cold and her armpits hot, a tipping between feeling and not feeling that there were people in the houses, other walkers by the roadside, passers and passengers in cars, that not feeling being the loneliness of the last apple on a bare tree or a dumb, silenced stone, such a weariness, unwilling to move, afraid to stay still
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©Marie Marshall
e made the girl a one-off tarocky pack, each female pasteboard subtled with her face, shown riding, old heraldic or and gules made with gold leaf and blood, and, while she (abstractedly) ate from a bag of chips, he laid them out, magesplaining thus: that the minor pack, the suit of cudgels scaling the low-born and guttersniped, but also stubborn, tenacious, resistant, determined, the family of swords, they eugenic and noble, quick to defend by attack, but also vain, the company of coins prudent or spendthrift, cautious or venal and easily bought, cups passion, showed her humours each in its proportion, and thereby her character; that the medians of castle, prince, mounted queen, and king gave the place of each minor in the whole of her; that the majors showed her arcane, her specific, led to a tale of her and the road she would have to walk down – in all this, the word he used most was “you,” and the girl noted this, squirmed in her seat, remembered she was a bus ride from home, and licked salt from her fingers, down to the cold taste of skin like cucumber (the soap she used) and the scratch of her fingernail on the roof of her mouth,
he says, “The noose hangs from my eyes, I kill whoever I see,” but in fact all she does see is the fall of an ash-pit, black, profound, and herself sitting on its lip, and she feels the slip of the motes and flakes under her seat, keeps herself ever on the knee between safe and lost, with a laugh on her face as bitter as a weal, her hands hot, and hard, and aching with sweat, her neck and shoulders cold with the nagging wind – all for the sight of a piece of chequered cloth and a moon face, and she false, fraud, imposter – telling herself there can be no haven in life, only hunger, and she a machine, a grub for turning sustenance to waste; and when she does push back with her heels, the effort eating away at the black ash, get up, and walk away from that silly abyss, it’s with defeat in her heart, her throat choked, knowing an urge that she couldn’t right, a button she couldn’t push, no spine, fail, pulling her thin clothes around her, the wind a fishwife cursing and mocking in her ear, she in a desert, mapless, only a straight line to walk, repeating the curses
t that time the girl’s pictures take her back to the moment she first became tidal, and she realises that since then she has inhabited herself, the way Eve inhabited Eden after knowing she was naked, the destruction of something truly native but the bed for a tough plant – say dandelion or thistle – that is presented as her real face; “I am beautiful, but I’m alien,” she declares, using one of two voices, as she stands in the walk-up to school, alone, jostled by others, greeted, ignored, feet slightly tilted within black, square-aproned shoes, a breeze stirring her skirt, an item in her rucksack hard against her shoulder blade refusing to identify itself, and – the ground is grey, the verge is green, the school presents itself as a set of squares against the milk-and-dust sky, the moving girls race to a single seashore or to a place where parallels meet – someone speaks her name, a simple act that recalls the legs and arms and bodies around her; the speaker has black hair, a face that could be rounder if use led to it, breath telling Polo mints, so they link arms and break the girl’s lack of motion, propel themselves into the general wave, head for shore
et’s murder a few years, she thinks, slipping between backstage and a fire exit to make the sin of fish and fish (this in itself nothing new) with a rocker, a cocktail of adrenalin, vodka, and perspiration (!) and – having worked out a storyline where the narrator cuts and eats piece of herself every day, keeping a journal, seeing how long she can stay alive or maintain her resolve, will there be a point where she stops, saves her own life, or at the very least refrains from writing the words “love” and “kiss” on any page, but instead becomes fascinated with the squidlike melt of ink and blood, heading a new page to the effect that pain is only relevant to a moment, all of which could be parlayed into song lyrics – only to be prized apart by the rocker’s boyfriend and left there like a forgotten story, the ache after an electric shock or a wasp’s sting, carrying the mess of (yes) a kiss as a hipness signifier, in the space between backstage and the fire exit, the music baffled into the tread of an army or a gross-score of heartbeats, the girl muttering that it’ll soon be morning anyway, and we’ll all spill out
t was the occasion when the girl laid her mouth to the bare shoulder of a young Caribbean woman, an experiment into whether it tasted of oranges as well as it scented, that she realised something had broken – as though a moment ago she had been taking alphabet blocks and arranging them, rearranging, twisting results to make the most uniform colour and the most repeatable letter appear on the same face of a wall, her cheek against the solid floor and its rasp of carpet, and the endeavour failing or, at best, being tantalisingly close, until she realised a trick of space and time and breathed a sigh of delight – the way an exultant gale sweeps away leaves and limbs, the latter a reminder of stark change, and it wasn’t the sin of the tidal pull, the wax and wane (and indeed she would still have innocence, but innocence of a different cloud, innocence of a different weather), but it was enough to lead her to the swings at Blake’s Rec, or again to the little source of a little river, as though the sight from a different angle or a listless sway would recapture something, even the blood-metal taste on her fingers, a first indication of