RESCUE

Lying in the darkest dark, torn from my children by my eyes, I get to know the woman in the other bed. She is old and wise and she has seen the firestorms of Dresden. Her voice saves me as we tell each other stories through the night. We cannot read, we must not move, we may have no visitors. By the weekend, when her son comes to collect her, we know each other well.

Ludwigshafen has little to commend it. There is the unmistakable smell of metal and sulphur, chemicals drifting into the hospital over from the BASF – the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, which made dyes, munitions and fat men's fortunes.

As she speaks of her escape, her young son on her knee, riding on a tractor away from a phosphorus hell where thousands die in cellar refuges, I smell the burning. Behind my bandages I see the sky catch light.

She too is sightless these few days. Her son arrives: a cultured, lovely man he's grown to be. He is the conductor of Ludwigshafen's City Orchestra and brings the family car to rescue her. His music's one good thing about that soulless city. The other is the firenight rider of the storm.

The ping of a small brass gong pulls us gently back up through limbic layers. The breathing deepens, the sound of chanting still echoing, to the exclusion of all bothersome thought.

Limbs return to slow life. Folding back the blankets of our chrysalis, we draw in sticky wings and then roar like charging lions and our yogamama has us shake out fingers, wrists and tingling forearms and wave our hands in the air like Good News Mexicans. Someone murmurs hallelujah. Yogamama tells us of the class she runs in the Jewish care home.

Vital signs all but extinguished, cast-off human carapaces line the walls in ticking-over silence.

Words may all have seeped away, everything tastes of stale toast, voices are a jumbled blur and shapes and lights flicker and confuse, but the touch of a hand still comforts and music will lift the heart's puppet-strings. They wave their hands as the music gathers speed and memories surge into fire - wedding dances, stamping, clapping, skirts whirling, Hava Nagila swaying, desert nights, starlight, youth, hope and freedom, futures of their collective pasts.

Shakers, bells and rattles are pressed into arthritic claws and the eager percussion section swells to fill the Albert Hall. Steadied by third world carers, first world detritus stirs from chairs and throws lost decades into the corner. The music swifter now and ever more compelling the shaking and the stomping and the Zimmering.

The eminent visiting psychiatrist from New York looks around for an instrument and settles back, a bed-pan drum to hand. Besuited, bespectacled and bearded, he is won over by the moment of communal awakening. Not a single soul is untouched by the vibrations and the rushing blood.

The tall black cook leads a kitchen conga through the hall, Black and White Marigold hands glistening aloft.

Brief therapy

 

Nearly twenty years ago a short term memory was suddenly lost as the aftermath of an operation.  The hospital saw us every few weeks. He had had a problem but Everything Was Better Now.  The Maudesley Head Man said, "Actually, it's you who is having to cope with thi. You could benefit from the talking therapy."  So I arranged some Brief Counselling.  Thought it sounded just the ticket, so that I wouldn't be spending the rest of my life trying to unwind and unravel.  Just ten sessions, secretly, in my lunch hour.  The best thing, in my eyes, was that the therapist was German, so I didn't have to explain about the husband, the mother in law, the past.  The sessions often made me Quite Cross.  But when she said goodbye she handed me a slip of paper that said If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always got.  I was a bit cross about that, too, but I stuck it on the wall and looked at it for a week or two. 

Then I took off my fawn raincoat, put an ad in the paper, and started a new life.

EASTER SUNDAY

Stationary, East Finchley. All trains go via Bank. Except this one, which likes the view from here. Everybody on the tube is wearing black. Mind the doors, please. One girl is wearing black but has red ballet pumps. One is all black but with silver earhoops and shopping. Mind yours, please. One bloke with a guitar case is all black except for a red T-shirt. He is with Ballet Shoes. Mine, yours, please. Nobody at all has an Easter Bonnet. Vegan in black is eating birdseed and cleaning plastic forks with baby wipes. Mind the jaws, please. Three Italian men, one with no dress sense, one with tiny feet and one balding, good-looking one with deep-set eyes and with hands that do ballet. Mind the floors, please.

 

Shoes and ships and milking sheds

 

Scissors from a carpet bag. Crackling, a leopard-skin coat comes off. On a wooden stool at a disadvantage I look up at the mirror. Her reflection, the same age as mine, stands behind me, aggressively sophisticated, rhubarb and custard short hair and darker roots, fingernails as sharp as the scissors, long skirts, ankle boots, jangling bangles and beads. I am in awe of her, as always, my hair limp and overlong. It's thirty years since I wore mascara and there's nowhere for my face to hide.

 

The bright glare of cold light pools on me from ceiling fitments and is answered from the mirrors. We talk about things we wouldn't in a salon: The menopause, regularly. Lodgers, sporadically, Spanish films, always. I sit on my own kitchen stool in my own shiny unkind bathroom and she cuts my hair. Trust, potential humiliation and very sharp edges - everything is in her hands. Who else ever has their fingers in my hair?

 

 

She tells me there is now a man in her life and the scissors move a little faster, then stop in mid-snip, her voice trailing. She's listening to the city sound of evening birdsong. "It always makes me think of milking."

 

She's not in my bright cold bathroom, she's not talking to the man she's met on the Internet, she's not wearing her long London fashions and she has no scissors in her hand. She's brought home the cows with sisters one and two. They are laughing and singing on low wooden stools in a dark shed, their heads pressed against the warm sides of twelve cows in Kerry. And the birds are singing like tonight, like always.

A special providence

A surprised and slightly hurt expression on one side and a disapproving one on the other. Both eyes at once is not an option for a toucan. What a task it is to heft the huge sun-coloured beak over first one shoulder, then the other, to focus on the world. ...in some large species the bill measures more than half the length of the body. Despite its size it is very light, being composed of bone struts with little solid material between them. Why the bill is so large and brightly coloured is still unknown. As there is no sexual dimorphism in coloration it is unlikely to be a sexual signal
It came from Ecuador in my hand luggage and is the weight of a leaf. Nestling in the palm of my hand now, it has almost lost its reproachful air. This is not the first time it has fallen from its perch and traces of paper glue still mark the join between head and rosy bill; one time it was blown to the floor by a gust of wind and it has not been returned to the rest of the painted balsa flock strung across the kitchen window. I let it fly to the tree in the front room, where, with alternate eyes squeezed shut, it can watch the street, or me at my desk.                                        This is the train of events responsible: The diary entry read: Nigerians at noon.     Because I am not a proper businesswoman, I agree to accept a translation job on a Sunday. I recognised the Hide and Seek telephone manner – you pick up the phone and say Hallo? The echo comes: Hallo? You wait and then say Yes? They say Yes? Hallo? Yes? Yes? Hallo? Hallo? The first time this had happened I let it go on and on, wanting to try the patience of what I thought was a cold caller from another continent. Then my conscience pricked me and I realised it was indeed
a cold caller from another continent and that he had called me to get help.

Because I am not a proper businesswoman I wait in, way past noon. Way past half past noon. Way past two o clock. Every so often they phone in and say traffic is bad in Edmonton. Sometimes it was Enfield. Or Edinburgh. Or the end of my road. They come into my house, one of them smelling faintly of aftershave. This is a problem for me, but we'll be quick – we won't even sit down. One man shows me a sheaf of small-minded print and pages of questionnaire. I think I may be some time. I think I probably won't get paid properly. I don't think I am going to be robbed, raped and murdered. I am right.

Because I am also full of compassion, angry that small-minded print is sent out in this way, I know that he is brave in not throwing it straight away, and I know he is frightened by it. I go through the small-minded letter and identify when he must respond by and where to and what for. We start on the forms. I ask him where he was born. He says, Nigeria, Embassy. I am intrigued. He shows me the way his birthplace Emisu is really spelt and the possibility of his mother having climbed into the diplomatic compound as her waters were breaking disappears.

After nearly two hours the last box is ticked: Are you or have you ever been a barge-owner on the River Rhine? Did you spend any time in an East German prison? Are all these records correct? Do you have private pension arrangements in your capacity as a handicapped civil servant deputising for a colleague?

Now we must talk about money. I have already asked whether he is in work, so I suppose, apart from the hopelessness of my position, I could have insisted on more. I told him I was making a special price. He shook his head. Not refusingly, but as if he no longer understood the world. Eventually we all shook our heads in the same way and after some very polite three-sided regretful smiling and murmuring, the two of them put their wallets together and bank notes were slowly extracted, one by one, until I nodded, still smiling and murmuring. We shook hands and they left.

Because I am sensitive as well as un-businesswomanlike and compassionate last night my eyes were burning from the residual chemicals in the air left by the perfume. I cannot sleep. My head buzzes all night. Because ambushing molecules are still lurking this morning I open the windows wide. Because I have not found my minimalist persona, there are obstacles. An Indian carved table slices into my Achilles tendon as I balance on the edge of the antique sofa bench. The wind surges through the room, driving the deadly chemicals further in rather than sucking them out. I hear the sound of a toucan in free fall.

Because I am un-businesslike, and compassionate and sensitive and un-minimalist and because I have let in the howling winter gale, the bird sits on my desk diary and looks at me warily over its shoulder.

There is a special providence in the fall of a toucan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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