of small things
‘I AM SORRY I am late this morning,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue, ‘but I was delivering a plant to a friend. I had several difficulties getting it on and off the bus.’ She unzipped her anorak and hung it over the back of the chair.
I gave an impatient shake of my head but she interrupted. ‘It was rush hour. Imagine. A nun on a bus and a potted myrtle shrub.’ Sister Mary Inconnue unlocked her leather bag and set the typewriter on her lap. ‘What shall we write about today?’ she said.
I thought of all the things she must have done in the time I’d only lain here and been attended to. The light at the window was a clear iced blue. There would be a late frost outside, perhaps the last of the year. I pictured my driftwood figures glinting with sequins. I thought of the crystallized leaves and grasses. The clifftop shining as blue as the bay below. I was overcome with sorrow. I will never get to the end of my letter, I thought. There is a huge story ahead of me, and the truth is so complicated. When a thing is broken, throw it away.
I don’t want to be here , I scribbled. I want to be in my sea garden .
Sister Mary Inconnue read my comment and sat still. She cocked her head as though she were listening to something a little beyond my range. Then she said, ‘I find it helps to start the day by practising one small, regular thing. I knew a businessman once, a very wealthy person, and he went out to collect kindling sticks each morning. He said it helped him to avoid all sorts of conflict later in the day. I have anotherfriend who walks his dog by the sea. Now, I realize sticks and dog walks are out of the question, but you might memorize a poem. Or do some spine exercises. It is good to practise these small daily rituals. What will be yours, Queenie?’ Sister Mary Inconnue cast a glance over the room.
It was hardly inspiring. The wheelchair. A sink. A framed print of two blue birds. Yellow curtains. A window. The branches of the tree outside, with only the flimsiest shawl of leaves. There is a television, but I have lived for twenty years without one of those. I lifted my hands in a helpless gesture.
‘Oh, very good,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue. I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘We will do finger stretches.’
So that is what we did. I copied her as she rotated her hands like wheels and placed them gently palm against palm. I copied as she pointed first her thumb, then the index finger, and so on. I remembered how you used to wind down your car window and give careful signals with your hand. From outside the hospice I heard the gulls in the sky, the wind in the tree. I heard the nuns talking with the medical team in the corridor. But they were gentle sounds that ebbed and flowed. I heard them and I let them go. Only the picture of you in the driving seat of your car stayed with me. I smiled.
‘That’s better,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘Are you ready for your letter now? One word in front of the other.’
Tin-pot tyrant
T HE IRONY IS , Harold, that I wasn’t even a trained accountant. I’d graduated in classics. The nearest I had come to an account book was when I got my first job as a researcher for a politician. He liked me to fiddle his chequebook stubs so that his wife wouldn’t get suspicious. He asked me to fiddle other things as well, but I drew the line at those.
After my decision on Bantham Beach to start again, I had taken the cheapest room I could find in a B&B just outside Kingsbridge. The place reeked of gravy and fabric conditioner. The smell was in everything. The woodchip walls, the terylene sheets, the pink bedside lamp and paper shade. Sometimes I’d be halfway down the street and I could still smell it. It seemed to crawl into my skin, my hair, and cling there. I had to find somewhere new.
I saw the brewery job advertised in a local paper and went to the interview. The work was beneath me, but I was desperate. The job would be a stopgap. I’d