Courtyard 2

But that wasn't what life was all about, not the way they said it.

That's what he believed, anyway.

He preferred people who were the same every day. A job was a very long thing, year after year, and you wanted someone who had a cheery smile, did his hours and didn't take time off sick; good old-fashioned basics. Remember when they found the German wasp in the yard last summer? Ian, Bill, Mike and Tom had been out there; everyone gathered round to have a look. You might say they were only the workmen but they were the ones who kept it all going.

Skills weren't really all that important. There was nothing you couldn't teach a good worker in a few weeks. A few weeks wasn't much when he might be around for forty years or more.

What about that feller upstairs who resigned in his second week? He told his manager that he didn't like working in an office. He might have had plenty of qualifications, but you only had to meet him to know that he would never be interested in seeing a big German wasp. He hardly said a word while he was here. He tapped away on his phone, but nobody knew who to. When someone doesn't say, people don't like to ask. You have to unbend a bit, have a laugh, talk things over with your workmates. You're here for the long haul. That's what gets you through.

This was real life. You come back, year after year, to the same chair. This time of year the fields are yellow with buttercups; in winter you have to go carefully; in August a lot of people are on holiday.

There were no Ranjits and no Polacks here. Not that it would bother him. But how would they fit in, how could you have a real laugh with someone, like when Bill went into one of his rants about the gyppos up Cleary. Our sides would be splitting because Bill is a very funny man, but these people might be gyppos themselves and how would you tell?

defo

Rumour!

Gerrard £35M, Alonso£15M, Kewell £1M, & Cisse £10M all defo moving to Everton! I saw them all in restaurant in Liverpool with their agents and I seen David Moyes in a sandwich bar 20 minutes away! No coincidence I think. Everton will get the money by ******* out the players wives, oh and some money they got from enter the Champions League. You heard it here first!

composition by Grant Jesse

r e e d f r a m e

5. (photo from April 2004, developed in March 2005 – Pineda de Mar)

The wind dropped, the rain scoured away to the south;
reed-stems lay on the tideline and in the space of the relaxed sands
I made my cabin, knotting them 2.5m in the air.
Technically you could wriggle in, like a tomb-canopy or a bird-table.



6. (bedding in the poles 11/4/2004 written 7/3/2005)

I grasped them at the throat and jumping sagging lodged them deeper.
His puffy tracksuit ignores me, bands above the elbows; his eyes

take the family out on the inconstant French lake. Alicia’s bedside,
cluttered with pills; a sculpture and a democrat, even his dog.




7. (parascending behind the top-knot, same dates)

Open the sky as when you look up and your eyes open
from a book you nodded over. Pampas on the littoral goes

high, not very high. Nor that man, babyseat above the surf. Whiter,
ulterior, the camera is drunk in the square of cloud-fashion-detail.



8. (the same – 8/3/2005)

Next to the sea it pressed. Clubbed ascenders
and rude ligature hung on in the way of persons

who happened next, we range widely in the advent
before the next squall for the glister of our reasons.



9. (Another – 9/3/2005)

Let go the latticework and pedalled into Pineda, was an angle
to the shore. You see it is a ghost-house thick with

snaking ghosts; here you can say as at the jutting of a post,
“Let’s walk back again,” and also “Let’s go somewhere else.”