Uncontrollable

The sky this afternoon - a brief silver lining

swamped by grey.

Garden tulips after the rain....

sheltering their hearts.

 8.30 am-  I leave my brother at the bus station. He waves goodbye through the nearly black glass window of the coach - a sleek, towering monster streaking off into the rain.....taking him and all those other long ago, wrenching goodbyes packed in his trunk in its deep belly.

9.30 am - Another ending - the last session with our young Clinical Psychologist....NHS cuts.....but I suppose we've had our fair share over these last four years...what price the space to listen/be heard?

 RC is uncontrollably vocal most of the time...with his usual obscene phrases.....at one point, as we are leaving, he starts shouting them, his voice raising to a higher and higher pitch...both the CP and I try to shush him.... I take his face in my hands and say STOP.... but doesn't.

In the car I ask him not to say those things to other people, in public places....ask him if he thinks he can. He says he'll try.....then starts shouting them - his obscenities. I shout NO but he can't stop. The knot in my stomach is an eagle's claw squeezing a shrew.

 10.45am We arrive at our friend's house. On the doorstep he repeats his phrases - high falsetto voice....I say Remember what I said.  But he doesn't. She welcomes him into her calm and gentle care and I drive home, tight with rage and despair. I start hoovering the house....sucking up all the dust and  the crumbs and the griefs of last week.....till the pain in my back halts me..... I sit on the bottom step of the stairs and wait till it passes....and it's time to go back and collect him.

Our friend has worked her magic and RC is calm and smiley. We go out for lunch in Topsham and he doesn't say a single foul thing even though the meal is 25 minutes in the waiting and mine is greatly unappealing - flabby salmon swimming in olive oil, wilted, wet, impossible to eat without dripping on your chin rocket, a huge heap of hard halved new potatoes in a pink sludge of beetroot mayonnaise. 

When the waitress asks if everything is OK I  just say yes - today I haven't got whatever energy or guts it takes to complain....something much bigger claiming my attention....when you can't control the uncontrollable  - what do you do?

Can't write about my cousin's funeral yet....