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By Root 497 0

Eleanor with her airs even when she was a child, liked all that royal and history stuff. It had a picture of the old duchess, the American, on it, the divorcée, some cheap thing. Not the duchess, the book. Though the duchess come to think of it had been a bit of a cheap thing too it was widely thought, and she married the king and he abdicated. They liked the Germans. They were right old German lovers, them two. Not that May had anything against Germans. On the contrary, she had met some when they came to the house on the exchanges with the school and so on when the girls and Patrick were young, and they had been very nice the Germans in reality.

The head has its coffins.

It’s not the coff that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you offin.

!

May made herself laugh with that.

Out loud?

No, it wasn’t out loud. It hadn’t been out loud, any of it. She could tell because of that girl.

What girl?

That girl there, the girl in the room, that girl sitting on the big raised chair the visitors sat in.

Who was she, then, that girl?

She wasn’t family.

She was just some girl.

Even without her glasses May knew she didn’t know her, couldn’t place her face, not in a million.

Well, whoever she was she hadn’t looked up, hadn’t even blinked nor nothing and she would have looked up if May’d been spouting away out loud.

Good.

Though she might, the girl, be wearing one of the things they wear, in their ears, they all wear them now, so they can’t hear anything but themselves and their insides, and even then they can’t hear themselves think. And if she was wearing one of them things she’d not have heard if May spoke or laughed or did anything out loud, so it’d not make any difference whether it was out loud or no.

She was wearing next to no clothes, that girl. She was more skin than clothes.

May turned her head.

Outside the window it was snow.

They were all mad as foxbitten dogs, the girls of today.

It was proper snow, that.

It was real old-fashioned winter outside this room. These last days there was more often snow than birds in the sky out that window.

No one to love me and nowhere to go. Out in the cold cold snow.

May sang this inside the confines of her head in a pretend old crone of a voice.

That made her laugh.

She turned her head back from the window again.

No, she was not dead.

She was not dead yet.

Well, but we’ve all got to go in the end.

Well, but there’s no getting away from it.

Well, what’s for us won’t go by us.

Well, Patrick held out the ten-pound note to me, out of his wallet, and I told him, I said, what would I be needing any money for? I’m on the last day of my holidays.

Well, that was the very last thing I said out loud, and the very last thing I ever will.

Well, these are my days of grace. And you don’t get many of them.

Well, wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. No, not goodbye. Cheerio. The long cheerio. Not goodbye, May, Philip said when he was in here himself in this very pickle, and she’d been up doing the visiting and was about to get on her way home to pick up some things, pyjamas, clean things. Never goodbye, eh?

Philip was small against the pillows in the bed, and the man in the bed next to him couldn’t pass motions, whined away in a high pitch behind his curtain while he tried; he was in real bad pain it sounded like. There was a chap the other side of Philip so thin he looked like a skeleton already. Across the ward there was a man who looked perfectly well. He was the illest of them all with something happening in his brain. Philip rested against his pillows and raised his eyebrows at her like a comedian. Then he reached up his hand to his mouth and his eyes and his nose to make sure his face was decent for her. He never liked to affront. He was a clean man. An awful lot of women ended up unlucky in their men.

May Violet Young (née Winch) (F) (84) (widow, husband dec. 20.7.99) admitted to IC 6/09 with general collapse / delirium / high fever / UTI, passed for rehabilitation 7/09 to Wd 7 then 8/09 down to Wd 5 (Geriatric) (slated for closure in 2/10 as per new NHS guidelines