ellen bell

We often talk outside the coffee shop while we wait for it to open. He is usually there before us, with his headphones clamped to his ears. He’s talked of the lack of bakeries before. It clearly rattles him. “Who’s going to do something about the fact that there’s no bakery anymore?” he asked. I suggest that he tries Medina, though I don’t hold out much hope that he will like what they have to offer. He is very specific about what he is after. “White rolls,” he says, “soft white rolls.” I suspect that what they sell will be ultra healthy, crusty and smelling divine. Heigh ho.

I chipped a bit off my tooth last Sunday evening. I went to the dentist and I’m now booked in for a filling. My heart sinks. It is so expensive, but it has to be done. While I was there he mentioned my wisdom tooth again. He’s been talking about it for the whole time I’ve been going to see him. Ten years now. This time he looked grave. (He always stands with his back against the wall, one of his legs raised up behind him, when he delivers the prognosis). What will that cost? I shudder to think. I don’t want to lose it. He says that I won’t notice it. I have to trust, to yield.

She looked the same. She was full of good spirits, as was he. Their garden was a joy. Her skin was the only revealer of unwellness. It smelt acrid and was bone-dry. Her eyes filled with water at every emotion. They were the same azure blue.

He read out Rod Liddle’s article last night while I made supper. His is usually rather caustic, leaning towards the right, journalism but this time it was more thoughtful, even rather derisive towards himself. He wrote about an incident from his past when he was working in London, and how, like crowds of others, he’d stepped over a man who’d collapsed so as to get on the tube in time for work. He had cause to remember it when he heard about the Norwegian mountaineerer who has been accused of leaving one of her sherpas to die alone on the mountain side. We all have such stains on our consciences. I am certain of it. I have them, though I can’t remember the specifics in the way that Liddle can. All those things we have done or not done that scar our sense of self. The unkind, the selfish acts that make us in-humane rather than human. I’ve been unbrave. I’ve avoided reaching out to comfort a stranger. I know I have. Was it fear of intimacy, of boundaries broken? Who knows. We are all guilty of it. Look at the way we behave as a nation over the refugees who come here across dangerous waters for safety. We turn away, we castigate and label them and then put them on insanitary barges or worse ship them off to Rwanda. We do not see human beings. I am ashamed of myself, of all of us. Let us do better. Let us know better. Let us be kind.

I woke from a dream the other morning struggling to settle upon which word he’d used. I was on a journey. I was to meet her and we were to go somewhere together. I had an address. She didn’t come. I knew this even before I got to where we were supposed to meet. I wanted to send her my phone number but I couldn’t remember it. The numbers wouldn’t come. Nor would the address. I was in a huge terminus. I was on the top floor looking down on thousands of people milling around below me. Then he was there. We looked up to the roof. There were faux clouds that looked like they were made from kapok or cotton wool. There was no sky. I could see dust in the corners. “We can see the beginning of the clouds here,” he said. But I think he meant to say birth. The birth of the clouds.

When he’s tired he forgets things, as do I. Earlier this week he forgot to take the keys out of the door and when I returned to the flat in desperate need of a pee I couldn’t get in. Easy enough to ring the doorbell, one would think, but not so for he can’t hear it. I rang it anyway, pressing the buzzing on and off at fast intervals, before resorting to banging my fist on the door and shouting his name, (this cacophony actually roused our downstairs neighbour, a woman of 104 years and who is profoundly deaf). In the end he heard me. And wasn’t, I thought at the time, at all shame-faced. I’d over done it and exhausted myself as a result. “You’ve too much imagination,” he said, later. And he’s right. I see it all, the being locked-out forever, pee all down my leg, and him possibly dead or dying. Ugh. I am ridiculous. In the end the shamefacedness was all mine.

I dreamt that I found his sketchbook. Or at least I came upon it. Someone had just left it, unwanted on a table. I took up in wonder, knowing it immediately as one of his. I woke as I was turning the pages, slowly, reverently.

I’ve begun reading a collection of short stories by Alice Munro. She writes exquisitely, so much so that sometimes I have to put the book down. It is too much pleasure. I finished one of the stories yesterday in which a woman has cancer but has just been told by the doctor that the chemo has reduced the tumour and she has longer to live than they thought. Rather than be happy with the news she is thrown, unsettled, even angry, I think. I remember that feeling. It was when that letter came with the notion that I might be dying. And we went through all that rigmarole in London carrying my pee and so on. So when the doctor told me that I didn’t have it, I felt the same as Munro’s character. I was lost, without purpose, and without that promise of an end in sight. I couldn’t tell him why, or that I felt that way about it. He wouldn’t understand, how could he? That promise of an end was a jewel to me. No more anxiety, no more not feeling good enough, no more. Just that, no more. She writes of things I know, like the ice left in the furrows of a field when the winter has gone. I know this.

I picked some more bramble berries and ate them for breakfast.

I think about them as I lie in my bed waiting for sleep. It comes too soon and I feel bad that I didn’t give them more of my thoughts, my heart and compassion. I keep forgetting his name as I used to forget hers, but I hold him, as I held her, in my mind. I imagine sitting with them in their cells, not speaking but being present as they sleep, or just sitting in witness, in solidarity for the life that they have been dealt. How many more innocent people are held behind bars? How many have their liberty stolen from them? And now the cricketer will also be locked away. They are brave. And I remember those men I met in that prison I visited outside Oxford. That stench of incarceration – of pent up frustration, boredom and fear. And I think of the man/boy we know in the coffee shop who’d spent years in and out of prison. Such a tender soul. “I was too frightened to come out of my cell,” he told us. I ache for him as I do them. Let there be some hope, or is hope worse? She was set free. Might they be too?

I lay out in the unexpected sun and read the last dregs of Gerda Saunders’ book on her early-onset dementia. She was writing about assisted suicide and when I eventually closed the book and closed my eyes I began to muse about what I would do in her place. I thought about Dignitas in Switzerland and how that would be my death of choice. But who would take me? He couldn’t and I wouldn’t want him to come with me. It would have to be someone I wouldn’t struggle to leave. A friend, or a sister? I think she would be best, uncomplicated and unemotional, pragmatic. And she would make sure that she was protected against prosecution. But I’d have to insist on white sheets, white walls and no frou frou like they appeared to have in that programme. I go to sleep with that white room in my head.

She was a challenge. I could feel her getting under my skin. Leave it, he mutters. She cannot hear what he or I say. And yet, I feel huge compassion for her. There she was sans teeth, mouthing off without any bite against doctors, the NHS and giving advice left-right-and-centre about diet and lifestyle. We all do it of course, but there’s something about her delivery and my increasing frustration at not being able to make out a word of what she was communicating. Or not. I can only take her once a week. And yet, I shall miss drawing him, and him and the volunteer. Bless her, and them all.

I think about her as I walk. Like her I don’t walk as I did. My legs are stiffened, my gait awkward. I feel clumsy, lumpen at times. But, I can still do it. I can still carry this body of mine around. I can go out of my own volition, out into the fresh air, wind and rain if I choose. And I do choose, even if I walk sans grace. She can move but only with the help of her carers and the physio who comes into the home twice a week. She can walk if she uses the various contraptions that clutter up the small ground floor room. We’ve given them names, though some had their monikers already. There’s Sarah Steady. I like her. And there’s the retitled Gusset Frame, which she admits to hating to use because it makes her look and feel ugly. She bought another one from Google and this is one is known as Gusset Mark 2. And then there’s Winny the Walker. She likes this one best of all but has to make her hand stronger before she can use it. Her voice has sounded frailer over the last few days. He says it’s because she doesn’t talk much during the day. And yet there is still some much vitality in her, I can see it, sense and hear it. Keep her well.

There are already ripe berries on the bramble bush by the car park and it’s not even August. I wanted to pick some and take them in for my breakfast but when I pulled them away from their little stalk they began to ooze in my hands so I ate them, there and then. It felt naughty to do so. I savoured the taste. They were not too sweet but gave me a cold, blue almost metallic sensation on my tongue. My fingers were stained purple. Have I taken food from the birds, I thought, as I walked back to the flat?

Later I looked out of the window and saw one of my neighbours that I don’t know (it could’ve been the young man who works in the cycle shop) sitting on one of the new wooden benches and table and carefully, neatly potting out some seedlings.

On Saturday mornings I mop that floor and stairs downstairs. The mornings are getting darker and at 4.30 am there is still no daylight. I put on the light in the hall so that it would shine on the wooden steps that lead up to our front door. A too-bright light shines from the bulb and as I opened the door a moth flew in. It fluttered and flustered, flapping its wing dust in my face. I cooed at it, cajoled and tried to coax it back outside but every time I managed it it would fly back in, fatally attracted, as it was to the light. I felt its panic and fear. Exhausted it sank to the floor. How grey and depleted it looked then. I cradled it carefully in my hand and turning off the light threw it out of the door. I hope it survived.