BREAD

BREAD

(Written not long after my last hospital admission: strange to look back on such times and heart warming to see how life has changed since then. By the way the house I mention here: it was a lovely annex that a dear friend let me stay in for some months. I just did not look after it or do anything to make it the lovely place it subsequently became.)

I went to the bread bin the other day for a roll to make a fried egg sandwich.

I was feeling greedy. It was late. My whisky was low in my glass and my desire to watch telly was ebbing away, as the need to relax and sleep, vanish into the dark, soft, night where, for a time I forget to think, had taken over my daytime fretting.

But first a crisp roll with a friend egg; slightly runny but only slightly, with butter that will melt and drip over my fingers and mayonnaise or not? I couldn’t make my mind up. Salt; a smattering of salt for taste.

In the back of my mind, I thought of my bulging stomach; my shortness of breath. I caught a glimpse of the corrosion of the salt crystals and the build up of the layers of cholesterol. I shut down that vision and switched on the hob; ignored the detritus of the previous days cooking and put the pan on to heat.

The kitchen is a cooker under the stairs with a sink besides it. I have banged nails into the underneath of the staircase for my pots and pans and pile up the empty drink bottles by the gap between the sink and the wall. It is not so much a kitchen as a kitchen in a cupboard.

For preparing my meals I use the porch. It has a table and a fridge freezer and a shelving unit where I keep my tins and spices.

The floor is a raggedy mess of torn underlay from the time when it used to have a carpet. It’s a bit messy; the accumulation of months of Sunday papers sit in a pile by the window. Jars that might be useful, sit on the table, next to the window sticker of an angel that I made for Molly when I was in hospital but never got round to giving her.

I keep my two sharp knives and my nice thick chopping board here. My brother bought them for me when I was being poor. He came up to sort out the bedding that he said I could no longer sleep under. He also came up to deal with the lack of pots and my refusal to take medication.

He spent hours on the beach by the shallow pools; by the sifting seaweed and the squawking gulls, talking to me about it.

A serious conversation: my younger brother, as the family representative, come to deliver the gospel according to whom I don’t know.

It was a lovely talk. I remember I wittered and the sun shone on the glistening sand. I talked about the validity of multiple realities and the advances of quantum physics and, as I talked, I realised I had no idea what I meant.

My brother nearly lost his temper and told me to listen to my mind and not my heart and used the experience of his own patients to build tram lines of arguments that scattered themselves on the sand.

In the end he decided it was just as well I was under a section and we turned back into the wind and the journey home where we were due to make tea for two dear friends of mine.

He is long gone home; back to the slightly hesitant, slightly gruff voice on the telephone that jokes with me and makes me light in my soul. But, on occasion, swears with anger to ask if I know the stress I put on everyone when I am in hospital after not taking my medication.

I left part of my family years ago in a flurry of resentment that smoothed into months long breaks between polite conversations on the phone.

Now, now that my own wife and son and friends are as far from me as a half forgotten dream, (Though they get up and talk and joke a half hours journey away) and, as they talk, they seal my absence with each hour and minute in which their memory of me builds a new history in their eyes.

Now I am finding new friends; rejoining my parents, my brother and sister and their children. I have not had friends in my own right for so, so, long. It is a strange experience.

Breaking into a new a life where everything is tentative; where givens that I never looked at closely such as self belief and trust. Such as giving and loving and achieving and asking for help are now all around me.

These are all jewels that shine with a fragile beauty. I dare not reach out to, dare not wrap my hands around and accept them into my heart.

I do not know the rules and usually settle for a mugful of whisky rather than the pain of a phone call or a text that might not be answered.

In the porch, I lifted off the lid of the bread bin; to find a dozen eerywigs scrabbling amongst the bread at the bottom of the bin.

I don’t know where the ‘eerywigs’ come from and I never used to call them that. To me they were plain old earwigs but that sounds so formal compared to eerywigs.

There is no roiling nest that I can see but every night, I find a smattering of them on the table; their forked pinchers lifted in the air, black commas that irritate me so much.

I thought maybe I was leaving the table unwiped for too long but even if I keep it spotless they still sit there or run around on the bread board or the spice pots. They seem to beckon menace with their obstinate presence.

I lifted the bread out the bread bin and the eerywigs ran around the bottom. I took it into the garden, upended it and they spilled to the grass with the bread crumbs. A few flattened themselves to the cracks at the edges and I had to dislodge them with the blunt end of a knife.

I cooked my egg anyway and had my bread roll and felt a bit guilty and flopped on my harsh springed mattress with its wrinkled bed sheets.

I sipped some more whisky and listened to the radio, while reading the latest of my bedtime books.

At some point I dropped the book to the floor besides me, where it sat next to the glow of the mobile by the small lamp. The radio warbled while I slept until the music of the shipping news woke me and I reached out to turn it off and slide back into darkness.

I slept. Oh peaceful sleep! An absence; smooth skin and slack muscles. I slept in an oasis of calm until the pitch black, early hours when I woke and the thoughts flooded back, caught hold of my mind and shook it as I tried to ease my way into a new future.

However, as the light took over the room, I began to doze and meandered in half heard thoughts until the alarm went off and it was time for coffee and Radio 4 and regrets that I don’t smoke any more and wishes that I still had the enthusiasm for toast in the mornings.

Crisp tanned, hot toast; with butter and marmalade. That would be good.

2009

(Photo: our bread bin!! December 2020)