|
|
|
Extract from:
CHANGES OF ADDRESS
White Gates Nursing Home - UK
A nurse has arrived to change the dressing on my shin. This one is a young
Irish girl and from her silky voice I form a picture of a face in which round
eyes hold an expression of bright wonder, like those of a baby, or a kitten.
She checks off tasks on her list with the soft scrape of pen on paper: pulse,
blood, temperature. Every morning she asks my name and I answer this trick
question absentmindedly; Lily Brennan, I say, although no one has called me by
that name for years. Some of the nurses frown when I get it wrong, I hear it in
their voices, but not this child.
"And so you are, Darlin'," she says, making a little song of it in her
language that is more than half dance.
There is nothing to fear from
this country girl, who has grown up expecting her share of
unpleasantness and been
taught how to handle it with grace. Not like the one who comes at weekends, her
tight, bored responses, the animal watchfulness in her body when Matron or the
doctors are about. I imagine her sulky pebbledash eyes lost in
self-preoccupation as she soaps the sponge. It isn't much now, this shrunken
frame, this chicken-skin stretched across a few blunt knobs of bone. But it is
a body that once gave and received pleasure; it was Gina's
gateway to the world. What more could I or anyone have asked of it?
The Irish nurse's fingertips are cool, soothing on skin as puckered and
transparent as the airmail paper with an onionskin finish on which I once wrote
long letters home.
"My name is Francis," the nurse says, and her calm voice doesn't change as
she peels back the dressing and inspects the wound, which refuses to heal
despite her best efforts.
"It's lovely and bright out today," Francis tears open a fresh bandage.
"But dreadful cold."
The shin is mottled with purple and green bruises, still weepy at the
centre. As the shift changes Francis whispers to the night nurse that poor Mrs
Raines's leg is not too good. I picture the wound flowering beneath the
bandage; it has a wicked sheen that reminds me of a set of Chinese rice bowls I
once owned. My body lacks the resources to heal, or else it lacks the will. My
mother Ginny always insisted that sickness does not exist. I almost believe it
now but refrain from explaining this to Francis, who hovers over my reluctant
shin like a worried mother hen over a chick.
And if the body is reluctant, the inner Lily grows stubbornly opposed to
making an effort. Lying in my chair I feel time rushing over me like a dark and
weedy river. And as I tumble in the current, invisible creatures slither and
dart along my flank. The Irish nurse strokes my wrist searching for a pulse and
from the darkness of the reed beds along the riverbank I summon a smile: this
girl does her sweet best.
"When this leg heals I'm getting out of here," I say.
"Oh! And where will you be going?" I sense the widening of Francis's
wide-awake eyes.
"Home, of course. Where else should a woman my age go?"
Francis sounds doubtful. "That'll be nice," she says.
I close my eyes as the blood pressure bandage swells. The hills will be dry
at home, broad curves of bleached grasses where the listless taupe-coated sheep
drift almost invisibly under a cobalt sky. This morning as the rain battered
ceaselessly at the windows, I made up my mind to go.
"As soon as it's healed, I'm off," I say, with as much force as I can
muster.
The air puffs out of the bandage and the Irish nurse squeezes my hand.
"That's you done, Lily Brennan," she says.
|
|
