Lonely

Sunday 9th January

Day 263

For lunch I snap a green stick of celery and dip it into a tub of hummus while I unpack the array of bulging Sainsbury’s bags sprawled on the kitchen floor. I like having the fridge occupied again with broccoli and tomatoes, eggs and milk. I even break all my own seasonal rules and buy beans from Egypt - ringing the sprout changes.

Later, walking to the car, I feel the sun hot on my hair and I think of my husband striding out across muddy fields with old friends. I sit with my father while the light fades in his room and the anglepoise lamp behind him draws a circle round our chairs. He tells me the story of the man who started his Abbeyfield Homes - who tried to fill the ache of loneliness he found in the people on the streets of Bermondsey in the 1950s.

We snack on the puffed cheese straws that I brought him instead of my moist slabs of Christmas cake, as he’s on a diet. I peel him an orange but it’s too sour and we find an almost ripe pear in his fruit bowl instead. I leave him talking to my sister on the phone, praying he won’t be lonely tonight.

Listening

Saturday 8th January

Day 262

While my husband walks by the river in the sunshine I sit with some dear friends in a big listening circle under the vaulted wooden ceiling of the Quaker Meeting House. I know most of these precious faces and that of the man who is talking to us. The walls of my chest hurt but only if I think about it. Sometimes I look up and see a sheet of blue silk sky framed in the high arch of the window opposite me. The words of the teacher fall on me like my favourite Beethoven Symphony - The Ninth - achingly familiar but new and rousing every time - lifting my spirits, cracking open my heart.

Dismantling Christmas

Friday 7th January

Day 261

Today is the day to strip Christmas from the house. I sweep the mantlepieces that my sister decorated so beautifully with sprays of yew and ivy, bay laurel and holly. I stand on the two-step ladder and unhook the strings of cards and fairy lights draped over the mirrors. The red candles and sparkly baubles go back into their boxes. The white linen table cloth with its red wine stain like a pale purple hand, is in a carrier bag waiting to go to the laundry. All the radiators sport damp pillow cases, duvet covers and guest towels. Making clear space for 2011.

The fridge is echoey empty but I root around and find enough to make an olipadreida lunch of sweet potatoes, spring onions, carrots and sprouts stretched with a tin of sweetcorn from the store cupboard - all spiced up with garlic, ginger and a spoonful of curry paste. We eat it at the table in the cold kitchen with left over basmati rice from the freezer. We don’t have much to say and watch a fine misty rain fall on the garden and the patio pots still full of slimey dead geraniums and sticky fuschia bushes.

I feel the dankness of January wrapping itself like a clammy ghost around my bones.

Pleurisy and Potatoes

Thursday 6th Jan

Day 260

The nurse on the phone says,

‘It’s probably pleurisy.’

Such a soft rounded pillow of a word. It doesn’t tell the story of the slicing knife that slides between my ribs every time I cough.

Tonight I’m happy to find soup in the freezer that I made from Christmas day left overs - peas and leeks and onion gravy whizzed into thick sweet comfort. As delectable as the memory of my nephew’s Christmas roast potatoes - deep crusted, rough edged golden globes, cottony tender inside - the winning Oscars on everyone’s plate.

I’m longing to re-create his technique when I get beyond this bed and the option of cooking lunch swings back into my day.

Buttercup Weed

Wednesday 5th January

Day 259

I’m still in bed.

‘It’s Professor Duhickeybob,’ says my husband, handing me the phone.

‘I said I’d let you know your husband’s prognosis,’ says our favourite neurologist.

The pussy cat chooses this moment to wake up and pushes his nose at my pen so it swerves across the paper as I try and write what I’m hearing.

It’s better than we feared. He says he falls into the fifty percent category of those people who will live beyond the average eight years.

My husband is hopeful. Although no-one ever suggested it to him, he thought he might die in two years. I live with a different story in my head - it’s not the dying but the living which is squeezing my heart. Living into a future with my husband who bit by bit is drifting away from me like buttercup weed on the surface of a slow river.

But today I am buoyed up by the constant care of the Dearly Beloveds in my life who hold me with a great tenderness while I hang over this dark abyss.

Umami

Tuesday 4th January

Day 258

Yesterday

My husband lights the fire in the sitting room and makes a pot of leaf Earl Grey tea. We sit next to each other on the sofa. On the table in front of us are pens and notepaper, our diaries, my computer, a print-out of our monthly standing orders and outgoings - for our usual New Year planning session. It’s our twenty fifth wedding anniversary year - silver.

We don’t venture very far into the stretching empty months. Soon our second cup of tea goes cold and I’m glad of the lance of his tears and hunched rage which I’ve been waiting for.

A little later while he walks in damp woods, I put on a panful of brown rice to boil and steam onions and mushrooms, pak choi and red peppers in a garlic broth. A squirt of rich dark umami paste wakes it up. Umami is Japanese for that undefineable deliciousness, a natural savouriness that you find in Parmesan cheese.

It’s good to have a secret ingredient that makes everything taste better. Like keeping the sun in your store cupboard.

The Rat

Monday 3rd January 2011

Day 257

Last night I had a dream that I caught a grey rat slipping behind the filing cabinet in my study. I grabbed it by the neck. It was compact and hairy - I could feel the weight of its compressed animal vigour. I carried it downstairs where my brother-in-law was lying on our sofa. He said,

‘You must strangle it with a piece of string.’

I said I couldn’t do it. He took it away.

For the last three days and nights my world has shrunk to the desert of bed. My husband brings me hot lemon tea in white china cups. He goes for long walks alone under a blanket of raw grey skies and returns at dusk with icy dry cheeks. I eat peeled apples and slices of sharon fruit and then feel sick but hollow hungry. In the kitchen the red leaves of the pointsettia curl up and drop on the table. I watch three episodes of ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ on iplayer and take long baths in the afternoons.

In the night while my husband breathes beside me I stare into the empty bedroom darkness and flay myself with the last thing he asked me -

‘Who is Alec Guiness?’

I must find a way to kill this rat. You can’t be this afraid forever.