(For RC with love)
I found a ring in the pocket
of my mother’s old coat
buried in the hallway cupboard;
she said she’d hid it from herself
so that she wouldn’t pawn it.
I was born among the Victorian terraces.
The Wates estate I moved to, after the divorce
down on the flood fields,
its derelict shops in the precinct,
at night I dreamt it was one giant building
connected by staircases
with rotting swimming pools between its levels,
and my father’s flat in the tower block
was an empty control-room;
and other times I dreamt I was sleeping
in the bathroom of my mother’s place,
green mould by my head/ and water,
the previous occupant
left scary pictures of the Madonna
amongst the spiders.
At eleven I had a series of dreams
of a past life. I was from a carehome
which burnt down traumatically
and I died of an overdose
in the underpass
of a hilltown in Surrey, in 1986,
the year I was born in.
*
Why hadn’t I gone to the comprehensive school
in Richmond like my brothers?
Where my brother went out with the girl
who played Barry’s daughter in Eastenders.
I disliked the boys’ school in the forest:
I was visibly poor, "eccentric", though “Really good at English”,
(the same yeargroup as Jamie T was;)
I went out with Rachel from the youth club.
She lived in the Victorian terraces I’d come from;
I felt I recognised her … from a park or carnival …
Then I dumped her, horribly,
on her family’s answering machine
from a phonebox; I did self-destructive
stupid things, such as
at lunchtime, at thirteen, bringing vodka
to the panelled hall of the private school;
weed, whiskey and cough medicine making me vibrate
alone before the youth club;
deciding to educate myself
only by watching late-night Channel 4 films;
walking through the streets of Woking
I bought *Golden Brown* by The Stranglers,
which seemed buried in my memory.
At fourteen I gave up my funded place
at the private school, the year 2000,
thinking I was in
a Lindsay Anderson film, or *Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner*.
The comprehensive school I chose instead
on the marshes below the woodland
was like a ruin of the welfare state,
something from *Kes*
or a giant soviet airship
sunk in the sandy gravel:
the scent of poppers,
smoke from my nostrils of
*Mayfair* cigarettes almost floral; a thousand people
forced to get on together;
in Maths I drilled a hole with scissors
slowly through my table. I thought about long hair
and knickers. I was poisonously anxious
vis-a-vis getting my **** out with someone.
I listened to *Another Morning Stoner*
and tried to write poems capturing
how the busy hallways felt abandoned.
The ex-students were eerie souls
trapped behind the mossy glass
in strange rooms of machinery,
in the echoes of the old gymnasium,
in the <<Stranglers>> graffiti in the theatre
or <<WAREHOUSE TRANCE 1979>> scratched onto my table,
or on the field
under the concrete, where it was written
‘I died here’. And sitting by that concrete
with graffiti of an open eye
was Rachel from the youth club.
*
She was a Gemini,
with walkman playing jungle music.
I can still see the transitions
of her face, her gestures,
her lips open by the bus window;
(are we still the same people
all these years after, if we keep these gestures?)
or her movements and her anger
surrounded by the fluid crowds
during her fight in the playground.
Eyeliner and speed garage.
Pencils keeping her hair together
after an art lesson.
I was always thinking about her.
She knew all these strangers
from the skate park in Kingston
and unheard-of places. That way she sat
with her legs folded under. (Later on
she would burn my letters.) She was thirteen
with many lives, many secrets;
2001. I had had unrequited passion before but
that’s the first time I ever fell in love.
And I only realised in 2015
that she was a *Twin Peaks* obsessive.
If no-one else ever got that, darling,
here you go. I got it.
When we were lounging in her bedroom
near the gated wasteland of quarries
and dead rivers
me afraid to kiss her
and wondering how I could get my thing out
somehow without anyone seeing,
she was re-creating scenes
and ripping off dialogue; how she had a notepad
for everyone she knew, each one filled
with her impressions of that person.
And she gave her own twist to it:
for me, she couldn’t write one.
What, I was too mysterious?
Thank you.
Rachel you were Laura Palmer.
Who was I meant to be?
Aah, the boy who is a writer
and never leaves his house. Harold Smith.
Aah yes
sweety you had it perfect
it was your masterpiece, I love you for it.
You couldn’t have planned it better.
Harold Smith also ended up cutting himself.
I did it when we went with the youth club
on a residential trip to my old private school
and I smuggled in beer
and graffitied my name everywhere: “I came back here”.
And maybe her overdose (a very harsh substance)
was some kind of tribute to Laura Palmer.
But to hear she was on a stomach pump,
from Amy at the school bus-stop
opposite the precinct,
I felt more a stranger than a boyfriend.
*
She moved to my Wates estate
after a divorce, as I had done.
From the Victorian streets
to the river chasm.
She combed the banks with rough kids,
or held court in the precinct,
and in the summer when I finished school
I joined them, and we had a fling,
pretty final,
and the river moved with a massive
silent, wasted surface
that was alien to us, stranded,
and the other Barnaby died
crashing his Vauxhall Nova
with the Burberry seat covers.
They threw cocaine in with the coffin.
That summer was too long and open.
That black cat of hers. When she drew my eyes
in one of her letters. Her rucksack on and
in short shirt-sleeves/ carrying her blazer
in her hands folded. (This has all vanished.)
At sixteen I went to college in Thames Ditton,
a local boy, and met the glamorous kids
who commuted across from Richmond, how exotic
(Richmond, foreign borough of my father’s
fabled council estate)
with parents in TV and music;
I left her behind, for wholesome Hannah
from Hampton, over the river from my estate,
whose father was a BBC cameraman
(though I still read the Gemini horoscopes
in the free paper); that's the last I saw of Rachel.
I was adopted by artists and musicians
although I couldn’t see myself as interesting,
I was very quiet, made of stone,
the only one from the comprehensive
in the hinterland of the river,
from that island surrounded by
many secret streams
and unchartered commons,
the leafy eyot
of sail-makers’ fields, churchyards,
industrial estates
and wastelands.
*
You were so lucky, to do all that living.
You couldn’t resurrect a dead boy who
was haunted by his dreams.
You had evening rendezvous,
I recorded films from television
and moved furniture around my room.
And *Five Easy Pieces*, *Walkabout*,
I found these films beautiful
but they were not as dark, as suggestive,
as relationship-driven or as emulative
as yours, as *Twin Peaks* was;
and although it scared me
to hear of the girls you’d slept with
when we were still ’together’,
and although you made up that horrible lie
for attention, jesus that was low,
that I’d *hit* you —
so that Amy’s brother, a pirate radio DJ
with a gun apparently in a biscuit tin
who lived two streets away on the estate
said he’d smash my teeth in —
despite all this, I have to admit,
*Twin Peaks*, you had good taste there,
and you had a life to live
(you said you walked with life’s rhythm,
that was how you met so many people),
a dead boy on your hands afraid to get his **** out,
you had your masterpiece to make
inspired by VHS
but made of people;
and those afternoons in your bedroom
when you asked me for the names of French painters
as if I might know them
they can never be taken,
and that day, taking the Hampton ferry
from its jetty at the edge of my estate
and walking through towering reservoirs
and boundaries of trees
into the walled gardens we found
upriver in Sunbury,
with the unseen brass band playing,
walking in the hollows, the walled expanse
of dried grass and mounds there,
like an abandoned, secret, ornamental park
and sat under the giant tree
spreading into the deep sky
my world changed,
so I carved BT heart emoticon RC
and buried the lid of a coke bottle,
I can still feel that kiss,
and I escaped into the sky,
its hidden, open, distant landscapes,
into another life,
and heaven was under her black T-shirt,
and her mixtape with *All Apologies*
by Nirvana:
I was alive by the end of the decade Rachel
and I’ve done a lot of living. Often with my **** out.
She had red and brown hair;
her personality was purple;
life cannot be any different.
Divorces etcetera.
She had her reasons.
