From the Neanderthal Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Against

  Sketch

  Tending the Stove

  Errata

  The Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor

  Big Wheel

  Rufus!

  Twitchers

  New Arrival

  Fuck the Bypass

  Wild Camping in Sweden

  Ghosts

  Pickings

  Eva

  Another Bad Year

  King Cnut

  Hot-Air Balloons from Marsh Benham

  Fossil

  Anniversary

  Playground Accident

  Lichen

  Balkan Tune

  Windows

  Footprints

  On the Beach

  The Execution

  The Exchange

  Look

  From the Neanderthal

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written eight others – most recently The Standing Pool – two collections of stories and five books of poetry. He lives in France with his wife and family.

  ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  FICTION

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  FROM THE

  NEANDERTHAL

  Adam Thorpe

  Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by the laws we know about things. Every day they’re spoken of and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, their secret converting into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. What’s alien peeps at us from the shadows.

  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude

  (translated by Richard Zenith)

  AGAINST

  for Josh

  Against the bolts and welder’s bloom of rhetoric

  chamfer the waggon, scoop and shave the grain

  to serviceable lightness, take the rein.

  Against the packs of fighters shocking screes to fall

  gaze on the heron, watch the wings wield their long

  elegance over the water, echo the call.

  Against the precipitate action of the angry father

  loosen the mother, wait for the snow, hold

  in a gloved finger his gloved hand, walk the lane.

  SKETCH

  for John Fuller

  I sketched my grandmother walking under the beech trees

  where Grim’s Dyke’s little more than a hint of humps,

  nettles in a shallow slump under a tangle of wire and posts.

  Now she’s gone. The sketch shows only a few lines of her,

  but somehow it caught the way she walked in age,

  and I do recall (I was nineteen) being amazed at the way it did.

  The trees have not gone. The hint of humps, the suggestion

  that here men constructed something bold and enormous for reasons

  few are sure of, has not gone. The nettles are the inheritors

  of the shallow slump of their forefathers my pencil suggested.

  Everything is the same, one can say, except for the presence

  of my grandmother, tiny in the picture, walking slowly away

  and my amazed glance before I rose and called after her,

  amazed that I could have caught her with a pencil’s flicker –

  knowing already that it would stay long after she was gone

  as now she was gone into the beech trees’ shade as if forever.

  TENDING THE STOVE

  NOVEMBER

  The bole’s on the block:

  its fell already old, the bark puffs

  at the first stroke of the saw

  but the heart’s harder: if time’s

  embodied anywhere

  it’s in this balking of a quick traverse –

  each decade’s felloe beaten only

  by a lowered head, the chafe of now.

  Sweaty, red-faced, I’ll cut a day’s worth,

  a creamy pyramid of Os

  with their exact configurations:

  rolled-up maps the flames can scrabble at

  or pore over, exultant

  like us with our several plans.

  DECEMBER

  We scour the river bank for flotsam,

  poles the floods tore free of their leaves –

  heroically long, dry from abandonment.

  Criss-crossed, almost weaved, most caught

  by a living trunk that rammed them

  into stillness, we thought at first

  they were nests – as if the wild boars

  had bristled wings, had brought each bole

  under massive, retroussé snouts, and fussed.

  Yanked free and shouldered, our faggots

  bounce behind us, shafts of chronology

  so dense we feel a little queasy

  as we reach the car. I’ve read

  how most of the mornings of the world

  are spent this way, but stumbled

  ten miles for the twisted bough.

  We lie, later, and talk by the heat

  we feel we’ve earned in tart shoulders …

  we glow. My life is a flicking of switches,

  I think, as the lathering turbines roll.

  JANUARY

  Hours are devoted: the iron crown

  perpetually up, ash snowing

  the wrought name as I huff… Godin.

  God in heat through a hard winter.

  The knuckle-rapping flames would take

  truck-loads, whole armies of timber

  if we had it; toughs of holm oak,

  brawny chestnuts scourged of sap,

  the fizzling savagery of Hell

  become the thrum of warmth we crouch to,

  hands outspread. How millennial old

  this altar, nurtured into embers

  so high by evening we overheat …

  like a late, imperial dynasty

  dreaming in myth, it shuffles

  its purple solely into ash, replete

  with memories of the split carton’s

  ur-flame; the crackle of vine-butt; the sudden

  resinous densities of laurel.

  FEBRUARY

  As Basra is pounded to dust, I puff

  old ash to glow

  or tip the tray free, watching

  the cloud it makes drift palely

  into nothing, like history.

  Abu Nawas, Hasan al-Basri –

  old mystics fogeyish

  as finger-bowls to the radio’s

  immediacies, old vowels

  of the Abbasids, old blown-on ash

  glowing in a man’s eyes

  short on humanity …

  How fine this oyster-coloured

  dust, this tossed smoke

  floating importantly past the still trees.

  ERRATA

  No sooner had we come

  than already the misfeasances of history

  recalled in the bullet-hole

  some great-aunt could once locate

  where the last priest to inhabit here

  slumped, un catholique,

  and the line high on the creepered mill

  recording the flood

  that took the miller’s wife

  and left him ruined, still

  sued by the landlord
>
  for lapse of rent.

  I finger our stone wall, searching

  as ever for resonance,

  time’s contusions, chips

  off the old block. The washed-

  up body of the miller’s wife

  is easy to imagine

  now the rains have swollen

  the river to a roar,

  but the rest is harder: how

  the harried widower fared, or what

  purpose the shot priest served,

  bundled by our step.

  Now the times are quieter, rosy

  with expectation, le pittoresque.

  The shush of the D-road

  mingles with the weir: each day

  we speed past the cardboard plaque

  on the dented roadside tree,

  limply wreathed: IL AURAIT

  EU 21 ANS

  AUJOURD’HUI –

  an execration increasingly faint,

  a fact that each day makes

  increasingly wrong.

  THE NINE LADIES ON STANTON MOOR

  We know you’ve got a thing about us,

  scuffing the earth at our feet,

  giving us a voice. Like this.

  We know about the groans we’ve heard,

  the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny.

  Bellies keep pressing us; we decline.

  Thunder on the moor and your effeteness

  assured, we think of us as crown

  whetted on the storm, not bald queans.

  We know about the influx of coach parties;

  the way their crisp-packet ordinariness

  ruffles you, the way they laugh as they count us.

  We have tumbled from the sky’s favour.

  We know we are emblazoned by tussocks,

  heather, hawthorn. We have erred, somehow.

  Stars! We look up to them. Clear nights

  remind us of their massive dignities;

  we know what we have known, but forgotten.

  One of us is missing. We know this.

  Buffed by the flanks of cows, she swings

  a gate. We hear her, complaining, often.

  Adrift on moorland, we are tethered.

  Far off on a skyline, we have caught you.

  We dance what we know; you are frozen.

  Cromlechs rise routinely from mists:

  we are granite lumps. We know

  how ugly we are, and once how lovely.

  BIG WHEEL

  I feinted with my vertigo and curved

  to early middle age, I’d say; anyway

  the top. There we were stopped and began to sway.

  For my idiot daring it was all I deserved.

  The remarkable vista of the environs of Gütersloh,

  the backs of birds actually in flight, the shrubbery

  of trees and the pinhead people made me rubbery

  in the legs, of course, but what was worse was the slow

  remorseless haul on my brain, or maybe my body

  for the earth far below was wide and craving

  my entry at whatever price. The kids were waving

  and I started to wail, I’m afraid. I clung to the rod

  and shut my eyes. You had to hold me tight.

  In high air there was no bolt-hole from whatever

  sirens were singing me down … as if I could sever

  myself from this swaying life without a fight.

  RUFUS!

  for Emma

  Gloominess of oak and Tirel, gut-twanged treason

  getting William – every passing forest’s

  running commentary for my sister’s obsession.

  Rufus! Tell me about Rufus! The Simca droned

  and out it came again: from blundering boar

  to wail of horn; the Fact that the King was alone.

  Thwack! My sister in the back seat, covering her ears,

  and me arched next to her, fisting my spine:

  what makes most history something to be feared

  is simply thwacks and aaaaghs, to a kid. I see us

  speeding through the Sixties like a film,

  the Simca’s windscreen scrolling up the trees.

  A legend gets it in the back from a dream.

  History blunders into bracken to retrieve.

  If I timed it right, I could make her scream.

  TWITCHERS

  For every booming bittern there are ten,

  for every cliff-stacked gannet mass

  there is at least one with his clingfilmed

  lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda.

  This is surety of sorts. That the index finger

  will go on twitching till the loch

  gives up its greylag, the moor its merlin,

  that even the chough has its hangers-on

  grim-jawed on outcrops where the breakers sting

  assures Him that all the aeons’ messy fuss

  holds some of them in thrall, despite the mockery.

  When the Trumpets sound, drowning the guillemots,

  when the souls rise like a billion fulmars

  discarding behind them the stink of cerements,

  when even the dotterel has shrilled its last

  over the wrathful tussocks of Beinn Bhreac Mhor

  He’ll be there with his binoculars and notebook

  spotting them: the Chosen, the ones who bothered,

  the twits who noted His miraculous exactitude

  all day in everything He could throw at them.

  NEW ARRIVAL

  for Miranda, much later

  The announcements mangle the names

  of nineteenth-century villages:

  Streatham, Norwood, Bermondsey.

  The rest drowned in the vowels of the fast one to Brighton.

  The platform indicator clicks to 6.

  It’s made by Solari and C. Udine,

  Italy. Boredom yields such things,

  presses them on you like a sales trick.

  I think of Tarkovsky, the planet’s brain

  in Solaris like a broiling ocean.

  They’re sealing the roof in a fierce stink

  of fibre-glass: there are so many jobs,

  so many rules. We live in a world

  of ladders and paint-splashed footstools.

  Here it comes – always the one

  with a friendlier look (if still aloof), the dummy

  of the driver tiny in one of its eyes.

  A schoolgirl drops her files, pushing

  onto the carriage before me; her papers

  wheel into a cogged underworld of grease.

  The doors clam up, bad-tempered as ever;

  pistol-shots to have us shake.

  Humans make so much noise of the world.

  It comforts us, I think. Death’s to be deaf

  and on one’s own. Settled among litter,

  I remember Cousin Ruth, my age;

  at five, on a journey, she slapped some seats

  like these, full of BR dust and something

  strange that turned her blind and simple.

  The guards are stranded for life between

  thirty and fifty, sidle past

  in cocked hats, condemned to being this cocky

  or miserable, one with such long hair

  his uniform is more an outfit.

  Maybe they dreamt of being this,

  as boys: whistling a real train into gear.

  The platform removes itself discreetly

  like a ship, along with its passengers,

  or like a country with its population

  staring as if curious, without compassion;

  why does everyone look as though

  they know what they are doing, as if

  they have never not been here? The river

  beyond the bolted trellis-work of bridge

  is so wide we stop on it

  for breath. The woman opposite

  watches me read. My harmless book

&n
bsp; becomes embarrassing, opening its legs of pages.

  Her benign smile struggles against

  the rapid blink of eyelids. Today

  my wife’s new niece had hers ungummed,

  their two pale leaves now open to infection:

  this is what life is. Duress

  begins with the light, the looming faces.

  We’re really all too delicate for this,

  this life, these jerks of some machine, this air.

  At Charing Cross the metal turnstile

  tries to keep time with a cellist’s Bach.

  It doesn’t, quite, and the effect is brutal.

  Think of all the thighs its bar has pressed.

  Toughen up. London yanks

  us out and in like a clumsy midwife

  and I make for the museums, the bookshops –

  those cots where I can suck my thumb and dream.

  FUCK THE BYPASS

  Cycling to the theatre on the ‘other side’,

  I pass between the high wire fences

  and feel the chicken. This is where the mammoth

  project strides, like a pause in language,

  a gasp between the murmurs of woods.

  There are a thousand, ten thousand guards

  in Pinkerton surcoats, helmets carnation-bright.

  They laugh as I shout, scattered up the ridge

  like a countermanded army, still confused.

  Or flowers swelling where the ogre slew.

  Each little lane demands a massive bridge

  and likewise the winding Lambourn’s stream –

  where I tick now under a clear sky

  will be thundered gloom too soon for this moment

  to be more than dream, or a war’s false lull.

  The hedgerows return like cool pillows

  discovered after nightmare, and I breathe again.

  Yesterday’s battle’s caught its sleeve;

  lying in the ditch before the old stone humpback

  into Bagnor, the plastic hull of a duffed-up helmet’s

  scrawled all over in black felt-tip.

  Curses that might or might not serve,

  strangled war-cries, the head of the enemy

  lopped and kicked and left to rot.

  Keep it as souvenir of a strange time.

  WILD CAMPING IN SWEDEN

  Our trouble at first was the pegs

  our mallet got emphatically in

  to the tufty pelt of needles;

  they kept emerging. As if distrusted.

  The lake bred plops of frogs