Nicholas Hancock
New Girl
My first day - and I hope my last -
at Birchdale Residential Home,
this chit of a girl nudges my walking frame
towards a row of chairs beside a wall,
all but one occupied by women as old
and dry as me. ‘This is Rachel, dear,
this Gladys, Myrtle, Isabel, this is Irene...’
Their eyes don’t waver from the TV screen
or from their private comas in the middle
of dying gleams; meanwhile I let
their names fall like Gretel’s bread
to the linoleum and wait for birds
that perch preying on untended words to swoop.
‘So there you are!’ she adds cheerily,
easing my hip bones onto the vacant chair.
A compassionate palm on my collar bone,
then she’s away for another cup of tea,
leaving us to cook.
We simmer before the mumbling telly,
waiting to cook, waiting to cook.
And I ask myself, ‘If only Mum could see me now!’
If only she could come back, that is
to see her daughter
shrivelled in a chair that smells of Flash
and old woman’s piss, her daughter whose step
was a supple rebuke to the stiffness of the old,
whose lips, unencumbered by this moustache,
kissed the world.
Our eyes don’t blink as the manageress’s skirts
move air between us and the television set.
We wait. We wait.
How could that young woman remain
inside of me?
We sit, and we sit,
the cook’s clock ticking down our time.
Gladys or Rachel or Irene sinks,
cooked to a turn,
and they trundle her away.
A passing hand turns up the volume.
And we sit.
Page(s) 168
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