She had seen you first. But I didn’t know that.

She’d watched you for months now, from the shadows of the trees.

You shared the same eyes, the same ears, the same quick, sharp voice,

and she’d made herself your totem, all unseen.

An invisible benefactor on each lonely journey,

though always your attention was elsewhere.

She didn’t care. She loved you. And in her mind, you were hers.

Even though, out of shyness, she’d never shown herself.

And so it was I who saw her, sitting beside you that day,

as she slipped across the road ahead of us:

a fine gangster’s lady, in her crimson overcoat,

languid steps indifferent to our bus

as it rolled down towards her. She paused and turned to watch us,

face elegant and harsh, her expression unreadable.

And that was when all the trouble started.

Because, all of a sudden, in that face

something flared like a meteor, and wrenched,

and suddenly there came, welling up with a gasp,

a soft breaking sorrow, and a swift bitterness.

And I felt a pistol hidden beneath that coat

being cocked and pointed —

but our bus was almost on her, and she turned away:

melted from sight into the stroke of a tail

and was lost to straining eyes. And even

as tongue found voice and I cried, “Fox, fox!”,

nothing was left but air.

You chided me for not singing out sooner.

You said you’d never seen a fox before —

not though I’d been there half a day and you six months before me.

It seemed unfair, to you. Your happy indignation gambolled round about

till we got to the village. There we nearly got lost.

And suddenly the blue skies I’d enjoyed for two weeks

hardened to a bleak leaden sheet. Crows sat in the treetops.

Caws drifted across the field. We stumbled through at last,

as the sky’s grip tightened; wanted tea and cakes

and a cosy afternoon. But the teashop we found

closed its doors in our faces. Private party, they said.

There was no help for it. We pressed noses to the glass,

then, since we were there, searched for something else to do.

The ruins of an old castle beckoned from their hilltop.

Foolish, bored, we went there. We were wrong.

We dashed about the hill like frantic mice as winds

wrapped coils of cold around us. We stuffed

glove-muffled hands deep in our pockets

and scuttled and stamped for warmth.

You didn’t understand then, and neither did I,

what a fox’s jealousy means. We didn’t see that red brushtip of a tail

dipping itself in reality’s whiteness,

drawing mad swirls. Just at that moment, I was engrossed in you.

Lost in the newness of your land. And you,

mesmerised, as ever, by our world —

you had never known.

At three in the morning that night,

the fire alarm — some electronic device, like no bell I’d ever heard —

shrilled its mad cry in our ears.

Again and again and again it shrieked: someone is going to die,

flinging us both, bodies still clad for sleep,

out into the black winter wind.

Mercifully that was all. Our final warning. I cottoned on.

Took the first bus to London, feeling the brunt of her stare

as I passed into the cold grey wind:

leaning invisible in the leaves by the wayside,

a cigarette’s flick, and a tail, and triumphant dark embers watching.

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