The year that drops our of Janet’s life is the flutter of a dying oak leaf, spinning flailing gliding flying until it settles quiet in the shadows a few metres away from the host trunk where it may lie and decay, unless disturbed by a blackbird or a hedgehog or a stag beetle or the tread of a non-slip waterproof walking shoe.
Janet is, initially, a wisp of her former self. Her hands do not comply with orders. Her fingers shake and struggle to grasp the half-filled plastic cups of luke warm tea. Her feet are too far away and too discoloured and too full of fluid and too uncertain to walk without a frame or a physiotherapist holding her arm. Her tongue and lips form words that are uneven, clipped, that take time to get going. Her mind toys with her, teasing, playing hide and seek, scrabble without the full set of letters, a favourite jigsaw with a missing piece. There is no one to ask and no one to tell her. No visitors, they keep saying. And she’s too afraid to use the phone.
Some days Sergi helps her to get up and dressed and she sits on a reclining chair by the large picture window in the room that used to be reserved for visitors. She wiggles her toes under the blanket, counting them in and counting them out. Over and over until she is sure. She has ten. She has ten. She has ten.
The room has been emptied of anything interesting, of any visual cues, of anything that connects the institution to the outside world. No calendars, no posters, not even an old newspaper or a magazine. She leans back and watches the sky. Watches the Altocumulus clump and roll and dodge the sun. She measures the clouds with her fingers, counting off the inches, checking them against the horizon of the long pale flat of water that sometimes glistens, sometimes doesn’t.
How do you know their names, Sergi asks her one morning as she points out the Cirrocumulus.
That cloud, she says, is six miles high. Imagine that. They’re made of ice crystals. Rare.
I didn’t know, Sergi says as he measures her pills out and signs off her chart.You know a lot about clouds, he says, handing her the pills. Were you a weather lady?
It takes Janet a minute to reply. I don’t know, she says. I’d be on the telly, wouldn’t I. I’d remember that.
To be continued
SANDERLINGS 