The haunch

Staring across at the haunch of a hill that I stared at a week and a half before.  But how much changes in nine days.

N.  Africa-hand, whose veins bump and jerk with the spirit of Malawi, South Sudan and Nigeria, hanging around Boots, the toilets and WH Smith’s, picking up nibbles, reading and a bottle of water, still not transitioned.

She’s there now.

Whilst I’ve chased the tiger from care home to Blitzkrieg, After Eights to hidden incontinence pads, heavily soiled, disappearing CPN and a singalong to “Bless ‘em all!” And what couldn’t be borne twelve hours ago becomes a joy and what I hated, I suddenly love.

I don’t know how to write this, and I don’t believe I ever will.

So I bury myself in the text.  Burrow into the canon, and pick at the scabs.  It should be easy.  Undergraduates turn this stuff out.  The pages of the TLS and New York Review would never exist, but for…  If only I knew.

I’ve brought myself back to this room, looking across to an anonymous hill.  Spring birdsong complicating the evening.  The blackbird, I know.  Perhaps the Robin, too.  They’ll pick up the theme tomorrow.  And me?  How many more evenings?

Stodge.  And I recognise it.  But these six months have measured me.

The (Scarlet) CPN.  He told me about “sundowning” among the demented.  I haven’t told him, and I never will, but it applies to me as well.  Each night, as her agony sends her stumbling past my room to the toilet.

I lie awake waiting.  The footfall.  The door, left ajar.  The glass-like sound, and the quietly closed door.  No flush.

The stench.

I don’t say anything now.  Just put on my shoes.  Open the door, the window.  Flush, and wash my hands.

Last night, it was every half-hour.  The rest of the week, more or less.  One night maybe less.  I forget.

I’m lost again, not sure of what I’m supposed to think.  Not sure why I’m writing.

The haunch is darkening.  The car park is mainly empty, except for five vans.  Vans signify no-work-from-home.

I think I can justify this room, and the fuel in the tank.  I rehearse the idea on anyone I can and, so far, the answer is good – or not bad.  

I rang her.  She’s fine.  Well looked-after.  I think she knows.  Somewhere.  A locked-up safe.  “The long and the short and the tall.”  We know all about that.  It isn’t meant to be exclusive, but it is.  I can’t change that.  Neither can she.  

Strange that 1962 was still Post-War.  And a good few years after.  It was the air we breathed.

Things move on.  She’s following Corona like Eastenders or Coronation Street.  Our kids have their own war to fight.

What’s it to be?  Malbec?  Or Woodford?  It doesn’t matter, as long as it isn’t Charrington’s, Watney’s, or Cameron’s.  

God, the reading’s the same.