by Adam Thorpe
She is back again in her grandmother’s cottage, its yard and its chickens and its wooden swing; the family’s vegetables and their orchard are on a slope beyond the last of the hamlet’s houses, before the forest starts. The tiny whitewashed church has a bell with a crack in it, and after three peals it turns dull, as if (as her father jokes) someone has put their sock in it. She closes her eyes; she can smell the waxed wooden benches and now she is hearing the creaks of the floorboards in the aisle. She misses the mountains but she also likes the flatness of everything here, the huge skies. You don’t see those in Bucharest either. Here it is like the first time she went on a boat on the proper sea. She can breathe and spread her wings to the horizon.
She keeps her eyes closed and searches through the sensation of pressure, looking for clues. The doctor looked at her eyes and said there was no sign of concussion. But sometimes bleeding can build up on the brain afterwards. She is trained to be aware of this in the rest home. Floors and walls and the edges of furniture don’t like old folk, they spend their time battering them black and blue.
Cosmina stands up and snorts in self-derision. Varsa! A weed to be plucked! That’s all she is!
She can’t hear what the voice is saying. Whether it is speaking in Romanian or English or some invented language. People pick up radio signals with their metal fillings. Maybe it is just that.
She stretches and thinks of the dream she had last night, in which a huge wolf out of the dark forests munched through her bicycle while she was up in a tree, looking down at the scene. The wolf was demonic, with glowing eyes. Her mother would tell her at bedtime about the wolf who persuaded three young goats to let him into their house. The mother returns to find blood splashed on the walls and the heads of the two eldest children lying on the window sill.
‘What happened to the little one, mămică?’
‘She was tucked up in bed, all safe and warm, bibic!’
Through the thin wall they could hear her father shouting, ‘Go get fucked by kangaroos!’ He was shouting at the radio. At the politicians. They’d got rid of the two big devils but not the system. They were the system. The same crowd, the same minor devils. Oportunis¸ti!
‘You know what, my sweetie,’ he would say later on, when she was a young teenager. ‘Romania has almost no memory in its brain. It’s like a goldfish. A memory of five seconds. I have a memory almost as long as my life. I remember everything. Everything.’ He’d strike his head to show how it was all still full of his terrible memories. ‘But fighting people with no memory? It’s to kick a wooden leg.’
Dear tată, I miss not being with you, even though you still shout Go get fucked by kangaroos! at the T V (in colour these days).
England is stretching all about her, with its English trees and birds and grasses in which English insects crawl and spin and hum and jump. The English river swirls past and English fish rest as if dazed by the sunlight in its current. She feels young and vigorous but at the same time blighted by concern, by worry. She wishes she had found a nice English boyfriend, yet the thought of trailing after someone else is anathema to her; she appreciates the solitude of the life she is tasting, the choices it leaves her free to make.
Madalina wants her to come to Grimsby, where there is skilled work available in the fish-processing factories or the chilled-food plants. Madalina is already assistant team leader in 2 Sisters Food Group after only a year. Better, she claims, than being a healthcare assistant. You could join 2 Sisters Food Group and rise to manager status, buy a house with a garden after a few years, with Romania properly in the EU so no permanent-residence problems. ‘You don’t want to look a gift horse in the teeth, drăgut¸o!’ But Cosmina doesn’t fancy working for 2 Sisters Food Group or anyone else in some massive cold warehouse or factory smelling of fish or soup or rubbish food, whatever the money, the opportunities. Madalina always treats her like a little girl, telling her what to do, what is right. It’s a kind of joke, but it’s not funny.
She likes working here in the care home. The beauty of this riverside garden is settling into her like fine sand, laying down a sediment of memory uncluttered by conversation or relationships, the kind of annoying feelings that even a good friend like Madalina provokes.
Cosmina pictures her brain (a brain picturing itself) impacted by the darting spots of light, the sprinkles of birdsong and the smells of the green river and the garden flowers, of the cells filling up with this liquid honey, of her own inarticulacy in the face of such profound moments, for she has never written so much as a poem outside those exercises ordered by school.
She yawns and feels a sharp thorn-prick in the temple. Her mother has described how her uncle died in the war, when the proud Romanian army was fleeing before the German onslaught: his skull had got dented by a piece of shell which infected the brain in some way. Cosmina rubs her temple with her finger. She has bought a helmet since the accident, and the ridged plastic can be felt through the foam when she is riding along. It is uncomfortable, it has probably created the headache out of nothing. Why do doctors always want to worry you? It is a question of power. They want to control you.
A swirl of lather emerges from behind a rock and makes its way spiralling slowly like a galaxy past the sandy spit, spiralling out of itself yet remaining intact until a dip in the current takes it, and it disappears like she will one day disappear. And then? Black. Not an ever-changing black like her thick hair but completely lightless. She no longer believes in Heaven. She gave her rosary to a street child in Gare du Nord, where the orphans sleep and beg and sell themselves: the kid might earn a few leu from it. She believes in this life, in making the most of this life and not spoiling it instead of waiting for the next one. But she would never tell her mother or her sisters that she believes in this life more than the next. Her father would understand, always working out where the leak is, how to run a pipe behind a wall, fixing taps.
It is time to go back to the old folk until she is off at two, to change their soiled sheets and offer them milky cups of tea that have to be just the way English people want them, like a secret recipe she hasn’t yet found. The air inside is always so hot and stuffy and thirst-making, except when the boiler breaks down, but you can’t open the windows because the damp currents of air find your ears and neck in this country worse than in Romania: it’s like being in a train going through a tunnel where someone’s yanked the window down. But Bronwen and the others like to open the windows, and when it is cold the home always loses one or two to pneumonia. No one minds, because there is a long waiting list. The owners have no need to worry.
She takes a last deep gulp of the red roses and feels fine now, smiling to herself as she makes her way over the soft, perfect lawn to the back door and its sign that says, NO VISITORS. PLEASE USE FRONT ENTRANCE. NO SMOKING PERMITTED. KEEP CLOSED.
The voice has faded, like a mobile signal. She pulls herself straighter, lengthening her neck. That usually helps. Less pressure.
She pushes at the heavy fire door, and it swings open to the faint smells of antiseptic and tomato soup and sour pis¸at, which cling to her clothes and hair all week. The smells seem stronger than usual, which is a bad sign. Migraines mean she can only endure one smell: lavender. Her grandmother’s lavender scent.
Diane has soiled her bed yet again. Cosmina tries to see the point of Diane’s existence, the poor woman’s eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, her body shivering under the heavy blankets, her tender parts calloused with bedsores, but she can’t. It would be better if Diane were dead. But Diane refuses to let go. She clings on to her pointless existence as if it is precious. Her elderly husband in his flat cap comes in almost every day and talks to her, but she never responds. He claims Diane squeezes his hand now and again. That is probably the pain, but Cosmina doesn’t tell him that. Instead she says, ‘That’s lovely, Mr Bucksbaum.’
A few weeks ago he said, ‘Cosmina, you’re an angel. And I mean that. Call me Howard, by the way.’
She won’t ever call
him Howard. The rules are that everyone who is a relative or friend must be addressed properly, formally.
‘I am not allowed to, Mr Bucksbaum,’ she said.
‘Rules are for breaking, princess. Angels break them all the time. They don’t even obey physical laws, do they? I was called an angel, once. A real one, y’know? Angel of hope. Mind you, I was only two.’
She didn’t tell him that she was also called an angel of hope. She tries to avoid him now. Some older men can go all silly when it comes to the younger staff in their uniforms. Janie Watkins’ son is more sensible at least. Very polite. Shy. He once tried talking to her, and of course it was about Ceaus¸escu, as if the tyrant hasn’t been dead for twenty-two years. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was a very bad dictator.’ And the son said, ‘You mean as dictators go?’ She didn’t quite understand him, and she was busy, but she said yes anyway. Then she had a puncture two or three weeks back and he gave her a lift home. He offered to buy her a drink in the White Horse and she said yes because there is no question of anything silly with him: he is very introverted and probably gay, in love only with his books. His name is Mike. The only problem is that some-times he smells. She talked too much about herself in the pub. Then he went on for a long time about shops in Sheffield, and she pretended to listen. But she told Anca that it was quite enjoyable, on the whole.
As she turns Diane and changes her with the help of the new, frightened-looking nursing assistant from Latvia whose strange name she has already forgotten, Janie is wailing like a cat on heat. Her son doesn’t come enough, she complains, when in fact he always tries to come at least three times a week, but she has dementia and short-term memory loss. For her the son never comes, he has abandoned her somewhere she doesn’t know.
A few days later the son tells Cosmina that if she ever needs good books to practise her English, he sells them second-hand on Totter Hill. He’s already told her this before, and maybe more times, but she’s usually busy and tired when he talks to her and she doesn’t always take it in. Again she replies that she hardly ever goes into the centre of Lincoln; she works too much (this is an exaggeration). Again he says she can order them through the Internet, as the shop has just moved into the twenty-first century. This time, however, she replies that she doesn’t have her iPhone any more, and the tiny flat she shares above the betting shop has only one computer, which is really Anca’s, and Anca doesn’t like anyone else using it except in an emergency.
‘Was your iPhone stolen?’ ‘No, it was run over by a car,’ she tells him, trying to concentrate on Janie's medication.
‘How his face dropped!’ she tells Anca afterwards, scrubbing the dishes in their tiny sink. ‘Atât de surprins! Like I was joking with him! He is very sensitive. He asked me how and when it happened. I told him. I parted my hair to show him my ear.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Mike.’
‘Is Mike rich, Cosmi?’
‘What? He runs a second-hand bookshop! I dunno, maybe even a stall on the pavement. Like that barefoot guy on the Strada Doamnei, back issues of Click! spread out on the ground next to nice old books. Maybe I shouldn’t have accepted that drink in the pub. I felt sorry for him. And I was thirsty after my shift.’
‘What a mistake.’ Anca laughed. ‘Feeling pity for an old bookseller! Cosmi, you are just too good for this world.’
She doesn’t tell Anca that he offered to show the phone to a friend who can mend anything. Or that she fetched it from her bag in the nurses’ room and handed it over. Neither did she tell Mike that if ever she needed a book, she’d go to the library (where she could also use the computer). Or Oxfam or Age UK. They even have some tatty Romanian novels in Help the Aged. She pretended that she’d come to look at his books, ‘the next time I will be in the centre’.
He seemed pleased. Even if he smells of alcohol and body odour, he has kind eyes, he listens. This was only yesterday, but his mother would already have forgotten. Like running uphill on ice. The T V in Janie’s room was working badly; there was static interference. Mike fiddled with it. He said things about the universe, but she wasn’t concentrating; the extra night shift at the weekend had exhausted her. ‘In Romanian we say the T V has fleas,’ she told him. Mike laughed. His face completely changed again. Maybe he should laugh more. She seems able to make him laugh quite easily, although mostly he looks depressed and so reminds her a little of her daddy. About the same age. At least now you can see his face. When she first met him he had a huge beard like the priest in their village back home, Father Daniel. Then one day a strange man came into Janie’s room and it was Mike, with much less barbă.
As she takes the stuff she needs – swabs, ear cleaners and so on – out of the drawers in the dispensary, she thinks about him and his reduced beard. He is obviously very intelligent, like her tată. She feels sorry for him. Another idealist. Not an opportunist. She feels sorry for idealists. Their ideals are always betrayed by the thugs and then the opportunists.
‘Nu-urse!’ the sing-song wail breaks in, chasing away her deeper thoughts. ‘Nu-urse! Where the fuck are you?’
Just after six on Monday morning, as her own parents are tucking into their mămăligă and eggs and pickles because it is eight in the morning at home, Cosmina enters Janie’s room, and the poor thing is sitting in her chair, dressed and shouting the same words. It is business as usual. Those on night duty are always being told to wake and wash and dress the inmates early, to make things less busy for the day staff and to make it fairer, but Cosmina thinks this is cruel: who wants to be woken up at 4 a.m.? Yet the fact that she can come back to something that hasn’t gone away, been taken away from her, feels like a miracle. She must focus on that. Not give in to that little voice she heard last week or to any other voice. The flashing lights.
‘Hello again, Janie. How is it going?’
‘What do you expect me to say, pet? Bloody marvellous? Who are you, anyway?’
‘Hey, is it your birthday, sweetie?’ There is a present on the tray next to the bed, good-quality gift wrap: fancily penned words on the paper instead of pictures. She reads the repeated sentence where it isn’t hidden by the folding.
The valiant never taste of death but once. William Shakespeare. The valiant never taste of death but once. William Shakespeare. The valiant never taste of death but once. William Sha …
The label isn’t addressed to Janie Watkins, but to herself. ‘Is this for me? I’m thinking it is, Janie sweetie!’
‘Eh? Where’s me tea? No sugar.’
‘You always have sugar. Why you have this idea you don’t like sugar, sweetie?’
‘Open it, then.’
The old woman’s eyes are excited. Cosmina has never seen this in her eyes before.
‘Why you don’t open it for me, Janie my darling? You’re so good at these kind of thing. If you do it carefully, we can keep the paper. It is so nice.’
The knobbled fingers work away feebly at the ribbon. Cosmina sits on the bed and helps her. A bell rings, meaning another inmate needs something. Nurse Bronwen can see to it for once. She is fat and lazy and sweats a lot; she especially likes to open windows as if she is the only one who can’t feel the cold currents of air. Shuffling about with a carrot permanently up her arse. She’ll kill all the inmates soon. One by one. Then Cosmina remembers that Bronwen is on the following shift. It’s so complicated! Every week it changes!
The glossy wrapping paper rips apart suddenly – Janie is stronger than she looks – and reveals an iPhone box, white as snow. On the box, written in black felt pen, are four words: Take care of me.
‘But who’s this come from, Janie?’
Cosmina knows of course. All Janie says is, ‘Daft bugger. He stole that, you know.’
‘I don’t think he would steal a thing, your son.’
‘The ugly fucker always stole. He had a whole room full of books he stole.’
‘Janie sweetie, your son is so kind. He’d never do an ugly thing. Would you like to see the flowe
rs in the garden? How about we go out together into the nature after your tea?’
‘Oh, I’d like that. I would, you know. I’ve always liked roses. And delphiniums. And them others, what are they called? I do lose names. Can’t remember me own, sometimes.’ She’s better today.
‘Daffodils?’
Cosmina only knows the names of about three flower species in English, and a few trees: laurel, beech, oak. She’ll have to learn some more – each night, looking in her dictionary. She used an app before the accident. What is she going to do with this phone? She can’t accept it, can she? She’ll have to return it to him, quietly but firmly. His mother is scowling at her.
‘What are daffodils when they’re at home?’
‘Yellow, sweetie. Early in the spring.’
‘Oh, them. He stole that, you know. Or maybe you did. That used to be mine, that thing. My stuff’s always going missing. I’ll have to tell Bronwen about it. You’re light-fingered, Cosmina, like all them fucking foreigners. I know all about daffodils.’
Cosmina looks surprised. ‘Sweetie, you are so better at remembering names.’
‘Am I?’
‘So better because you even remember my name.’
‘Oh.’
Janie Watkins smiles a lovely smile.
The sun stays out as Cosmina wheels the chair slowly through the thick gravel. How stupid to lay gravel in front of a rest home! The poor old treasure loves the roses, their fragrance, the silky petals, and learns their colour in Romanian: conabiu. You have to keep challenging the brain, not let it soften, poisoned by the pollution of dementia. ‘Conabiu, Janie. You learn my language, now. Conabiu.’ A whisper comes out. Another. ‘Sweetie, you are brilliant.’
‘I was. I was.’ Janie pulls at her false teeth so they protrude, then sucks them back in with a click. ‘Now I’ve got this, what’s it called? Demonwhatnot.’