ellen bell

He replied to his text late last night. The same minute detail. He needs to do it, he admits to this. Emojis pepper his words – smiling faces, grim faces – an attempt at trying to make this palatable. It isn’t. She is failing. No food, no liquids, nothing. Any sustenance she takes just feeds the tumours. He describes her as ‘donkey’, refusing to give up, stubborn. Is she? Is this what she feels she ought to do on his and their family’s behalf? I wish her grace, once again and the space to go when she wants and needs to. Oh, hold them both. Let the nightmare of death reach its conclusion in peace.

His brother texted him back. She’s beginning to fail. His texts are exhaustive, all the details are there. He clearly needs to write it all, sharing the falling apart of her body and the onset of his inevitable aloneness without her. He writes matter-of-factly, almost childlike, innocent in its lack of filtering. Would she want us to know all that? Perhaps she is beyond caring. He writes back, carefully selecting every word. This slow dying of her light has to be acknowledged but at the same time, what? What can really be said? I hope it’s painless, I hope it’s fast. I hope. I hope. What do I wish them? Grace.

I walk into the New Year not knowing what to expect from the town. Discarded plastic bottles roll along the streets, more evidence of the lack of a bin collection last week than any sign of revelry. The occasional figure or two moves the gloom, but it’s only when I near the centre of town that I hear the noise. There are three men at the taxi rank and several are crossing the road to join them. The noise is from outside The Angel. There seems like hundreds, which is probably an overestimation, but that is what it sounds like. They’ve evidently all just come out and they shout and holler as if they are still inside. Kids, mostly – that is, students returned or local teenagers. It is New Year and it needs to be celebrated, noisily, evidently. I cut down a side-street.

I expected to be woken by fireworks at twelve but there was nothing. I slept through till 1.15am. A wild night. Perhaps there wasn’t the will or inclination to see it in by us older inhabitants. A damp squib of an Eve.

I’ve been reading about home. It’s a thing of memory, writes Bachelard, and our first homes remain forever embedded within us. I don’t remember my first, we moved so often, but others that followed I can recall. I have to ground myself to feel safe. I do it wherever I am, in the car, in a hotel, in a holiday cottage. I impose myself on the space. I make it mine. And then when I have to leave there is that loss, akin to homesickness. Do others feel the same way? I am sorting out. I am cleaning out and ordering. It’s tiring work but there is peace in it, even if I can never get everything that I’d like to do done.

I enjoyed talking to him yesterday. He is not easy to know, I suspect. There is a slipperyness to him, not in a snakey or shifty way, but he has a front, a social side, as we all do, that I feel would be hard to penetrate. He wearst the manner required of him by his job, I suppose. But things are let out. A closeness to his father, now gone, a loneliness that brings him out to the coffee shop all that way on the bus. He is open and yet closed. Are we not all the same? I certainly am. But I enjoyed exploring, nay encountering his world.

He always asks her what she’s been doing that day. She is held captive by physical incapicity. Life has to come to her. She knows this and he knows this. But we (and I say we, for we both participate in valuing how she has to live) still give her current existence creedence and value, no matter how small and restricted. This is her home and, indeed, her life now. When he asked her the same question yesterday she said, Father Christmas has just been. What, he said, checking the date on his watch, it’s now the 28th, what’s that, three days late. We asked what happened and what he looked like. She chortled away down the phone. Yes, he was round, and yes he’d dressed appropriately, as you’d imagine a Santa to be. No, he didn’t bring her a present but he did walk into her room and pick up a few of her teddies. What a lot of teddies, he apparently said. Insightful. She seemed to be non the worse for the encounter. And she clearly enjoyed telling us about it. And there hadn’t been some cheesy mush for lunch. Things are looking up. How I love her…..

She told him over the phone that she had her wild flower book out and was drawing. He had to get her to explain. And yes, she was drawing from the images in the book. And she was drawing them first and would paint them afterwards. I like to think of her doing this. She was always good at art, he said. Yes, I can imagine. I like to imagine the peace, the small transcendence such an endeavour might give her. I’m trying to remember the flowers that we had our in meadow, she told him, milkwort was one. They’d had a field, she and her husband, near her old house. We stopped them using fertiliser. I ask about cornflowers. No, they hadn’t had any cornflowers. I remember them. That blue.

Another patriarch has died. Though I suspect he was a rather ambivalent one. A taciturn man, he was always more comfortable talking about business and to men, mostly. He could never think of anything to say to us girls. Have you got children? he once asked me. R.I.P.

I never want to go out into the dark. A tension gathers in my neck and in my back before I do so. It’s the pitch blackness, the wildness, the feral almost lawlessness of those early hours that get to my very soul. And yet. And yet. Once I am out there is something like joy in being exposed to the air, the wind, the possibility of some kind of renewal in the approach of the day. I don’t see it then, of course, certainly not in late December, but it is coming. I walked up and over the Buarth. The town’s rooftops stretched before me. And then it was down to the harbour and to the buffeting of the wind off the sea. The Perygyl was marvellous. The waves rolled and crashed beneath it and I felt alive. That’s what it does. The dark brings an aliveness, a perception that is lost during the daylight hours. I feel with my skin, my hair, my fingertips. I am alert as a mouse ever awake to its chance slaughter by a prowling cat or a swooping owl. Like the mouse I twitch with that aliveness. Is it worth it? That fear? Yes.

Christmas Day at 3.45 am and all is quiet. I can hear blackbird song. And there is one car driving along the Prom. The sea churns but the wind is less than yesterday. A few windows are lit. People unable to sleep or landing lights from the various guest houses that line the seafront. I wanted to see shining Christmas trees in the front rooms of North Road but all were off. I walked and embraced the solitude.

It’s nice hearing her laugh. He makes her laugh. And I try too. We get her to read out the Home’s activities itinerary for the week over the phone. She enters into the spirit of it. It’s a gentle piss-take, not of her but of the situation life has placed her in. She is more acquiescent of it than she was. She is fond of the ‘girls’, as she calls the carers who tend to her needs. And mostly she doesn’t engage in the ‘leisure’ activities, prefering to remain self-contained in her room. The list of what is on offer amuses her as much as it does us. Wolfren Riverick has turned up before. She says she can’t tell us what he does but that it is something to do with music. There is also a couple coming in to sing Latvian folk songs (at least I think it was Latvian). She says that the man’s name is Costa. Banjo Barry seems to have disappeared. What lost him the gig, I wonder? She giggles and splutters with mirth. As do we. I do love her.

She’d emailed me a few days before my appointment to warn me that he’d died. They’d had him over 14 years. A surrogate child, clearly, he went with them wherever they went. I wasn’t sure if she’d want to talk about him but she did. She told me that they both knew that he was nearing his end. He couldn’t settle and they called the vet. It was a stroke and they agreed to the vet injecting him. He died quickly with them lying by his side, and after eating his favourite foods. She didn’t want the vet to take him away to be cremated. ‘You never knew what you get back,’ she said. ‘They do road-kill, and everything. I want to make sure I get my dog and only my dog.’ So she found a man in Llanidloes. ‘He was a bit odd,’ she said, ‘but we got him back that same day.’ They’re going to scatter him in his favourite places but she will keep a bit back to put in a locket. (Or was that her mother’s ashes? Our conversation did digress.) I am so fond of her, and her chitter chatter is calming to my soul. I wish her peace in her grieving. Her partner has offered to make them lots of afternoon teas, she told me as I left.