I: March 1945
Aunt Wendy, in her second month of life,
lay cot-bound in a flood of dreamy peace
until Great-Grandma plucked her from it cooing
“what a gorgeous girl you are” and so forth,
scooping Wendy off to the back kitchen
where floral teacups gleamed with housewife’s pride
and saucers sparkled. How my auntie wailed
at being wrestled from her blissful dreams!
But one of Adolf Hitler’s V-2 rockets
pulverised that moment half the street.
The front door and hall floorboards flew upstairs,
the bedroom blackened in a blizzard of soot,
its windows crashing into scattered splinters
over carpet, sideboard, mattress, cot,
piercing through young Wendy’s tiny ears
so that they rang with tinnitus and strained
with semi-deafness all throughout her life.
II: July 1978
At last, engulfed in sweat, aching all over,
Wendy could sink back into the pillow.
Uncle Phil, his little Welsh head plump
with joy, inspired, piped up with the name Dennis.
“Eh? You want to call him what?” she panted,
her half-deaf ears still ringing. “Dennis, I said!”
Or that’s how I imagine it transpired
that my sisterless, brotherless, luckless cousin
came to be called Dez. Dez with a zed.
III: August 1992
The sun was baking London, bouncing off
the glass that peeped among Victorian brick,
filling every pollen-packed back garden
with all kinds of flying buzzing beastie,
browning my still-hairless, skinny legs
as I lay basking on a towel, above
the bones of not-forgotten, well-loved cats:
Korky, black and sweet as brambleberries;
Squeaky, undersized and tender tabby
who never learned to meow right (hence his name).
Closed-eyed, I felt a tickling, furry tail
coil around my twelve-year-old left shin.
I saw it then – a tail without a cat –
and hurtled howling back into the house.
My mother sat me down and asked in earnest
if any of the boys I knew at school
had ever offered me strange cigarettes.
IV: December 1998
Down from Suffolk you appeared that Christmas,
six foot four, a Sherman tank in boots
all cramped into a cluttered-up Ford Escort
with heavy metal slam slam slamming round it,
long black jacket, long black hair and puffing
like a nineteenth-century northern town.
“Let’s drive down to King’s Cross and find some whores!”
you boomed. And off we skidded, slam slam slam.
But all we found, a scraggly gap-toothed black girl
begging us for change, called me a “bumscrape”
or something sounding similar to that
when I refused to give her anything.
We jumped back in the jalopy and zoomed
across the city. Christ! Those poor, poor pedals.
Poor steering wheel! You stamped and swerved and burped
your way through Islington and Bishopsgate
until the clutch surrendered and collapsed
outside the Barbican Centre. There we stopped
and called for help. But it was two AM
on Christmas Eve. A ghost town loomed around us.
And so we sat there hour after hour
sniggering at the black girl’s insult, “bumscrape”,
and drawing pictures in a little notepad
of implements a bumscrape might have been,
until we fell asleep behind the dashboard.
A few nights later, clutch patched up, we bombed
back homewards from the pub down Shernhall Street.
Before I could advise you that the main road,
Lea Bridge Road, which teemed with ten-ton trucks
and double-decker buses, would be here soon,
there it was. The brake went through the chassis,
we bounced across that road and down a side-street,
jerking to a halt perhaps five inches
behind a Volvo only just vacated
by a family of stunned Somalians.
Back home, I played my Morrissey albums at you.
You wept and told me softly about Jodie,
a girl from your old school who’d sparked your heart
with a light that never would go out
but who was still, alas, against the law.
V: August 2004
“Hey, cuz! Long time no see!” your email slammed.
“I’ve bought a motorbike, and with some welly
it bombs along at nearly a hundred and eighty!
How d’you fancy zooming up to Wales
to see great-uncle Elwyn’s fabled leek farm?”
My answer was a wee bit hesitant.
VI: December 2009
“Fuck, my tinnitus won’t stop”, I thought.
“It’s like a wasp is living in my ear,
and all that I can do, the doctor says,
is switch a frigging fan on in the background.”
Perhaps it was those earphones that I’d plugged
into the rabid screams of Johnny Rotten,
the cryptic wanderings of David Bowie,
their curious hybrid lovechild, whatsisname
the singer with the Psychedelic Furs,
bony, rumbling, eerie Joy Division,
dark and slightly sordid Depeche Mode,
all at volume ten (no-one had warned me)
in order to drown out humanity’s drivel,
its boring conversations about work,
its fake concern and sneering empty pride,
its trifling, problem-glossing platitudes,
its brain-entangling, heart-impaling quests
to make itself look virtuous and right.
The drivel had now driven me to seek
the guidance of a man who claimed his talents
formed a hotline to the spirit world.
Voice like an East End gangster, grey-haired Ronnie
gripped my hand and joined me to my father
who pottered about all day in the universe’s
infinite, eternal shed. He told me,
“Someone in your family, a man
who has a very modern sort of name,
is always tinkering with cars, is always
thinking up new ways to push them faster
than they’ll go. Drives like a lunatic.
I’m worried that this man might be in danger.”
VII: June 2014
The robot wasp that nestled in my earhole
now had a family, so it would seem.
The never-pausing electronic buzz
was growing up to be a factory whistle.
But God be praised for Germans and their know-how!
Vorsprung durch Technik! In engineer-crammed,
vineyard-skirted, clean, yeast-wafting Stuttgart
I bought a tiny metal aubergine
that whispered, rushing like a waterfall,
through a pipelet into my left ear.
Without that wondrous cochlea-caressing
hissing aubergine, I would have landed
in a padded box-room, shouting “Bumscrape!”
every thirty seconds. Cash well spent.
Three days later, earhole full of heaven,
I heard the news from England. “It’s your cousin.
Cousin Dez...” and straight away I knew
that you’d been flattened by a juggernaut.
“He died this morning. No-one had suspected
he had leukaemia. That weight he’d lost
we all thought was a sign of better health,
that Jodie had been feeding him alright.”
VIII: December 2014
Ding dong, the sky was filled with angels singing,
and I was home, the tinsel snaking round
the happy family photographs, my brothers
with their buoyant offspring, me with my
uneasy smiles of forced participation,
and puddings pinging in the microwave.
My aubergine alas not waterproof,
I laid it gently on the bedside cabinet
and stood beneath the shower for four minutes.
Returning with an arse-crack full of bubbles,
my aubergine was nowhere to be found!
Naked as the day that I first wanked,
the screams of Satan whistling through my skull,
I scoured every square inch of the floor
around my bed, across the mangy rug.
I dragged the bedside cabinet from the wall,
and finally I found her – there she hung,
her whooshing pipelet hooked around the lamp-cord
that ran behind the cabinet, rocking softly
to and fro, as if to snigger at me.
How the pissing hell did it get there?
In recent months, she told me then, my Mum
had been disturbed by cups and saucers clattering
to the empty kitchen floor downstairs,
by bursts of drilling in the empty bathroom,
and by a deep and manly sort of laugh.
Your photo smirked at us across the room.
“It’s you, you cheeky bastard, isn’t it?”
I asked out loud. Your silence frothed with guilt.
Aunt Wendy told me her place, too, was noisy,
even to her rocket-deafened ears.
Doors creaked open, footsteps climbed the stairs.
The washing machine, tumble dryer, cooker,
television, every single clock,
had all stopped working. But she wasn’t spooked.
She’d long seen ghosts around the house, of cats
whose rotting bones lay underneath the garden.
They rubbed against her legs, then disappeared,
just faded into other-worldly nothing.
