BRIAN PATTEN
Armada

DEDICATION

For my mother, Irene Stella Bevan

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 the armada

Cinders

The Armada

The Betrayal

The Eavesdropper

Echoes

Neighbourhood Watch

Inattention

Juggling in the Crematorium

Stepfather

The Nightlight

An Incident

Ward Sixteen

Ebb Tide and the Sparrow

The Khardoma

In the Dark

Ghost Ship

Five Down

2 between harbours

These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men

The Word

Don’t Ask

Survivor

Her Coldness Explained

What I Need for the Present

The Sick Equation

The Recognition

Dear Thief

An Obsession

The Wife

Hooks

April Morning Walk

Act Two

Waiting

Our Lives Had Grown so Empty

3 inessential things

Inessential Things

Minister for Exams

Tina’s Flight

Devilment

Why Things Remained the Same

Poetry Lesson

Waiting in Macedonia

Khartoum

Lockerbie

So Many Different Lengths of Time

Drinking to the Muse

Circus Act

The Mirror’s Apprentice

Garden Lore

In Perspective

Full Circle World

Into the Blue

Sea Saw

The Brackets

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 the armada

Cinders

You never went to a ball, ever.

In all your years sweeping kitchens

No fairy godmother appeared, never.

Poor, poor sweetheart,

This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,

Is the only theatre-gown you’ve ever worn.

No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.

The drip beside your bed discontinued.

Life was never a fairy-tale.

Cinders soon.

The Armada

Long long ago

when everything I was told was believable

and the little I knew was less limited than now,

I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond

and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.

A broken fortress of twigs,

the paper-tissue sails of galleons,

the waterlogged branches of submarines –

all came to ruin and were on flame

in that dusk-red pond.

And you, mother, stood behind me,

impatient to be going,

old at twenty-three, alone,

thin overcoat flapping.

How closely the past shadows us.

In a hospital a mile or so from that pond

I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,

reach out across forty years to touch once more

that pond’s cool surface,

and it is your cool skin I’m touching;

for as on a pond a child’s paper boat

was blown out of reach

by the smallest gust of wind,

so too have you been blown out of reach

by the smallest whisper of death,

and a childhood memory is sharpened,

and the heart bums as that armada burnt,

long, long ago.

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