Author: Ellen Bell

She got me to lie down on my front, my face pushed through the hole in the massage bed. I’d bared my shoulders and arms. It was cold. I was cold. She’d arrived late, all apologies. There’d been a road closure. Traffic, she said. The heating, if there was any, was slow to come on. I could hear the water being run in the flat above. The bed was starting to warm up underneath me, but my exposed skin was freezing. All I could see was what was directly beneath the bed, a series of boxes, a Tesco bag and the wires that connected to paraphernalia surrounding the massage table. My hearing and sense of smell were all I could rely on to orient myself. I could hear her in the shop busying herself about filling pill bottles and weighing out ingredients. She breathed deeply, from the diaphram. A small woman wearing a Chinese-style denim cap. Her soft-shoed feet shuffled along the lino, back and forth. The curtain dividing the back from the front jiggled as she passed through and back, a rustling of beads, of raffia. I smelt jasmine, herbs, though not ones I could distinguish or even recognise. The needles pricked and pierced, some were like knives, others a mere sting then nothing. Her fingers were worse. Electric shocks shot through my limbs, my stomach, my head. Any pain, she’d asked. How about here, or here? Two customers came in whilst I was in the back. One for his usual pills. He wanted a discount. She gave him one. Chinese New Year, she said. I give it to you for thirty-three, normally thirty-five. Your tight, Lily, he said. The other man wanted some ginseng. I usually buy on the internet, he said, but I was told that this would be better. He bought two lots. I used to use when I was boxing, he said, in London. She gave me two more bottles of pills. That will be twenty pounds, she said, and repeated her now familiar mantra. No coffee, no chocolate, no chilli.

The smell reminded me of stink bombs. It was sulphuric, a yellowy, slightly-toxic miasma. It pervaded the harbour and then along the south end of the Prom. Had the sea churned something up? It was too dark to tell. Even the rain made no difference. I tried to draw – my lines ran like tears.

It came back. She never went to collect it from the Post Office. She couldn’t have known it was from me. Or did she? Nevertheless, it hurts. I wrapped everything up so carefully. I put a note, a card inside saying how I wanted her to have them. My jewels. Not much, I grant you but mine to give to her. She could sell them, I said. That would be fine too. She never opened it. Never collected it. The bridge has gone. I am adrift from her.

They come thick and fast. First the leaking boiler then the suspension going in the car, and he having to sit there waiting for the AA for hours and hours, bless him. My heart sinks with it and yet, it is nothing compared to the trials of so many peoples’ lives. I know this. And I try to remain buoyant. If only I wasn’t so tired. I would have more resilience then. I think. His comment on Instagram helped. It helped immeasurably. Though I struggle to ingest it. How could he see beauty in what I do when he is such huge figure in reportage illustration? My oeuvre is small-town, the scribblings of a tiny being. I was moved though and thankful. I want to own it, definitely I do. I will try. But thank you.

I intended to write about ten thousand things, the ten thousand things that seem to constantly fill my head these days and that I spend my time trying to deal with (or at least despatch onto yet another list). And now we have a leak. And the ten thousand things have become one thing. The leak.

I think about her and him as I walk. More him, now that she is gone. Her sisters stayed another night. He texted him to say that he thinks that they are worried about leaving him. Possibly, but perhaps it’s also that they don’t want to go, to leave the site of her passing, going, away. She is gone. I think about all that she invested in her life, a life that meant so much to her while living. What of it now? All those relationships, those loves. The instigators, the repositories of her love will continue, live on. Her grandchildren will grow and their memory of her will wane. It is inevitable. We need it to be the case to live well. Her memory will remain stronger in her children and in him and in her siblings. Of course it will. She was a mainstay, a force – of both joy and control. She had will. I think. I saw it. She held so many people. Now they must hold each other. Let him remain strong. Let him see a future. Let him thrive.

She died. She died at about 11.25 on Monday night. He texted him to tell him. She died peacefully, he wrote. Last night he texed him again to say that he and the sisters were on their third bottle of Cava and that now and again one of them would start crying. She would’ve been furious, he told him, that she wasn’t able to join in. I can still see her in my mind’s eye, as clear as day, laughing. We’d sat out in their garden. A lovely hot sunny day. Her hair had gone grey and the cancer was taking root but she was still able to walk and sit and entertain. She’d talked about taking her little sister to school on the bus as a child. She’d laughed about the then fay-ness of her sibling, and how she’d stop to look at every buttercup, “off with the fairies, most of the time”, she said. I liked hearing her stories, her voice and seeing those blue eyes shine with the reminiscence of it all. Rest in peace, dear girl.

They don’t leave her. There is always someone sitting with her. Though he texts him to tell him that she no longer responds. When we were there at her bedside her mouth moved and there were little moans coming from it. Not pain, but a wanting to communicate but she couldn’t, she was too deep under the morphine. As she is now. They talk around her, over her and to her. Her sisters and partners come, her children and her husband. They keep up a chatter, just as she would’ve liked them to do. She’d be weeping though, if it had been one of them not her, copiously. Does she want silence? I would. But then I am not her. She thrives on family, on love, on company. So open. So all-embracing. So vital. Even now. Look at the love that comes to her, that emanates from her. You did that, I want to say. You. You with the endlessly-blue eyes. Look what you made. Go well, my love. Find peace. Find light. Find sleep.

She is still alive. He texts him regular updates, though, there isn’t much to say. Her family is keeping vigil. It is such a loving act. She won’t go alone. He was there the last few nights. The hospice had given him a meal and he had a glass of red wine and Bruce Springsteen (her favourite) was playing in the iPad. He cracks jokes via text. He can still do this. All he wants, he writes, is for her to go peacefully. She sleeps most of the time. I don’t think she eats, drinks or talks or even opens her eyes. He holds her hand throughout. Her son and daughter take turns too. They took the hospital bed and the commode away from the house a couple of days ago. He said it looked empty without them. Every step is a final one now. There is no go back, just this long waiting. A long, long goodbye.

I’d bought a pair of Nordic style gloves, knitted and with several layers of insulation but they still won’t do, my hands (to be exact my fingers) still froze. Am I being a baby? They really hurt out there. The numbing comes quickly, even as I am leaving the door, and then the stinging. My circulation is sluggish. I am getting older and it tells in my hands. The skin on the tips of my fingers crack and cut, and my nails chip. My hands hurt in this cold. I don’t do well in it. Does anybody? Some do. Like the Yorkshireman who used to work in the Health Food Shop (now defunct, the shop that is not him) who always wore shorts and rarely a coat, swearing that he never felt the cold. As my mother would have said, “Bully for you”. What can I try next in the glove department? Fur? It hardly squares with my vegan sensibilities. But needs must. And I do need. Coming into the warmth almost hurts me, the stinging certainly increases. I think of the Bronte sisters at the school in Cowan Bridge and their childblained hands. Poor loves. So little comfort. And I think of her, her eyelids shut and her face with its new mantle of an old woman soon to leave us. Poor love. May it be gentle for you.

It was a strange day. We got to the funeral too early. My fault. So we sat in the waiting room – also the room holding the toilets – and watched the comings and goings of the party attached to the funeral before us, including the undertakers managing it all. Formal, rather stiff men in black coats and jackets and striped trousers. One wore a bowler hat. We heard one fart as he peeed.

He told me that his father had died soon after sicking up some dark, viscous matter. He wondered if it had been the five bars of chocolate he’d left in his care home drawer. He mentioned this to the paramedic. No, it was it cancer. He checked anyway and yes, the drawer was empty. He didn’t push the point. Yesterday he placed a bar of Cadburys on his coffin. Will it go in fire with him?

She was under when we arrived. Her beautiful blue eyes hidden, closed-up. She appeared to be trying to pull herself out of the sleep that the two syringe drivers had put her in. Morphia, keeping her under, giving her hallucinations and anxiety. She has to have it, else the pain would be unbearable. Neither of us recognised her. She is an old woman now. Though she is not and never will be. He sits by her bed, keeping vigil. He wears white. An angel, seeing another angel on her way (and not wanting to). Poor love. Poor loves. The son too, so polite, so warm, so uncomplicatedly good. All of them. I am awe of their love. I weep for them. And shouldn’t have done.