Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  He may not like the process by which the bone is scraped away, but he does it nonetheless. Now the equation is on paper and the decision has been made. Isn’t that the job of the professional man? – to come in, dispassionately, and do the work that has been assigned to him, without pointlessly going over all of those issues that led to the decision being made in the first place? He comes in and does those things that need to be done. Should he be censured after the event? Should he be made a pariah because he removed a woman’s teeth? Of course not.

  She might say that teeth ought not to be removed (if she said it, she would be an idiot, but she might say it), that a lunatic has no proper grounds for consenting to such a procedure, and that any such procedure would be an assault, just as if a man had taken a spanner to a woman’s face. But this is to forget that a lunatic has given up the rights to herself by becoming a lunatic in the first place, and has been placed under the care of the state. The state has the responsibility for her health, and also therefore the right to decide what is best for her, regardless of whether she consents to it, finds it a desirable state of affairs, or wants it. If that is not enough, then take it up with her doctors. Take it up with her MP. Take it up with parliament, with the Queen – such is the legal situation, and the man who operates outside that legal framework lays himself open to prosecution, and should a man be punished simply for doing his job?

  Dentures are very good now, so much better than a mouth full of rotten teeth, both practically and cosmetically. They can be removed for cleaning, they do not break easily, they are at least as good at the work of mastication, and if it was not for the fact that they can slip around the mouth and irritate the gums, then many dentists would recommend them in the place of poorly maintained teeth any day of the week, so he stayed long into the dark evening.

  And then left her to rot without the necessary protections.

  I looked over at my colleague and, knowing that he was not the kind of man who would share my feelings on this matter, I resolved to go about my plan alone.

  This woman had gone into the afterlife friendless and I resolved to address that lack.

  Your ka being in front of you

  The spells, rituals, talismans, and texts protect her from crocodiles and snakes, and provide her with the strength to pass the seven gates, cross the fourteen mounds, and enter the twenty-one portals.

  TORIA THURSBY

  NORTHAMPTON, 13TH DECEMBER 1976

  In the winter it is almost always dark. The sun sets before the evening meal and doesn’t rise until after breakfast, so there’s no need to close the curtains. If you are feeling under the weather they don’t make you come down to eat, but they will insist on having lights on in the rooms if it’s dark, so if you want to watch the transitions you have to wait until their footsteps in the hall go silent and then get up and flick the switch off. This is harder work than it ought to be, but preferable to sitting in artificial light, no matter how long it takes, or how your fingers ache. Edison gets a lot of credit for the invention of the light bulb, but is it really such a boon? The light they give is so monotonous and harsh, overwriting everything with a grim whiteness that makes mirrors of the windows. Your candles provide enough to read by, if they are close to the bed, and you can snuff them out without having to drag your old bones up. In the dark a window pane is a marvellous thing – as minutes pass it changes: a block of colour you only gradually recognise, shapes that grow out of nothing and then the most beautiful subtle colours, different in the morning to the evening, different in each season, an infinite and unnameable progression in the eye that is exquisite.

  When day returns there is the tree, and the bird’s nest, and the distant tower blocks.

  If they catch you lying there in the dark they tut and flick the switch, which can be a shock if you aren’t prepared for it. We can’t have you stewing here in the dark, and the sheets straightened and the pillow plumped, and there you are, your own face in the window, so much older than you remember it, so much older even than your memories of your own grandmother.

  Do you really need to see that? Or the framed pictures that you have seen a thousand times and which were not terribly inspiring in the first place. You’ve never liked Constable, have never been to the mountain photographed in the painting’s opposite number on the other wall, and the replacement of the infinitesimal gradations of the day’s progression with these mass-produced and poorly executed excuses for art, the same in every room, irritates you.

  Even if you aren’t feeling on top of your game today, you still have to get up. There are the routines that the institution relies on, that you rely on, you realise, that must be adhered to, particularly the medication. You must have something, even if it is just beef tea, since you can’t take your pills on an empty stomach, and if you don’t have the pills then you will regret it in your joints, and in the headaches, and in the static that builds in your eyes and ears through blood pressure, so you force it down. It makes you feel better – it is warm and takes the edge off the nausea that you hadn’t realised was building – which is another irritation, as if your body is in cahoots with them, siding with them, acting out their prophesies regardless of how much you want to resist admitting they know best.

  Except about the light – you know you are right about that.

  Anyway, you are needed. You allow yourself to be washed and dressed, a process that they have perfected over years so that it is almost possible to ignore it. There was a time when it was mortifying, but now she hums and does it all and you stare over her shoulder and think of something else – tennis, sometimes, plays you have seen, memorable events with minimal emotional content – and then you are standing there ready and she is backing out of the door, carrying linens, or yesterday’s laundry and you are alone in your room and can make preparations for the day.

  Your friend will be anxious, since you did not come down for breakfast. They will have told her there is nothing to worry about, but she will be worried nonetheless. And why shouldn’t she be? It is perfectly rational to be worried for a seventy-nine-year-old woman’s health, and perfectly rational to assume that nurses will not necessarily tell her the truth, especially since she has a history of reacting poorly to bad news. They shouldn’t chide her for being worried; if anything it’s a good sign: it shows she cares enough for something to matter, which is a problem for a lot of the others. Better to be worried for a friend than to sit in a chair all day and do nothing at all.

  She will also have hidden her pills. When she is anxious, she hides her pills at the back of her mouth, behind her dentures, and when the nurses aren’t looking she spits them out into her hand and shoves them down the side of her seat. There’s no point in picking her up on this, it only makes her defensive, so you’ll need to get her up on some pretext, retrieve the pills and reintroduce them to her as if for the first time. It’s little tricks like this that your long life has prepared you for – how to deal with difficult characters – and though it feels tiring to you on occasions you also know that it is one reason to keep living, something that perhaps only you can do for this woman. To be needed cuts years off your age; it spurs you into action, and it’s those helpless cases that die young and miserable, the ones who will do nothing for anyone, don’t see why they should, who dismiss everyone around them, that haven’t really understood what life is all about – it is about being needed, it is about doing things for other people, and that’s what makes your life worth living.

  That is what you tell yourself.

  The hall and stairs are hard work, but you refuse to use a walker, and you don’t trust the Stannah: it is infantilising. There is nothing wrong with hard work; better that than to take the easy route out and atrophy entirely, and if it takes you a few more minutes to get downstairs, are you really in that much of a hurry?

  Your friend is not at the bottom of the stairs, wringing her hands, which is a good sign. You had dogs for most of your life; some are relatively independent and can enterta
in themselves if you need to run an errand, but others wait behind the door, whimpering and digging at the threshold, and she tends towards this latter sort, though not irredeemably – she just needs distracting. She has one of those portable radios and an earpiece that allows her to listen to Radio Three in the common room, so perhaps that is what she is doing now: listening to Wagner, if she is lucky, with one finger in her ear and a transported expression. You can’t tolerate Wagner – so melodramatic and overblown, lacking in subtlety; a lot of fantastic nonsense told bombastically – but you keep your opinions to yourself, lie a little, take the earpiece when she offers it to you and nod appreciatively at the aria.

  Is that cowardly? Some people would think so, but then people are so opinionated these days; they’ve forgotten the importance of considering the feelings of others. If it gives her pleasure to think her pleasure is shared, then where is the harm in that? And if it’s cowardice to make an old woman happy, then you are content to be a coward.

  Midway down the stairs you realise that you have forgotten to bring your reading glasses. You turn, and the five or six stairs to the top stretch ridiculously up, like the never-ending flights in an Escher drawing. You laugh at your own pathetic frailty, comparing these steps to the walks you did as a young woman, a middle-aged woman, an old woman, even: wind-bitten across the broads, no distance too far providing there was a drink to be had in front of the fire in a pub at the end of it.

  Forget it, not worth the effort now. In fact, she can go to fetch them for you. She likes to be given little jobs when she’s in the right mood, and you can express your gratitude to her effusively, something she likes even better.

  You grab the bannister and forge downward – up is too much, but you can still manage down, for God’s sake, and at a lick when your blood is up.

  Downstairs smells of breakfast – fried eggs, burned toast and Ready Brek, which is superior to porridge in the opinion of the other residents. It’s fine since you never liked porridge anyway. You feel a little wobbly… no, that’s not quite it… the floor feels too solid; your heels generate too much resonance when they meet the floorboards. That’s not it either… this is why one should wear slippers and not insist on outdoor shoes. It’s okay to take advice occasionally, acceptable to let others know what is best… or is it? Isn’t that the beginning of the end, when you start admitting other people know better about your life than you do? Is the problem in the knees, then? They jar as you walk, no matter how softly you try to tread. You should stop being ridiculous. If you had anything real to worry about you wouldn’t pay so much attention to these minutiae… if you were being chased by a tiger.

  Out of the door ahead of you come two nurses either side of whatshername, the one who has occasional fits – epileptic, not temper – and you press yourself back against the wall so that the dado rail is in the small of your back. They go past and you hold your breath – it’s a fact of getting very old that you can sometimes lose control of your bowels, but you all agree not to talk about it, or to notice when it happens. When those of you who are not afflicted in this way feel the urge to be disgusted, as you do now, you squash it – relatively easy if you’ve had children and grandchildren, not so easy if you have not – in a spirit of comradeship, and as a sacrifice against the future, when you dearly hope people will pay you the same courtesy. In here it’s the least of one’s troubles, and if the maladies keep themselves to the physical, then everyone is happy.

  She isn’t in the common room, but the chair she usually sits in is empty. You go over and sit in it, as if this is what you’ve come here for, and even though that isn’t the case, you are appreciative of the chance to sit down, though that strange sense of disjunction is noticeable here too – you feel too light, as if you have been filled with helium and are now on the verge of lifting off. You grip the arm rests.

  The room is full of old women; some are already back to sleep, others are chatting in confidential huddles, one is ruminating like a cow, churning her teeth loosely in her mouth and periodically pouting. The radio is on in here, though not Radio Three – it is the local station, something it announces at every opportunity between the news of traffic signals malfunctioning and the minor intersections between the national news and the people or places of the region.

  Which is where?

  You reach down into the tightness between the seat cushion and the sides of the arm chair and, sure enough, there are pills: capsules, more accurately. You once knew exactly what she was taking, the counter-indications, the closeness with which their advertised effects matched their intended uses in vivo, so that you could discuss it all with her, but that is something of the past, now. What has changed, you can’t pin down, but the particularities of these concoctions is something she simply accepts, and she has turned her attentions to other concerns. Which is not to say that she wasn’t concerned with these other concerns before, but now they are more all-encompassing. Since the brother died.

  In some ways it is a relief for you – it is very much easier to explain why people do not visit when they are dead.

  Excuses must be made for living people, very complicated excuses which require a great deal of knowledge of family history, and a certain amount of resourcefulness in the answering of difficult questions. On the fly, often. But you care deeply for her, and would not have her suffer the grief that the death of a brother brings just for your convenience. Or a mother. Or, back into prehistory, a father.

  And there are other problems.

  You palm the capsules and bring them up to your chest. You are wearing a baby blue cardigan, and it has a pocket on the left breast, and you mask the fact that you are slipping the pills into this pocket by simultaneously removing your handkerchief and coughing into it. Such slight of hand is rarely seen outside members of the Magic Circle, and you are very impressed with yourself, so much so that you smile. Perhaps that was a career missed… along with all the others.

  You rise, creaking, and the blood leaves your head entirely. You have been warned about this – postural hypotension – and yet you consistently fail to take it into account. Now you wobble, halfway between standing and sitting, supporting yourself as best you can on your arms, while the world becomes entirely white, as if everything real has bled milk into everything else and become one snowy mass with no form or substance. The sound of your breath is very loud in your ears, and your heartbeat thumps in your throat.

  Is this it?

  It isn’t it. When you stand up the body sometimes has a job getting blood up to the head, and if there’s no blood in the head there’s not enough oxygen. It can make you feel faint. So don’t stand up quickly, or you risk a fall – the doctor has said this, in increasingly weary tones, for years.

  Eventually the heart cottons on and pumps a bit harder and then it all comes swimming back.

  You straighten up. If she isn’t in the common room, then she’s probably in her own room – it’s too cold to be out in the garden.

  If that had been it, then what? Stroke has carried off more of the women in this place than you can remember, either to the grave or to a cheaper institution, where they can sit out their days in an efficient immovability that no longer requires psychiatrists, or therapists, or anti-psychotics, or any of the specialist facilities – a stroke victim who used to be troubled is like any other stroke victim: not much trouble to anyone.

  It could have been a stroke. It could have been any of a number of things – you don’t bother with the ins and outs – it’s not the kind of subject there’s any point dwelling on – but you know enough to realise that women of seventy-nine can go of anything. Would she accept it? That is the problem.

  She is in the garden after all. You didn’t think she was, but as you pass the window on the way to the other staircase, there she is at the bottom, by the compost heap, wrapped up in her waterproofs with a blanket over her shoulders. If you want the French doors open you’ll have to go and get someone with the key, so you go round to the kitch
en instead, which is how she must have got out.

  When her father died, the nurses told you, she wouldn’t believe it. She’s spoken about it to you since, how he watches her from the grave, which is morbid, but not entirely unexpected since she wasn’t invited to the funeral. The mother never came to see her, after that, and she can’t believe she’s dead either. Same story with the brother. Your father would tell you, when you were a child, about faith, and what it meant – it is no small thing to believe in something you haven’t seen and not everyone has it in them.

  She does not have it in her.

  There she is, staring into the trees. What does she see there? It can’t be much – it’s hardly a forest; there’s a couple of ashes, a privet bush, and then a creosoted fence. Some rhododendrons.

  When you die, will she cry?

  Or is it too late for all that?

  Will she pine?

  Who will rescue her pills from the side of the chair and get her matches from the kitchen? She has this silly habit of chewing on match heads, when she is not smoking. Who will pass her the handkerchief so she can spit the splinters into it and then empty them into the WC later, when no-one can see? Who will listen to her stories? She has a hundred of them, strange people she has met, some of whom you recognise from books you’ve read, all the things that have happened to her, which no one knows about, all the places she’s been, her strange ideas, her dreams.

  Who will listen to her at all?

  You shouldn’t think such nonsense. Seventy-nine is no age, and you’re in better health than she is. A country upbringing and God-fearing abstinence from the indulgences of life are a fine basis on which to predict an extended old age, whereas smoking two packets of cigarettes a day, eating match heads, and standing in the garden in the cold weather is asking for trouble.