The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea Read online

  MARK HADDON

  The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea

  Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children’s books and television screenplays. He is the author of the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2004. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.

  ALSO BY MARK HADDON

  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

  To Alfie and Zack

  With thanks

  to Don Paterson

  and Sos Eltis

  Contents

  Go, Litel Bok

  A Rough Guide

  After a Beheading

  Cabin Doors to Automatic

  Green

  This Poem is Certificate 18

  Trees

  Nuns

  Rescued

  1998

  The Seventh Circle

  A Tally Stick

  The Model Village

  New Year’s Day

  Average Fool

  Bushings

  Midas

  Thunderbirds are Go

  Great White

  Rings

  Black

  The Penguin

  Days

  The River-Car

  Galatea

  Christmas Night, 1930

  Lullaby

  The Twilight Zone

  The Short Fuse

  Miaow

  Woof

  Gemini

  Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

  Dry Leaves

  Poets

  Silver Nitrate

  The Facts

  The House of the Four Winds

  Once Upon a Time

  Go, Litel Bok

  Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the jury.

  Those of my trade, we are like the badger or the mole.

  We work alone in darkness, guided by tiny

  candles which we do not share, sweating to give birth

  to replacement planets where things happen which don’t.

  And sometimes the hard jigsaw becomes a picture

  and not a car accident. More rarely we place

  our fingers adroitly on the frets or keyboard

  and multitudes plummet through the small white trapdoor

  which bears our hieroglyphs. Then we are taken up

  into the blaze and shout of the conurbations

  to make words in the air and strike the strange pose

  from the clothing catalogue. But sometimes we see

  a swallow in wintertime. And the talking horse

  and the sad girl and the village under the sea

  descend like stars into a land of long evenings

  and radically different vegetables

  and a flex is run from our hearts into the hearts

  of those who do not know the meaning of the words

  cardigan or sleet. And there is no finer pudding.

  Now I am like that cow in the nursery rhyme.

  The fire I have felt beneath your shirts. These cloisters.

  Red mullet with honey. This surprisingly large

  slab of Perspex. Your hands are on me. But this man

  is another man. The clock chimes, my pumpkin waits

  and the frog drums his gloved fingers on the dashboard.

  May the god whose thoughts are like a tent of white light

  above the laundry and the pigeons of this town

  walk always by your side. My burrow calls. Good night.

  A Rough Guide

  Be polite at the reception desk.

  Not all the knives are in the museum.

  The waitresses know that a nice boy

  is formed in the same way as a deckchair.

  Pay for the beer and send flowers.

  Introduce yourself as Richard.

  Do not refer to what somebody did

  at a particular time in the past.

  Remember, every Friday we used to go

  for a walk. I walked. You walked.

  Everything in the past is irregular.

  This steak is very good. Sit down.

  There is no wine, but there is ice cream.

  Eat slowly. I have many matches.

  After a Beheading

  When you have jumped the logging trains

  across the Hendersons and eaten

  stray dog roasted on a brazier,

  when you think that you can feel

  the rasp of a freshly laundered pillow

  on your face and hear

  the little song of halyards

  below your window at “The Limes”

  but come round to the smell of petrol

  and the sherry-hollowed faces

  of your dubious companions,

  when you want to lie down in the soiled,

  grey snow and never move again,

  you will come to a five-gabled house

  in the suburbs of a cutlery-making city

  and be embraced by a bearded man

  with the build of a former athlete

  who smokes “El Corazon” cigars.

  His wife will have perfect breasts

  and make the noise of a leopard sleeping.

  Neither of them will ask you for your name.

  You will be offered the use of a bathroom

  where the towel-glare hurts your eyes,

  the soap is labeled in Italian

  and the cream suit on the warmed rail fits with sinister precision.

  You will then be led into the dining room.

  There will be beef Wellington and firm pears

  and a jazz trio playing Monk

  on guitar and vibes.

  There will be many fingerbowls.

  Your host will say, “Eat … Drink …”

  and as your hand hangs like a hawk

  above the confusion of forks

  you will realize that this

  is where your journey starts.

  Cabin Doors to Automatic

  We take off in a lightning storm.

  The big jets kick in and we climb

  through blue explosions;

  below the fuselage, moonlight

  on the Solway Firth, the fields

  of Cumbria, our litel spot of erthe

  that with the see embracéd is.

  This is how we leave the world,

  with the heart weeping,

  and the hope that distance

  brings the solving wonder

  of one last clear view

  before that long sleep

  above the weather’s changes.

  Green

  Horace Odes 1:4

  Spring and warm winds unlock the fist of winter.

  Winches haul dry hulls down the beach.

  The ploughman and his animals

  no longer love the stable and the fire.

  The frost no longer paints the fields white.

  The moon is overhead. Cytherean Venus

  dances with her girls. The Graces

  and the spirits of the trees and rivers

  stamp the earth while flaming Vulcan

  tours the massive thunder-forges of the Cyclops.

  It’s time to decorate your oiled hair

  with green myrtle or with flowers growing

  from the soft earth. It’s time to find a shady spot

  and sacrifice a young goat to the woodland god.

  Or kill a lamb if that is what he wants.

  Death’s sickly face appears at the doors

  of shack
s and palaces. Rich Sestius,

  this short life makes a joke of long hopes.

  Pluto’s shadow hall, those ghosts

  you read about in stories, and that final night

  will soon be snapping at your heels.

  And then you won’t be throwing knuckle-bones

  to win the job of drinking-master,

  or ogling pretty Lycidas, who’ll drive men wild

  until he’s big enough for girls.

  This Poem is Certificate 18

  When you open a collection of poetry or attend a reading you need to know that the poems you choose to read or hear are suitable for the audience.

  To help you understand what a poem is like you can look at the certificate it has been given. This poem has been classified as 18. That means this poem is unsuitable for anyone younger than 18.

  A poem with an 18 certificate may contain scenes of a violent nature. Carlos de Sessa burning at the stake, for example, his hot fat bubbling like porridge. Or Erymas, stabbed in the mouth, the blade smashing clean through to the brain so that teeth, bone and blood spray from his ruptured face. The slow death of a parent, often from cancer, is particularly common.

  There may be sex, too. A man may be sucked off in a McDonald’s en route to the airport, a babysitter may masturbate on the kiln-fired tiles of her employers’ bathroom and an arsehole may be described in more detail than is necessary. The word “cunt” may be used.

  In a poem with an 18 certificate the syntax may be knottier and the meaning more opaque than in light, narrative or straightforward lyric verse. A phrase may have as many as four different interpretations, all intended for more or less simultaneous comprehension. Conversely, when the hedged sun draws into itself for self-quenching and these modalities stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith, the intention may simply be to confuse the less intelligent reader. Sometimes a line or phrase is used simply because “it sounded right.”

  A poem with an 18 certificate may be written according to occult rules which are not made available to the reader. A parallel universe may be assumed wherein the expanded inkling undergoes an allusion and, at the climax of frogging, binges in the Bermuda. Some 18-certificate poems purport to be translations of work by Finnish and Romanian poets who do not, in fact, exist. In others a lightbulb may be granted sentience.

  Like plumbers and dentists, poets are fallible, and the possibility of genuine nonsense cannot be ruled out. Unlike plumbing and dentistry, however, poetry is slow, frustrating and poorly rewarded work which fails more often than it succeeds and is therefore embarked upon largely by men and women labouring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both. As a result, many poems with an 18 certificate are written by people whose minds you may not wish to enter.

  The language of a poem with an 18 certificate may be denser and more powerful than the language you are used to dealing with. And though it makes nothing happen it may, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, ride its own melting into your soul and bring you face to face with the madness of space.

  It is an offense to read or supply a poem classified as 18 to anyone below that age.

  Poetry certificates are there to help you make the right choice.

  Trees

  They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.

  Some of them are taller than department stores,

  yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

  You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day

  and see, through the louvre window,

  a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction

  in the air that swims above the little gardens.

  Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,

  your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill

  as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

  Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,

  these are accidental things.

  We lost this game a long way back.

  Look at you. You’re reading poetry.

  Outside the spring air is thick

  with the seeds of their children.

  Nuns

  They’re out again,

  flocking on the esplanade

  like crows.

  Passing the nudist beach

  they giggle into cupped hands

  like smokers around a match.

  Some play crazy golf.

  Some buy the less exciting

  flavors of ice cream.

  Others lie in deckchairs

  and seem unnaturally comfortable

  despite the heat.

  Their ankles are

  like flashes

  of lightning.

  We come across them

  paired in bumper cars

  or spellbound by cartoons

  and Rugby League

  on televisions stacked

  in storefront windows.

  They smell of soap

  and dentists’ hands

  and rustle when they move.

  Some go native,

  as they always do,

  stung by that long view

  through the shilling telescope

  or by the soft eyes

  of the boy who rents the pedalos.

  They move into cheap lodgings

  with a single suitcase

  and experiment with fashionable clothes.

  Later, out of season,

  we will recognize them,

  frying breaded cod

  or punching ferry tickets,

  marked out

  by the chapel-silence

  which surrounds them still,

  and by the way they stoop

  to talk to children.

  They are not mourned,

  for come October,

  when the ghost train shuts down

  and the colored bulbs along the pier

  are packed away,

  their places will be filled

  by the girls we teased in school

  who yearned for love

  and dreamed of reaching up

  to take the teacher’s hand

  and being lifted from the flesh

  in which they’d never felt at home,

  or walking, as they walk now, up the harsh rake of the lanes, past burger bars and butchers,

  past the Grand Hotel,

  the Smuggler’s Haven

  and the Wall of China,

  past the car park and the campsite,

  past the Esso station

  and the padlocked school

  then through the granite arch

  and over moonlit

  geometric lawns

  into the silence

  of a clean white room

  out of the swing of the sea.

  Rescued

  Horace Odes 1:5

  Which under-muscled, over-perfumed boy

  is groping you on roses in your love-nest,

  Pyrrha? Who’s inspired you to wash and cut

  your honey-colored hair like this?

  God knows how many times he’ll curse

  the bad luck that made him love you,

  and be flabbergasted by the force tens

  blackening your little sea.

  The idiot. He drinks your sunshine down

  and thinks the wind will never change.

  Those miserable men. You dazzle them

  but no one ever ties up in your harbor.

  As for me, you can read my story

  on the temple wall: just another rescued

  sailor who has offered up his sodden boots

  to the great god of the sea.

  1998

  Come, Muse, let us sing of Velcro,

  teabags and the Tetrapak.

  For these too are works of nature,

  as deserving of our praise

  as dawn light on the Half-Dome,

  hare tracks in overnight snow

  or a fine French derailleur,

 
; and will join the astrolabe

  and toasting fork in old films

  and stand on plastic trivets in museums,

  giving off that low hum

  of the long dead.

  The Seventh Circle

  Another werewolf night, the trees spastic

  with wind and the dogs uneasy on their chains.

  Three trolls wrestle with a bloody scrap

  that will not die, the taverns roar and glitter

  on the greasy quay and the Scissorman

  chases the dragon down those little tracks

  that promise daybreak by the sea, pistachio

  cakes and minarets but curve, always,

  back to that long night in the nursery.

  The clock strikes twelve, and on the dirt road

  where the shanties thin to marsh grass and burnt cars,

  the music stops and tonight’s crocodile

  of lost children melt into the dark.

  They are ours now. You cannot touch them.

  They will see you in bad dreams.

  The smoke of October bonfires, a single

  gunshot hurling rooks into a white sky

  and you, at the French windows, ogling

  the gardener’s boy while your niece makes a pig’s ear

  of a Chopin Polonaise and the servants

  bitch about you in the scullery.

  But you will see them from the evening train,

  raging in burned-out lots and under bridges.

  You will see them in the corridors

  of hospitals. You will see them hover

  on the dark that pools in hotel rooms

  and lying under blankets on the tarmac of the other carriageway, the broken glass

  like snow and the lights flashing

  like a black Christmas. You will see them

  standing at your shoulder in the mirror.