did the good days. One thing you can’t stop is time passing.
As I said, I used to use that word all the time but I haven’t had cause to since I retired from the pub trade. Until Miss Prim and her leaflets turned up and tried to tell me what to do.
A few hours after her visit, though, I grew afraid. I was afraid she’d come back with some official form or something to tell me I had to leave my house, go into a nursing home. I would rather have died than gone into a home. I thought about finishing things, about doing something to make sure that I wouldn’t end up being taken away, but you need courage for that and by then I had none left.
I went to the Co-op at the end of the road twice a week to get my shopping, and to the doctor’s to get my prescription, but apart from that I never went out. I planned ways to finish it over and over again but it felt wrong to give up, and, besides, I was afraid of getting it wrong, not doing it properly. But all through my life I’d made choices for myself, and for the first time other people were starting to make choices for me. It was this that I objected to. I was a grown woman, an old woman, and while I still had all my marbles I wanted to be able to choose to finish this life that had become so wearing, so empty. But of course that’s not done, is it? If I wanted to end things, then I must be ill, or depressed, or something and therefore I needed help to cope, help to find new ways of enjoying the world. This is how the young see it, from their position of complete and utter ignorance.
I wished for someone to help me. I wished for someone I could trust who would make sure that it happened, that I wasn’t left half-dead… to make sure that I couldn’t change my mind.
Annabel
There was nothing more miserable than starting a Monday in the dark with cold, wet feet.
By the time I got to work the bottom of my skirt and my suede boots were wet through. Days like this, the Park and Ride was no fun. Getting to the car park early, before it was even properly light, waiting inside the steamed-up car for the bus, then swaying in my seat, still half asleep, all the way into town. I still hadn’t worked out which bus stop dropped me off nearest to the police station. I opted for the war memorial stop today, but I’d forgotten about the blocked gully in Unity Street. There was no way past it, unless you crossed the road, of course, but that wasn’t easy. So I waited for a break in the traffic and took my chance, crossing that bit of pavement next to the vast puddle before another van came splashing through it and soaked me.
I was never quite quick enough. Not built for running, me.
I let myself in through the back gate, letting it swing with a heavy-duty clang behind me. The rain was easing off by now – typical. My access card bleeped through five different security points – count them: the back gate, the gate from the car park, the back door, the doorway to the Intelligence Unit and finally the door to the public protection office. I hung up my coat and my long scarf, both wet, felt the radiator – cold, of course; it was Monday after all – and filled the kettle with water from the two-litre bottle that we would carry back and forth from the kitchen, which was about half a mile away.
The fridge, needless to say, had been raided. There had been at least a pint of milk left in there on Friday but the plastic bottle had been emptied and placed neatly back on the shelf, as though that made it acceptable. My half-eaten tuna sandwich from Friday was still there, though. The smell brought back sudden memories of the house I’d been in on Friday night and everything that had happened afterwards.
Holding my breath, I took the sandwich out, carried it into the corridor, down to the patrol office, and dropped it into one of their bins. They would have been the ones who nicked the milk. They could have the sandwich as well.