Why would the Queen need a building
that looks like a mutant slug
had mated with a spaceship,
in Norwich, to store her paper clips?
Well, it seems she doesn’t, and she must be holding
them instead in a lion-and-unicorned silk bag,
because Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
has for twelve years been a postmodern cave,
a plywood-patched leviathan of an edifice.
I yanked up one of its mutant glass eyelids
and then, fingers gripping the groove
of a filing-cabinet the size of a milk-float,
levered myself into a room where solids
were not.
Walls holes that spilt foam.
Doors firing-targets.
Dead bullets frogspawned about the carpet.
Had the Queen’s own frogs leapt around
these corridors, spitting the words “room clear”
across walls after stabbing them to dust-coughing death
with a sledgehammer and a breath
of royal gunfire?
Outside a paper-storage cupboard
a blue biochemical bodysuit adorned
the floor among pigeon skeletons and
silence, limbs splayed like a chalk outline.
Sun-bleached little cardboard signs jabbered
“Occupants evacuated. All suspicious items
removed” in a Cold War typeface.
Evacuated how? With boots in their scrotums?
And then a room full of rickety hospital
bedframes in echoing shivering
silence. A key with a tag saying “Biological
Anatomy – Annie”. A glass case
with three taps, ‘water’, ‘air’
and ‘nitrous oxide’. Isn’t that laughing gas?
From a cobweb-curtained graffitied fifth-floor
window, watching Norwich go about
its trolley-trundling mustard-bottling
yellowgreen-taxied business, I stood
swaddled in graveyardish air and industrial hum
until, brain rattling,
fear ticking like a time-bomb,
instinct screaming get out get out get out,
visions whistling through my head
of nuclear apocalypse,
of zombies jack-in-the-boxing out from behind mossy desks
gushing blood over pin-prickled maps
of East Anglia and wall-planners deadlining dead tasks,
I panted past the uprooted coffee-machine,
weaving round nooselike electric cables
and a mound of floppy disks,
back over the filing-cabinet and then
free, comforted by baubles
on the forecourt of a greeting-card boutique,
heart hammering like a woodpecker’s beak.
