Author: Ellen Bell

He went to the coffee shop without me. “I’ve sad news for you,” he said when he called to say where he was sitting and to tell me who he’d spoken to and who had made him his coffee. “The wedding is off,” he said, “Posh and Becks have split up, and apparently she’s going round telling everyone that he hit her.” I am sorry. They both deserve something like happiness. And it’s hard to be in a small town when something they’ve puffed up with hopes and dreams and all that fairytale detail is punctured. I am sorry for him mostly. But it doesn’t sound like anyone he spoke to was laughing. “It’s more likely that she hit him,” Jack Russell’s mum said.

They talked about the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. She was almost thirteen at the time, he was six. They had no TV, no one did back then, at least not here. So there were no moving pictures, no real focus, other than the ‘street-party’ that was held in someone’s garage. She remembered it being a dull day. Neither of them could remember what day of the week it was. Apparently someone gave her a coach and horses as a souvenir. She kept it for some time. They had jelly and sandwiches and the women of the street served them the food. He remembers the event through the photos he saw, and kept pouring over, in the magazines from the time. It seems that that was enough to cement it in his mind. And hers. I do like to hear them talk about such things. A life lived before me.

It was a gentle morning as I walked. No wind at all. I was tired and walked slowly, seeing things with more clarity, drinking it in. The lights around the marina, blue against the black, are a comfort in the still springtime morning dark. There were lights shining from a small fishing boat too. It was moored on the far side. I could see two men moving around and in and out of the boat. Perhaps they’d been fishing all night and were bringing in their catch. They worked in silence, companionable, knowing each other and the separate tasks they had to do, always did.

As I walked towards the station this morning I watched as a great juggernaut made its way towards me. It was like some kind of dragon, its lights appearing in the misty, grey dark to be of fire. It came slowly but steadily. A huge thing. It turned at the roundabout, crossing in front of me on its way to B&Q possibly or Lidl in the retail park. Brand-spanking new, its cab and wagon gleamed white. Emblazoned on its side was a patterning of what looked like pink flowers but when I peered closer I saw that they were pegasusi or winged horses. Pink winged horses. PRETTY LITTLE THING it read. Perhaps it was a lorry-load of ‘My Little Ponys’ – a job lot possibly. As a child she certainly would’ve been delighted. Oh, the pride she took in combing that plastic monstrosity’s mane. Over the arch of the cab it read – DELIVERING HAPPINESS.

I had one the other night. It was quite early on, though perhaps being an early to bed kind of being, for me it wasn’t. I had two of practically the same dream one after the other, or so it seemed to me. Something or someone was at the front door. (Thinking back to it now, and I can see the images of it very clearly, it must have been our front door here.) They were going to come in. I didn’t see them but I knew I was terrified of either them or what they represented and I was rushing, pawing, scrabbling up the stairs to escape them. And I was screaming or trying to. The stairs felt enclosed like the set of steps in our farm in Lancashire, or indeed the ones we have here, a narrow tunnel of a space. My screams came out as animal noises, begun in the throat as moans but unable to be fully articulated. I tried and tried again. I think it was the huge effort that this took that eventually woke me. It was only 9.15pm.

We talk as she does my feet. Our words are cast outwards from our mouths to the sound of the pick-picking of her scalpel blade against my sole. I watch her as she works and talks as my discarded skin falls onto her plastic apron. She does most of the talking. I feed her discourse with questions which she takes up happily. We do we talk of? Her heart, her children, the painting of the shop, her husband and how he wanted to be an auctioneer. That leads us to talk of auctions and how she went in search of a small Moorcroft piece. “The auction turned out to be held in someone’s back barn. It was freezing, everyone else had blankets. And there was no coffee.” The Moorcroft was going for £500, and way beyond her affording at the time, she said. What then? Yes, the Royal Welsh Show. She’s already booked their caravan in. She loves watching the cattle auctions. She doesn’t care for the shops. She’ll sit for hours looking at the cows, the bulls. She has a favourite spot. Then she told me of her daughter almost breaking her neck falling off the bull at the Builth arena. Apparently, everyone has to climb it. She had to spend the night in hospital. “She could move her toes so I knew she’d be alright,” she said. There is no real exchange of intimacy. She calls me ‘Bach’ but then most Welsh women do. It’s a performance for her, as it is for me, I suppose. A mutual exchange, a way of dealing with the fact that we are in that little room together for almost an hour. I don’t know whether she likes me. It doesn’t matter. I see her struggles to be something, to match her father, her brother. There is spikiness and pain, I think. She removes some of the discomfort from my feet, though not all. But she isn’t as loving as she is, she has less to give, I suspect. She isn’t warm, and yet the other, she’s a performer too.

I will mark her day. Shall I write the envelope in capitals so that she will at least open it?

Do you think less of me? he asked. No, I said. How could I? He is my love.

I was outside drawing when he got back from his walk. I saw his head first as he climbed up the back lane hill. I fell, he said as he approached. Apparently he’d caught his shoe on the edge of the kerb as he came out of the avenue and went, as he said, “arse over tit”. He thought he might have grazed his knee but there were not cuts. He was just shaken. He laughed later when he recounted it all to his sister on the phone, particularly when he was describing the rather large woman on the bench opposite who saw him fall but clearly dithered as to whether to get up and give him assistance. Are you OK? she asked, eventually, as he just about managed to get himself up. Poor love. I wish I’d been with him. It’s the humiliation, he said to his sister, who readily concurred, and the struggle to get yourself up again. To this she also agreed, knowing it all too well.

I haven’t been able to go and draw in the coffee shop for some time now. I miss seeing the familiar faces. He tells me about the ‘goss’ as he and his sister call it. ‘Posh and Becks’, as some of the regulars in the coffee shop refer to them, are still together and seemingly happy. He bumped into them on the Prom and she asked him his name. He, in turn asked her hers. “I’ve just been writing them in the sand,” she told him. Ah, how lovely, I said, when he told me. That’s just what I said, he replied. I’m happy for them. So what if people think its doomed. They are taking some sort of happiness for themselves. And that’s good enough. Bless them, both.

I love these still mornings. And with no chance of rain. I walk lighter. The students are back. I see evidence of their pre-exam revelling through the kitchens in the various halls (though more like houses) of residence along the Prom, in the bottles of spirits, alco pops and beer crowding the table tops, the disturbed chairs and unwashed dishes. I hear them too. Shouts echo across the town from open windows, taxi ranks and this morning from halfway up Penglais Hill. It’s like we live in a parallel universe. I watched two boys pour out of a taxi outside a house on Northgate Terrace. They walked a few steps then crashed into one of the front doors shouting. The door opened and they were soon inside. It’s the noise they make. It shatters my calm as I walk. Earlier I’d seen a lone skateboarder along Terrace Road. All in black, he sped along, head down, no eye contact. There was that noise too, the sound of small wheels on grainy tarmac. A pulling sound. I brings me back to the nowness, and out of my over-thinking head. Not a bad thing, I suppose. The birds are noisy too. But I love their calls. I walk further just to extend the song.

There was a beautiful star-lit sky as I walked this morning. I kept going longer because it was so beautiful. No moon, just stars. And a few seagulls ripping open bin bags and flapping over dustbins – well, it is Tuesday, bin day and they are creatures of habit. I love the peace of being out there. The sea was as gentle as a millpond despite the east wind. I feel better today. He said it wasn’t so bad after all. And there was calm in that. He is so kind. He said he’d read it twice over last night. A few favourites will be ‘murdered’ in the process but I have to accept that. I just want it to be right. And compelling. It hurts to do things badly.

I think about him in that prison. Twenty-five years. And he was so brave going back to Russia. Ah, my heart bleeds for them, the fighters, the courageous, those who put their lives on the line for others. I am not so brave, my interventions are tiny ones. Tiny. May there be relief for them all. If not now, soon. x

Reading about dementia is a moving experience, and frightening. one. Our brains are such fragile things and yet they hold the whole of us. Without them we are nothing. No thing. Nothing. Sally Magnusson writes about her mother’s Alzheimer’s which seems to be a kind of loss of normal wiring, every thing becomes a mass, a jumble, a tangle in there. “I’ve lost myself”, one of Alzheimer’s patients in 1906 said to him. Loss. It is all about loss. And what remains? And then there was the article he read out to me while I prepared supper about the two daughters who took their mother to Dignitas in Switzerland. She’d had massive stroke and was left with no quality of life whatsoever. She wanted to die. They helped her. And on their return the police were waiting. Life seems so topsy turvy at times. And then there is P, and C&C, all experiencing some kind of hell. And yet, some would say, there’s still life. C wants to take C to her favourite hotel. They are out and about in the way that P cannot be. She has lost almost everything. She has her books, and a treasured things to crowd up her room, and her two loving sons. There’s still something but not enough, I suspect. My heart aches for her and them and them and them…..

Those gentle touches of synchronicity warm me. The mention of the word Hausfrau in the book after it was a clue in the crossword yesterday. The turning up of the word burgeon and then mushroom, after I’d thought of using them in my article. Is it a gesture of connection? We know you, we are near you – such serendipidity seems to imply, or am I being fanciful? Who cares?

You break my heart with your toils and struggles but I do love you. All of you. And you.