The indefinite. He wants to explain. He'll tell me some stories, the poet says. He found a slug in his washing up bowl this morning, the poet says. The exposed edges of the bowls were slimy, he says. And here's another: last night, quite late on, he smelt toast from upstairs' kitchen.
Stories, stories, the poet says. Nothing very much happens around here, the poet says. That's how he likes it! Nothing happens, he says. The white sky, that's a story. That's story enough, the poet says. The grime on the concrete. Thick grime, that's another. He laughs.
'I suppose you go skiing', he says. 'I suppose you going sailing'. I probably sail up to Norway to go skiing, he says. Then I sail back and ask the Danish government for more money, he says. For tax-payers' money to interview daft poets, he says.
Nothing much happens round here, the poet says. Occasionally, someone upstairs flicks a cigarette butt into the yard, he says. He can even hear the sound of the flick: a fingernail on the base of a cigarette. Flick. Once, a workman came over the yard wall, climbing up his ladder on the far side and letting himself down. That was a surprise, the poet says. He was here to fix the pipe, upstairs' pipe, which was leaking into his, the poet's, kitchen.
For a time, there was a magpie who would peck at the binbags when the bin lid was up. He closed the lid. And he saw a blackbird once, poking around in the drain. Oh, and sometimes the drain overruns, that's always exciting, he says. That's always a drama. He has to go out and poke a bamboo stick through the grunge. He has to find the holes through which the foamy washing up water might drain.
Nothing much happens here, the poet says, and laughs. Every morning, the day dawns above his yard and, guess what?, nothing happens. The plants are dying, the concrete is streaked with green, nothing is happening, nothing in particular, do I understand …?
*
Nothing in particular. There was the episode of the underground river, the poet says. He heard it at night, the underground river. His hearing fell through the layers of silence to find it, and there it was. A streaming. A rushing.
He imagined a mountain stream. He imagined a fresh brook, babbling in the fells. But he knew this stream ran in darkness, and was probably full of sewage and rats. He shuddered. There was a disgusting stream running beneath the flat. Everything disgusting was running beneath his flat.
But when he pulled up the floorboards, he found nothing at all, just earth. Someone might be buried under there, he thought of the earth. There's no proper foundations here, he thought. But under there, somewhere, there's an underground stream, he was sure of that.
In the end, the water company came out, he said. It took a lot of phonecalls, but they came. A workman pressed his ear to a long tube pressed to the concrete and listened. The pipe's burst, he said, and then had me fill out some forms so the water company could come out with a drill to see what was what.
Then he marked out with blue paint a square of concrete besides the kitchen wall. They'll dig there, he said, and that's what they did, a few weeks later, when they came out with their pneumatic drill. They dug and dug, and what did they find? Nothing, the poet says. An intact pipe. So they filled up and the hole and left.
'Can you hear it?', the poet says. 'Can you hear it now, the streaming?' And then, 'Of course you can't. You've got Danish ears. You can't hear the indefinite'. I can't smell it, either. Something is rotting, he says. Can you smell it? No, of course not. Well, he'll make me touch it, he says. Go on, touch the wall in the kitchen. It's wet, isn't it? Clammy. There's rust-coloured paste on my fingers, I tell him. The plaster's coming off, he says, laughing.
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