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Armada
BRIAN PATTEN
Armada
DEDICATION
For my mother, Irene Stella Bevan
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1 the armada
Cinders
The Armada
The Betrayal
The Eavesdropper
Echoes
Neighbourhood Watch
Inattention
Juggling in the Crematorium
Stepfather
The Nightlight
An Incident
Ward Sixteen
Ebb Tide and the Sparrow
The Khardoma
In the Dark
Ghost Ship
Five Down
2 between harbours
These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men
The Word
Don’t Ask
Survivor
Her Coldness Explained
What I Need for the Present
The Sick Equation
The Recognition
Dear Thief
An Obsession
The Wife
Hooks
April Morning Walk
Act Two
Waiting
Our Lives Had Grown so Empty
3 inessential things
Inessential Things
Minister for Exams
Tina’s Flight
Devilment
Why Things Remained the Same
Poetry Lesson
Waiting in Macedonia
Khartoum
Lockerbie
So Many Different Lengths of Time
Drinking to the Muse
Circus Act
The Mirror’s Apprentice
Garden Lore
In Perspective
Full Circle World
Into the Blue
Sea Saw
The Brackets
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cinders
You never went to a ball, ever.
In all your years sweeping kitchens
No fairy godmother appeared, never.
Poor, poor sweetheart,
This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,
Is the only theatre-gown you’ve ever worn.
No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.
The drip beside your bed discontinued.
Life was never a fairy-tale.
Cinders soon.
The Armada
Long long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines –
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart bums as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.
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