The World's Wife Read online

  The World’s Wife

  CAROL ANN DUFFY

  PICADOR

  for May and Jackie and Ella

  with love

  Contents

  Little Red-Cap

  Thetis

  Queen Herod

  Mrs Midas

  from Mrs Tiresias

  Pilate’s Wife

  Mrs Aesop

  Mrs Darwin

  Mrs Sisyphus

  Mrs Faust

  Delilah

  Anne Hathaway

  Queen Kong

  Mrs Quasimodo

  Medusa

  The Devil’s Wife

  Circe

  Mrs Lazarus

  Pygmalion’s Bride

  Mrs Rip Van Winkle

  Mrs Icarus

  Frau Freud

  Salome

  Eurydice

  The Kray Sisters

  Elvis’s Twin Sister

  Pope Joan

  Penelope

  Mrs Beast

  Demeter

  Little Red-Cap

  At childhood’s end, the houses petered out

  into playing fields, the factory, allotments

  kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,

  the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,

  till you came at last to the edge of the woods.

  It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

  He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud

  in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,

  red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears

  he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!

  In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,

  sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

  my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.

  The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,

  away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place

  lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,

  my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer

  snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

  but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,

  breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.

  I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for

  what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?

  Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws

  and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

  which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.

  One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,

  licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back

  of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.

  Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,

  warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

  But then I was young – and it took ten years

  in the woods to tell that a mushroom

  stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds

  are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf

  howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,

  season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

  to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon

  to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf

  as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw

  the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.

  I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.

  Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

  Thetis

  I shrank myself

  to the size of a bird in the hand

  of a man.

  Sweet, sweet, was the small song

  that I sang,

  till I felt the squeeze of his fist.

  Then I did this:

  shouldered the cross of an albatross

  up the hill of the sky.

  Why? To follow a ship.

  But I felt my wings

  clipped by the squint of a crossbow’s eye.

  So I shopped for a suitable shape.

  Size 8. Snake.

  Big Mistake.

  Coiled in my charmer’s lap,

  I felt the grasp of his strangler’s clasp

  at my nape.

  Next I was roar, claw, 50 lb paw,

  jungle-floored, meateater, raw,

  a zebra’s gore

  in my lower jaw.

  But my gold eye saw

  the guy in the grass with the gun. Twelve-bore.

  I sank through the floor of the earth

  to swim in the sea.

  Mermaid, me, big fish, eel, dolphin,

  whale, the ocean’s opera singer.

  Over the waves the fisherman came

  with his hook and his line and his sinker.

  I changed my tune

  to racoon, skunk, stoat,

  to weasel, ferret, bat, mink, rat.

  The taxidermist sharpened his knives.

  I smelled the stink of formaldehyde.

  Stuff that.

  I was wind, I was gas,

  I was all hot air, trailed

  clouds for hair.

  I scrawled my name with a hurricane,

  when out of the blue

  roared a fighter plane.

  Then my tongue was flame

  and my kisses burned,

  but the groom wore asbestos.

  So I changed, I learned,

  turned inside out – or that’s

  how it felt when the child burst out.

  Queen Herod

  Ice in the trees.

  Three Queens at the Palace gates,

  dressed in furs, accented;

  their several sweating, panting beasts,

  laden for a long, hard trek,

  following the guide and boy to the stables;

  courteous, confident; oh, and with gifts

  for the King and Queen of here – Herod, me –

  in exchange for sunken baths, curtained beds,

  fruit, the best of meat and wine,

  dancers, music, talk –

  as it turned out to be,

  with everyone fast asleep, save me,

  those vivid three –

  till bitter dawn.

  They were wise. Older than I.

  They knew what they knew.

  Once drunken Herod’s head went back,

  they asked to see her,

  fast asleep in her crib,

  my little child.

  Silver and gold,

  the loose change of herself,

  glowed in the soft bowl of her face.

  Grace, said the tallest Queen.

  Strength, said the Queen with the hennaed hands.

  The black Queen

  made a tiny starfish of my daughter’s fist,

  said Happiness; then stared at me,

  Queen to Queen, with insolent lust.

  Watch, they said, for a star in the East –

  a new star

  pierced through the night like a nail.

  It means he’s here, alive, new-born.

  Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.

  The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t’adore.

  The Marrying Kind. Adulterer. Bigamist.

  The Wolf. The Rip. The Rake. The Rat.

  The Heartbreaker. The Ladykiller. Mr Right.

  My baby stirred,

  suckled the empty air for milk,

  till I knelt

  and the black Queen scooped out my breast,

  the left, guiding it down

 
to the infant’s mouth.

  No man, I swore,

  will make her shed one tear.

  A peacock screamed outside.

  Afterwards, it seemed like a dream.

  The pungent camels

  kneeling in the snow,

  the guide’s rough shout

  as he clapped his leather gloves,

  hawked, spat, snatched

  the smoky jug of mead

  from the chittering maid –

  she was twelve, thirteen.

  I watched each turbaned Queen

  rise like a god on the back of her beast.

  And splayed that night

  below Herod’s fusty bulk,

  I saw the fierce eyes of the black Queen

  flash again, felt her urgent warnings scald

  my ear. Watch for a star, a star.

  It means he’s here . . .

  Some swaggering lad to break her heart,

  some wincing Prince to take her name away

  and give a ring, a nothing, nowt in gold.

  I sent for the Chief of Staff,

  a mountain man

  with a red scar, like a tick

  to the mean stare of his eye.

  Take men and horses,

  knives, swords, cutlasses.

  Ride East from here

  and kill each mother’s son.

  Do it. Spare not one.

  The midnight hour. The chattering stars

  shivered in a nervous sky.

  Orion to the South

  who knew the score, who’d seen,

  not seen, then seen it all before;

  the yapping Dog Star at his heels.

  High up in the West

  a studded, diamond W.

  And then, as prophesied,

  blatant, brazen, buoyant in the East –

  and blue –

  The Boyfriend’s Star.

  We do our best,

  we Queens, we mothers,

  mothers of Queens.

  We wade through blood

  for our sleeping girls.

  We have daggers for eyes.

  Behind our lullabies,

  the hooves of terrible horses

  thunder and drum.

  Mrs Midas

  It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun

  to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen

  filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath

  gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,

  then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow.

  He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.

  Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way

  the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,

  but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked

  a pear from a branch – we grew Fondante d’Automne –

  and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On.

  I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree?

  He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed.

  He drew the blinds. You know the mind; I thought of

  the Field of the Cloth of Gold and of Miss Macready.

  He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne.

  The look on his face was strange, wild, vain. I said,

  What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.

  I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob.

  Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.

  He toyed with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the forks.

  He asked where was the wine. I poured with a shaking hand,

  a fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched

  as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank.

  It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees.

  After we’d both calmed down, I finished the wine

  on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit

  on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.

  I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.

  The toilet I didn’t mind. I couldn’t believe my ears:

  how he’d had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted.

  But who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold?

  It feeds no one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes

  no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette; I gazed, entranced,

  as the blue flame played on its luteous stem. At least,

  I said, you’ll be able to give up smoking for good.

  Separate beds. In fact, I put a chair against my door,

  near petrified. He was below, turning the spare room

  into the tomb of Tutankhamun. You see, we were passionate then,

  in those halcyon days; unwrapping each other, rapidly,

  like presents, fast food. But now I feared his honeyed embrace,

  the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.

  And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live

  with a heart of gold? That night, I dreamt I bore

  his child, its perfect ore limbs, its little tongue

  like a precious latch, its amber eyes

  holding their pupils like flies. My dream-milk

  burned in my breasts. I woke to the streaming sun.

  So he had to move out. We’d a caravan

  in the wilds, in a glade of its own. I drove him up

  under cover of dark. He sat in the back.

  And then I came home, the woman who married the fool

  who wished for gold. At first I visited, odd times,

  parking the car a good way off, then walking.

  You knew you were getting close. Golden trout

  on the grass. One day, a hare hung from a larch,

  a beautiful lemon mistake. And then his footprints,

  glistening next to the river’s path. He was thin,

  delirious; hearing, he said, the music of Pan

  from the woods. Listen. That was the last straw.

  What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed

  but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness. I sold

  the contents of the house and came down here.

  I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,

  and once a bowl of apples stopped me dead. I miss most,

  even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.

  from Mrs Tiresias

  All I know is this:

  he went out for his walk a man

  and came home female.

  Out the back gate with his stick,

  the dog;

  wearing his gardening kecks,

  an open-necked shirt,

  and a jacket in Harris tweed I’d patched at the elbows myself.

  Whistling.

  He liked to hear

  the first cuckoo of spring

  then write to The Times.

  I’d usually heard it

  days before him

  but I never let on.

  I’d heard one that morning

  while he was asleep;

  just as I heard,

  at about 6 p.m.,

  a faint sneer of thunder up in the woods

  and felt

  a sudden heat

  at the back of my knees.

  He was late getting back.

  I was brushing my hair at the mirror

  and running a bath

  when a face

  swam into view

  next to my own.

  The eyes were the same.

  But in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts.

  When he uttered my name in his woman’s voice I passed out.

  *

  Life has to go on.

  I put it about that he was a twin

  and this was his sister

  come down to live

  while he himself

 
was working abroad.

  And at first I tried to be kind;

  blow-drying his hair till he learnt to do it himself,

  lending him clothes till he started to shop for his own,

  sisterly, holding his soft new shape in my arms all night.

  Then he started his period.

  One week in bed.

  Two doctors in.

  Three painkillers four times a day.

  And later

  a letter

  to the powers that be

  demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.

  I see him still,

  his selfish pale face peering at the moon

  through the bathroom window.

  The curse, he said, the curse.

  Don’t kiss me in public,

  he snapped the next day,

  I don’t want folk getting the wrong idea.

  It got worse.

  *

  After the split I would glimpse him

  out and about,

  entering glitzy restaurants

  on the arms of powerful men –

  though I knew for sure

  there’d be nothing of that

  going on

  if he had his way –

  or on TV

  telling the women out there

  how, as a woman himself,

  he knew how we felt.

  His flirt’s smile.

  The one thing he never got right

  was the voice.

  A cling peach slithering out from its tin.

  I gritted my teeth.

  *

  And this is my lover, I said,

  the one time we met

  at a glittering ball

  under the lights,

  among tinkling glass,

  and watched the way he stared

  at her violet eyes,

  at the blaze of her skin,

  at the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck;

  and saw him picture

  her bite,

  her bite at the fruit of my lips,

  and hear

  my red wet cry in the night

  as she shook his hand

  saying How do you do;

  and I noticed then his hands, her hands,

  the clash of their sparkling rings and their painted nails.

  Pilate’s Wife

  Firstly, his hands – a woman’s. Softer than mine,

  with pearly nails, like shells from Galilee.

  Indolent hands. Camp hands that clapped for grapes.

  Their pale, mothy touch made me flinch. Pontius.

  I longed for Rome, home, someone else. When the Nazarene

  entered Jerusalem, my maid and I crept out,

  bored stiff, disguised, and joined the frenzied crowd.

  I tripped, clutched the bridle of an ass, looked up

  and there he was. His face? Ugly. Talented.