You know when you can hear your mother inside you saying that you have to rest? But you know and she knows that you can’t, not now. Well, not just yet.
And your mother’s face is around you with that look, that understanding that you can’t stop. And she swallows hard, keeps it all in, and like her, you do just the same.
And she sits alongside you in the silent dawning kitchen, she makes the tea for you while you let yourself feel feelings for a while.
She wears that old green dressing gown that kept her warm and she shuffles with her life-lived feet. She knows. And under her dressing gown, her body that made you, is reminding you that you can do this, that you have the strength.
You lean into the worktop, the oak takes your weight. It’s quiet in here, apart from your sniffing and the soft sounds of your mother busying herself around you.
She walks alongside you keeping you up.
She passes the tea cup to you. She knows everything you feel.
You drink up, wipe your eyes.
Do it all again, she whispers.
You can stop soon. just not today. Your mother on the inside, charging you up. again.
The water seems kinder today or maybe I’m just more aware of it that’s all. I wash my arms with consciousness as though cleansing myself from within. It helps.
I wonder about the woman in the black dress . It looked black though its print was of tiny bright flowers, red maybe orange. She passed me on day one, eyes pooling, brimming, hand to nose and mouth as she rushed out. I couldn’t hug her but the feeling pulsed up through me. It would have startled her anyway if I’d reached out, she had enough to deal with. She spilled over as I just about kept it in.
That was last week.
I wonder about her this morning. Is she having a shower, does she have time for a bath, is she thinking in the water like I am? Is she held in its amniotic fluid, giving her strength for another day.
Maybe she has a quick wash, doesn’t bother with make-up, or maybe she needs it as a shield against the world.
Does she feel the tightness in her chest, her tummy flip as she sanitises her hands and pushes through the heavy doors? Has she forgotten she’s even got a body, is she churning in her head, like me.
The water is kinder today, present, healing, it tells me to slow down as it drips off my skin. Little spheres of surface tension, swirling rainbows dance inside. I send them out to the woman in the black dress, I hope she’s still holding up, like me.
Flashing cursor. And there it is again as you pause. Just pause.
And people complain about technology, how it isolates you from the real world. Well, yes. Yes, You’d rather be sat in a coffee shop spilling out all over the place, emptying your thoughts and feelings to someone else and imagine if they took your hand, took your hand like the nurse did on the first night. Just imagine that. That real world physical contact. Imagine if they held you as you let out how it feels.
Still, you’ve got here.
Here, tapping in the quiet morning, knowing that someone will read this, that you can send this out into the world. That somebody, somewhere will hear you, somehow. That they will hold you in this binary coffee shop in the palm of your hand.
You get an imaginary green tea (double cupped) and carry on.
Is it day six or seven, I’m not sure? Not that it matters. Time has rolled in on itself. There aren’t hours, there are interruptions, people doing things, bringing things, taking, giving, adding observations to their charts. There’s no natural light, everything’s in suspension.
I walk the corridor in my mind, through the big old doors, nod to the receptionist, past the childrens’ drawings of a lion. The lion smiles, you know, the way they do? Secure in their strength, protected by a massive mane of gold. I think he waves a paw at me, not sure. And up the slight incline almost like a ramp boarding a ship to somewhere else, a sense of entering a different world.
The artwork on either side demands attention but I rush past, abstractions blur, birds and flowers shrug at me. They don’t care, they’ll be there on the way out, suspended in gouache, captured moments that mean the world to someone.
My feet keep walking, step after step, soles squeak on their lino, sometimes heels click, depending on which shoes I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter either way so long as I keep going. Past the towering stacks of SHEETS and BLANKETS covered in thin plastic. They’re organised in here. I’m back in the machine, cogs turn, people sometimes smile, sometimes avoid your eye. Everyone churning, focused.
I walk the corridor in my mind. It’s 06:08. I’ll walk it for real again soon. I’ll say hello to Leo as I go past, Maybe I’ll imagine that I’m a lion too.
Do you know how much I hate the relative’s room? I know hate is a strong word, maybe I resent it, is that better? Of course, I’m so grateful for it too, its functional furniture, its token flowers on the windowsill as if to say don’t worry, things will bloom again.
Do you know how much I feel for The Lady from Upstairs? She visits us twice a day, in her clouds of dementia, has a little walk with the nurse who tells her she can’t go any further. That’s the men’s ward, she repeats but The Lady from Upstairs doesn’t care, she protests, she says hello regardless and we wave back until she turns around to go again. She’s on repeat – as am I.
It makes me sad, it makes me grateful, it rams home our essential life affirming interconnectedness and all I want to do is bundle her up in my arms and hug her until all the things she struggles with will seep away, until she’s a young lithe girl again, giddy, in fresh love and her mind is as crystal clear as her young eyes.
I turn away, I look towards the bed I sit by. I want to do the same for all the patients. I want to make us all ok, but I can’t.
And on the way in for the nth time this week, up the endless polished corridors, I passed the brand new parents, the father clutching a warm thing to his chest, he murmurs ‘it’s ok young one,’ as as I go past, although I know he’s not talking to me. And as I reach the place where I turn off, where I brace yet again, an elderly man pushes his wife in a wheelchair, and I feel the invisible threads between us all. The elderly woman and baby swap places, meld into each other and I can’t tell where either begin or end.
This morning I took time out in the relative’s room, I looked out past the sprig of freesias to the claustrophobic slabs of brick. I know this place. I’ve got form.
I throw my damp tissues into the bin and head back to the ward. The Lady from Upstairs will be back to see us soon. I hope she feels happy in her world, somehow, in some way.
Why is everything so blue in here? I guess it’s designed to bring calm but it doesn’t really work. I don’t like blue concertina curtains. They unnerve me.
If I could say anything to her, I’d tell her to still wear the Mary-Jane’s, they suited her. Their implied sweetness that belied her strength. In any case she’d never believe the steps she’d take beyond the pub in Wooten Wawen even if I told her.
And yes, the bells jingled on her skirt, noting how their sound hangs in the air, looping around, even now and what is it about the black and white Indian cotton that always comes to mind? Is it the waft against her legs, is it the foreshadowing of the woman in the making? Yes probably.
And if I could take her hand and tell her to choose a different skirt, one with less sense of contrast, would she? I doubt it. Did she buy that skirt and wear it because she had to, because she would think about it now, now when the black and white contrasts had become her life?
She would always choose that skirt and in an August car park it would billow out in the scented summer night. Billow out, like the curve of a balloon in a hot Summer sky. But then, you knew that didn’t you?
If I could say anything to her, I’d say don’t worry. Just wear the shoes, you’ll be alright. Believe me. And she does.
Following myself along is sometimes confusing. I do get lost at times. I start out down by the river by the ancient bridge. I wonder how I’m connected to the woman in the photo from 1905, with her skirt brushing the pavements. I jump-cut, I fly.
But I know how I’m connected to the woman in 1962, sipping strong tea, exhausted and her brand new warm pink baby has a heavy head, it makes her arm ache, her thin arms that would entangle mine on-top of Pendle Hill, years later. You know the hill? That hill, her arms, that baby, this life.
You know how it goes. So I keep following myself. The river flows over rocks, timeless. There are words in the river. I wander by waters. Fluid.
She would wear strawberry like tomorrow’s moon and watch it rise, silent in her orbit. But not today. Today was about light and off to her left, her sky had no need for clouds, not even cirrus in her mind.
Her leaves would deal with the heat, like they always did and one day the rain would return but not now. Now it was about light bouncing off her retinas, wavelengths bringing mirrors to her world.
It was fine. Fine, in the sense of a sublime moment. Fine, in the serendipity of time. The light falling across everyone busying themselves with important tasks, while the third generation star raged hydrogen and helium around them, keeping them alive.
The star spitting fire, giving them this day to be busy in, to rush and worry when they could stop and look up, stop and feel the sun on their skin, when they could just stop and Be.
And she looks towards the mirror on their longest day and in the delirium of light she knows she can wear red again. Tomorrow, strawberry red like her rising moon still shining like their sun.
Sometimes it’s the smell of lilies and the look of them boxed on her kitchen floor. Sometimes it’s the fluster of silk on her wooden stairs, how people busy themselves around her as she sits.
Now and again it’s the smell of nail varnish, sharp and clean, almost fruity, cutting through her day. Quite often it’s the thought of her mug of tea to her right, going cold as women fuss. One kneels down and laces her boots while the other stands behind her and sticks clips into her hair.
She notes how the moments jump haphazard, back and forth. The barefoot giggling, the squealing down the phone line, the faces waiting as she rustles down the stairs and then the door.
Sometimes it’s the front door open wide, the look of April grass, sap-full of promise in the sunlight but always it’s the crisp smell of taffeta, the feel of it, the weight of it, the look of it around her form. And then the leaving.
Most times it’s the leaving and her ivory heels on the mat in the foot-well of the car. And everyone who wakes up on that morning, who passes them as they drive by, will notice her, will smile and wave and she will know that decades later, that she’ll recall their faces even though they’ll have forgotten her.
And then the stone path comes into view, her clipping and shuffling into the heavy hush, dust particles hanging in the air like prayers. And most times, in fact all of the time, it’s the haze of photons, marking seconds, as if to say they’re waiting, just like he was. Waiting as she smiles towards him, knowing. And she moves through in slow-mo silence to his side.
Again and again and again. With her shield of flowers.
Sometimes later, it’s the metal sound of the hotel fire escape, as they sneak their way back in, when the guests have waved them off, when the guests think they have gone. High heels and alcohol, such a potent combination but they still make it to their room.
And then the cathedral looms up out of sequence, permanent against drunk daffodils. She tilts, she swirls against the ancient backdrop, arms outstretched with wings of chiffon, secure against the stone, pearlescent in the rays.
In the evening yards of taffeta bunch up to make a bustle and she inhabits it as though it’s intrinsic to her form. Music frays, lights and faces twirl, handshakes, hugs and tiredness falls.
And it flips back to the waiting and then the moving out towards. Always. Moving forwards, always holding flowers, a beacon to light the way.
The waiting there, this waiting here with purpose, with belief and certainty. And this is how it was, how it is.
And it makes me wonder what I’d say, if I could say all the things in my head, if I could give you all the images and moments, all the feelings, thoughts and words.
And if I could shape them, if I could form them out of the mist rolling in by your door, would you hold them, would you take them in your arms and keep them close?
I move as if unhindered by time, the mist rolls in, softening me, droplets of water around my words. And beyond the bustle, in the place that only we know, there is calm.
Janey L Foster 