Chapter 9: Thank You
Eileen Prosser said thank you eleven or twelve times in a session, and meant it every time, and had no idea she was doing it.
That is what thirty-eight years of nursing does.
It puts the word in the mouth the way a metronome puts a beat in a hand.
Thank you, love, when I turned the chair.
Thank you, when I put the cup where she could reach it.
Thank you, when I did nothing at all except stand still while she got her breath.
I counted those too. I counted everything in those years.
It was the only accounting I had.
Two hours a week. Call it eleven thank yous.
Call it five hundred and fifty a year.
In the house on the same days: none.
Not out of cruelty. Out of category.
You do not thank a chair for holding you up.
The Wednesday I am thinking of was the last one in October and it was raining hard.
I got there at five to two and hung my coat on the hook by the staff door and clipped the badge on, and Ruth was at the desk on the phone to somebody about a delivery that had not come.
There was a drugs trolley parked outside room nine with an agency nurse standing at it, writing.
I went past her and up the corridor with the slope in it and I did not look at what she was writing, and there is no reason why I should have, and I want that written plainly.
Room fourteen.
Eileen had the window open four inches in the rain because she said the room smelled of other people's soup.
I read her the local paper.
She wanted the deaths and the planning applications and nothing else.
There was a paragraph about a barn conversion being refused, and she was pleased about it in a way that suggested some history I never learned.
Then I did her hands.
I filled the little bowl at the basin, tested it on my wrist, and put a towel across her lap.
Her left hand went into the water and she closed her eyes.
Six minutes to soak.
You do not rush that part, and if you do, the nail splits and you have hurt a person who cannot easily tell you so.
While her hand was in the water she asked me what I used to do.
Nobody in three years had asked me that.
Not once, in a dining room, at a Christmas, at a wedding.
Nobody in that family had ever asked me what I used to do.
I said I had been a sportswoman.
She said, Which one, and I said judo, and she said, Any good?
And I said, I was second in the country.
Then I took her hand out of the water and dried it finger by finger, and neither of us said anything for about a minute.
She said, Second in the country.
She said it the way you would read a road sign out loud, checking it.
Then she said, Well.
Somebody had to be first, and it wasn't a better woman, it was a different day.
I cut her nails in three bites each, corners last, holding the hand from underneath so it took its own weight.
There is a thing you feel doing that, and I have never had a good word for it.
Her hand was ninety-one years old and it weighed almost nothing and it was completely relaxed on my palm.
A hand only does that when the person has decided about you.
In ten years of competition I put my hands on about four hundred people and not one of them relaxed.
That is the entire discipline: nobody relaxes.
I had gone twelve years without touching anybody, and then I found out that this counted as touching, and that it had been available the whole time.
I did both hands. It took thirty-five minutes.
Then I took her down to the porch to look at the car park in the rain, and she would not have the blanket, and we sat there until three minutes to four.
She said thank you when I put the brake on.
She said thank you when I turned the chair so the rain was not on her face.
She said, Same time next week, love, which is not a thank you but did the same job.
I put my coat on at four. Ruth was still on the telephone about the delivery.
Stevie was asleep in his car in the corner of the car park with a jacket over the window.
I stood under the porch for a moment before I went out into the rain, and I did something I had not done in a long time, which was nothing at all.
No exits, no distances, no counting.
Then Damon's car came round the corner of the wall with its lights on.