"Sovereign House, Norwich"
Why would the Queen need a building
that looks like a mutant slug
had mated with a spaceship,
in Norwich, to store her paper clips?
Well, it seems she doesn’t, and she must be holding
them instead in a lion-and-unicorned silk bag,
because Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
has for fifteen years been a postmodern cave,
a plywood-patched leviathan of an edifice.
I pulled up one of its mutant glass eyelids
and then, fingers gripping the groove
of a filing-cabinet the size of a milk-float,
yanked myself into a room where solids
weren't so solid anymore.
Walls holes that spilt foam.
Doors firing-targets.
Dead bullets frogspawned about the carpet.
Had the Queen’s own frogs leapt around
these corridors, spraying the words “room clear”
on walls after stabbing them to dust-coughing death
with a sledgehammer and a breath
of royal gunfire?
A blue biochemical bodysuit adorned
the floor outside a paper-storage cupboard,
limbs splayed like a chalk outline.
Sun-bleached little cardboard signs jabbered
“Occupants evacuated. All suspicious items
removed” in Cold War writing.
Evacuated how? With boots in their scrotums?
And then – what in the Queen's name was this? –
a room full of rickety hospital
beds. A key with a tag saying “Biological
Anatomy – Annie”. A glass case
with three taps marked ‘water’, ‘air’
and ‘nitrous oxide’. Isn’t that laughing gas?
From a cobweb-curtained graffitied fifth-floor
window I watched Norwich go about
its yellowgreen-taxied mustard-scoffing
springy-diphthong-accented business and stood
wrapped in graveyardish air and industrial hum,
my instinct screaming get out get out get out
and for a while I succeeded in blocking
out the screams, until, fear ticking like a time-bomb,
visions of nuclear apocalypse whistling through my head,
I panted past the uprooted coffee-machine,
weaving round nooselike dangling cables,
back over the mountainous filing cabinet and then
free, safe, comforted by baubles
on the forecourt of a greeting-card boutique,
heart hammering like a woodpecker’s beak.