Charms

 A hoist, a winch. 

 A cardboard bowl. 

 A Kylie sheet. 

 A hand! A foot! A sail! 

When they cut the lunchtime visit, Joan became aware of her own incontinence and worried that it worried that it worried that it might affect her future in her own home and so she began wrapping solid turds in brown council notice envelopes which she could then ask certain visitors to dispose of. The window in the envelope made this high-stakes stuff and as a certain visitor, your hand had sprung open when it understood from the warmth, the contents. 

‘I’ve had a dog in,’ she said. 

The Carers found her, not you. 

When you finally got to her bedside she whispered ‘Wow!’ and stared like she was unable to take  you in. She was curled to one side of the bed, it was the side of her little leg.  

‘Is this foot usually blue?’ The doctor asked. 

‘Yes,’ you said.  

And as the Doctor gently predicted her shut-down, Aunty Joan dutifully enacted every step until a  thin brown liquid pooled where her bottom teeth had been, finally breaching the spout of her lip. An abysmal stench. Her hand continuing to grasp. 

You should know by now how to give final hugs. 

Thanking staff, you pressed your way through the series of exits and realised that your earring was  missing. 

Despite being famously immoderate, you have never believed in treating yourself, but you bought  these particular earrings without asking the price. You were in Prague to present a paper on the role  of nicotinic receptors on attentional parameters; some of the first data you had collected with Ian  Stolerman at the Institute of Psychiatry.  

The earrings had been waiting for you in a Jeweller’s vitrine in a shop adjacent to the Old Cemetery  where the jostling headstones looked to have been swept into a tight pile with a stiff broom. You wondered if anyone of yours was under them. They trembled in the jeweller’s fingers as she held two ridged pips, each fixed in a dull convex dish, suspended on an oval loop. You have wondered  since if the patterning on the central buttons reminded you of the links on your mother’s only bracelet. Then, you think of each as a clitoris inflated by a fine straw but you can’t think of a reason. Was there something clitoral about them or did you just wish there was for the sake of this story? You chose not to check. Which story is this? 

Now, when you wake at 4am you make your way through hierarchies of panic. A couple of strata  below simulating your own beheading is clapping your hand to your wrist to see if you have lost that  bracelet which you never wear because you are so afraid of losing it. The bracelet is how your mother would be, were she a bracelet. Noble, classical, ancient. From Italy. More likely Albania. It once fell out of your brother’s pocket when he came to see you in hospital. In hospital because, out blackberrying in your nylon pants in the woods, you had fallen down a ravine from a rope swing and on impact, your ulna escaped your skin at the wrist and entered the earth for about four inches. Plaster cast tight over the scruffy wound, they were scrubbing you down until the early hours unaware they had helped you cultivate a life-threatening infection. From now on, people would stare at your scarred wrist in horror. You had injured yourself on Aunty Joan’s watch. They told your mother they would have to amputate at the elbow, she told them that they had better find a different solution. 

Joan had you to herself at the weekends and she’d ringlet your hair for you. In her nightgown, chores done and free of her calliper, she sat on the leatherette settee (a goatskin slung over the back to save it) meaning you could watch telly while she did it. The cast iron leg brace had a coffee and cream leather knee patch and a stuffed grey ring, shiny with friction buffered her crotch. Once off, it stood in the corner, overlooking games of cards and strong Vimto in a decanter because this was Friday night, after tomatoes fried in bacon fat! You would make her wash her hands before she put in your ringlets but she didn’t wear underwear and you’d sit between her legs. When she smoothed the golden tubes of hair around her finger, you could hear her sucking the spit through the raft of hair grips held between her teeth. With a grip she’d separate the tube of hair from her finger. Her mother, Mary McCullough, called ringlets turds and lamented retaining two only; one hanging each side of her face because the gypsies cut off the rest on a tram ride to town. 

Ringlets done, it was time to take a tea-towel and wrap it around that little foot, atrophied by polio.  There had been some idea in the 30s that surgery was an intervention for the disease, then massage,  bed rest, — years of notions that made no difference. Carefully covering the toes with this scarf then  pinching it together at the front, you could kiss the inverted teardrop of its featureless little face. All  hot with taut skin, the dolly smelled vinegary, like the padded ring at the top of the calliper and it  was pacifying to play your lips over the shiny blank surface. You squeezed the turgid calf to your belly with your elbow and felt you could have played the toes like a bagpipe had you blown them. You almost recollect a bleat out of it but you know the toes were dumb; coaxed square by immobility. 

You will tell the congregation during her eulogy that until you saw a waitress in Wimpy imitating  Joan’s limp behind her, until that moment, you had no idea Aunty Joan was disabled. Joan never had kids; your mother already had three before you so this was donation at its most natural. Besides, before her stroke, Joan still had one good leg and before you were born, had used it to kick the doctor on the shin when he told her Mary McCullough was dying. 

When the good leg hopped, the shorter leg jangled to the side like a stretched skinned rabbit that  someone had attached to Joan’s torso with a couple of safety-pins. Without its calliper it was useless  but she had managed to get to the bottom of the stairs on it to shout, ‘Di and Doddy are dead!  They’ve been chased by Pavarotti on a motor bike.’ Diana’s death was immediately, unswervingly, a national event which you were bound to care about even if the night that it happened you’d had an e  and a rake of whizz, pints beyond tally. 

You had decided to stop smoking on your conference trip to Prague so that you wouldn’t drink so  much. (Such discipline could have been better used to preempt what an international audience would ask  you at an international conference but you had urgently prioritised working on your new side the sis, that regret was addictive, instead of fine-tuning interpretation of the data sets you were to present and defend on behalf of your lab). But because you were alone and because the exchange rate was good and because time sags in abstinence and loneliness, you had a massage in the convention centre. It was cheap and you had never had one. After it, you didn’t start smoking again but you did put on double patches to protect against what you see now was an encroaching awareness that where you came from, no-one deserved luxury. The nicotine patches electrified that night’s dreams and you still remember the one where a homeless man you had encountered in the underpass to your hostel, puked sausage on you and on waking, you could still feel it’s fatty heat soaking your crotch. 

You still have a headscarf from a company who made nicotine replacements called Tab-Ex, that has  “ex-smoker”emblazoned all over it (you have two in fact, collected from the folding table of the conference trade show; blue with gold copperplate and white with navy- the Tab-Ex industrial logo in  upsetting contrast to the copperplate). You still use the scarves to keep your ringlets in place  overnight. 

In Stewart Lee’s autobiographical book there’s an anecdote about finding an inflatable ALF (alien life form) at the gates of Kensington palace after Diana’s death, and the lead up to its discovery is the  funniest thing you have ever read. You laugh so much that your partner of twenty plus years texts  down to you, ‘Please be Quiet.’ He is due to read the book next and you apologise for disturbing him  but say of the bit, —‘you’ll love it, oh my god, so funny.’ 

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I thought you were crying.’ 

Prague was not your first International Conference. There was the Lickometer data you prepared for  The Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour at the old Medical School in Pecs. At the conference dinner, your previous supervisor noted that your forehead was flat like a Hungarian’s. 

You had not expected at all the sunbed tans and rara skirts and blonde, feathered manes of 1995  Pecs and these felt surprising and intriguing and in the evenings, gypsies criss-crossed backstreets  like paper dolls. They knew exactly their place and you remained winded the whole trip at the universal hatred of them. You covered your mouth, your hairlines were an exact match. In the discos, alone again, you acted as if you had never been wowed by the whiteness of teeth in the ultra-violet. There was cold cherry soup, but instead of enjoying the rich, cool depth, you planned to tell about it,  sacrificing living to the readiness of sharing the memory. Really and truly a problem. 

The last time you took Aunty Joan’s shopping over, there was a lass in the kitchen wearing a Cosi Call tabard, vaping something like Calpol who was able, even with the heavy instrument between her  teeth, to stir a cup-o-soup and open an Actimel. Texting with a free hand, she approached Joan to see if she wanted owt else apart from this lot on the plate. 

Joan stuck her tongue out. 

The carer did it back. 

Joan gave her the rods. 

They know this Joan better than you.

You nearly tell the lass, —My friend invented an adult nappy called Who Cares? 

Don’t be stupid. Nothing more careful than silence. Luckily, they ignore that you are trying to side with them and begin rituals of wiping, unwrapping, becoming wrapped, single use, used, multi-pack, unlimited rolls, boxed (sterile)(powdered). Rolling, endless. 

You google Roma + Tory Manifesto. 

You look at your aunty to whom you were a gift. 

She sticks her tongue out. 

You have reason to believe an ex-carer sold the charm bracelet which was the only thing she left to  you. With the earring gone, you dream you find her charm bracelet under a little bed in the coal house, and under that is a red velvet lined box with the exact space to house each charm however  intricate. One of them is a fan with embossed folding slats, which when opened makes the word Es pana. There is the gypsy caravan with wheels that go round, complete with static gypsy (she spruced  up the tiny crystal ball with pearlised nail varnish, she also superglued her own teeth back in, and  made paintbrushes for you with match sticks and her own thick black hair secured with cotton).  

There was the game of Newmarket where you were low on coppers so you bet the opal ring Joan had  bought for you. 

‘That cost fifty pound!’ she cried. 

‘It’s bad luck.’ 

‘Not if it’s your birth stone, you said.’ 

‘I don’t want it any more.’ 

She went to snatch it up, ‘You’ve had an abortion.’ 

You kicked over the pot of ones and twos, scraped both heels through the cards on the carpet, bending them on purpose. The Vimto went over. You went home. 

Your words still don’t flow from one another, they are too discrete, too closed off, standoffish, unsure.  Your care has been the same, fractured, untrue, or was only ever true briefly. About a month after losing the earring, you knew it was time. Up to this point, thinking about it gave you a plunging sensation and you wouldn’t allow this because you had no idea where it might end, it could be the frictionless descent to those levels you had not yet dreamed of.  So you say to the mirror, ‘it’s just a  thing, let go of things,’ and from close by you hear your daughter’s voice and she is saying ‘hey Mummy, look what I found.’

Previous publication: Charms, a work of creative non-fiction, was first published in ON CARE  (Eds Rebecca Jagoe & Sharon Kivland) by Ma Bibliothéque in 2020