Author: Ellen Bell

Do you know of an NHS dentist around here? asked the girl who’d I’d been drawing in Costa Coffee in Newton.

I told her I didn’t. She had an Irish brogue – very subtle. She told me she was from Dublin but gave no reason as to why she was in that small Welsh town.

I had to have a tooth out, and I need to see a dentist for my wisdom teeth and some are rotten, she continued, almost to herself. I haven’t been to a dentist for years. Do you see an NHS dentist? Oh, yours is private is he? Is it very expensive?

She’d moved tables since I’d drawn her. Now she was sitting quite close to ours. She’d been consuming (eating rather than drinking) a large frothy drink with what looked like crumbled biscuits on top. I’d watched as she’d got up to get a spoon. Her hair was a mass of tangles and piled high on top like I sometimes wear it. She seemed edgy, a little high-wired. I could sense him tensing a little. I wanted to help but couldn’t.

I like your hair, she said, it’s like that actress on Desperate Housewives, she wears it like that sometimes.

I wished her the best of luck with finding a dentist.

A young man walked ahead of me along the main street this morning. I say walked. He didn’t, he lurched and zig-zagged. Spidery-thin, he kept falling towards the town houses to his right sometimes being lost to my view completely. Is it sadness that makes them drink so heavily, or a need to fit in? Turning down Thespian Street, I went home the other way. On one of the doorsteps either by intent or mistake, someone had left a bouquet of apricot roses. They were still in their cellophane.

She is lost to me. Though she shared my womb and my bed, she was never really mine. Not really. I never felt it to be so. Was that my fault? I never felt good enough for her, or her. Was that it, that perpetual failing that moves so naturally and habitually from one relationship to another? She said she loved me, that I’d always been there. But that was the day she cried after her lie was found out. It was guilt, I suspect. We pussyfooted around each other. Nothing was ever really said. She’s said it now, via FB, in staccato paragraphs, not stopping for breath. It won’t disappear. It is still there, haunting me. Tell me you’ll do something about it, says a distant relative from America. Life is too short, she says. Yes, it is but I don’t know what to do. I am so vulnerable to the hurting of her. I was from the moment she emerged, greasy with whiteness, crying for succour. We do not know each other. Nothing holds us. She was lost to me then, and sheis now.

I am a fusspot. I fuss too much. I want perfection, order and control. He is forbearing. He doesn’t have the same need as I have but he tolerates mine. But sometimes, just sometimes he snaps. It is fair enough. I push him too far. I know this. He loses his temper, I slink off, a dog with a its tail between its legs. I am sorry. He is still smouldering. We do make up. I am sorry and he forgives me. It will happen again. I try to temper it. He doesn’t know all the times I keep my mouth shut. How can he?

It struck me yesterday as I walked how much this arthritis in my hip has sapped my strength. It’s a slow drip sort of discomfort with real pain at times. My walking is slow, measured and a bit of a chore to be honest, yoga practice is the same. I just keep going on, what else can I do? And I am mindful that an operation to alleviate it is not a promise. It may not happen, and if it does it may not make it better, it might even worsen it. I have to accept it all. He told of how the Cambrian News were reporting on the orthopaedic department’s trial with a robot who mends hips. He was excited, I am more, what is the word, sanguine or is doubtful? I don’t want it but I want to feel stronger.

I caught a glimpse of a group of people leaving C block last night. They were clearly going out for supper (or at least that is what I imagined was the case) for one of the women had a bouquet of flowers in her hand. It prompted me think about when we used to do the same. I never looked forward to it, nor indeed enjoyed it much when there. I loved the conversation but there was much awkwardness around food, and being tired and wanting to be home and safe. The book I’m re-reading had a paragraph where the main protagonist had just seen a opera and it standing in the foyer afterwards watching the audience mill about getting taxis, putting on coats and so on. She recognises that she suddenly feels very lonely. How I know that feeling. Too well. I’ve been to those theatres, those occasions where the drama is over, the dream is spent and it is cold and wet outside and there’s that journey home….

Do I mind this now interior life? Do I miss the metropolis? He mentioned a review that was in the paper about the new Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam. He wanted to go. Shall we? he asks. Oh, yes, now that I could and would do. Shall we?

I heard his phone go after I’d got into bed. The caller’s voice was loud, cheery. It was one of our elderly neighbour’s son calling to ask if he could go down and turn off her TV as she couldn’t do it. He is always so obliging. I call him the boy scout sometimes. He loves to please, to be of help. And I adore him for it. Don’t be too long, I call out. He is away over 15 minutes. It isn’t just her TV apparently but another gadget that amplifies her phone for her. Fixing it is beyond him. She uses his appearance as an opportunity to have a moan. And why not? This time its about the carers’ practice of giving her a bed bath each morning. At my age! she says to him. What do I want with a bed bath every day? I can see her point, though I’d want it. Her body is old, fragile and it must abhor all that jostling and rough use of wet flannels. They mean well. And her indignance mustn’t make their job any easier. But they seem kind. I’ll never forget watching one of them brushing her hair so lovingly.

Ah, the kindness of strangers, like the artist on Instagram offering me those encouraging words. He didn’t have to.

It’s not real, he says whenever I get too caught up in a drama that we are watching. I know, I know this but I cannot help being sucked in. As I have been with Sanditon 2. It’s a terrible mish-mash of Austen-esque melodrama, flying off into ludicrous plot-lines but I am still caught up, particularly in Esther’s plight with the threat of Edward’s attempt to gaslight her. He is too much. A real arch-villain with his raised right eyebrow and smirks. And then there’s the artist – a beautiful man but again stretching the bounds of reality. Ah me. What a show. I want to end but I also don’t. Rather like life after all.

They’ve fixed the water leak on Llanbadarn Road, finally.

I endeavour each morning, when that darkness is most heavy, to concentrate on the small, the sensual and the pleasurable. There’s the rather saccharine but not unpleasant smell of my banana-scented bubble bath; there’s the bath itself, slightly hot as it thaws away the cold of me; there’s the music from Radio 3, sometimes divine other times not so, and the warm sweetness of my breakfast baked apple. Yesterday it was the taste of Assam tea. I usually drink Lapsang Souchong – I love that hint of smoke – but yesterday I tried the Assam. It was dark, rich and strong. Lovely. I thought of her and the pot she usually has of it in her garden first thing. She takes such care of things – in her slow, measured way. She isn’t a rusher like me. I think of her often when I want to be more mindful. I fall short, always.

There’s no doubt that my exterior world (and indeed, my exterior self) has shrunk, contracted, become smaller. And I don’t really know how I feel about this. Have I made it happen? Do I feel happier for it? There is much that I miss. Like travel or should I say escape? And the joy that comes with that – like those first steps on the Millennium Bridge as we make our way towards the Tate Modern and London in all its murk and glory pans out on both sides. Or being in the hot sun of Italy and Spain and lazing on chairs or sunbeds like lizards. Or just being on the move anywhere but here where all my fears and dreads live and flourish. And yet, here is where I have chosen to be and the grounding and my bed and my love are what keep me safe and sane. And I am grateful, profoundly so, to be fed, dry, warm and safe. And there are small joys, like that smell of toast yesterday morning when I went down to collect the parcel outside the front door, or the aroma of coconut from the tea lights I was burning at breakfast. I drink these in. I must and do. I know how fortunate I am and how sorrowful so many others are. I feel for them, always.

They’ve taken such a long time in coming that I wasn’t sure if we’d see any blooms, but they’ve started. A soft, white form is beginning to show on one and a tip of the same on another. I think you are supposed to grow them outside. I have them on the windowsill in the shared hallway downstairs. It was a blatant act of selfishnessness, I wanted to see them. The hyacinths have gone. What a pleasure they were while they lasted. The smell was luscious. I’m not sure if I will keep the bulbs for another year, though I do hate to discard anything with the potential for life. We shall see. For the mean time I will leave them where they are.

That poor child. May she rest in peace now.

I’m struggling to work out why it is that I find her difficult. I suppose it is something to do with her lack of acknowledgement when I send her what she requires and the hoops I have to go through to get her to respond. Is is just about ego though? Is there more to my struggles with her than feeling like I am unimportant to her? After all, do I really care what she thinks? There’s a sharpness to her that challenged me from the start. She blows hot and cold. It’s a microcosm of that other relationship in which I was also an outsider. I tried too hard, I suspect, but there was no script. As there isn’t with this woman. Must I just accept that we do things differently? Is that the way toward grace?