Author: Ellen Bell

I heard their voices coming through the dark but couldn’t work out the direction. Climbing up the little hill I caught the nearness of them. There were two of them, students I presume, sitting on the wee bench on the corner of the bend. One was doing most of the talking and the other was listening, head bent. You don’t have to take on other people’s shit, the talker was saying, it’s their shit not yours, man. I know, said the other, his head still bent. They didn’t stop talking as a I walked by. They were enclosed in their, evidently a trifle inebriated cocoon, and my presence or overhearing of their conversation had no importance. I saw them again on my return. They were ahead of me, still talking earnestly but this time it was the counselee rattling on, in a rather drawled, slurring way. You see, he said, I don’t want to be too clever. No, said his friend, you’re too friendly for that, you like to get on with people. You like to talk.

I’m a little in awe of her. At least I think it is awe. What is she now, 103 or 104? Profoundly deaf and virtually blind she must be cocooned against much of this present world. What does she think about? I asked him yesterday after we’d met her by the car park. She’d been out on her daily tour of the estate. She knows him, though he has to tell her his name and very loudly, but not me. He told her I was his wife. Oh, yes, she said. And then she asked if the little girl she’d seen was his. What little girl? he asked.

I think she meant me, I told him afterwards. Yes, I think so, he said. I don’t know why I thought that. It was a hunch. I sometimes see things that aren’t there, she’d told us, and sometimes I don’t see what is. She is untroubled by this. Or that is how it appears to me. Her looks and her voice have become mannish. When he told her we’d been to Yorkshire she said that she’d been married in Leeds and honeymooned in York. I cannot square the notion of a honeymoon with the being that she is now, and yet she has, or had, five children, so why not? Because she has gone beyond it? And the little girl? I sense it was me. She saw me but she didn’t.

And the little girl? She is ever present and just as scared.

We bumped into one of our neighbours when we walked into town yesterday afternoon and asked him about the building work that he is having done. My guess had been either for a conservatory or a possibly even a swimming pool. But no, it’s a kitchen extension. I commiserated with him over the mess. And that’s when he called me by that name. Mine’s a simple name, I think. Not much room for error one would imagine. Nevertheless I’ve been called by various other monikers. Sometimes the e is replaced by an i or an a or an e is added to the end or there’s an h put at the front. Is it that people don’t listen or perhaps they have never heard of Ms Terry, or Ms Barkin or Ms DeGeneres? I thought about this new version after he left us. And actually it felt OK. A new identity. Why not?

I’d come across David Hockney’s sketchbooks and sank. Other people’s brilliance always has that effect on me. No? he said. Then I picked up. I rooted through mine trying to find ones for the photographer to work with. And they were OK. Not brilliant but they show promise. I think. Then the sun shone and we went to the library on the hill and he was nice and then we had some tea and I drew and then I walked home in the sun. And then we went out again and the sun still shone and I closed an account that I’ve always had trouble with and we walked back in the same sun.

Elsewhere though, people are dying, needlessly. Where is acceptance in that? Show me.

We’ve three long ones. It’s our only garden really, other than the cloth container on our neighbours balcony with our now dying crocus in (the container wasn’t a success really, it sags and bulges – I just didn’t want to buy plastic). But the hyacinths have gone (I’m just waiting for the foliage to dry out so I can recycle the bulbs if Monty Don is to be believed) and I’m at a loss for the moment what to replace them with. However, they are currently encouraging a blossoming of flies. Are they fruit flies or just little gnats. I had asked them to disappear by our return but they didn’t so I had to (well, I didn’t have to but the mass of them gets under my skin) exterminate them with bathroom spray and loo paper. I’m sorry, I kept saying, I’m sorry.

I walked again this morning, early. How I’ve missed it. And the birds did not disappoint. Thank you for the joy of you.

Returning from a holiday always makes me feel like the contents of a snow scene – shaken up and discombobulated. There is to much to put back in place and sometimes it won’t go. And last night I couldn’t sleep. I was still in the car being rolled about. And our neighbours TV was so loud. Waking to bird song and walking in it (well that’s how it feels) helps but the news of what awaits Ukraine doesn’t. Or indeed the news that another family member (though not mine) has been diagnosed with something beastly. Poor love. Poor loves. And yet the sun still shines. Why?

Last time we saw her in the coffee shop she’d been unable to sleep because of her aching shoulder. It’s been a week since we’ve been in and yesterday the shoulder had been side-lined by concern for her sick cat, Socks. She clearly feels it. ‘I’ve had him since he was three months old,’ she told us. He can’t swallow.

We all have them, those things that hurt and trouble us, some big, some small. And meanwhile WW3 goes on for the Ukrainians. Yesterday the newsreaders were talking of the digging of mass graves and the request for UK citizens to offer a Ukrainian refugee a room, today it was the shelling of mosque sheltering, amongst others, children. It all matters. The dying, the dead, the fear, the homelessness, the starvation, the abuse, the frustration, the hopelessness and a sick cat. It all matters. And I hold it all, when I can, in my heart, hoping for a resolution, hoping for peace, and an end to suffering.

Amid all the horror that is playing out before our eyes and ears, and oh so near, there are moments of something like joy.

She was standing under the bridge that leads to the harbour leaning on pink scooter and singing. When I came close, she stopped, picked up the scooter and walked on. Then, as I approached home there was another. She was sweeping. An elderly lady in carpet slippers and a nylon pink and white gingham apron, she was sweeping the pavement and the road outside her terrace house. Just that square or oblong beyond her door, no more. Just that.

We don’t and won’t forget what you are suffering. I promise.

I read novels at breakfast while he reads the papers. There not actual papers but virtual ones, online. I sometimes glance over at what he is reading. Yesterday I noticed the heading of one of the articles. ‘Isn’t it time to start talking about Nuclear War’, it read. Is it? Is it really going to come to that?

I think about all the destruction, and how for the Ukrainian people it probably feels like it has already begun. What can we do? Let it take me if it comes. Let it be fast. I am sorry. I am sorry that as a civilisation we haven’t learnt to be kind. Maybe next time. Adieu.

I’ve been lain on them, photographed by them and swallowed in by them. Yesterday’s was the last of so many. My poor little body has had enough. It acquiesced, breathed in and out as the generated voice told it too. It obeyed, drank the water, filled its bladder and held it, and then allowed them to inject the dye, (‘It will feel like you’ve wet yourself,’ said the girl with the short fringe, ‘but you won’t.’) I was good. A good girl.

He was standing at the entrance to the hospital by a sort of padded wheelchair-like contraption. We didn’t know him but he smiled at us. ‘It’s good news,’ he said, ‘it isn’t cancer.’

It goes on. Women crying through the radio, despair in their voices. They are being deprived of heating, water, food and being shelled as they try to escape to safety. Oh, let there be an end to it. Let their hell cease. Please.

They run parallel, the horror of what is happening to the Ukrainian people, the pain in my hips and the kindness of those around me and those whom I have yet to meet. I feel her heartbreak, she has been worn down by the lack of care from the hierarchy. It is time for her to rest and begin again, somewhere new. I wish her success, though, as I wrote I will miss her.

How do we carry it all? (Though as that journalist wrote this is not about us.) I think of them all day and when I wake through the night. Such courage and such nationalism. He showed me the video of the wedding of the two reservists. Light in the dark. And oh, so necessary in our human story.

One more to go. And then back to drawing and then a rest.