[The second half of the fifth section of 64 continues to follow Peleus and Thetis on their honeymoon, through Paris, a city that is not dwelt upon, except dismissively in retrospect, on down to Gibraltar. As they move further South, the vulgar free verse tends to metamorphose into gentler poetic prose and to be more infused with my own voice. This section ends with a sort of redemption, as Thetis ‘takes a dip’, a kind of secular baptism, in the now heavily polluted Mediterranean sea that was her mythological spawning ground, echoing the section in the courtship part of the poem in which Peleus, in flirting but cruel jest, threatens to throw her back into the cold Irish sea from whence she came, like an unwanted sprat.

The fish-like qualities and features of Thetis are more heavily emphasized in this section and there is a slight suggestion that she is now pregnant, as the result of a ‘quickie’ on the back seat of a night-coach on the long journey through Spain. This will be picked up (nastily) in the final Epilogue section. Things are not going to end well for Peleus and Thetis (do they ever?), but there is no suggestion that the couple do not otherwise, despite a dismal and ill-starred beginning, live a long and at least somewhat fulfilling life together, as our parents and our grandparents, on whom these characters are broadly based in my imagination, largely did, despite their physical, cosmetic and moral flaws.]

(27)

                                       Nightmare

Thetis starts, her fins twitching frantically,

before paralysis sets in and she goes into REM,

as if she were being strangled by some incubus

or thrown up on deck by a fisherman,

struggling for oxygen through panting gills.

She is not sure whether she has pissed herself or come.

There has always been something fishy about Thetis,

her dozing brain thinks, as she burps,

rolls over. What the fuck. Back to her dreams…

The Nazi officer in his freshly pressed uniform

is at once cool and cruel with his boots and his whip

but that’s nothing compared to the shaving and parading she gets from the Résistance.

My name, she says, as she jerks briefly awake, is “Marianne”… I appear on bank-notes

and my bared breasts are known to the whole world.

‘Vive la République!’ she cries out in an ecstasy of humiliation,

as hubby, kitted out in the clean-cut clobber of the SS

has her ass through the ripped open bottom half

of an old-fashioned French maid’s outfit.

*

“Weird dream I had last night,” she comments casually,

as they mull over a disappointing continental breakfast

and the hotel windows are lashed by rain.

Peleus grunts. He is already having a bad day.

 

(28)

Postcards

Calais doesn’t have much to commend it

apart from the giftware and the hypermarkets.

Thetis picks her way through the kitsch,

like a schoolgirl combing a polluted beach for shells,

wishing she were back on the boardwalk in Weston-super-Mare,

but happy to have a hubby in tow…

Wishing secretly they had opted for Penzance.

An Isolde deceived by potions and pirates on the ocean

between mist-tinged Tintagel and Brest;

her virginity smuggled away in some secret sea-lashed cave overhung by cliffs…

*

Hubby has bought a clutch of post-cards depicting classic paintings,

the power of Van Gogh sunflowers and Monet water lilies

long since sucked out by mass-reproduction

and suitable for decorating walls. Delacroix’s Wreck of the Medusa

incongruously among them: the cross, the mast, the sails,

the wooziness of travel by sea. Thetis catches herself from swooning…

Peleus calculatingly folds up a wet umbrella, like something out of a Magritte.

We are all cannibals of sorts, she thinks,

feeding on one another, eating each other up.

 

(29)

South

As they move south out of Paris, the poetry in motion of the great city of lights gives way to the grass and vineyards of prose. Paris was a bore of bistros and bars and seedy hotels that happen expensively to look out on the Eiffel Tower or Saint Cloude. The ghosts of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine leave a bitter taste in the mouth and make them toss and turn in troubled sleep. Both wake up on the wrong side of the bed somewhere non-descript in the Midi. Thetis thinks it is already too fucking hot by far.

The trip moves south; Autobahns seem to straighten of their own volition, except for the bus-driver union regulation stop-offs at service stations with fast-food joints attached, where the staff still think they are waiters and that waiting on half-drunk, half-asleep passing tourists is a sadly neglected and peculiarly French form of performance art.

France too has its deep south. Land of the lizard, the orange tree and the mimosa… Half Muslim, half crusader and El Cid. Troubadours and mosques rub shoulders. Village after village puffed up with pride for their local vine or cheese. National Front posters, untouched by vandals proudly adorn the ancient crumbling walls of aqueducts. As if Caesars and Popes had only recently scorched the earth here and the locals are still keen to please.

Crossing the border into Spain, there are still armed guards milling around, as if the Second World War were still not over, Spain still neutral, Vichy France still a firm outcrop of the axis of evil of that age. The toll-booth is the last refuge of a bitter little Hitler, waving you reluctantly through.

The coach moves through most of Spain by night, skipping Guernica and the Basque country. The New Guggenheim crouches sleepily in the dark, like a toad or a turd, as Peleus snores and the coach roars by. The hills are so high they make ears pop as the vehicle descends hastily from barren plateau to orange-tree-lined seaside. Peleus and Thetis have a quick fuck in the dark of the back seat, before stopping off at dead of night in Toledo for burgers and beer as the drivers sip coca cola and mock Moroccans dumping rubbish under the wheels.

Gibraltar comes as a relief. They can catch up on the gossip in the Sun and get a decent bag of fish and chips, as they watch Africa shimmering in the distance across the straits.

Ceuta, with its refugees clambering desperately onto boats. Bodies already floating in the blue waters. Thetis titillated by the latest gossip, Peleus gawping at tits.

A mosaic in the hotel lobby shows a bull dragging a virgin onto these cool and fertile shores, as if it were a tacit advert for sex traffickers.

Bare-breasted and burkini-clad women jostle for a place on the sunbeds.

Thetis takes a dip in the vast blue warm calm enclosed sea fed by the effluent of twenty-three overpopulated surrounding nations.