Berberis' World

Were very definitely false. No question. It wasn’t as though the rest of her was any less false. Her meringue dresses, her pampered pooches, her powdered complexion; the woman had been a walking advertisement for some kind of ageing process which led to decay and foolishness and ridicule.

Then there were the books. Best sellers in a hundred languages. Millions sold to the unsuspecting. All the same plot. Same characters. Same dialogue. All crap.

That’s my opinion, anyhow. Anyone who’s watched ‘Little Britain’ will know about Sally Markham and her 7 pages of blah blah blah, and how she churns out book after book with no real thought whatsoever. I used to live in Catherine Cookson country, and I can’t say I read any of hers either. Books for old women.

But then, I think, I’m getting towards being an old woman. Ok, on current demographics, I’ve got a while to go, perhaps another span of the years I’ve already lived (like I’m going to tell you how old I am!) but I am still older than I was. I don’t feel it though. I’m doing the kind of things now that perhaps a 25 year old might do – getting very drunk and chatting up strangers in pubs – even though I’m not 25.

A friend of mine said I was finally going through my teenage years, long after I should have. And I guess I am. I do things now that I wouldn’t have dared to do then. I express my opinions, I read the books I want to read, I watch the films I want to watch, I listen to the kind of music I want to listen to, I sing very loudly at the top of my voice in the car… I could wear false eyelashes too, like Barbara Cartland.

The impact sent her reeling. One moment, she stood calmly waiting for her bus, the next she was hurtling through the crisp December air at 40 miles per hour, towards her destination: the newly laid red brick pavement. What blood there was – surprisingly little, considering the extensive injuries she was found to have suffered – blended into the rough crimson blocks, seeping slowly from the cut at her left temple. Witnesses reported that, for all the violence of the crash, she had not made a sound the entire time. She never said another word again.

In hospital, she lay unmoving as they cut off her clothes and exposed her bruised and battered body. She always took great pains to keep her skin soft; sensitivity to sunlight made it impossible for her to wear the latest fashions, the midriff baring tops, the hip-skimming min skirts and low rise jeans. Not for her were the strappy tops and the gauzy blouses which would float against her skin were she able to wear them. She adopted the style of a Goth, wearing dark, sensuous fabrics, silks and velvets, swirling around her ankles, draped around her shoulders and swathing her thighs. However, instead of the blacks and deep indigos worn by Goths, she would wear crimson and purple velvet, moss green and sea blue silks.

Such opulent fabrics were meant to be peeled from a body, slowly, like you might peel a ripe banana, or a sweet orange, slowly, revealing the delights inside. They were not meant to be ripped and tom, rent asunder by frantic hands, discarded as so much useless wrapping on a gore splattered floor. Not meant to be trodden on, like a child steps on the paper in which its birthday presents have been lovingly wrapped, stamping on bows and folds, heedless of the damage. Velvet was to be caressed, not crushed, not torn. Never torn.

Having unwrapped her, they manipulated her, tested for any response, attached and inserted tubes, applied tapes and gauze and strapping and pronounced her alive, but critical. Under the watchful eyes of half a dozen machines, she lay in the bed, her body broken and bloodied… only the smallest fraction of her mind keeping her in the world. The soft bleeping of the machines, the swoosh of the ventilator as it inflated her lungs, sending oxygen into her blood, penetrated this quiet corner. As though from nowhere, she stood by the bed, looking down at herself.

“That was quite a ride,” she said to herself, touching a fingertip to the livid bruise which haloed her left eye. “Matches your skirt.” She looked at the length of material which hung on the trolley at the other side of the room. “What’s left of it. Still, when it’s a choice between velvet and living , I think I’d choose living.”

The ventilator stuttered then swooshed. A dark haired doctor pushed through the doors and stepped to the side of the bed. He scratched his head as he cast tired eyes over her chart, seeing how her blood pressure had begin nearly non existent but was now climbing, how her pulse, thin and thready when they laid her on the table, was now steady, if weak. He made some notes in handwriting only legible to other doctors, lifted her eyelids and waved a small torch in front of unresponsive eyes, making some more notes. He clattered the chart onto the end of the bed and left the room.

“He’ll be back in a while. Every five or ten minutes, someone comes in, has a look, scribbles something, goes away. He’s been in twice. There’s a shift change in a while. It’ll be someone else then. He’s nice though, sweet. Good looking in a plain kind of way… you know, all his features are ordinary but put them together and they make a prettier picture than you might expect.”

*

Twenty four hours passed. Still the machines beeped and swooshed and someone would come in and scribble and then leave. The body on the bed was still unmoving, presenting a picture of calm… only slightly disordered order in the cuts and bruises. Inside, all was chaos. White corpuscles raced through her system, patching up, even as their scarlet counterparts sought to ease themselves from between the torn edges of her once velvet soft skin. Her heart, shocked back into life once, twice, three times, fought to keep the blood flowing, but it too was bruised. The valiant effort it was making to keep her in the world was weakening it. Even as she appeared to be rallying, even as the machines told of her winning the battle to remain alive, her heart was tiring.

“He should have been here a while ago,” the figure beside the bed told her sleeping double. “His shift started at eight.” She walked around the bed, back again, and around and back, her stockinged feet sliding on the tiled floor. “Where is he?”

As though on cue, the doors opened. A light haired woman in green entered. She frowned as she looked at the chart, rubbed her nose as she studied the machines, scratched her neck and then pressed a button. Within moments, another woman joined her, leaning over the bed, pressing and prodding and kneading and checking and comparing and contrasting and looking and examining. Within minutes, the figure in the bed was being wheeled out of the room, the portable machines now hung from hooks on the bed, tubes and wires draping across her legs.

*

The dark haired doctor peered around the door.

“Where have you been?” she asked him angrily. “You should have been here hours ago. They had to take her away. The machines were going crazy.”

He disappeared.

*

The chaos was subsiding now. Her heart was no longer racing, struggling to pump the blood around her battered limbs, through her vital organs. Her breathing was no longer ragged and forced. Her brain was no longer struggling to make sense of the blackness into which it had been plunged, even as she had flown through the crisp December air. She lay unmoving, still, on the bed, the tubes and wires removed, the machines now silent, their screens dark.

The figure at the side of the bed sighed, touched a gentle fingertip to the bruise which haloed her left eye. “He came to say goodbye, I think,” she whispered, and then all in the room was calm.

She loved him, but…

How did she love him?

Eventually did she

Love him?

Indeed. Eventually she did.

Eternally, totally, utterly did she love him.

Definitely. Unconditionally. Unquestionably. Categorically. Absolutely.

As they drifted, so did she. As it passed, she did also. Slowly drifting through her day… week… month… year…

Lifetime. She who had once been so vital was now lethargic. She who had sought to save the lives of the smallest of the nearly living was now housebound. As caught behind the net curtains of her living room as was the wasp.

The wasp died, eventually. As would she. She knew this fact, and was largely content with it. But still there was regret, inside her, buried so very deeply… buried under almost seventy years of denial and sacrifice and service to others and regret and bitterness… hidden always behind a uniform; the black and white of a scullery maid, the grey and white of a nanny, the blue and blue and mauve and blue and white of the many disguises she’d nursed as a nurse… caring for the elderly, the children, the babies.

More than any of these, she loved, she missed the babies most of all; their vulnerability, their total dependence, their absolute love… their sweet little faces… which would come and go and change and develop… and shift and pass before her eyes like sand through her fingers.

Her time with endless babies was past. She had drifted through marriage, foundering on the uncertainty of her love for the man she had wed… swept up into hidden, forbidden passion with another… letting her hopes and dreams slip through her fingers as so much sand. With the passing of time came the departure of those she loved, the arrival of those she would love… but not, perhaps, as she would have wished.

Time would show her this. As it would shadow the movement away and back, the ebbing and flowing, of those she could have loved differently… as it dragged behind the one whose presence was immovable and, fatally, irresistible. The ever present presence, the always baby, the one who she had once admitted she would have allowed to drift past, had she known what she might have to watch pass by…

Turning from the enveloping net she moved her feet, and they moved slowly, as through sand.

By the end, they will have been married for nearly fifty years. For almost thirty of those years, he will have shared his wife with another man, watched as they kissed and canoodled with each other, and allowed this other man to become part of their lives together.

At the end, he will have realised that this other man has become an almost indispensable part of the marriage. He will have accepted him as a brother figure, a replacement for the sisters he has not seen in twenty years. He will have accepted, quite openly, that he is unable to provide for his wife what this other man does.

Not love, you understand. Oh no. By the end, he will have understood that she needed him and much as he needed her; that fact will have been obvious to both of them for some time, but it will have taken his demise to make them admit it. He will have loved her as best he could, and she will have loved him as much as she was able. It will have been enough, for them, at the end.

There will, of course, have been the children to consider. Their inattention to their offspring will not have been something of which they were proud. Not at the end. They will have seen that the interloper has brought something other than affection to her, and companionship to him; they will have realised that he brought dissention to the house. They will have seen how his presence disrupted the normal balance of family life.

If it were to have happened now, perhaps, they might have been divorced. Legally separated. Living apart. She might have taken the children and set up home with the other man, leaving the cuckolded husband to fend for himself. Which, of course, he could never have done; in her opinion, he was useless, hopeless, unable to even boil an egg or open a tin.

By the end, she will have realised that he could do all of these things and more, and that she had never really given him the chance to show that he could. By the time he dies, she will have realised that he knows this, too. She might even have realised that he forgave her a long time ago, realising that he was not the one she should have married.

Oddly enough, they will, by the end, not have managed to get a divorce. He will have stood before a judge and, when asked, will have not been able to say that she did no washing or cooking or cleaning for him. This first, and only, attempt at ending their marriage had failed. It might have been wisdom, or lack of it, which will have prevented them making another attempt.

So, at the end, when he dies, it will still be as man and wife. Despite her three decades living as another’s wife – in common law at least – she will have said her goodbyes to him as a widow, rather than an ex-wife. Whether or not this will have made a difference only she can say, but she does not. Perhaps she never will.

The children of their union will have said their farewells in their own unique ways. The eldest son will have delivered the eulogy in stoic fashion, not shedding a tear, not even with a quavering voice. The youngest son will have been comforted by his partner, shed some tears in private. The middle child, a daughter, will have wept from the time she set eyes on the coffin as it sat in the hearse until the time the service was over, and then again in the pub where they drank a toast to celebrate his life.

Even then, it will not be over. He will have been cremated; his choice presumably, but not one his wife will have disagreed with. He will have been reduced to a mound of grey ashes, as indistinguishable in death as he was unique in life. A pile of grey dust in a small hole, prepared by those who will have reduced him to this state.

They will all have gathered in the warm and windy cemetery, as they had done five months earlier, to witness his laying to rest. They will have shared the carrying of the urn from the impersonal office to the nondescript piece of pseudo meadow into which a man with a spade will have dug a hole, 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot, or thereabouts. A small piece of astro turf will have been placed before the hole to allow them to pour him in without getting their feet wet, or dirty.

This will have seemed strange to her, the daughter, seeing as the one place is his life he was happiest was his allotment. Where he will have got his feet wet and dirty and not given a stuff about it. He will have relinquished this plot of land when he became too old, in his opinion, to work it to his satisfaction.

He will have realised, soon after this, that it was a mistake. Had he kept on going down to his allotment he would have had the exercise he so badly needed. Because, at the end, it will be his heart that will give out. His heart that will succumb to the exertion of surgery. Not that he will have had to exert himself; he will have been peacefully asleep when they tried to repair the damage a lifetime of dependence on cigarettes had done to his system.

His heart, unused to having to work that hard, will finally, during the second procedure, decide that enough was enough. And it will have stopped at some point the following morning. Most of his family will have been with him, to say goodbye, to wish him God speed, because he did believe, despite the apparent lack of attendance at church.

At the end, then, he will have fallen asleep, passed on, been delivered unto God, died, at peace with himself, and his life, as far as anyone will have been able to tell. His life may not have been the best life, the most fulfilling life. His death may not have been the most pleasant or the most expected. But his future, he will have imagined, at the end, would be perfect.