By Sarah Das Gupta
A strange noise, a sort of rattling, came from the room at the end of the corridor. It was almost time for afternoon break. I dumped the Hoover and box of cleaning materials in a large cupboard, before walking across the yard to the cleaners’ room.
The regulars were already sitting round with soggy digestive biscuits dipped in tea.
“You on corridor D, love?” It was Di’s tired voice from the small kitchen. “Leave room 24 this afternoon.”
“I was going to mention. There was an odd noise coming from there, a sort of heavy breathing.”
“Yea, its Dotty. Don’t worry. It’s not your job. Best leave it for today.” Di put her washed-up cup
back in the cupboard.
“Is Dotty ill or something?” She was a frail, bird-like old lady. We usually ate chocolate biscuits
together on a Friday.
“She’s dying. She don’t know what’s happening. Just let her be.” Di lit a cigarette and leant back in her chair.
I drank my tea quickly and hurried back into the nursing home. I stood outside room 24 listening. The rattle was deeper, more rasping than when I’d heard it earlier. As I opened the door, it was like wading into water. The heavy, green curtains had been closed. A shadowy, subterranean light filled the room. The bed by the window seemed to be floating in shadows. I stood looking into Dotty’s face, my eyes becoming more accustomed to the half-light. If anything, she looked frailer than ever.
Her pale skin was tightly drawn over her face, which had the effect of making her eyes darker and larger. From the corner of her mouth, she was dribbling. It had run down over her nightdress onto the white sheet. I took a tissue and gently wiped her lips. The rattling had stopped, and the room was coldly silent. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of the bedcover recording each hard-won breath. I whispered some nonsense about her getting better by next Friday, so we could gossip again over the chocolate biscuits. Were chocolate biscuits relevant to these last, precious moments? I tried, unsuccessfully, to summon thoughts of eternity, immortality.
Somehow, the afternoons sharing chocolate biscuits seemed more real.
The darkness of the room became oppressive. Did you have to die in darkness? I leant over and opened the curtains and the late afternoon light flooded the room.
I walked over to the dressing table. There was a single photograph, grainy, yellowing at the edges. A young soldier was leaning out of a train window and waving across empty tracks. On either side of a glass tray were two old fashioned, cut glass containers. One contained a powder puff, the other a long-dead fly, on its back, its desiccated wings and legs scattered round it.
On a side table was a black rosary and a Bible. I thought of all those long Sunday afternoons in a Methodist Sunday school, singing Wesleyan hymns and reading from a modern Bible. Now when the moment came, I had to walk by on the other side. I’d never held a rosary, and this was the Jerusalem
version of the Bible.
I sat down beside Dotty. She had told me stories about her family Christmases, mixing up the Christmas pudding and putting in sixpences and threepenny pieces. How one day her brother had eaten some of the mixture and swallowed a coin. He had been blue in the face when her father held him upside down and thumped him on the back. She had described how the sixpence and the half-swallowed cake mixture had shot out across the kitchen floor and how her brother had refused to eat Christmas cake again.
“God bless him. He drowned when the Hood sank in the war,” she had added quietly. I sat holding her hand which felt limp and cold, retelling her the story of the Christmas cake. Whether Dotty heard me or not, I don’t know. Yet I felt then she was listening, at some level of consciousness.
I opened a window slightly, and in the garden the ringdoves were calling. That call which seems to encompass twilight, the setting sun, and the pale shape of the moon rising. As I sat holding Dotty’s hand, I felt for a moment she responded with the slightest of pressure. Did I value this response or was I selfishly rehearsing my own future?