The Stranger She Knew. Rosalind Stopps
table. I was wedged in between the coffee table and the sofa and the smell of blood was horrible. Turned out I’d only bashed my head a bit, no stitches needed, but at the time it smelt like an abattoir and that’s what I mainly remember.
Two days. I nodded like I agreed with them but two days, honest. I’m not sure about that. I’m going to ask some of the others when I can, I’m going to ask them how long they lay on the floor for if they had a stroke, and if just one of them says, two days, it will be obvious that it’s something they say to everyone, the two days thing, a big old lie. I’ve caught them telling lies a couple of times so I won’t be at all surprised.
I don’t remember much about the ambulance journey. There’s the smell, I remember that, the blood from the cut on my head, and another smell, a dirty smell that showed up in the ambulance. Maybe it was a smell from the person who had used the ambulance before me. They needed to work on that, clean it up a bit better. I’m sure the smell couldn’t have been coming from me. Who smelt it, dealt it, that’s what they used to say in the shop I worked in when I was a student. It reminded me of the day one of the boys in packing brought a stink bomb in during stocktaking. It brought tears to our eyes, but none of us girls said a word, in case we got teased.
I didn’t say anything in the ambulance. I just went to sleep and the next thing I knew, the young man who had been kneeling by me and the well-meaning woman with the thick ankles, they’d gone. It would have been nice if they had said goodbye or cheerio or something so that I’d known they were going. I’d got used to them being there and I felt lonely without them. They should have said something but they didn’t, or they didn’t do it loudly enough, so when I woke up there was a different woman. She had a badge on that said, ‘hello, my name is Agnita’.
Hello yourself, can you not speak then, I wanted to say, have you got badges for other things you want to say? I imagined a person covered in badges, all of them saying useful things like, would you like a cup of tea, or, mine’s a pint. Count me out, I thought, I’m not wearing any badges, they can’t make me. And they didn’t, but get this, what they did was even worse. They wrote it, on the wall above my bed. ‘Hello,’ it said, ‘my name is May. Please talk to me.’
I couldn’t believe it. Please talk to me, indeed. As if. I don’t need anyone to talk to me, thank you very much and if I could just untwist my mouth enough I’d tell them so in no uncertain terms. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time, no one except for my daughter, Jenny, and she’s so quiet I can hardly hear her. Speak up, I always say, speak up or I’m going to read my book and ignore you. That makes her nervous, and I’m sorry about that but there’s no point mollycoddling a grown child. No point at all.
I fantasised for a while about scrubbing the words off my wall. If I could just stand up for a moment I’d make sure there wasn’t a trace of writing left. There wouldn’t be any ‘please talk to me’ then, I can assure you.
They tell me I’ve got the sequence of events all wrong. They say that I went to the hospital first, had scans and saw doctors and that sort of malarkey, and that I only came to the nursing home later. I don’t know why they say that. I’ve got no idea at all, so I don’t argue, I just keep quiet and watch them all. It’s not something I’d forget, is it, a whole trip to hospital and everything that goes with it?
Honestly dear, you’ve been unwell for longer than you think, said the one with the purple streak. (Hello, my name is Abi.)
I hate being called ‘dear’ and I don’t trust any of them. It’ll be a cost cutting thing. It’s my guess that they just cut out the middle person and bring the old people straight to the nursing home, save money on hospital beds. They tell the poor old dears they’ve had some treatment but they don’t remember and everyone is happy. That’s the thing with me, you see, I’m quite clever underneath this old lady exterior. That’s what it feels like, an outfit I’m wearing. As if I woke up wearing a fancy dress costume complete with wrinkles and grey hair, and I can’t take it off. Inside it’s different. Inside me I’m about thirty, with occasional forays backward and forwards. I don’t think the other old people are like that. I’ve watched them. It’s real for them.
I didn’t see any of the other old codgers that first day. As far as I remember I was on the floor in my front room, in the ambulance, and then this room. I’m not complaining. It’s all very nice and everything, this room, clean and bright, but it smells of gravy at all times. It’s like living in a gravy boat I wanted to say, one big gravy boat sailing away into the night, full of old people on their last trip. I’d like to be able to say that to Agnita, she’s the one I’m supposed to go to if I have any ‘issues’. She’s not a nurse. Mentor friend, they call it but she hasn’t got a badge that says that.
So that first day, she sat with me for a while, telling me this and that about St Barbara’s, that’s the name of this gravy boat. St Barbara is the patron saint of miners, firemen and prisoners, she said, so that’s appropriate. I didn’t listen to everything she said, but I liked the sound of her voice, all soft and lilty like a bedtime story. She told me that she came from a part of the West Indies that used to be Dutch, and that was why her accent was unusual, I remember that. I remember it mainly for the frustration I felt, wanting to let her know that I was a true Londoner, not racist like the other old people. They weren’t proper Londoners, I could tell at a glance. They seemed more like the sort of people who’d moved to London from Hull. A sea of bad perms, crimplene and right-wing nonsense. The most important people in my life have been people of colour, I wanted to say but all that came out was spit.
Come on now May, there’s no need to be alarmed, she said, I’m a trained carer. Something like that anyway, but it wasn’t fair, I wasn’t alarmed. Well I was, but not by her, I don’t know why people always think it’s about them. Trained carer, I wanted to say, trained carer? An untrained toddler would have been able to see that I was actually alarmed by the fact that I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t join in with the conversation I hadn’t asked for in the first place, and I didn’t want to be having it anyway. I must have got a little upset after that. She looked offended, and that’s bonkers. How could anyone be offended by an old woman who spits instead of talks?
She left me alone for a while, but she left the door open. I could see two rooms across the corridor. One had the door shut, and the other was open. I couldn’t see who was in it but I could hear the television blaring so I knew it was occupied. And I could see people moving up and down the corridor with trolleys. Pill trolleys, cup of tea trolleys, book trolleys. This was clearly going to be a place where they didn’t leave a person alone for five minutes. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. I’ve been lonely in my life, I’ll admit it, but I’ve learned to like my own company too.
I slept again then, and when I woke up I realised exactly what was going on. I didn’t have a voice, that was the long and the short of it, I was trapped until I could make myself understood. That was a difficult thing to come to terms with. No one could understand me and while there was a kind of freedom in that, it was not a freedom I wanted. I was set apart from the rest of the world, a separate kingdom with my own self as ruler and subject. I was going to have to make my own rules; work hard.
I’d heard a radio programme about someone famous who had had a stroke and then practised and practised and got themselves better and climbed Everest for charity or something. I should be able to get better a lot more quickly, I thought, because I didn’t want to climb any mountains at all. I just wanted to go to the toilet unaided. I wanted to manage the whole process without swinging through the air on a hoist, or being helped by two carers while I lurched along with a three legged stick. I wanted my dignity, that’s what I wanted the most.
I never thought that going to the loo would be such a big deal in my life, but in between toilet visits not a lot happens in here. There’s TV, and meal times, and therapy of various sorts, but the other people are very dull. Mostly of the common or garden vegetable variety; no conversation to speak of. I need to practise my talking, that’s what the speech and language therapist says, but it’s hard to do that when I’m surrounded by people who are either busy working or busy dying.
There’s one, I’ve never seen her, I guess she keeps to her