Search results for "xmas "
Door
Monday, 25 December, 2006 - 14:27
So it was 5 years ago, 2.30pm on Christmas day. Andrew's breaths had slowed down - there were 45 seconds between the last, I don't know why I was counting. I waited a little, and there were no more. I didn't say anything to anyone else in the room, I just went outside for a cigarette. When I came back, everyone was standing outside the door. A nurse had been in to check him, and had suddenly asked everyone to step outside. Now there was a doctor in there. He came out a few minutes later, and told us he was very sorry. I was glad I hadn't been there to be told to leave.
I can't describe what happened when we went back in the room. Maybe in another 5 years? I remember afterwards that Kathryn called the smell the death-spray - something they spray in the room, that just smells of death, masking malodour with malodour. Different worlds, either side of the door.
What is strange is how you know when you leave finally that that is the end. You can't go back to the body. Once you leave, you have left forever. The body lies for days, and I suppose if you demanded it, you could go to the mortuary, wherever it is - the basement? - and be with it again. But really after you leave the room, 'it' is now an 'it', not 'him'. I held his hand, and of course it was still warm. They had closed his mouth, as well as sprayed him with death, but it had fallen slightly ajar. Ajar, like a door. I don't actually remember leaving the room - just being outside again - the sun had gone in, and the day was grey from then on.
Consumption
Sunday, 24 December, 2006 - 11:50
1997: just days before christmas, around about when I really started to cough blood, I was diagnosed with TB. My dad insisted I should come and stay with him, but a few minutes later, called back to say he'd realised, of course, I couldn't come to stay. I was supposed to be in isolation, and certainly not hanging around with kids.
Two weeks I had to stay away from people, and my house-mates had to get checked up before going away for the christmas break. And six months of anti-biotics and no alcohol. My mother and her husband came to stay with me, and we had a roast lamb christmas dinner in my student house.
It wasn't all bad - I was just trying to get a job as a writer with a small publishing company, and told them of my predicament. They said that having consumption was a good omen in a writer.
Swiss-army Knife
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 18:56
1983: At my grandmother's house, and big sprawling family - uncles, great-uncles, aunties, babies, cousins, great-grandmother, mother, a clan numberless. For christmas, I got a pop video annual with David Bowie and the Police in it, and a swiss-army knife from my dad, who had come early that year.
I have photos from that day, where I sit next to my great-uncle (he was a great uncle, he said 'well, I don't know...' and when he said it, it meant 'isn't the world an amazing place?'). He held a child in his arms, looking as though about to fall, a shy look on his face. I remember aluminium steamers full of sprouts and carrots, and steam everywhere.
The swiss-army knife lasted for years. It opened tins when I hitch-hiked to Frankfurt 7 years later, and sliced dirty cheese on trips with my friends to camp-sites in the wet English summer. The cork-screw broke quickly though, before I was supposed to use it. Sat in my fist like a knuckle-duster. It's gone now, like so much else from that day.
Christmas Melodica
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 13:21
I must have been eight or nine, when for christmas I got a melodica, a cross between a recorder and an accordion - the bellows replaced by a mouthpiece. It was a beautiful day, so sunny and bright, and crisp, walking down the road home from church, I was a pied-piper, blasting a cacophony from my new toy.
Back home, I competed with the radio in the room whose details are just so to me but must seem bizarre. A pram hung from the back of the door. Giant red rats stuffed with cotton wool and rags. Cloth on the walls, and through the window, the bare tree, winter-blasted but basking in the sun.
The moisture in my breath condensed inside the medolica, making it gurgle, and when I got carried away and blew the thing like a herald, it trickled back into my mouth. And my dad visited, as he did faithfully every christmas, and I blasted some noise in his ear and he seemed delighted.
An American Neighbour
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 00:11
Windsor, 1999: an American neighbour was a lover for a while. She heard me through the walls, I bought her flowers because I scared her daughter by banging on the door, and she thought I was 'Etony' because I wore a waistcoat with my suit.
For some reason I forget, I told her I disliked Robert Burns. For christmas, she gave me a book, inscribed it beautfully; it was an Everyman, one of my favourite bindings; it was 'The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns'. Later, of course, we fell out permanently.
I don't even know whether she'd ever been to Scotland. I could have deceived myself and seen her earnest American evangelism as irony. Funny the things that you think of at christmas.
Death on a cold day
Friday, 22 December, 2006 - 00:50
On very cold days, when your breath buffets away visibly, I still think of a car-park, outside a hospital, five years ago. Frost on the wind-screen first thing still takes me back to mornings five years ago, over christmas, going from hospital to house to house, brother, ward, step-mother, brother. Cold winter, hospitals, houses, disconnection, cancer, death, ward, breath. Dad. Never cried like I cried on christmas day, 2001.
I still can't write about it. Winter mornings, cold breath, disconnected hardness, death. Man aloneness. I remember most clearly getting out of a car, looking up at the hospital building, christmas morning, breath tossed away, little brother, silent, sun shining, carrying PG Wodehouse to read to a man in a white starched bed, wanting to be made of granite.
If I'm miserable and nasty to you at christmas, I'm sorry, I can't help it.
