Mrs Quasimodo’s divorce (extract)
. . . We lived in the grounds of the Cathedral.
The bell ringer.
The hunter’s wife.
The Quasimodos. Have you met them? Gross.
And have a life;
our neighbors – sullen gargoyles, fallen angels,
cowel saints
who raised their marble hands in greeting
as I pass along the gravel paths,
my husband’s supper on a tray under a cloth.
But once,
one night at the Ladychapel on my own,
throughout his seventh-hour singing,
I kissed the cold lips of a king next to his queen.
Don’t ask me why.
Something had changed,
or have never even been.
Very soon,
he began to find fault.
Why did I do this?
How could I do that?
Look at myself.
And in that summer’s dreams,
I’d see it
watch the gypsy pin-up with his goat
dance for the tourists in the square;
then turn his disaffected, betrayed eye upon me
with no more love than stone.
. . . Where did it end?
School. Heavy equipment. A steady hand.
And me, alone all night up there,
bent on revenge.
He had pet names for them.
Marie.
The bellhouse was shaking when he spoke for him.
I climbed inside her with my claw hammer, my pliers,
My flow, my clamp;
and, though it took an adversarial hour,
ripping her brass tongue out
and let it fall.
Then Josephine,
his second favorite bell,
keeping open her marvelous golden lips
and let me in.
the bells. The bells.
I made them dumb.
No more arpeggios, than scales, no extensions, trills
for baptisms, weddings, great, happy occasions
Thursday.
No more practicing
for bells on smudgy autumn evenings.
No clarity of sound, divine, groovy,
to purify the air
and bowed the heads of the drinkers in the bars of the city.
No single
solemn
funeral note
to answer
disease.
I saw and pulled and hacked.
I wanted silence back.
– Carol Ann Duffy
Here is a poem from Scotland. An eloquent example of fresh Scottish literature at the end of the twentieth century. Taken from the anthology New Scottish Writing edited by Harry Ritchie and published by Bloomsbury in 1996. Something bright and exciting as it fits into a new year.