Smithereens Press Chapbooks 'Zero at the Bone' by David Wheatley | Page 27

SCENE EIGHT
MCALLISTER
When I think of Perdue I think of lost and found,
of found and lost. She told me she’d turn up
the other evening in Hull down the pub,
down by the river Hull. Down the Whalebone,
a pint of neckoil poured for her as planned,
the fire piled high and the rugby on.
Here where whalers drank back in the day,
the whalers who would have brought all the way
from Greenland Memiadluk and Uckaluk,
that Inuit couple they paraded like
a couple of freaks, on board a ship called Truelove.
Whalers who would have seen leviathan spout,
infinities of right whale finished off,
flensed, butchered, their mazy guts sponged dry
on the killing decks awash with ambergris.
And then I noticed no one else was around.
Maybe the barman had nipped down the cellar
or out for a fag. I stood and warmed my behind
at the fire. All evening I’d tried to call her:
no response, just an old voicemail of her
reciting that Dickinson poem she loved,
for me to ‘listen again’ to over and over.
‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass... His notice
sudden is...’, nudge, nudge. How we laughed
at the thought of great aunt Emily getting it on.
If that’s what she meant. Now I’m not so sure.
I opened a tin of snuff at the bar marked ‘gratis’
and stood there sneezing away to myself.
[Sneezes violently.] ‘A tighter breathing... and Zero at the Bone...’
Just what’s been lurking in the grass for her?
Where was I when she was... if she’s in... danger...
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