Umbrella

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I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man. . Along comes Zachary, along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath. I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man, oh I’m an ape man . . The lawns and verges are soft with dew, his arms and his legs are stiff — a rigor he associates with last night’s tense posture, when I aborted the fumbled beginnings of a non-committal congress. While Miriam fed the baby in their bed hawsers and pipelines coiled away into milky, fartysteam — the enormous projectile retracted into the cradle of my belly and thighs. . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . the Austin’s steering wheel plastic vertebrae bent double, kyphotic . .had pulled at his shoulders as he wrestledthe car down from Highgate, then yankedit through East Finchley — knees jammed uncomfortably under the dashboard — then across the North Circular and past the blocks of flats screening the Memorial Hospital before turning right along Woodhouse Road. Under the bonnet the pistons hammeredat his coccyx, the crankshaft turned his pelvis round and around, while each stop and start, each twist and turn — the very swivelof his eyeballs in their sockets — didn’t ease this stress but screwed it still further into his frame: bitindrill, chuckinlathe, poweron . .In his already heightened state he had looked upon the city as an inversion, seeing the parallelograms of dark woodland and dormant grass as man-made artefacts surrounded by growing brick, tarmac and concrete that ripples away to the horizon along the furrows of suburban streets .

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