Blanket of Love

When I declared til death us do part to my imminent husband, Allan, in September 1984, I meant it. I just never thought it would happen. It was theoretical. For the last two years of his life, knowing Al’s cruelly random Parkinson’s/Lewy Body dementia combo was terminal, it was still only theoretical. Now, his ashes, his earthly remains, rest under some ornamental orchids in my piano room. His handsome face grins at me from its A4 frame on my dresser. Seven months since his death, I'm just beginning to understand that it did actually happen.

 With Allan I was always securely wrapped in a blanket of love. That's what is missing now. I still have my health, even better with new cataract-free enhanced vision. I'm physically in great form. I have my intellect, my interests, my friendship groups and friends. But that love to come home to that was only ever a phone call away has gone. The memory of it remains and I'm hanging onto that but I can't have Al's love reaffirmed by his hug or his hand to hold.   

Oh, I'm very busy participating in my days: listen to another audiobook, the more unfathomable the plot in a Lynda La Plante or a Jack Reacher the better. Stops me ruminating.   Organise my recycling, bike-ride or walk somewhere, always with a shopping list in my back pocket. It's good to tick things off. Chat to whichever willing shopkeeper I can find. Over-share. Garden. French class, German class, choirs. Busy. Busy. Busy.

 This is what I'm doing every day. Trying to entertain myself and get through the next 24 hours. With luck I'll manage a few hours sleep, preferably during the night. If not, I'm learning heaps from podcasts.

 Seven months on, I'm missing Allan doing the little that he could still do: in the evenings, sitting on his kitchen chair, facing the TV, flicking through free-to-air. I miss him shuffling through to me in the lounge after dinner, interrupting my absorption in yet another unmissable series, asking if there was anything we could watch together. 'Do you mind if I just finish this episode?' I'd ask. He never did. After a while I'd call him and we'd watch something that would appeal to us both. It was always my choice. I knew what he liked.

 He'd sit at the corner of his couch at right angles to mine, so close that I could reach across and briefly - as long as I could stand it - hold his icy hand. In all but the hottest weather, he'd be wearing a beanie, windcheater and puffer jacket to combat his cold sweats, a symptom of his Lewy Body dementia. He'd sit leaning forward, the pain and deformity in his back preventing him from reclining against the cushions.

 Throughout his illness, he only 'lost it' a couple of times. The first was when the GP told him he could no longer drive. Standing next to me at the kitchen sink, in reply to my asking if he was all right, he said, 'I'm absolutely gutted.' There was nothing I could say. The fact that I'd been doing all the driving since the previous Christmas when it became obvious that he was too vague and slow to be trusted behind the wheel was irrelevant. At least he'd known that if he wanted to he could.

The next time he expressed despair about his illness was the following year, maybe 12 months later. It was after 10 pm or so. Bed time. Time to clean teeth and retire for the night. TV was off. We'd had our drinks and customary squares of dark chocolate, our evening treat after we both quit alcohol a couple of years earlier. It should have been a cosy time but it never was while Allan had that illness. Every day was imbued with my fear of what would happen next. We hadn't yet stood up when I noticed Allan's face, so sad as he leaned forward and stared into the corner.  'Allan, what's wrong?' Well, what wasn't wrong? but we say these things. 'I'm just thinking depressing thoughts about life, the universe and everything,' he said heavily. I went to sit and hold him and reassure him that we were coping. Practically we were. But emotionally it was torture. Allan rarely said anything other than to express that through it all, he was just worried about me having to do everything because he was no longer able . He worried about me having to go on without him. Typically, I'd joke at this stage. 'Don't worry about me,' I'd say over his shoulder, because inevitably he'd be holding onto me. 'I'll be heading off to Europe with your money.'  Which is exactly what I'm doing.

 But at the end of the day - at the end of every day - I'm so sad and lonely without him. I had 45 years safe in that blanket of love.

Killing your darlings

Anyone else found anything interesting during a Covid clean-out? Like, for example, their own completed novella manuscript buried in a back room drawer? Well, that was what I found. I'd put it away, after too many publishing rejections, in 1997. A bit disappointed with myself, I shook the dust off and returned full time to my proper job as a secondary English teacher. Hadn't read my novella until recently. It's a bit of a time capsule and I can well understand the rejections and why a trusted reader proclaimed it a draft short of complete. But rereading it, I didn't hate it. Its themes are perennial and I am still interested in my protagonist's story.

So during Covid-19 lock-down, amongst other things I've been revising my novel. That means trying to improve my fiction writing. Call it a project. It's not for anything but it is creative and absorbing; good way to keep the black dog at bay. (And believe me, I can see it straining at the lead in my peripheral vision.)

You'd think that as an English teacher I'd be able to write passable fiction, given I taught writing for years in secondary school. Yeah? Well, no. Sure, I wasn't bad at encouraging others to develop their ideas.  Same with editing students' writing. I could easily correct grammar and spelling, slash redundant expressions and suggest modifications to anything clunky. I also had heaps of ideas as to how others could begin and develop their stories.

And yet, I've struggled with this in my own prose fiction. 

Somewhere in my thirties, I think I was trying too hard to be literary, or something. My fiction style became ponderous, laboured . No one's ever enjoyed my fiction writing. There's been a bit of damning with feint praise if not actually diving under bushes to avoid my asking them what they thought of something I'd written and foisted on them for comment. 

However, with the help of a couple of trusted, unpaid editors, I think I may be finally figuring it out.  Of course, one can Google all this stuff. Gems of wisdom are fed to me daily on social media. But something clicked when my editor-sister - also an English teacher - gave this piece of advice after she'd graciously suffered another telephone reading. Get rid of the scaffolding, she said.  Trust the reader's intelligence. Let the reader make the connections. She demonstrated in an example and, lo and behold, a veil fell away. Never mind that I'm a fascinated wanderer as I detail what I can see in my mind's eye. It's not doing it for the reader. 

It's the basic 'show don't tell' thing. And furthermore, don't make a ball of string out of a piece of cotton, which I fear I may have just done.

My last post, Broken Glass, was a short story that I wrote in the mid-1990s during my early try-hard literary phase. I've edited it, keeping my sister's sage advice in mind. Is it any better? Perhaps. Think I was quite depressed when I wrote it, having just lost a 39 year old friend to pancreatic cancer. Didn't realise how prescient that whole experience would be, given how things have turned out with the loss of our lovely 'son-in-law' to cancer last year.

Anyway, here it is Broken Glass, version 2

The crash sent Rick's mind back to his childhood, so he could almost feel the slippery opaque glass with its milky surface, and regular pattern of tiny coloured dots. Holding it was dangerous, but he'd wanted it.

Even his mother couldn't hold it easily in one hand.

"That's too much. Here." Cross again, she’d made a sucking snapping sound with her mouth. "I’ll do it. As if I haven't got enough to do around here." She'd helped him."Why did I buy these stupid looking things? I should throw them out." She kept saying she'd get rid of them but she hadn't.

His mother was outside at the line when he wanted a drink. Knowing he was supposed to have his drink in the kitchen, he chose instead to sit on the floor in front of the TV in his nest of cushions and blankets.

Despite his mum’s warning, he took one of the greedy, slippery glasses from the back of the cupboard where they lived with the Easter and Christmas mugs from his granny. "Cheap and nasty rubbish," according to his mum when Granny wasn't around to hear.

With infinite care, he poured his cordial from the heavy bottle in the fridge. It welled and splashed at first, but he wiped it up. He avoided resting the container on the side of the glass in case the glass tipped over. He didn’t completely fill it.

Holding the drink aloft, he walked in concentrated slow-motion to the lounge. His eyes flicked from glass to doorway guarding against a spill. Painstakingly pacing, his toes feeling the ground, he made slow progress on the tortuous route to the next room, six adult strides away.

After a sip, he placed the glass safely not near the edge but in the middle of the coffee table. He remembered his mum’s lessons.

Pleased with himself for not bothering his mother, he clambered into his nest. 

Suddenly his mum shouted sharply, "Rick! Get the door for me! Hurry up!"

In his haste to help her, he knocked the table. The drink washed over onto the floor on the far side. Helpless, he watched the slippery glass rolling across the table before smashing on the hardwood floorboards.

"Rick? Rick! What have you done now?"

He heard the backdoor and the alarming rush of air and temper as his mum flew

into the room. As he darted around the table, his bare feet lost their grip in cordial.

"Leave it! It's too late now! You've done the damage. What have I told you

about those damn glasses?"

Her feet outside the puddle, she reached out  and dragged him back. He’d felt sharp pain in his bottom and legs as glass jabbed into the ball of his foot near his little toe.

"Stop crying now. It's never as bad as it looks." Crimson splats dripped on the floorboards as she'd hobbled him back into the kitchen. She bathed his foot with cotton balls soggy from disinfectant mixed white in her baking dish. "Oh, it's all right!" Soothing, holding his face in her hands she kissed him and lifted him onto the table. "Sit there and I'll get you another drink. Don't worry about the rotten glass. Stupid looking things." She was quite sure she'd got all the glass out.

The memory flashed through Rick in the seconds after his son, Luke, accidentally nudged the wine glass off the edge of the bench. They both looked blankly at the spreading red pool on the floor and the glass, on its side, missing a jagged piece but with its stem intact.

Standing there, he remembered a few weeks ago looking outside over someone’s shoulder and watching the celebrant. Her lacquered dark hair was lifting slightly with the pace she was making. Brief case at her side, she was probably striding off to the next job. That bit of hem on her long black skirt was coming down. You'd think she'd have fixed it. He hadn't been able to stop cataloguing the details and felt guilty.

"I think we're talking about a very special person here," she'd said, her voice like liqueur. Her head to one side, she'd slowly scanned the crowd. She'd timed the pause while the mourners drew breath. Janine's sister in the front row released an enormous sob which hung for a while like the dust motes visible in the sun.

Rick shook the memory away, crouched and picked the two sections of glass out of the puddle which Luke was about to step into.  “Careful, mate. Go round that way and get the mop would you?’ 

"Sorry, dad." Luke's eyes filled with tears.

"Forget it, Luke. It was an accident. It doesn’t matter."

Rick had only drunk a mouthful out of that second glass and there was no more left in the bottle. He wasn’t sure he could manage through the night without another drink. Rationing it, he'd saved some from the night before. Sensibly, he’d consciously re-corked the bottle after he'd had his two and a bit glasses. 

'It's not a good time to give up drinking," some friend had told Rick, a couple of

months back. They'd shared a bottle of wine on a Tuesday morning. Janine had been asleep and wine seemed like a good idea. 

He hadn't had such a hectic social life since he was a teenager. The visitors with their cakes and casseroles had propelled them along. But that had stopped now. Life was supposed to go on after some respectful pause.

"I've got it dad." Luke mopped the floor while Rick prepared dinner, wondering whether he ought to go out and buy another bottle. Maybe later, after they'd eaten.

Alyse, Rick’s teenage daughter, had turned silent. Like Luke, she was helping out. Doing the washing. Setting the table. Taking over where Janine's mother had left off when she decided it'd be better for all of them if she returned to her own house.

Alyse briskly set out place mats, cutlery and serviettes like Janine had. Alyse's hair fell in golden glossy blobs. Rick had helped her to get the knots out when she was little. She used to hold him round the waist and press her face into his tummy while he smoothed out the tangles. He'd held her head gently so he wouldn't hurt her. There'd be a hot damp patch on his shirt where she'd been breathing. Now she  glanced up occasionally at The Simpsons on the television as she set the table. They watched television while they ate.

Rick was still painting the house. He hadn’t finished it in time, even though he'd

tried to. The garden was a clock, every day reminding him as he weeded it.  He'd never really bothered with it except for this last year. He’d thought it would be good for Janine. Some sort of compensation for their up and down life together for the last sixteen years. 

He'd really upset his mother-in-law when he'd refused to go and have one last look at Janine in the funeral home.

He'd felt a curious ecstasy after the funeral. He was ashamed of the feeling of relief after weeks of lying next to his dwindling sedated wife, her body swelling hideously and her  bones sticking out, never sure when death would strike or whether it already had.

The day of the funeral came blue and sunny; odd vaporous clouds drifted in a warm deep sky; weird metaphysical conditions that he couldn't help noticing. A compilation of Janine's favourites blasted at the crowd as they gathered outside the bizarre red-carpeted hopeless mechanised temple.

They'd all gone back to Rick's afterwards. He didn't know who'd organised the barrage of food and alcohol but it had all happened. The sun shone and he’d sat on the front veranda and held court with Janine's basketball girlfriends. One minute he’d forget and be laughing and getting drunk. Next he’d be slammed by violent engulfing waves of unthinkable loss and that putrid jasmine blooming by the front door.

Sometimes it is as bad as it looks.

Broken Glass

I've been sorting through a few things to fill in my isolated days. Who hasn't? I found a short story and I thought I'd share it here. I wrote it when I was in my late thirties.

The glass was slippery, Ricky recalled, skidding back to his childhood in his memories.. This particular glass had a smooth milky opaque surface, and a regular pattern of tiny multi-coloured dots. It was awkward for him to hold, but he'd wanted it.

Even his mum couldn't hold it easily with one hand.

"Why did I buy these stupid looking things?" she'd said. "I should toss them out." She kept saying she'd get rid of them but she hadn't. Ricky liked the look of them and they held a lot of drink.

"That's too much. Here," she'd said to him more than once. She'd make a sucking snapping sound with her mouth. She was cross again. "I’ll do it," she snapped, "as if I haven't got enough to do around here-"

When his mother was outside at the line, Ricky had wanted a drink. He’d also wanted to watch the cartoons on TV. He knew he should have his drink in the kitchen but he'd made a nest of cushions and his special baby blanket on the floor in front of the TV.

He got one of the spotty, slippery glasses that his mum said he should be careful with. They were at the back of the cupboard with the Easter and Christmas mugs from his granny. "Cheap and nasty rubbish," his mum always said later when granny wasn't around to hear.

He poured his own cordial carefully from the heavy bottle in the fridge. It welled and splashed at first tip, but he wiped it up. He was careful not to rest the container on the side of the glass because he knew the glass might tip over. He didn’t fill the glass right up to the top because he didn’t want to spill it.

Carrying the glass of cordial, he walked with concentrated slow-motion through to the lounge. He held the glass in front of him, eyes darting from glass to doorway, trying to watch where he was going, but when he looked away he somehow tilted the glass so the drink almost ran over the edge. Neatly pacing, feeling his toes on the ground, he took painstaking tiny steps on the tortuous route to the next room, six adult strides away.

There. He sipped a bit of drink then placed the glass safely into the middle of the coffee table behind him. Not near the edge. "Not there, in the middle! Here." This was what his mum always reminded him. He might knock it over otherwise. He clambered into his nest, pleased and proud. He hadn't given his mum any bother. He didn’t have to trouble her and hear "What now?" if he called "Mu-um?" his high voice undulating with request.

Then his mum called sharply, "Ricky! Get the door for me! Hurry up!"

He jumped up to get the back door and in his haste knocked the table. The drink washed over the table, onto the floor on the far side. The slippery glass was rolling, rolling over the table then it smashed on the hardwood floorboards.

"Ricky? Ricky! What have you done now?"

He heard the backdoor and the alarming rush of air and temper as his mum flew into the room. He darted around the table, bare feet losing their grip in cordial,

"Leave it! It's too late now! You've done the damage. What have I told you about those damn glasses?"

Keeping her feet outside the puddle, she reached out, gripped his forearm and dragged him back. He’d felt sharp pain in his bottom and legs as glass jabbed into the ball of his foot near his little toe. There was lots of blood. 

"Stop crying now,” his mother had said more gently. “Come on. It's never as bad as it looks."

Crimson splats dripped on the floorboards as she'd hobbled him back into the kitchen. His mother had bathed his foot with cotton balls soggy from Dettol and water. 

"Oh, it's all right!" She’d held his face in her hands, smiled at him. She’d kissed him and lifted him onto the table. "Sit there and I'll get you another drink. Don't worry about the rotten glass. Stupid looking things." She was quite sure she'd got all the glass out, she'd said. 

That memory of his own childhood had flashed through Ricky in the seconds after his son, Luke, accidentally nudged the glass off the edge of the bench. A wine glass. They both looked blankly at the spreading red pool on the floor and the glass, on its side, with a jagged piece out of it, but its stem intact.

Then he remembered when he'd seen the celebrant through the window. He saw her over someone's shoulder. On one level he couldn't help noticing, as you do. Her dark hair, lacquered into place, was just lifting slightly with the pace she was making, striding with her brief case to the next job. It's how it had seemed. That bit of hem on her long black skirt was coming down. You'd think she'd have fixed it. He hadn't been able to stop cataloguing the details and felt guilty. "I think we're talking about a very special person here," she'd said in a voice like liqueur during the service, her head on one side, her eyes roving around the crowd. Then she'd timed the pause while the mourners drew breath and Janine's sister in the front row released an enormous sob which hung for a while in the dust motes shining in the sun.

“Mind!" said Ricky. "Go round that way and get the mop would you Luke?' Luke was eleven. Ricky crouched and picked the two sections of glass out of the puddle.

"Sorry, dad."

"Forget it, Luke. You can't stop shit happening."

He'd only had a mouthful out of that glass and there was no more left in the bottle. Ricky wasn’t sure he could manage through the night without it. He'd saved half a bottle from the night before. He was rationing it. He'd consciously re-corked the bottle after he'd had his two and a bit glasses. He was sensible about it.

Luke was filling a bucket. Good lad.

"It's not a good time to give up drinking," some friend had told Ricky, a couple of months back. They'd shared a bottle of wine on a Tuesday morning. Janine had been asleep and it seemed like a good idea. "Nope. Not a good time."

He hadn't had such a hectic social life since he was a teenager. The visitors with their cakes and casseroles had propelled them along. But that had stopped now. Life was supposed to go on after some respectful pause.

"I've got it dad." Luke mopped the floor and Ricky cut vegetables into even strips, wondering whether he ought to go out and buy another bottle. Maybe later, after dinner.

Alyse, Ricky's thirteen year old had turned silent. Like Luke, she was helping out. Doing the washing. Setting the table.Taking over where Janine's mother had left off when she decided it'd be better for all of them if she went back to her own house.

Alyse was briskly setting out place mats and cutlery. She put out bread and butter plates, folded paper serviettes, tucked them under the knives on the plates.

Alyse's hair fell in golden glossy blobs. Ricky sometimes had helped her to get the knots out when she was little. She used to hold him round the waist and press her face into his tummy while he smoothed out the tangles. He'd hold her head gently so he wouldn't hurt her. There'd be a hot damp patch on his cotton business shirt where she'd been breathing. Now she glanced up occasionally at The Simpsons on the television as she set the table. They’d watch television while they ate.

Ricky was still painting the house. He hadn’t finished it in time, even though he'd tried to. He'd been keeping the garden weeded. The garden was a clock reminding him. He'd never really bothered with it except for this last year. He’d thought it would be good for Janine. Some sort of compensation for their up and down life together for the last sixteen years. Like most people's lives, he supposed.

He'd really upset his mother-in-law when he'd refused to go and have one last look at Janine in the funeral home.

He'd felt a curious ecstasy after the funeral. He was ashamed of the feeling of relief after weeks of lying next to his dwindling sedated wife with her body swelling hideously and her bones sticking out, never sure when death would strike or whether it already had.

The day of the funeral came blue and sunny with odd drifts of vaporous clouds in a warm deep sky, odd, metaphysical conditions that he couldn't help noticing. A compilation tape of all Janine's favourites blasted at the crowd while they gathered outside the bizarre red carpeted hopeless mechanised temple.

They'd all gone back to Ricky's afterwards. He didn't know who'd organised the barrage of food and alcohol but it had all happened. The sun shone and he’d sat on the front veranda and held court with Janine's basketball girlfriends, wondering how he could be intermittently laughing and getting drunk, then suddenly being slammed by violent engulfing waves of unthinkable loss. Getting giddily plastered on wine and that putrid jasmine blooming by the front door.

Losing my shit.

So I've had this cheap plastic water bottle for years. It lives on my bike in a neoprene, faded pink and blue spotted holder. Recently it brought me close to tears. Twice. To anyone else it's about as precious as an old newspaper blowing along a gutter. Unless you were into collecting rubbish, I doubt you'd pick it up.

The guy working at the cinema snack bar must’ve thought me deranged as he retrieved this wrecked vessel from his special lost property cupboard under the counter - and he didn't know I'd just cycled seven k to pick it up.

"Come to mama," I thought, eyes pricking with tears. I only talk to myself when no one can hear. "You’re home now," I smiled. Was only mildly self-mocking as a bit later I fitted it into the bottle carrier on my bike.

I hate losing things and it doesn't often happen. I have a mental map of where everything is and can generally find anything, with little mental backtracking, amongst apparent chaos.

Beats me how I recently lost two items. Had to let the first item go. A neoprene - that word again - wrist support, in case you're wondering. I knew I’d left it behind in the Ladies, just as I settled in for my second viewing of the three hour film Never Look Away. (I'd make some comment about the ironic title, given my loss, but if you've seen the film you know I wouldn't dare suggest such a trite analogy.) I was hardly going to leave my seat, stumble out of the dark cinema and run downstairs to the public lavatory to see if that’s where I'd looked away and abandoned my armband. 

The movie over, I dashed to the loos. Well, it is a long film. Unfortunately, in my haste I looked away from pink spotty bottle, which I left behind in the cinema foyer. Didn't know that at the time.

Felt a bit ridiculous leaving my name and contact details for the cleaner, in case she'd found my manky wrist band and rather than dropping the smelly thing in the bin had put it carefully in lost property. No luck there.

Cycled home a little forlorn, despite my second viewing of one of the best films I’ve ever seen. A couple of hours later, back home, pink spotty bottle was still addling my thoughts. To assuage my misery, I called the cinema. I teared up when a kind person told me she'd found my precious and I could collect it from the snack bar.

About 20 years ago, I watched a teacher spend her recess accosting a room full of busy teachers on their break. She was sure one of us had stolen her coffee cup. I totally understand. There are so many things over which one has no control that some of us become a bit manic about guarding our stuff. Think it's time for me to give a few things away.