Oh, wasn’t there anywhere where she could hide and keep herself to herself and stay as long as she liked, not disturbing anybody, and nobody worrying her? Wasn’t there anywhere in the world where she could have her cry out – at last?
Ma Parker stood, looking up and down. The icy wind blew out her apron into a balloon. And now it began to rain. There was nowhere.
(Where could a stoical, hard working woman find any ‘space’ to express her grief? Katherine Mansfield’s famous story, The Life of Ma Parker is haunting as it refuses to grant Ma Parker the solace of privacy or even tears. Endurance is all she has left.Sometimes we would all hope for far better things! The echo of KM’s story is found in this fragment. )
There was nowhere to go. The woman stood watching tired leaves, thinking about her death. Nowadays it felt just one breath away. They had warned her, he had warned her, everyone had spoken of the final haemorrhage, their safe clinical words separating them from this person who went by the name of Katherine.
More leaves were thrown up by the wind; a golden, bloodied carpet stretched out before her and then there were so many stories she would never get to write.
Never never never, she whispered to a black woolly glove. Wet prayerless words. Now who gifted her such harsh luxury? She couldn’t find the name, even when she shook her head, scrabbling at the smudged edges of memory. Her mouth burnt against the damp heat of the glove like a fierce kiss.
It was that coffee that had raised her up a little, had made her nod more than mechanically, and the stranger’s brown eyes were so alive across their table.
But out here she was alone again, shaking her head like a dog at the dissolving threads of her life. She pulled the hat lower over her cold ears. Muddy water skimmed over her boots, darkening them and a crow landed in front of her, its head on one side calling out to a companion she could not see. If she was superstitious, she could call this an omen.
Yet the woman felt less than any simple sadness today, yet more too. For she had enjoyed the coffee, that synchrony of spoons and the face across the table – more than -she corrected herself, more than anything she had felt for a very long time. And it was time that she missed. She missed the carelessness of health.
There were several stories she enjoyed, yet her characters seemed asleep somehow. They stood outside their lives on steps, or at windows looking in, cramped inside tiny existences. But where could she send them that she could believe in? There was nowhere.
