The Wicker Men

Walking up Oxford Road for the first time in months
My father and I cut up the steep steps towards the station.
We are on our way to Blackpool, where he will go to a meeting
And I will wander the blustery streets
Allowing the wind to ambush me at every corner, pretending
To be blown further off-centre than I am
In solidarity with passing grandmothers,
whose tartan shopping trolleys are full of dogger,
eggflints that chink against jars of marmalade as they
clutch, handle in sinewy hand, their trundled anchors.

We are running late for the train. Not as late as I would usually be -
all pant and sprint, imploring yelp as the doors begin to beep and shut –
but later than he would like, so that there will only be a few minutes between
the platform watch-checking and the train pulling in.
And yet he pauses as we skitter over a stretch of damp cobbles
Breathing in the pub-reek from the doors thrown open for cleaning.
I remember throwing up behind that very bin.
Ten years ago, and the smell hasn’t changed a bit,
Damp hands on my forehead
the self-important whispers of the girls I was with.

He says he remembers coming here when I was newborn.
Before the tiny black-walled club existed
with its cheap drinks, a tear-filled loo with scribbled formica walls
before the baby learnt to swear and frequently left home howling,
those years of him wincing at the smell of smoke and slammed doors.
Dislocated joints had me in a hip-brace for the first eight weeks
Splayed like a frog on the dissecting table
my forcepped head still swollen on one side,
Birthmarked, orange hair falling out in clumps,
In a tangle of metal and plastic too wide for a cot.

Not many photographs of me in those early days
But various stories, all of which end in relief
In my parents smiling as they count every finger,
every feature on my face,
Drop an invisible plumb-line down the straightness of my legs
Just to check. As though making sure that this half
of whatever night-whispered bargain they struck then
is still being honoured. Just in case.

He brought me here, his frog-child,
Before the first of many metamorphoses began.
And here I am now, wearing my grown-up’s coat
As he points up to where the wicker men used to be
Two Jewish wizards, deposed from an old German fairy tale
And living here below the railway arches
in a workshop full of the creaking whispers of their trade
stripped willow-canes, expanding and contracting
from the heat of a stove and the cold of a Manchester night.

In the war
they had fashioned wicker landing-baskets for supplies
Radios parachuted in behind the lines,
glass valves that had to come down soft.
Wicker was the best for this, deftly woven,
layers of it inter-sprung. Willow wands tight-set into rows
the nest of a geometrically-inclined bird
each airy craft destined for only one flight.

And once the war was over
they had re-learned how to make
the sort of baskets they had first manufactured
in the old country. Oval, deep and round,
Designed to be snug against the sway of a farm-wife’s hip.
Shallow trugs, suitable for the transportation of flowers
between garden and vase.
Hampers young couples could pack in the boots of their motor cars.
No matter that the business was failing.
No matter tupperware and plastic tote bags in chic new season colours.
Eventually old age and cheap imports must have closed them down
But not before my dad climbed the staircase to their door
Carefully, one hand clutching the bannister,
the other cupped behind my head
as I grizzled in a denim sling across his chest.

Between them they tried every Moses basket they had
Passing me hand to hand, trying to angle my metal-wrapped torso
Into each aperture. I squalled through this
parodic reversal of my difficult birth
Until, finally, chairs were brought out
A cup of something offered
names and handshakes exchanged.
Dandling me as though my dislocated limbs were glass
the wicker men conferred and measured. The tiny scent of my fontanelle
insinuated itself amongst the proving timber.
I quietened
Dad must have talked of his cycling trips in the Black Forest.

Although he does not tell me all of this, just as I omit
The full particulars of me, the bin, the taxi tipping me out,
staggering upstairs past my parent’ bedroom door
As, their fretting turned to fuming by the key’s tapdance round the lock,
They planned my seven a.m. wake-up call. I do not tell him
About those desperate nights
Drinking to try and blunt the edges of my freshly bud-burst nerves
just as he does not tell me
About them worrying over x-rays, over sores on tender limbs.
Some stories need a little sweetening.
Some stories do not bear too much repeating.
He points to where the workshop used to be. I say only
that I used to come dancing here.
We climb the steps to the station and the train leaves on time.

Later today we will walk down to the seafront as the light fades
Past the hotels in their frames of scaffolding being repainted
Past the drunks being quietly sick in the public gardens,
past the war memorial.
And once that’s all behind us
We will only have a few minutes to look out to sea
To stand together speechless in the ear-clapping wind
Collars up, arm in arm.
I will realise, once again, that I am taller than him.
He will remember that the train will be leaving soon
And that any moment now we will have to begin the walk back.