The ward is a long ward full of chaotic things like beds and curtains and tea-trolleys. They have put me in a side room with blackened-out windows. Every four hours that horrid nurse comes in, asks for my arm and injects a straw-coloured liquid into the tube that extends from it. I have never taken drugs in my life, but this liquid helps me to see my mother more clearly. It makes me fuzzy at first, but when I screw my eyes up, open them and focus on the walls I can see her coming through them towards me, hair flowing and fins fluttering.
‘Oh there you are’, she says.
‘I love you mother’, I say.
‘I love you too’, she replies.
Whenever I look into her face – really look into her face – tears fall from my eyes. There is water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink!
Through the silence of my own anatomy, from deep within my inadequacy I am able to speak about her death. I have been given a quest to follow and it starts from here: point zero, in sleep! It has been forty days and forty nights since her leaving and I can’t remember being awake at all, although I can feel the starched sheets of hospital linen wrapped around my legs trapping me in like a mummy lying tattered in an old tomb out on the sands. Nurses are busying themselves around me and a rotten clinic smell, like the odour of chrysanthemums, pervades my senses. As I watch intently for a glimmer of kindness from them I imagine my mother dying in their care, lonely and sad. I am sad too because they cannot understand me when I say that in her leaving I can see a look of each generation gone by, as well as the breadth and scope of my own physical and intellectual life, through the eyes of a gaze that is not mine. You see, her death has reminded me of who I am. Oh yes, my friend, since that fateful millennium night I have been thinking through my own mortality in order to find her.
I am going through a healing process, but Mr doctor woman does not believe me. I have told her many times that through the experience of my mother’s death I can see the interpretation of my ideas and the context of my life being revealed. They are being revealed through the language of indolence for I have laid myself to rest with her, safe at last in knowing that death is not a passive but an active thing full of gravity and importance. She is where I abide and so to is my father. The Mermaid and The Balladeer are showing me the way!
When I speak these words Mr doctor woman shakes her head.
‘Rest now’, she says, ‘you will soon feel better’.
What does she know?
Learning to walk again.
Heat and humidity are upon me every day in this place. It has taken me almost six weeks to recover myself, but I am now standing on my own two feet and I do not need anybody to hold me up. There are mirrors at every bedside in this ward – a device of a sort to make the patients see themselves as a consistent entity in the world, but they can’t fool me. My old self has gone with the Mermaid and the Balladeer into the night air and is travelling forward somewhere into the realms of a history that cannot be known. Every day I feel heavy, yet weightless, and a sensation of infinite wonderment is passing through me as if I am being used up forever by them – they are my salvation. Through the mirror, which I look into every single day, I can see that they are holding the large white door open for me and as I watch them, their souls and skin become visible to me again. Like narcissus I have developed an ego that is dangerously destructive, although I am not falling into the murky pool just yet! Each day that the Mermaid and the Balladeer are with me new air fills up my lungs like a spring fills up an unknown watercourse, for they have walked themselves out of their deaths and into paradise and I am with them.
My mother is the leader and is very gentle. She has a soft voi
ce full of the joys of Spring. I have never heard her take the lords name in vain or be harsh with children.
The hospital and its bays of sickness.
The hospital is called St Mary’s of the Martyrs and it has large garden areas to the front and back of it. It looks like a temple to me, edged with parallel lines of colourful flowers that seem out of place. It is a tall building with big arched windows at its highest level, but most of the patients are confined to small wards guarded by thin corridors. Full of wings and sickbays it is a labyrinth; a place with open and closed spaces that hide life’s accidents and returns the damaged to altered worlds in which like my own also have to be rebuilt. I pay no attention to most of the staff as they go about their work and rest instead in the corner of my room that is off-set to the entrance of my designated ward area for it is my very own sickbay – a space in which I may render myself as off-colour as I wish to be whenever I want to be. Most of the time I keep myself to myself simply because I and find it hard to even look at another person without feeling physically sick. All that I keep thinking about is the time when my mother approached me on that wonderful millennium night and took hold of my hand with hers – a hand that was small and adept at making others feel safe. There is not one other person on this small bit of spit and sand that I am able to trust quite yet.
‘Come forward’, my mother keeps saying to me, ‘we will have to hurry for time is waiting for us’.
Time goes slowly when you are forced to wait but I know why she has been given especially to me for, in my waiting, like Lady Lazarus in my Jew linen nightdress, I am reborn again several times over, despite the fact that I have to stay in this place for a little time longer. You might be wondering why I ended up here – so too am I. I think it is because I have become different.
It’s so hard to keep yourself occupied in a place like this as if time is standing still and the outside world is far, far away. To fill in the gaps of my days I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the books of women long since passed over, but Mr doctor woman is looking at me with a strange look trying to find a way of making my mind focus on the here and now rather than stories of the past written by women that were mad. She does not look directly at me and does not make any attempt to make physical contact. She just peers into the great void she calls my mind and opens a hole in her face that looks vaguely like a mouth.
‘Your mother has gone Catherine, try to be strong’.
‘But I am strong. Can’t you see her here in the pages of this story that is filled with her words?’ I ask.
‘No, I can’t Catherine, she is dead’.
When she talks like this I tell Mr doctor woman that she is a stupid woman with black eyes, and even though her hair shines with light as if the snowdrops have marked her head with white speckles of glory, she is sometimes very dismissive and arrogant. If I were to describe her to you I would say that her lips are full and curl at the edge with a wickedness unseen ever before, but only when I try to tell her my stories. Perhaps she just doesn’t know how to listen, I think, and go back to sleep in order to escape any kind of human interaction.
The doctor is going around the ward; ward rounds are also life-saving like the table of life!
Mr dr woman has come to see all of her needy children. Her coat is really white and she can listen to your heart with a magic trumpet that she places over yo
ur heart. She has a file to write in, but you can not read a word she writes. Her medicine chest is full and she can heal you with the blink of an eye. Today I have decided that every time she tries to see me through eyes that are black and distant I will cup my face with my trembling hands and cry out loud and strong into the stifling air – Oh my God, Jesus is a woman. I have been saved, I am out of myself, I am alive! Usually she ignores me and walks with her arrogant walk, out of the ward and far into the thin corridors that mask her disappearance. When she comes back today to the table of life I will try it again, for I am having no joy in convincing Mr doctor woman that I am a prophet from the future. I can see her now at the nurse’s desk trying to ignore my presence, but that won’t work for I am persistently crazy and nothing will stop me. Without looking at me she starts to walk towards the next bed and it is then that I can hear myself ranting straight at her.
ur heart. She has a file to write in, but you can not read a word she writes. Her medicine chest is full and she can heal you with the blink of an eye. Today I have decided that every time she tries to see me through eyes that are black and distant I will cup my face with my trembling hands and cry out loud and strong into the stifling air – Oh my God, Jesus is a woman. I have been saved, I am out of myself, I am alive! Usually she ignores me and walks with her arrogant walk, out of the ward and far into the thin corridors that mask her disappearance. When she comes back today to the table of life I will try it again, for I am having no joy in convincing Mr doctor woman that I am a prophet from the future. I can see her now at the nurse’s desk trying to ignore my presence, but that won’t work for I am persistently crazy and nothing will stop me. Without looking at me she starts to walk towards the next bed and it is then that I can hear myself ranting straight at her.
‘Oh my God, Jesus is a woman. I have been saved, I am out of myself, I am alive! I bellow.
Mr Doctor woman in her harsh black eyes is jumping now, right off the seat she has acquired at the next bed and into the air like a woman gone silly with power. She has lost her magic wand and she is flustered and unsure of what to do. She asks the nurse to restrain me. It’s batty Nurse. I can see her running towards me from the doorway of the ward so I throw my poetry book and all the other books I have by women, to the ground in defiance and sit and wait. As she places her fat hand firmly against my forehead and forces my head onto my pillow I shout at her too.
‘Do it’, I say, ‘it is the only way that you are going to stop me from travelling with them’.
She grips me with her right hand and plunges something into my forearm. They are all at it now, I think, as I feel my body become heavy, like a body touched by sleep paralysis. As I fade into dullness I can see Poppies in July. When I awake I am fused with their aroma, feeling mad with anger. How dare they try and make me silent and dull. I am being controlled and I don’t like it one little bit! I will get even with batty Nurse some other time, for now I have different matters on my mind and I have to fight this lethargy that is forced on me. Things aren’t going as I planned.
Solitary Confinement
Alone again – naturally!
I have been moved to private quarters and the door has been locked. My mouth is always dry and parched and when I ask for a drink they pretend that they can’t hear me. My eyes too always feel cloudy, but they won’t stop me getting to my destiny. Every night batty nurse sits there watching me drift away, but I make sure that she can hear me as sleep takes its hold.
‘I don’t know where I am going mother, but I will follow you and my father wherever you wish to take me’, I whisper to myself.
Batty nurse smiles and turns the light out.
‘Bitch’, I say, and then all my words are gone again.
Another day brings another story to tell. I have decided for good that never again will batty nurse or Mr dr woman invade my space. I will tell my story of death and grief as I please. I will not write death in the way it is used to being written. It just isn’t something that I can do. Mr doctor woman said that I am t
oo opaque. If that’s right, then let it be. How can I be responsible for her laziness? She will have to work at reading me and open my book instead of always trying to close it down, for I know secrets about myself that I have not told anybody yet. To help Mr doctor woman with her reading process I have told her that I will use headings to denote my frame of mind, some of which she has already missed, and that she must use them as a guide to where I have voyaged and will be voyaging in the future.
oo opaque. If that’s right, then let it be. How can I be responsible for her laziness? She will have to work at reading me and open my book instead of always trying to close it down, for I know secrets about myself that I have not told anybody yet. To help Mr doctor woman with her reading process I have told her that I will use headings to denote my frame of mind, some of which she has already missed, and that she must use them as a guide to where I have voyaged and will be voyaging in the future.
‘Grief’, I told her ‘does not travel in a linear way’.
‘And what good will your voyage do?’ she asked.
‘It will do me good’, I said.
Today I have stolen a lap-top from the nurse’s office. I will use it every day when she has gone. I am going to write a book. I will disguise it as not a book, but a book about books and how they can be read if they were a book.
Here we go – ellipsis is such a beautiful word!