"Transitions" Pavement Pounders' journal: Sunship a Short Story by Annie Webb

Sunship

A Short Story

by Annie Webb

It was an unusually hot spring morning when Poppy had announced unexpectedly, “rage expresses intensity of hunger and is found in the anger of storms or fires”. Cherry blossom, almost losing its pinkness, had effloresced white in the bright sun against fluffy grey cumulus on a cerulean sky and a bowlful of fruit bursting with cherries, apricots and a single blood orange had starred up at them from the table.

Picking up this last blood orange and using the sharp cutting edge of a kitchen knife to slit its peel longitudinally from top to bottom till the orange orb dropped out from underneath, Mya had said it was too hot to eat anyway. Then making a converse correlation to Poppy’s between heat and the lack of hunger, added, “but I’m still hungry”.

Poppy didn’t need to coax rage to drop like a blood-red orange from its peel like I do, Mya had thought, for Turn had written his celebrated poem, The River, about a ‘sun-ship’ with its multifarious four-sided sail-cloths, ‘a mythic canvas-catcher of the wind’, and a lost river, just for Poppy. She was a little envious of that.

Ivan had drawn pictures only for himself, but he’d been so insistent with his knocking she’d opened her house, whose walls were the walls of her soul, and let him in. She’d never let anyone into that place before, but when she’d asked him to take her in his arms he’d indicated a impenetrable box around his body, so she’d shouted, “go, get out through the front door of my soul”, and he’d looked alarmed. But he’d attacked her with that which-does-not-make-sense. Had she been Dusty she would have burst into song, “Anyone who had a heart would take me in their arms”. Instead she’d said plainly, “Don’t knock again”.

But Mya didn’t want anger or sadness to fill the sails of her sun-ship, so she’d read the poem Turn had written for Poppy, follow its drift as if unravelling a ball of string wound round a gemstone. Poison came from standing water, so she’d be re-directed before the stultifying need of a becalmed millpond turned to stagnant sinking sand.

Though the heavily laden sunship tore painfully from its moorings, Mya needn’t worry the poem reassured her. Piloted by the sun child it was autonomous. A psyche possessing its own momentum no cloth of therapy could wipe clean. An idea that could tow her in its slipstream, unharmed, even through hell.

The sunship’s one mast, the footnotes explained, supported the sail of the soul that sliced through the earth on a north south axis like a centrifugal but flexibly unravelling spine. The Egyptian’s longitudinal cut. The prow or stem of a vessel that made headway against a tide, a current or a gale, was the expansive side of us - crossing the divide between west and east. ‘Ship’ when added to us - craftsmanship, fellowship, authorship, friendship – described a quality which identified us. If rage as Poppy said was the anger found in storms, Mya could confront the storm full on, protected by her vessel or redeemed by her own creation.

When Poppy had moved south from Scotland with her mother to Mersea Island - an eastern island a little north from the Isle of Grain (whose shape reflected its southern counterpart, Canvey Island) - her mother, never keen on men, had joked. A mer-cy she’d said. Mermaids off the Mer-sea island may be enticed into sailor’s nets but the silver tailed ones, the ‘lucky fish’, would slip away leaving small ever-changing eddies of water lapping low against white sands. For when the men came to grab their elusive prizes they’d forgotten to keep their hands closed.

Yet ironically Poppy was the one who got ‘caught’. Mermaid chaste but not untouchable, she’d come across Turn by his beach bonfire one summer’s evening and, under salmon pink clouds, found herself touched by his words. The mermaids would be taken by surprise, Poppy’s mother said to hide her dismay at the announcement of their engagement.

Mya’s daughter was to be bridesmaid. Often she’d watched the small girl stand before the mirror in her peach bridesmaid’s dress, anticipating Poppy’s day that she reckoned would be hers also: one of ivories and peaches and primroses, of light lacy veils and promises made under ancient fan-vaulting and stucco. The ceremony was to take place at St. Helen’s Church in Cliff where Turn lived poised on the jagged southern side of the Thames inlet fraught with creeks, and the rivers, Roach, Crouch and Blackwater.

Mya went with Thomas to explore the place. At dusk they stood at All Hallows on dykes over marshy waterways and fields where the bleak, flat river mouth entered the land yawning between Southend-on-sea and the Isle of Sheppey. Three red lights squinted at them from the solitary tower of a power station that rose temple-like at Grain, cradled gently upon the reedy surface of marshy egg-shaped land between the Medway and Thames. One by one other lights along the shore from Tilbury to Southend lit up, then across the waters to Grain and along the Medway to Rochester.

With no one else in sight, Mya and Thomas, curmudgeonly controllers of riverine lives, viewed their riparian rights without having yet decided from this broad scope how to end their connection with imposters who, like lost rivers, etched painful gulleys into the tender banks of their minds. Yet in being here they’d almost done that.

“We’ve been on many journeys” said Thomas as they stood upon a confluence of two rivers where the mouth was so huge they couldn’t contain it. “But the most exciting forays are ours at night within the confluence of sheets, when our mouths fix and lead us down to lands and waters our eyes cannot contain”.

But as they stood outside St.Helen’s a sudden cold wind gusted towards them, swirling bushes and litter in the precision of its whirlwind grip, lifting up inside their coats and spinning them round. Sheet lightening filled the sky. Thunder clapped and fistfuls of snow fell in bucket-loads out of the grey.

The day of promises made under fan-vaulting never would arrive. Neither Poppy nor Mya’s daughter would experience their moments of pastel, their anticipated day of ivories and peaches and primroses, for Turn was cancelling a wedding that had he said never been promised. Not just because his father would cut off his inheritance and all association with him if he married Poppy, the alcoholic, the one who came to Masonic evenings and disgraced herself in front of his cronies, but for Poppy’s chasteness, so set she seemed to remain mermaid forever.

The bridesmaid’s dress that should have been used for Poppy’s wedding got used for dressing-up. Mya’s daughter put it on her unwitting brother when he had long blonde curls and after it became an item, along with the white feather boa, the sparkling tiara and the multi-layered, polka-dotted flamenco dress, in a fraying wicker basket that got dumped at the bottom of a wardrobe.

Along with Poppy’s reason. She began to hear voices of the Virgin and saw Her walking through the tombstones in the graveyard at St. Helen’s. Mya wasn’t allowed into the hospital where Poppy was sedated. She sat on a grassy bank stunned by her friend’s breakdown and the rage Ivan had put her in. Later, when she was let in, the raging voices in Poppy’s head that had gone into overdrive were drug diluted. “My madness is like a cobalt lake”, she winked in the madhouse where ‘normal’ was watching television, but where she, sitting apart from the others who delighted in calling her mad, was becoming more lucid.

“Turn’s River is about the Fleet, one of the many rivers that had flowed – like the Tyburn, the Westbourne or Counter’s Creek – into the Thames” she offered in a stage whisper to Mya. It is also about St Helena, fourth century Christian saint, mother of Constantine the Great, wife of Constantinius, Nehellenia, Celtic Madonna of London, a mirror of the Virgin who sought the wood of the true cross. “Helena”, she cleared her throat with an imperious cough, “was no royal daughter of an emperor like Theodora who supplanted her as Constantius’ wife but of an inn-keeper. Nevertheless she was mother of a sovereign who summoned her to the imperial court and conferred her ‘Augusta’. Striking coins with her effigy”.

Mya would have told Poppy had it not seemed inappropriate that she too felt like a queen, the point where Thomas penetrated her like a pebble breaking the surface of a lake causing ripples of pleasure to fan out to the shore, Arthur’s sword looking different now: Queen Regina’s water Rex’s vessel of renewal, not rising out of the water, but forged within it, fixed in steel at the moment it entered the lake.

When Poppy asked Mya if she would follow the course of the Turn’s Fleet and Helena, Mya had no difficulty in saying yes. Accepting Poppy’s request to put words to place, find a lake and a woman, and not least having Thomas beside her, would help her remember a thing she could now forget. That once Ivan had given her a white plastic bag with a haiku written on it in black about love, along with an inability to disbelieve in their ending.

Thomas and Mya approached the Fleet - which had burst into sunlight ‘with jets of gold and fluid curves’ at seven springs and risen in a valley of stringed ponds at Hampstead and Highgate - by battered car, as if their life depended on it, gliding they said in their gale-bound galleon, then joining it by foot where the two tributaries met in Camden. Not to verify Turn’s research but to understand an unspoken quarrel he’d had with Poppy and to re-script a course that had begun with their own bodies.

At the junction of Hawley and Kentish Town Road a stink pipe emerged from deep underground and soared into the sky. Three fat sewer-tenders in a yellow van sat idle beside it, their steel rods poking up from holes underground. Graffiti on a wall opposite looked down on them:

The river knows the answer and the way to go. You cannot push the river.

Mya would bring Turn’s River to life for Poppy. What did it mean that the sunship of their minds could be borne up again on the Fleet making its way through the Royal Valley towards the Thames? Or that the white maid of the River of Wells had closed the Book of Plurality to read from the Book of the One Word while the blue stars listened? Something simple? That last night Thomas’ weight inside her, turning her round and folding her inwards had made ‘one little room an everywhere’.

But instead Mya would tell Poppy to hang on to the thread of Helena’s greater task, the ‘snake dance of the heart’, and remind her that though we’re all at sea Constantine had seen a great flame in the sky. His vision of the eight-spoked wheel, the monogram of Christ, had convinced him to be awake and attack the decadent crumbling Rome.

She’d also tell her that with his chronometer the Royal Lord of the Axis - that was Turn - could measure the escapement of the crew’s longitudinal position from true time so they need never run aground against rocks again. Not that they could still run up against a thing that couldn’t be measured.

Poppy was discharged from the hospital which she said smelt of witch hazel mixed with overcooked cabbages and ketchup. She sold clothes in a charity shop, then cleaned cages in a cattery, but would often ring in sick having drunk too much the night before. The people of Mersea were agog as she staggered towards the off-licence. There goes the wino they’d say.

Finally she was found further south wandering the streets of Cliff in her white nightgown so they took her back to the place where the smells of antiseptic and ketchup waited lingering in air despite the open windows. You’re safe with us, the old ladies of whom she’d become one, had said.

Months after Poppy got out of hospital again she’d turn up at Mya’s house, bottles clanking in a Victoria wine bag, a stench of seaweed wafting out from under wild matted hair, and collapse on the bed laughing light-heartedly before passing out. Turn told Poppy she couldn’t live with him if she touched a drink before midday. She did so he sent her to live in a caravan on his land above a rockery of lamb’s tongues and primroses that slid gently downward towards reeds carpeting the half-land right out to the estuary. Mad squares, silver grey of soft furry lamb’s tongues leaves and yellow of primroses, chequered her walls.

Madness chequered her people said, but they didn’t know madness informed her. Once when scuttling among rock and marsh, her red hair a Magdalene slogan brandished against reeds, a boot got stuck. Days later when the waters rose it could still be seen rising diagonally like a sodden log from the marsh. Though it was Mya lying beside Thomas, her womb a lake filling with desire faster than water between lock gates, it was Poppy who told Turn that Magdalene was made of flesh and blood. She showed him a picture of Titian’s Magdalene with unkempt hair, outstretched hand, head lifted in adoration, nakedness clothed with cascades of hair. No repentant whore she but dramatic, urge-to-life woman who ‘loved much’ and lived her agony in contrast to the Virgin’s lifeless faint.

Turn asked her to stop tormenting him. She said she didn’t mean to, “Though I have red hair I can only hear the Madonna but have to drink to keep her voice at bay,” she said the day she was carted off to hospital again.

Mya and Thomas took their journey into the Fleet one step at a time. Leaving the mast of the stink pipe on a cold January day, they plummeted away from roads in Camden Town parallel to where Rimbaud had stayed with Verlaine, and where the Fleet was said to be submerged in 1812. In an oasis of elevated treetops stood St Pancras Old Church where Constantine had brought Helena, and where Chatterton at seventeen, driven by some dark Masonic enchantment had fallen into an open grave three days before he died. William Blake on the other hand might have wandered through the surrounding fields sifting bleakness through his imagination, separating fine flour from husk in minute lines of engraving, transfiguring this place into fluorescents of unearthly moss greens.

Startled by emerging too quickly into roaring traffic they dived down again like foraging ducks, bottoms up in the water, to canals taking them to the other side of Kings Cross by way of a nature park and a gasholder; then passing under York Way and Caledonian Road popped up again like the same foraging ducks taking a breather. The southern curve of Keystone Crescent would’ve fitted into its northern if pushed - like Thomas’ hand clamped tightly over Mya’s. Down the King’s Cross Road where Granville Square had once stood on the banks of the Fleet valley a cold wind blew Thomas’ hat off. Rushing men in long black coats pulled large lapels over their chests in defence against raw wind which had once blown chilly off water. With Mya mostly tucked under Thomas’ arm to protect them both from the chill forgotten episodes in their lives came alive again in the telling as they walked and most nights saw them caressed together by the velvet-gloved dark. Not so Poppy into whose already burdened heart the poet had thrown wastelands.

For the mythic river was rife with real waste. Dirty, violent and chaotic, inferno of Pope’s hypocrites, Hogarth’s Bedlam, peopled by the lonely, the poor, the drunk, the suicidal or insane, it was so foul it eclipsed the four rivers of Hades. Though fallen women no longer leered by fallen buildings on street corners at men with the long black coats and large lapels Mya and Thomas shivered in the cold. Office workers trapped by concrete buildings down Bear Lane puffed quickly at cigarettes and watched the smoke billow away on blasts from air-conditioning fans.

Not only was Turn’s metaphorical, lost, sacred River duplicitous Mya must tell Poppy, but falling to oblivion at Mount Pleasant the Fleet full with subterranean pigs, green slime, dog-flesh and typhoid had wound as a sewer under Saffron Hill. Its slaughterhouses and tanneries from Gaggeswell Brook had turned the monks at Blackfriars water’s red, its stench overcoming incense burnt at mass. Finally its rancid, foetid gasses had burst into the street and the underground ditch had blown up, sweeping away Clerkenwell poorhouses like cardboard boxes in a tidal wave of sewage. A Thames steamboat had smashed against Blackfriars Bridge denting like a tin. Poppy’s sunship had been carried downstream by a sewer.

Long before December Poppy was out of hospital again. The father Turn usually spent Christmas with had died after an attack of angina while mowing the lawn. About to spend Christmas with Turn Poppy had a massive haemorrhage in her throat instead. Her liver had gone. She spent her first Christmas ever with Turn alright, but they were in hospital. They said it was her last.

Sitting in a pool of sunlight against white puffed up cushions Poppy looked regal now in her hospital bed not mad. She talked of a sunny room in a granite house on a road that ran straight off the sea from Portabello outside Edinburgh. Here she’d been brought up with the mother who’d said that though relations with men were unpleasant they were necessary for purposes of procreation.

In their recreation Mya and Thomas had looked for the point where the Fleet entered the Thames many times. It had to be low tide before they could finally find the dark shape of its arch by Blackfriars Bridge. Just a hole in the brick work. A dark passage flowing into the Thames. Had the voice of Poppy’s mother still not be making dirty with warnings against the flesh, Mya could have told Poppy the passages we forge should be lined with moss and velvet, us daring the incarnation every night and seeing in the rosy-fingered dawn.