a one hundred sixteenth poem ... 'osborne'

George Osborne

Was born of wax

Crucified by press hacks

Made unholy mess, super taxed

Families with two thalidomide kids

Or more, and achieved the fiscal

Equivalent of skull fucking

The poor.

Eventually, he will also die.

a one hundred and fifteenth poem ... 'cameron'

Cameron

Or Dave

Raised

The spectre of

Hitler at a 

Charity dinner

When speaking

About Europe,

Gassed on 

For far too long.

a one hundred and fourteenth poem ... 'johnson'

Boris Johnson walked into a room:

The walls cringed,

And the doors began to sweat,

Tables and chairs attempted to shuffle off,

And the carpet crept

Towards the fire brexit. 

The Intervention

‘We don’t owe him this,’ I said.

‘He’s complicated,’ she protested. Always code for being something of a twat.

Why is it that one episode of bad luck is supposed to make you stronger, but a lifetime of disadvantage rarely propels you to the top? They fuck you up, she’d said in the past – a vogueish notion for the salespeople of parenting books, playing on guilt, but ‘they’ aren’t weighed against the alternative, I always thought.

We were in my uncle’s flat. He was not home yet; presumably he was on the corner. He had always been uncompromising in his view of self-determination. ‘You’re good? Why not great?’ he would say. ‘And if all is not well, why aren’t you fixing it?’ I protested only weakly in these circular conversations. He tended to speak like a stage actor, a ham. My uncle was also uncompromising in his self-delusion. He read books with titles like ‘Feel the Power’ and ‘Don’t Dream It, Do It’, even attending the authors’ so-called seminars from time to time. Arguably, he’d missed the point when he got into accumulator betting. He had the perverse perspective that the longer the odds, the greater the achievement if you won. It was a ‘one man against the system’ mentality. It hadn’t been successful so far.

So this, today, was what my mother called ‘an intervention’.

She sat rubbing her knee where she had knocked it on the wooden bar on the edge of my uncle’s couch. The gap between the two seats in his sitting room invited this. I slouched in the armchair, but felt so ready to fall asleep I stood to move about. I struck my shins on the little table, rattling the cans on there. Bangs and shouts came from the corridors outside, and a dog started up. My mother pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes so hard I was compelled to grasp her wrists and pull her arms away from her face. She pulled back, and we grappled foolishly, like a parody of boxers sparring. My heel kicked out and sent some of the cans over, dregs oozing out and onto the carpet glacially. I let go. The air felt too dense, so I turned off the little gas burner. My uncle’s darts trophy looked at me from the mantle, and his wedding photo.

‘Thanks for coming with me,’ my mum said. ‘He needs his family now – we have to circle the wagons.’

Two wagons were all we had. The other one was on the south coast with my cousin (who wouldn’t ever join a circle with this desperate pair) and had been for months now. My father, for his part, had been gone, lost at sea, far longer.

We heard loud banging from the corridor, then breaking glass. The curses were my uncle’s and it took him two tries to open the door. He came in straight so he wedged himself in the door frame; he noticed us, and just regarded us for a while. He twisted his shoulders free and sidestepped behind the sofa. My mum reached for his hard hand but he pulled it quickly free. My uncle returned from the kitchenette five minutes later with a drink for himself. He was in the first flush of old age, skin drying and wrinkling, but not in a sweet way around the eyes. It was getting ruddy and blotchy, freckles joining up on his forearms and the hair getting thicker and greyer like oxidising wires. His ears, too, were thickening and his eyes were like teacups with dregs.

He put the fire back on as he passed it, deftly dodging the precarious coffee table and slumping into the remaining sofa space, the tail of a dove; only we were supposed to be the doves, or the bearers of the olive branch, or the bringers of a white standard, or who the hell knows. He stared back and forth at us for a time, no-one speaking. I stared at the fire, the carbon monoxide becoming visible before my gaze; a slow yellow cloud spreading from the fake coals. My mother stared at him, with moisture in the eye corners, and that look she slapped on that meant immense pity, the kind of look you’d cast at a laden donkey being beaten in spite of its best efforts by the mean-mouthed driver.

She said, to him but with an obvious look at me to count me in, ‘This is an intervention.’ My mother explained the plan: to drive south, where her sister-in-law was staying with my cousin and her family. My uncle said nothing, just taking long pulls from his can, until:

‘Fine. We’ll take my car though. I filled it up and checked the oil yesterday.’ My mother blanched, taken aback at how simple it was.

I stood, feeling impatient, and turned off the fire again. My uncle looked at me, then asked my mother: ‘Who put the bellows up his arse?’

I led out, my uncle bringing up the rear so he could lock the damn door.

The building was a brutalist beauty, as it is fashionable to say. I guided us along the walkway and down some stairs, but they stopped before ground level, so I led us along another street in the sky. Around it looped, stairs only leading upward. I heard my uncle sniggering. I couldn’t bear to turn and look at him, so I went on, going back to the stairs we’d come down, only to go up and past his door the other way. Again, though, I could not lead us down ground level, only reaching the first floor. I stopped, looking out at the surrounding, connecting blocks. I could see a down staircase, but no way to get there. My uncle came next to me and flattened his now empty can onto the concrete ledge.

‘This way, you dope.’

We carried on, switched left along a turning I had not seen, and down.

‘My car,’ he said again.

‘You can’t drive,’ my mother said.

‘Fine. Let him drive.’ He passed the keys.

I went to open the driver’s door, but it was no good.

‘Chuck the keys.’ He unlocked the passenger door and got in, having to lean over to open my door.

‘Flip the seat for your mother. I want to lie back.’ I did what he said, before ungracefully getting in myself.

‘How long has the door been like that?’ I wondered aloud.

Turned out my uncle had done it deliberately by squeezing wood glue into the keyhole. He said it bought time if someone was trying to nick it.

‘Time enough to symbol crash them, right enough.’

‘What?’

‘Crush an empty can on each side of their head. On their dumb ears. Symbol, like.’

‘Oh, cymbal. You mean cymbal crash.’

‘Aye, that’s the ticket.’

He seemed relaxed now we were on the road. My mother said nothing; I headed for the motorway. The car wasn’t a total waste of metal and glass. It had a little squirt to it. I amused myself for a time pondering the best way to strip it down and how to package the parts for sale on. I splashed through the fast lane south. My uncle fell asleep, snoring gently. My mother didn’t, she just watched him out of the sides of her eyes. We continued late into the night, until fuel and my eyelids ran low. As soon as I hit the slip road, his head snapped toward me, as though he’d never been sleeping.

‘Petrol,’ I said. He grunted. In his company I could never shake the sense that he was perpetually holding me in judgement, as though he had the right. Then again, I couldn’t tell him, or my mother, about my impending divorce. We were a family who failed privately, catastrophically. Only this time, my mother thought he couldn’t carry on failing, for shame.

Of course, I ended up paying. At least my mother bought us a coffee each, while my uncle stood under a speaker in the shop, listening to the football fixtures and team news. He perturbed me with how quickly he threw back the burning black drink. My coffee burned my mouth, giving me a little flap of tissue on my hard palate to probe with my tongue through the rolling miles. I drove through, at my mother’s behest, until bleak night broke into bleaker day. The rain thrummed down. I ate some crisps for breakfast. My uncle slept on, slept it off, as I’m sure he had so many times. My mother stayed unnervingly alert. She pressed her lips together like the priest if you whisper in the chapel. She was always puritanical. She told me off for drinking too much coffee, for taking a second slice of cake, for spending money on my wheels.

Almost dead on eleven, my uncle muttered, eyes still closed: ‘Sun’s over the ja darm.’

‘Ja darm?’

‘Yes, German, isn’t it.’

I heard my mother sigh. He ignored her. Their relationship was unfathomable to me. It was my gathering suspicion that she had no genuine interest in her brother. She wanted the story to tell the ladies, a reputation in the family of bringing the errant one back into the fold. The vanity of the morally victorious.

We stayed in silence for another hour or so, my uncle’s suggestion hovering there like a speck in my eye. I saw a sign for a town I know, from doing business in car parts there. The guy had taken me for a pint after we’d agreed a supply deal. I felt it would be the kind of haunt my uncle would choose. Bloke reading the back pages at the end of the bar; that kind of thing.

We went in, and it was enough to cheer my uncle such that he bought the round. The football wasn’t even on yet. There was a group of kids sitting in a booth: the place had some remnants of its time as a gin palace. They didn’t look old enough to be there, my mother said.

‘Leave them be,’ my uncle growled.

There were six in the cabal of jealous anxious teenagers, already drinking shots. They also had pints in front of them, scummy surfaces rocking as they banged the table, drawing attention to their own boorishness – a point of pride.

My uncle eyed them. His face was inscrutable. To me, it looked like he was sizing them up as potential drinking buddies but that seemed stupid so I put it from my mind. My mother sipped a lager and lime, which loosed her tongue.

‘Eric, don’t blow this. I called Tina while you were sleeping. She’s prepared to give you a chance – she’ll at least hear you out. But you can’t show up drunk.’

If my uncle knew the former was a lie, he didn’t let on. My mother had always abided by the illusion that if you believed in something strongly enough, it had to come true; I guess she had this in common with her brother. It didn’t work for bringing dad home from the North Sea, and it probably wouldn’t work now. But still: complicated, as she would say.

Suddenly, an uproar from the booth of youths. There were yelps of disgust and phones came quickly out to take photos and videos. One of the girls couldn’t take the relentless vodka measures, and had vomited down her jacket and onto the polished wood table. The gang jeered and bayed; tears came from eyes rolling back. She lurched from the bench, knocking a half-drunk pint down. This brought snarls and opprobrium more than laughs.

‘Filthy prick, what is the matter with you?’ Another girl stood up.

I hadn’t noticed my uncle get up. He was wide and, of course, had a look of total distain for others and their thoughts. So when he stepped between the girls and pointed, the girl throwing insults sat down.

‘Finish your pint,’ he said.

To the chucker: ‘Come on love.’

He unabashedly put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the bathrooms. Unexpectedly delicate, he led her like he was coaxing a lamb. The table of teens was silent, watching. After five minutes or so they emerged. The girl was leaning on my uncle’s arm. He looked for all the world like a proud father steering his daughter down the aisle.

He brought her to sit with us, even collecting her a glass of water from the bar.

‘This is Erica – isn’t that funny,’ he chuckled. I wondered if he welcomed the saviour to a damsel in distress routine, or was enjoying being distracted from the reason for our trip. Either way, his kindly air was troubling. He chit-chatted with Erica, not that he got much from her. She was vacant company, in her state.

Eventually my mother said: ‘Let’s go. This is getting silly.’

My uncle unwillingly agreed. He deposited Erica on the street outside, telling her not to bother with her companions of earlier.

‘They aren’t your real pals if they can’t handle you when you’re out of your tree.’

‘Ok Eric,’ she said, before reeling off down the street.

~

Later, we sat outside the house, which stood one street back from the sea view. So close! It was dry, with a steely light. We were eating ice creams. Perhaps at first glance we would look like an ordinary family. My mother perched; uncle Eric and I slouched back. The ice creams were my idea. For some reason I wasn’t ready for this to conclude, or else I wasn’t convinced we could see it through.

My mother was strategizing.

‘You need to convince her, Eric. If you go all cap-in-hand, she probably won’t believe you or buy it. That’s failed before.’ She waved her hand dismissively. My uncle gave me a sidelong look – our first moment of unity.

‘But she has to believe that you are going to change and that you’ve already started. Be humble, but be yourself. I think she is ready to forgive you Eric.’

My mother was rarely happier than when giving instruction and guidance. She should get into surf instruction down on the beach here, or sandcastle building classes for cack-handed toddlers. She could correct them at every turret.

‘Ok,’ my uncle said, and opened the passenger door.

‘Break a leg,’ I said. He looked at me like I’d told him to eat his shoes.

He went up to the door and knocked. My aunt was the one who answered. We watched, but couldn’t hear, even though my mother wound down the window as though she was curb crawling. He didn’t go inside, and after a few minutes he was back in the car.

My uncle didn’t say anything, although my mother asked. He pointed forward. Obediently, I started the car and crawled away. He just pointed left and right as I drove slowly through the pastel streets. He indicated me into a parking space by an inn a couple of roads away.

He bought a round again, not that he took requests: Guinness for him and me, lager and lime for mum. He also bought a glass of white wine and set it down at the empty seat when we settled around a little table. There were old fishing nets fixed to the walls and tealights in scallop shells everywhere.

My uncle took a long pull on his pint and smiled surprisingly gently as I grimaced through a sip of mine. My mother pointed quizzically at the glass of wine. Even she didn’t want to break the brittle feeling of strange hope that had alighted over us.

My uncle looked at it too, then smiled again, this time conspiratorially.

‘Oh yeah. She’s just getting changed then she’ll join us.’ He was enjoying his moment.

Mum and me waited, as though interrupting would silence him by breaking some stream of consciousness we were half-expecting.

‘Well, it wasn’t easy to convince her,’ he said, looking pointedly at my mother.

‘… But telling her about the big win certainly helped.’