Author: Ellen Bell

There is talk of that poor beleagured country being divided up. A line drawn through it. Just like Berlin, they say. Can it be stopped? Can this madness end? My heart is full for them. Can the meek inherit the world? Really?

I hear the first bulletin when I am in my bath. I don’t want to do so these days. There’s such madness. And his voice chills me. This morning’s flash told of a helicopter crashing into the Hudson river, killing all of its passengers and pilot. A family from Spain. Tourists. Gone. No survivors.

The diabetic nurse said that he looked well. And apparently it was a good session. Blood pressure, pulse, everything was good. I am glad. Perhaps not disappearing quite yet, then, my love.

It was good. A good day. A surprising day. Snapshots of pleasure. The Eames’ chairs, that first cup of tea, walking in the sunshine, sharing practice and then a slow journey home, sitting in the sun, eyes shut. Just being away. That was what was good.

It’s a nothing in the whole scheme of things. A little inconvenience. You handled it well, he said. Did I? I’m glad he thought so. Am I getting calmer, more peaceful? I am shamed by my sometime outburts. I have her in me. But then she was immensely practical, her outbursts were from another source. That well. Of unhappiness.

I forget them. I think of them, grieve for them, and then they are gone from my mind. How can this be so? Those who have lost so much in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, and in Myanmar. I forget them. I forget their loss and losing. I want to hold them inside of me. To bear witness to what life has brought them. Help me to do this. And not forget.

The distress of it woke me. She was a chef, Japanese, and she’d laid out on the ground the food she’d prepared for herself to eat on a black cloth. Everything was white and raised up on little plinths. There were shapes and foodstuff I didn’t recognise. Alien. One of these culinary objects was still alive. A bird. Denuded of all plumage, it too was white. It’s breast had been slit. No blood, just a line. And at its throat was a hole. And it was singing. The sound came throught the hole. I was devastated by the cruelty of it. The bird was dying but it kept singing. And she was going to consume it. I woke with the pain of it. Was I too culpable?

He weighs himself before his shower and then comes upstairs to the kitchen to tell me the latest ‘score’. It is slowing but it is still less than it was last time. There’s a part of me that wishes he wouldn’t keep doing it and keep telling me. That’s selfish. He needs reassurance. And all I can say is that you are looking well. Which is true. He says he’s lost his arse, which is also true. Am I losing him? Of course. As he is losing me. Though possibly he will go first. Today is all we have. No other promises can be made.

I thought of her much over the weekend. I remember her crying down the phone. Incoherent sobbing. No words, just tears. It wrenched at my heart. I’m coming, I’d said. I’m coming soon. She went before I got there. Minutes before. I would not have forsaken you, I wanted to say. Never. I would’ve cared for you. Taken you home. I would.

It was a small thing. A text sent to him to be read out to me. I don’t know her well. We are not intimate. She is hard to know, a closed-off being, gentle but difficult to read. But she wrote it. Acknowledged my claim to be a part of the day. She remembered. And wrote it. I am touched.