Spurious

Mid Mission

Can you alter the past?, the poet says. Sometimes, he would like to alter it, the past. He's frightened of the future, he says. He doesn't understand the present. But the past, now, the past ...

It's growing in his memory, he says. It's coming closer to him, as though it were asking for something. Coming closer, nervously forward, like an animal that didn't quite trust him, but that wanted, still, to trust him.

For a long time, as he was getting iller, but before he moved into sheltered accommodation, he thought he would meet Ann by chance at the cafe, or on the streets. He thought he might see her outside the secondhand bookshop she liked to visit, or buying something at the Italian deli.

He anticipated running into her, smiling, and seeing her smile in turn. - 'So, how are you?' And it would take off as they left it, their not-quite-friendship, their never-yet-a-relationship. Wouldn't it be through the coincidence of a meeting that it might begin again?

They might decide to walk. She would leave her new book or her pot of pesto in the front seat of her car, and they'd set out again: that's what he imagined. We'd be off, talking, and conversation would be ease itself; they'd let their speech alight upon this, upon that. It hop about, their conversation, as bright and agile as a robin.

He wanted to leave them to chance, their encounters. He didn't want to arrange a meeting with her. He didn't want to phone or to text. Ann wasn't to feel acted upon, invaded.

He'd called her once, he say. It was a terrible mistake. Once, only once, and she sounded distant. He'd interrupted one of her activities with his phonecall, his dreadful phonecall. He saw it in his mind's eye: she'd begun some business of DIY, and there it was, her ringing phone. She pulled the phone from her pocket, spoke. 'Hello?' And it was him, just him, and what had he to say? Who was he to summon her from her tasks?

He liked her independence, and the sense of the separateness of her life from his. He liked the idea of meeting her when she was midway through some task or another. With a bag of shopping, for example, a tip of baguette poking out of her bag. She was busy, she had things on, but there she was. And there he was, who was likewise busy, likewise out on his errand, before her. A coincidence: 'how's it going?', 'fine, fine ...' Light words. Frothing words that never settled, like a rushing stream. "I've been shopping ...": those words like rapids, quick with light. Words that caught the light and flashed it back.

He always delighted in ordinary speech, the poet said. In exchanging politenesses. Of asking how the other person was, and replying, 'fine, thanks', when asked. What did it matter what was said, or who was saying it? Speech like an impersonal babble, a brook bubbling along, as though the aim was to help speech along without detaining it. To let a spurt of water - a word, a phrase - glint with light.

Better still, he said, was to be party to a conversation, on the verge of it, listening to the voices of others rise and fall. To hear gossip about people he didn't know. To hear rumours about unfamiliar events.

For a moment, he had the fantasy of meeting someone when he was with Ann: a friend of hers, perhaps. Of meeting the friend, and listening to Ann and her talk for a few minutes. Enjoying the flashing of their conversation, a river in sunlight.

Would she introduce him, Ann? Would she feel the need to introduce him, to place him for her friend? In his mind, she said nothing. He was there, at the conversation's edge, but remained unintroduced, part of things, but at the edge of them. And when the conversation stopped? When Ann walked away? He would walk with her. He, the poet says, would walk with her.

But Ann wasn't with him. Ann was nowhere.

The field of chance was the afternoon, the open afternoon. That's where he rolled himself like a die in the afternoon, hoping that she, another die, would be rolled in his direction. Would they meet, he and Ann? Would she appear because it was what he wanted? He asked God for it to happen. - 'Make it happen', he prayed inwardly. But he didn't believe in God, not really. But if he did see her? He'd thank God, he says. We need to invent God sometimes to have someone to thank, the poet says. Thank you, God: that's what he'd say.

But he didn't want Ann to search him out. To call him, for example. To knock on his door. He never liked visitors, he says. Even now, he doesn't like them. Especially now, with his visiting Dane and his dictaphone!

When he is alone, he likes to be no one at all, the poet says. Likes not to belong to himself. That's what he means by solitude, he says. That's how he enjoys it. Lightness, diffuseness. Being committed to nothing, holding no opinion. Paying attention to neither this nor that.

Yes, that was what he wanted when he was alone, indoors, in his flat. But outdoors? When he was outside? He used to love the street, he says. Loved walking down it, with the sense that anything might happen.

The street is open to all, the poet says, and to every kind of encounter. And the cafe, which spilled out onto the street? The meeting place above all meeting places, the poet says. That place set aside for meeting, for allowing meetings.

Was it a coincidence that they used to gather, people he knew, people he half-knew, at four o'clock in the afternoon? Four o'clock: that was the time; it wasn't pre-arranged. Four o'clock, most of the way through the day. You could have got things done. Could have a little sense of accomplishment. And now it was the time to pause and take the air. Now to stand aside from the street, although you were still a part of it, the street, but set back from it. You could rest in an inlet of the street, some place still part of its streaming, but sheltered, restful.

That's where he used to meet her, Ann. That's where they used to meet, by chance, always by chance. She would appear, and he'd be there already, sitting with others, or sitting alone. Or she would be sitting there, talking to others, and moving her bag from the chair for him to sit down.

They used to meet. And before they met - what bliss! - the anticipation of meeting. He had rolled himself across the afternoon like a die. And she, too, had rolled herself. Two sixes: they'd won. They'd both won. Everything led them to one another. Their winding paths wound no longer.

Fate: to affirm what had arrived to each of them by chance. To set off on their adventure. To walk out into the day, through the old cemetry and past the old village green. To the meadows and the Ees. To the river, and Jackson's Boat.

But she wasn't there. Days passed, and she never appeared; her car never pulled up. She never crystallised from the day, arriving from her tasks, her projects. He was at the cafe as he always was. He arrived there. He sat, with others or alone. But Ann?

He phoned her once, in the early days of her absence. She sounded busy. Her hands were full, she said. - 'I'll call you back later'. He said he was at the cafe. She said she might come later if she had time. - 'I've got a lot of things on'. He felt he breached something, some code, by phoning her. That he'd disturbed something, the still surface of their association. He should have been truer to it, that limpid surface. Nothing should be forced: why hadn't he understood that?

The afternoons passed. He walked; he didn't see her. Best of all, he thought, was to bump into Ann by chance. To bump into Ann, blinking and surprised, mid-mission. Midway through one of her missions. She'd tell him what she was doing. Where she was going. What she had bought.

She'd open a bag. Food from the deli: pasta, pesto ... or a blind from the hardware shop. Or a box of screws and picture hooks. He'd meet her on route, on the way to something, or coming back from there. Heading back to her car. About to go off, to drive off. To launch away from the kerb like a riverboat ... 'Great to see you'.

It would have been more perfect still if she had failed to see him, he says. That she was about to walk pass him, having failed to see him. He would hail her, the poet says. He would call her name: 'Ann!' Ann, exclamation mark. And she would stop, surprised. He would have seen her default face, her everyday face, her face for the streets, her face for her missions (she was always very busy, before her illness, Ann). He would have caught it out, there on the street, the most public space of all.

Or better still, he would have liked her not to recognise him at all, so he had to remind her who he was, the poet says. - 'I'm ----', he would say, 'remember me?' And she would stop and look at him, her eyes narrowing, sizing him up. - 'We used to meet at the cafe', he would say. And she still wouldn't be sure who he was, not really. He finds that idea very moving. He pictures a lake, perfectly still in the twilight. A lake beneath the sky, and holding its image. A lake reflecting nothing, nothing in particular.

Or, still better, he would have to remind her who he was, but she wouldn't remember. She would deny all knowledge of him, even as, somehow, she was sure she him from somewhere. Who was he? Who was he, now, to Ann? No one in particular. Anyone; everyone. And she would go off and meet someone else. Someone she knew, the poet says. And he imagines a planet of water, perfectly still. An ocean planet, orbiting some remote star, turning in stillness.

But he never met her, Ann, on the street. Never saw her driving by in her Saab. And soon, he wouldn't walk those streets himself in the long afternoons.

The Diagonal Path

'The path had been beaten diagonally across the meadow', the poet says. 'It was made of beaten down grass in the tall, flowering grass of the field. Who was the first to stamp it down? Who chose to stamp this path so assertively through the field? No matter. It was there; it seemed to us to have always been there, and by walking it again, we'll bear it down again. We made the path; we'll remake it.

'Ann and I. Ann and I on one of our walks, heading out to the river across the diagonal path. How was it that our meetings demanded we move out and away from the others, from the cafe where we met and where the others gathered? Why did we want to go away, and together, two bodies walking in the afternoon?

'We'd been singled out. Chosen. By each other? By the afternoon. By the Ees and the meadows. By Jackson's Boat. Back there, in the cafe, we were full of laughter, jokes. We were funny. We were funny together - other people told us that. But when we outside, away from everyone? When we walked along the diagonal path? A kind of stillness, first of all. A solemnity, as though we were being attuned to something. As though we had to drop to find the level of the afternoon. The grasshopper's noise. The humid warmth.

'It was still. It was always still when we met, Ann had said. There's never any wind, she said. And it was true - there was a kind of gap in the weather. As though it was looking for itself. The thick clouds. The heavy air. As though it was gathering itself up for something, something that hadn't happened'.

'And in a sense, it never happened. Nothing happened', the poet says. I've been asking him to remember. Asking him questions about his past. But he hasn't got any stories, not really, the poet says. He was ill, unemployed ... That's how all his non-stories begin, he says: "I was ill, unemployed ...", as if to void all incident from them in advance. Expect nothing, the poet wants to warn me when he begins that way, he says. Nothing's going to happen.

The diagonal path. The river. Jackson's Boat. How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? What happened then, the poet says, what failed to happen, turned its face away from him, from his life. It was looking elsewhere. Does he want to tell his story, to bring it to account, or to look off where it is looking, his story; to look off with it, and see what was revealed? Too look at its look? To look away from him, his life, his story, but to do so within his life, his narrative?

If he remembers it all now - the path, the river - it is not to lose himself in the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of that distance which separates him from the past, diffusing and blurring particular events, and seeming to insinuate itself into those events, even as it seems to suspend still further the sense that anything was completed.

The diagonal path, the poet says. Beating it down, he says, as it had already been beaten down. What was she telling him, Ann? Something about telepathy. Her theories of mind reading. Of mind feeling, he says. - "I can feel what other people feel", she said. About her illness. She was really unwell, she said. About his supposed illness which she said could discern. - "It takes one to know one", she said. About the others in the cafe. - "They think they know me, but they don't".

She liked to use his name, the poet noticed. She liked to say it, he thought. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe: one syllable. "Always liked": what tense is that? Completed action in the past. As though a past event could be completed, and broken from the present. But it seems, for him, not to have been completed. She's still saying his name, he says. Breathing it. One syllable.

Sometimes he dreams his life is already over, the poet says, and he is living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which he has been before. Is there a way of watching your traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day, he will arrive at the point where he is not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, he, too, will disappear.

What were they talking about, he and Ann? About ESP. About dreams, and the power of dreaming. About her job and her business partner, who was half in love with her. He felt the delight of letting their words go and letting them float into the air. He felt the delight of smiling, of a kind of smiling irony, by which what they said was lightened and made playful.

She liked to play by speech. Liked for it to float, lightened. To say nothing in particular. To converse as a dreamer dreams. About this thing, then that in swerves and darts. - "You give good conversation", she said. A strange phrase. Later, she would say, "You give good phone". It was vaguely sexual, he thought. "You give good head".

You can't step into the same afternoon twice. Or even once, the poet says, thinking of Cratylus. He wasn't the same after that. His life had changed. The afternoon - that one, and the others, although perhaps there was only one, the same afternoon happening over and over again - had become a kind of brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky: the backdrop of his life, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned nevertheless, discreetly, in stillness, gathering without resolving itself, on the perpetual brink of its own happening.

When did she say it? When did he walk into her trap? - "Can you read minds?", he'd asked her. - "I know what you're thinking", she said. - "What?' - "You're thinking how pretty I am". And there it was: how pretty she was.

How indecent it seemed: that sentiment. How personal. Before, they'd been speaking of other things, faraway things. He was at ease. It was as easy as falling, pure relaxation. They had been falling through the afternoon as through the sky.

And now? She'd turned him. She'd come into the field of his gaze, forced herself there. He was to look at her. It was a kind of reckoning. And what did he do, who was walking beside her? Did he stop walking? Stop her with a touch? Turn and face her? Kiss her? Ah, but what did he know of any of that?

He was falling alone now. Falling faster and faster, and into a blackness beyond the stars. He felt panicked, queasy. He could feel the heaviness of what he had eaten for lunch. He'd eaten too much. Anything he had eaten would have been too much.

He was at the brink. He'd been called to account. Here he was - here, in the sultry afternoon. Here - but where was he, and what did she want from him? Sometimes, you see things too closely, from too close up. There's no distance between you and what you see. He saw her. How could he not? He turned his head, looked. Pretty. Was she pretty? My God, what did all this mean?

He kept his silence, the poet says. That makes it sound dignified. But it wasn't dignified. They walked, Ann and he, Jackson's Boat to their right, on the other side of the river. They walked. Hadn't he been waiting to be included in life? To live? And wasn't it being offered to him now: a chance to live? Life itself was very close. He should reach over and touch her. Reach - and touch.

He was on the tip of the wave-crest as it was about to break. And it was breaking. He was about to lose the moment - he lost it; the wave broke. Foam and splashing. A kind of roaring in his ears. He felt ill, quite ill. That's what he said to her: "I feel terrible". I feel terrible: the worst thing he could say.

He broke the spell. He tore the afternoon in two. His life was falling back again into time without event. Nihilism: nothing meant anything. Nothing kept its form. Dispersal - did it happen then, as they walked through the Ees? Were they blown away, apart from one another, as they walked along the council estate to the road?

It was no longer still. There was a low wind. Pollen in the air. His eyes itched. We were going back. Back to the cafe, back to her car. Oh God. A tight feeling across his chest, like a stroke. Like an imaginary stroke. Oh God. That's what Ghandi said when he was assassinated. Oh God. Oh God.

Back to the cafe and the others. Back to the others, who knew something was going on. But nothing's going on, he would want to say to them. Nothing's going to happen.

ESP

'Ill, unemployed. Unemployed and ill. The Ees. Walking in the Meadows, the grass flowering ... Walking up past Jackson's Boat towards Didsbury. Was this really the Mersey, which flowed into the great estuary on which Liverpool (pretty much) was built?'

What does he remember? What stands out? That time, more than the others, is indistinct for him. As though there was something about it that memory could not cross, not all the way. That, like the birds who set out to fly across the Dead Sea and drop from the sky with exhaustion, there was something not to be reached, that remained there, fuzzy and indistinct, a background that could not become a foreground, and which could only be seen from the corner of your eye.

And even then, it seemed to not to want to be seen. To hide from sight, if only (in my imagination) to turn its eyes on you; to see you before you could see it. - 'It was as though it had already seen me, already known me, that what I sought to remember was the effect of its greater power of memory. As if my whole life, everything I had lived, were but an episode it was recounting to itself. A way it would know itself, discover itself, and perhaps come back to itself, for it was always coming back thus, sending out arcs of lives like the flares that rise and arc across the body of the sun.

'Who was I? Who had I ever been? My life had been an echo of something else. Mine, what was mine, was only a way for something else to possess itself. I felt as though I were being turned inside out like a glove. My memories were not mine; my life was not mine. Everything that belonged to me did so only as a kind of haze produced on the surface of a greater body. I was mist. I was a cloud of midges above the water. No: we were like a mist, Ann and I; we were like a cloud of midges above the water.

*

'Read the quotation on the post-it note there', the poet says. 'No, not that one - above it. Read it out'.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

'Virginia Woolf', he says. 'And it's true not only of memory. Does his life make sense to him only now?', he wonders. 'The opposite, the very opposite', he says. 'It shouldn't make sense. It should be released from sense, or what we think of as sense', the poet says. 'From linearity. From order. There's nothing worse than the story! Nothing more imprisoning!

'Storytellers are like drunks', the poet says. 'The worst kind of drunks, rambling and belligerent, convinced they have something important to say. But there is another kind of drunk who knows nothing is important. The sovereign drunk who will say anything and nothing, who will speak just to let words bob like a beachball on a seal's snout. To make of speech a toy, and of speech pure play. To say words simply because they are words.

'So what story will he tell?', the poet says. 'The same story, over and again', he says. 'The same, which is to say, the non-story, the impossibility of stories. Look at you, with your dictaphone, waiting for stories! Waiting for wisdom. Well he has no stories, no real stories, and no wisdom, not what a Dane would regard as wisdom.

'The Mersey, that was the river. The young Mersey, because it was no more than ten feet wide. It was modest, almost anonymous. You wouldn't have thought to ask its name. It didn't want to be remembered. But the Mersey it was, and there we were, on its banks.

'How many walks did we take, Ann and I? A handful? Just one? Or perhaps they didn't walk at all, perhaps this is a fake memory, cryptomnesia, as they call it'. But it's real enough, this memory, he assures me of that. What were they talking about? Ann was telling an anecdote, the poet says.

'It was the end of a summer's day, Ann said. She and her friend were sitting beneath a tree. A game, even though they were weary. One of them had flash cards, and the other - was it Ann? - was to guess the shapes on those flashcards without seeing them. Wearily receptive, as the light failed, and Ann, the guesser (if it was Ann), guessed right almost every time.

'"That's what you couldn't repeat under test conditions", Ann said. "It's why they can't prove the existence of ESP". Ann was a great believer in ESP, the poet says. - "Really, we know all each other's thoughts", she said. "We know, but we don't want to know". What am I thinking, then?, I asked her, falling happily into the trap. - "About how pretty I am", said Ann, smiling'. How pretty she was! And there it was. She wanted something from him. Something was to begin, but who was he to begin it?

His tendency, he's well aware, is to narrate his life as though he was always acted upon, never acting. - 'As though I never showed any initiative, and what happened did so almost despite me'. So what did happen then, on the banks of the Mersey, just up from Jackson's Boat? What did he do?

'Nothing', he says. 'Or nothing that she might have wanted'. He didn't take her in his arms, as you are supposed to. He didn't turn and kiss her full on the mouth. He didn't let his hand drift out and touch hers, and then clasp hers. They walked along. He was awkward. He'd got in his own way. He was getting in his own way.

Oh to stand aside, completely aside! To let another come forward in his place, living his life, taking it over! He wanted to delegate his life to another. Someone else should be living for him. But there he was, living, or doing something like living. No kisses, then. No taking her in his arms. He was the one being acted upon, not her. He was the one yielding, but to what? Oh God, oh God.

What excuse did he have for his inaction? What alibi? Did he really want to be left alone, unromanced, unromancing? Was he really to sit on the sidelines of life? I'll sit this one out: wasn't that what he'd said, so far, of his life? And he was sitting it out, this one life, this only life he had. But what of it?, he thought to himself defiantly. I stumble over myself; I get in my own way. And so what?, he thought. I am my own obstacle. And why shouldn't he be?, he thought, suddenly fierce.

'Nothing happened, Dane', the poet says. 'Do you see? Do you like my story?' As a Dane, I would have kissed her, he knows that. A big, strapping Dane, all blonde and blue eyed. All poetic! - 'I would have taken her to my arms and held her', he says. 'You Danes are all decision, he says. All decision and straightforwardness!

'It's as though you were a young nation, though he knows Denmark is quite ancient, with its Vikings and so on. As though you were Australian, or something, very young, full of life and confidence and white teeth!' But he was no Australian, he says, and no Dane, do I see? Can I understand?

He was passive, dreadfully passive. Mars was not in his birthchart, he says. He was a Pisces, dreadfully Piscean. Too old to act! Too tired, as though he'd lived a thousand times. Hasn't he felt, sometimes, as though thousands of lives had trailed before him. That his life was one of the last times his soul would be born on earth?

It was so attenuated, his soul. So blanched. It wasn't enlightenment that he had to achieve to escape the wheel of rebirth, but a kind of perfect attenuation. A perfect stretching out of the soul ...

Sometimes he wished he was old, really old. That he could have had done with it, all the business of life. In India - old India - you can become an ascetic only after you've lived as a householder. You must have married and had children before you can leave the world behind. But there were exceptional cases in which asceticism was permitted.

Didn't Sankara, for example, forgo marriage, and leave his parents' care as a wandering sanyasin? He would have wandered thus in his imagination, the poet says. He was ready to give the world up before he had grown to know it. And he's ready still, he says. Do I suppose he's ever lived, really lived?, he asks me. Do I think he know what it means to live?

White Light

'Illness', the poet says. 'Unemployment. Each hollowed out day was exactly the same. Each day ... It was a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. Within what labyrinth was I lost? The great plane of carpeted floors spreading from room to room ...

'Peace: my neighbours quiet. How far into their illnesses had they gone? The agoraphobe, who, when it was dark and the sky felt less distant, would take an ancient, half-blind collie to the meadows. The manic-depressive who, when she was 'up', would bring men home from nightclubs and make great mad plans with them about their future lives. - "We're trying for a baby", she said of one, who she had met three days ago. Trying for a baby ... Until the new lover disappeared, like all the others. Until the depression came and she sank back under, moving greyly beneath at its surface like a body under ice. We were falling, each of us. But my neighbours were quiet then, the poet says. Not like now. Not with these students ...'

His curtains were drawn. No light. He didn't want to see the sunlight through the filthy windows. Didn't want to see the dust motes drifting through the air. Time was vast enough - there was already too much time. Too much light, on top of that ...

'You have to surround your living space with darkness. You have to shroud yourself'. He still does that, the poet says. That's why he lives half-underground. And live carefully, meagrely, without venturing into the open waters. So he reads in his armchair, the desklamp by his side. He reads there, at the bottom of the world, in his pit, surrounded by four walls and a curtained window.

He'd learned it then, those skills, those survival skills. The indecency of light, he says. The white light that sees nothing, but that sees. Blindness watches. Blindness sees. And there are no secrets left; nothing hidden. What's your excuse?, asks the open sky, like God. What are you going to do with your life?, that's what it asks.

In those moments, the sky feels very close - vast and wide and close. White light. It's the day itself that interrogates you. Light in your face: the whole sky interrogates you. And what answer can you give? The question turns inside you like a whirlwind. It's hollowing you out; you're an empty vessel. Hollow, hollow like a clay pot.

'We need darkness and silence', the poet says. 'We need to be left alone'. That was the worse thing about his illness, he said. It left you prone. It beached you. Lying down, you could be horribly exposed.

But then, too, sometimes he thought of his illness as being terribly light. Buoyant, even. It wasn't quite his, his illness, that's how it felt. An illness no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. As though your innards were filled with light. As though the white sky was there too, where you once had organs. White light like the maggots which writhe below rotten logs.

'It's why people start drinking', the poet says. 'The day drives them mad. The pale, seeming sourceless light of a cloudy day'. Is that what the alcoholics saw, whom he used to pass at the end of his street? They drank under clouds. Drank as soon as the morning lifted itself from the night. With dawn, their first drink. And they drank their way to dusk. - 'The alcoholic lives in the eternal day', the poet says. 'In eternal light'.

For a while, he drank, the poet says, but he had no stomach for it. Sweet, stale beer in abandoned cans on his floor. Stale lager, bought cheaply - an obscure brand from a German supermarket. Others, elsewhere, would be drinking Aldi lager, he thought. Hungarians. Albanians. Old Europeans. They would understand him over there, he thought. They knew about light, bland and shadowless. It was the same white light above their rust belts and zones of radioactivity.

He sipped his cans of sweet beer, curtains drawn, TV turned on with the sound down. White light flowered through him, he imagined. Light passed through his permeable body. Nothing happened, he said. Nothing was happening, least of all his life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? Can the Dane imagine it?

'Nothing - thickening', the poet says. 'Nothing, as though it had its own substance its own body, seeking itself inside you. Absence become presence, white light like fog drifting through you, light displaced from itself like a ghost. Can you imagine, Dane, wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits?'

Summer returned, the poet says. So it had been a full year! Summer. He opened the small window to let in the air, he says. He saw and pulled back from the hazy sky. He had had enough of the sky. He watched the traffic gather and disperse on the road. He saw the blank faces of the houses, opposite.

Was he recovering? He wondered. He was up - awake. He was at his window, vertical, and looking out of window. Wasn't that a great deal? But I wouldn't understand any of this, the poet says. Danes are vertical people! A striding-about people! You're always striding about, getting things done!, he says, except when it's winter, and you're drinking and becoming maudlin.

Am I a maudlin drinker?, he wonders. I don't look maudlin, it's true, but you can never tell, with a Dane. One minute you're all bonhomie and striding about, the next, slumped into a corner weeping into your schnapps ... The Dane is never really a horizontal person, a defeated person, the poet says. He's vertical - and then he's non-vertical, slumped, and that's all. The maudlin is only a modality of purposiveness, of striding about, in the Dane, the poet says.

But he was telling me a story, the poet says. He was trying to improve me. Where was he? Ah yes, his recovery. How can he convey it to me? What it meant. What he left behind. He shouldn't try, he says. He should give up now.

I'm going inside, he'd said to himself last summer, the poet says. I'm never coming out. He was going in, he had decided, and it was the world that had to come inside to see him. He was to be inside, and the world outside; it knew where to find him. He was brought meals on trays with tin foil covering them. A cleaner came to vacuum his rooms and wipe the surfaces.

Sometimes, it was true, he went out. Some evenings, with the darkness around him and his fleece zipped up, he would take a few steps down the road. Aldi wasn't far, and it was open until late. Once or twice, he'd knocked on the door of the manic-depressive. Once or twice, the agoraphobic. No reply, just as he'd never reply when there was a knock on his door.

The cleaner had her own key. The meals people, who unlocked his door to leave a warm tray on the dining table and then took the remnants away the next day. They were disturbance enough. He would hide in his bedroom when they came. He wasn't ready for company, for small talk.

His life was simple, he said. He wanted it simple. Sometimes you have to simplify life, he says, to strip it down to a bare frame. That was Ann was doing, on her side of the city, he was sure of it. And Claire. What Zen-like simplicity had they attained? He couldn't find out, he says. Ann's answering machine had been switched off. He couldn't get through.

He pictured her silence as a great wall, he said. What did it mean? What was its significance? Would he ever find out? Ann was further along than him, he knew that. She'd gone further. Did she, too, feel signs of recovery? Was the illness departing from her, too? Or did condition, all along, run deeper? Did it ask for more from her than him?

He tried her phone again. No, no one there. No: she might be there, but he'd never know. There behind her wall. He thought of crossing town to see her. Thought of catching first one bus, then another, and riding all the way. Couldn't he cross town and knock on her door? Couldn't he, if she didn't answer, throw a handful of gravel up at her window? Perhaps she, too, was vertical. Perhaps she was awake enough to look out from the half-darkness of her house.

He would knock and wait. Throw pebbles and wait. But perhaps no face would appear at the window. And perhaps the door would remain shut, a blank wall. Where was his friend of the four o'clocks? Where his friend of the afternoons, of the old afternoons? Wasn't it at the cafe table they met every afternoon, to celebrate their partial crossing of the day? Wasn't it there, a full hour before the shift changed and the cafe prepared to become an evening restaurant, that they could share a pot of tea?

'We're made of our absences, of our lacks', the poet says. 'We're made of what we crave'. Do you know as it happens that a particular event - a meeting, a phonecall - is the last of its kind? He didn't, he says. In fact, he could hardly pick them out, those last points of contact, those last encounters. Nothing had really finished. Nothing had really rounded itself into a story.

We want always want stories, the poet says. He's sure I want a story, that's what I'm after, isn't it, waving my dictaphone about? And he would have liked a story too, back then. Would have liked something to have ended or to have carried on beginning. The latter, of course, was what he really wanted; but the former, too, would have done.

We like stories, the poet says. We like things to make sense. And when they don't? When the story becomes a non-story? That's been his life, the poet says, leaning forward. It is that to which he's tried to be loyal, if he's been loyal to anything. Nothing really happened, he said. Nothing began, do I understand that? No, of course I don't. It's the last thing a Dane could understand, he says.

The Most Ill

'Months and then years, falling into illness. How far could we fall, the ill? Always further, even as the city regenerated around us. We were the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sickness benefit to unemployment benefit and back again ...

'The walls of the room. The bed, the television, the sofa: this was my world. Days and nights passed in my flat, alone in my flat. Is this what I wanted? To draw a shelter over my head and hide in the half-light?

'I thought of Ann. We're all ill, she had said. Everyone's ill, if only they realised it. She had thought of herself as a kind of pioneer, as an antennae, quivering sensitively ahead of the race. Ann was ready to be seriously ill. She was ready to see it through to the end.

'She'd worked hard - too hard, she'd said. She'd built up her business, she and her business partner. She'd bought her houses. But the illness came, and she had to wait for illness to pass through her and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome illness in her own way, and to affirm it as it passed. Only then would she be able to rise, one day, and be ready for the world.

'She has all the time in the world. Time - for what? For falling ill, she said. Really ill. And now it was to be my time, too. I was lucky I met her. Lucky she referred me to her GP. Lucky that I had been referred, in turn, to the specialist. And now? She had fallen away from me. She lay on her own bed in the other side of the city, as I lay in mine. She lay in her own half-darkness, her sheltered accommodation protecting her from the world, and I lay in mine'.

He used to leave messages on her answering machine, knowing she'd be there. She'd promised to listen to them. She'd understand, she said. She was a little further on than him. He was a little behind, catching up. She would listen to him, she said.

'So I'd phone her, and hear her pre-sickness voice on the line. Please leave a message after the beep. I left my messages. Ann, I'm just calling to say ... or, Hi Ann, it's me, I hope you're feeling better ...

'I remembered Ann's friend Claire, who seemed sicker than both of us, even farther on. Did Ann leave messages on Claire's answering machine? Hi Claire, it's me, Ann. I'm just ringing to say ... or, Claire, it's Ann. How are you?

'And to whom did Claire turn?, I thought. Who was more ill than she was? And who did she ring, Claire's friend? Someone, beyond us all, was the Most Ill, I thought. Someone, in some distant suburb, was further on than any of us ...

'And meanwhile, illness. And in the meantime, illness. That filled my day. No: it drew my day away from me. There was no more time. No forward movement. Week after week fell into obscurity. Week after hollowed-out week. I'm so bored, I said to Ann's answering machine. Do you think it's possible to die of boredom, I said, really die?

'Sometimes, as the days grew longer, I would remember how Ann and I first met. I remembered in the cafe, unknown to me, talking to this person or that. I remembered her in the cafe garden, taking the sun, or coming in to shelter from the rain, the dreadful Manchester rain', the poet says. 'I remembered her car, her grey Saab, with the power tools in the back.

'Who introduced us, Ann and I? Who told one of us about the other?' He can't remember. Either way, they ended up talking, over a pot of tea. They talked, and it was as though they had always known one another. That's when she said it. She was ill, she told him. He was unemployed, he said. - "You're ill, too", she said. - "And you're also unemployed", he said, although that wasn't really true, she told him later.

She'd become a silent partner in her business. She was sent cheques every month ... And she got sickness benefit, too, she said. But she hadn't been feeling well. She couldn't work, not really. Perhaps it was time to sell one of her houses, she said. What did I think? 

'She should sell it, I had said. She should free herself from everything. From everything that might distract her. If you're going to be ill, then be really ill, I told her. I told her what Robert Walser, the author, said when he entered the mental hospital. "I'm not here to write, but to be mad". So he stopped writing. As she, Ann, should stop working. That was what she wanted to hear. That's when she told him about her friend Claire, who had the same condition. She was much further on than her, Ann had said. And we drove over to see her in Ann's grey Saab ...'

So one day, in late spring, he phoned her, full of memories. Hi, it's me again, he was going to say. I wanted to know how Claire was. Are you guys still in touch? Or, Hi, Ann, hope you're okay. I was thinking of the cafe the other day - do you remember? And Claire. How is she? But he didn't hear the recorded message on her answering machine. There was no one to take his call.

Was the machine full? He wondered. Hadn't she bothered to empty the machine at all? Or perhaps she'd unplugged the machine. Perhaps she'd had enough of his phonecalls, his messages. Or perhaps she'd moved on, left. Perhaps she was better, and walking out in the spring sunshine ... Perhaps she fixing things in her houses with her power tools. Perhaps she was showing round new tenants ...

He imagined her opening her front door and standing there, narrow-eyed in the light. He imagined her going out to the car, brushing away the leaves on the bonnet, opening the door, driving away from the kerb, power tools in the boot ...

What might have happened between him and Ann?, the poet says. What romance? There are romances that never really begin, the poet says, or that teeter on the edge of beginning, reluctant to step over, as though they carried with them something that would not begin, that would continue to hold them back.

Illness drew them together; illness separated them. Illness was what they had in common; illness held them far apart. Nothing began, nothing was to begin. Ann had retreated. He had.

Now, when he thought of her, it was as something impersonal. A row of arches spanning up into the clouds. The dry bank of a stream. Hadn't he thought he saw her in the swifts feeding their juveniles on the wing, or the grey wagtails on the riverpath?

Once, Ann and he and walked out along the river, quite far, almost all the way to the Botanical Gardens. They'd walked out, talking of nothing in particular, talking of everything, talking of nothing, as the summer filled each topic they touched upon with a kind of lightness, loosening them up into the air like fire balloons.

It felt like a beginning, but in fact it was an end. How many days had he spent like that, thinking he was at the brink of something, that it was a matter of stepping forward? - 'No matter', the poet says. 'No regrets.

'We are made of our defeats', he says. 'From our failures'. Look at him, he says. Do I see a failure? Of course I do, he said. - 'We're stranded in this life', he says. 'Someone left us here. Someone forgot us.

'And what of you, Dane? Who forgot you? Are you going to be like Kurtz, disappearing among the tribes he was supposed to conquer? Are you going to give up your Danish life and disappear into Manchester?' He laughs. 'A Dane in Manchester, a Dane in Manchester ...' He finds this very funny.

Photophobia

'Before I was ill, I was unemployed', the poet says. 'Or was it the other way around? Illness, unemployment: I switched from one kind of benefit to another. Lost in illness, I became unemployed. Or I became ill through unemployment, because there were no jobs or because I never wanted one?

'What did I do all day, every day? How did I occupy my time? But I didn't occupy it. I'd fallen; time passed me by. There was nothing to do. Days passed. Weeks, and nothing. I think I kept notes for a time. I jotted down the symptoms of my condition for the in-house specialist at the surgery.

'There was television, of course. It became the structure of my day, its frame. At 1.40, Neighbours - everything worked up to that. Morning TV - chatshows and magazine show; antique shows and the news - led to the plateau of Neighbours.

'And after Neighbours? That was difficult. There was the long stretch of the afternoon. The sag. What target audience were the programme makers trying to reach? Cop show repeats. Made for TV films. It was always a difficult time, the afternoon.

'Things picked up in the evening, after the kids' shows. 5.30 Neighbours (the repeat); the evening news. The trick was to cross the afternoon safely. It was hazardous, the afternoon.

'I didn't go out. I knew I shouldn't. The noise of the street frightened me. The light - above all, the light. I hadn't lied to my GP about my photophobia. It was quite real. It still is!', the poet says. 'The light, the light. Sometimes I thought I was sick from light, that that was the cause of my illness and its motor. Light, light ...

'Sometimes Ann phoned me. She was getting iller still, she said. Her paranoia was worsening. Her fatigue. She wasn't doing anything, she said. She'd given it all up. I asked her how her friend Claire was. Ann didn't see Claire anymore, she said. She didn't see anyone. And now she wasn't going to talk on the phone, either. I could leave messages on her answerphone, but that was it. She wanted to be alone.

'Now there was nothing to keep illness from having its way with me', the poet says. 'There was nothing to divide us. My strength had failed; I accepted this. I lay beneath time; this, too, I understood. I slept a great deal. I kept the curtains closed against bright light. But otherwise my illness was gentle.

'I thought: this would be the way to die, as one might fall asleep in the snow. I was falling asleep, perhaps dying, but my suffering didn't seem to have much to do with me. True, I was tired, infinitely tired, but this tiredness didn't seem to be my own.

'Meanwhile, the city sprawled all around us. The city, and the pressure of regeneration. New jobs were being created. New opportunities. A bright, gleaming future. The ill had been cut some slack. We'd been given a few years before we had to become worthy of its transformation. How tired we were! How lost! But, for all, we were sheltered. Months could pass - years - but we'd be okay.

'Sometimes the inspectors would visit us. Sometimes, we'd have to go to our doctors to get new sicknotes. Sign us off!, we said to them. Sign us off for life! The inspectors called us clients, but we were really dependents. The city tolerated us; the city indulged us. Everywhere there was regeneration; everywhere the remaking of the city, except in our sheltered accommodation. Everywhere people property investing and buying their council houses, except for us, except for the ones who lived in half-darkness.

'I liked my flat. Was it mine? I liked the flat through which I was passing. When they showed it to me, I thought: here I will have time. Here is peace. And when they left me there and closed the door, I thought: I won't disturb its peace. I'll go about quietly. I'll leave no mark.

'This is a flat for the ill, I thought, and I am ill, just as others will succeed me who are also ill, one after another, in a long series. Just as there had been many before me, equally respectful of the peace, equally quiet.

'I will have my time here, I thought. Others will come, but this is my time. I thought: this is where I'll lie every day as my illness is lifted from me. Doubtless it will intensify at first, strengthen, but gradually it will leave me.

'The spaces of the flat will ache with suffering, I thought. Soon, the rooms will be empty of everything but suffering. The rooms will suffer as suffering is drawn out of me. I will have delegated suffering to this space, this time. I will have swapped places with this peaceful expanse.

'I knew there were others ill in their flats all around me. The agoraphobe, who liked Denton Welch. The depressive. We knew of one's another's presence; sometimes we passed by one another in the stairwell, or along the corridor. But I imagined each of us was busy making his or her exchange in the darkness of our flats. Suffering was elsewhere, as we were each to be inhabited by the expanses of space, by a time broken from the onrush of time. We lay in separate rooms, falling, falling through our lives.

'I felt tiredness, a great tiredness. My hands were not mine; I could barely lift my arms. What actions could I bring about? What could I do? I could hardly pour a glass of water. But tiredness freed me from the great questions: how was I to make my way in life? What was I to do? I need ask no questions, I thought. I would lie down, and the flat would draw my suffering from me like a sting.

'I lay slumped on the old sofa. I lay feverish in bed. I left messages on Ann's answering machine. For a time, I was determined, like the stranded Crusoe, to keep track of the passing of days. I thought to make marks on the walls of my flat.

'But then, as week fell into week, and whole months came to resemble one another, I saw there was no point, and I might as well drift, and that this time was the gift of my flat, and the gift of my illness. I have an alibi, I thought. I have a sicknote. Everywhere around me, the city is transforming, but I do not need to be transformed'.

Everyone's Ill

'How many years is it now?', the poet says.  'Ten years? More than ten?' It's set adrift in his life, he says. A part of his life adrft in his life, like a floater in the eye. What happened then? What happened back then?

He was unemployed, he says, and she, Ann, was ill. He was on unemployment benefit, she on sickness benefit. Or was it the other way round? She was unemployed, undoubtedly. But illness was her thing. If you asked her why she didn't work, she'd tell you she was ill. She was taking some time for herself, she said.

He had his ill days, he said, but he regarded himself as being unemployed. Ask him why he didn't work, and he said, quoting the song, I've never had a job and never wanted one, even though that wasn't quite true. He was a part-time TEFL teacher, really. He taught English in a Foreign Language. He taught foreigners, he said. But he claimed benefits as well. He only worked part-time, after all.

He, anyway, was unemployed, and she was ill, says the poet. But then, she told him that he, too, was ill. She was a great believer in illness. Everyone's ill, she once declared. Everyone would be ill, she said, if only they would allow themselves to be. She had allowed herself to become ill, she said. It was a liberation. And now, he, too, should let himself become ill. It was time to be ill!, she said. 

'Now, Ann had a friend who was even more ill than she was' the poet says. 'Claire was a kind of exemplary ill person, the measure of all illness. She was a former businesswoman, Claire. She lived in sheltered accommodation. People brought her meals. - "I don't go out much", she said as we drank tea in her flat. She couldn't go outside.

'It was rush hour. The cars were jammed outside. Claire was too clever, her doctor told her. That was her problem. Too clever. - "Clever people like us always become ill", she told us. Like us: did Claire really see illness in me? Her flat was dark. She kept it so, she said.

'She told us of her former life. Of her intelligence. She was very convinced about her intelligence. She'd put on so much weight, she said. She never used to look like this, she said. But after her nervous breakdown ..., she said, and let the sentence trail off.

'Claire had panic attacks went she went outside, she said. And she felt terribly exhausted. Tired all the time. But she thought she might get better. She held on to the idea of recovery. One day, when I get better ..., she said. One day. But what day?

'She's working on herself, Ann said, when we left. She was working on herself, she who could barely get up from the sofa to make a cup of tea. Illness was working on her. On us all!, Ann thought.

'Ann herself was expecting to get sicker. She was spending less and less time outdoors. It was time for her, too, to stay in, she said. Time for her to draw the blinds. Was she as clever as her friend?, Ann asked me. I said she was very clever, very perceptive. Then she might get very ill, she said. She was frightened.

'How can the weak help the weak?, the poet says. How could he, an unemployed man, help an ill woman? He thought she was strong enough - she was a landlady, after all; she owned property; she had a big car with a toolbox at the back - but she was getting weaker. She thought she'd sell one of the houses, she said. And she might sell her car. Maybe she'd sell her second house, too, and arrange for sheltered accommodation.

'That was where she was heading, she thought. She was preparing to be ill, very ill, she said. She wanted to give up everything for illness, to let her illness be itself. She wanted to be alone. I was no help. I had spent years falling more deeply into unemployment. I was more unemployed than anyone! And there she was, preparing to become more ill than anyone.

'She sent me to her GP and told me what symptoms to report. It wasn't a lie, she said. I had the symptoms - she could see it - but it was just a question of reporting them correctly. I told the doctor I felt tired, very tired. That my limbs ached. That I was photophobic, and that when I went outside, I only wanted to go back inside. I was agoraphobic, I told her, but that when I was inside, I only wanted to go back outside. I'm claustrophobic, I told her.

'I could barely sleep, I told her. And when I did, I had terrifying dreams. I couldn't stand getting on the bus, I told her. I couldn't stand other people. I felt they were watching me, criticising me. And I couldn't eat in public, I told her - Ann told me not to forget that one. In fact, I had trouble eating in private. I couldn't keep food down, I told her. I had a nervous stomach. I had nervous indigestion - Ann had taught me that phrase. I get headaches, terrible headaches, I told her.

'The GP sent me to their in-house specialist, whose office was in the basement of the surgery. I've been feeling tired for months, I told her. Exhausted! She made me fill in a questionaire. When did I feel most tired, it asked me. All the time, I wrote. Do I feel pain?, it asked me. Frequently, I wrote. Do I ache anywhere? Everywhere, I wrote. Do I have stomach problems? Continually, I wrote.

'The diagnosis was clear. There was no question about it. I have the condition myself, the in-house specialist said. She had it too! We both had it, the pair of us. No wonder Ann liked it here. There was a sense of fellowship. Of fellow feeling. She had the condition, the in-house doctor said, and so did her sister, who was confined to bed. Her sister's children were being looked after by someone else, the in-house specialist said.

'I was instructed on how to handle my symptoms. Take it easy, she said. Plan everything when you have strength, so that when you feel weak, you're not overwhelmed with worry. Arrange your life so there's no stress, no panic.

'Should I go out?, I asked her. Not unless it's strictly necessary, she said. Should I get buses? I should avoid buses, she said, and public spaces. She avoided public spaces, she said. She found them very taxing.

'It's common to highly successful people, our illness, she told me. I'm hardly successful, I told her. To highly motivated, intelligent people, she told me. I was flattered. So I was intelligent! Highly motivated! I told her I lacked motivation. It's the illness, she said. I told her I didn't feel highly intelligent. - "The trouble is, you're exhausted by your illness", she said.

'Am I really ill?, I asked her, doubting for a moment. Yes, I was really ill, she said. She was ill, too, she said. Is this illness common? Oh yes, she said, more and more people were being referred to her. And was our illness really an illness? Oh yes, she said, it's definitely an illness.

'I was lucky, she said. This was one of the few surgeries that took the condition seriously, she said. She gave me a pamphlet. It was full of practical advice and cartoons. The list of symptoms indicative of the illness seemed endless. They were listed down one page and halfway down another. Nausea. Depression. Listlessness. Stomach upset. Acid reflux ...

'So, I was ill. I embraced my new identity as an ill man. I'd read The Magic Mountain. I expected great insights! I wondered about the people among whom I was walking on the narrow pavement. Were they ill, too?, I wondered. Did I, an ill man, have insight into their illness?

'Perhaps they were all ill, I thought. Perhaps that was the great secret. They were ill as I was ill, as Ann was ill and Claire was ill, only they didn't know it yet. I should hand out pamphlets, I thought. I should recommend my surgery.

'How many times did Ann I meet, after that? Not many. It's not a romantic story after all, is it? We were on separate paths. Separately ill, she heading in her direction, a little further ahead than me, and I heading in mine, a newly ill person. An apprentice in illness.

'I remembered what I said to Ann when I first met her. I'm don't think I'm ill, I said, just tired. Ann said she was sure I was ill. She was certain of it. Don't fight it, she said. And I hadn't fought it. I was letting myself be ill, she said. I'd let myself be ill. Did I understand what that meant?

'Soon, I'd be too frightened to go out, she predicted. It frightened her, stepping out of her house. Terraced houses in both directions, dark cliffs. It menaced her, she said. Everyone with our condition gets frightened, she said. No one wants to go out.

'There are thousands of us, she said. Thousands!, I thought, imagine! Thousands of ill people, all over the city! This in the same cafe where we'd first met. This a few months after. Her car was outside. She wanted to make a quick getaway, she said. Public spaces frightened her, she said. It was too much.

'Off she went, leaving me alone with my Purdeys. Would I, too, have to plan for sheltered accommodation? Would I have to give it all up and let myself get really ill?'

The Last Neanderthals

'We should have been shot like horses, didn't they know that? We should have been stunned like cattle about to be slaughtered, and our throats cut ...' He sees it in his mind's eye, he and the others strung up, hung from butcher's hooks, bleeding from their throats.

He sees himself hung thus, forming words in blood. Speaking them, his last silent words, in bubbles of blood. And isn't that what he's doing now, as he speaks into my dictaphone? Isn't he really upside down on a butcher's hook? Isn't he to be trussed up and splayed in a butcher's window? - 'You Danes. You crafty Danes ...'

He'll carry on with his story, he says. He'll continue with my instruction. - 'They'd called us in for training. Their heads ached. Their eyes glazed over. So the future had come. The city would gleam, and they were part of the dross of the past'.

Who were they, the remnants? Who, the voyagers out between worlds, between the old and the new? They were rounding them up, the unemployed, the long term sick. The last drunks were being picked up and driven away. The last smackheads were being rounded up and shipped off. The criminals were all tagged and under house arrest. There was to be no slackness, no time to wander across the face of the earth.

'We'd lost the battle, the poet says. We'd lost it because we couldn't be bothered to fight. We'd lost the war because we'd barely known there was a war. We'd been asleep. Asleep at our posts, our non-posts. We'd been left behind. We'd deserted, but then we'd never joined up.

'We weren't guerillas. We weren't partisans. But the great wheels were to roll over us as great wheels roll. The wheels would turn, we would be crushed, and no one would notice. Ah, the wrecking balls at Old Hulme were only a forewheel of the great juggernaut. Only a plate of the great caterpillar tread of what was called regeneration.

'We weren't prepared, of course. We'd posted no watchmen. The sentries were asleep, the army scattered. How could we resist them, we who were unprepared and dreaming? How, we who barely knew we were there, let alone an enemy? In truth, they, too, barely knew we were there. They didn't set our sights especially on us. They didn't crush us as the Israeli army crushes Palestinians. We were the slack, and the slack was to be taken up.

'What happened to them, the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed?', the poet says. 'They knew they didn't belong and couldn't belong. Knew the coming world was not theirs. They weren't hunted to extinction, but died of irrelevance.

'No doubt, the new breed were kindness itself', the poet said. 'Bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, not really; that they didn't belong to the new world.

'What would become of them, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? What would become of their swamps and still water? What would happen when their marshes were drained?

'They called us in', the poet says. Their names were called and they stepped forward. They crossed the floor tiles of the open plan office to a waiting desk and Case Worker. Why bother with us?, they wanted to say. The midges are buzzing in our heads, and mosquitoes are hatching in our hearts, they wanted to say. We're the old breed, and you're the new breed. You win.

You win. But how could they do anything else but win, the new breed and their Case Workers? They'd become clients, he says. - 'The light had reached us. The gleaming city. And what were they to do, who had banked on structural unemployment? What, for those who had no corners left in which to hide?

'We weren't all Neanderthals', the poet says. 'We hadn't all given up. I'll tell you how they got us', the poet says. 'It was a very Danish ruse', he says.

'Community arts! Community projects!, that was it. We were made part of community regneration. We were encouraged to bid for money. Encouraged to wear hardhats and to tour the orange-bricked housing in the new estates that were replacing Old Hulme and everywhere like Old Hulme'.

They were treated like Prince Charles, he says, as they were shown along the gently curved streets that were named after hedge flowers. Community arts! Community projects! All of south Manchester was going to hold hands Denmark-style, he says. The supermarket was about to arrive, and carparks were to sprawl out on unused land. Orange-bricked community centres were coming, and the healthfood shop would be rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. Community arts! Community projects!

But he'd grown suspicious of it, the word community, he said. They're manipulating us, he thought. They're regnerating words, and not just the city, he thought. Words: soon he wouldn't be able to speak. Soon his words wouldn't be his words.

The word I, for example. The word am, for example. The word alive, for example.

'We were to become our own spokespersons, our own salesmen. We were learning to sell ourselves, to become our own advocates. We learned how to construct CVs and write cover-letters. We learned to read the job pages in the papers.

'Ah, we became avid readers. Avid writers, using the computers in the Jobseeker's training suite. We opened blank Word documents. We watched rows of text march across the page as we typed. We centre-justified and double-spaced. We emboldened and italicised ... 

'Some went into web design, God help them. There was training for that, too: web design. Web imbecility ...

'And the rest of us? We could hardly believe in our CVs, in our letters of application. Could hardly believe in the world. We would have laughed, if we had the strength. You woke us up for this? 

'Our heads ached. Our eyes were red. The welfare state was receding, we saw that. We were the last, and the last of the last. They should have left us lying on the shore. Should have left us beached, defeated, on the great shore of the future'.

'We should have been shot like horses, didn't they know that? We should have been stunned like cattle about to be slaughtered, and our throats cut ...' He sees it in his mind's eye, he and the others strung up, hung from butcher's hooks, bleeding from their throats.

He sees himself hung thus, forming words in blood. Speaking them, his last silent words, in bubbles of blood. And isn't that what he's doing now, as he speaks into my dictaphone? Isn't he really upside down on a butcher's hook? Isn't he to be trussed up and splayed in a butcher's window? - 'You Danes. You crafty Danes ...'

He'll carry on with his story, he says. He'll continue with my instruction. - 'They'd called us in for training. Their heads ached. Their eyes glazed over. So the future had come. The city would gleam, and they were part of the dross of the past'.

Who were they, the remnants? Who, the voyagers out between worlds, between the old and the new? They were rounding them up, the unemployed, the long term sick. The last drunks were being picked up and driven away. The last smackheads were being rounded up and shipped off. The criminals were all tagged and under house arrest. There was to be no slackness, no time to wander across the face of the earth.

'We'd lost the battle, the poet says. We'd lost it because we couldn't be bothered to fight. We'd lost the war because we'd barely known there was a war. We'd been asleep. Asleep at our posts, our non-posts. We'd been left behind. We'd deserted, but then we'd never joined up.

'We weren't guerillas. We weren't partisans. But the great wheels were to roll over us as great wheels roll. The wheels would turn, we would be crushed, and no one would notice. Ah, the wrecking balls at Old Hulme were only a forewheel of the great juggernaut. Only a plate of the great caterpillar tread of what was called regeneration.

'We weren't prepared, of course. We'd posted no watchmen. The sentries were asleep, the army scattered. How could we resist them, we who were unprepared and dreaming? How, we who barely knew we were there, let alone an enemy? In truth, they, too, barely knew we were there. They didn't set our sights especially on us. They didn't crush us as the Israeli army crushes Palestinians. We were the slack, and the slack was to be taken up.

'What happened to them, the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed?', the poet says. 'They knew they didn't belong and couldn't belong. Knew the coming world was not theirs. They weren't hunted to extinction, but died of irrelevance.

'No doubt, the new breed were kindness itself', the poet said. 'Bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, not really; that they didn't belong to the new world.

'What would become of them, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? What would become of their swamps and still water? What would happen when their marshes were drained?

'They called us in', the poet says. Their names were called and they stepped forward. They crossed the floor tiles of the open plan office to a waiting desk and Case Worker. Why bother with us?, they wanted to say. The midges are buzzing in our heads, and mosquitoes are hatching in our hearts, they wanted to say. We're the old breed, and you're the new breed. You win.

You win. But how could they do anything else but win, the new breed and their Case Workers? They'd become clients, he says. - 'The light had reached us. The gleaming city. And what were they to do, who had banked on structural unemployment? What, for those who had no corners left in which to hide?

'We weren't all Neanderthals', the poet says. 'We hadn't all given up. I'll tell you how they got us', the poet says. 'It was a very Danish ruse', he says.

'Community arts! Community projects!, that was it. We were made part of community regneration. We were encouraged to bid for money. Encouraged to wear hardhats and to tour the orange-bricked housing in the new estates that were replacing Old Hulme and everywhere like Old Hulme'.

They were treated like Prince Charles, he says, as they were shown along the gently curved streets that were named after hedge flowers. Community arts! Community projects! All of south Manchester was going to hold hands Denmark-style, he says. The supermarket was about to arrive, and carparks were to sprawl out on unused land. Orange-bricked community centres were coming, and the healthfood shop would be rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. Community arts! Community projects!

But he'd grown suspicious of it, the word community, he said. They're manipulating us, he thought. They're regnerating words, and not just the city, he thought. Words: soon he wouldn't be able to speak. Soon his words wouldn't be his words.

The word I, for example. The word am, for example. The word alive, for example.

'We were to become our own spokespersons, our own salesmen. We were learning to sell ourselves, to become our own advocates. We learned how to construct CVs and write cover-letters. We learned to read the job pages in the papers.

'Ah, we became avid readers. Avid writers, using the computers in the Jobseeker's training suite. We opened blank Word documents. We watched rows of text march across the page as we typed. We centre-justified and double-spaced. We emboldened and italicised ... 

'Some went into web design, God help them. There was training for that, too: web design. Web imbecility ...

'And the rest of us? We could hardly believe in our CVs, in our letters of application. Could hardly believe in the world. We would have laughed, if we had the strength. You woke us up for this? 

'Our heads ached. Our eyes were red. The welfare state was receding, we saw that. We were the last, and the last of the last. They should have left us lying on the shore. Should have left us beached, defeated, on the great shore of the future'.

Mayflies

'Cycle lanes', the poet says. 'They're the sign'. He remembers cycle lanes appearing in Hulme. ('Hulme was a rough part of Manchester that was rebuilt in the '90s', he says, 'put that in a footnote for your readers'.) That was when old Hulme was becoming new Hulme, he says, which is to say, unrecognisable. He saw cycle lanes being painted on the roads. Uh-oh, he thought. Who was going to use them? Who was coming?

The new cyclists, the poet says, with their helmets and yellow jackets. The advance-guard of property developers and business start-ups. The new cyclists ...

Manchester was becoming a European city, the poet says. A 24-hour city, my God! A bright, gleaming city. That's what it is today, he says, a bright, gleaming city.

He used to see them from the bus, gathered at the health food shop, the old Hulmers, he said. They'd sit out on the Oxford benches idly watching the traffic as it went past. They had all the time in the world, he said. He envied them.

Time was propitious for the Old Hulmers. There was so much time. They'd been given it, time, all of time; freed into it. The afternoons were their kingdom. They dreamed away their afternoons on the Oxford benches, rolling spliffs and watching the traffic go by.

Old Hulme, the poet says, like a lamentation. How can he get Old Hulme into my Danish head? How the transformation of Old Hulme into New Hulme, upon which everything rests? From Old Manchester to New Manchester. From Old Europe into new Europe, he says.

It was bad for everyone, that time, the poet says. 'They were hunting us down, every one of us. They were hunting us down, the long term unemployed, the long term sick ... One by one, we we'd be caught and brought in ...', he says.

'You'd get a letter', he says, 'calling you in. You'd be docked £10 from your benefits if you missed the first interview, and £20 if you missed the second. £10 or £20 for not joining their brave new world', he says, shaking his head.

The leaflets were dropping through their letterboxes, he and the other unemployed, he says. They read of funds set aside for the transition, for schemes to get the long term sick back to work. He was one of the long term sick, he says. He was sick of the world! Sick of everything!

It was time for them to be straightened out and reskilled, he says. Time for flipcharts and groupwork and the long road towards employment.

'They called us in', the poet says. 'Letters arrived, leaflets ... Ah, they were friendly enough, the Job Seeker people. It was all first names and shaking hands, and we're here to help you'. It was all personalised service, the filling out of forms. It was all sitting with them at desks in open plan offices.

'They never kept us waiting long, we who had all the time in the world. They were always polite, respectful, we with whom no one had been concerned before. Jobseekers, that's what we were called now, not the unemployed. We were seeking work, looking for it, supposedly. And we always had been, that was the supposition. The pretense.

'Let's pretend, that's what we said, in effect. Let's pretend you really were looking for work, all along ... That's how they changed the past. That's how they forgave us our pasts. It was the new ammesty. We were Job Seekers, now. Job Seekers who'd got lost on the way to the future.

'And now each of us had our advisor, our Case Worker', the poet says. 'We had Case Numbers. We were to sign Agreements. We were to present ourselves at the office to be retrained. Reskilled! - 'It meant flipcharts', the poet says, 'group work'.

He's sure Danes love group work, the poet says. He's sure it's all about group work and roleplay back in Copenhagen. Every Dane has a Case Worker, he's sure of that. A Case Number! You get one assigned at birth in Copenhagen, he says, he's sure of it.

'They had music playing there, in the open plan office. Distant music, calming, soothing. We were all to be calmed and soothed. It was going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay: words whispered to a sick child as you stroke its hair.

'We were to be reborn, retooled for the new world', he says. 'We were like nymphs looking up at the world with underwater eyes. Now it was time to hatch. Now we would hatch and dart above the water like mayflies ...'

He looked around the office. My God, his fellow unemployed! His fellow absentees! They were a sleepy lot, he says. They looked dazed, red-eyed. No doubts their heads ached from the night before. There was always a night before, he says. Always a night before, and never a day.

They'd been asleep too long. They'd been asleep half their lives! They'd fallen asleep and woken to - this. Why bother with us?, their demeanour said. Give up now, their slouching in the chairs said.

*

'What was never understood', the poet says, 'what no one seems to understand, was that there was a kind of wisdom to us, the long term sick and unemployed. A wisdom that had accreted over the months and years', he says. 'A wisdom that had dripped down from the sky, forming us like stalagmites. A wisdom that had lain down on the earth over the millennia, like the tiny skeletons that make up coral.

'What had we understood? What you Danes will never understand, you who plan out everything in advance. You for whom everything is planned!

'We'd known five hundred kinds of boredom', he says. 'We'd seen everything, and the wearing out of everything. We'd lost ourselves; we'd discovered ourselves lost. We'd seen our reflected faces in the windows of night-buses. We'd ascended to the plateau of the hours before dawn, and to the plateau of dawn.

'What hadn't we understood? It was as though we'd lived a thousand lives. Memory grew thick in us like Molasses. Not our memory, but the memory of concrete, the memory of crushed glass on tarmac. We remembered like puddles lying out beneath the sky. We remembered like kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.

'We were lost', the poet says. 'We disappeared into the empty hours. We rode acrosss time like wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. Today, what is to happen today?, we asked ourselves each morning. And we knew the answer: nothing at all. Nothing in particular. Today will be exactly the same as yesterday.

'And we dreamt', the poet says. 'We dreamt in those days. Does the Dane have any idea of what it means to dream? Of dreams only the idle can dream? Of carrying vague thoughts in your head like fireflies? Of mist-thoughts that have yet to coalesce?

'We saw the vagueness of our futures like summer haze on the roads. What's the opposite of deja vu?', the poet says. 'Not I've seen it before, but I'll see it again? What is the opposite of a story? Of the succession of days? Nothing happened today, we wrote in our journals. Nothing happened. Nothing completed itself. Nothing was resolved. Life is not short', the poet says, 'but long, terribly long.

'Today is the same as yesterday. Today: that word turns in eternity. Everything that happens - every incident, every event - happens on the backdrop of the nothing-is-happening. Of the immensity of time, and the impossibility of stories. Of the river that silently bears all, sustains all and destroys all, like a Hindu god.

'You can't step in the same river twice', the poet says. 'Today is the same as yesterday. But the depth of the same! The depth of today, of yesterday! Those words ringing out like great bells', the poet says. 'Those words ringing out from the heart of time ...'

'The same is not the same, that's the secret', the poet says. 'Only those unemployed or sick for years know that. That there are too many hours to inhabit. Too many of them, like the abandoned rooms of a house'.

That's what he saw in the people of Old Hulme, he says. That in the faces that looked up at him from the Oxford benches.

Liquid Tungsind

Did I bring him some schnapps? I should at least have brought him some schnapps. And then, Ah!, schnapps! Good. And what about sild - see, he knows some Danish, he says. Sild. They used to be a Danish restaurant in town, he says. He'd go there with his friends - when he had friends - for an open sandwich on Saturday mornings, he says. The open sandwich - well, it's not really a cuisine, is it? The Danes don't have much of a cuisine. But sild on an open sandwich - not bad, he says. On rye bread. Home-made rye bread, preferably, he says.

He goes to fetch shot glasses from the kitchen. Aalborg Akavit should be served cold, he says. See, he knows that. He knows something about Danish culture, about so-called Danish culture. They used to drink Aalborg Akavit with their Danish lunches, he and his friends, he says, and drink Danish lager. A shot, then a chaser: that's how the Danes drink, he was told. A shot, a chaser, then another shot and another chaser. And then some more shots and chasers.

I hope you're not going to get drunk on me, the poet says. Drunks he doesn't mind, but Danish drunks! The Danish drunk is always maudlin, he says. Always morose. Tungsind, that's the word Kierkegaard uses for Danish melancholy, isn't it? He wrote it down, that word, on a post-it. Tungsind - was does it mean, literally?, he asks me. Ah, heavy souled. He likes that, he says: heavy souled.

He'll drink, and I can watch. Oh, alright, he says, I can drink too. He pours us each a glass. Skol!, he says. - 'Are you full of tungsind now?', he says. He thinks he might be full of tungsind, drinking with me, he says. Drinking with a Dane, God help him.

'Your dictaphone's still going', he says. 'Why don't you turn it off? Are you trying to catch me unawares?', he says. He's got nothing to say, anyway. - 'Not a thing! I might as well record the empty wind whistling'.

He's lost in the middle of his life, the poet muses. Lost in some sense, although he doesn't know how. In the middle of life ... It's like the beginning of the Inferno, Dante's Inferno. He's lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts. - 'You're a beast', he tells me. 'A great Danish beast ...'

Sometimes he feels like a character in a novel, who realises he's in a novel. - 'But I'm not in a novel', he says.

Ah, he says, pouring more schnapps. What story should he tell me now? The story of the leak from the gutter from the upstairs flat? Of the leak, the flood, that ran down the wall in a single sheet? Or how about the flying insects that stuck to his face when he walked through the Meadows the other day? It was disgusting, he says.

Anyway, he says, his storytelling is only a kind of indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. There's something he wants to say by not saying it, the poet says. He's trying to tell me something.

But what would a Dane understand of these things, regardless of his tungsind? Danish melancholia turns inward, he says. It's a melancholy of the Danish soul. Mancunion melancholia - because that's what he's trying to describe to me, Mancunion melancholy and perhaps British melancholy, he says - is turned outward. It's about the world and the relation to the world, he says.

It about being defeated by the world. It's about lying down and giving everything up. You've had enough! You can see no point in anything! Why bother? That's what he said to himself when he gave up writing. Why do anything at all? Why not just lie down and wait for the apocalypse? - 'For Ragnarok, as you pagans would call it', he says.

There's probably a can't-be-bothered grant in Denmark, isn't there?, the poet says. A waiting-for-Ragnarok grant ...

The flat, the yard. - 'Nothing really begins here', he says with great emphasis. 'Nothing really happens. You can be up early - but for what? Ready to work - but for what? You can pull the chair to the table - but for what? There's no way to gather yourself for a beginning as God gathered himself up before the creation.

He went astray, the poet says. - 'I lost the beginning. I lost hold of the beginning. And if you can't begin', he says, 'you can't end either. The day lies down and rots. The day gives up', he says.

But what could I know about that, the poet asks, about days rotting? The Dane has no idea of ruination. He always keeps his appointment with the beginning. The Dane's punctual, above all! He knows where he is and where he has to be!

There is no people more orderly than the Danish people, he says. None more dutiful. The Dane can become melancholy, yes. Melancholy over his schnapps on a Friday night. Melancholy in a Danish bar on Sunday afternoon. Muttering about his tungsind, the heaviness of his soul. My soul, he says, it's so heavy, boo-hoo, boo-hoo, he says.

But come Monday, and the Dane's refreshed, he says. He's forgotten his heavy soul and his boo-hoos! He's ready for work! Ready to organise! Ready to be taxed! Ready to spend tax-payers' money! And off he goes to work on his bike, following his cycle lane!

*

God, it's disgusting out there, he says of the yard. The plants are dying. The concrete's streaked with green. And a layer of scum over everything, God, what is it? Everything that will happen, will happen here, that's his feeling, the poet says. Everything that can happen ...

It's like that scene from Nostalghia. The sky will brighten, and the sky darken. A night passes in eight minutes. A week in eight minutes. A year, a millennia. Everything that has happened, happened here, the poet says.

'There's only one word for this flat', he says. 'Absolute. It's an absolute flat', he says. 'With an absolute yard. Look at it', he says. 'The plants look ill. God knows, I look ill. We're all ill, all of us, except for you Danes with your white teeth'.

What can I know of it, his illness, his wretchedness? He's a wretch, he knows that, the poet says. - 'See, this is what your schnapps is doing to me! It's poison', he says. 'It's liquid tungsind', he says. 'You've come here to poison me, you beast of a Dane'.

'Look at them, the clothespegs on the washing line. What do you think they're try to say? What do they mean? And that oval rock, covered in algae ... what's it doing there? And that brick, likewise covered in algae?'

He could never write about the yard, the poet says, that was his trouble. There was no poetry that could be written about the yard, or his flat, for that matter. His table edge is at the same level as its concrete surface, the yard, he says. He thought he might make some kind of reckoning with it, the yard, he says. Thought that if he began writing earlier enough, if he was there before dawn, watching it dawn ...

Purple and black and white, those are the colours of the pre-dawn, the poet says. Purple light, the outline of the black pipe, the white wooden door to the road. Every day, waking up, his first thought: I've outlived myself.

Upstairs, in the morning, he hears his neighbours passing from one room to another: there are others around him who are alive. But he's not alive, not anymore, he says. He watches over his own corpse. He keeps his own vigil. He passes alongside himself, among himself ... how can he put it?

He sees the light come on in the bathroom of the house opposite. The sky's light blue. The colours of the world are beginning to reveal themselves. He closes his curtains. He's had enough, he says. It reminds him of so many mornings, old mornings. It reminds him of so many botched mornings and botched days, he says.

'Oh God', he says, 'no more schnapps'. Can't I see what it's doing to him?