The charms from my new handbag jangle bright and inappropriately as I desperately search for the small rosy bottle that I know is in there somewhere. Warm tears spill down my unmade Sunday-morning face as Greg gently takes the bag from my lap and places it on his. He doesn't ask me what I'm looking for: he understands. A moment later, he finds it. This one? he asks, and I nod and take it and clutch it tight as he starts the engine. I knew this had been coming. To leave so unprepared is inexcusable. We curve down the street and towards the motorway, beginning the familiar pilgrimage to the nursing home. I know we won't make it in time, and it is this knowledge that harrows me now. She had been there at my first moment, as I had inhaled my first breath of this world, and now, as she is probably exhaling for the last time, here I am worrying that my nails aren't painted at look too shabby even for a Sunday-morning.
I was born to a theatre technician and battered wife on a windy March morning, much to the disgust of my grandmother - Nan, as I always called her - who openly disapproved that her daughter had chosen to live in martyrdom under my father's reign. Nan's first comments about me had been typically bitter: Oh. She's not as pretty as Kelly, followed by Danielle? What's that, an anagram of Linda and Len? Kelly, my older and prettier sister, had shared Nan's monstrous disapproval of me, asking my mother if all babies were born with a square head; from her comment was born the nickname 'Frankie,' a name as stubborn as the stains on my Nan's white furry rug that no amount of scrubbing could shift. I was born eight years after Kelly, but those eight years could have easily been a century or an ocean. I was essentially an only child. When my mother returned to work, typing invoices on a clipperty typewriter, I was left in the care of my Nan. Her pink bungalow, with pink curtains and carpets, rosy wallpaper and a salmon sofa felt like home to me. Everything was pink apart from the tea-stained rug that looked like the moon if I scrunched my eyes.
Mostly, I felt alone growing up. Years after the midnight escape and the battered wives hostel, I'd devise ways of melting the loneliness at home in our flat. When I wasn't pressing my forehead to the cold glass of the kitchen window, desperately looking down at 'the kids off the estate' happily chasing each other around while their mothers smoked on the red-brick balcony below, I would sit on my bed, delicately cutting out girls from my sister's magazines and catalogues. I'd pick ones like me - brown and with curly hair, although they had rosy cheeks and content expressions and new, pressed clothes - and I'd stick them in a scrapbook and give them names and they'd be my sisters. I used to love to cut things up. Stuffed under my bed were tens of Tesco bags overflowing with centimeter squares of confetti; my thumb and forefinger always marked and blistered from the repeated use of the scissors. My first brush with self-harm. And then there were my imaginary friends who were very real to me; Dennis was an old soldier who I'd talk to on the phone, and there was Simone and Nicole and their brother Stephen. They were French.
I don't paint them, my nails. The heaviness engulfing my body has left me feeling anaesthetised, my limbs tingly and numb and incapable of moving. I'm transfixed on the image of her lying there, just as I'd left her two days before. Did she know what was happening? I silently try to organise my thoughts. Arrangements will need to be made. My hand is clammy around the varnish bottle and I want to ask Greg to turn the heating down but my jaw is fixed shut; I can barely breathe, so speaking is unthinkable at this moment. Nan's nails were always painted. Her bedside table in the pink flat had overflowed with varnishes and hand lotions - my favourite had been a red, waxy cream in a flat cylindrical box that smelled of sweet bubblegum. At bedtime, she'd rub it into my cuticles and dim the lights before whispering Goodnight, God bless. I am shocked to suddenly realise that the reason I'd ended up working in a nail bar was so obviously because of her, a fact that had escaped me until this very moment.
We approach our junction and just ahead, a symphony of starlings pirouette above us. Their movement reminds me of a bow gently gliding across the strings of a violin, a silent requiem of brush-strokes creating something beautiful. I've never liked birds, ever since that incident with a peacock at the Botanical Gardens, but this - this is heavenly. The tidal change between dark and light against the grey sky as the tiny creatures search for a better place is like a harmonious change of heart. Like an angry grandmother finding the beauty within a child and becoming her guardian angel. Nan would have loved to see this. Maybe she can, I think.
I have never seen a dead body before now. My stomach tumbles with guilt for referring to her as a body; she was and will always be so much more than that. As I step into the darkened room, I expect to feel a presence. Her spirit or something. But I'm greeted by a thick and silent emptiness. She is in her bed, snuggled under her broderie anglaise blanket that she had only ever used for best until she had been forced into the home.I feel a fire rise from deep inside my belly and up into my throat, lodging itself in my clenched jaws. Tears bulle down my face once again. I move closer, past all the faded photographs that my aunt had decorated the walls with, to remind her. In reality, we were all strangers and had been for a long time. How confusing must it have been for Nan to feel stared at daily by all those unknown faces, visited by relatives whose names had trickled from her mind years ago, taking any traces of memory. The only person she remembered was my Granddad who had slipped away some twenty years ago. She would sometimes mention him, asking if he'd had his supper, and was he back from Burma? Nobody had had the heart to remind her that they had divorced a long time before he'd passed. I straighten the lapels of her dressing gown, smoothing over her shoulders and delicately dusting down her arms, the soft fabric a comfort to us both. Beside her is a black and white picture of her and Granddad sat on a gate outside their old house, he in his flat fronted trousers and signature white vest and her long legs delicately folded while the smoke from the pipe she held danced across the rollers in her hair. Although I never knew her then, this is how I'll remember her. That was who she was inside, not like this, a beautiful but empty shell. I stroke her grey forehead. Her eyes are ever-so gently closed and her skin is more smooth than I have ever seen it. The midday sun glows gently behind the closed curtains, softly illuminating a photo of me aged about three, a green telephone receiver perched between my ear and shoulder, with the wire, as curly as my hair, wrapped around my tiny fingers. Love you, Nan, I whisper, silently praying that she might hear me from wherever she is. As I reach towards her cold hands, I smile with a warm realisation. What am I gonna do with you? I sob, perching myself next to her fragile, weightless body. As soon as I unscrew the bottle, the sharp, tangy musk hums through the air like a familiar ghost. Carefully, I begin to coat each of her perfectly ridged fingernails with rosy polish; to allow her to leave so unprepared would be inexcusable. And when I am done, I stay close to her in the dark and paint mine too.
Although this is a fictional piece of writing that was written in 2010 for my creative writing module at university, many of the details are true.
Thank you for reading,
Goodnight, God bless x
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