I offered to help him with them. And new ones were duly bought. And they also hurt him. I offer to help once more, this time by squeezing the Fixodent in the grooves so as to hold them in place. I am glad that he is at ease with my involvement. I thought I would feel squeamish, but I don’t. Not now. Not any longer. It’s love, I think that does this. A deep cavern of care that goes beyond the aesthetic, the pretty, the perfect. Nothing is.
It’s soon to be full and it is playing havoc with my dreams. What complex scapes they are. Last night there was a baby in a car boot, which I offered to carry in my bag in which lay a teddy. There was an exhibition of collages based on the underwear wore by notable female royals. It was a swirling affair but I appeared to keep steady, watching, as I mostly do, from the wings.
Most of them we don’t know at all. It’s a place that is in a constant state of flux. People move in and out regularly. It’s only us and a few others that have been here for some time. I watch their windows, particularly those, that like mine, are lit up in the early hours. What wakes them? I wonder. I feel a connection with them then.
They help. I don’t know why. The schmaltz of them, that razzmataz, I am a sucker for it. They don’t take any of the agitation, the sadness away but they do counter the bleakness. A little bit. So thank you.
Sometimes it is all too much. She has had to have a lumbar puncture. It is too much. How do you explain such pain, such fear to one so young? I weep for her, for her parents, and for those other children losing their grandfather by inches.
A young life. A flower. An old fashioned-name. A shining child, now sick. It is heartbreaking. His brother sounds sanguine, when he is not. It’s the curable one, he says. I hope so. Oh, but the anguish they must be feeling. Poor, poor ones.
He had it when we were here, looking out through this window on the sunlit roofs of this sharp-lighted, little seaside town. He was visiting her when it happened. He has pneumonia now. He may have already gone.
It’s been a week since I saw her. Seven days. I wonder how long it will be before I see her again. That look on her face after she’d opened the door cut through me. It still does.
I see it too sharply. It’s the detail of it, it arrests my eyes, always. Yesterday it was the torn net curtains in Flat no: 1. The windows had been opened and the wind was blowing them inwards. It was a bleak scene, regardless of the sunshine.
Someone has moved in. We’d been hearing noises from down there all day and the day before her chest of drawers had been removed from outside the front door. It’s a family, with two young children. The father is in the army and has been quartered here. He told him he isn’t happy with it. I don’t blame him, its a bleak, unkempt space. I thought of them last night, unable to feel at home in her once-much-loved home.