Maureen

The tempo of life in Dalmuir is one slow season change. First the Romans came in c2AD. Nobody noticed that they had left. Then Maureen Rainier came c1968, stood outside the school gates, her blonde pigtails tied elastic band tight and making a curtain of her face, with her head to the side and her pink tongue rasping out, as if it were normal, as if she was normal.

Maureen is quick to smile when she sees me. Time never played by clock rules when I’m with her. Her arms are up and out and, before I can stop her- not that I want to- she enfolds me in the fragrances of our past lives. We are reincarnated in the moment as she pulls me like a child and lets me nestle where her breasts had once been. I used to think that lumps in the throat were school day fictional creatures like ogres and dragons, but they are not, of course, and there are different kinds, such as the one that doesn’t allow you to speak and the one that means you are going to cry, but mustn’t, mustn’t.

‘I’ve lost so much weight,’ she says showing me her thin arms and moving the blankets aside a little to let me peek at the flesh of her bare stomach. She has a dot of red lipstick on her front teeth, but I say nothing. ‘Even my love handles,’ she pulls at the shroud of the blanket, sloping it like a scar against her wasted body.

‘Why don’t you lie down beside me?’ she says, pushing back onto the bed.

‘I’m not tired,’ I say.

But I am, of course. I’m tired of waiting, and tired of not wanting to wait for our other life, to bolt away from us. The life we never had.

‘How are Caroline and the kids?’ A frown creeps onto her forehead. Her skin it too tight, like the dusty parchment of an old bees’ hive, ready to crumble and smudge with the slightest touch, something to do with the chemicals they feed through a tube. I don’t ask.

‘Fine, Fine,’ I squirm in the chair beside her bed and hide my face behind the yellows and red blooms of the carnations carpeting the table beside her white virginal bed. I’m sure she would understand. She was always very good at listening. But I don’t want to depress her. I don’t want to depress myself. I don’t want to think about it. My children seem a different tribe from me, with their stomping gestures, alien cries and shouts, so that I feel like an evolutionary step behind, a Neanderthal to their Hominid, before grunting a reply, holding my hand out and making the obligatory offering of money. I know that I’m doing it, but there seems to be nothing we can do to close the gap in our dance of different generations.

‘And how’s?’ I pause, don’t like to say his name; heard that he’d left her, when she got ill, said he couldn’t cope. I clench my teeth and pour her a glass of water and say nothing more. Nothing about his younger bit on the side. He seems able to cope with her I want to shout. I pass her the water carefully, as if she were still a child and is unable to hold a full glass herself. She’s propped up sideways, looking at me. Her blue eyes are sparkling with life and she knows what I’m thinking so that I have to look away. I turn back when I hear her sipping, ready to catch the fallen glass, should her hands slip.

‘That’s bottled water,’ she says, ‘Strathmore, none of that tap water. It’s not good for you, you know? It’s all full of chemicals.’

I try to look convinced, but a smile escapes and darts across my face.

‘Have you got any ciggies?’ Although she has a whole double room to herself, she whispers.

I hear the echo in her voice of a younger woman, hiding a fag behind her back, read to nip it should somebody come, nipping at my heart with her nicotine stained lips and tongue. ‘No,’ I say, ‘I haven’t smoked for years.’

‘Yeh.’ She tries to push up with her legs and move herself across the bed, but it is like using paper paddles in treacle. Sweat forms on her forehead and she makes an ah, ah, noise and her throat moves up and down as is she is trying to swallow a spoon.

I don’t know what to do. I wish I’d never come and want to get away, but I don’t know how to leave, or how to stay. ‘You want me to get somebody?’ I finally say.

‘No.’ She’s edged herself up the bed and her smile says that she is back to normal so that I can almost believe it.

I sit down in the chair beside her bed and her hand finds mine.

‘I’ll be alright when I get out of here.’

‘Yes.’ I smile at her. I try to sound encouraging, but my eyes cannot maintain the lie, so I look outside. ‘It’s really lovely. Outside.’ I nod with my head. The door to the room opens out into a wooded garden, with alpine flowers and seats sitting in shade and others in sunshine. I wonder if I’d be allowed to take her outside, in a wheelchair or something. I hadn’t really though it out. But it would be nice.

My hand falls away from hers, when she starts coughing. It goes on and on, like a car engine without the starter motor and I wonder why the nurses don’t hear it.

‘Are you ok?’ I say leaning over her, like a ghoul.

She has a giant hanky, more like a napkin to her lips and I’m not sure, but it may have been flecks of blood. I know its not TB, nothing infectious, but I take a step back. She’s holding her hand up, frantically signalling to me that she is going to be fine, in a second, in a minute. But I can’t take any more.

As if on cue, a woman in some kind of medical uniform, comes into the room. She looks Eastern European, with her sallow skin, quite attractive really. Not that I’m prejudiced, but I do wonder if they have got the same qualifications, or indeed, knows what she doing. ‘If you’d like to wait outside,’ she says firmly, through tight lips. And I’m right. It is a small triumph. She does sound foreign.

I sit outside and play with my phone and try not to listen to the hawking noises I can hear. Finally, they stop. Part of me wonders, if this is it. And I was here for the end of things. The nurse, for I have promoted her in my mind, since I was right about her nationality, shuts Maureen’s room door softly behind her.

‘You can go back in,’ A shy smile spreads across her face, that makes her more attractive. She has good teeth. Eastern Europeans always have good teeth, because they have plenty of dentists

I stand up slowly, like a geriatric, my body undecided, which way it is going. ‘No. No.’ I say, ‘you can tell her from me…’ and I try and think of something appropriate, picking over my words like presents, trying to select the right ones. ‘You can tell her that, emmm…’

The care worker waits patiently. Eastern Europeans are good at that. They are in no hurry. It’s all double shifts for them and double time. They send it all home anyway. Her brown hooded eyes give nothing away.

‘You can tell her that I’ll be back later,’ I stride away from her. I know she is watching me leave, but I do not care. There is nothing to be done.