Free Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams Page B

In the pocket of my shorts is a fruit and nut bar, which I open without stopping, pushing the plastic wrapper carefully back into my pocket. It is sweet and chewy, not the sort of food I like, but satisfactory for now, the teeth bracing themselves against the stickiness of the sugar.
    â€˜Jess,’ says Anna, quiet, persistent, ‘what about your husband?’
    I am thinking again about the nursing home. From the window of my room, if you leant out a little you could see, below, the kitchen door and beside it the old wooden bench where I used to sit in the dark with Maud while she smoked her sneaky fags. Sometimes in the daytime Tina and Steff sat there when they had a break. Steff with her head tilted back against the wall, blue-trousered legs straight out in front of her, Tina, on the occasion that now comes to mind, inclining forward over the woollen rug she was crocheting for her baby niece.
    She is big, Steff, bigger than Hil or me, set on a solid steel frame. Not fat, or if she is it all seems useful or necessary. She has thick dark hair which she pulls back in a ponytail with those coloured hair bands you buy from the chemist in lots of twelve or six, and which disappear, in my experience, almost immediately you have opened the packet. She would have been the sort of girl I avoided at school, uninterested in showy displays (boys, makeup, fallings in and out), unsmiling except within her coterie. When Steff was in the same room as me I felt that I was back at school and that I was on the outer.
    I could not make out what they were saying, on this day, except for the occasional lilt of Tina’s clear voice and, once, a deep sharp burst of laughter from Steff. It is odd to think of them as friends and perhaps they are not, away from the home, but they sat together for quite a while and each time I looked out they were still caught up in conversation. Once when one of Tina’s balls of wool rolled from her knees on to the gravel, Steff leapt forward, surprisingly graceful, and dusted it off before handing it back. Almost gallant. After a while they both stood up and Tina put away her wool, then they disappeared inside. When they reappeared each was pushing a wheelchair, and after a moment Steff went inside for another, then another, until there they were: four old ladies lined up on the asphalt, their backs to the sun.
    After a while Steff disappeared inside again and Tina sat down on the bench. When she saw me coming, she waved and asked if I would mind waiting with the ladies for a while. From the plastic container on the bench beside her she brought out hand-cream, scissors, tissue paper and a nail file. ‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘Make yourself useful.’
    I started with Mrs McClintock. The skin that stretched over her bones was like baking paper, translucent, decorated with brownish circles and deep blue, almost black, veins. Her nails were long and thick, horn-like. ‘Here, Eileen, can I give you a bit of a manicure?’ The thumbnail was the thickest, ridged and yellowish over the small shrunken digit; the tiny delicate bones beneath encased in skin, articulated by stringy bands of tendon or ligament that I could feel around each joint.
    â€˜Careful dear, careful. Don’t take my fingers off with those scissors.’
    â€˜I won’t Eileen, I promise. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
    â€˜Not so much frightened, dear, as watchful.’
    Even so her hand flinched each time the scissors bit into the nail, and I had to hold her fingers quite firmly between mine—‘nearly there’—to get it done. She had no children, although a nephew came every few weeks and wheeled her along the footpath, sometimes around the block. ‘I don’t know why he does it,’ she once said tartly. ‘It jolts me terribly, rushing along at that pace.’ Although whenever I watched he always seemed to be moving carefully and not fast, stopping every few