This is not my room

Date Unknown – Nobody will tell me

This is not my room.

There is sun outside

The red trousers came to see me today. He held my… It is all… My fingers they are different. They have painted nails and notches and you can follow the grain of them to my wrist. He held my wrist once. His shy eyes darted to the ceiling.

June – I think

The young girl helped me get dressed today. I told her that this wasn’t my room. But it was my dress. It was the green dress. I know this touch. I know this fabric.

She told me it didn’t matter that I didn’t remember her name. “Chloe!” I shouted. She giggled. It was a delicious, spring giggle, like a lamb in a field. Rolling down hillsides. I used to like that.

She gave me a cigarette. I smoked it, without lighting it. There was no fire. There was no handsome man. Just me with a cigarette in my hands, in my mouth, between my fingers . My shoulders went back. I have been drooping. Mummy told me to sit up straight. Where is she?

A day with clouds

I know something happened today. There are cards on the window sill. I feel like I have eaten. The young girl took pictures. She made me laugh. I know for a moment I was important.

I’d like to sit in the dark, at the picture-house, with a hand on my knee.

A Day in May – I don’t know the year.

My hands are wrong. Something is tugging at my.. I want to say… My writing is so neat. I just need to keep writing. It will come to me soon. I must be tired.

12 May 2023

Chloe has smuggled in some salt and some mustard sachets. She brings my dinner into me. They don’t pay her.

10 May 2023

New girl. Her name is Chloe. She chews her nails and has her phone with her all the time. She takes pictures of stuff that she makes look like a face. She put my slippers together with a newspaper and a banana. “See it’s smiling,” she said.

I laughed. I laughed at a moment. I was there.

She told me about how she had had to stay inside for two years and that she didn’t know what to do with her life. I nodded, because it made sense.

I told her about my four husbands. “I killed the second one,” I said, “It looked like an accident when he fell off the yacht.”

I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that. It is our secret.

6 May 2023

Adrian came to see me today. We did the crossword together. He smiled often.

“They seem really nice here,” he said.

I knew there was an answer I was supposed to give, but I couldn’t find those words. I got three clues without prompting. Adrian was wearing red trousers. They gave me a headache. Red, what does it mean?

“I can’t taste the food,” I tell him. His smile is something, there’s a word for it. His smile is unconvincing.

“I don’t like eating with all those people. They watch me.”

I told him that I’m scared. He looked sad, like that time he dropped an ice-cream.

There’s a new girl. She told me her name. I will have to ask it again tomorrow. Her clothes are too big.

3 March 2023

This isn’t my room.

Gregory Peck will come and rescue me. I’ll be swept up by his broad shoulders. Held high. Giggling.

2 February 2023

I know I must have done something terrible, but I can’t remember what. There are days missing from my journal. I read somewhere that when going through a trauma, the brain doesn’t make new memories. It is too busy with other things. And my brain struggles with memory. I remember that.

Adrian promises he will visit every week. The room is smaller than my bedroom. It has a bathroom to one side. There are rails everywhere.

I smell clinically clean with no floral undertones.

Adrian tells me it is the best room in the home. He made a big show of the garden. But it is February and there is very little to see, except for some snowdrops on the rockery.

Adrian has placed the signed photograph of Gregory Peck on the bookshelf, along with pictures of the girl and the boy. They look out of place. They look alien.

I want a cigarette. The nurse looked at Adrian when I asked for one.

“She doesn’t smoke,” he said.

“I want to take it up,” I said.

The nurse laughed and unpacked the suitcase into the wardrobe. I sat on the edge of the bed. My feet didn’t touch the ground, like a small child. I had to insist that the notebook was left at the side of the bed.

“I’ve kept a diary every day since I was 12 years old.”

“Oh wow, that’s amazing” said the nurse, who sounded less amazed and more bemused.

I’m scared. I miss my mother.

1 September 2022

My brain got tangled and mangled. I did something that worried Adrian, but I feel fine. I dawdled, doodled, diddled, fiddled, muddled. I can still see beauty in the mess, but Adrian’s face is scared.

Adrian says he has found somewhere for me to go. He wished he’d known about it when his mother was ill.

“I don’t want to leave my beautiful home.”

Adrian looked around the kitchen. He had rubber gloves on and looked faintly ridiculous, but I remembered not to laugh. His look was despairing. He has never liked mess. Even as a small child. I am one of the few people left who can tell him what that boy was like.

I stroked the wood of the kitchen table. It has never been smooth.

“I know all these notches,” I said as my finger traced the grain. “And the fabric on these chairs. I put that there. I had an upholstery moment in my 50s. If I leave them, no-one else will know that I made them.”

“I’ll know,” he said.

“I don’t want to play bingo and eat mushy food without salt.”

“It won’t be like that. They have specially trained staff.”

“I want to have my birthday here, and have family and friends make a fuss of me.”

I said that I would think about it. Am I thinking about it now? Am I considering leaving a house that creaks and sighs with me? Bleats and flies at me?

I still sweep down the staircase in the morning, imagining a husband returned from war at the front door. He would have just one small suitcase and a look of astonishment on his face. A face like Gregory Peck’s. We would embrace with a sigh.

I have always wanted a party thrown in my honour. There was no wedding. There was no big leaving do from the Library. The Labour party sent me a book token. I wanted to drink too much and be involved in a scandal. The sort of party that gets reported in fanzines and scandal sheets.

2 April 2022

Adrian called around today. He looked around my beautiful house and sighed. He asked me what day it was. I said, “I think you know the answer to that.”

He didn’t smile. I checked the copy of The Guardian he had left on the table and reassured him that it was Wednesday – Society Guardian day. He made me a great sandwich, something I could really taste, lots of butter, strong cheese and a mustard. We did the crossword together. It felt like a test.

He talked about the garden. The bluebells are out in force this year. Jingle Bells. Bluebell smells. Robin flew away. Oh what fun it used to be on a woman’s unpenned day.

I have the television on for company, as I write. A channel that shows old sitcoms on repeat. They still make me smile. But as I’m smiling, I wish there was more. A memory of a young man, holding my hand. His shyness was blushing through his cheeks. His name is not there. But I can still see the way his eyes could only land on my face in short bursts as if what he saw was too much, too lovely to bear.

I never married, did I? It was just a passing phase.

14 February 2022

Today it is official I am a dotty old lady.

The daily cryptic crossword and sudoku puzzles have not kept the monster at bay.

Adrian had looked unbearably something when the doctor broke the news. Was it sad? Was it pity? I didn’t like it.

I suppose this means I will never live out my fantasy of four young husbands and a gambling addiction. I so wanted to die like a Bette Davis stereotype, smoking in dark green satin and a whisky sour in my hand. I don’t even know what whisky sour is.

The good news is that I can use this as an excuse to stop doing the minutes at the local Labour Party. I won’t be there to see a revolution, but I always doubted that ensuring that paragraphs were correctly numbered was a real contribution to social justice.

The diagnosis was handed to me as a sombre mass card. And yet, I feel fine. I know that sometimes there is a heaviness when I’m struggling to follow a thread, like breadcrumbs strewn in a German fairy tale. I search for items that my brain has put away, like the names of Adrian’s children, but I don’t worry. It is just the labels that have faded, like jam jars at the Women’s Institute. I know who they are. I remember the girl’s giggle and the boy’s insatiable appetite for dinosaurs, and the way his chubby fingers fold around a picture book.

Sometimes I like the tangle in my brain. The other morning I tried to remember the words to the school song. All I could see was the word heart, and I knew it was aglow, or an igloo. I giggled like a screwed girl. More laughter.

And I can still look after myself. I had sausage and mash for tea, with lots of salty gravy. The kitchen is clean.

I wore lipstick to the doctors. He is a very handsome man, tall and straight-backed. I suspect he has a pretty wife and won’t remember me when she asks about his day. And yet, I’m the one with memory problems.

*****************************************************************

“No, she never married,” I told the matron. “She seemed happy with the library and the Labour Party.”

I held Aunty Edith’s hand. She was frantic, then at peace, then in tears.

A young woman came in, her eyes red-rimmed. “Edith is one of my favourites,” she said.

“Mine too.”

I went back to holding Edith’s hand.

“You’re the one who gave her a birthday party”

“Yes. She told me Gregory Peck was her husband.”

“She told me you were afraid of food.”

The young girl was tiny in a uniform too large.

Edith’s hand stopped. Time stopped. The crepey skin, the fragile fingers, nothing left. Matron told me that the doctor was on his way. It was good to be so peaceful at the end. “Did she say anything? Any last words.”

I shook my head.

The young girl took my hand, “I’m going to college to study photography. Edith told me to stop wiping bums and do something.”

I smiled at her through tears.

“She also lectured me about the minimum wage.”

“Sounds like Aunty.”

The young girl gulped and then she said, “I didn’t know Edith. Just the person she wanted to be. And I liked her.”

The notebook by Edith’s bed. There were hundreds of them in storage. I flicked through and then turned to the last entry. Her handwriting so familiar from birthday cards, letters when I was in America, the poems she made up with the children. The meticulously neat and gothic cursive that should be writing secret love letters.

The last entry.

This is not my room.