Slow Train to Strasbourg...

January. We are sitting on once-plush, deep pomegrate seats with bouncy, trampoline springs. They are tatty, a bit threadbare.

Knees press against the under-table heater blowing waterbottle warmth into a compartment where we sit, still thawing out, ruddy cheeks raw, numb noses running.

Outside, crusted, frosted furrowed fields; trees naked but for the thick, lush tangled balls of mistletoe.

We are cut off in here. It's snug, a bit oppressive if you're not used to it. There are five of us and outside, on the other side of the door, people walk to and fro on the long narrow corridor that snakes through the train.

It feels as though there ought to be conversation, but instead the silence grows from awkward to companiable. And on occasions when eyes meet, there are fleeting smiles, nods of acknowledgement, that we are in for these five hours together.

As the train leans, twists and meanders, first one of us, then the other is blinded by the low-slung setting setting sun, flinking and flashing through the spidery arms of the trees, hiding behind distant buildings and flaring again. Now-you-see-it-now-you-don't at 120kph.

The snow is thick on the ground - it would go 'crump' under foot if you walked on it. Three days of sub-zero temperatures keep it here, a kind of suspended animation. There is no melt. There is more to come.

Chimneys smoke and as we sway through quiet villages, busy towns, alongside lonely farmsteads, people going about their business give us a passing glance. They are thick-wadded dumplings in bobble hats under sharp icy skies, under icicle clouds. Their hot breath blows sharp and is snatched away.

As the light dims, house lights go on..and we can glimpse other people's lives: a TV, a woman washing up, a man bent over his desk upstairs, children playing, a girl at a piano..

Hard earth, harder sky...and us in between. And the pylons move and sway and stride away, sweeping left to right.

The goods yards are postcard pretty. On pilings and girders the rust glitters a burnished bronze. Trucks, sheds, metal, piles of wood...all transformed.

We see few livestock but in one field, two Shetland ponies with thick, russet shagpile coats, wait out the winter by a pile of hay.

As the sun dips our shadows play kiss-catch, mine sweeps across my neighbour's seat..and my neighbour's neighbour.

The slow train. Time stretches, uncurls and expands, and we stretch with it, fill the space, fuggy in the waterbottle warmth. Detached from everything and everyone.

One of my neighbours nods over her book, her hand protectively resting on her rucksack. Her neighbour is at work;  he has paperwork on his knees and gazes with intensity at his precariously-balanced laptop. The couple to my right share a packed lunch: baguettes, cheeses, meats and red wine in plastic cups.

A younger man, perhaps only a teenager, is vulnerably dead to the world, his cheek resting against the corridor window, his coat a pillow, his mouth open. Dark, curly hair flopping over one closed eye.

We are above the land now, on a ridge looking down over woodland, lakes, streams. A grey heron is priesting in the reeds, a buzzard is great-winged, soaring above. Another one ..this time in a treetop, its back golden, catching the last faint rays of the sun. Rabbits bounce bob-tailed through stubbly fields and a charm of goldfinches head speedily to roost: flap flap flap dip, flap flap flap dip. Unmistakeable.

Forests look mystical, misty, an illusion perhaps, but steam curls above them - are they breathing?

Flatlands, marshlands; dangerous, tempting frozen ponds; a snow-crusted war memorial, a factory belching white steam. Lines of cars, glimpses of tired faces at the wheel; headlights, streetlights, traffic lights//

All this and more Thomas - and we sway and doze and sway and doze. For a moment, not quite asleep, not quite awake, I feel you beside me, bouncing on the springy seats. Of all things you loved a journey. What lay at the end could take care of itself.

Heaven, for you, I think, might be a slow train like this.

Perhaps I was in a doze when the sun set. The light changes from silver to gold to pink to purple....

Darkness comes quickly...and the landscape rushes blackly against a blacker sky.

Now, in the windows, we are reflected back at ourselves....


                                                              nicola-furbisher.blogspot.com

                                                                                 

Bedside Manners...

It is a small gesture...yet it carries all the love and compassion in the world.
A hand placed gently on a shoulder...and left there. A slight movement to and fro as a mother might make to comfort a child.

Few words are said. A quiet, murmured 'Je sais, je sais' (I know, I know)'

Tears roll silently down the face of the woman receiving the gentle words. The pain is all-consuming today. The hopelessness and loneliness too. 

She sits in a metal chair by her bed, attached to a drip. Her feet are bare and her toes are blue. The table at her bedside has no cards or flowers or fruit, no photographs, no books or magazines; just a jug of water.

She has no visitors. The staff told us this, and we know it too, because last week, in a moment of clarity, she told of a dead daughter, a dead husband, dead friends.

'All gone' she said. And the hugeness of her loneliness and her emptiness and her sadness made it difficult to know what to say. But we held her hand, and talked of her garden and of springtime and of birds and sunshine and told her we would see her next week.

The staff here in this busy Brussels hospital are attentive and kind but swift of foot and quick to move on. They care..but don't have the time to spend too much time doing it. 

So others are stepping in to fill the void. A group of volunteers - the man with her, Arnaud, is one of them - gather at the hospital three times a week, organising themselves into a rota.

They push a trolley round the geriatric wards, offering tea, coffee, the occasional little cake when supplies and funds allow. Above all they offer the single most glorious gift they have within their power to bestow. Human kindness.

The woman Arnaud tends to has not opened her eyes today, she makes no effort to wipe away the tears that have settled into the wrinkles of her thin, gaunt, shadowed face. But at his presence there is a change in her demeanour, a relaxing. Her head tilts slightly towards his hand and it's clear she knows he is there.

Around them is the bustle of a hospital ward at visiting time: nurses, orderlies, daughters, sons, grandchildren, illicit mobile phone chatter.

Yet there seems a bubble separating this man and this old woman from the rest of the world. A peacefulness. We leave them there, together. 

'We do what we can, we can only do what we can...if we can make just a little difference....' he says later. 

 In the next room we find a patient roundly berating a cleaner doing the rounds with one of those big circular sweeping floor polishers. She's cross because she can't hear the TV. The cleaner rolls her eyes at us and carries on regardless.

The woman's mood changes as does the subject of her ranting, when she finds out I'm British.

'Why you have Camilla?' she says. 'Why? You are fools to let her into your royal family. Camilla is bonkers...I Do. Not. Like. Her! Nobody like her! Why you British like her?' 

She speaks in carefully enunciated but staccatoed English. 'Bonkers! Bonkers! She bonkers, you English bonkers to let her in!'  and then she twirls each index finger at her temple. 'Bonkers!' She snorts and sniggers and gives such a stonking belly laugh that we have to readjust her oxygen mask.

 She pauses a moment, reflects.

'...But Kate is sweet, I think...' and an afterthought, 'will it be a girl or a boy?'

She sits bolt upright, demurely accepting a cup of cafe noir, pressing her lips to the hot liquid.

A Parisian unwillingly in Belgium. She came 53 years ago to be with her now-dead husband but hates the place. Any attempt to put the city in a positive light results in a dismissive wave of the hand and a sound that could only come from a Parisian...a kind of scornful 'pffffh'.

So we turn the conversation to the city she describes as 'the greatest and most beautiful in the world' and her eyes shine as she speaks of Montmartre, the Champs Elysees, her memories of the Eiffel tower, of a childhood heady with sunshine and joy. 

Then she adjusts her flannelette nightie and fingers the ruffled neckline. 
The ward is oppressively, fuggily hot. The world outside seems a long way away.

'I know where Diana died, I go to the bridge and I remember her,' she says, lowering her voice, gesturing that I move closer to her. 'I think they kill her,' she hisses conspiratorially.
She takes another gasp of oxygen and her chest rises high and falls.

In the bed next to her, a woman lies hollow cheeked, open-mouthed, eyes wide but seemingly unaware. She groans, coughs sharply, spittle flying from her mouth.

Her arms are heavily bruised, her bare, skinny legs protrude from the sheets. One of the volunteers, Adilah, is with her. She gently adjusts the blankets and wipes the moisture from her cheeks. She takes her hand, more bone than skin and gently rubs it between her palms.

The rest of us move on and find Marlene sitting in a chair next to her bed. It's her birthday, her 92nd. She's here because she had a fall at home and has a pot on her arm and leg. She's fretting about who will do the gardening and how she will manage when she gets home.

 She points at the ceiling when she talks about her long-dead husband and we celebrate her birthday with a cup of tea and a petite Madeleine in a plastic wrapper.

'I lived through two world wars,' she says, in a voice that suggests  'so think on!' And we do. 

And the hours pass and the team moves from room to room, ward to ward, chatting, consoling, supporting, and it is an honour and a privilege to be with them.

At the far end of the last ward is a woman so tiny and dainty she is almost doll-like. The small hospital bed seems huge against her.

She is reclined, just so, on top of the blankets, in a floral-patterned, quilted dressing gown fastened up to the neck. She has purple fluffy slippers on her neatly placed feet and her hands are carefully folded across her middle.

She might appear serene and calm - but her eyes give her away. They are filled with anxiety and something else...hope. She looks constantly to the window, as if thinking she might see something, or someone, important there.

Then, as we approach the bed, she sees me and everything changes. She smiles with what seems to be relief - a huge, delightful gummy smile.

'My daughter, my daughter, I was so scared you would not come. I was so scared...' And she repeats this. 'so scared so scared so scared..you have comeyouhavecome...at last...'

And I don't contradict her and I sit on the bed with her and hold her hand. And she talks and talks and rambles and chatters and I cannot understand all she says...but she grips my hand with such strength and her eyes shine.

With Arnaud's guidance I lift her to a sitting position, gently feed her juice through a cup with a spout, and hold her paper-thin hand as she speaks to the daughter who is not here, through me.

It is hard to leave her and to release the iron-like grasp on my hand, but I do, gently, and tell her I will be back to see her again.

As we leave I look back at her, perhaps to wave. But it's clear I am forgotten. Her gaze has shifted, hopefully, longingly, to the window once more.

xxx 

* For more information on the hospital volunteering programme and other ways to volunteer visit www.servethecity.be.
 "A movement of volunteers serving cities in practical ways & inspiring people to be givers in this world. We believe that many people doing small things together can make a big difference in our world"

Ice and Fire....

Not sure how I ended up here. It wasn't the plan when I set off today.

Alone in a heaving restaurant in Strasbourg in February.

It was partly the cold: minus 10 and dropping - a walk in that kind of cold can only last so long before it becomes an endurance test.

And partly something else. A thought that needed....that needed, well, thought. Something that struck me in the middle of a frost-bitten park where early-arrival storks clattered beaks in noisy mating rituals and we slipped and slid on paths of sheer ice under a low, blinding sun.

A thought that shocked me into stillness.

They found me a table, squeezed me in, between a greying man in a suit reading a French-language newspaper and a couple in love, feeding each other spaghetti.

It is noisy and busy and people are devouring jugs of wine, steaming plates of choucroute, baeckeoffe, shining steaks, perspex bowls greasy with salted frites.

They have their coats and bobble hats and scarves on as they tumble inside, into the heat of the restaurant, into sanctuary from the kind of weather outside that eats you up, that turns you inside out, that keeps your eyes on the pavement so you can keep your nose in your coat. The kind of bitter that scratches your face, hunkers you down, the kind of cold you can't imagine on a summer July day.

In here we turn ruddy-cheeked.

There are old ladies gesticulating wildly across the table - one has her hair in plaited pigtails wound over the top of her head. There are business meetings, business cards exchanged, ipads and Macbooks showing flow charts and Excel sheets, tourists chaotic with shopping bags and cameras.

Conversations rise and fall, the kitchen clatters, the waiters are a smart, efficient blur of black and white. There is a small kerfuffle at the next table as one of the young lovers knocks over his glass of red in his eagerness to reach out and touch the face of his girlfriend.

 The strong, hot, milky, foaming coffee is bitter.

Any place would have done...a place with a table to write on. Because sometimes the urge is unbearable, unstoppable like the foam-tipped waves that suck and surge around the sheer cliffs at Flamborough.

I chose your coffin.

That was my thought in the park. That came out of nowhere and hit the solar plexus like a boxer's right hook.

 I want to say it out loud. Perhaps to stop the world in its tracks, perhaps because it carries on regardless.

Why now? Why think of it now? Cursed mind with its own secret ponderings throwing things up to spoil the day.

I chose your coffin.

The black-suited, black-tied, funeral director; stiffly formal, trying to be informal, with his click-shut folder, A4 pages stuffed into plastic holders, each page a different option, a colour, a finish, handles and whatnot.

Light, dark, elaborate, plain, fancy-handled, varnished; page upon page upon page upon page, getting grander and grander, more elaborate. And he carefully, gently, lifts and turns, lifts and turns, each time smoothing down the plastic with a sweep of his hand, not meeting my eye..noting the descriptions, the finish, as if we're choosing a bookcase.

Until I put out my own hand and I said 'Stop. Please'. And I turned the pages back, right back, to the first one. To the plainest simplest one, made of light oak - or was it beech? 'That one' I said.

Yes, that one. The box that will carry my dead child on his final journey. Decision made. How simply done. How easy I must have made it for that kind, awkward man. No weeping, no wailing, no tearing of hair or gnashing of teeth. Just 'That one'.

I remember the thought process. You were a child; a child of simple pleasures, a child of light and joy and the very thought of....of what? Of you being encased in heavy, swathed grandeur? Yes, that's it. It didn't fit. It wasn't you, I thought.

And we moved on.

I see the moment in the park for what it is. An aftershock. Unexpected. Landed from nowhere. One of the 'waves' that those who are paid to know these things tell you about.

They come and they come, these waves...sometimes gentle, joyous ripples of memory in a sparkling sea, sometimes seismic spume-tipped breakers that wash you away, and there is nothing to be done but let them carry you to where they will...to ditch you on a shore where you emerge battered, storm-tossed, but alive...alive!...and able, somehow, to carry on.

Because that's what happens....it's not bravery....or strength...it's just what we're genetically programmed to do, to crack on.

So I don't do what I want to do which is to sweep away the tray, the coffee cup, the teaspoon, sugar, the silly little wrapped-up lump of nougat they always put on the saucer; to sweep away the steak and chips of the fella next to me, sweep away his wine and the table and the spaghetti and the sucking, spooning lovers and crawl under the table and weep and weep.

I don't do that. And it passes as I watch people enjoying their lunch. Wondering, as I always do, what waves  may engulf them, too, from time to time.

Five years and this still happens. Not as much, not half as much, but it does.

And inevitably, one wave brings another, brings another. And when the waiter brings the bill I'm surprised because I'm splashing with you in the fountains at Alnwick Castle gardens, walking the desolate beaches at Bamburgh, staggering and stepping back to keep our balance, to hold you up, when the tide briefly catches up with us and the water covers our shoes, marching in time, like soldiers, back to the cottage over windswept dunes, drizzle in our hair, fingers numb with cold.

Watching your Mary Poppins DVD; taking that last photo, us together, holding the phone away towards us in my right hand, the image blurry as a result; me all red nose and heavy cold, you with your rosy plump cheeks and Dr Who tee-shirt.

The picture is still on my mobile phone and I fumble for it and my heart lurches at it. So I write and write and it is as if steam pours from the pen.

Ice and fire made up your last day: a bitter, bitter February and you, consumed by the crackling, spitting logs in the open fire of Alnwick's Barter Books, rosy cheeks redder and redder. You watched in wonder.

Ice and fire. Ice and fire. Our last day together. And a few days later I chose your coffin.

Could I ever visit that place again? That place of vast, sweeping beaches, a great castle silhouetted against a wide sky, a place that is more myth, legend, to me now.

The dunes where I made calls to tell desperate faraway friends as the wind snatched my voice away. The dunes, the sand, the sea, the sky, over and over.

I chose your coffin.

There is wine and cheese and the man at the table next to me has left. My coffee was finished long ago and the waiter hovers, anxious to clear the way. All the languages of the world are here. People are cheery, busy, moving on, living.

I close my notebook, pay up.

Outside..and the sun has dipped lower and the freezing air whips our breath away in great foggy gasps of steam.

At the tram stop there is a noise from the skies, a huge skein of geese, flying high in a v shape, then another and another.

Their calls are clear, desolate, telling of far off places, of wild tundras.

They foretell longer, warmer days..they foretell spring.

xxxxx

Putting a Sock in it...

One of the best things I never did was go to Diana's funeral.

Quite extraordinary when you think about it. Imagine, a front row seat (kind of ) at one of the biggest events the world has ever seen..and I said no.

And people look at me with incredulity when I tell them. When I say that, instead, you and I sat at home, watching it on TV, and you took off your sock during the minute's silence and put it in your mouth. As if you knew there was no way you could keep quiet without it.

You were five then - though not five, not really. Still a baby who needed feeding, changing, pushing about in a push chair, prone to temper tantrums...and 5am waking.

I remember us in the front room of our little home, me on the floor, nose pretty much pressed to the TV, you on the couch in the sunshine surrounded by toys (you didn't move about much then - I could vac the whole house and mow the lawn and you'd still be there, an hour later, merrily beating up a playgym).

I remember sitting there and glancing at you as the Westminster Abbey choir reached its agonising, unbearable heart-rending crescendo. And you put one finger in your ear, shouted with what sounded like joy, and glugged from your juice cup. And as the world wept I knew, right then, that this would be one our most precious moments together.

A moment in time printed as if in tableau, as if painted, like a Leonardo fresco, on some deep part of the mind, but never losing colour, never losing light, no cracks appearing over long, interminable years without you.

The world fell silent and you put a sock in it. Worth all the tales I might have been able to tell about rubbing shoulders with the great and good, about being a player on this world stage... 

Why did I decline? Because I had been away from you without you for two weeks, because Diana's death meant I'd spent another weekend in the office, another weekend away from you and I needed you with me. Does that make sense?

Precious hours. 

I think I knew, you see. I think I always knew that we wouldn't have you forever. Don't tell me how I knew? I'm not even sure if I acknowledged it to myself. No doctor ever said your time on earth was limited. You were rarely ill, you were as strong as an ox..... 

But sometimes in the quiet of an early morning, I would lie in bed, waiting, listening.

 This is how it would go: first the thud as you negotiated yourself out of the bed and on to the floor, seconds of silence as you bottom-shuffled your way across the carpet and then the crash-bang-wallop as you started on your toy box. Emptying it all , picking out your favourite, and giving it hell for leather. 

This until you got bored. Then you'd fumble your way round the bedroom door, bottom shuffle along the hallway to the kitchen, dragging along your best toy to the washing machine and bang it around inside.

But sometimes, this didn't happen. You would sleep in and I would lie there thinking...not today Thomas, not today. And it never was. Until it was. 

Do you know how many times that happened? More than I can say. Do you know how many times I played over in my head while sitting at my desk, scenarios of how it might be...and what if I were far away? 

Do all parents carry such dark morbid thoughts with them or was it my subconscious preparing me for something it knew would come? 

I took so many videos of you, as other parents will do...but I took them thinking, I need to make sure I always have you....just in case. 

So when I was asked to cover the funeral, that we had tickets to get into the Abbey, I think they were surprised. I surprised myself to be honest. But I never regretted it, sacrificing the chance of pomp and circumstance, to watch you putting a sock in it..

xxx

Day Between Days...

Driftwood.
Six pieces. Grains of sand and salt crusted in the smooth grooves and crevices.

Found in the slush and mush of a seaweed tideline on a sloped beach of grey pebbles and shining silver sand, where oystercatchers divebombed black backed gulls and the sun crackled on the surface of the water - and we couldn't help but turn to it and close our eyes.

We got there by mud-sucking path that was drenched and saturated after days of rain, past curious scraggy cows with long highland horns, clumps of muck clinging to their bellies, past gorse that smelled of coconut if you crushed it in your palms.

It was a day between days, a day of casting off clothes, of cares; for gazing in happy awe at rock pipits courting in the crevices of the cliff face, at the winter-starved pipistrelle venturing from his sleepy hollow to catch a snack in the sun, at the flash of  a redshank's legs.

Driftwood. Drift. Drifting..

One piece is long, round and smooth like a relay runner's baton, another is broad and rectangular, worked and worked by the sea until it is all but hollow. A third is long hard and spiralled, as if someone has taken each end and twisted and twisted.

They smell of wet sand and sea and seaside air and, fleetingly, of woodsmoke, and I collect them and add them to the pebbles, shells and stones in the rucksack.


Around the cottage we have eagles and otters, shiny, chunky rocks and water, water everywhere.

There is a stove with a creel hauled above it where we dry the tea-towels; there's a supply of too-damp logs, a torn, raggedy patchwork quilt on the lumpy bed, a bath with a spider in it and chairs that sag and tip you out.

Our home squats on a peninsula and we wander from window to window constantly - spotting birds, watching the snowline drift on the mountains - and at night we watch the flashes from distant lighthouses. By day we have it to ourselves and at night it is blacker than black outside and we hunker down.

Today the hills across the Sound of Mull are dripping with grey, heavy, slung-low cloud and on this side of the cottage - the sea side - the wind whips the water and every ripple is an otter's slick back or shiny snout or a porpoise fin. Light flinking and flashing, playing tricks on the eyes.

On the loch-side of the cottage, in the little harbour near the front door, the water is millpond calm and in each passing moment, the tide slides away exposing oily, pulpy seaweed.

It's sheltered from the wind here and the long grasses springing from the deep muddy prints left by Highland cows are russet brown and dipping gently, heavy with raindrops...although the rain stopped long ago.

I brought you here once.

 I don't know what you made of it. We sat together on the rocks on a beaming blue day and watched porpoise, scores and scores of them, rolling and rolling in the blue. The sea glittered.

Then we had a snack of yoghurt, bananas and juice on a rug at the foot of Ben More and we rode on the Mull Little Railway. You chuckled as it clattered on the tracks, as if you couldn't believe your luck.

It is one of my happiest memories. That special week, all of us together....

Time moves differently here, more slowly.

Or perhaps we just notice more, second by second.

On the little pier near the cottage, the sea sucks, gloops and slurps.

Black-headed gulls hunt one last time before flying to roost. They lift on a bank of air, hover, spot something beneath the surface - and dip, settling briefly, before they paddle, paddle, paddle, feet pattering on the water, and up again.

A curlew lifts and makes his lonely, rippling call and a grey heron stalks the shallows. And as day turns to dusk the wind finally finds us and brings with it icy rain.

Driftwood. Found on one of the days between days, between the day you died and the day you were born.

A week of anniversaries this. Lifted, lifted by the soar of golden eagles in Glen More, by the otters and their rings of bright water, by the mother and cub swirling and twirling together near the shoreline - the little one swimming for the beach and leaping and bounding as if for the simple joy of living.

By the white-tailed sea eagle languidly coasting low over grey waters; by the bright eyes of fallow deer; by sheep-infested seashores.

By oysters collected on a desolate, deserted beach; by a hen harrier dipping and looping, pausing and swooping over hillocks and heather-strewn wilderness.

By wild winds, driving snow, bitter cold and, on that one day, by a gift of spring.

A week of anniversaries, of  memories of birth and death, of days before and days before that . Of a whole life lived and then lost.

And here, on our island sanctuary, the wind strengthens, the rain is hard against the window. A log drops down in the fire and the sea is a constant gentle roar.

And it is so very peaceful.

xxx