Author: Ellen Bell

They can’t do anymore for her. She will die. As will all of us but she knows, as does he, that her time is short. It is heartbreaking. They have been together since they were sixteen. Though they had been ‘joined at the hip’ long before that being in the same hospital ‘together’ since her birth (he was still in there after being incubated). They light each other up. And in turn all those who have the privilege of being around them. She is a joy. Her eyes carry sadness, I’ve always seen it, but despite this the joy still spills out of her. And there are her children. They all love her. And naturally so. Such warmth. Such lovingness and yet her mother was such a tight-strung, woman. What can you say but hope that there is grace in her passing, as little pain as possible and time for them all to say their goodbyes and to laugh as much as they can in those brief periods of forgetting? May they be many. God bless you.

He told us of his shed. He’d been talking about the gardening that he intended to do this weekend, and how he was going to get his power hose out. “It’s brilliant,” he said, as proud as punch. Then he mentioned how he’d gone into his shed one morning after not having opened it since the onset of winter only to find a great mound of earth on its floor. I asked if it was mole. “No, a mole would be too small to make that kind of heap,” he said, “it was some kind of burrowing animal, I thought it might be a badger.” A friend who helped restore the floor of the shed to its former glory suggested that it might have been a polecat. Polecat is another name for a stoat, I think. What would it have been after? “My nuts,” he said and then laughed that laugh of his.

It had been a while since we’d been in the coffee shop and there was a lot of catching up to do. The manager had been off with a stomach bug, as had her second in command. After telling us of her projectile vomiting and diaorrhea in rather too much detail, she slipped in the fact that her assistant manager hadn’t been able to cover as he’d had to go to the vets to get his lizard’s tail amputated. He expressed surprise at such an unusual pet. She was unphased, saying: “He’s got five,” and then proceeded to list the types, telling him that he keeps them in five huge aquaria on high shelves fixed to the walls. It makes sense. He’s an eccentric man. And after all why not, though one can’t help thinking where those lizards would rather be than in those glass cages…..

She texted me at 6.00 am this morning, apologising for not doing so earlier. I took the opportunity to ask if I could draw her. I’ve heard nothing since. Do I ask too much?

Catriona Young one of the presenters on Radio 3’s Through the Night played Shubert’s song, which I believe (I don’t know any German) means of water you sing. It prompted me to think about water as I walked by the sea this morning, the rythmic noise of it, the weight and crash of it. Though not today. Today it was calm. The Prom has been swept and I managed to hoik my legs up to kick the bar. The moon, though not yet full, shone white across the stretch of ocean. The air felt still, despite the gentle wind. And there was no one about, other than the man sleeping in the Prom shelter, his belonging all bagged-up on the bench beside his recumbent body. It’s a private time for me. I like it and need it, even if getting myself out there is more problematic than it used to be. I think about those I love and the strangers I feel such compassion for, a feeling I often am at a loss to know what to do with. I am tired this morning and my back is still horny with tension. It will fall away, eventually.

I often ask him to tell me about what he has read in the papers while I prepare supper. Sometimes he reads part or the whole of an article. Yesterday he read a piece that appeared, at least initially, to be about the death of Paul O’Grady and his alter ego Lily Savage but it was in fact about Dan Leno the first ‘proper’ drag artist. He, like O’Grady, was loved by royalty and gained international fame. It was a lovely essay. Then he read from Matthew Paris’s article about the huge losses on both sides in the Ukranian War. It was a moving text. It stopped me still. The callousness of Putin’s tactics are too alarming reminiscent of the cavalier way young men where offered up as cannon-fodder in WW1. Oh, have we learnt nothing?

The call he makes to her afterwards is lighter, though not really. Her tiredness and resignation comes through the line. She tries, as does he, but the heaviness is there. We ask about her Chair Ballet. Apparently it is only once a week. They offer other exercise classes such as one called ‘Oomph’ but she doesn’t like the music. It seems that Chair Ballet is just that, and that they strike their poses (though inevitably some fall soon asleep) to actual ballet music.

I am heavy with compassion for each and everyone of these souls. It leaks from me.

She started to cry. She cries like her mother used to, almost noiselessly and certainly unexpectedly. I pricked her with my question. I shouldn’t have said anything but I wanted to stand in her shoes, to feel her frustration and indeed her sadness. She talked of the humiliation of relying on others to do everything from going to the toilet to dressing. She is bed-bound, chair-bound, room-bound. And there she was just before her fall walking, albeit with an aid, around the corridors, and outside if the weather was fine, sometimes four times a day. Poor love. Well, might she cry. But she doesn’t. So stoic, so strong, so brave. What is your perfume? I asked her. Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant, she said. A feminine woman. A pretty woman whose hands, now bent and swollen are forever turning over and over, stroking and rubbing and seemingly searching the air for something, what? Another life now gone. We talk about the characters of 44 Scotland Street. It’s a lightness we can share.

She needs a name. It’s my way of making machines mine. We are slowly getting used to each other she and me (is that right, or should it be I? – he usually picks me up on such grammatical issues). I am slow and she is fast. I am old and she is new. I miss my old laptop, though her languour was beginning to get under my skin, but I will grow to love this one. She’s an HP laptop and I spent my morning walk trying to think up names for her and chuckling to myself as I did so. She really needs a thrusting name but I can’t bring myself to give her one. So old-fashioned it will be. Hilda. I like that name, it’s steady, grounded, a little strict but also sweet-tasting. Then the surname. She needs one. Definitely. I came up with Primly as I walked from the Perygyl and along South Marine. Hilda Primly it is. Welcome. Work well my love and I will care for you to my utmost. E x

She is sounding better. Her voice is stronger when she answers the phone to him. Though the sprain in her chest is clearly giving her some discomfort. She is a stoic, a non-complainer, nevertheless one gets a real sense of the restrictions the Home imposes on her autonomy. They are well meaning, clearly, but its the little things like a decent cup of tea or coffee, “theirs is too bitter”, and a hot water bottle to put on her chest to ease the pain “they don’t like hot water bottles here” and the ability to take two paracetamols rather than just the one they are currently giving her. Oh, I know it must be all about health and safety and they’ve countless residents to attend to so there’s little time to sate personal whims and foibles, but I feel for her. She is chair-bound, even reaching for a change of book is an issue. Though she did manage to put her weight on her foot yesterday. It’s enough. It’s progress. Give her the strength to keep going, to want to keep going. Let there be enough in her life to want that.

(As to the monkeys – was she watching them on the TV – I forget now it was too long ago and life has moved on such great steps since. Sorry for forgetting. She made us laugh about it, I know that.)

I love hearing her family stories. She is a wry one. She clearly loves them dearly but sees their ridiculousness too. Ah, we all have it. This time it was about her mother-in-law. She’s featured before in our discussions. In her eighties now she’s had lots of time to build up a stock of habits and mores. I hadn’t heard about the jigsaws before. I’d asked if they were going to stay with her when she took her to see Madame Butterfly at Swansea’s Theatre Royal. She said she was this time but the last few times they hadn’t been able to on account of the jigsaw. “Yes,” she said, “she had a 10,000 piece jigsaw of the New York skyline spread out on the spare bed, so we’ve been having to stay in a hotel.”

We saw him as we walked into town. He was standing looking at the list of buses due in the makeshift bus station. He had on a lime green jacket and he was standing there brushing his teeth, sans water and sans toothpaste. “Mad as a box of frogs,” he said, “and his eyes are a piercing blue.”

It’s so often the way that just as I am packing up my drawing things someone gorgeous comes along that I would’ve love to have drawn. Yesterday it was an opera singer. She was such a pretty, elfin like thing in her green woolly hat, huge coat and Doc Martens. She told us that she there to perform in Hansel and Gretel and that she was to be Gretel. “I normally have to be all wigged-up,” she said, pulling off her hat and shaking out her tousled cropped hair, “but this time they’re letting me be all tomboy. ” Apparently they’re setting it in the 1980’s and she showed me a photograph of the set and I got a pang of nostalgia for those long, long ago days of my theatre design training. “They’re basing the witch on Maggie Thatcher.” She was so light, so blithe. What a fillip she gave me.

I might even get my hair cut.