What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

canvas that has taken the place of the headless nude of which you did not approve, and the ghost of you brushed my wrist.

      At a window table overlooking the beach, I saw a group of Holy Cross mothers. One of them, a psychologist called Angie, came over and asked after Beth. “How long will your sister be away?” I heard her boots first. They are very spiky and resoundingly noisy. Beth once told me that Angie is a recovered anorexic who now jogs compulsively to stay slim. She must have some other shoes for jogging in, but I know her in jeans and spiky boots. She is slim and these new low-slung hipsters suit her. Her sexy bottom half doesn’t quite match her severe top half, with its staring, slightly protruding eyes behind glasses. If I were one of her patients I’d feel like a mouse waiting for the wise owl to swoop. Angie’s claws hovered briefly over me as she said that if I need help with Sal I must just call. Then she was back off to her corner with a beating of carnivorous wings.

      She must have reported back to the Holy Cross mothers because they immediately all swivelled round on their branch to stare at me. Probably pitying my incompetence in their field of expertise. While I was paying for my cappuccino, another of the group came up and said very shyly and softly that she wanted to organise a play. At first I thought she must be either a mad am-dram or a sotto voce pervert. But then she said, “You know, for Sal to come and play with my daughter Harriet”. Harriet. Of course. Sal talks about her all the time. This was her mother, Hannelie.

      Afterwards I stopped by the supermarket for groceries. No Coke, thank goodness, as Sal decided of her own accord to give that up several months ago. When you have to lug shopping up twenty-eight steps you don’t want heavy, nutritionally irrelevant items.

      I had a list and my foray went smoothly. I’m familiar with the essentials of how the house is run, though it’s true that Beth has not relied on me. If she says, “We need milk”, or “Pick up some ciabatta on the way home”, then I complete the task. I was a bit nervous the first day she told me to “buy electricity” but the staff at the 7-11 were very helpful.

      After I’d unpacked the shopping, I came back here to work. Ryno’s mother knocked and said her computer was playing up again and “Beth usually sorts it out.” You remember Mrs Cloete, who lives in what was once a little holiday cottage at the back of our house? With a bad grace I followed her there and saw she had a game of solitaire going. She’s seventy-six: I don’t know what else I’d expect her to be doing with her computer.

      So what’s the problem, I asked her.

      She said: “It’s clearly missing the jack of diamonds.”

      I paused for a while before I asked: What does Beth do when this happens?

      “She usually finds it,” said Mrs Cloete.

      I sat down and took over the game. The jack of diamonds stayed stubbornly uncovered. I clicked on New Game and the bugger popped up obligingly in the third row.

      I have to go work now, I told her. I have a deadline.

      She said: “There’s something I forgot to tell you. I’m always forgetting things these days. Ryno phoned from the Transkei. The line was very bad. But he says you must fetch Sir Nicholas from the kennels. They won’t have him any more, they say his temperament is not suited to a solitary existence. He tried to dig himself out.”

      So Ryno’s dog has been expelled, I said. Where must I take him to?

      “You’ll have to bring him here,” said Mrs Cloete. “You can make him a cosy little bed in the shed.”

      Sal was delighted when she heard. You’d swear we’d bought her a new puppy and not just offered board and lodging to an old mutt. “Let me sleep with him!” she said. “I can wake up smelling of dog!”

      I asked her, as a matter of interest, when she took a bath. Suddenly I couldn’t remember Beth’s routine, or if there’d been one.

      “Rarely,” replied Sal, and grinned.

      I’ve always marvelled at my niece’s propensity for joy. She wakes up happy, exclaiming about something funny she read or saw the day before. She laughs a fat, full laugh at the nonsense she and her mother talk in bed at night, at her friends, teachers, dogs and cats of her acquaintance, everything. She’s quiet sometimes, but a happy quiet, absorbed in long games and books, books, books. Other times she’s less studious, gets on a pair of Beth’s high heels and pushes a little pink pram around, pretending to chew gum and talk “gam”. She worries about a naughty boy in her class called Noah. Last year she wrote him a letter promising him ten rand if he would just stop “throughing paper balls at the teacher’s back”.

      At bedtime tonight she was less upbeat. I asked her whether she’d finished her homework, and she listed all the tasks she’d completed. Then: “There’s just one more thing: I have to examine my conscience,” she said. She sat silently, bolt upright for a while. I sat next to her, as perplexed and wistful as only a lapsed Catholic can be.

      I read to her. When I thought she was asleep, I started to creep away from the bed. I felt a steely grip on my arm. I understood that I should lie next to her until her breathing was deep and even, past the first light phase, the one that ends with an inexplicable shudder, or jerk, past the false start that precedes true dreaming.

      All I could think about was how I really wanted to be on my own, reading my own book in my own bed. I have no gift for this. I’ve met nurturers before; never imagined I’d have to be one.

      Monica used to complain that I never looked after her, never tucked her into bed when she was sick, never took her car to the mechanic when it needed fixing. How do I want to defend myself against these accusations? Firstly, Monica was always in charge, always announcing how things would be and then monitoring them so that they met with her blueprint. Secondly, I frankly don’t remember her ever being sick. She was frighteningly robust. I was attracted to her strength, which seemed a good foil for my passivity.

      My passivity, yes. As you get older, you grow accustomed to yourself. What I mean is that as a child, I kept expecting to turn into someone else – a rugby player, an academic achiever, someone who copes easily. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t become those things, that they required internal and external qualities I didn’t have. It took ages for me to cotton on that my interior life was in fact different from that of my friends. Only gradually did I apprehend that I was experiencing the world differently from other people.

      Commonplace objects are for me like old books I have read before, and in which I have left a distinctive bookmark, an envelope, postcard, bill, ticket, shopping list, letter, or photograph that forever reminds me of the circumstances in which I first turned those pages. I move slowly through a world that is bookmarked with meaning. I can’t get ahead, as other people do. The others have gone on ahead, are waving at me from their established careers, while I linger here, thinking about the broken handle of the handsome old Monarch fridge that once graced our kitchen. I feel there is something about that fridge and its absent handle that needs commemoration. The way the fridge only admitted those who knew the secret curved finger hook that opened its mechanism. I’m using the fridge as an example, you understand. I’m reluctant to instigate new experiences because I have a backlog of old fridges to process.

      Poor Monica. Just as I, in our early cohabitation, thought I might still metamorphose into someone else, she too doubtless hoped I would change. Happy are those who fall in love at fifty, after all this fruitlessness.

      Thursday 15th August

      11.33 pm

      Last night, when I finally did get to my own bed, a large mental doorstopper kept my sleep ajar, still linked to waking. The sound of the boats going out, the puk-puk-puk of their engines, is the theme tune of my insomnia.

      I know you think of me. Often I feel and even rely on the warmth and steadiness of those thoughts. But I also suspect that I am not completely real to you; that you don’t expect me to respond as a real person who is overpowered by jealousy and urgency. I wonder if, to you, I am a dream, ether-real.

      I have been thinking about your mail