ellen bell

She is sounding better. Her voice is stronger when she answers the phone to him. Though the sprain in her chest is clearly giving her some discomfort. She is a stoic, a non-complainer, nevertheless one gets a real sense of the restrictions the Home imposes on her autonomy. They are well meaning, clearly, but its the little things like a decent cup of tea or coffee, “theirs is too bitter”, and a hot water bottle to put on her chest to ease the pain “they don’t like hot water bottles here” and the ability to take two paracetamols rather than just the one they are currently giving her. Oh, I know it must be all about health and safety and they’ve countless residents to attend to so there’s little time to sate personal whims and foibles, but I feel for her. She is chair-bound, even reaching for a change of book is an issue. Though she did manage to put her weight on her foot yesterday. It’s enough. It’s progress. Give her the strength to keep going, to want to keep going. Let there be enough in her life to want that.

(As to the monkeys – was she watching them on the TV – I forget now it was too long ago and life has moved on such great steps since. Sorry for forgetting. She made us laugh about it, I know that.)

I love hearing her family stories. She is a wry one. She clearly loves them dearly but sees their ridiculousness too. Ah, we all have it. This time it was about her mother-in-law. She’s featured before in our discussions. In her eighties now she’s had lots of time to build up a stock of habits and mores. I hadn’t heard about the jigsaws before. I’d asked if they were going to stay with her when she took her to see Madame Butterfly at Swansea’s Theatre Royal. She said she was this time but the last few times they hadn’t been able to on account of the jigsaw. “Yes,” she said, “she had a 10,000 piece jigsaw of the New York skyline spread out on the spare bed, so we’ve been having to stay in a hotel.”

We saw him as we walked into town. He was standing looking at the list of buses due in the makeshift bus station. He had on a lime green jacket and he was standing there brushing his teeth, sans water and sans toothpaste. “Mad as a box of frogs,” he said, “and his eyes are a piercing blue.”

It’s so often the way that just as I am packing up my drawing things someone gorgeous comes along that I would’ve love to have drawn. Yesterday it was an opera singer. She was such a pretty, elfin like thing in her green woolly hat, huge coat and Doc Martens. She told us that she there to perform in Hansel and Gretel and that she was to be Gretel. “I normally have to be all wigged-up,” she said, pulling off her hat and shaking out her tousled cropped hair, “but this time they’re letting me be all tomboy. ” Apparently they’re setting it in the 1980’s and she showed me a photograph of the set and I got a pang of nostalgia for those long, long ago days of my theatre design training. “They’re basing the witch on Maggie Thatcher.” She was so light, so blithe. What a fillip she gave me.

I might even get my hair cut.

I know that there has been a shift towards a more secular approach and that to focus on a specific religion such as Christianity is now frowned upon. But I like it. It is familiar to me. I like the marking of ritual and festival even if I don’t attend church anymore (if I was still in Bath I would, I would). It represents a structure, a safe reassuring measuring of time passing. And Lent is one of those. I don’t personally see it as a time for self-denial but one of reflection. The darkness imposes that, don’t you think? It’s a going inward period. I hear them mark it on the radio both Radio 3 and Classic FM. I appreciate it. It’s old school, of another era. And long may it last. Oh how I miss the Abbey…..

It was on a radio news bulletin. An Italian, a rescue-worker from the Red Cross, I think. He was talking about the people, many of whom drowned, trying to reach the shores of Italy. Hundreds of them in a wooden boat. A small boat, too small to hold so many. They said there were in a small wooden boat. What did they pay the people smugglers for the privilege? Was there room to sleep, eat or even sit? Was there a canopy against the elements? I heard someone say that it is mostly young men who make these hazardous journeys, but I can imagine that there are whole families involved. Parents with small children, grandparents and young couples, all trying to escape hardship, oppression, war and hunger. We label them as ‘boat people’ as if they are a particular species distinct from ourselves and therefore need not empathise with them. They are not, they are sentient beings as we are with the same physical and emotional needs – the need for refuge, security, order and the possibility to flourish . What can we do but stop, think and feel for them – the desperation of their plight and the abuse of those who set them out on this treacherous journey and hope that if they do survive that they are met with kindness, generosity and love? The Italian man’s voice was full. He stumbled for words. The ones who were pulled from the sea are traumatised, they cannot articulate what they have been through. “They are destroyed,” he said.

It never feels enough. It never feels good enough. I never feel good enough. Just do your best, he is forever saying. You did your best, that is all you can do. It reassures for a while. I like to hear him say it, for I cannot do so for myself. I just don’t feel it, I never have. I don’t feel I was ever good enough as a daughter, a mother, a sister or a friend. Funnily enough, I do feel good enough as a wife, well, his wife. He shows me that. I sink in the evenings. I am tired and when I look back over the day I cannot see that it has been good enough. The work done, the writing or the drawing is never enough. The problem is mine. A hand-me-down sort of non-esteeming. I know this. I will try to circumvent it. I will. I promise.

I managed to steal some time a few days ago to sit in the sun. It wasn’t warm even though I was wrapped up in what he calls my Tellytubby suit. I wanted quiet but alas there was the woman with the baby standing by her car, jiggling it about as it wheedled and griped and the family (including grandparents) of the Sri Lankan doctor, who chose that self-same moment to file out of their flat and head for the back lane. It was a noisy business particularly as the father was insistent about negotiating the pram down the sleep slope also. I waited for peace. It came for a moment. And then my phone rang. Did you call me? he asked. No, I said. Funny he didn’t even know I’d gone.

I was over-tired. Not enough sleep makes me cranky. And her asking me if ‘I was up for another’ was the last straw. I wanted to stop. I needed to stop. To implode and have some empty space ahead of me. I could’ve said no, and was childishly petulant when he wouldn’t give me permission to do so. I don’t want to infantilise you, he said, with his usual wisdom, adding, even though at this moment you want me to. And he was right. I wanted him to save me, to carry me. He cannot do that and when I am strong and well rested I don’t want him to. So I said yes. Of course I did. It is my living. Nevertheless, I heard all those petulant voices in my head, longing to snap and carp at him. He is sanguine. He knows me. He knows that my crossness is short-lived and that I will think again, evaluate my behaviour and be remorseful. As I was and am. And I am grateful for the work. Always. It was a learning day, certainly.

Do you know of an NHS dentist around here? asked the girl who’d I’d been drawing in Costa Coffee in Newton.

I told her I didn’t. She had an Irish brogue – very subtle. She told me she was from Dublin but gave no reason as to why she was in that small Welsh town.

I had to have a tooth out, and I need to see a dentist for my wisdom teeth and some are rotten, she continued, almost to herself. I haven’t been to a dentist for years. Do you see an NHS dentist? Oh, yours is private is he? Is it very expensive?

She’d moved tables since I’d drawn her. Now she was sitting quite close to ours. She’d been consuming (eating rather than drinking) a large frothy drink with what looked like crumbled biscuits on top. I’d watched as she’d got up to get a spoon. Her hair was a mass of tangles and piled high on top like I sometimes wear it. She seemed edgy, a little high-wired. I could sense him tensing a little. I wanted to help but couldn’t.

I like your hair, she said, it’s like that actress on Desperate Housewives, she wears it like that sometimes.

I wished her the best of luck with finding a dentist.

A young man walked ahead of me along the main street this morning. I say walked. He didn’t, he lurched and zig-zagged. Spidery-thin, he kept falling towards the town houses to his right sometimes being lost to my view completely. Is it sadness that makes them drink so heavily, or a need to fit in? Turning down Thespian Street, I went home the other way. On one of the doorsteps either by intent or mistake, someone had left a bouquet of apricot roses. They were still in their cellophane.

She is lost to me. Though she shared my womb and my bed, she was never really mine. Not really. I never felt it to be so. Was that my fault? I never felt good enough for her, or her. Was that it, that perpetual failing that moves so naturally and habitually from one relationship to another? She said she loved me, that I’d always been there. But that was the day she cried after her lie was found out. It was guilt, I suspect. We pussyfooted around each other. Nothing was ever really said. She’s said it now, via FB, in staccato paragraphs, not stopping for breath. It won’t disappear. It is still there, haunting me. Tell me you’ll do something about it, says a distant relative from America. Life is too short, she says. Yes, it is but I don’t know what to do. I am so vulnerable to the hurting of her. I was from the moment she emerged, greasy with whiteness, crying for succour. We do not know each other. Nothing holds us. She was lost to me then, and sheis now.