Written in situ today and first published here
HEAVY STEPS
The living-room was crammed with a lifetime’s knick-knacks and keepsakes in a jumble as orderly as one could imagine it to be. But the lady who had ‘ordered’ it wouldn’t need imagination to do so: she knew.
Perhaps her mind was jumbled – thus making the jumble seem orderly to her. I looked at her. This was her living-room. She had lived in it for sixty years until she grew as old as she was that day, the husband of a distant lifetime, quite gone, but, for her, less gone than simply gone.
The jumble comprised many photographs of children and grandchildren, dusty ornaments, encyclopaedic books – plus nods to modernity with a pile of music CDs and a TV screen that seeped grainy colours into each other through lack of proper reception, on a low volume because even at a high volume she wouldn’t have been able to follow it properly.
The place was a shrine – a place where, against all hope, hope still existed. The mind’s own mindset did tune better than the TV signal despite her own jumbled words when speaking. The thoughts were clear, the words not, I was sure.
Tapped into dual waste systems of disposal, she was her own living-room, pure and simple – where everything was self-contained if not self-perpetuating – and there were trolleys galore to support her vagaries of movement, followed, necessarily, by visits from local authority nurses and carers and, perhaps, from the odd relative like me.
Time runs on as if it runs on forever for all of us. Each with their own jumble that they deny is jumble or they claim is jumble whichever rings truer amid each day’s self-restraint or self-pity. A projection inward or outward amid an ancient shrine of now.
I left the house, after kissing her farewell, silently wishing for her a comfortable self with whom she could continue to live.
Later, it was imagined silence or simply felt silence when her TV flickered into the whispering background of the air’s deafness, if not of hers.
She heard nothing as she quickly flicked through the newspaper I’d brought for her to read after my departure. Meanwhile, she ordered jumble around her in the half-light of an Autumn dusk; and it was obvious that she would soon struggle to use a trolley to reach a light-switch and draw the curtains. Then, suddenly, she heard the sound of heavy steps.
But I had gone. She must have known it couldn’t now be me. A miracle she heard the steps at such a low threshold. This was an imagination that peopled jumble with a roomful of living solid souls. Or a belief stronger than imagination that jumbled people into a single solitary figure who, after kindly drawing the curtains, stood silently before her – wrapped in glistening wings like a Christmas present.
