Mayday

I hold onto the last thing that you said,

each word a lifebuoy to a drowning man

adrift without your voice, unanchored.

If your breath cannot save me, nothing can.

I'm no less lost ashore though, once rescued

and blindly blinking love out of my eyes.

Where you are and I am, I am renewed;

resuscitated, panicked and unwise.

Love After Auschwitz

No poetry after he fails to find a way to say

the essence of you, finally, the thing

ness the actual thing that might actually be somehow

reduced call it an essence, a concentrate, concentrate!

A reduction, an absurd reduction the essence of you

in fact some fat some phosphorus mostly carbon

the spirit of you proof of what exactly?

Electric blinds. Perhaps so, if used

irreverently.

A womb of a room, false ceiling, panelling

in the richest of wooden veneers reproduced

here in more robust, synthetic form and the

model couple on the hotel television screen fixed

staring into an imaginary future of lost looks

and marital acrimony (suited polo shirts not guaranteeing

happiness forever).

The living creatures lie, honest at last, naked

reduced to some solution, finally. No more

poetry.

How Bill Broke His Knee

Bill had been a fine dancer, not a great one. He had married young and had a ten year-old boy who told his schoolfriends that his dad worked in an office. Bill and the kid's mother had split up some years ago, but while they were together he had refused to tour, or to take work abroad. His career had stalled as a result, and he'd done some admin work to pay the bills, mindless, soulless stuff at first, until he found an agency which specialised in third sector placements. He took longer contracts. He stopped taking classes. He lost fitness and poise, but gained an understanding of how to run a successful non-profit, and found his way back to dance.

The company made a little money from touring, more from corporate sponsorship, a steady income from classes and studio hire, sporadic lottery grants, workshops, DVDs, advertising work, pop videos and theatre concessions. Bill managed this money as prudently as the artistic director would allow. He gently pruned the administrative staff, but retained an assistant. He gave himself a pay rise and began to take classes again. Towelling down after a class he would look at the studio mirror, a slimmer, looser version of himself looking back as each week passed, and say to himself “It's not a comeback.” He joined a gym, swam three mornings a week, weights in the evening.

Bill broke his knee irreparably in Barcelona. It was late October, a few days before his thirty-sixth birthday. He didn't break his knee carrying two suitcases down the aeroplane steps, greasy with warm rain and the smell of kerosene. He didn't break his knee falling off a rented bicycle, though his pride, and the civic litter facility he had hoped and failed to avoid, were both dented. He sustained no injury playing football on the wet sand of Barceloneta beach and survived unscathed the sudden full stop of an escalator in an out-of-town shopping mall. The direct cause of the ligament damage which would end his unvoiced hopes of a return to the stage was not the stunt he pulled to impress the young female assistant he had brought along on this tour, executing a triple pirouette on the arced surface of a giant cannonball in the Placa Reial. Although it is possible, likely even, that it was this whirling motion that caught the attention of the year old Newfoundland which, slipping its leash, barrelled into Bill's legs in between him hopping off the cannonball and landing. Crushed, Bill lay on the cool paving of the square. Nausea came and went in waves, but the pain was constant. Everything lost. “Fucking dog,” he thought, his eyes full of tears.

Christóforos

Ben came down from the hills brown and peeling, his last few drachmas spent and his spirit exhausted by a month of too many stars and resin wine and the odour of sheep dung never distant. His hair, usually the colour of wet sand, was now bright blonde, standing out on his arms as filaments of gold. His jeans were stiff with dust. He walked slowly into the village. A sweat-stained shirt loose about him, and another in his bag, both appropriated from his father's wardrobe back home. A wallet empty of all but a donor card and two tickets for the Paris Metro. His passport. House keys.

He spoke very little Greek, but his thirst was obvious. An old man waved him over with his stick. A pensioner, all in white, white hat, large white moustache, an angel, Ben thought. He sat in the shade outside a bar. 'Kátse káto,' said the old man, gesturing. Ben sat opposite him. The old man shouted for water and beer. 'No drachmas,' said Ben. The old man waved away an imaginary fly. 'No drachmas, no próvlima.'

The old man watched him drink, nodding when he had finished the beer. 'Efcharisties,' said the young man, rising. The old man lifted his hat. His hair was thick and perfectly white.

Further into the village there were tourist shops and a post office, with a sea-rusted Western Union sign sticking out above the door at an uncertain angle. Ben went in. There was only one counter; behind it a small, nervous clerk on the telephone. 'Yes,' he said. And looking up at Ben, 'yes,' again. Then he smiled and handed over the receiver. 'It's for you.'

His father's voice, richly amused. 'Will a hundred quid get you back to Athens?' Shame draining slowly into relief. The clerk counting out the notes with short, slender fingers, like a girl's.

He bought a ferry ticket at a creosoted hut in the small harbour. The next crossing was at five. He walked back to the bar at the edge of the village. The old man was gone. It was too hot to be outside now, even in the shade.  

The Padlock

The padlock was heavy, a lump of polished stainless steel the size and shape of a cigarette packet. His uncle, who ran the hardware store near the cathedral, had engraved it for him. ANNA I XIMO with the date underneath, today's date. Ximo had done some extra hours in exchange, stocktaking in poor light. He felt the padlock bump against his ribs, its shape shrouded by the red lining of his jacket. Like another heart, he thought, but cool to touch, dead. He straightened on the seat of the moped.

He picked her up just after eight. Everything about her sad and dark. Her eyes made him want to cry, even as she was smiling. He had had girlfriends before, several. He had a job and wheels, after all. But Anna's sadness was irresistible, all-conquering. She dressed badly, he suspected, to avoid unwelcome attention from boys like him. She didn't speak much, preferring instead to communicate her inner pain with a broad repertoire of glances, from her large, dark, sad eyes. This suited Ximo, who himself was not much of a talker. Sometimes a gesture was easier. If you didn't know how to say what you felt, or even what it was that you felt, a gesture or an action could make feelings comprehensible or concrete.

Her father watched her put on her helmet. Silhouetted by light from inside, a dark shape, yellow all around. A big avenging angel sort of a man, in a short-sleeved shirt. He saw them pull away, heading out of the city. By the door was a large plant pot. Two gallons of dry earth and a dead aloe. He spat into it, meditatively, and went inside.

The city sat in a bay surrounded by mountains and from the lookout seemed like a gorgeous necklace around the throat of the sea. Ximo took the padlock from his pocket and showed it to Anna. He explained its purpose to her. Here, in front of God or whoever, the padlock represented their unbreakable love. That it could not be sundered. She looked at him and nodded gently, indicating comprehension, if not necessarily approval. There were other padlocks attached to the railings of the lookout, all smaller and tattier than theirs, some with initials written on in permanent marker. Ximo, for the first time, began to feel self-conscious. Perhaps he had said too much. In silence he secured the lock to the railing. Then he threw the keys over it, into the night, the drop too deep to hear them land.

The bad news came about a month later. Anna had grown increasingly evasive, but the text which ended it was shattering nevertheless. I don't want to see you anymore. Ximo put a pair of bolt-croppers, three feet long into a rucksack and swung it across his back. The handles sticking out above his shoulders like the blackened stumps of wings. He got on his moped and rode up the mountain.

Close Up

It felt good to be looked at the way she looked at him human and brown-eyed in this case dark and shining like polished stone but warm somehow amused and alive and completely present. Better still when she looked away listening to someone else but conscious of his gaze seeing him without seeming to see him responding when he smiled. She would purse her lips as if anticipating a joke that ought not be made a cruelty that might (and should) die unvoiced or a blandness she didn't have time for. Life is short. They were sad apart and not quite as sad together enduring hours weeks months apart each future meeting a misericord. This is happening now, in time, but we know the outcome. All love the same trajectory Montagus Millers renounce renounce. Love like the universe cooling and dammed passion a dry lake. How much longer he wonders can they keep finding the energy. A string of spit between her lips she looks up at him a puzzle an absurd face she tries not to laugh at the man she can't have but has anyway. Asks if he's okay. Yes he says not untruthfully after all it felt good to be looked at the way she looked at him human and brown-eyed in this case dark and shining like polished stone but warm somehow amused and alive and completely present.

Skin Deep

He woke up to a new face. He was wearing a hospital gown which was neither green nor blue but some kind of non-committal shade thereamongst with a pattern on it. The bleached-out logo of the hospital trust, perhaps, he couldn't tell. A dusty glass of water on the bedside table but no cards or fruit. He sat up and drank. The gown tied up loosely at the back and his fur and his arse visible to all, the water, as warm as the room, it being a hospital significantly warmer than room temperature, dripped down his chin, some of it. Down his chin where once, and until quite recently, there had been a beard. The water, some of it, dripped onto his chest.  He looked down and couldn't see anything, concentrating his glance no further than the bottom of his face. Nothing to see. They'd shaved him. He stroked his cheek to confirm the fact. All gone. Well.

It wasn't a castaway beard or a shaped beard, it was in every way unremarkable. A middling beard, but one which he had been very much attached to. On the left side of his face was a dressing, which followed the line of his jaw from below the ear halfway to his chin. A talking point, certainly, but at the same time a poor substitute for the hair that had of late covered the same area. He worried at the gauze, scratching at it reflexively until a nurse appeared and told him off.

His wife and son arrived some time later without the missing fruit, she having determined, quite reasonably, that it would just go off, but with a large greetings card. A cartoon bear in a pyjamas sucking mournfully on a glass thermometer. The boy was only two and was frightened at first by the stranger in the bed. He had never seen his father clean-shaven or with a post-op black eye. Hearing a fat-tongued approximation of the familiar voice though he gauged the situation and climbed onto the bed. “New daddy hurt?” he asked. His father nodded yes to everything.   

La Vita Nuova

He hadn't turned up for work. There had been no calls, no apologies. It was completely out of character, that's what his fellow players said, though none knew him very well. They couldn't tell you if he preferred dogs or cats, tea or coffee. He was quiet, competent, and reliable, they knew that. But that was all.

His sister raised the alarm. She had left several messages for him, with a creeping note of concern in her voice. The messages went unheard, she realised, letting herself into his flat a week later and retrieving them herself. No-one else had called. His violin, a 1914 Audinot, sat in an open case on his bed. His dress suit hung behind the door in a cellophane poncho, and five white shirts, similarly sheathed, jostled in the wardrobe like commuters. She found his shoes on the table in the narrow kitchen (the table was a hinged flap meant to drop down to save space but there was only him and the stay underneath, disused, was now immovable). The left shoe had been buffed to a dark brilliance, its pair lolled on its side, streaked with dried-out polish. A cigarillo had burned itself out in the ashtray. An open window. The absence of dust was a kind of bareness.

He reappeared after a month. His sister had never seen him with a tan, even when they were kids. His eyes, too, seemed more deeply coloured.

He had sat at the table smoking, polishing. A blackbird settled briefly in the plane tree outside his window and rehearsed, twice, a trill of pure notes. He knew that if he did not get out right then, at that moment, he would never get out.

He came back to sell the violin. He'd find something cheaper and live for a while on the difference. Learn the language, offer lessons, feel the sun on his neck.

Beneath the Cemetery

There is a green plain between the mountains, and a railway line. The train pushes through the clamouring paddles of cactus and great high grasses, following the river into the city. Static caravans rust among lemon groves. A gang of dogs, cartoonishly assorted, free somehow, have taken over a roofless farmhouse. I see them every day, barking unheeded orders to each other. No-one else looks out of the window. Beyond the glass, still new to me, are empty commuter villages.  Embankments thick with flowers. Doleful, tethered burros. A bronze statue of Christ on an eastern peak, arms outstretched for balance, his position never so precarious, even here.

Each morning I drive my Renault 4 (also available in white) down the mountain to the station, where the train sits humming like something from the next millennium. The garage by the level crossing where I bought the car, taxed and licensed, for 600 euros, is run by two brothers whose age cannot be determined with any certainty, though a rumour persists that they fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. Which would put them in their late eighties, at the youngest. I suppose it's the kind of thing you tell a foreigner. The two of them can often be seen roaring through the village on matching yellow trial bikes, their faces lined by age and speed and relentless sunshine. They grimace at me from beneath peaked helmets and miraculously dark hair as they buzz past. Smoking. Riding one-handed at 80 kilometres an hour on bad roads. Perhaps they are that old. Perhaps they're indestructible.

I spend my days in Malaga, trying to make myself understood. The labourers on site are Brazilian,or Francophone African. The skilled workers are from the Baltic states. There are even some Spaniards. Thankfully they all speak a little English, so we get by, particularly after an unhurried Andalusian lunch. There is something democratic about a hard hat and a hi-vis waistcoat. Everyone looks much the same in them, and everyone has to wear them, the millionaire developer from Madrid and the floorsweeper from Côte d'Ivoire. If we finish early I take a bus to the beach and sit there watching the sky change, until the flies chase me away, or night comes.

People talk on the train home. They have their own jobs to complain about, suppers and weekends to plan and disagreements with loved ones that are important while they're on the phone but will dissolve, in most cases, with the first touch at the doorstep. How were the kids today?


No-one is waiting for me, not in this country at least, so most evenings I stop for a drink in the station bar. The tap hasn't worked for weeks, so Francisco - Me llaman “Frank”! - pours me a beer from a small can and charges me a euro. The bar is L-shaped, with a door at either end, always open and the weather blows through unobstructed. When a mist rolls over the mountain, it rolls into the bar. There's a table in one corner, though no-one ever seems to have sat there, three barstools, a fruit machine and a small colour television on which Frank and I watch Pasapalabra, a game show on Telecinco. We're obsessed.

Frank may own more than one cardigan, but if he does, they are all burgundy, and otherwise identical. He is as gruff and self-contained as one might expect the proprietor of a station café in southern Spain to be, but he seems to like me, perhaps because I share his enthusiasm for Pasapalabra. Álora nestles among three mountains, and the railway station is at the very bottom of the town, so the TV reception is often poor, and when the wind picks up along the Guadalhorce and rattles the shutters and agitates the spirits bottled behind the bar it's hard to hear much. Nevertheless the charisma of Pasapalabra's winsome host, Christian Gálvez, shines through the gloom. Everyone talks very quickly. Elderly women in the post office speak an accelerated version of the language recited on my Learn Spanish tapes. Of the conversation between host and contestant on a gameshow, against the clock, I pick out maybe two words in five. Somehow this does not diminish the charm of the thing. It's a word quiz, and everyone loves those, don't they? I do well in the music round, most nights. Frank does less well, not just in the music round, but generally, which is odd, him being a native speaker. He seems untroubled. Sometimes, I suppose, what is most important is to have the right answer, even if you don't understand the question.

The Way She Says His Name

There is a music in the way she says his name, but now that she's not speaking to him anymore he thinks that seeing her will be halfway or someway at least towards the experience of hearing her so he starts finding time during his working day to slip off and hang around near the coffee shop where he knows she gets her four shot latte twice a day and there's a bus stop twenty or thirty yards down the street where he can smoke and drink his own coffee and still appear to be on the way somewhere rather than just waiting like a bloody fool for a glimpse of her face and the lips he has kissed and the great mass of hair that he has tried to push his fingers through. Love it was, he supposes, for him at least though he always sensed there was something unreal about the whole thing, what with her being so extraordinary and him, well, a bloke in a hard hat she met in a pub after work, not that he had his hard hat on, but she had a trolley case full of paperwork and he'd helped her into a taxi with it and she had kissed him there in the street, a bit inexpertly, if he was honest but she was drunk so he understood.

He stands near the bus stop picking little bits of dried plaster off the back of his fingers. Then he goes back to work.

Running Repairs

They arrived home within a month of each other. Toby was a year older. He had recently divorced and his wife had kept the house. He had exhausted the patience of his friends, in whose kitchens he had got drunk, and on whose sofas or spare beds he had sweated out the booze. So he had gone back to his parents, until he found a place of his own he could afford. Luke had come back to look after his mother, who was dying more quickly than expected. He worked from home, anyway, and his sister was moving to Leeds with work.

They met again as they had first met, in their respective back gardens. Toby smoking, Luke on his mobile. There was pointing, the nervous laughter of recognition and a handshake. They had fought and played here, from six to sixteen, a forever ago.

They bought a car between them, seventy-five quid each, a doer-upper from the local paper which they hunted down in fulfilment of an unrealised teenage ambition. Luke spent more time on it, while his mother slept. It was something he could fix. Toby helped him out on alternate weekends when he didn't have the kids, and when the evenings got lighter he'd change out of his suit into overalls and lean over the engine with a Haynes manual. The yellow concrete of the shared driveway camouflaged, soon enough, with drips and runs of oil. Another four-hundred in parts and a failed test and they got it on the road. They drove Luke's mother to the hospital.

Dissent

Natalia watches her father on the evening news. A still portrait with a caption at first, his learned face and bright white beard spread across the screen, then him suddenly live, responding calmly to an excitable BBC reporter, his lips moving, but the rest of his face a mask of mild amusement. And in the background acres of West London stucco, leaping youngsters in thawbs with jeans and hi-vis running shoes underneath, ululating and punching the air, their energy communicating itself to the newsman who turns to camera with the shiny obvious zeal of the newly converted.

The world is changing and somehow she is part of it. Her mother on the phone in their small kitchen, the coiled lead stretching around two corners like gossip over a fence, and her father's face, impassive to all but its own certainties.

The brick appears in the corner of the screen with its own certainty, no arc, flatly damaging, catching her father beside the left eye. A sudden stillness, blood, calls for Allah then the barriers crashing forwards and the camera reeling drunkenly. Language moving from the diplomatic and statesmanlike to the base notes of anger and revenge and sat upright on the pavement the cleric, her father, no longer middle-aged, clutching his eye and asking for help. Blood streams down from his cheek on to his white robes, his beard all red and his other eye weeping and his daughter crying too, watching it all unfold on the small television.

A Minor Character

Everyone agreed that the kid was an extraordinary talent. His parents were not the sort of people who would normally choose to nudge a child into the hothouse of celebrity. His elder sister, Kayleigh, had a pretty enough singing voice and most of her teeth, but they had never been pushy with her (she was not discouraged; they attended her performances with the school choir three or four times a year.) The boy was something else, though. He could do Joni Mitchell, Jeanette McDonald, Gaga, Maria Callas, Whitney Houston, Ethel Merman and the falsetto of Prince. If you closed your eyes you couldn't tell the difference. What made him exceptional, however, the accuracy with which he could reproduce female voices, also limited his popularity. There was something unsettling, something uncanny about hearing the world weary timbre of a torch singer rendered by a bony thirteen year old boy. He had been eliminated in the early stages of a TV talent show, the judges using words like 'weird' and 'inhuman' to describe him. The public never caught on.

Secretly, his mother believed it was a gift from God. She had been raised in a kind of charismatic baptist cult and had never really shaken it off. She never spoke to her son about this, even on the warm spring afternoon when she interrupted him, crouched and sweating at the desk in his bedroom, the distinctive monosyllables of internet coitus barking from his laptop. A week later his voice began to break.

Man of the House

His father told him he was staying with a friend, threw a holdall over his shoulder and walked away. From the doorstep the boy could hear his mother crying, an unfamiliar sound, somewhere upstairs. He understood that what had happened was irrevocable, that the 'friend' was a woman from the bank, younger than Mum, but thicker through the middle. But he didn't see what was worth getting upset about.

There were two ways of looking at it, he thought. He had either lost a parent (one who considered his home a sort of self-excavated oubliette, who forgot himself in televised golf for whole weekends at a time, a tactic of avoidance so classical in heritage and execution it was almost admirable - Pro-Ams, Japanese Senior Tour, WPGA, he'd watch it all, while his clubs rusted unswung in the carport, a caldera of arse-scuffed oxblood leather accommodating his crescent misery – gone now, though the golf bag remained, the mittened woods poking out from its top like reproachful civets) or gained one: a heavy-hipped woman not much older than him, numberwise. With a honest, open face and presumably an exploitable sense that she had wronged him, the son. More cash at Christmas, and the tantalising possibility that his newly single mother, trimmer than her replacement, though admittedly less honest and open of face, might herself find new love.

He shut the front door. Then he went and sat at his father's end of the sofa, and picked up the TV remote.

Trinity

Ten, she is, lowering herself gingerly onto the riverbank grass,

amidst goose shit and the patter of punters on the Cam.

“Milton, Newton and Winnie-the-Pooh”,

their names jangle over the water, agitated by the boatmen;

loose change for the fountain, keys over a drain,

they drop. “Shakespeare, too.”

A bend in the river, what does she think?

“I like it here,” she says. “It's peaceful.”

Ah, a romantic! As ferry punts and self-hires collide

unsilently before us she sees only the green rhythm flowing,

the wind-combed grass, the cool colonnades of the library.

My daughter imagines her own Cambridge.

“Robert Oppenheimer”, a boatload of Japanese tourists

try to place the name. No, they shrug. It's gone.

Back over the bridge, dodging cyclists and proctors, we go.

I take a picture: her back and the Great Court beyond

spread out like someone's future. “Milton, Byron, A.A. Milne...”

She abandons the future, distracted by a college cat.

Sunday

He had called some numbers from the local paper. Three different men turned up, similarly dressed, to look at the tree stump. One was honest enough to say he didn't want the job, the other two called back with prices that John couldn't consider paying. Next he tried the plant rental place in town for a digger, but they wanted a deposit and waivers and all sorts. So instead he kicked the padlock off the lean-to, found a spade and a handsaw and oiled the rust off them. He started digging on Sunday, after church. It was almost spring and the ground was soft. He dug out in front of the house until his daughter called him in for dinner.

It was just the two of them now, a widower and a divorcee, the grandkids at college or at their father's. She was a counsellor at the school and there was a manfriend, a teacher. John didn't like him. She turned off the television while they ate. Pork fillet. She was a good cook.

It was an old beech and the trunk had split in a storm ten years ago. He watched the news while his food went down, talked to Sarah about work. He put his boots back on and went on digging until it got dark. He had promised his wife a summer house here, somewhere to sit with a book and watch the sun set. Nine years gone now, she was. She had always loved to read.

April in Faslane

Women gathered at the dock, mothers, wives, girlfriends. One with a baby braced in the crook of an arm, slouched against a rusty railing, smoking. Look, there's your pa, all pasty. Fatter than I remember. The long black shape slunk in, with a great nose on it, but otherwise like a guilty thing, half-submerged. Four or five men on deck doing God knows what outlined against a bright horizon, morning. The mountains still with snow in the creases and the sky half-sun half-thunder cloud. A burger van wafted seaward the smell of frying onions through the gates of the base as two MPs sat in a Land Rover, one with his feet crossed high on the dash, boot toes pushed against the windscreen and the other dangling a warrant in a manila envelope.

The baby fidgeted and began to cry. Ma flicked her cigarette away, exhaled over her shoulder, away from the little girl. The butt marked a shallow parabola, still lit, out into the green sea which flicked the floating cylinder and the rest of the floating debris, smashed pallets, styrofoam burger boxes, shrunken footballs, all local stuff, back against the concrete wall of the quay.

The women drifted off inland. There were warmer places to wait. For some it had become hard to tell what was life and what was interval. The baby chewed on a dummy, looking out at the long black shape in the water. It raised a chubby arm and pointed, out to sea.

Rex Redux

Rex couldn't go through with it. He had gone in up to his waist, the worst bit really, when the cold forces the breath out of you. Then felt the sun on his neck and thought “I've paid for breakfast.” He was ruined of course, nothing would change that. The house, the car, gone. He'd hook the kids out of school at the end of term, try and get them into the local comprehensive.

Collected his clothes as he walked up the beach, hopped gracelessly into his boxers, grit on his sea-shrunk balls. Nevermind, he'd shower and dress again before popping down to the dining room. Appear respectable. For that breakfast he'd already paid for. He shook his shirt in a whisper of April wind then pulled it over his shoulders. Coward's way out, really. Limited liability. Better to drown in debt than to just drown.

The sun was above the hotel now. It was a beautiful spot, the broad bay with a fort at either end, uninterrupted views, the Atlantic, nothing between here and Newfoundland. Shame about that road, but you have to get here somehow. Late-Victorian it was, the hotel, he guessed. Queen Anne revival. Chintz. Built on a bend.

He picked up his shoes. From the East he heard the growing noise of a helicopter. He watched it fly overhead, still moving, and his bare feet registered the change from sand to tarmac. He never saw the van which threw him, broken, back onto the beach.

Back and Back

His mother combed his hair while it was still wet, her cheeks wet too and her eyes looking tired and sore. His hand in hers and in the other a small suitcase as they walked through town, half the buildings empty or ruined or condemned. Just a short trip, two nights then home, a great honour it was, of course. They had a compartment to themselves. He told the inspector that they were going to meet the king.

“Oh, is that so?” the inspector said. The boy knew that the inspector didn't believe him.

He shared an apple with his mother then threw the core out of the window. She told him off. She wasn't really angry though. They played Beggar My Neighbour but the cards slipped around on the seat and anyway it was better with more people.

The roof of the terminus was vast and black at midday. At the left luggage counter his mother took a small bag from inside the suitcase. The Underground was crowded and smoky. It was nine stops; he counted them on the map above the door. Outside the Abbey his mother knelt in front of him and pinned the cross on his jacket pocket. She was crying again.

The king was older than he looked on stamps and newsreels, and thinner. He leaned down and said “You must be very proud” and for the first time the boy felt the absence of his father, a dead man he didn't remember.

'Nothing Besides Remains' - Some thoughts about ruins, and the Gothic

Percy Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', written in 1817 and published the following year, interrogates the curious fascination that ruins hold for an enlightened, early nineteenth-century imagination. The particular ruin in this poem, 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone' accompanied by 'a shatter'd visage' half-buried in the sand, is a broken statue of an Egyptian king.One straightforward reading of this piece is as a kind of vanitas. The king's statue has fallen, the civilisation which he ruled over has been superceded, the boast engraved at the base of the edifice – 'Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair!' - has been rendered absurd by death and time. But Ozymandias represents more than just a simple moral lesson. Shelley's poem exhibits a number of preoccupations, and trades in a number or themes which, taken collectively, stretch beyond the Romantic and into the Gothic. The ruined totem of the dead king is equally totemic of post-Enlightenment interest in what is ancient and exotic, in the waning civilisations of the East. The fable of Ozymandias is about timeless issues of hubris and usurpation, mortality and haunting, decay and degeneration. These are Gothic concerns, and the landscape of Gothic fiction is scattered with ruins which invariably stand for more than simply the remainder of things. I thought it might be interesting to explore the role of ruins in the Gothic tradition, and also to examine the ways in which we interact with, or 'read' real historical ruins, and how these approaches differ from or correspond to our reading of ruins in fictional artefacts.

Shelley's vivid rendering of the dismembered, monumental body of Ozymandias is prefigured in one of the earliest Gothic texts, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. In this short novel a usurped, long-dead prince, Alfonso the Good, restores his descendants to 'the lordship of Otranto' by manifesting severally as a giant helmet, a giant sword and a giant, disembodied fist. When the giant helmet appears in the courtyard of the castle, crushing the sickly Conrad (false heir to Otranto, milksop) and setting the novel's plot in motion, another helmet disappears from a marble statue of Alfonso in a nearby church. The 'ominous casque' has shifted from one sense of being monumental to another. It is no longer memorial, but is instead simply massive. The transubstantiation of the helmet is emblematic of the instability of even the most stable things. The hardest, densest materials are subject to the influence of external forces, whether natural, supernatural, or political. What is built to memorialise, to last, Walpole indicates, is not guaranteed to do so, at least not in its original form. Everything is subject to ruin. Appropriately for a Gothic text, in The Castle of Otranto this ruination is complicated, perhaps even perverse. In restoring Theodore, his descendant, to the lordship of Otranto, Alfonso destroys his seat. 'The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins.'Assuming that the disappearance of the marble helmet is followed by further disintegration of the statue, is seems that Alfonso has to disassemble himself, to reduce himself to ruins in order to effect change. If we take this interpretation of The Castle of Otranto as our model we might conclude that ruins are a necessary by-product of political change. Our feelings about ruins, more recent ruins at least, are certainly coloured by politics, and our ideological position in relation to the ruined artefact. The Berlin Wall, a symbol of Cold War division for forty years, toppled in 1989, dissected, commoditized and fetishised ever since, is a political ruin par excellence. Its destruction can be read as marking the triumph of capitalism in a post-feudal world. Accordingly, fragments of the wall are displayed throughout the west, the majority of them in the U.S.A., the principal antagonist on the winning side of the Cold War. These fragments serve either as a a kind of ongoing concrete vindication of the Pax Americana, or as evidence that the unbridled materialism of America and its associate nations has turned suffering into a product of sorts. Similarly, in the latter part of the sixteenth century the ruined abbeys and monasteries of post-Reformation England signalled either the success of the protestant project and the birth of a new nation, free from the influence of Rome, or the sacrilegious destruction of holy institutions. The response of someone encountering these reminders of a defeated mode of living will depend on their political or religious sensibilities.

It is, of course, impossible to engage with ruins politically without engaging with them historically. What makes a ruin significant, in a political realm, is its history. It might also be problematic to read ruins ahistorically in fiction or poetry. Ozymandias can be understood by a reader as a specific historical figure (his name is a Greek rendering of Usermaatre, the praenomen of Ramesses II), simply as a product of Shelley's Romantic imagination, or, perhaps most fruitfully, as something of each. Whichever approach is adopted, it is impossible to engage fully with the poem without bringing even the most basic understanding of Ancient Egyptian history, or at least the cultural imprint of a kind of macro-history, in which empires and kings rise and fall, to bear. Absent this understanding the sonnet loses much of its significance. Those pieces of the Berlin Wall that have been preserved are often those which are decorated with striking graffiti art or poignant messages in permanent ink. Someone standing in front of one of these recontextualised fragments, someone who was entirely ignorant of the aftermath of World War II, would be alerted that there was something remarkable about the slab of concrete in front of them by the way it was displayed, disembodied, outside a museum or a bank, but their experience of the Wall would be materially different from someone who was familiar with what the Berlin Wall meant in the quarter century between its construction and fall.

We might choose to analyse a ruin from a political or historical perspective, but it is more challenging, perhaps, to consider how ruins act upon our imaginations. We don't simply look at a ruin, register its shape, smile at its pleasing asymmetry and then move on. We savour it, shiver at it, and in a sense (I'll come back to this) we absorb it. Ruins are disturbing and fascinating, even when they are not spectacular. This is in part because they stimulate a sensitivity to chaos and disorder which is probably infantile in origin. Almost every parent will agree that children create disorder, not just by omission, but wilfully. Unable to control their world children quickly realise that the simplest way to influence one's existence is by disorganising it. The bombed-out terraces of East London proved popular playgrounds for boys and girls in the 1940's not because they were picturesque but because they represented a consummation of the childish desire to level the adult world, and to occupy a space free from even childish responsibilities. Layered on to this early enthusiasm for the ruin, as soon as we can read and often sooner, is an appreciation of the fictional energies of the decrepit castle and the crumbling haunted house, both commonplaces in children's stories, (which are often extravagantly Gothic). A literate child understands that ruins, while apparently static objects, exert a dynamic on the story. When ruins appear, things happen. In a fictional sense we read ruins as a marker of excitement from an early age, a practice which we never altogether abandon. Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, an avid consumer of Gothic romances, is carried away by the idea of vile goings-on amongst remote, ruinous stones, and is affectionately teased for it by her suitor, Henry Tilney, en route to the eponymous abbey. Disappointed by the pedestrian situation and considerable comforts of Northanger, she is obliged to fabricate her own Gothic story, in which her host, General Tilney, has done away with his wife. Appropriately for a quixotic reader, Catherine is unable to separate this exciting fiction from the prosaic truth, that the late Mrs Tilney died of natural causes. In upbraiding her for her foolish suspicions, Henry describes a society which is free from chaos, and free from mystery. Feel free to insert your own italics as you read.

"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this? [...] Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

Catherine's immersion in the Gothic constitutes a new education which may not have prepared her for any atrocity but has at least taught her to look for the clues. Henry presents her fantasy as a kind of suspension of rational thought, an interlude of childishness. Perhaps he has missed the point, perhaps even, he is jealous. Catherine experiences the texts of Radcliffe and Lewis primally, eyes wide open. Henry Tilney is a jaded figure whose country and age, by his own account, offer little to divert him. The Gothic in general an escapist type of entertainment - television soap operas set in inner cities amongst the working class rarely exhibit Gothic traits - which explains in part its interest in what is remote in space and time.

Gothic markers such as ruined castles, crazed aristocrats, supernatural interventions and so on, offer familiarity because we recognise them from an early age. The Gothic is accordingly both exotic and familiar at the same time. We might also observe that generically, it repeats its improbabilities, over and over again. Freud suggests that these qualities, of entwined familiarity and unfamiliarity, and of improbable repetition can be defined as unheimlich, or 'uncanny'. What Freud says about the conjunction between heimlich and unheimlich is particularly interesting when related to a discussion of ruins and how they are situated both within Gothic fictions and within the individual imagination. Ruins fulfil his larger criteria for uncanniness because they resemble buildings but are not buildings. Parts of a ruin - window arches, thresholds, stairwells - if they are still standing, perform a parody of their former function. Sections of a ruin which stand apart from others are, in effect, disembodied from the rest of the structure, and disembodiment, as we have seen, has its own subset of Gothic associations. Freud notes that the meanings of heimlich are so various that they eventually intersect with certain meanings of unheimlich (interestingly, one might make the same observation about 'canny' and 'uncanny' which both carry a sense of possessing supernatural capacities. The sense of unheimlich that most interests Freud is that defined by the Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. 'According to him,' Freud paraphrases, 'everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.'The ruination of a building reveals its inner structure, often to disturbing effect. Exposed brickwork is considered chic in certain contexts, plaster is preferred in others, but there is something discomforting about brickwork which is visible behind crumbling plaster. The most thrilling part of the Roman auditorium which lays beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery is not the remainder of the walls but the timber guttering, revealed by the archaeologist's trowel, which once drained water, and on occasion, presumably blood, away from the arena. Similarly, we may find skeletons creepy and puncture wounds may make us wince, but there is a special horror to the sight of bone poking through flesh. The ruin which reveals its workings, its substructures, is particulary uncanny because it speaks to us of our physical vulnerability. When we consider the peeling screed we are also forced to reflect upon the fragility of the human structure. Schelling's definition of the Unheimlich might also be sensibly applied to the ruins of Gothic romance. In The Castle of Otranto the secrets which surround Manfred's illegitimate occupation of the castle are revealed as Alfonso reassembles himself and razes it to the ground. Emily and her aunt come to appreciate just how deplorable Montoni is and his motives for sequestrating them as they first approach his dilapidated Appenine retreat in The Mysteries of Udolpho Secrets are both contained and revealed by the crumbling walls. This idea is closely related to how we experience historical ruins.

When we walk through or stand in front of any historical structure we are in dialogue with it, in a sense. It presents itself to us, we respond to it, emotionally or aesthetically. This dialogue is intensified in the case of a ruin because it has no other function than this dialogue. It is not slept or worshipped or exercised in. At some level of consciousness, the fabric of the ruin is understood to be doubly porous. What has been absorbed into the stones, the iniquities and suffering and celebrations they have separated or enclosed, continuously permeates back out of them. Self-evidently this dialogue goes on in our heads, but it doesn't feel that way. Ruins may act upon us rather as the romances of Mrs Radcliffe act upon Catherine Morland. We might respond to them unthinkingly,immersing ourselves in their projected melancholy. Or our approach might be more analytical. We might contemplate the machinations of Cranmer as we walk around the arches of Tintern Abbey. The Reformation is contained within those walls, and not simply within a figurative sense, just as the great pageant of the Twentieth Century, and its two world wars, is somehow soaked into the concrete of the Berlin Wall. These kinds of ruins are fascinating because they represent a historical or political trajectory which has stalled. Fictional ruins are often similarly coded; the ruin is the abode of the villain traditionally, to whom no good will come. Ruins, both real and fictive remind us of the thrilling narratives of childhood, but this nostalgia is tempered, and ruins acquire a new ambiguity as we grow and our understanding of history develops. However, there remains an ineffable quality to ruins which has survived the rationalisations of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. To engage with ruins, therefore, is to engage with ideas that are both thought and unthought, and it is this miscibility of effect, ultimately, that characterises our interaction with ruins and sustains our interest in them.