INVISIBLE THREADS

“Reach out and grab this,” said Manus holding up a reel of twine.
The boy reached out and seized it.
“How did you do that?”
“Just grabbed it,” replied the boy.
“Easy wasn’t it?”
The boy nodded impatiently, looking intently at the twine and wondering what the old man was driving at.
“You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?”
The nod became a shake. Manus picked up the wooden cross in his right hand. The lines tightened as though taken by a fish, and the limp, lifeless figure rose up from the cold stone floor in a wisp of dust. In that instant, he was alive. The feet tapped the tiled ground ever so slightly. The knees and hips were poised. The trunk seemed to rise and fall almost imperceptibly, breathing in time with the old man. Even the eyes took on an extra quality. They fixed the boy with their sentience. They dared him to question the life behind them.

“The thing is, you do think about it, only you don’t. It’s not just a case of your brain telling your arm what to do. Sometimes, your hand tells your brain what to think.”

With difficulty, Luca broke the stare of the puppet, and traced the flashing lines of light betraying the threads above the hung figure. Up the threads, into the tips of the old man’s fingers which gripped and caressed the cross as an artist might a pencil. He noticed the sinews flexing and dancing under the weathered skin, up the lean, sun-tanned arm, still scanning, still a figment of the movement across the trapezius bridge of the shoulder as the old man’s pale blue, slightly moist eyes fixed those of the boy.
“There is no divide between mind and arm, arm and hand, hand and finger. Do it long enough, and there is no divide between finger and string. I feel these threads like they were my own nerves.”

Manus stood up slowly from the low wooden stool. His knees clacked and the puppet started then settled.
“Eventually you become the puppet.” He raised his left arm, and with a deft twist of the right wrist, the puppet followed. “And the puppet becomes you.”

He dropped his head, stared at his worn boots, and pitched his hand forwards so the puppet’s head did the same. The boy found himself mirroring the movements of the man and the model, so with an allegro jaunt, Manus roused the three of them to dancing an imaginary reel. They clipped and clopped their way about the room, picking up pace quickly and clumsily voicing the rhythm, if not the tune of the dance. The jig got faster and faster, eyes flashing from man to boy to puppet so it wasn’t clear who was leading who, feet flailing, kicking up a whorl of dusty ash and din until the clamour peaked and the old man collapsed back onto his stool, spluttering and wheezing. The boy stopped and caught his breath. He looked at Manus struggling for air in and felt bad for whipping the old man up into such a frenzy. The white prism of light from outside eddied and swirled in the dark of the workshop. Between coughs, Manus looked up and nodded to Luca to show he was alright, then raising his left palm as though confirming it to himself. Eventually he sat back with a long, uneasy sigh. Pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his limp right hand, the cross. Sprawled on the floor in a flaccid recovery position, the puppet. Between, the threads, twisted but still connected.

We quaffed happily
Without slaking anything
Specially not our thirst

I

I have fallen on hard floors
Without breaking anything
You have stumbled into shelves
Without breaking anything
I have walked into doors
Without breaking anything
You tripped over your words
Without breaking anything
We shared others’ secrets
Without breaking anything
We shared a silence
Without breaking anything
But can I say “I want you”
Without breaking anything?

Susannah Hart writes

II

Amazingly,
You fell from the top of the climbing frame
Without breaking anything.
I dusted you down,
Wiped the grazes, kissed the bumps,
And we walked home companionably
Holding hands.
After your bedtime, when the wine was poured,
I tried to tell your father
What I thought mattered most,
But I wasn’t sure that I could do it
Without breaking anything.

Granny

Benn came from Paris, Guy from Edinburgh, I from Cambridge, Richard and Dan from other parts of London. The girls were too young.

‘You’d better say goodbye,’ said the ever-faithful Dr Stock. ‘But she did the crossword!’ I exclaimed, having noticed on the bed the familiar sight of the Daily Telegraph folded to the crossword page, squares filled in with her spidery writing.

We trooped home, leaving our mothers with theirs. Endless cups of tea were made and half drunk, countless cigarettes smoked as we lolled around chatting about nothing, dozed, comforted the dog. The door banged at quarter to one. We looked at each other. Sam licked my hand and, for once, it comforted me.

It was Remembrance Day.

She was Granny. Like it or not, the other grandmothers in the family had to accept a different name. She was everyone’s refuge. Not just for us and the cousins, but for a stream of nieces, nephews, great-nieces, great-nephews, and all our hangers-on. It was always open house at Crouch End, and an unfamiliar face appearing at the breakfast table was put at ease by a welcoming ‘how about some toast, dear? Or bacon perhaps?’

Anyone less like a matriarch is hard to imagine, though. Her bright eyes and slight frame, with its unexpectedly generous chest, gave her the look of a blackbird, and she maintained til the end that she was exactly 5’, although she confessed to me once that she’d shrunk half an inch.

‘You should be dead!’ the less guarded students at Brompton Hospital would say, when called in to see the interesting specimen of Granny’s asthmatic lungs. ‘Be a darling and find me the puffer in my handbag,’ she’d wheeze as she paused on the landing, stood up from weeding the garden, or leant against a tree while we were in the woods with the dog.

She was always gadding about, much to our delight and her doctor’s dismay. ‘Thank God I got my licence before driving tests were invented,’ she’d say, after another near miss in the elderly Ford Fiesta. When she said ‘thank God’, though, she usually really meant it. After Grandpa died (‘life with your grandfather wasn’t exactly easy, but it was never boring’), Granny became a staunch church-goer, although she never could quite take seriously the desperately earnest vicar.

There was nothing that annoyed Granny more than apathy or inertia. ‘I don’t mind’, our standard teenage response to subjects varying from what to have for dinner to what we wanted to do with our lives, was met with a bracing: ‘Well, have a mind – really dear, do buck up!’

She was always on our side, though. Her role as guardian to my brothers and me while Mum and Dad were abroad compelled her to play the authoritarian figure on occasion, but her heart just wasn’t in it, particularly when she was secretly amused by the miscreant’s activities. Aged 17, Guy was suspended for brewing beer in his cupboard, and Granny punished him by not allowing him to stay in bed after 11am and taking him to the cinema only twice during his ‘week of reflection’. She did, however, make him promise not to do it again, allowing her to report to his housemaster: ‘Yes indeed, I’m being quite strict with him, and I’m certain you’ll see no repeat of such dreadful behaviour.’

‘Darling, do get a handkerchief!’ Sniffing was Granny’s bête noire, and good manners were essential, especially at the table. This didn’t preclude lively conversation, however, and meals at Crouch End were always convivial, if not always of the highest culinary order. Years of domestic staff meant that her own talents in the kitchen, acquired late in life, were limited to steak and kidney pudding, roast chicken and apple pie.

The hour after lunch was devoted to the crossword. Daily Telegraph Monday to Saturday, Sunday Times on Sunday. Curled up next to Granny on the sofa, over the years I slowly learnt how they worked. But I never could beat her, even when, as she got older, she dozed off between clues. After a gentle prod, her eyes would open and she’d say, ‘Ah, yes. 16 down, “quintessential”, don’t you see, dear?’

I was staying at Granny’s when my A-level results came through. Flunking history seemed the most unfair thing that had ever happened to me. What’s the point of working hard if this is what you get? How I hated the world. But instead of departing for a gap year, I spent the next four months living with Granny, studying for the re-sit. She died less than a year later – shortly after I’d gone up to university, having got the grade in the end. Since then I’ve always believed in the possibility of a blessing in disguise.

In those four months, in her unassuming way, Granny told me a lot about life. Now, when things don’t go to plan, I try to remember what she said. ‘Clairey darling, know your own mind. Always do what you think is right, but be kind, and try to do it without breaking anything.’

Heather’s brief got me thinking about the different, often conflicting, ideas that people have of each other. Sometimes they’re completely different versions of the same person.

I think back to my granddad’s funeral some years ago (he had a stroke in his 80s and died a few years after). My parents divorced when I was around three, and we three kids and my mum moved in with my grandparents. We grew up living with them. They were both domineering people, and I always saw my
granddad as rigid, narrow-minded and intolerant. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye!

At the funeral the priest (who had barely met him) began to describe this extremely open-minded, tolerant individual, who I barely recognised. Casual acquaintances often did see him this way.

So this is a poem about my granddad, those conflicting, alternative versions, and inconsistency within and among people.

Compiled

A charming man the gutter unthinker
Always a cheery word
When beating, hands inflated
Open minded eye-beam ideas
splinters really
All patient explosions, thoughtless caring
Serenely knotted raging Reasonably against god’s kind crippling
Broken
and without breaking anything

The Karma Sutra?
Sounds to me like one good stitch
Deserves another.

He howled through the night
Without pleasing anyone.
Please pass the manual.

Haiku #3

He tiptoed to bed
Without waking anything
She breathed, innocent

This haiku fest is putting me in mind of two such efforts written by Roger McGough many years ago:

Only trouble with
Japanese haiku is that
You write one, and then

Only seventeen
Syllables later you want
To write another

Some well chosen words
Five syllables or seven
Who decides the rules?