Author: Ellen Bell

I went out in it. I heard his voice in my head. Stay in. Don’t be a twat. But I needed air and to move my body. So I went out in it. It was heavy. I took an umbrella and dressed up in my fisherman’s waterproof leggings and mac and put covers over my boots. I still got drenched. But the air was warm, there was no wind and the sound of the rain on the umbrella was lovely. Just lovely. I wanted to stay out in it but, despite the covers, my boots, were getting more and more waterlogged. Resigned, I headed home.

I walked through the graveyard on my way home this morning. A man was there tending to a grave. He was too spruce for the work. I saw his shiny white Mercedes parked up near the entrance. He had a plastic pot in his hand and was patting, no stamping down the grass around the plot with the soles of his shoes. He looked cross, irritated. The stone was black with gold lettering. He was too far away for me to read the inscription. Was it an act of love or mere duty?

The blackberries are riper along the path to the avenue. I should bring a small bag next time.

I think about loss alot these days. I read about it. I draw it. I think it. I think of his loss and her’s, less recent. His plays on my mind. Why? I don’t know him, not really. And when I did, albeit it briefly, it was thirty years ago. And yet. I do feel it. I feel his loss, or at least, what I think that loss might feel like. A daughter, gone. Grandchildren bereft. I think he has a capacity to feel deeply. And that is what I tune into. How does he makes sense of it? How does he get himself out of bed each day and face the up and down banality of it without her somewhere presence? I read of hers. I didn’t know her. I know a little of her through her writing. She is foreign to me. Her location is not mine. She is exotic. Sharp-edged. Fascinating. I hope she doesn’t lose both.

The moon was a slit, a cut, an upturned smile but vertical. It gave no light. It is waning, dying. A last hurrah. I walked with a longing for its heyday. The wind pushed me back, not hard but insistent. They’ve cut back the lavender on North Road. No more running my fingers through to grab at the smell. The sea rolled and churned up white, foaming. As I draw a figure come out of the darkness. A woman. She walked on. No birds. No sound except for the rustle of leaves.

They’ve taken them away. I noticed there was more light, in the gloom. And no shadows. I didn’t need a torch. That was when I realised. I’d stopped to look. Turned back. They’d gone. The dog rose bushes had disappeared. I rue it. The smell of them was so redolent of making ‘perfume’ as a girl. That sweet headiness that would often catch you a few steps on. Sweetest in the late summer still-heat. Gone. I am sad.

It’s the second time I’ve done in a week. I woke at the wrong time thinking it was the right time. I got up and got things ready for my bath, only to discover that I was wrong. Way out. I’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. It felt like a whole night. Such wrongness discombobulates me. Is that really the time, I kept asking him. Do you promise? The order had been upended. I am jarred, sharp-edged, wary. Is it all this death? There’s nothing new. There is always death, but I am looking at it hard in the face. The film rips the skin off me. It is so heartbreaking. They are lost. He is doing his best to save her but they are both drowning. In sorrow. In loss. Oh, god make it stop.

I picked my first wild blackberries on my way back to the flat. They stained my fingers purple. Most are not ripe yet, but there were a few, just opposite M.’s window that were black and shiny. I had them for breakfast. They tasted sweet, but not too and soft.

There was a half-eaten fig on the path through the cemetery.

I saw the man with his rucksack again this morning. I think he sleeps rough. He walks slowly. A man with no intent, no aim, no goal but survival. I wish him warmth, food and safety. x

We’ve begun re-watching Amour. I’d forgotten so much of it. Though I remembered their kitchen. The smallness of it. The old-fashioned-ness of it. It’s a film that takes its time. As the old do. Details are lingered over. As are empty rooms, dark with shadow. She stands at the sink cooling his boiled egg under the tap. He’s at the table drinking coffee, talking about getting a handyman in to fix the front door. The drama begins when she has a kind of waking black out. Is unresponsive. Gone. You feel their terror. Both of them. Later he folds her now paralysed body into bed. Thank you, she says. Before all this, he said she’d looked pretty. Had I told you? he asked. Love. Old love. Slow love. Steady love. With the promise of loss. Can it ever be borne?

I found her writings through a radio programme about travelling across the US. The presenter mentioned her and I bought her book about the deep south. I begun another. This is her account of grief. Her grief after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Her writing is raw. There is no soft edges, no sentiment. It cuts. She is cut and we are cut. It is good. It is very very good.

It was her funeral yesterday. Tears came when her four sons wheeled her wicker coffin into the church. I miss her. But mostly its the sense of her being there, hearing the click of her stick on the wooden floor beneath my studio, and of going in to her flat to draw and talk to her. She had a long life and by all accounts a full one. I believe she was happy to go to her rest. I wish her peace.