We’d just got back home from two days of intensive drawing and I was shattered. I saw her making her way up the steps. Let her go past, I said, I’ll wait in the car. It seems churlish but sometimes I just can’t manage to engage with our neighbours. However, as I opened our shared hallway door there she still was, hovering.
She’s a force, even at 103 or is it 104? I’m a little scared of her. We rarely talk, he does most of the interacting with her. I said hello and she raised her face to mine, always slightly quizzically as she can’t see at all and probably had no notion of who I was. Are you from upstairs? she said, almost shouting (she is also profoundly deaf). Yes, I said, and explained who I was married to and so on. We talked about art. Well, we started to talk about my practice but she moved quickly on to talk about hers. She is confused. ‘They are using something of mine, I don’t know what it is,’ she said, ‘and my map doesn’t seem to be for sale any more. I don’t make anything from it but it should still be available. They’re waiting for me to die, I suspect.’ I have a vague idea of what she’s talking about (entirely self-taught, she took up book illustration in her 50s and did a lot of work on The Mabinogion) and I nod and say ah ah. And all the time I am looking at her moustache.
Gender becomes a fluid thing as we move towards death. Her eyes are deep set, as is her voice and hairs have sprouted up on her chin and upper lip, muscle has gone as have all the curves. She is thin and her clothes hang from her. So what. She doesn’t care. She is in a tunnel due to her deaf and blindness. Her family visit regularly but she must be lonely. I look at her and find my compassion which has always been there. Always, in fact particularly when I’ve watched her walk by and sit on her ‘seat’ in our ‘garden’. ‘Keep working,’ she says as we make our goodbyes. I asked her if I could draw her. She laughed but said yes. Good. I might come to know her then.
The drawing was a marvel. But I am spent.
