Body

by Judith Cook

I close my eyes, resigned and ashamed as she starts to remove the bed-clothes.  Ashamed, though I know she doesn’t see me, this young miss in the uniform.  I am not a person, not a woman.  I am a task.  Too old to exist. 

She begins peeling back folios of hospital clothing, revealing my ancient body to the sterile, dry air. It is a map, my body.  Or an encyclopaedia.  Like in that old Marx brother’s song from – now when was that from?  Must have been years back, I can’t recall exactly.  Lydia.  Lydia the Tattooed lady, it was.  But my body-map is not made from tattoos, it was made by life. It is the legacy of my life.

See now, when she rolls me over to release the sheet and my stick-legs are exposed.  The blueness of the vein that runs the length of one skinny calf is indecently virulent against the dusty parchment white of my skin, hairless and baggy.  And on my knee a birth-mark.  It was shaped like an eye, when the skin was firm. She doesn’t notice it, this young miss doesn't. She doesn't see me.

How long ago it was since the skin around that birth-mark was taut and firm. I inked around it one day.  Years ago, on a summer's afternoon.  Polly and me. We used to draw on our bodies, or paint our faces and pretend to be grown ups.  What fun that was.  I remember.  Why do those days seem brighter than these days?  It is the same world I live in.  It is the same sun I can see – could see, if the curtains were not pulled around my bed, protecting my modesty, hiding the ancient map from the rheumy scrutiny of the others who have washed up here.

I squeeze my eyes shut tighter as she rolls back my legs and lays them gently down.  She lifts my arm, slides me out of my bed jacket and backless gown and there I am, as naked as a baby, but lacking all the plump charm of new flesh.  She covers my lower half with a dry towel as she starts to clean my top half.  Fast, efficient wipes.  A squeeze of the cloth, the sound of water dripping into a metal bowl.  I cannot see.  It isn't real.  More fast, efficient wipes.  She is talking at me now in soft, patronising tones. I am old, please do not treat me as if I were slow or retarded, I am neither.

I think the words.  I do not say them aloud.  I say nothing.

She lifts my left arm and wipes the skin around where the breast used to be, where the puckering scars now remain.  I got an extra thirty years from having that removed, the doctors tell me.  I remember vaguely the warm rush of relief when they said it hadn’t spread.  I remember the look on Joe’s face.  He didn’t like women-troubles.  He didn’t want to know what was wrong, he just needed me not to die first.  Men were a bit useless back in them days.  And I didn’t die.  Of course, he never touched me after that.  Never saw the scar, the space where my clothes gaped a bit before I stuffed one bra cup with padding.

He wanted to go first, Joe did, and he did go first.  Funny that I don’t think of him so much.  It seemed a shame, then, that he should go just before he retired. How distant he now seems.  I don’t think of him nearly as much as I do the others, although we were forty-some years together, me and Joe.

The cloth is warm and damp but only a bit damp.  It rasps against my skin like a cat lick.  She is still talking, Miss Nurse.  Aware now of my body, what is missing and what remains.  She puts down my arm and tells me I am a good girl.  I am many things.  I am hardly a girl.

She moves the towel to cover my top half and begins work on the lower.  My legs. See there -  that scar there – on the other leg. That I got when I was a girl.  Must be fifty – no – sixty years ago.  I got it when I was riding on the back of Jonnie Spence’s motorbike.  He was taking me to meet up with Polly and the boy she was walking out with – what was his name, now?  It's gone. I must remember to ask her.

Jonnie, though, he was twisting around, trying to get a look at me on the back of this motorbike, clinging on for all I was worth.  He wanted to see me afraid, wanted to see me with my eyes scrunched up.   Only he lost control on the bend, just as we came into the village, and then we were both screaming and then Polly was there with that boy she was seeing, the one whose name I can’t remember.  They picked us up and checked us over.  We were both alright - except for my leg.  I tore it up a bit when I slid across the old shingles.  Tore off all the skin, I did. A raggedy tear that never looked right when it healed.  All bumpy, it was.  I had to lie about that to my old Dad. Said a car nearly ran me over and I’d jumped out of the way.  If I’d mentioned Jonnie or the bike I wouldn’t have been allowed out again.  I never walked out with Jonnnie after that.  To annoy him, I started to see Joe.  And I never wore a little summer dress again either.  I always wore a neat pair of slacks, even when the weather got warm.  The scars and puckering were purple, then. Really livid purple.

Miss-Nurse has finished wiping me down and now she pulls on some clean pants.  Old lady pants, with a disposable stick-on gusset in case of little accidents, as they call them.  She pulls them up across my flat, puckered belly.  See here – can you still see my stretch marks?  There.  I am a mother.  Was a mother.  Do you stop being a mother if your child dies?  Is it like being married and getting divorced?  You aren’t single again, you are separated.  I am separated; separated from my child.  Still a mother, just separated.  The map of my body is proof that she existed.  And there was another child, a boy, but he was stillborn.  My body thought he lived, though.  After the birth, when he never came to and they took him away, I still had milk for that little lad. My breasts were swollen and sore with it.  But for her - the girl - these lines along my stomach - see here?  They are proof of my little girl.

She doesn’t see.  Miss Nurse.  She is wringing out the cloth, disinfecting and drying her hands.  Does she think I am contagious? What does she think she will catch?  Age?  You are already dying, my dear.  Blink and you will miss it.

She turns to finish dressing me, she knows I am not asleep.  Some of them in here do snooze through their bed bath.  They are dosed up, I think.  How can you sleep through humiliation?  Do you really grow accustomed?

Come on, love, she says now, be a help won’t you?  Lift up so I can put a fresh nightie on.

I lie still.  I won’t be a help.  I am not here.  This is not me.

She rubs my arm.  It is flecked with age spots, the fine hairs long ago turned white and withered.  The skin is crepey and old.  It hangs from my bones in a way that would have horrified me when I was young and beautiful.

Although, thinking now – was I beautiful?  It is hard to know, so many years later.  Polly was beautiful.  Polly is still beautiful, she is not old and ugly, like me.  Now I am old, I regard the world with a jaundiced eye.  I have lived it all before.  Or if I haven’t lived it, I remember it from the films at the picture house, and that is as real to me as if I had lived it.  It’s funny that.  When your memories start to merge with fiction, which bit of you is real?

That’s one of the reasons they brought me here, that is.  Polly came to visit me when I was still in my flat, and I had heated up some of her favourite scones and we were talking about the old days and then later, when she started to cry, I stared at her some, and then some more.  I started to realise, then, that she wasn’t Polly even before she told me she wasn’t.  And I got a horrible heavy feeling when the girl that wasn’t Polly told me that Polly died.  She died fifty years ago.  Well I know that, I snapped at her.  Do you think I have forgotten my own sister?  But I wasn’t cross, I was afraid, and that horrible heavy feeling moved up into my throat and stuck there so I couldn’t speak any more for it.  Polly was dead.  Dead all over again.

Poor Polly.  When she died I thought of her all the time, all the time, all the time.  And then the years went by and I didn’t think of her so much, but when I did, I was sad, and cried a little.  I can think of her now, in my lucid moments, without tears.  I think more about the old people than these new young ones.  Polly, now.  The end was unexpected, so sudden.  Now she’s gone I can see her life as a whole, from start to finish.  A complete thing, an entity.  She has a legacy.  Her little girls lived, although she died.  She has grown-up grandchildren.  She would be so proud.

Polly never got old.  The photographs I have of her are faded and old fashioned, but always she is young, she will only ever be young.

Now, there was this girl in my flat.  I didn’t know who she was, the girl who had come for tea, the girl who looked like Polly.  Her body was fresh and new, no lines, no maps for me to read.  Not Polly.

She left me that day, but said she would come back again the next day with – who was it?  I forget his name.  A man.  I knew him, I recognised him but his name escaped me.  He looked at me.  Pity.  That was the expression in those eyes.  I busied myself putting scones in to heat – Polly’s favourites – so I wouldn’t have to look in his eyes, nor wonder why it was that I couldn’t remember him.  That’s when I burnt my hand.  See here now – they have taken the bandage off and the skin is pink and shiny-raw. New skin.  I burnt my hand when I took the tray out of the oven. I was scared, it made me clumsy.  Polly didn’t eat the scones, once I burnt myself.  She looked at me, distress in her eyes, and then I saw that they were the same eyes as the man.  I think they must be related to each other.  And then they brought me here.

She has finished her ministrations has miss-nurse.  I am dressed again.  My dignity restored.  She is twitching things, the bed covers, straightening the things on the table.  Soon she will leave me alone, she will tell me to have a bit of a sleep, and she will go.  I am not sorry to be left alone.  I do not want her condescension, no matter that she means well.  I am suffering only from having lived too long.

Not much longer now.

I have been here three weeks and now I have stopped asking when I may go home, back to my flat.  They always say soon.  Soon, Dear.  For I gave up my name and identity when I came here.  I am now Dear.  Soon, Dear. I know what Soon Dear means.  It means never.  I think now that I will never again see my little flat.  I would like to go back, I like to look at my pictures.  They are in frames near the television.  I have pictures of me with Joe and that picture of Polly and there are pictures too of the young girl who isn’t Polly and the man with the pity in his eyes.  At a wedding, they seem to be, those two with the same eyes.  They are smiling, they look happy and beautiful.

I wish I could go back to my flat, I do not like it here.  It is full of ancient misery, people who are lost, people who have no one.  People who have lived too long, people who are taking too long to die.  I feel that I have outstayed my welcome in this world.  I have lost all my flesh.  I am a bag of yellowing bones, my body lined with age and care and the journey I have made, from one date in time to another.  The date of my birth to the date of my death.  And I shall show Polly the map, the map I have made, the map that life has made of me.  Soon I will show her, very soon.