There’s a lot lost in translation between the surgeon and myself. He is kind, and clearly trying his best to be clear. I’m not interested in stiffness, he says, I want to know if you are in pain. That depends what you mean by pain, I want to say but don’t. Can you still do what you usually do? he continues, you know, like go shopping, see friends and have a nice time? We laugh about it outside, he eating his sandwich and me my apples. The surgeon’s vision of what women do all day is evidently based on what his Muslim culture has shown him. And he misunderstood my hesitation about the operation. We will teach you to climb the stairs, he says. Yeh, but, I should’ve said, what about all the things that I do, need to do, to keep my life and his life in order. But I didn’t. He was a powerful presence and I was over-awed, so much so that I seem to have agreed to further tests.
I walked along North Road this morning, pushing myself too fast to get the walk done and be home in time for breakfast. The Christmas tree is still there. It’s inside not out, in a ground floor room of one of the tall terrace houses as the top of not Loveden Road by the one parallel to it, the one that leads down to the little SPAR. There is one what looks like an aquarium in the window, all lit up. And in the corner there is a huge Christmas Tree. It still looks fresh as a daisy, even though it is now May. It is real or faux? And what’s more all the decorations are still up and the lights on. I get it. I do. It’s a child-like thing to wish to prolong the joy of it, that sparkly nonsense of it and to have it there to stare at from your bed (the room is clearly owned by a student, who I can also just about see working away on their computer). And why not? There is misery enough.
He knows him. As do I, but from more of a distance. He frequents the same coffee shop we do. And I draw him, often. He comes in with either his friend, a bloke with long, slightly curly hair, a hooked nose and glasses, or what we call his ‘carers’. There are two woman who do it and a large man who wears a heavy overcoat and has (if my memory serves me right) bicycle clips around his trouser bottoms. They talk to him and walk with him on the Prom. But they always seem to have a coffee together first. Yesterday he was with the younger of the two women. She is tall, wide girl with jet black locks and who seems to favour pink coats, jackets and sweat tops. She makes him laugh. They sat a table next to ours. She was asking him what he’d made for his supper the night before. Chickpeas, he said. What, just chickpeas? she asked. No, it was a kind of soup. Oh, like an Indian thing? she said. Yes. Anything else? Yes, I had some bread. What a couple of slices? No, he said, the whole loaf. You didn’t? Yes, he said. Any pudding? Yes, I had some cheesecake. Oh, what type? Those mini ones from Tesco’s. Oh. I had two last night. There was a pause, and then he continued. And I had the other two this morning.
There is always too much, those ten thousand things to which the Buddhists refer. Sometimes I think they will drown me. Most can wait, few are urgent so I can only surmise that it is my obsessive need to impose order, to put things away, neatly in order. And all the time I know that there is real chaos out there, real calamity, real catastrophe, real misery. The word ‘depravity’ was there on the front page of the online paper he was reading at breakfast. I don’t want to know more, that word says enough. Acts of depravity perpetrated in the name of war, of egotism, of braggadocio. And then there are those captured humanitarian workers accused of spying. I know as much as I can bear to know. Let there be an end to it. For them. Soon. Please.
When I’m walking in the night I sometimes catch traces of smells, odours that people have left behind. This morning it was that bubble gum sort of smell, sweet and cloying, from a vape cigarette. It was lingering outside the glass block of flats opposite the M&S and Tesco depot. I also caught a whiff of cheap body spray, male, it could have been Lynx. It makes my nose wrinkle. That was on South Marine just beyond the house where the man stands outside to smoke and read his phone at 4 am.
It was a bulletin on the News. A woman had been interviewed in Ukraine. And elderly woman by the sounds of it. She’d been in her basement ever since the war began. Holed in for all that time and yet she was still positive. It will end, she said.
They said yes. I am to have it (with small provisos, naturally). It hasn’t sunk in yet, I’ve a head full of writing that must be made. It will. Eventually. He’s as pleased as punch.
He’d gone in to check on her just before lunch and found her still in bed, sleeping. Is she breathing? I asked. I’ll just go and check. Yes, he said, calling up from the stairwell, she is. When he checked on her again at just before three she was still in bed. He called her son. Yes, he said, it used to unnerve me too when I visited.
She sleeps a lot, apparently. And why not, she is over a hundred. She sleeps so trustingly, never locking her door so people, such as him and the meals on wheels and D. her help can come and go as they please. Though, of course it isn’t quite like that, they come merely to see and attend to her. She doesn’t ask much. And that sleep. I wonder about it. How will I feel if I get to her age, will I succumb to such deep, restful surrendering? And without a fight?
I struggled to remember my dream and why it had unsettled me so. And then it came, that image of the bird, wounded. A woman, a mother had hit out at it because it had nipped at her grown son. I thought it had died but I saw it’s chest heaving up and down though its feet had been broken off. Just its feathered legs remained, black as a mole’s velvet. I knew she usually cared for birds but this son of hers meant more.
I didn’t tell you about the two cyclists we saw on our return from Newtown last week, did I? I noticed the one behind first because there were two crutches strapped to his back. He and his friend we motoring along. And then he overtook. And we overtook him and then it became clear. His right leg was missing. There was just a gap and his shorts on that side flapped with the emptiness of it. But he was cycling and fast. He raced along, his left leg pedalling like billy-o. We were dumbfounded. How does he maintain his balance? I asked. We were both silenced by his courage, his energy, his determination. And he was so young, twenty or maybe twenty two, three. Incredible. A marvel.
And then there was the cat this morning. A black cat, young with a white mark under her chin. She ran across the road and I could see the approach of a taxi. Then seeing me she became spooked and dashed back across the road. No! I shouted. But the taxi slowed and swerved and just missed her. Is it six or seven lives that cats have? I asked him at breakfast after recounting what I’d seen. Nine, he said, nine.
It’s the Easter holidays and I’ve been watching grandparents interacting with their grandchildren during our various coffee shop and café visits while I practice my drawing. It has been an interesting study. Some are clearly at ease with the relationship, others not so. The most fascinating examples have been in M&S. Perhaps this is evidence of a particular place or site reflecting the demographic who choose it. It was an altogether stiffer affair, like the man sitting in the little alcove with his grandson. ‘You talk funny,’ said the little boy. The grandfather had been eating a dry pretzel and complaining about it’s saltiness then it’s blandness. I don’t like the white bits, he said. They’re salt, said the boy. They were a discordant pair. The man was so offhand, and mostly distracted by his iPad which he had propped up on the table in front of him. There was another grandfather at a more central table that I also began to draw (I’d moved tables by then for a better view). He too was distracted by technology, though he did try to engage his grandson in it. He spoke in Welsh. The boy was fidgety and squirmed about on his seat, eating a scone and sucking a drink through a straw. He leaned into his grandfather, clearly fond. And even when he pressed the box containing the drink so that the liquid shot up in a fountain and sprayed all over his grandfather’s food, tray and phone, the old man kept calm and remonstrated with him in a measured, placatory way. The generational gap in both cases was a chasm.
I think of them all, those women that are near, far or in my thoughts. They are mostly older than me, and in better financial circumstances. They have led full lives, raised families and some have had a professional life too. Some are a little ill, or infirm or have poor eyesight and hearing. Their lives are slower now. They have little they must do, or, I suspect, want to do. Some, I know, do a little of sitting. Some sleep in the afternoons. Some are tired. Some not so. I think about them and what it must be like to take that rest, to accept that state of having not very much to do and relishing it.
Downstairs she watches TV. She told him that Pointless is her favourite now that Eggheads and University Challenge is ‘off’. I even got a ‘pointless’ the other day, she told him. Pleased as punch no doubt. Her’s, out of all of them, is a unique case. She is 103. Her days are un-prescribed. There is nothing she must do for she is on borrowed time. So why not? Why not do fuck all?
Ukraine darkens our thoughts, always. I hold my breath for them in that steel plant. And yet, there is still joy. Handel can do it with his Sarabande. Upstairs I dance for the joy of it.
