Book Of Wild Hours

Thursday 1 June 2023

The Last Time Ever

Six Months Since My Friend Died And Left Me His Bird.

Nearly exactly half a year. From Christmas Eve (when he died…and I spoke to him right before he went, between par-boiling the potatoes and putting them on to roast) to now, to leafy, summery June. It turns slowly, imperceptibly, but the wheel never stops inching forwards. I think it’s forwards although there is the sense of spiralling. Time ticking us ever onwards…moving, it sometimes feels, away from that person.

Three weeks before he passed, on a November afternoon I drove the six miles from my home to his. He was moving to a smaller flat in the same town, and I was to care for his pet bird during the move. We visited the new flat, in the same road as the house I grew up in, and where he had also worked and lived as a young man.

It was a nicer flat, he reconed. A more homely place to make a fresh start. A footpath ran along the edge of the various blocks, sheltered by lofty trees. We cast our minds forward to how leafy and green the summer would be here, and I cast mine back to walking there with my mum (also in the Heavenworlds now) and tiny son there 30 years ago, her blowing dandelion fairies for him, the verge was rich with wild grasses, under the verdant canopy of the old oaks and beech. There’s a spiral for you, that unexpected fleeting glimpse back at the fabric of my universe, those same threads weaving under and around it all.

On our return from visiting the new place, we climbed the internal steps in his block, eight flights up. He’d been ill for a long time, so the climb was slow and punctuated with stops. The cold concrete floor and walls, the smell of the other inhabitants’ lives…cigarettes and fabric conditioner and cooking. The broken lift was one of the reasons he’d had to leave. I gave thanks for my own health and fitness. Once indoors, he put the kettle on and I set about taking some photographs of the epic views from his place across the Sussex downs to the south, Ashdown Forest and the Weald to the north east.

If you’re nearly 60 and you haven’t moved far, everywhere you look is a story from the past and this view was thick with them.

He sat on his kitchen stool with his coffee as I snapped away at the distant autumnal downland in the fiery late afternoon sky. I could see my own town, its windmill and water tower miniatures from this far away, their white paint glowing peachy pink in the low sun. The November sky put on a spectacular show for our last afternoon there, our last hour together. (how could I not have guessed it was the last?) operatic greys and golds folding silken smoke of ethereal heavenly vistas of Byzantine wonder lighting up the windows in the town below like lighters (or phones nowadays) at a concert of the heavenly choir.

“…the shadow covers me, the sky above a blaze…” and the tears will dry on their own.

From my spot at the lounge window I swung the camera round, looking through the doorway into the kitchen…he knew what was coming and flipped the obligatory bird as I clicked.

The last time.

(Did I know? Did some part of me know? I feel like now it did, but memories change every time we get them out of the box because that’s how our neurology works. We add to them with our thoughts…we can’t help it. Each one is a new version. It’s why I don’t look back too often, I want to preserve the essence. It’s why I love photographs, I suppose. You can rely on their immutability)

I left his flat with the actual bird (Garth) in his cage, the doors of which were stuck down with Micropore because Garth is an escapologist, and my scarf over the whole thing for the journey. I put the seat belt round the cage, and looked out of my sunroof to the top floor flat where he was waving goodbye. A familiar waving figure in his black woolly hat. I paused to wave…the final wave to him from this place where he’d lived for so long. It was also the last ever time that he would wave me goodbye.

You can see that flat from miles away. When I walk on the downs, or in the woods near my home, I catch a glimpse of it, a little Lego block from so far away, sitting among the buildings of the town, framed by the surrounding countryside, the forest, the distant weald, the horizon, the sky. It looks grey since his passing, as though swathed in a mist, it blends back into the scenery, empty of him now.

How strange that buildings remain and people die, I think to myself. Death makes me think things like that, the sheer, unscalable mystery of it.

For the first few months, and even still, I find myself having to repeat, over and over out loud, that he is actually dead, because I still can’t quite believe it. Which is hilarious in a way because he was so damned ill. But still.

We were friends a long time and we had our ups and downs and of course death lifts the lid on things you didn’t know about a person. But it also wipes all that earthly stuff away. The vibration of this place is so slow and heavy and now he is in a place of light, he tells me.

And I get it. All the tiresome ins and outs of our lives down here fade away into nothing in time, and only the essence remains. The love.

Transitions

A downland walk in late winter. The hope of spring is in the air up here. There will still be freezing cold nights, and leaden, frozen days. There will still be days when we give thanks for a few minutes extra daylight, whilst aching for the sun's warmth to increase, and the land to soften out of cool brown to vibrant golden green.

Ditchling Beacon, February.

First time up on the downs since my dear friend passed. I can see the incongruous and universally loathed block of flats he called home from all the way up here. Even six or seven miles don't diminish its impact. But what a view there was of this from his place, the broad sweep of downland from just past Ditchling Beacon to Cissbury...or was it Chanctonbury...and beyond.

Its not the February Friday afternoon splendour up here that I had imagined when I downed tools and decided to head up to the beacon with the dog. Some of these late winter, very early spring late afternoons offer a low golden sun that lends an ethereal tone to the green-ness of the downland grass. This one, not so much. Half-way up I realised that my idea to travel light with just camera, phone, gilet and dog was not a great one. For a start, I didn't have the parking fare, and I was under-dressed for the biting winds...will I ever grow up and put my coat on?

But I had my phone, and so managed, with a boring amount of faff, to pay, and I had my hat, so we could proceed.

There was a nice hazy sun over the sea that I couldn't see, and some light blue sky peeping through. Northwards, the sky and landscape were a uniform leaden grey. Haywards Heath Friday afternoon. In the not so distant past I would have been whipping up lattes and milkshakes in the high street cafe. Even more distant past, I would have been working in the hospital just up the road. Even further back, we would have been tearing around on the motorbike, or by the fire of the pub with a red wine, rolling a cigarette to smoke in the chilly garden.

That fireplace in the pub went a few years ago now. And the company we kept, two or three of those chaps are now six feet under. The wine, a Tempranillo, so warming and fulsome, also a thing of my past. How quickly does the present become the past, and then the long past, where subtle and not so subtle changes render places no longer what they were. Now they live on in my head alone.

And over at the grey slab, empty rooms. Usually I would text from up here, and WhatsApp a picture, and he might send me one back, of the view from where he was. The first year of grief is all about firsts, I guess. The building stares back through my lens with sightless eyes impervious to the biting wind and the little person looking at it as if from many years ago.

A visit to a dead friend, and the woods

Standing in the winter woods, away from the everyday rush of life, is like a moment out of time, solitary, cold and silent, like the hour I just spent with the body of my friend before I came here.

I drove into town after the early morning rush and parked outside the funeral directors. It must be the last bastion of free and easy parking in town, but you've got to lose a loved one to qualify. I lugged my rucksack, heavy with two DSLRs and a lens the weight of a newborn out of the passenger seat; collectively they're worth more than the car, which isn't much, but I can't leave them. I looked up at the tower block along the road, and see his budgie's rope perch still hanging from the lounge window catch of the eighth floor flat my friend occupied for the past 17 years.

How sadly ironic that he was back in this part of town again, a mere three weeks after leaving the flat and the old budgie rope, for a new place the other side of the railway line, close to these woods.

A smaller, more friendly block to call home, from which he had imagined a new and happier life. A life that included walks, in these woods.

Everyone is kind, hushed and respectful of my status as a Bereaved Person. Everything is spotless, and smells fresh, a front office, and a slightly concealed back area with a dining table and chairs not as incongruous as they sound, and tasteful mirrors and pictures and several closed doors at the end of small recesses and corridors. One of the mirrors reflects the road outside seen through a small gap. I see people walking past in the sunshine, and cars. This road was always busy, I remember the constant whoosh of traffic regularly peppered with sirens when I used to visit him at the flat.

I can watch the outside world carrying on it's business from in here, but no-one can see me. I am an invisible 58-year-old married mother of five and grandmother of four, waiting to go and see her friend's body. Tears threaten to spill over and I hide in the loo for a quick, intense cry, as involuntary as laughter. It moves through me like a rain shower across the downs, so compose myself and back at the dining table, the funeral director is opening a door.

It's a small blue room with two dining chairs, and a sideboard upon which are some china things, a box of tissues and a candle, flickering. There's a big vase on the floor with some flowers, dried I think, oh, and a coffin on a plinth covered in blue velvet trimmed with gold. Inside the coffin is lined in a calm sea of white satin which parts slightly to reveal the head and chest, hands gently crossed over the lower abdomen. It's as though he's been taken by death who is now lending part of him back, peeping coyly through the satin veil, for me to glimpse one last time. Which of course is exactly what is happening.

I cry for some time, and we have a laugh too, because we were like that. I apologise profusely and tearfully for not realising how close to death he was, and for not being a good friend during those times we all have when selfishness consumes us. He looks OK, better even than lately. They didn't get him quite right, but near enough.

After a while, half an hour maybe, I hear someone outside. At that moment I am back to sobbing and thanking him for his friendship, and I feel more than hear the person recede, leaving me to it. There is silence again, or maybe the muffled sound of the traffic...I listen for the sounds of life outside whilst I'm death's vast and silent presence. How can I cram all the decades in to this one goodbye? He knew all my weak points, my difficult little corners and what it meant when I was unable to speak. I could call him anytime day or night, home or hospital, even intensive care once, and he'd answer. How will I cope with radio silence now forever more?

In that instant he's in the room, slouching in the spare chair by the door. He's twenty years younger, left ankle resting on right knee, Rizla laid open and waiting for his ministrations on the Jeans of his thigh. He's pleased that I came to see him, and is laughing at my worry that we wouldn't be in contact. He first came in like that five days after his passing, looking so much younger, not the tiny old man that illness had made him. After that, he was around most times I thought of him.

Three-quarters of an hour have passed. I could stay here all day it's so peaceful and self-indulgent and a bit like therapy, because it's all about me...not him...he's dead. But also it's really kind of draining being around a body. Various layers of aura still cling to the departed, and pull upon the aura of the living as they are drawn steadily like smoke from the fireplace up and away from the hearth. Surrounding the departed one with flowers and candles provides the energy for this transition of the subtler bodies, but suddenly it was time to go.

One of the employees makes me a cup of tea as I return to the dining table, that symbol of normal, everyday living, whilst I stare directly at the closed door behind which is the silent corpse in his coffin. Another nice fellow apologises for leaving me alone to drink my tea and sits to keep me company, with chit-chat. I respond because he is being so kind but really I just want to be alone with my tea, and the closed door, and my phone. We're never really alone, with a phone are we? Unless it's that one number. That one that texted every single day since the dawn of time, just to say good morning. And never will again.