I look back upon life, upon my young days, my elementary spell, which isn’t something the uncomplicated do. I think of the Father son and holy ghost, a refrain from my biblical classes. The holy trinity. A pas de trois, like a mum, dad and child, and past presence and future, like my brother, me and my sister, the three-leaf clover, much more fertile than the four leafed variety, that one is much sought after, these being the lucky ones. I remember looking for them, with my friends, in the playground in the summer when we got learning outdoors. I loved that. Being outside, on the grass, fresh with the air, the sun warming our shiny caps. Headmistress, teacher, child. Birth, life, death. Death will come to all was the message I heard when we were educated on The Big Bang Theory, with an additional lesson on how this would happen again, in the future. ‘Don’t worry girl, it won’t be in your lifetime,’ the teacher said, ‘but what about my children,’ I said, never giving it a second thought that I may not have any, ‘and what about my children’s children. Are they all going to die?’ I didn’t sleep easy after this lesson. Dream, followed dream, followed nightmare, followed sleep wanderings, even outdoors. You don’t believe I could do that? I don’t blame you. It’s not natural. I was freaky. Everyone else was normal and I thought they must be better than me. How did I rid myself of these negativities? The tree helped. Branches, leaves and roots. I’d snuggle along a sturdy branch, coated in green, leaves as large as the palm of my hand, the smell of chlorophyll rising. Or I’d sit amongst the roots, feel the vibration of life, look up at the rebirth of the tree as it turned again from rust to green. From my perch, I’d place my head in the clouds, and I’d breathe in fantasy. I would fly over the land, invisible, free as a bird, I’d swoop and I’d swirl, twirl, caressing the breeze. Seas and rivers would shout up at me and I’d wave and blink and ripple with pleasure. Foxes, deer, rabbits and squirrels scrambled about, disappearing under canopies of emerald, mint, sage. The land beneath watched me with baited breath, willing me to soar high. I felt wild, almost crazy. As unbalanced as I was, the tree was my stability. It didn’t move, it didn’t tell scary stories, keening that the end is nigh. I liked the tree. I could see it from my bedroom window. It didn’t judge, it didn’t make me feel small, even though I was, it didn’t scold me, it accepted my weaknesses, and it listened to my fears and my joy. Grandmother, mother, child. Seed, upon seed, upon seed. My grandmother’s fears invisibly laid across my mother’s breast to then be laid across mine. Would I then lay them across my child’s breast, like folklore, ballads from times gone by? Songs with a message of love, of hate, of murder, of woe, of a little fish, floundering, eyes, gills and mouth, birth, life, death. The triangle, the circle, the threesome, the piggy in the middle, me, always me. Safety in numbers. It’s safe in the middle, the starlings who dance in the sky are all making for the middle, they all want to keep safe from the birds of prey, so I should take some positivity from being in the middle. But I’m alone now. Alone with only my thoughts, thoughts of escape, of release, of failure. I can’t even find it in myself to urge the bell to ring, so I can run from my history cupboard, as I’m numb in defeat. I’m not a Suffragette, I’m not brave, I’m not bold, I’m just an ordinary middle child trying to grow up in a closeted, disciplined world.
‘What the…,’ I shouted over the thunderous vibrations, watching the cat’s tail disappear into the shed, my neighbour flying out his door, pulling at his dressing gown belt, a girl behind him, peeping over the threshold in a flash of bare white. I soon find out we’d experienced an earthquake. Forth FM reported it, telling us that at approximately 11:00 hours, an earthquake of 2.5 on the Richter scale shook Midlothian, and in particular Penicuik. My quaint Scottish town. As if that wasn’t enough, the next day, a guy and his gas detector lurked around my airbricks checking for leaky pipes. ‘Carry on, don’t mind me,’ I said and after a thorough examination he told me I didn’t need to camp out in the shed with the cat, I could enter the house, no leaks, merely the visitation of a gregarious gas cloud. All I need now is a Monarch butterfly migration, or some shooting stars, or a steam eruption, or a white rainbow.
Is this the result of global warming? Like the floods, winds, dire weather changes, filtered through the news, in buzz words, greenhouse gases, climate change. It has to be, no? What else can it be? I look to stories I’ve heard in my past, and I perceive some likenesses. The parting of the Red Sea for instance, could this have been an ocean bed earthquake? And Noah’s Ark, I mean, it’s scarily apt right now. Could this be a premonition as well as a biblical event? A time-travelling flood. Humans rather than animals piling in, and not in twos, with no social distancing evident. I look around me, there are many hills, Arthur’s Seat far in the distance. I’m level with the top of this hill of volcanic proportions, 800 feet above sea level, so I’m hoping when the rains eventually fall an Ark will not be necessary to float me to a new destiny.
An eclipse would excite. Switch me off and then switch me on again, to a different me. It’s not that I’m fed up with me, it’s more like the me, inside of me, is shrinking, plummeting to my achy metatarsals, my fallen arches. I need restored, my battery rendered, refilled, rejuvenated. I need a kick up the arse, a talking to, a jolt, a thump, I need to obscure this insidious languishing.
A year and a half of listening to facts and figures on the TV, hearing harrowing stories, living harrowing stories, locked down, isolated, distanced from those we love, worrying about those we love, nothing to do but care. No mixing, no matching, no hugs, no kisses, no warmth, and from down in my gullet, no laughter lathers. I’m out of laughter, of partying practice.
Happiness is an art form. A form of art. A How to be Happy shape. A smile, a crinkle around the eyes, twinkling, laughter, liveliness. It comes easy to some. Or does it. Some merely suggest happiness. Pretence comes easy to some. The actor, the secretive, the diplomat, the independent, the child. Ah yes, the pretence of a child. This brings happiness. How wonderful is the sight of a child running free in the wind, simulating a bird, a plane, no superman?
We could all learn from a child, if only we would open our eyes and see that a child’s innocence and happiness can be ours. If only we would rekindle our immaturity. Easy for some, for those of us who have never grown out of it. For others, there is too much baggage cluttering the hallway, no space to angle around it, to let the sun in, to feel the breeze, to allow the heart to beat lightly.
But how do we break the sitting at home alone cycle, now that the world is slowly opening up to us again. Friends and family call to meet you, to go here, go there, but you’ve forgotten how. Your body is numb, your heart is slow, you are weary, stiff, after a long hibernation. The gaping cavern is familiar, it is home and the big world, absent for so long, makes you wobbly about treading there again. A baby comforted and coddled, too warm to move from the mother’s breast.
I can only hope I still harbour my child-self, that she jiggles inside, embracing the new world, the new experiences, as she looks into the gulley of veins and tendons, searching for the earthquake epicentre, the cause, the effect. A gas cloud?
You cradled me, soothed me, fed me, clothed me, protected me, taught me, led me, showed me, love, wisdom, strength. From infant to toddler, toddler to school, you assisted, buoyed, listened, heard me, raised me. I grew into adulthood hearing questions, always questions, you asked many questions, to learn you once said, smile you said, but worry hung over me, blinkered me, blurred me, saw only battles and tears, fears, illness. Then you’re gone. The mist is gone. I’m now adrift, surfing on shifting sands, resting hands squeezing, heart grieving in the gap. I’ve so many questions, they float, a swirl of words, but hear me mum, I’ll hold on to them, and I’ll smile as I use them as you used them.
This is the dawning of days filled with flowers. Flowers and leaf laden trees, pollen filled, attracting the bees. This is the release of summer, the emergence of sunshine, the showers, the growth, the birds, starlings swirling in the air, making their arrival known. The swans have mated, the signets looking upon the big wide pond, from their straw worn nest.
I lie in bed, only just awoken, and see the clouds float by my window. I sleep with the curtains open. I like to see the stars and the clouds and the trees reaching up to the clear skies. This morning the trees wave in the breeze. It’s gentle, this breeze, like my awakening. Introduced to the day by bird song, as two little sparrows sit on the telegraph wire outside the window.
As I consider my night for a moment, I allow the sleep to slip from my body. If you are unaware of your night’s sleep, you’ve slept well. If it was dreamless, you were sound. I did have a dream. My old boss was in it. She was passing me over for promotion. Dreams are crazy. Where do they come from?
The visions too, that keep popping into my head from time to time, no apparent order to them, why do they just drop in uninvited? The vision I see this morning flits behind my eyes again as it has so often in the last two months. I see my mum, gently sleeping in bed, her lips blue.
I get up and try not to dwell in this sensation. I look instead outside my window. The skies are cloud filled, but white clouds, not ominous rain filled patches as forecast. The light of the sun is rising in the east. My bed faces east. I like the east. The way the morning sun ascends, slowly, raising its hands in a refreshing stretch, makes me unroll. Time now for me to get up. I know I have to get up, I cannot give in to aimlessness. I breakfast while reading my book about life and war and love and relationships, and all the while my mind is whirring.
There’s a pile of freshly laundered clothes on the chair by me, and I pick them up, take them upstairs. I put them on the drawers. As I turn something comes over me, catches me unawares. I don’t know why or what causes it, this feeling, but it’s as strong and as cold as the arctic seas, touching me only momentarily. This notion carries words, words that only I can hear. The words translate into a story of instability. My mum’s passing, the narrative which has brought with it my insecurity.
Even though we know this time will come, there is a part of every child which thinks that their parents will be with them forever. A mother is the first person a newborn child sees at birth, the first human touch, a childhood filled with unconditional love. Dependant, the chick in the nest, fed and watered and taught to fly, the mother flying by their young’s side, protective always.
I wobble forward just the tiniest of shades, grip the drawers and then I gasp. It comes to me, this revelation that is no surprise, but still, it stuns me in its realisation. My mum, who has been with me for sixty-four years, is gone. Taking with her the practical stability that forever supported me. You become accustomed to it, you take it for granted and it’s only when it’s taken from you that you notice and it shakes you.
It doesn’t happen right away. No, this understanding is there, but it lies dormant, allowing other thoughts to cascade and fill your head, and it waits its time. It wants to be noticed, so it hits you suddenly, out of the blue, making you stumble and cry out for the return of that stability.
The apron strings may have been untied in young adulthood, but they still hang loose, they are there even if they do not bind you close, but when they are removed permanently, when your mother is taken from you, there is a jolt to your foundations. A fissure, a crack, an open sore.
I make for the pond, and the swans, who guard their young, where magpies snigger and hop, where sheep stray, where ferns sprout higher and higher, where the trees stand tall, day in, day out, and the water ripples and I sit, I seize the breeze and let the good memories flow.
Fairy lights decorate the bedstead with the rose pillows and bedspread bringing a dreamy glow to the room.
CINDY REILLY
This is the perfect setting for the scene I play in my mind.
CINDY REiLLY TOO
What about the sand, sun, and the sea? The waves shushing all your worries down, down, to squirm with the shoals and sharks.
INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT
100 screens all showing a different play.
CINDY REILLY
If only. This is my mind. 100 different screens, 100 different plays. I’m working on scripts. What’s the script today? Only 100 screams because bed, relax, sleep is all I want. Even in the day. I just want to sleep. I don’t want to think of the 100 screens but each is flashing furiously in and out of my mind with one scenario after another. My life in play. Why did I do this, act like that, say this, carry out that? How have my actions affected this person, that person, my own person? Pain. Hurt. Regret. All showing from my cloud. All stored in that cloud. Weighing down that cloud.
CINDY REILLY TOO
As one cloud drifts north, another sails in from the south.
CINDY REILLY
My file is forever stored in the cloud. Is it possible that my cloud could hang over others, that they could help me disperse it?
CINDY REILLY TOO
Who should know the answer to this? The neighbours, the local policeman, the friendly Doberman who cocks his leg against your hedge? The doctor perhaps?
CINDY REILLY
Should I call the doctor? What would I say? Please, help me doctor. You see I have this cloud hanging over me and it’s not for leaving me alone, however hard I try. I’ve tried ignoring it, I’ve tried speaking to it, I’ve tried running from it, I’ve tried flying with it. I’ve even tried to blow it away, and it does go, but then it comes back. Same format as before.
CINDY REILLY TOO
But you see it carries all your files, your scenes, your settings, your screenplays.
(Cindy Reilly gasps for air)
CINDY REILLY TOO (CONTINUES)
It’s not my fault that they’re all showing at once.
CINDY REILLY
Give me air. Pure uncluttered air. Air that will free me. Air that breathes happiness. Air that will make me laugh and smile without worry or fear. I’m looking for some non-anxiety air, as my cloud has ceased providing this. Is this normal? Do I need help?
DOCTOR
No dear, you’re doing fine. Just grab a screen, any screen and embrace it. You’re the director. Play around with the screens, mix and match, join up, rotate, crop. Do what you must for your screenplay. Let nothing else matter.
EXT. BEACH – DAY.
A woman stands by the sea, she wears a sunhat, her face is hidden, all but her mouth, but her body language is easy, she’s relaxed, she’s contemplative. Her lips curve slowly into a smile. She laughs then she runs into the waves kicking her feet in the sea.
Who am I? I never used to think twice about this. I always thought I knew who I was. A middle child, the odd one, the wayward one, the secretive, guilty one, the crazy as a cuckoo one. I look back often, at the child I was, but my past is like a kaleidoscope, the colours change patterns with each decade that sits upon me. What may have been a hurtful episode, a scary event, an upsetting time, seems different now. I seem different. Was that girl really me? Feisty, funny, bubbling with life, musical, sporty, adventuress. Now I’m not sure who I am? What I am? I’m blinded by my presumption of me. The me I’ve always been. The me that’s all of the above. But what if I’ve got it wrong. Maybe I’ve always been wrong. Maybe I’m not me. I’m someone else. I’m a serious, intelligent, respected individual.
Do crazy people know they are crazy, do the stupid see their stupidity? Do ugly people know they’re ugly. Are the bores aware they bore? Can the comedians tell they’re funny without laughter? I don’t think so. But let’s imagine there’s an app one could download. A ‘What are My Traits’ app. Like Alexa. ‘Alexa, what do people think of me?’ Or Google, ‘what’s my worst habit?’ Can you picture the effect? ‘People think you are a total buffoon.’ ‘Stop that incorrigible crunching.’ ‘Close your mouth, you’ll catch flies.’ Imagine if when you have a baby, a he or a she or it. I used to call babies it and was scolded, into saying it’s he or she, don’t be so insensitive. Now we’re encouraged to call them it, or is it they, them, their, there, hare, hair, bare, bear, too, two, you hoo. No, come back, come back, I’ll behave.
Anyhow, as I was saying, what if when you have a baby it’s born with projector eyes and shows you all your own personal steps in life, what you’ve been like throughout the years. A girner, a joker, a pleasure, a pain, dirty, pernickety, stupid, bright. Excuse me, I’m going to be sick, my baby has just put up a production of my youthful drinking days, and I’ve just downed a half litre of cider and am puking in the bushes, flickering fag ends lighting up the ground around. Or maybe it would be better with a chip. A microchip buddy not a French fried one or a stuck in your shoe aggravating little beggar chip. What if we were chipped with an inbuilt self-checkout device. No not for Tesco. To check out yourself, like ‘how do people view me today chippy?’ ‘You are viewed as a narcissistic cow today.’ Oh! How lovely would be the vein of thought.
Maybe we are already chipped. Have you ever had a thought, just a thought now, not a spoken word, and next thing popping up on your laptop is an advert for that thought? Boob enlargement, liposuction, piercing, naturist holiday camps, plan your own funeral. I mean how the…How does that even work?
Wait I know, a character alarm. ‘Warning, warning, you are a dick today.’ A disposition detonator, buzz, buzz, ‘you should stay away from the human race for now.’ A charm ring, ‘ring, ring you’re exceptionally musical my dear.’ A behavioural band around the forehead internally displaying external viewpoints. ‘Your halo has slipped.’ Or why not a personality mirror. We could have them in the supermarket foyers, on the bus, the pub toilets. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the most beautiful and kind of them all.’ ‘Not you mate, you’re a narcissistic cow.’
Or how about a magnet that sticks you to people the same as you, then you only have to watch and listen to them to know what you’re really like. ‘Good morning your Royal Highness, how simply divine to be spending time with you today.’ ‘Nurse, pass me the scalpel.’ ‘Lights, Camera, Action,’ I hear say as I look towards the fourth wall. Do directors even still say that? Lights, Camera Action? Or are they conscious of their fellow workers sensitivities. ‘Ok, in your own time my little beauties.’ Oh no, you can’t say that. Oh well. ‘Hello my supporters, what are your views on the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Theory?’ ‘Fuck off you little faker.’
Thank you all, my most valued friends, I know who I am now. I was right enough all along. I’m the middle child, the odd one, the wayward one, the secretive, guilty one. I am indeed the crazy as a cuckoo one.
The land is superior. Beautiful variations on green. Sage, forest, lime. Only there is a flaw. A fault line perhaps. There’s a deep cut in the land, which has become my obsession. A new path discovered. A fresh trail. A pristine sight, the first crocus, the first daffodil, the first lamb, the first day when light stays longer. A vibe growing from sleep, into a thought, into a need, into something deep, something that shakes you up, blinds you to everything.
My train of thoughts fill every carriage. Sit svelte on the itchy seat as I career past rows and rows of hedgerow in a thundering capsule, long unseen on these tracks. I wheel along regardless. Victorians, Georgians, Edwardians litter my path. Ghostly visions, unscaring, unscathing, just being, having been and being once more in my mind. The old train track is full of the scent of others who have walked the railway banking, who have been carried along it, or looked upon it, and I drown in their illustrious lives, looking for ways to heal my own.
In triple quaver hops, hat down over my thinning eyebrows, I move on. I have a few landmarks to pass before reaching my goal. The castle, the horse paddock, the monument, the viaduct, all on the way to the Black Sheep Farm. A respite I’d promised myself. There is my first view, in fact. The tip of the castle winks at me through the trees, whose gnarled knotted ancestors had witnessed terror. I feel it, looking as I do, high up to that cliff ledge, walls of red stone, ruinous now but once so dramatic, majestic, maidens and knights eating fowl and supping sweet wine, while some way down the hill, in a dark cavern like land, the gunpowder mills, a winding river, the flickers of English soldiers, feet lost ground, bodies falling bluntly into the gorge and the riverbed rocks.
The sun lifts its head, shining rays of pre-occupation onto mine. I keep my eyes down, towards the path, slabs of saliva, snot and bird shit insidiously dispelling my mind waves, the romance of the moment, ousted.
‘Hi Jo. Where are you off to?’ asks a bonnet topped man, waggling a Daily Mail in his hand. It’s Stevie, my neighbour.
‘Nowhere,’ I chip in.
‘Now, that’s funny. You look like a person with a purpose.’
I laugh. ‘Ha ha. You know me, Stevie. Always up to something, but nothing ever doing.’ I wave off his sociability and quicken my step. Around the corner I weave between a group of masked folks, cardboard coffee cups and fresh baked rolls in hand. One guy bows and lets me pass through; his smile visible in his twinkling eyes. I walk on, the smell of the newly made rolls and burnt sugar following me for a bit.
Looking down the track, I think on my great grandfather, I believe he lived not too far from here. I see him wander, along the same route, whether or not he really had. I envisage him anyhow. It was 1890, life was slow. I walk away from the town, all signs of dwelling thinning out, leaving only fields. A black and a white horse dot the green, a searing farmyard smell circling. My internal vision of the man walks steady. I follow.
A clearing in the trees. A monument, a recent build, carved into the stone. A battle, these stones the remembrance of life, so many suns and moons ago. I stand quiet, the hair on my neck rising, as I say a blessing. A blessing is necessary surely. Respect. A walled circle, a barrel shape, stones from the river piled with posterity. Chaffinches and blackbirds jeep jeep in the trees where beyond the ravine rests in grave endings.
Walking on through my fanciful fascinations, a maid in the field, milking a cow, one cheek red, clapped as it was against the cow’s rump, the heat radiating from the animal. She doesn’t look up but I know her eyes are cornflower blue, like my grandmother’s. Were her mother’s eyes blue too? What of my great grandmother? Janet, same name as her child, had lived further off, by the sea. It was a three or four, or five, hour carriage journey away from her beau, Robert. Imagine a seedsman and a domestic servant, a knock on the back door, a welcoming smile, refreshment at the big oak table.
Janet was primrose and buttercup, stiff of upper lip but soft underneath, valued by her employers, and trusted too. Her intuition was that of a much older girl than twenty and one years, and she felt comfortable in Robert’s older company. She felt emboldened before his eyes. But there was a delicacy of mind there, that hid behind veils and when those ribbons were tightened there was no getting through. They married in 1891.
The embankments become steeper, weeds, trees, scrubby shrubs climbing up the rugged ground. My ancestors rise before me. A coachman, a seamstress, a domestic servant, a scholar, all walk with me. A hidden path ridden by history, the seedsman’s love, giving life to three girls. Near enough six years between each. No such six years coming between this last birth and the death of her mum. A baby motherless at two. A haunting, a premature death in 1905, a reminder of the fragile grip life has.
And now in this moment, the eerily quiet of the concealed path, the blue sky above, tree branches tapping out their stories, the pathway veers into scrubland. A white tail bobs in front, and then another and another, tottering shyly along behind, only visual for seconds before disappearing into a bunch of bushes. A pond comes into sight and I watch two swans float gracefully on the sparkling water, wings softly tucked in natural bliss. The Boer War? 1899 – 1902. Had that affected my great grandparents’ lives. I’ll never know. I know my grandfather marched off in his kilt, underage, to take his post in WWI. I know my mum was evacuated to the country, leaving her parents, and her Abbeyhill home during WWII. My mother told me these things, while patting the chip on her shoulder. I also know my great granny fell from her tenement flat. Do you know that every swan in the land belongs to the Queen? Funny. I sit. I’m tired.
‘Hi Jo,’ a woman calls over the path. She has a dog. It’s an excuse for a dog. It’s in a buggy. How can it catch sticks from a buggy? ‘I thought it was you,’ the woman adds.
‘Hi Shona,’ I say. Shona was an acquaintance of many years.
‘I hear you’re not keeping too good,’ says Shona.
‘Och, nothing too bad, I’m ok,’ I answer. ‘What breed is your dog?’ I ask in way of avoidance. I like avoidance, especially of public displays.
‘A Chihuahua.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Chiquita.’
‘Cute.’
‘You need to ask for help when you’re poorly Jo. I’m nearby if you need me.’
‘I know. I’m ok, really.’
‘Are you still writing?’
‘Not for a while.’
‘Writer’s block?’
‘Mediocrity block, unexceptional.’
‘This track is haunted, did you know?’ she asks changing tact and before I can speak, she speaks again. ‘I never go beyond here, I get the shivers,’ she says.
‘It’s hearsay, gossip, old wives’ tales,’ I reply crossing my fingers at my back.
I’d been haunted by the ghost of failure. Too much time on my hands. Lowered through lockdown, left rifling through my family history. Wanted to know if something there could help free me of my inferiority complex. Mind you how long have I had it? Is it even inherent? Could it simply be the nature of a middle child, a child born on Christmas eve, a child who can’t even have their own special birthday, have to share it with last-minute shopping, gift wrapping, trifle topping, turkey cooking, and carol crowing?
Whatever the cause, it’s there, and in full view hugging my neck as I wonder at all the family members gone before me. What made them tick? What cruelties of nature had they suffered? Queen Victoria had instilled a strong morality in her subjects and this continued into the next and the next generation. This strength often showing as heartlessness. A kind of cruel to be kind, kind of scenario. The British stiff upper lip. The getting a grip of yourself and not letting the side down. Simply a sign of the times. An inferior infection, silent pain, or some other hang-up passed down from one peer group to another, by standards. Times alter, fashions change, but what of mood?
I say goodbye to Shona, and walk away, into a wooded area. Fallen tree trunks lie, felled soldiers from battles of yore, the odd stone, the remnant from a house perhaps, a pile of logs idling, waiting for the day they’d be moulded into tables, chairs, garden fences, huts, and branches, so many branches of every size, tangled, strangling the undergrowth. A waterfall roars in my ears, and then dwindles as I continue on, the lay of the land on each side rising, cloistering me, sheer rock face dulling my senses, making me shiver, the sun blocked, drooping branches decorated with plastic poo bags, ogres of the day.
Onto the viaduct I tread. It spans the gorge, only wilderness below. It’s a metal construction unlike the fantastic red brick ones I love so much. The fences at each side are high, you’re well protected from the drop, the tops of the trees almost stroking your shoulders. I look into the eyes of an eagle, or a hawk, or a crow. It looks back. I feel like I could touch it. The crow, it is a crow, I see, lifts its wings and rises from the nest, taking my solitude with him. My eyes water, my limbs wobble, as my predecessors fade from me, my tears falling into the deepest of gullies.
Once over the crossing, and around the bend, I set my eyes upon the most charming frolic of fun. Here I am. My destination. Here to chat to the lambs at Black Sheep Farm.
I aimed the shower head at the glass and sprayed away the swirls of Cif, before grabbing the squeegee and trying to show off, only to myself, my most avid audience, by performing a little wrist action. The rubber wand wound across and down the sparkling walls of the shower. It was the 16th April 2020, I knew that at nine a.m. but two hours earlier, as my being was pulled from sleep, I had to make the usual concerted effort to determine the day of the week. That day, I awoke to blue skies. Bluer than I ever can remember. It was a vivid blue, a reflection of my mother’s eyes, I realised just before disappearing and being closeted in her shower. It was the only way to clean it. Mum’s shower. Small. Cubicle.
As I squiggled away with the squeegee, stripped off to a degree, I have to wonder, a year later, if I’d been wishing away the scum gathered around my cortex. Would this not have been in my mind? Could this not be flushed away down the drain too, along with the scaly skin and soap debris? Worry and anxiety were my bed mates as they had been then too, this same time in April. April had always been my favourite month. The budding of trees, lambs, daffodils, tulips, the days stretching out, promise in the air, but April 2020 had changed all that. I imagine wishing myself down that plughole. Swept away, in a rush of water, down drains, pipes, hands raised above my head, toes pointed downwards, squealing, take me down. Down, down.
As the Corona Virus took hold, the Care Home Corona scandal went into the bedrock of our society. The failure to protect our most frail, a grotesque refusal to equip their poorly paid carers, fat cat bosses rubbing their whiskers, a system left to rot. This dominated the news. Add to this my eighty- nine-year-old mother. Not in a Care Home. In her own home. Independent to the last. Alone in the house, with simply a TV and a daily paper for company, not that she could see very great, macular degeneration holding her back.
We were told not to see our family or friends. Stay at home. Leave only once a day. Fines will be delivered. Video links were encouraged. Problem. My mother didn’t have the technology nor probably the wherewithal to get her head around it, not that I’m being condescending, not that she wasn’t bright enough, her eye sight again, held her back.
A decision had to be made. And I made it quickly. I had to become my mum’s unlisted carer. How could I abandon the woman who gave me life, deprived herself of much to give me and my siblings, taught us right from wrong, manners. There was no way I could leave my mum to wilt in that little hot house of hers. Which she would have, if no one had cared.
It was worked between me, my brother and sister to attend to mum. To shop for her, clean for her, and talk to her, give her the time of day. To do this, I had to create a bubble. A word bandied about sometime later. I had to deny myself the company of my own children and my grandchildren, as I had to protect my mum at all costs. If she contracted this virus, it was and still is my confident view she would die. I knew her weaknesses. Heart murmur, chronic kidneys. This wasn’t easy and I suffered a thousand low mood swings, walked with a permanent dark cloud over my head. The cloud hasn’t cleared yet. I’m not sure when or if it will ever clear.
The shower was shining, as I stepped out from the glass square, put on my socks and jumper, and walked through to the living room, then the kitchen, where I filled the kettle to make a pot of tea. I carried through the biscuit tin, and my mum took out two tea biscuits. Back in the kitchen, I filled the tea pot, and quickly poured her tea. Not too strong.
‘Would you believe I couldn’t get you loo rolls mum, or macaroni,’ I said, once seated on the chair at the opposite side of the room.
‘I saw that on the TV,’ she said. ‘Never mind, I’ve got enough for now.’
‘But your shower is clean.’
We sat apart, with our own thoughts and sipped our tea.
Jimjan's Journal 