Author: Ellen Bell

Isn’t a drooling. Not like dogs do. All that slather hanging from their jaws. No. It’s more like a spurting, a jet of clear water bursting from his mouth as he opens it ready to receive food. I’ve never seen such a phenomenon before with any body else. He is a different man as regards food. When I first knew he picked at food or left a plate unfinished. There was no appetite, no asking ‘What’s for supper?’, no anticipation of tastes, no interest what so ever. It was the drink, he says, booze as food. Now, he relishes it, hence the salivating.

They come at night, in bed. I wake with one. It’s in my neck. Tension. Fear. My sinews stiffen with it all. And then there is the nausea. I yield to the temporary relief of a pain killer. I don’t like to. I don’t want their chemicals in my system. But they take me back to sleep. I woke with another one three and half hours later. I lay there with it. No more pills. I need a clear head tomorrow.

My skin is thin. Thin-skinned, I bruise easily, mostly on my shins. You look like you’ve been in the wars, people used to say. Yes. I do. I have the body of an old woman. I’m strong but battered. Not pretty. Not that I ever was. A ‘passable’ woman, as the poet says. Neat. I aspire to neatness in dress and aesthetic. No longer nubile. I manage. I have my work. I live for it and for him. It is enough. Till I can shuffle off this corpus. Bless it. It has carried me far. So far.

The sun is trying to come out. Do.

He and I are getting old. I have liver spots on my skin. My arms wrinkle up. My innards misbehave. My bladder and colon cannot be trusted. Nor can his. He dribbles. I try to be understanding and wipe up after him with some grace. I don’t always succeed. Old bodies. Can we maintain our dignity?

I struggle to teach in the afternoon. I am spent by then. My energy is depleted. I am a shell of a being. And yet, it requires so much of me. The group is languid. They are used to going there to talk, to emote, to chatter. They are good women. And they’ve had to endure much. But they are not ready to work. No one is taking responsiblity. The onus is on me and the leader. I’m always over prepared. I think about every eventuality. Even so, pushing towards working is like trying to encourage an elephant to pirouette. I need to persevere, but oh, I could do so much better in the morning. So be it.

Of course, he didn’t come. Did I really expect him to? Yes, I suppose so, at least at the beginning, when I first said that I might go. And then I worried about it. It’s been thirty years, after all. A lifetime has passed. Then as time got nearer, I didn’t want him to. Leave it be. He always unsettled me, even back then. A restless being, uncontained, reckless, careless. I went. And he didn’t come. And I was glad. I wanted to be with the work, alone. Not have it talked through. No. It was better that way. Alone.

I want to be a better person, to keep my temper, to not be childish, venial and self-centred. I want to accept those things I cannot change. And to live peacefully. Do I want it too much? Each day I fail. I fail miserably sometimes. Yesterday it was the losing of my temper when he spilt his coffee and then it was the hissy fit that I threw when I came upon the huge splats of bird shit on my bedroom window. What does it matter? I read de Waal’s memoir of his ancestors and what they had to endure as Jews under the Nazis. Nothing matters compared to that. Nothing. I am nothing in the big scheme of things. And I am glad of it. My head fills on waking with all the stuff that I must do. And I forget the joy of it. The privilege. The privilege that is my life.

Too many nights of being deprived of a proper sleep and I spent much of yesterday crying. And biting my tongue – literally, great chunks out of it. Which if course made me cry even more. Reduced to a child. And just when I thought I was feeling more like myself, I lose my temper when he falls asleep at the breakfast table and upsets his coffee. A great pool of caramel brown flood the surface. It is too much. And then I am sorry. How will I be when his dotage is well and truly here. I’d like to think calm, patient and loving, but possibly not. I will try. I promise.

I’m always ragged when I get back from a trip. Always. I need sleep and the steadiness of routine. My head spins. An overwhelming urge to go through every drawer and tidy it almost takes me over. The dust must settle. For now, just take it slow. Oh, and breathe.

He came back from the launderette where he’d bumped into the woman who runs the sandwich shop and she told him. He’d had diabetes and had been failing. He was at school with him, though he hadn’t known him well, just enough to greet him in the coffee shop. Over the last few years he hadn’t bothered to raise the metal shutters from the windows. He still stood in the doorway, blocking rather than encouraging people’s entry it always seemed to me.