Like Gold to Ayery Thinnesse Beate...

Is it possible that the aura and spirit and very essence of a person are somehow revealed in death? Clare hadn’t considered the possibility until the curious incident of the wasps on the day her mother died.

Everything had happened fast; one day mother was fine, and the next she was queue-jumping her way to death. In June, mother had struggled and panted up the hill to deliver a large cardboard box containing Clare’s birthday present. Breathless on arrival, she had eschewed food, wanted nothing more than to sit in the kitchen and drink large amounts of cold water, all the while informing Clare that a man she knew had heard a doctor say that ninety percent of all ills could be avoided by drinking plenty of water; she pronounced this pearl of wisdom as she sat next to the sink steadfastly quaffing and refilling her glass.

Clare remembered mother’s arms and legs, startlingly white, pre-skeletal, the skin drooping from the bones, but the trunk had grown robust and usurped the ghostly limbs. Another time, while driving mother shopping, mother had said she wasn’t feeling well, had slumped in the passenger’s seat and then uttered an eerie incoherent gibberish which Clare had strained to decipher. On becoming lucid again, the gibberish alarmed mother more than any incipient physical ailments and she had batted away any suggestion of doctors or hospital, insisted they continue the shopping trip and kept up a monologue of people she knew who DID talk nonsense.

Weight loss and breathlessness eventually drove her to the doctor, who sent her for numerous tests and gave her a diagnosis of asthma and a little puffer to carry around in her handbag, which she never used, considering it a mortifying affectation.

The end came with scant warning. In July the doctor ordered her straight to hospital with her hugely swollen abdomen; mother felt in her old green jacket for her bus pass. The hospital admitted her and drained her stomach of the fluid by means of a white hose inserted into her side; they insisted all would be well. Even when they found the cancer, they pronounced it treatable and to mother’s importunate pleas to be allowed to make a will (fetch me a sheet of foolscap) they replied, no need, no need.

Three weeks later she ended up in a cancer hospital in London. Three weeks after that she was dead. So fast. On checking-in mother had chosen to expunge her second husband by declaring him dead to the registering nurse, but on Clare’s shocked exclamation mother had relented, had the grace to look sheepish and explained to the baffled nurse,

‘Well actually he is alive..., but I got rid of him’ and she peered closer to the young nurse in a confiding manner, ‘you know how men can get on your bloody nerves? I gave him the elbow’.

Mother always did think people essentially felt as she did if only she had time to convince them.

At first she was jolly in the ward of six. Six women in varying stages of the cancer experience. They laughed and joked and Clare and Albert thought, ‘ah she’s in the best place, now she’ll get well’. But she continued to lose weight, eat little and the hideous swelling of her abdomen returned and frightened her.

Clare and Albert got her a private room and Clare read The Country Girls to her and massaged her hands and they teased each other, ‘you’re a right looking eijit’.

Along the Fulham Road lay a small corner shop where fine Italian perfumes were sold. Escaping the hospital in search of cool air and sunshine, Clare happened upon it one day. She entered and tried to shake the hospital from her hair, gazed at the even shelves displaying lineaments, perfumes, creams, salves, balms, ointments, soaps and stiff fat envelopes stuffed with dried rose leaves drenched in a strong fragrant perfume which lingered years after and became a direct line with the hospital, mother’s death and the strange affair of the wasps.

Within the wares, on the walls at the back of the shelves, hid small mirrors which flickered back the gentle lights of the shop and made the cloistered space like a medieval oratory Clare had once visited in an old house long ago. The sales assistant conducted the transaction in a hushed and reverend manner and packed rose scented lotion and the dried leaves in lavish cream boxes tied with thick black ribbon. The assistant’s farewell rang like a benediction for Clare’s sick mother who lay in a hospital bed not five hundred yards from the small sepulchre perfumiers.

Mother took great delight as Clare drew each stout cream package from her bag; first the scented rose lotion and then the envelope containing the elixir of rose petals, thick with concentrated richness. Clare tipped the dried brown petals into a plastic bowl she found in the ward and the visceral scent coursed through the room and they drank its exotic fumes. She stroked and pressed the rose lotion onto mother’s white and blue-bulged-vein hands. Mother could no longer talk fluently, fluid on the lungs, but she gestured pleasure at her newly supple hands.

Mother had taken a fancy to her consultant, a distinguished man of Middle East descent – she had always favoured dark-eyed men – and became adept at ducking quickly under her pillow to replace her dentures whenever he entered the room. Members of her congregation visited and wore them all out with their inability to take a hint when to leave. Clare bought little treats to her but mother couldn’t desire them. Then she got the nil-by-mouth treatment and ironically she motioned Albert to smuggle her a cheese burger. He searched for Clare in a tumult. Stated Clare: ‘Don’t buy the cheese burger’. He slunk back to mother’s ward like a turncoat but mother just chuckled softly and chided him with her hands.

They presaged the chemo with much needed nutrition and mother was hooked up to an intravenous bag of white fluid. It was beautifully white like a giant bag of coconut milk and marshmallows.

‘That’s what you need mother’, observed Clare.

But that night they were summoned, ‘It won’t be long now’.

She couldn’t talk except for one sentence,

‘Did you transfer my money into your bank account’?

They kept vigil and the world contracted to that one room, their nest. Clare found herself intoning Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:

As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:

So let us melt, and make no noise...

...Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate

The line impressed itself on Clare’s auditory memory, a constant refrain, an incantation, a liturgy for cancer.

One day the consultant came in.

‘You know what is happening’?

She nodded quickly and they both turned to look upon her mother’s face.

Then they moved her. Along the corridor to the end room. The nurses avoided stating the obvious reason; mother’s room, being opposite the nurses’ station, was needed for a patient who still had HOPE.

The room at the end of the corridor, the final room. It was colder, not in a temperature way, for it was August and warm. It was whiter, starker, clinical and occupied a corner and had many windows like a pent-house, a bright, icy, cruel penthouse. No more nest.

As the week wore on Clare and Albert grew further and further dishevelled. Albert’s beard put in a scrubby appearance and Clare believed only an iron could improve her face. Their clothes became warm and baggy from being slept in every night when they took it in turns to occupy one of the small sofas in the family/visitors room. Clare lay on the sofa, her face pressed into the greasy, stained fabric and she caught the scent of countless relatives who had lain there before her.

One night she was alone in mother’s room and mother was doing the only thing she was now able to do: breath. Clare dozed off in a makeshift bed she had formed by fronting two armchairs together; it enabled her to lie horizontal but her knees were bent and gradually as the night lengthened the gap between the chairs opened as her knees unfurled till she slept above a precarious chasm. As she dozed she became aware of mother’s breath becoming noisier. ‘Brilliant,’ she thought churlishly, ‘now she’s snoring, as if I need anything else to disturb my attempts at sleep.’ Later she discovered that what she had heard was death’s herald, the death rattle.

She drifted into sleep only to be awoken in the still dark early morning by silence. She lay listening to the silence, straining for her mother’s breathing. When she didn’t hear it she knew. She decided to stay put, do nothing, suspend the moment in the room at the end of the corridor high up in the hospital. Once she moved, silence would be gone forever. She knew she was dead even before she gazed upon the still face. She summoned the nurse who confirmed that mother had passed away. Mother’s bladder released its contents into the bag beneath the bed – the last of life, yellow, warm and vibrant.

While the nurse prepared mother for the undertakers, Clare went to fetch Albert who had been sleeping in the visitors’ room. He awoke quickly like a lean cat springing to life.

The nurse had been joined by another and they had just finished their ministrations and hurried about the room, the sun had begun to rise and the room was filling with a dirty unclear daylight; that horrid no-man's-land between dark night and light day, thought Clare. Mother lay wax-like against her pillow. About a foot above her head the most unexpected and bizarre sight: a cluster of wasps circled and whined as if they had been shortly released from mother’s mouth. Clare and Albert recoiled at the sight of them. The nurses noticed.

‘Yes, we were wondering where they came from. We think perhaps the open window and the scented leaves you have in the room...?’

Both nurses looked perplexed, apologetic and at the same time accusatory.

When the nurses left the room the wasps started to dart and pitch in wider circles above mother’s head.

‘I can’t stand this’, said Clare as she ducked and flinched.

They fled the room and returned ten minutes later. The wasps were gone. Not a trace of them anywhere. Outside, the sky had brightened and the room was now firmly in daylight. In the clear light the occurrence of the wasps seemed an apparition. The nurses had changed mother into a fresh nightdress and restored her false teeth to her. The teeth had not been replaced securely, with the result that mother, in death, wore a macabre buck teeth expression.

‘My God. Her teeth. What has happened to her teeth’? Squeaked Albert.

They stared at the teeth, horrified at the ghastly leer of mother’s mouth, glanced uneasily at each other and then exploded into peals of giggles and laughter. The more they tried to curb their mirth the more it gurgled up; tears rolled down Albert’s cheeks, his eyes were mere slits, the skin either side concertinaed into tiny rolls. Then Clare remarked, horrified,

‘Shhh! The nurses! What will they think? They’ll think we are laughing at mother’!

To atone, she said, in an admonishing voice,

‘We ought to put them in properly. Mother would hate to be buried looking like this.’

She adjusted her shoulders, bent over and gingerly attempted to push the teeth back into mother’s mouth hoping to find their customary seat, but they wouldn’t budge and Clare hated to force them. This caused them to break out in fresh, tense giggles.

‘You try’, she hissed Albert who had collapsed over the bed, holding his stomach with one hand, mouth clamped in an effort to subdue his chortles.

Albert refused to touch the teeth.

‘She’ll be cursing us if she’s looking down’. Clare chided to Albert, ‘She won’t want to be buried like this. She was so particular about her teeth’.

Albert reluctantly approached mother’s teeth. His strong joiner’s thumbs, levered by his two fists, attempted to prise the dentures into place. He gulped, shimmied his feet, glanced uneasily at Clare. It was no good, her eyes danced and Albert retreated, his eyes squinting again, his voice squeaking incoherently. Forgive us mother.

For years later they mused over the strange cloud of wasps. As Albert pointed out, that entire week in August no wasp had entered the room even though the windows had been open and as for the leaves, they both thought that a weak, spurious explanation, seized on by the un-nerved nurses.

Clare couldn’t shake the insistent idea that they had somehow swarmed out of mother’s mouth and then dispersed. Mother’s soul had winged its way in disparate pieces all over London. Mother had always said she’d never liked London, but Clare didn’t think small wasps could fly as far as Ireland where mother had been born and spent the first eighteen years of her life. If the wasps were an expression of mother’s soul, she didn’t want to dwell....