I pick it up and read the items one by one.
04/01/2016
6 eggs
sandwich bread
diet coke
tampons
apples
sugar
deo
cotton wool
pizza
whole chicken
spaghetti
soup
tomatoes
teabags
aftershave
white wine
prawns
olives
mobile top-up
strawberries
honey
moisturizer
dates
flowers
conditioner
single cream
pulses
steak (lean)
bleach
some kind of pudding
6 EGGS
Ruth
Now
The light is dim in our west-facing kitchen. I keep the curtains shut. I call the care home and say that I am sick and then I climb back into bed and take a sleeping pill. The sun doesn’t go up for six whole days, six empty shells of days, nothing in them, just me either asleep or about to be.
In this dream you feed us spoonfuls of bright white cream. There is something wrong about its colour; too white, iridescent. That can’t be right, I’m thinking in the dream. ‘It’s organic,’ you say, lifting your thumb to show me the picture of a cow on the tub, sketched by a grown-up imitating the hand of a child.
After he leaves me, I take to sleeping on my side with a pillow held against my belly and I dream of babies. It’s unclear which of the two acts has triggered the other: did I begin clutching the pillow because of my dreams or did the clutching bring about the dreaming? I am comfortable sleeping like this, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t continue. I dream of baby girls, never baby boys.
In this dream I miss her first steps, but you tell me it happened in the park. It is not clear why I wasn’t also in the park, nor do I have a clear image of what the park looks like or where it is located. You refer to it as if it is a familiar location that needs no further specification, and it is implied that we often go there together as a family. You tell me that she got up to chase a ball and off she went, like she’d been doing it for ever. Walking, unaided, almost running away from you. It was a red ball, you say, with white polka dots. As if knowing this particular piece of information will make me feel better about not having been there.
This is how, in sleeping, I pick up my first solitary habit: I either sleep too much or too little. Sleep comes to me in uncountable portions; it surprises me, knocks me out like a seasonal sickness with no early, recognizable symptoms. I’m not used to sleeping on my own. When I was very little I shared a bed with my mother, our dotted spines lined up against one another, like rodents sleeping under earth. Then, for a year, I slept alone in my college room. It was the year I almost starved myself to death.
In this dream we are driving through a car wash. It is the kind you pay for with tokens. Our daughter is strapped into the baby seat on the passenger side. She is facing me. The shower jet sprays on to the windows, shadows moving across her cheek like grey water. Her face is calm. There is a feeling of calm inside the car. In her right fist, when she unfurls it, is the triangular shard of an egg shell. I look closer and I realize the shard is a tooth and yet it is way too big for her mouth, way too sharp.
⋆
Neil and I would sleep in a flat knot, pressed against one another like flowers in a book. He’d face the other side of the bed and offer me his back. I’d cling to it, marsupial, matching my smaller toes with his. His body was always hot, as if he were running a fever. I’d push my face into the hollow of his shoulders and breathe the oxygen out, until I fell asleep drowsy with asphyxiation. Often, when I couldn’t remember my dreams, I assumed we had dreamt about similar things and that reassured me.
In this dream she is sitting on the floor of my mother’s old kitchen, chequerboard lino throwing her tiny body into sharp relief. Her right leg is at an angle that I can tell is rather strange for a toddler. I’m not sure why I approach her, maybe nothing to do with the leg, some kind of instinct or intuition, because she honestly doesn’t look distressed, but when I get closer it becomes apparent that something is wrong. There is definitely something wrong with her legs. Her leg that is bent doesn’t match her other leg. Something about its length. I’m inching closer. It seems that her right leg is a few centimetres longer. I drop down to my knees to check: definitely some length longer. My mouth opens into the shape of B-A for ‘baby’, but the sound hasn’t quite come out when she looks up and says, perfectly eloquently, ‘Don’t worry, ma’am, it’s just tomato sauce.’ There is nothing on the black-and-white tiles.
These days, sleeping feels like a kind of drunkenness, like travelling by sea. I roll from one end of the bed to the other, never comfortable, never warm, not enough limbs to hold down the covers. Sometimes it feels like sailing in a tempest. The flat is full of noises; the darkness is windy outside my window; all the surfaces slope. I crawl my way up through soggy dreams, craving fresh air to stop the nausea. My eyes fly open on the upper deck and I am back in our flat: it is still night-time and I’m scared. He always fell asleep before I did. I fell asleep listening to his steady breathing. Now I am awake at two in the morning because the shower is dripping and it’s driving me fucking mad.
In this dream, she’s dressed like a cartoon frog except her costume is like no other costume I’ve ever seen: the head is sturdy and heavy, the body rigid. She has to leap forward to move at all. It looks more like a large plastic frog has swallowed her whole than a costume. Her eyes sparkle darkly from the frog’s engorged neck. They follow me around the room. ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she gurgles as if she’s speaking from deep under water. I push my thumb into her frog mouth and it goes inside without hitting resistance, deep into her hollow limitless skull.
On the sixth day I wake with a start, my face damp and throbbing. I kick the cushion on to the floor, push at the duvet. The phone is ringing in circles on top of the wooden dresser, its calling: 6:30! It’s a new dawn. It’s a Monday. And one of the worst: a Monday in January.
SANDWICH BREAD
Four Years Earlier
From: [email protected]
Sent: 13 January 2012 01:23
To: [email protected]
Subject: Good Morning
Dear Sumiko,
I don’t doubt that this email will come to you as a surprise. You don’t know who I am and certainly I can’t claim that I know you. Technically, we’ve never met, never made eye contact, not even in the shallow way you sometimes do in a city like this, during shared coffee breaks and cigarette breaks, smiles on opposite sides of a zebra crossing, or at the offering of a seat on the bus … Though a bus is indeed where I first saw you. What a lovely coincidence that it should be the number forty-three, as I had just that day in my book read about the numbers four and three and their combination: four representing stability, three the bearer of joy and free expression. I couldn’t help but think this was a happy omen. You stepped in through the doors in your chalk-white coat, like a pale water lily, just about keeping afloat in a stream of grey overcoats. I thought you might be a vision of hope.
Sumiko (I hope you won’t mind me calling you by your first name), let me apologize if I don’t yet reveal myself. I am feeling quite shy, you know, Sumiko. And what good would it do you to know my name, when you have never seen me? Your name was the first thing I learnt about you, when your coat came open as you walked past me, revealing the name tag pinned on your heart. So imagine my surprise when I saw it bore the logo of my own company, and underneath, I realized you were wearing our in-house staff uniform. I must say the colour complements your eyes perfectly.
Let me tell you this. Your eyes, Sumiko. Your eyes are the reason I write to you. Each morning, as I come in the door you startle me with those eyes. I have to hurry past reception, because I
cannot look into those eyes of molten steel. You probably think I’m just another one of those rude boys who don’t bother talking to the new receptionist. So I thought I’d write to set the record straight. I’d love to talk to you, actually.
Your Cloud
From: [email protected]
Sent: 16 January 2012 00:56
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Good Morning
Dear Sumiko,
I apologize in advance if you should feel that this email follows really quite soon after my previous one. The thing is, Sumiko, I would be a fool if I believed love to be an exact science … and yet, and yet, I couldn’t get that infamous three-day rule out of my head. I thought you might be biding your time, waiting to get in touch today. The third fateful day, isn’t it? But since the day is pretty much over and I have not heard from you, I thought I would check in just to make sure you’ve picked up my message. If you have, and you’re unsure what to write, please don’t worry so much. It doesn’t matter. I just want to get to know you better.
In the glimpses I’ve caught of you, you have always struck me as one of those rare creatures who will think twice or more before they choose to express a thought. In the images I have of you, you rarely speak. Swiping in or out of the doors of our building, sitting on a bench, unwrapping your little square sandwich and lifting each neat quarter to your sweet little mouth: you always keep your eyes trained on the object you are holding. Your little sandwich. I’ve never seen you linger outside of work, smoking with colleagues. Though many times I have seen you smoke alone, lighting your roll-up laboriously with your back against the wall. Why do you choose to smoke in such a windy spot? Sumiko, all I wanted to say is you don’t have to be scared. I want to reassure you. You can talk to me.
Your Cloud
From: [email protected]
Sent: 21 January 2012 01:10
To: [email protected]
Subject: Sorry
Dear Sumiko,
I have spent the past few days in a daze, sitting around, daydreaming, imagining the different ways you might have interpreted my words. I’ve been waiting and hoping. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been longing for your reply with sighs uncharacteristic of this era. (Actually, I am; I am kidding, I am being ridiculous. I am making things up, because I am starting to feel like an idiot.) I was so excited at having finally summoned the courage to speak to you that I never tried to read my own messages through your eyes. Now that I have gone and done so I realize how terribly naive I have been.
Sumiko, I am beginning to suspect that you might be reading these messages as the ramblings of a madman. Well, listen, I’d like to send you my sincerest apologies. I want to reassure you that I only wanted to get to know you better. It is true that your modest beauty has touched me deeply, but please believe that I never intended for my admiration to make you uncomfortable. Don’t let me bother you further: write back and I can explain.
Your Cloud
From: [email protected]
Sent: 22 January 2012 10:22
To: [email protected]
Subject: Phishing Warning
Dear Neil,
I have been updating our company-wide contact list and couldn’t help noticing that the email address [email protected] is listed as your secondary contact in your profile entry. I would suggest looking into your security settings, as it appears that a number of spam emails have been generated from that account.
Best wishes,
Sumiko Hino
Administrative Assistant
The Kite Group
London W1 3HN
+44 208 648 9992
From: [email protected]
Sent: 22 January 2012 11:06
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Phishing Warning
Dear Sumiko,
Thanks for letting me know. I have now changed the password to my account. Will you please remove said spam address from my record? Thank you.
Best,
Neil Pratchett
Senior Accountant
The Kite Group
London W1 3HN
+44 208 648 9986
DIET COKE
Ruth
Now
Coping with loss.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve – everyone can find a healthy way to deal with pain.
I know the cover off by heart. I know the name of the colour too – periwinkle: a muddy, bluish violet. I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that it’s named after a flower. Everything about the care home is carefully calculated in this way, pastel and artificial; soft conventions that hold meaning beyond their official functions.
There are a number of reasons why the booklets exist, the least useful of which is for preliminary reading, although that is their official capacity. They live in a discreet corner of the visitors’ waiting room and we only hand them out when a patient is looking particularly bad. If the relatives haven’t actively picked one up (often this happens spontaneously) we fold one into their palm to snap them out of their denial. Get them used to the idea.
Normally, we’ve called the family in ahead of this moment. These ‘difficult calls’ summon a family to the patient’s bedside. We give these calls to the voluntary nurses. ‘Candy-stripers’: our American boss, Dame Melissa Barnes – ‘Call-Me-Melissa’ – likes to call them by their vintage name. She once confessed to me she might consider enforcing white-and-red pinafores as a uniform for the volunteers. She thought it would be quaint. ‘Of course,’ I said. I find it infantilizing: an excellent way to keep them in their place. We give the difficult calls to the candy-stripers so that they grow a thick skin. That is also the only official reason.
Guess what? Telling people that their relative is going to die is an unpleasant and thankless task and it’s a lie when people say that you never get used to it. In a private care home like ours, where palliative care starts at three thousand pounds a month, without counting meals or toiletries, not even a fucking minibar for when the family visit, you get used to it. This place is engineered for a single purpose: to administer the death of the rich in the most graceful, effortless manner.
We give the calls to the candy-stripers because we can’t stand going through the motions again. The statements of sympathy are like magic spells: they lose their power after they’ve been repeated a certain number of times. You stop believing in them. And without sympathy, how can a professional nurse be expected to do her job properly? We need a break once in a while. The candy-stripers are volunteers: they don’t mind dealing with the difficult calls. They like to feel essential. Are we sure we want them to? It’s a big responsibility after all.
Of course we’re sure. We have a million other things to deal with. And we don’t want to talk to the relatives, who sweep in only for the grand finale, having rejected the very same experience we curate, handed it over to paid staff, a less pressing matter in their busy lives. Do I ever want to have a heart-to-heart over the phone with horrible Miss Hancock, for instance? Prepare her for the death of her equally horrible father? Not in this lifetime.
The booklet also reduces the need for conversation. It provides families with the correct language for grief, a prescriptive emotional route. But we nurses are already well acquainted with that path. That’s why it hadn’t occurred to me to actually take a look beyond the periwinkle cover. That stuff is for beginners.
Today, during my lunch break the limp illustration of a lily called out to me from the rack. I was sitting behind my desk. I’ve been unable to eat for days and my stomach feels like it has shrunk to the size of a fist. Caffeinated drinks keep me going: there’s the shadow of a migraine constantly lingering at eye level and a silver can constantly clenched in my hand.
Funny how some things become meaningful only when you are very, very sad. This lily has suddenly fulfilled its intended role as a clever, multi-layered metaphor for the end of life’s natura
l cycle – gentle decay, sweet final death, the syrupy smell of funeral flowers. Isn’t it funny how the deeper meaning of these things only manifests for those who already grasp it somehow, slipping unnoticed past those who don’t? They pay people handsomely to come up with this sort of trick. Nice job, everyone.
On page one there is an introduction penned in a slanting, longhand font, conveying both intimacy and authority. It’s hard to read, presumably because everyone knows doctors have terrible handwriting.
Grief is most often associated with the loss of a loved one. However, someone who has suffered a subtler loss can still experience grief. You may experience grief on the occasion of the death of a beloved pet, retirement from your career, selling your family home, or the end of a relationship.
Mona waved as she came through the front door and past the reception desk. We call reception ‘the Goldfish Bowl’ because you are tragically visible inside it. There’s nowhere to hide. The plants are offensively green, polymeric. I flattened the booklet on to the desk then slipped it into the pocket of my smock as she rounded the corner to the back door. I took the booklet home with me at the end of my shift.
TAMPONS
Fourteen Years Earlier
21:31, 09/02/2002
[ IS ONLINE]
says:
trace babe u there?
says:
hiiiiiiiii
says:
fully done w maths for tonight
says:
girl
says:
literally just came out of rehearsals
says:
wow thats late
says:
yup
says:
miss was in a real mood tonite she wouldnt let us leave unless we finished the whole routine
says:
no mistakes
says:
jesus
says:
that woman behaves like shes the royal ballet
Shelf Life Page 2