17 Section 9 Siren

[This ninth section of 17 is written entirely in prose and shifts the point of view to that of law-enforcement, principally that of an imaginary female police officer. Although anachronisms and geographical ambiguities tend to abound in my poems, they are usually set in a late 1970s/early 1980s suburban British setting. Apologies, therefore, to any currently more enlightened law enforcement officers who may be offended by the way I portray them in this section of the poem.]

Siren

The police helicopter is grounded today and the mainframe in the precinct is on the blink again; the telephone exchange jammed by incoming calls, operators fending off hysteria with quiet trained patient voices of calm.

Women in green dungarees camp out outside the air-force base, a thick wall of police eyeing their chained bodies with dogs. Fighter-planes boom overhead, spoiling for a dogfight, deafen out the chants and jeers, scatter beads, pamphlets and flowers, almost setting off the hounds in their wake.

Steph stomps out of the police canteen and into her car in a blind contained rage. That fucking hand on her knee to start off the day, those looks from the pigs slobbering over their unfinished breakfast of sausages and eggs as their eyes follow her ass marching out to deal with a crank call from an old dear they can’t be bothered to attend, the phone lines jammed, the mainframe on the blink, barely holding themselves back from laughing at her or whipping out their pricks, like they did at last year’s Christmas party. “Go girl!” Boys will be boys. “Don’t you like male strippers, then, love?” the Chief Super smirked in the interview following her formal complaint.

“Cute cop!” a building-site worker leaning over scaffolding whistles down at her through the car window she has wound down on account of the summer heat. She plops the police siren on the top of the car and turns it on so she can let off steam with some urgent police-work justified speeding along the old Roman road.

Steph calms down as the car veers into a lazy suburb surrounded by parks. Net curtains twitch in tidily arranged houses set way off of the road by cherry trees and a grassy verge. Old folk walk their dogs out for a shit. Kids play in the back garden. Telephones ring. Televisions are tuned in to daytime chat, tennis, Australian soaps. Something crackles on her walkie-talkie. Some dick wanting to order her about, she thinks. She takes her eyes off the road for a second to sneer before answering it.

Something hits her in the chest twice like a thump. She looks down at the blood pumping out of her heart. Her cramped foot rams down instinctively on the accelerator. She swoons and swerves at high speed into a telegraph pole. The sudden jolt catapults her through the windscreen in a cascade of auto-glass crystals and the parabolas of applied mathematics she learnt in school. Unusual for a girl to be turned on by that, the teacher noted. Seat-belts are optional for police officers on the job she thinks, eyes twitching on the ground, still— for fuck’s sake, even now—remembering the schoolyard taunts, the hands up her skirt, the patronizing tone of physics teachers, parabolas, ballistics, graphs, the poor grades, the rape, the self-harming, the triumph of graduation day, the shaming first day on the job, the ogling pigs slobbering over their breakfast this morning, this fucked-up cunt who’s just put a bullet through me, the nose-bleed, rose-red blood, the slowing beat of her hurt heart. Turn it off already, will you. Police on walkie-talkies tweet innuendoes into her broken receiver out of reach several feet away. “Show him your tits, love! That’ll put an end to it,” they snigger. She reaches out for nothing and gives in. Worried old dears uselessly mill around.