Category: Writings

She seems to have a new lease of life since his death. Can I say that? Is that kind? Perhaps they had grown tired of each other. They were clearly very different – he a little torpid, sleeping late into the morning, online gambling or maybe it was gaming through the night, smoking, clearly an interior bird though one who loved to travel alone, as he did whenever he could (was it to escape?) whereas she is up in the mornings, supremely independent even at 104, a walker, a stalwart of life, religious, artistic, perhaps a little no-nonsense, telling it like it is. Were they good companions at the end, or was it cohabitation of mere convenience? Now he is dead she seems to manage. Her other boys have let her remain in her home. He tells me a cross-faced woman comes in daily to see to her needs, from the Red Cross perhaps? She follows behind her when she does her daily circuit of the estate and sits with her as she listens to her music. Now that is a new thing, the music. Does she have an old gramophone? It is loud. It comes through our floor boards. Do I mind? I don’t think so. I want her to have that pleasure. And it does create a gentle atmosphere. The other day it was a string piece, last night a piano. I can’t hear it clearly enough to identify it.

As I’ve told you, we’ve been putting out food for the birds on our neighbour’s vacated (for the moment) balcony. We’ve filled their bird feeders with seeds and fat balls. Well, at the weekend I saw a man doing the same. I called to him up in the kitchen. There’s a man, there’s a man feeding the birds, quick. Anyway he went down and spoke to him. Apparently, the Americans, as we call them, are coming back as ‘visitors’ ( a visa protocol) soon and that he is a friend who they’ve asked to see to the birds on their behalf. How nice, and how like them, gentle couple that they are. So there will be two of us doing it now, good.

He drew up at the harbour and rolled down his window to say hello. He is a fisherman. I asked him about the RNLI burial I thought I’d seen. Oh, that was Willy Street from Penparcau, he said, clearly delighted to pass on the information. And he gave it us all. All the detail, well not much detail really – a real example of a restricted code. A spot on the lung, within three months, life and soul, a bit of a drinker, not been with the RNLI for long, always hanging around, the Greek chorus and so on. It wasn’t a burial. Silly me, but just a drive round by the hearse, who, apparently went too fast and forgot to drive down along the harbour. All those RNLI comrades waiting with flag in vain. May he rest in peace.

Did I tell you that the hyacinths are on their way?

I woke from a dream in which I’d just broken a window. I was in someone else’s house, though lots of people lived there. It was an old house with lots of stairs and huge windows that seemed to reach into the sky. I’d opened it wide to let in some air but as I did a gust of wind caught it and ripped it from it’s hinge. I heard it crash to the ground and shatter to tiny pieces. I turned to my host and apologised profusely before rushing out to begin gathering up the pieces. (I heard myself say but what about the animals? Was I scared that they would cut their paws on the glass?) I found broken shards of pottery too and spent sometime holding them and then turning them in my hand. The sun shone.

I watched as two women began talking in the coffee shop whilst waiting for their drinks to be made. Have you been swimming lately? one asked. The other woman, rather fay, pale haired and skinned, looked a little bemused at the question, said that no, she hadn’t been for a while and then asked, what about you? Oh, yes, the other one replied, an altogether more robust specimen, yes, we went in yesterday, though it was cold. Oh, you mean the sea, said the other. Yes. Oh, no, I never go in the sea. Oh, I couldn’t. Though people do say it is very exhilarating. Yes, said the other, visibly losing interest in one whom she had assumed was a compatriot.

I didn’t get it. Am I disappointed? Not really. The money would’ve been nice but the weight of it, the expectations and the doing of it would’ve been a huge responsibility, that to be honest I’m not sure I want anymore. I want this, this freedom to explore, to see where my mind and my creativity takes me. But it is amorphous, unshaped, and that scares me. And where am I going to make my money now? That perennial question eh?

He said that he hadn’t wanted to wake me. Poor love, and he was in such a state. With the sweet logic of a child he’d decided the best thing to wear in bed to withstand the volatility of his bowels after taking the laxative they’d prescribed prior to his colonoscopy the next day were his waterproof trousers. It didn’t work. Everything was soaked and it reeked. And he was so cold. I did what I could to make it all clean, including him but without upsetting or chiding him. Getting him into the bath was easy, getting him out again wasn’t. He has no feeling in his feet so can’t get a purchase. Keep calm, I kept telling myself. In the end (after he’d pulled the top of the hot top off trying to use it as a something to grasp) we decided that the best thing was for him to go onto his knees and then use the edge of the bath to hoist himself up. I become aware of his need at such times and I feel the love and weight of responsibility surge through me. Grant me the strength to be what he needs me to be.

The procedure went well. They only found one. And he won’t have to do it again. I made the bed eventually after a day of airing his room. I felt better for doing so. And I burnt sage. I love the smell, associating it with cleaning the house through. I feel it in my head. It’s an old smell, an old-fashioned smell. It feels safe, good, balanced and wise.

I was discombobulated all day. What will I do, be without him? He is the centre of my life. He alone makes sense of it for me.

I remembered the day before and the radiologist not being able to proffer a word to describe my fanny. He needed to go deeper down into my groin and told me to pull down my leggings. Though even that command was difficult for him. (If he is so awkward why don’t they have a nurse in there?) I did so and he said, ‘Use some of the paper to cover up the……’ I did so and noticed that the radiologist pulled the curtain across, though to protect my modesty from whom I am not sure.

The dentist has had to postpone my appointment for a filling. Well, that is something less to dread next week. One less intrusion. We’ll manage, he says. And we will. I know we will.

It was his funeral yesterday morning but it was to be just for family so we couldn’t go. His body doesn’t exist anymore, he said when he returned with the shopping. No, I said. I heard them in the flat downstairs when I returned from my walk in the afternoon and put out some fat balls for the birds in the feeders hanging outside the flat the Americans vacated oh so long ago (are they ever to return?). There was the noise of talking voices and a child. I hoped that they couldn’t see me as I made piles of birds seed on the step and struggled with the now rusting feeder lid. He wants to get new ones but I have a thing about discarding things (even when they are clearly no longer efficient) – an age thing perhaps or was I always like that?

She called in the middle of our supper. Can he come round and measure the carpet? He’ll be there in about half an hour, she said. We both sink. We share that privacy thing. The prospect of the interruption, the intrusion even, gives me indigestion and makes him snappy. He does it though and often with more grace than I can must. Aright? asked the carpet man as he came to the top of the stairs. Made grumpy at having to remove his shoes and wear a mask, he made no attempt at customer-focussing. Who’s supposed to be lifting it up then? You are, we said in unison. Oh, he replied, first I’ve heard of it. I am impatient with the way other people do things. Why does it always have to be so drawn-out and then forced into this last-minute affair? But then I pull back and remind myself we don’t all see the world in the same way.

I felt discombobulated by the day. And even when I walked out into that glorious day I felt little moved by it. Is it the prospect of the investigation today? Ugh how I hate being tampered with. And yet, she, poor love, is having an operation today. Mine is nothing by comparison. Such a smiling woman, so warm. I wish her well. Keep her safe. And her, and her, and her.

The moon is full. Or is it new? Either way it has been playing merry hell with my dreams. Playing merry hell, who was it that used to say that? My night time visions have been very lucid and very symbolic, or so it seems. I have conversations. I talk things through and try to resolve them. The night before it was with my mother. She is long dead but she was alive and well that night. I was cleaning a lamp of hers. I remember it from when we used to live on the farm. I thought it a lovely thing, as special thing, then. It was a reproduction of an old oil lamp, electric, of course, with a glass inner funnel and a too-shiny brass base. This one had a little more patina. I was scared that I would break it as she watched. Then she began to tell me that it wasn’t actually hers that she’d just acquired it because the previous owners of the house (was it the farm?) had left it behind. She seemed to imply that she too would do the same. Last night I dreamt of a boat. I’d been sailing on it. It was a huge liner with thousands of cabins. All my things were there. Then I was watching it from a window with him and it was on fire. Great rolls of smoke and fire was emitting from it. It was very dramatic, almost filmic. I went to see how I could recover my things and spoke to a very officious woman who told me that all would be sent on. But how do you know who owns what? I asked her, for, as I explained, there were several people in the cabin. For instance, I said, how do you know what belonged to the mother, or the daughter? In the end she began to see my point and did something on her phone. I woke feeling satisfied that I had been understood.

We walked early, before the rain came and the sky was yellow, orange and pink.

We are mystified as to where she has gone. Perhaps he’s killed her, he says and I laugh knowing he is joking but still discomforted, as he is, by the change brought about her son’s death. Someone is down there. Or at least they are on and off. Lights are on in the kitchen sometimes and I’m sure that it was there smoke alarm that was screaming at 8.30 am yesterday. But her window isn’t open and she always sleeps with it slightly ajar. It isn’t our business but you can’t help but notice and be involved, however much at a distance, with the lives and cares of one’s near neighbours. Her other sons take care of her clearly, but how can she possibly remain here alone at the age of 103? (Or is it 104?) Another smoke alarm went off in the afternoon. Is everyone burning toast?

She told me her father was an arc welder. I love such details, they immediately form stories in my mind. She was telling me that he is now virtually blind and dementing. Bless him. All that life shrunk to nothing. Or is it? Perhaps there is still a wealth of knowing behind the forgetting. I hope so. I watch her as she works on me. I close my eyes but I am still acutely aware of her as she lays crystals on my head, my stomach, my chest, my groin and my neck. I sink into the couch and if it wasn’t for the desperate need to empty my bladder I would have fallen in the deepest, kindest of sleeps. She carries so much but is still such a generous healer, keeping her hand on my leg right to the very end.

Thank you.

I didn’t recognise her. I know it has been a long time and it was only a photograph but she has clearly aged dramatically. It’s grief. I know this. She has been so shaken by the loss of the child, it has uprooted her to her soul. We want people to stay the same. It is a selfish need. I do it all the time, particularly to women. All those temporary and stand-in mothers. I want them to remain unshaken by life. I want them to remain strong, for me, when I am weak. It cannot be so. Not if they are good and if they love as she does. My heart breaks for all those women. I can think of three, four, maybe five that I know whose lives are not the same as they were. And their bodies carry the pain of those seismic cracks.

I walked alone yesterday afternoon as he was too tired after the usual Monday morning shopping. It was strange to stride out alone and at that time. I expected the dark, and though it wasn’t sunny it was light, though a melancholy, heavy kind. I walked to the harbour only to encounter a line of RNLI volunteers in uniform, one holding a flag lined up outside the boat shed. Others stood on the steps, some not uniformed but in dark winter coats. I sidled past them up the steps eager to get out of the way of something (I couldn’t work out what) that was clearly about to happen. One of the boats was out of the shed, as was the tractor that they use to tow it to the water. I walked towards South Marine noticing people standing by their cars and a couple peering through a window of a downstairs flat. Then I saw the black car. I should say cars, for following the hearse, with its coffin inside draped in an RNLI flag, were three limousines. So that was it. Were they going to bury him (should I assume it is, was a man?) at sea? It was a moving, almost sensational sight. It sobered me. It sobered us all who saw it.

I walked back through town and saw its shabbiness. One of the waiters from the Shilam with a long, inappropriate name that I cannot now remember walk swiftly with a sideways glance into the betting shop. He is usually smiling, he wasn’t then. I told him about it afterwards. Oh, that’s quite common, he said, unmoved. I remembered an Italian waiter we used to see regularly on a Friday night, he too was a gambler, with him it was the horses, I think. I suppose its about dreams. I’m not judging, I feel compassion, and an awareness that perhaps they do not see the sordidness that I see.

We’ve started watching our box set of the BBC adaptation Lark Rise to Candleford for the umpteenth time for that half an hour wind-down before I go to bed. It is highly silly and schmaltzy but it is easy on the eye and there are moments of poignancy. Fisher Bloom and Laura Timmins have this thing that they say to each other. Shall I tell you one true thing? they say. Shall I tell you one true thing? Shall I? Well, the fact is I want to do an altruistic job. I want to do a kind thing, a caring thing. But at the moment I don’t know whether I have the energy. Oh, yes, there is my practice. My drawing, my writing, my sewing but it, they, isn’t/aren’t enough to make me feel that my life is worthy. You see it all too often comes back to how it makes me feel about myself. And if that is the case, is this really altruism? I don’t know. A philosopher we knew in Cambridge would say that there is no such thing. Perhaps not, but can’t I try to step out of my own needs and attempt to help another? I keep getting the emails. And I want to do it. Just as I wanted to be Samaritan. I thought I could help, and I think I did, a little but it took its toll. Would this too? He would say, yes. And I would upset all that we have put in place. And yet, I long to be a carer. I do. I want to sit with others in their trial and distress, to offer solace, kindness, care. Can I do it? Have I the strength? And is this weariness of body, this less than wellness a sign of an emptiness, of a feeling that I could do more? Be more?

There’s no doubt that they are noisy. They irritate him. I try to be more charitable. I admire their energy and their courage. To go into the water in such temperatures takes bottle. And they enter the café on the wave (excuse the pun) of their achievement, still thrilled, still exuberant and ready to relish their hot chocolates, teacakes and coffees. For all their coats, hats and scarves, you can see that they are substantial women. And they are mostly women. They need to be well-fleshed to take on this sea. Gosh, it was glorious yesterday, sending huge waves that crash and flood onto the Prom foaming and white. Several people stood with cameras aimed down by the harbour in an effort to catch the crashing. Even he had a go. I still walk you see, though not, alas alone in the early mornings. That has to wait.