ellen bell

It woke me. It wasn’t late in most people’s terms, about 7.20 pm, but for me going to bed as early as I do it was. She woke me. A voice. A sharp, cultured voice. I tried to listen to what she was telling me as I pulled myself from sleep. She wanted to book me. For when? I asked. Tonight, she said, at about 9 o’clock. My heart sank and that old familiar bleakness that comes from the prospect of having to engage with the late night dark began to threaten. Hang on, I said, as I struggled out of bed, I just need to get a pen. Just a minute, she said, her tone becoming sharper. Someone was talking to her in the background. I could hear him. I’m so dreadfully sorry to have disturbed you, she said, conciliatory now, but it seems we’ve already booked someone. That’s OK, I said. But it wasn’t. Sleep took so long to come after that. It doesn’t feel right – such a rude awakening. Is the fault mine, or the job’s. I hate it. I hate that pulling from rest. And I’d laid down determined to be at peace, to accept the calm, the unusual uncluttered-ness of my brain. He was kind, coming back in to tuck me in. But oh, the lost sleep. Do I need to make a change? I cannot say. Opportunities seem few.

I’ve hung her painting. It is a wonder. She prepared it for me. What a nice thing that is. She thought of me as she did so. For that period of time I was in her head. The colours are muddy, and her finger traces clear. She cried when I took it away. But she was poorly, her cheeks pink with fever. But it is here. I have a small piece of them. And I am glad.

Home again. The flat is freezing but sleeping in my own bed last night was a dream. Didn’t wake once. And the moon was a giant this morning as I walked. Gosh, it dislodges me going away. But was a joy. And there were joys. Thank you for making it OK. As you always do. x

It was on the front of the local paper. There was a picture of her too. She was knitting. An old lady in an outsized jumper knitting pouches for marsupials hurt by the bushfires in Australia. I shall keep on knitting them until they tell me to stop, she told the reporter, a big smile on her face.

I think about my work all the time. I do battle with it, with myself, most of the time. This battling between soulful work and pay-the-rent work. It has always been thus. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie, I need to earn money to feel worthy, useful. And yet. And yet, these ideas keep coming, esoteric mostly, flickers of something like wonder. I want, no need to chase them too. Even though they often cost money to produce and see through. I thought about making for an object, for a reason, for a person. And that makes sense too. The sewing I am doing for her and for him. And the piece that I have begun to dream up on my head for her. It gives the time spent on it meaning. There is a point. A focus. I want to do these things. They are gifts. A gift exchange. She thanked me. It’s lovely to have a piece of you, she said. Yes. And it makes me want to do more. That gentle, demure, diffident being is my model, and look what she produced.

We are off tomorrow to that light, that openness and what else. I cannot say. It steals into my sleep and invades my dreams. I am unsettled by her, though it isn’t her fault. Let me be at peace with what is and what is to come.

I love the snatches of conversation on the radio that I catch when I’m doing other things. Yesterday it was from a history podcast in which they were talking about the Stasi and how they collected archives of stuff on people they suspected including a whole series of pants that they stored in jars. The idea was that the worn underwear would contain a remnant of the suspect’s smell, for sniffer dogs to refer to I suppose. I was doing my yoga at the time and my mind began imagining pieces of work I could make about it. I love the flow of it, the sadness is that so many of such ideas never materialise. Considerations of time, money, opportunity and places to show it often kill them before they’ve had a chance to flower. Sometimes I fantasise about going back into education just to allow me the chance to make again. I imagine him raising his eyes to the ceiling. The perennial student, eh? As I walked I thought about the pain of not letting ideas come to fruition. I’ve so many waiting in the wings, in drawers, in my laptop, in my sketchbooks, and in my head and heart. I am a walking vessel of them.

That image still plays in mind. Did you see it? The one on the front of The Times of the old man, the ex-inmate of Auschwitz, crying, with that distinctive blue and white striped cap on his head. I wanted to ask why did you keep it? That hat with so many terrible associations, but then I thought, of course, of course you would, it is too important to discard, it is a symbol of the memory, the only thing left of that time. And it still fitted him. Nothing has changed, he is still that boy grieving the loss of his family, his friends, his community, his race. We can never forget. Forgive, I hope, but forget, never.

At times it is all over, though mostly on my back. There is no rash, no evidence of disturbance. I try not to respond, to itch. I practice detachment, a separating from my physical self. It works when I concentrate. He tries to help and reads out a long list of possible causes, some frightening, others not so. None of them ring true. It’s the M word, I’m sure of it. That gradual dying of the young self, the physically vital self. So be it. Let it come. I will bear it, millions have done so before me. It saddens me sometimes, there is much lost, and yet what is gained? A promise of death, of departure. Yes. That is OK by me. I shall miss much but I already have one foot outside the door.

Our last days as Europeans. Now that is sad. But I still claim allegiance and always will. I am not one thing. I am a child of many cultures, as are all of us. Do your worst. We will defy you internally, holding true our notions of communuality, brotherhood, sisterhood and belonging to a bigger world, border-free.

We bought our first cut daffodils of the year today. A pound a bunch. And I will love them. If you can’t find the big things that will bring you joy find the little, she suggested. Yes. Flowers help, especially ones that you can watch unfold and open. I miss flowers. The florists here are run-of-the-mill ones, not like in Bath – no cornflowers or sweet peas. Such scents, how I long for them, sometimes. I was turning the radio on yesterday afternoon and I got a ghost of smell. It was the hyacinth that had been then a few days before. It had left its trace. What a nice thought. Do we do the same?

I woke grieving. I cannot help it. The tears come. It is always the way before I go to see her. I expect too much. I know this. And she is not to blame. This has been visited upon her. We do the best we can, she and I. Oh, but the hurt of it. I think of another who did it all right, by the book and still her son won’t see her. The tears are always near, waiting in her eyes. And yet he is not to blame either – he is surviving as best he can trying to avoid the jolts, the memories, the pain.

I was wrong about Larry Hagman’s mother in South Pacific wearing pyjamas, it was an outsize sailor suit. It was a clue yesterday in a crossword. Funny that. Synchronicity, she calls it.

Work now. Emails absorb time. But I need to do it, to neaten up, to order the unorderable. Breathe.

A good good day yesterday. I was nervous. Tea at Rhug helped. But he was a delight, so receptive, so open and so generous. My head is full. I need to come down from it all. It is possible. It is all possible. A night bursting with dreams. I woke to the colour violet. My head was complete with it.

We saw the first snowdrops, banks of them between trees, not fully open but beginning. It is beginning.

There were a selection of books, LPs and DVDs in the window of OXFAM’s bookshop on the theme of the ‘Silver Screen’. I stopped in front of it on my way home. Seeing the LP of South Pacific with Larry Hagman’s actress mother on the front in those outsize pyjamas brought forth a deluge of memories. There was an LP of the London cast singing The Pyjama Game too and a few others that I’ve forgotten now. Dad had many of them. I remember putting them on the record player as a child and singing and dancing along to them. The films were imprinted indelibly in my head and I could picture the characters as I sang. ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair’ and so on. Glorious. I was so open to it all – the escape, the romance and that post 1950s promise of the happy-ever-after – encapsulated in people like Doris Day.

The grief is always there. She pricks it with ease. There is no neat answer, we do our best, both of us. There is no laid-out path, we have to make our way stumbling, mostly. Oh, the sadness of it. The grief, the hurt. Pick yourself up and get on with it. Be grateful for the small offerings from her table. It is enough. It is more than it was. Be at peace. Then rest. And he is there, understanding and taking my hand. I am forever grateful. I know it.

I saw her walking ahead of me. Well it was more like waddling. She was tiny, at least in stature. The width of her was about equal to her height. I thought she might have Downs Syndrome, she had that same rolling, waddle of the girl we used to see walking through Jesus Green in Cambridge, happy-as-a-sandboy (as my mother used to say of such simple bliss) singing away to her Hp3 player. But then I thought, surely not, who would let her wander out at this time in the morning (it was by then about 3.30 am)? She sat down on one of the Prom benches and as I passed I saw that she was crying. She didn’t have DS, that was clear. Her face was heavily made up, her dress, black and figure-hugging was stretched tight across her chest revealing two barely matured breasts. On her head she wore a black woollen hat pulled down close to her eyes, emblazoned along the front was the word WITCH. The tears were streaking her mascara. I went over and touched her arm. Are you alright? Then it all poured out. She’d lost her friends and her feet really hurt and she needed to go to the Spar but couldn’t walk. Her boots, faux Doc Martens were in her hand, her stockinged feet, now wet and curled at the toes, rested on the sandy pavement. Don’t you have your friends numbers in your phone? I asked. No, she said, still sniffing, they’re my flat mates. How will you get home? I asked. Taxi, she said. Patting her shoulder and stroking her face, I suggested that she call a taxi and get them to take her to the Spar (though it was only about 500 yards away) on her way home. And then she could see her friends when she got back. She stopped crying and thanked me. God, they are so young, these fledgling girls sent to University, unformed and unready for the bigger world (though this town is hardly a Mecca but all things are relative). Her loneliness in those post-club-post-booze hours was palpable. Bless her. Bless all of them, squeezing themselves into tiny fake leather dresses, dolled-up and expecting some kind of deliverance. It won’t come, it never does. I want to wrap them all up.

A fully-lit Christmas tree still sparkled from a back upper window in one of the flats along South Marine Terrace. A chocolate digestive, still whole, still round lay in a puddle on the pavement along Llanbadarn Road.

She told me of her daughter who is studying podiatry at Cardiff and the challenging stuff she’d already encountered. She hesitated about telling me. Are you squeamish? she asked. Yes, I said but she told me anyway about the homeless woman whose toe came away when her daughter was observing a podiatrist at work. And of the little boy who was asked to press his foot into oasis at the gait clinic so that they could make an impression of his sole. But it hurts, he kept wailing.

My greed in ordering too many library books has borne fruit. Three came at once.

Elephant and family have moved.

I’ve been calling her once a week for over seven years now. There were a few others that I used to call too. One, a woman who was deemed a trouble-maker and was thus taken off the books, and another, a man, Irish and much given to ranting (though I was fond of him), who died a couple of days after returning to Ireland for his daughter’s wedding. It was such a trip, one that took an age for him to arrange (fretting mostly about who would care for his black labrador whilst he was away) and then he just up and died. He was home, though, some compensation I suppose, if there is any. So now it is just her. Once a week, every Friday. I’ve ‘seen’ her blossom, though not in the visual sense for we’ve never met. But she has grown bolder, braver and more willing, though it takes it toll upon her, to leave the house and meet new people. It’s just the two of them, her and her daughter. I can only imagine their home – cosy but perhaps a little austere. They don’t have much but they have enough. They live on their nerves the two of them, sensitive to the outside world and all the uncertainty it brings. I don’t think she has ever travelled abroad, maybe her daughter hasn’t either. She is not curious to do so, it seems. She belongs here. She just wants to be safe. She walks with the neighbour’s dog in tow. They have a cat that lives in the shed. A feral thing, it shuns the domestic. They have chickens and a cockerel who runs to greet the daughter’s car when she returns from work. They have a small garden with a greenhouse where they grow tomatoes. She talks of her carrots and runner beans. They are both particular about their food. I love to hear her voice, the lilt of it, the Welshness of it. She is gentle. She feels things deeply. She sometimes has nightmares. Her ex-husband and father of her child hurt her. She keeps things close. She always thanks me for calling. I value her, deeply.