Strange Fruits Read online

  Title Page

  STRANGE FRUITS

  Maria C. McCarthy

  Copyright Page

  First published in 2011 for WordAid by

  Cultured Llama Publishing

  11 London Road

  Teynham, Sittingbourne

  ME9 9QW

  www.culturedllama.co.uk

  Digital version converted and published in 2012 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2011 Maria C. McCarthy

  All rights reserved

  The right of Maria C. McCarthy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  No reproduction of any part of this book may take place, whether stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from Cultured Llama Publishing

  A percentage of the profits from the sale of this ebook go to Macmillan Cancer Support, Registered Charity Number 261017

  For further information about this project and other WordAid projects, please visit www.WordAid.org.uk

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  About the Author

  Maria C. McCarthy writes poetry, short fiction, reviews and memoir. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories, As Long As It Takes, about first and second generation Irish women living in England. Some of these stories have been published by The Frogmore Papers and on the websites of Writers’ Hub and Tales of the Decongested. She has also written and broadcast as a columnist for BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths (as Maria Bradley).

  She has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent.

  She writes, and occasionally teaches creative writing, in a shed at the end of her garden in a village in North Kent.

  www.medwaymaria.co.uk

  Also by Maria C. McCarthy

  Nothing But (2007)

  Learning to be English (2006, 2008)

  Reviews

  On poems in Nothing But

  These poems ‘...have a freshness, depth and immediacy... Her sequence of poems dealing with a journey to her father’s hometown in Ireland stands out in its roundedness and consistency of imagery.’

  Alexandra Loske in The Frogmore Papers, 72, 2008

  ‘These are thoughtful and well-structured poems, with a down-to-earth voice that make subtle use of sound-patterns and line- and stanza-breaks, and some striking and memorable images. The reader has the feeling of having travelled some distance in a deceptively short and simple space.’

  Susan Wicks

  On poems in Learning to Be English and Nothing But

  ‘So many of these poems are sharp and moving, richly suggestive with evocative details.’

  Moniza Alvi

  Dedication

  in memory of Karen McAndrew

  Maria with Karen (right)

  Preface

  Karen McAndrew had little interest in my writing. I would tell her if I was taking a poetry class, doing a reading, but I never showed her my work, or talked about books with her. Our friendship was based on simple pleasures - cups and cups of tea, nattering about our families, ‘mooching’ around the charity shops of Rochester and pub lunches.

  I haven’t written a poem for Karen, but this collection opens with ‘Blithe spirits’, which Karen would have liked. Karen’s blithe spirit will be wearing jeans, a brightly-coloured top with a bit of a sparkle on it and colourful jewellery, all found in charity shops. She may not bother with footwear now; she was a size 9 and had trouble finding fashionable shoes. Perhaps there is a plentiful supply of size 9s in the afterlife.

  The collection closes with a prose piece, ‘Where the High Street meets Star Hill’, about our last outing together. May Karen be sitting in a cafe with an endless supply of tea, or in a pub, in good company, drinking Pernod and lemonade on ice from a tall glass.

  Maria C. McCarthy

  Foreword

  This is the fourth project from WordAid, a collective of poets dedicated to raising money for charity (to date, over £4000) by publishing good writing. As in all our books, the poems here have been selected not only to make a positive impact on the world but because their quality brings its own rewards.

  Maria McCarthy has dedicated this book to raising funds for Macmillan Cancer Support (www.macmillan.org.uk), the charity that helped her friend Karen McAndrew in the last weeks of her life and supported Karen’s family and friends as they struggled to come to terms with their loss. Maria is a poet of remarkable skill, whose work offers surprising glimpses into our 21st-century lives - the ‘strange fruits’ of our civilisation or lack of it - shot through with meditations on the past and her heritage as ‘an Irish girl, an English woman’. Whether describing a burnt-out building, ‘its curved bones / bared like a half-carved turkey’ or the dream-shop where ‘the skins of outgrown friends / hung on a rack by the door’, her images and insights are always unexpected and original. In ‘Where the High Street meets Star Hill’, she relates how she and Karen used to ‘mooch’ around charity shops, and Karen’s gift for noticing items that she would reinvent as gifts for family and friends. Maria’s parallel capacity to notice and reinvent the world around her in writing shines through in these pages.

  Macmillan Cancer Support works with cancer sufferers and their relatives and friends to improve the lives of all those affected through providing practical, medical and financial support, as well as campaigning for better cancer care. Two million people in the UK are currently living with cancer and many of our lives have been touched by it, directly or indirectly, so there’s no doubt this book will make a difference.

  Buy it, enjoy the poems, and change lives for the better.

  Vicky Wilson, WordAid.org.uk

  Blithe spirits

  Do women spirits glide ethereal

  in chiffon, ectoplasm-green,

  like in that Noel Coward film,

  or do they haunt as when the angels came -

  flannelette pyjamas; half-dressed

  in bra and slip; safety pins clasping at

  too-tight trousers - or well turned out

  as for a viewing of the deceased?

  Do they hobble round in slippers,

  toes wrapped over toes,

  or does the afterlife’s chiropodist

  pumice, balm, remould, render them to dance

  in six-inch high stilettos, forever bunionless?

  May yours be the marriage of voice and piano

  May yours be the marriage of voice and piano,

  song and accompaniment, duet and solo,

  sometimes soaring to top Cs,

  sliding to changes of key with ease.

  May there be light and shade to the music

  of your marriage: the ambient sounds of a film;

  the passion of opera; rock and punk

  and jazz funk; singer-songwriter.

  May you cover the best songs of others:

  Joni, Eva, Regina, Half Man Half Biscuit.

  May you work on your own songs,

  husband and wife, music and lyrics.

>   poem on the marriage of my daughter Rachel Bradley to Stephen Morris, 22 January 2011

  Nice people

  You drip into a puddle, but it’s fine.

  They get in such a muddle and you don’t mind,

  really, stepping from the shower to the phone,

  because they’re so nice.

  You know that it’ll build their confidence

  if you can help to lift them from this mess,

  that come next time they’ll sort it out themselves;

  you have faith in them.

  You’ve so much more than they do; how could you complain?

  Even as they’re on your doorstep, sobbing,

  interrupting the delicto you’re enjoying.

  It’s just this once.

  They’ve no-one else to go to, bless them,

  and you’re sure it won’t happen again.

  I dream of a shop filled with all the clothes I’ve ever worn

  The shopkeeper offers the shirt

  I wore on my eighteenth birthday -

  the only gift I asked for -

  blue and black, like a lumberjack’s,

  frayed threads, faded check,

  detached collar and yoke

  now healed. ‘Try it on,’ he tempts,

  sleeve across breast, hand on heart.

  It no more fits than the jeans

  I wore with it - red-tagged,

  stitched patch - the felt-penned plimsolls

  lying gape-mouthed on the floor,

  or the skins of outgrown friends

  hung on a rack by the door.

  After the fire at Matalan

  Men in uniform lift and lower the tape

  for other men in uniform

  as the crane rises and circles.

  Neighbouring stores close, choked by the acrid plumes,

  bank holiday shoppers deprived of DIY and carpets.

  And those of us housebound by the flames

  walk by late afternoon to view the carcass

  of this giant industrial bird, its curved bones

  bared like a half-carved turkey,

  and inhale charred remains that float,

  then settle on the concrete of the retail park,

  ochre insulation like discarded nesting.

  Close to Christmas,

  graffiti-ed hoardings disguise the deconstruction,

  apologise for the inconvenience, while skip lorries

  rattle the ashes of the pyre through the town.

  Viewed through the square link fence,

  an open space, a pile of rubble.

  And still stray slices of the old bird’s nest

  skim the car park, perch on the branches of the winter trees.

  Missed you on the day it rained

  On the first day,

  you lashed poles to poles,

  vertical and horizontal,

  created your own first floor with wooden planks,

  filled in the cracks

  in the brickwork.

  You picked out the flowers and tendrils

  on the lintels,

  gold on brown,

  and now you are painting the pillars

  between the windows,

  the rounded plinth

  a rich chocolate, the column cream,

  topped with the curves

  of the fleur de lis.

  I am learning the exact length and breadth

  of the naked patch at the back of your head,

  how it shines in the afternoon sun,

  the way stray strands arch over

  in the breeze

  like a field of ripening corn.

  If you would only turn round

  you could see into my house.

  Missed you on the day it rained.

  April snow

  Snow settles on the satellite

  dish beneath the bedroom window

  and on the supine tree in the garden below,

  an unseasonal change from green to brown to white

  since it was ousted on twelfth night.

  You and I are propped in bed

  checking emails on wireless internet,

  browsing the broadsheets that tent our legs:

  a pensioner busses from Penzance to Carlisle;

  Heathrow’s new terminal in terminal decline.

  Later, my youngest flat-hunts online,

  unlike you and I who trudged from window to window,

  and I discover what my oldest is up to

  by checking her status on Facebook:

  Eating chocolate, staying home due to snow.

  We reminisce about coal fires

  that remained unlit till teatime,

  the never-heated bedrooms,

  and talk about lacing our boots,

  making footprints, as I click the thermostat higher.

  Railway cottages

  Once a woman stood at this window

  by a large stone sink

  above a curtained cupboard,

  and saw another at a window

  loading sheets into a zinc bucket,

  hauling them to the mangle in the yard.

  She mirrored the other,

  stepping from her own back door

  with a basket of clothes

  and a bag on a wooden hanger,

  fashioned like a dress,

  drawing pegs from the cleavage.

  They chatted about drying, ironing, and

  scrubbing grime from husbands’ collars,

  as they raised the washing skywards

  with ropes and pulleys to wave

  like flags at passing trains.

  She kept a weather eye as

  she billowed and straightened

  sheets on children’s beds,

  and rushed out at the first spit

  in a race with her neighbour,

  draped clothes on an airer

  to steam before the fire.

  Night watch

  I thought it dead, no sign of a leaf

  until after the tulips had wizened beneath.

  I am watching for a season -

  a new gardener used to paving slabs and pots,

  a townie come lately to a country plot -

  and this tree appeared entombed in lichen.

  Now, as the peonies shout as loud

  as Ascot hats, a sudden budding.

  Half-woken by an alien sound,

  I peek through the curtain.

  The tree glimmers; a portal through which princesses

  may dissolve, returning at dawn with tattered slippers.

  Now, to the daily watch

  of the vegetable patch -

  strawberries, courgettes, onion sets -

  is added a night vigil,

  waiting for the amber glow,

  watching for a signal.

  Strange fruits

  Blackberries shrivel on Cellar Hill

  though a few late blooms defy the new order:

  bletted plums usurped by ripening pears.

  A kestrel hovers over the orchard,

  the gate staked by an estate agent’s board.

  Cobnuts lie scattered like popcorn on the turning

  to Lynsted Lane, by the houses that first broke

  through the earth in the spring, now de-scaffolded,

  exhaling steam through plastic heating vents.

  And strange fruits hang in the hedgerow,

  Stella cans, a Co-operative bakery wrapper


  with orange sticker, reduced to 40p.

  Car on a country footpath

  Twig fingers probe where windows

  no longer wind down. Russet windfalls

  tumble in the foot well, rot on skeletons of

  once-upholstered seats. Long since scavenged

  of mirrors, tyres, headlights, a bramble-clamped car

  on a country footpath, though human-placed, is not out of place.

  As much a part of the landscape now as the lines of planted poplars.

  The brickbat wall

  One side of a garden gate,

  a man is building a wall

  from threes and fours

  and bits of bricks stuck

  higgledy-piggledy,

  tumbling-climbing,

  upright crazy paving,

  a never-identical twin

  to the old wall

  on the other side.

  Can’t get ‘em now, says the builder,

  meaning brickbats, rejects

  from the brickfields of Conyer,

  where men like him once worked,

  so he makes his own,

  with separate, perfect bricks,

  cementing them to other perfect bricks,

  breaking, mosaicing, tipping and turning.

  Years ago I made a patchwork quilt.

  Of old, scraps were clipped

  from clothing, stitched by hand.

  I cut my bedspread from bolts

  of new material, machine-stitched

  strips and stars and blocks,

  perfect fabric re-imagined,

  pretend make-do-and-mend.

  How strange these crafts

  of breaking and joining,

  attempting the random,

  recreation as recreation.

  The old wall stands dark and mottled.

  The new wall a uniform yellow,