Author: Ellen Bell

He’d gone to so much trouble. I’d asked him not to but I would’ve done the same. I was sorry if our visit had taken too much of his precious energy. The kitchen table was laid with such things. There were strawberries, baby tomatoes, purple grapes, chocolate orioes, raisins coated with yoghurt and bakewell tarts. We sat around the table drank tea and coffee while he perched on the piano stool. We talked about loss and death while I drew him. His house filled me with joy. As did he. A singular, special man. What a gift to know him, to be allowed into his home, his life, however briefly.

We sang on the way home. Bridge over Troubled Waters at full pitch as we came down the mountain towards Tal yr Llyn. Once home I made supper while he read me Carol Midgley’s back-dated articles. It was nice to laugh. And to hear him do so.

A lovely day. Thank you.

Another diagnosed with cancer. Another good woman. No real details, just an acknowledgement of having the disease and getting ready to take the treatment. I’d noticed she’d been distracted of late, her mind was elsewhere. I wish her well and think of her often. I’m still reading Jenny Diski’s account of the same. Her stories of the treatments, which she likened to the ‘clubbing of baby seals’, make for discomforting reading. She died. Many don’t, at least not as soon as the predictions often say they will. Will or is it a life-force, a determination to survive no matter what. I see both defiance and a grim acceptance in the group of women I’ve been working with. Some look so ill, not from the cancer but the poisons that have been pumped into the bodies. Poor loves. I wish her well and think of her often.

I think about his dying alot. The thought of will he be alive in the morning often plays through my mind. It’s not morbidity. I am just being realistic. And open to the fact that he could go, any day. Will you be there in the morning? I ask him when he tucks me into bed. Yes, if I have anything to do with it, he says, adding, I don’t want to go yet, I’m having too nice a time. I’m glad. He is happy. I can see that. Yes, there are the usual gripes and temper tantrums, but they are generally over small things and more often than not about being irritating with himself because he can’t do something or other. I am glad that I’ve played a part in his contentment. It makes a life worthwhile, that.

I seek it, long for it. I am aware that it is within me. It is there, somewhere. And that the stress and physical tension I feel is self-made and self-generated. It is mine. I create it, trigger it. All of it. I give myself pain, unnecessarily. I know this.. All of this. And yet I long for the other. I believe others have, display it. I think I see and am the presence of it. They would probably dispute it. We are all actors. Let it rise to the surface, the fretting serves no purpose. It depletes my energy, hurts my body. Let me breathe and pay attention to the moment. All will come and all will be done.

Precious one. And she was precious. Not for some sweet loveliness. She wasn’t sweet. She was fierce. A fierce force, intractable, dogmatic, sharp-tongued. But also enchanting in her still-childlike spirit for life. She died yesterday at ten minutes past six in the morning. She was still in hospital, though not in A&E. They’d moved her to the stroke ward. Her sons said that she was calmer towards the end and her skin had stopped itching. She wanted to die, they said. Why can’t I die? they told me she’d said, adding that she saw it as a failure, this not dying. She died peacefully. I wish I could die like that, one of the sons said. They’ve given me a key. Go in and draw, they said. Yes. I will.

I often feel like the rooms, houses and institutional spaces that provide the interior landscapes of my dreams are familiar. I’ve already been there, in them, walking through them. I’m revisiting them. This could be as much an illusion as they are. Last night’s space was a sort of restaurant, they often are (is this a sign of my constant hunger or a reflection of my obsession with managing my intake of food?). I was a kind of intruder but not. There had been a tacit agreement to allow me access when there was no one there but nothing had been formally acknowledged. I had nothing on paper. I got in through a backdoor that was always unlocked. The lights were on. I remember a flight of stairs. They were those 70s style wooden slatted stairs (they terrified me as a child, they were so slippy and shiny and I was convinced I’d fall through the gap – all that floating space). It was an elegant hallway, made warm with yellow lights. Homelike. I woke before I was halfway up. There is no fear in my dreams, well rarely. Just a kind of searching, for what, I know not.

I’m doing it in earnest, like a good girl. It’s no hardship. I love to read, to think, to learn and to taste others’ words in my mouth. But I do worry about whether I am reading the right books. Or whether I am reading too much of them. I am thorough. I need to be. It takes a long time for things to sink in. I am not naturally bright. I have to work at brightness.

Jenny Diski was writing about it in her book that I am currently rereading. Uncertainty. Living with it. Bearing it when you’ve been told you have between two to three years left. She’s not good with it. Neither am I. Is anybody? And yet that is the reality. We don’t know. We don’t know anything for certain. Ever. In some ways a diagnosis gives one something concrete. Albeit unpleasant. You know you will die. It has been confirmed. Nothing with save you from your extinction. Drugs can lengthen the stay, a little, but that’s all. You, we cannot be saved. She minded. Would I if I’d been in her situation? Tom Lubbock appeared more sanguine. He didn’t express anger or self-pity. Diski rages at times. It is human. Forgiveable. She wants to live. To be with her poet. What of me? And of M. downstairs? Is there more? Is she right?

It’s an old lady’s smell. Or at least that is my particular association for it (or is it with it?). Nanny C. smelt of it and other elderly ladies of my acquaintance. They’d have it in florally-decorated metal containers with a hole-punched twisting lid. It was a cosy, smell. A feminine, nice, slightly prim smell. She’d just had her shower when we entered her room and it reeked of it. She did too. Reeked is the wrong word. For it implies something noxious. And it wasn’t. It was soft, self-effacing, overtly female but it was strong. I liked it. Though it revealed the intimate bodily ablutions that had just gone on. A sharing of which would probably not have pleased her. It’s a proud thing, that maintaining of femininity, against such odds. She does it well. Her skin is baby soft, thanks to the array of creams and lotions she keeps in the bags about her. She is always neat, self-contained. I admire her, so much.

We went to see an exhibition of reportage drawings by an old tutor of mine. It was quite a trip. And not without its unexpected detours. A small exhibit, housed in a public library, it was, nonetheless, worth the journey. I remembered her through her work. It was all there, that reverence I felt for her courage, her ability to draw under pressure and the moods she managed to capture in empty spaces. She has none of that high-octane self-promoting that others I’ve known have. Though, she and another who I’ve visited recently, are just as talented and brave. Heigh ho. Such is the world and the people within it. A good day, if only to get away. My tightness did dwindle briefly and sitting outside that little street cafe drinking tea in the sun was sublime (no matter that it was the wrong town and the wrong museum).