Wrist Stump

My granddaughter came to see me yesterday, here in the care facility where I live. She's twenty and doing a creative writing degree.

"What do you remember from when you were twenty, grandma?" she asked.

She's doing a piece about older people's recollections of being her age.

There was the Blitz of course, but everyone over ninety talks about that. There was painting the fake seam down the back of your bare leg, using Bisto, so that it looked as if you were wearing nylons, but that's a cliche too.

 In the nurses' home one night, I was sitting in a friend's room. She was elsewhere in the building. I can't remember why. Beside the sofa there was a book; it was an exercise book, but with marbled covers. I picked it up to have a look.

"My Poems," she had written on the cover.

They were all dedicated to "Davy," all about how she had loved him from afar, when they both atended The Methodist chapel together as kids, about how she had sought him out during her early teens, and even followed him home a couple of times, and then he had asked her out.

Writing of that night when he asked her out, she said, "You have severed my hand."

 It was an arresting image. It stopped time, seizing it and detaining it in that moment, when I read that concluding line, kneeling on the carpet, in the narrow emotional ambit of that metaphorical act - the cleaving of the hand from her forearm.

 I paused forever as the axe fell, saw the wrist bleeding and bereft, the hand, apart, buried elsewhere. I saw the blistered but healing wrist stump, like a blind creature, trying to blunder free, for the rest of her life, while she hid it in her cardigan sleeve.

My granddaughter looked nonplussed. I told her that she still had a bit to learn about creative writing. 

 

by Marie Hartley