It was on the floor by the front door, a solitary cherry pip. Where had it come from? It made me smile as I picked it up and held it in my hand. A gift from the gods?
It was wild this morning. How I longed to yield and not go out. The rain lashed the window from all sides and the wind rattled the doors. I dressed for it with two coats, a hat, gloves, thick socks and waterproof gaiters. I could barely walk. The wind came at me from all angles, buffeting my coat and blowing my stick off the ground. But the air smelt glorious. Students were out, first years probably. They reminded me of our horses who’d suddenly race around the fields in the wind. Buoyed up and excited by the gusting breeze boys shouted and ran down streets. There was chaos. Nevertheless I did it, but shut the door behind me gladly.
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.
He was walking along Llanbadarn Road as I was coming home. Well, I say walking. He was hugging his body with his crossed arms and swaying. Where the crossed arms a way of holding himself together, or upright? Was he in fact asleep? At one point he lurched into the road and that falling off the pavement seemed to jerk him awake, at least for a moment. He was young and there was no boozy shouting. He looked tired and sad. Did he find his way home?
I was so dog-tired after our Bath trip and the no-sleep-because-of-snoring-problem that I had an hour’s sleep on his bed a few days ago. I woke from a nightmare where I was being chased by a crocodile and my only weapon was a Dyson hoover (with no nozzle on it). He was making his way around a square cement pool and I was trying to get up some steps to run from him but my legs wouldn’t work (you know that feeling in dreams, like having limbs of clay). I kept aiming the hoover towards him and blasting him with it before I woke up.
So I’m sixty now. Where did the time go? Do I recognise myself? Not always but she is in there, that little one that I do know.
The last one to do today and then its draw, draw, draw and draw…..
It was good to see the sea again, though the wind is sharper than when we left on Tuesday am. The two seats in the Prom shelter now have too permanent occupiers. There is the elderly man with his books and his oh so neatly folded possessions and someone else next door. Man or woman it is hard to say for they have an opened umbrella hiding their face (no doubt as a wind break but perhaps its also a privacy thing too and why not). They too have all their belongings neatly placed on the seat beyond the end of their sleeping bag but they also have a tricycle. Yes, a tricycle that they park beside them with a carrier fixed on its back. It makes me smile. It is so practical.
We saw friends and what a warm thing it was. I feasted my eyes on them. One told me that picking and consuming blackberries in October is a no no. The villagers here, he said, say that then they will have the Devil in them.
I took the coloured dirty clothes out of the laundry basket this morning only to discover, as it scampered about, that the huge spider I’d seen last week had found or made a home for itself in there.
A man shouted at me as I walked home. He was with a mate. Maybe he was drunk. He was trying on a faux-black man’s voice: ‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘give us your money you motherfucker.’ I kept walking praying that they wouldn’t follow me and just get bored and move off. He shouted about, ‘Hey you!’ but my non-reaction clearly did the trick and they walked off towards the station. My hackles took some time to lie down.
We are off again tomorrow. And this time over night. It will be strange. I am wedded to being at home, mostly. And yet, to feast my eyes on that glorious city and those kind friends once more will be a joy. Carry us there safely and then home again.
That piece of writing was a hard one. And now it needs to be cut. It is too long. Such is the professional writing, no room for sentiment. Heigh ho.
Sometimes he reads or shares parts of newspaper articles with me as I prepare supper. Yesterday he read from a column by a sketch writer who’d obviously collected some anecdotes about the Queen, one of which was from a man who’d been a peacekeeper (I think) in Aleppo. He’d been talking to her Majesty about his experiences there and had realised that he was about to cry. She’d clearly noticed it to and touched his arm and then proceeded to break up some scone and hand it to him urging him to use it to feed the corgis. ‘Sometimes its easier not to talk,’ she’d said as they sat there together feeding the dogs. It calmed me, he’d recounted afterwards, and my need to cry passed. I’m glad she was kind, I said to him. Yes, I am glad. May she rest in peace.
We drove there and back to Birmingham yesterday so that I could see and then review two art shows across the city. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Cities are becoming rather too much for me, living as quietly as we do. But we braved it. And people were kind. Apart from the occasional loud beep of horns when we dithered about road lanes, it was a good experience. There was the garage man who let me use his very very filthy loo (‘Be careful in there, love’), the woman in the car park who gave us her ticket, the other woman in the gallery (I’m from Marple) who wrote down directions to the second gallery, the invigilator who talked about the art and gave his opinions openly (he had a Liverpudlian burr) and the other woman in the second gallery who explained the works to me. It was heart-warming. And now I must write.
They were an incongruous grouping. I noticed the girl (I say girl but she must have been in her twenties) first. She was fleshy, rotund and pink with a large round glasses. Her hair had a middle parting and was tied back in a plait. Her arms were bare and she wore a thin strappy vest with a floral design on it. I tried to draw her several times but her head was never still. She talked, certainly, at one point mentioning the castle and stressing how far away it was. The other two women with her listened and paid an inordinate amount of attention to her. What was their relationship? I’d assumed that the woman on the right was her mother as they shared the same build and massiveness but in fact it was the woman on her left that stroked her face and took her to the toilet. This woman was petite, a tiny thing with white hair and small hands. She was the parent, clearly. Had she turned her hair white? The love was clear.
They were swabbing down the lifeboat when we walked to the harbour yesterday afternoon. There were several men in waterproofs and wide-topped yellow wellies. They were even scrubbing its underneath. For barnacles perhaps? A man in shorts and no top was taking photographs of their progress.
It was quiet again this morning as I walked. The rain had finished, the sky beginning to clear so that I could see the stars. There was nobody about and all signs of the rally cleared away. There is gravel on the Prom again, autumn with it high tides is coming. I walk in discomfort and yet I love to be out, the air is clean and full of smells of wet earth, salt and sand. I am renewed by it.
Last interview today.
Was that the tinkly-jingly sound of an ice cream van that I heard late in the afternoon?
