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  What Girls Do in the Dark

  What Girls Do in the Dark

  Rosie Garland

  ISBN: 978-1-913437-05-3

  eISBN: 978-1-913437-06-0

  Copyright © Rosie Garland, 2020.

  Cover artwork: © Evgeniy Stepanets

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Rosie Garland has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published October 2020 by:

  Nine Arches Press

  Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

  Great Central Way, Rugby.

  CV21 3XH

  United Kingdom

  www.ninearchespress.com

  Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

  On December 10th 2018, the Voyager 2 explorer spacecraft left this solar system, and so did my father. To infinity and beyond.

  Contents

  Letter of rejection from a Black Hole

  Trans-Neptunian objects

  Snuffing hearts that burn too bright

  Yorkshire lights

  Making Thunder Roar

  Palimpsest

  Caroline Herschel observes the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, June 1783

  What girls do in the dark

  Heirlooms

  How can a woman sleep when the Master is in pain?

  Eloping with a comet

  The topiary garden

  St Catherine

  The last pangolin

  Extinction events

  The correct hanging of game birds

  You can begin at almost any point

  Wicker men

  They are an oddness

  Phrenologist

  Eczema

  Planetary wobble

  Long exposure

  The dark at the end of the tunnel

  Fox rising

  Quicksand

  Sleep of reason

  Personal aphelion

  Dancing the plank

  Scar

  Self-portrait as Halley’s comet

  Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape

  Dark matter

  Her name means Electricity

  The correct digging of latrines

  Goods to declare

  Biography of a comet in the body of a dog

  Auto-da-fé

  Plunge

  Stargazer

  Now that you are not-you

  There is no there there

  The devil’s in them

  Bede writes a history of the English people

  And yet it moves

  Since visiting the CERN Large Hadron Collider, you realise what you’ve been doing wrong with your life

  Post mortem

  How to keep breathing

  When worlds collide

  The autobiographies of stars

  Bowing out

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the author and this book

  Letter of rejection from a Black Hole

  We’re touched by your desire to join our great work

  of dismembering the fabric of time and matter.

  We can’t blame you for wanting to hide in nothing,

  and note the ways you’ve snapped off pieces of yourself

  to prove you’re serious.

  However, we wonder if you’ve misunderstood our purpose;

  the difference between obliteration of the cosmos and the spirit.

  You’ve been smothering your radiance for so long

  it’s become a system of belief

  that you’re cored with lead, incapable of anything

  but borrowed light, or – in a destructive twist of logic

  that impressed the selection panel –

  brilliance is only permitted to serve others’ needs.

  You have the right to glow.

  It’s not your duty

  to light up anyone else’s day.

  We urge you to reconsider, wish you well,

  and suggest steering clear of holes.

  Trans-Neptunian objects

  Way out there, between matter and not-quite void,

  they weave in rocky gangs. Rag-tag remnants

  of the solar system’s sober gathering, they crash

  each other’s parties, spit geysers of methane ice,

  break the law of what is and isn’t planet.

  They will not kneel in perfect circles round the sun,

  won’t toe any ordered line. There’s nowt so queer

  as Pluto, Sedne, Eris, Thule, Makemake.

  Shoved too far for any naked eye, it only looks

  like lonely. Faces cratered with a million kisses,

  their drunken stagger round the Kuiper Belt

  so leisurely we have galloped from cave to red button

  before they’ve notched a handful of orbits. They squint

  at our blur. We are grit in their eye. Blink and we’re long gone.

  Snuffing hearts that burn too bright

  Just my luck. One seat left on the bus, next to a star. I jab it with my elbow, in case it gets any clever ideas and tries to spill over onto my half. It shrinks against the window, which buckles, glassy tears pooling along the black rubber seal. The star blushes, embarrassed combustion tickling the baby on the row behind. The child gurgles, grabbing for plumes of feathered stuff and nonsense. If I were its mother, I’d be on my feet, banging on the driver’s window. Some people don’t know the meaning of stranger danger. I smell singed wool. The star peers at me, anxious, shaking its head when I accuse it of scorching my coat. It’ll deny everything. I’ve read how stars live off lies. So what about their surface temperature, cores of liquid helium spinning at a thousand miles per second, how they live for billions of years; haven’t they got enough space in the sky to show off how glorious they are? And the eyes. One look and bang, you’re gone. Not me. I know how to deal with heavenly bodies. Stars aren’t the only ones who can burn things to a crisp. I could parch the sea to sand if I put my mind to it. I’ve binned fairy lights the day after Christmas, set out full buckets on Bonfire Night. Diaries, letters, cards, endless boring children’s drawings, all tossed out with the ash. At my stop, I give my sleeve a good shake, trail diamond confetti onto the pavement. There it is, face pressed to the window, hoping I’ll look back.

  Yorkshire lights

  The aurora borealis may be seen as far south as Yorkshire,

  although the display is dull and brownish in colour.

  – Encyclopaedia Britannica

  You think it’s a trick of the clouds, but this is no will o’ the wisp

  that shimmers into nothing; no sleight of hand sleek flicker

  that plucks a penny from your ear while it picks your pocket.

  These are slow lights, sure lights; built for the long haul. Banked fires

  of bronze peat to outlast winter, rusty with the mucked-up

  brass of shuttered shops, stoppered coalmines, empty wallets.

  A flag steeped in bloody-mindedness. The opposite of surrender.

  Steady as the rain that grinds the Pennines. True as the Leeds

  and Liverpool Canal

  with its deep cut through moors marked out with sheep, daubed red.

  It takes less time than you think to adjust glare-adapted eyes,

  relearn the lessons of iron light. Reclaim night vision.

  Making Thunder Roar

  She curls her hair, eavesdrops the crackli
ng singe.

  The tongs hiss, whisper joys and horrors:

  beloved ghosts that redden the horizon,

  windows bursting with prisoned fire.

  She pricks herself into stocking tops:

  one letter, two. In darkness they multiply;

  unlock their stitches, unravel into words

  that itch against the soft flesh of her thigh.

  She blazes story. Shimmers the room

  like the waver of air above a seething pot.

  Can’t square this furnace passion

  with the dregs that rattle in her breast.

  With the dip of a nib, she is far away. Fingers tipped

  with ink, she carries boundless worlds

  in every striding step. Stokes heat to battle

  the moor’s damp wheeze. Blooms beneath broad skies.

  Palimpsest

  Adopted at seven months, I grow quick

  into my new family’s name, all flowers and gardens,

  and me with thumbs that wilt roses.

  I skin knees, scab knuckles, grime fingernails

  and raise eyebrows with where

  does she get it from? Good at stories, I fail

  biology. Alone in my class I lack the knack

  of mirroring a father’s nose, a mother’s chin; can’t figure how

  to plagiarise their features into my own.

  Three decades later, I fight for my certificate; a history

  kept secret from its rightful owner. It lists a stranger

  mother, blank box father, my self unrecognisable, spelled all wrong.

  Only the date’s correct. Birthed on a Sunday,

  but there’s nothing bonny in Blight, nor good, nor gay.

  Whichever way I twist it – Bly, Blythe – the root is rotten.

  I have a pair of parent names to choose from:

  half Sunday lucky, half Wednesday woeful, neither

  the whole picture. A contradiction

  of bloom and blotch, sickness and growth.

  One for each hand to reach up and grasp,

  sing 1-2-3 and swing.

  Caroline Herschel observes the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, June 1783

  It is an o, captured in a larger O.

  Blush of scarlet in the lower hemisphere

  where a mouth would be.

  He drizzles gravy down his shirt, a constellation

  of dim brown stars that take an afternoon of lye

  to whiten. The hours it takes to grind glass

  to precise curvature; to polish mirrors.

  Eye to the spyhole. A flock of shepherd moons

  herd ice into rings of such perfection

  they could wed the heavens.

  A smear of grease on the lens:

  she calculates the shape of lips

  kissing a distant lover.

  What girls do in the dark

  My sister goes missing for nights at a time. She’s always home by the time Mum bangs on the door and yells at us to get out of bed, so there’s no point in telling. Not that I would. I set my phone to wake me at 5am. Her bed’s still empty. I almost fall asleep again, but at half past she comes through the window, gathering her legs beneath her in a crouch and flattening her ears. Mum’ll never believe you, she purrs, reeling in her tail. She takes a deep breath and turns her skin the other way, so hair is on the inside and girl is on the outside. Show me, I say. Her eyes glimmer.

  When you’re ready.

  But!

  I didn’t say never. You’ll be good at it. Soon. But first, stop asking.

  Heirlooms

  Grandmother thumbs the knotted skin above her right eye,

  where they removed her horn. It was a long time ago, she says.

  Back when they wouldn’t let folk like us keep them.

  It will be different for you. Don’t let anyone prune away

  the strangeness that makes you strong. When I ask about Ma,

  she smiles, says these things skip a generation.

  She unbuttons her blouse. The scar where her left breast used to be

  is wide enough to post a letter. I lost my heart to love,

  she says, drawing a fingertip along the puckered skin.

  She describes the crimson pearl of it, shucked from the oyster shell

  of her ribs, still quivering. Did you cry? I ask. Of course, she says.

  A woman must cry, to wash away the poison of discontent.

  She lifts her skirt, shows the crescent stitching

  from hip-bone to thigh. From this I birthed my twin,

  she says. To her I give my aches and pains; my injuries.

  She stores them safe, away from harm.

  One day you will discover your own twin

  to walk alongside you through life’s bombardment.

  Grandmother sings me to sleep. Her stories are true

  on the inside, where it matters.

  The outside is embroidery. I dream of knives

  pricking their needlepoint into my flesh.

  She comes into my dream and whispers:

  don’t wish for wounds too soon.

  How can a woman sleep when the Master is in pain?

  In her room beneath the eaves, she listens.

  Laughter twists up the screw of the back stairs.

  The Master struggles to be heard

  above his wife’s shrill squeal. She knows how men are trapped

  in marriages; how women entice and steal what is not theirs.

  Her cheek beats a heavy pulse against Master’s

  bedroom door. She stretches the small hours

  with the pricking of her blood into Master’s shirt cuffs;

  unpicks the seams of Mistress’s gowns, sews them

  a shade tighter. Slides a curtain ring along her finger.

  The Mistress writes. It is poetry, says Mistress,

  although no question was asked. She heats the tongs,

  curls Mistress’s hair, peers at the dapple of ink on paper.

  She does not need the skill of letters to know

  the telltale shape of lies about the Master.

  All that twittering of the quill, when all a woman needs to do

  is spread her arms and cry, God. Yes. She will show him.

  She will mend his jailored heart. Will keep her eyes down

  and never laugh unless he draws it from her

  as a man persuades a shy beast to his outstretched hand.

  When Master is away, for men must go

  in order to return, the house-bones creak. At night,

  she sifts sugar into the ruts between the boards,

  loosens stair-rods, rubs the banisters with buttered paper,

  peels back the rug and polishes the floor.

  The half-hour before dawn finds her sharpening knives.

  She breakfasts on oats and water;

  doesn’t hold with honey, milk,

  things that distract the tongue’s attention.

  On the driveway beneath the yews, the crackle of rooks.

  Eloping with a comet

  Breathless with forbidden flight, I grasp his tail,

  hang on. Drunk on escape velocity, I boot night in the ribs,

  ride the sky till it runs out of I told you so’s.

  Made it, Ma. Top of the world.

  He drags me out of signal range of family, friends,

  so fast it rips breath from lungs, trousseau from my fist.

  Won’t need either where we’re headed. Shut off

  the warnings of burnt fingers, snapped heart.

  Doesn’t everyone win some, lose some

  in love’s true adventure? Those first dates!

  Snatched midnights, a dash home before sunrise.

  Prince-shaped hero, the size of dreams come true,

  he picks me out of millions. Life from dull

  to dazzling at the flick of his switch. Why walk,

  when I can kick home from my heels, grow fat

  on promises of fly me
to the moon? It’s a hoot,

  a whoop, a loop-de-loop as we crack

  the furnace edge of atmosphere that sears

  my skin to shrapnel. Cells stream in a bridal train

  of blood and bone. Too cold to count the zeros

  that make up absolute. I learn love the harsh way:

  hitch my wagon to a rock; mistake lustre for love.

  There are no battleships off the shoulder of Orion. No

  C-Beams glittering off the Tannhäuser Gate.

  The topiary garden

  She spreads the petals of her skirt, the dress of a child

  two decades past its wear-by date. She kneels, peers

  into the pond’s looking-glass. The water flusters

  with fish, tiny as eyelashes striped with mascara.

  She eases one foot from its shoe. Sticking-plaster unpeels,

  heel wet with a blister’s weeping.

  On the first day she spent all her money:

  Hello Kitty hairgrips, a matching clutch purse.

  Geese patrol the space that is not-land,

  not-pool. They creak, loud as old doors winched open.

  She startles; circles her lips, pats her hand over the little hole

  and lets go her ice-cream. It swims with ants.

  He takes her picture. He will post it

  like a card of wish you were what you aren’t.

  If these box trees weren’t clipped so tight

  they would grow anyhow they pleased.

  Saint Catherine

  It starts as a joke, the one about

  the kitchen and what you’re doing out of it. All smiles. Splay

  of knees, bulge of crotches,

  mutter of heavens, these women.

  Why have a dog and bark for it? Keep your eyes open

  for the tic of an index finger

  shoving spectacles up a sweaty nose.

  Keep running circles

  round their gnawed faith. Jab and feint.

  Jab and feint.

  They will kill you

  for being cleverer,

  worse than laughing at their dicks.

  You know all of that but

  won’t stop. Can’t. You didn’t read the Library of Alexandria

  to bat your eyelashes and keep schtum.