No Room for Surprises

23rd June 2011 Thursday

The house feels odd tonight without the pussy cat. There’s a breathing space in my head where he usually lives. I’m imagining him in the cattery where he’ll be for a week while we are in North Wales. He won’t be out hunting now.

There is another empty space - on the brick wall by the front door. Today my husband took down the brass plaque there with the name of his company on it. His filing cabinets are empty too. The man came this morning and took away all the files - piled them into the back of his Landrover and drove away. It took less than an hour.

I ask my husband what it feels like - this ending of his career. He smiles and says it is a relief - he feels positive, hopeful about the future. I feel numb and just get on with getting ready to go on holiday. My head is a jumble of things I must remember to take - Scrabble and flapjack, olive oil and sun cream, flipflops and walking boots.

I think I’m trying to cover all the bases - if it pours with rain or if we have a heat wave - have I got the right clothes? I realise I don’t like being unprepared for all eventualities. No room for surprises then. No wonder I’m tired - like that little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in the hole in the dyke. Trying to keep the deluge at bay.

Blood Fish and Bone

22nd June 2011 Wednesday

We are at the bottom of the garden filling a big glazed pot with new compost. I want to plant the cherry red tea rose we bought in the market two weeks ago - no space in the beds so I hope it will still thrive in a pot.

I say to my husband,

Have we got anything like blood, fish and bone?

I don’t know what that is.

You know - fertilizer. It's plant food. It’s a white powder in a box.

We haven’t got any.

Yes I know we have. It’s in the shed.

Suddenly I can’t bear it.

Well, if we have it’s on the bottom shelf.

I find the tub of Phostrogen. Where he says it is.

It’s called Phostrogen, I say needlessly.

I don’t know what it’s called, he says. I don’t remember.

But I want you to remember, I say.

Me too, he says.

And he holds me while I cry sorry into his neck. We stay like that for a while, locked together outside the shed, while the clouds cover the sun.

The Longest Day

21st June 2011 Tuesday

The Longest Day

A man is coming to take away all the files - four cabinets full - in my husband’s office. And download all those years of financial information from his computer. Stripping it bare. We transfer all the weird and wonderful creatures into my study, declutter all the surfaces and start cleaning the desks and the tops of the filing cabinets. I feel ashamed of how dusty everything is, even the computer cables are sticky dirty. Afterwards my husband says it feels completely different. I think it means there is space now for something else to come in.

The man never arrives. My husband escapes to the allotment with trays of tomatillos and sweetcorn to plant. I meet his aunty in town for lunch at the Cafe Rouge. She wants to know if she can be a catalyst - help heal the rift between my husband and his brother. I love her big heart but I know you can’t make people like each other because you think they should.

All afternoon a warm wind blows through the kitchen tugging the tea towels off the rails, slamming the doors, shuffling papery onion skins across the floor. I blend chick peas in the whizzer with lots of lemon zest and juice, olive oil and roasted cumin seeds. I stir chopped spinach into the mushroom and tomato ragu which makes it look like muddy sludge. I put two trays of coconut and almond granola to bake in the oven. I pour a long golden stream of honey and a capful of vanilla essence into a tub of Greek yoghurt - to accompany the strawberries which are not really sweet.

All this I pack into a cool bag and take to share with two wonderful women - adding it to the baked potatoes, yams and colourful garden salad already on the table. We linger over cups of tea long into the evening - the sky still light at ten.

Here in this company I can switch off the button in my solar plexus which has been on red alert all day. A gentle respite till it comes on again tomorrow morning - the new warning pulse in my blood - danger ahead.

Weird and Wonderful

20th June 2011 Monday

Saturday - At the Fair

While my husband talks to twenty people about Making Friends with Money in the Performance Tent, I sit behind a table, draped with a white sheet, and watch the faces of the people passing by as they catch sight of my husband’s weird and wonderful clay models arranged on the table. They all stop, they all smile. The children point at the duck with the cigarette, the man with the seven heads, the dragon with the golden toes, the woman with the six claws. If they catch my eye we talk about these creatures. They say things like,

‘They are mythic, wonderful, childlike, imaginative, creative.’

One woman says ‘I love them. I would buy four of them if I had the money’.

What I see is that people like difference and humour and quirkiness and what I call weird. I see that I have been wrong about my husband’s ceramics. He knows I love some of them and don’t like some of them. And the ones I don’t like I don’t want all over the house.

But maybe what I don’t like is that he can let people see his weirdness, his shining light - but I’m still hiding mine.

Sunday - Father’s Day

My father, my sister and I sit at the polished round table in his room. We have laid out his favourite tea - triangular sandwiches of roast beef, smoked mackerel pate,egg mayonnaise, and also cheese straws and a bowl of salad. Bananas and nuts for afterwards.

He says he didn’t sleep well last night. He was worrying that he couldn’t find a letter someone sent him about an organisation which supports the victims of torture. He wants his interfaith group and his church to know about it and to donate money. We can’t find it either and suggest Amnesty instead.

This is what keeps him awake at night. And keeps him going. Believing he can still make a difference at age ninety one. Which he does and not only to people all over the world. But also and especially to me.

Monday - Today

I’m learning that if I wake up early and don’t get up then the demons start their raucous screeching in my head and my day is stained with their ‘what ifs?’

Better to go downstairs and squeeze lemon juice into a cup of hot water, and stroke the pussy cat whose coat smells of early dawn and damp earth Better to watch the blackbird dodging into the honeysuckle hedge with a worm in her beak. And imagine those tiny featherless babies safe for now in their twig nest. Better to think about the froth topped coffee I will have with a dear friend later in town. One sweet moment at a time.

The Sky Inside Me

17th June 2011 Friday

It rained endlessly today. This morning I turned on the heating to dry the sheets. This afternoon it rained on the bubble wrapped clay creatures as we carried them from the car into the big echoey barn clattering with stall holders setting out their wares.

Driving home tonight along the M5, after a sumptuous late birthday supper for my sister at the home of a dear friend, the sky was still light at 10.30 - a luminous dove grey. No stars and I couldn’t see the moon but it felt like a vast bilowing canopy above me, rolling into forever.

I’ve been thinking that there could be an overarching sky inside me - a kind of emptiness, a void - a new place to live from, beyond sadness. Where mystery could replace uncertainty. A sky that I could sprinkle with stars to help me navigate this, so far untravelled path.

Superglue

16th June 2011 Thursday

The Speech and Language Therapist sits on our sofa with a cup of tea on the table in front of her and a very small notebook on her knee. You can tell she has a sweet nature. She has flawless pale skin and looks about sixteen.

In answer to my question she says she doesn’t know if the brain can re-generate itself through physical exercise or memory exercises. She says my husband shouldn’t try and read for pleasure if causes him stress. Which it does. And it’s fine to supply a word he is struggling for and that it’s no good hoping he’ll remember it if he just tries harder.

She suggests strategies. We could use a map with post-it notes on it to locate places we know, with photos and descriptions and put it up in the dining room. And make a book with photos of the people in our lives with their names written underneath. I wonder if we should label the appliances in the kitchen when he says,

‘I know all the people in the photos stuck on the...... white thing that keeps things cold.’

‘Do you mean the fridge?’

‘Of course I do - it’s so embarrassing.’

Later we drive out through rain showers and sunbursts to a farm high on a ridge in a forest where we’ll be on Saturday - a Mid Summer Fair where my husband is exhibiting his ceramics and giving two money talks. We get lost several times but the glorious views of Devon hills and fields when we finally get there make it all worthwhile.

Back home, I put the first allotment globe artichokes into a big pan of boiling water and make a garlic mayonnaise for leaf dipping. Then very carefully, we start packing up all his weird and wonderful creatures in reams of bubble wrap. Even so I manage to snap off the little cigarette in the beak of The Duck. Thank God for Superglue.

If only there was something squeezable in a tube for mending broken brains.

Lost Worlds

15th June 2011 Wednesday

I sit with my father in the hospital waiting room at the eye clinic. His pupils are dilated from the drops the nurse put in. He says his vision is blurred and he takes my arm when we are called in to see the consultant. He has a cataract in his left eye and macular degeneration in both. There is a waiting list - three months. Already I worry that the appointment will come through when we are on holiday in September and my sister is too. Who will take him to the hospital then? Who will wash his sheets and clean up the spilt fish oil down the side of his fridge? Who will cook him green cabbage in the microwave when he worries about not having enough roughage?

On the way home I stop in at Tesco's to buy him some topside of beef to roast for his breakfasts. I end up spending £63 on fish and olive oil and kitchen paper and lemons among other things I didn’t know I needed. I won’t be able to do that next month. Be careless/carefree at the till.

I tell my husband about my my day while he shells the broad beans we picked at the allotment this evening under brooding thunder clouds. I scrub our first new potatoes and fat carrots for supper and chop purple kale - ignoring the flakey white fly clinging to the underside of the crinkled leaves. He says he has had a good day - things to do.

We start to watch a DVD ‘Some Like it Hot’ with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. It’s a while before he remembers the film. But they talk too fast and he says it’s too difficult to follow. So we give it up. He makes tea and we have a spat - about nothing, too much wine - not about what’s really there buried in the coal seam - his lost words. His lost worlds. His despair - and mine.