Sometimes I Get Lonely

By Elaine Lennon

The house is talking to me. The floors on the landing are creaking just as they did after I moved in, when the building was settling and it was adjusting to my character inhabiting its forlorn four walls. The boards shrank as the building cooled and they squeaked as they settled in place. Wind whispered in the chimneys. Windows itched against freshly applied sealant and scratched against their frames. I was so frightened. It seemed the very structure was moving at night. I took to drinking whatever alcohol I had downstairs until four in the morning just before daybreak, when I would finally gain the confidence to ascend the steps to my bed, senses impaired, fear worn away, exhausted by sleeplessness.

I take pleasure from the sunlight pouring in and dancing on the ceiling. The way it plays on the curtains draped around the windows, lacing the panes like doilies, dappling the tables and rugs and slicing the bed in two.

The varnish that shines on pine flooring is dulled from lack of use or polish, clarifying the scuff marks on the surface.

A draught whooshes under the doorway heralding the arrival of my beloved cat Gilbert, the ginger boy wonder, constantly entering the room in the hopes that the situation will be different this time. He whimpered and whined for days, resting in the crook of my arm, wrapping his legs around my hands, walking up to my nose and trying to detect warm breath. He has given up. He has stopped licking me.

Memories come thick and fast, coursing through me like blood, arteries carrying pictures and sounds of people, places and things. They’re not significant. I’ve long forgotten more than I ever knew. Nothing matters. Nothing matters. My immediate surroundings concern me the most. My bedroom, lavender with white furnishings, Art Deco book nooks and chairs, a sky blue Bakelite lamp sourced at an antiques sale, gold and cream mirrors and all those delightful glorious stars on the ceiling, shining galaxies, a cosmic sequence of great and small planets orbiting the birdcage centre light.

I dream of a coffin lined in white velvet.

Smells have accumulated. The kind that only occur in this situation but other ones too, the type I didn’t take time to observe before. The scent of old perfume, the decaying odours from deodorizing spray, shower freshener, cleaning fluid, wax polish, the Febreze on clothing that has lain untouched in the laundry basket at the top of the stairs, mustiness creeping from beneath wardrobe doors, slightly ajar from the materials pushing out from their place. Has my bronze Harris tweed jacket succumbed to moths? Each relic from my past has its own array of notes, available to me now, unnoticed before.

I have never been so alive.

Dust gathers in minute drifts, almost invisible to the eye. It lies in the cracks between the wide boards, upon the mantelpiece where the fairy lights have long stopped illuminating the gonks and talismans and postcards, slanting adrift from their place. Webs are spun in delicate arcs across the ceiling beams by spiders who nonchalantly ignore the tubs of conkers: the chemicals have lost their power to put off the wily creatures.

Water drips from the tap in the bathroom, drip, drip, drip. Drop. It is deafening. The incessant rhythmic sound is driving me insane. If only I could turn it off. It must be the cold one, when I last brushed my teeth. I miss the taste of toothpaste. Crest, especially, although that went out years ago. Those stripes were a burst of happiness. It’s odd to think charcoal is sold for whitening. It makes no kind of sense. It makes no difference.

Wigglesworth my bear stares at me unseeing. He’s been a constant companion since we first encountered each other at Funderland when my work mate John won him and like a gentleman handed him over to me. That was thirty years ago. Now my little polar bear chum will no longer travel in my handbag to the cinema and doctor and dentist appointments. He was a calming presence, a lucky charm, a mascot, a confidant. He sits, dejected and untouched, at my right elbow.

I lost track of time but when did that happen? The days blend into one and the weeks are a muddle. The electricity must have been switched off because the radio stopped working. I haven’t paid my last bill. The crackling of the stations used to irritate me but I’m beyond that. I miss the sound of Radio Wien at two A.M., the weird Europop from Radio Monte Carlo, the BBC’s Shipping Forecast with its rhyme of Dogger, Fisher, German Bight. Wight, Portland, Fitzroy. Fastnet, Irish Sea, Rockall. Words of regularity and normality, punctuating consciousness. Words to lighten night. The dial lit up: Luxembourg, Hilversum, Athlone. The last song I heard played was In My Room. I like to think it was especially for me. I’m not scared of the dark now.

I am the dark.

A row of glass-eyed Victorian dolls stands to attention on the top of the bookcase housing my collection of childhood books. Susan, Victoria, Emmeline, Polly, Juliana. I don’t remember all their names now, those proud little girls in their flouncy skirts and elaborate hats, straight from the pages of E. Nesbit, crowning a library of other people’s reading, lost and found at charity and junk shops, a manufactured testament to decades-old isolation.

I recall very little of what occurred. A blinding headache as I stood in front of the big illuminated bathroom mirror. Gripping the sides of the sink and dropping the toothbrush. Struggling to remember where I’d put my drugs. Oh, yes. My bedside table, along with nail polishes, lozenges, my mobile phone. Staggering across the landing to the bedroom, pulling open the door, holding my head, stumbling in. Sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed in my black Boxed Life tee-shirt and ancient 501s, battered and bleached just the way I like them, fuzzy bed socks on my feet. Spraying the Nitrolingual pump, my go-to rescue remedy ever since the G.P. failed to deal with my strep throat and it mutated into rheumatic fever and a series of cardiac infections, rendering me a critically ill patient in a matter of months. Testing it once. Spraying twice, like you do. Sent for a brain scan. Two heart checks. Several ambulances to the local Emergency Department, a mere twenty miles from home. Everything flashing before me in panic. Gasping.

The effect of ingesting the drug was to make my body buckle in shock, seizing up, bending backwards and then collapsing on its side. I lay there, worrying I wouldn’t get up again. My eyes were open. I was looking at photos of my cats who lie now in Pet Sematary at the bottom of the garden, the last creatures I see before I fall asleep each night, Gilbert in my arms.

I drifted off.

Gilbert is curled at my feet now but he’s no longer moving. His love for me has been all-consuming and has found its natural expression in the ultimate sacrifice, the kind only associated with dogs, not cats who practically talk to you and make your heart beat right and true. For weeks he stayed with me by night and then trotted outside daily to hunt and returned, sated, settling here. He must have got in and out of the house through the window in the shower room downstairs, just as he always had. He tired of feeding himself, knowing I couldn’t do the same. One day he brought me a tiny bird that had been unfortunate to cross his path. A thrush. I didn’t respond. He reluctantly ate it alone, on the sheepskin rug, where the avian skeleton remains. Then he found a familiar spot on my pillow, above my head, and he lay there, nuzzling my hair. Waiting.

I reach out to him but my arms don’t move. I want to comfort him as I always have.

It’s just a habit of being.

I crave feeling.

Someone knocked at the front door yesterday. They did it repeatedly. Then they beat their fists against several windows. They shouted my name. Maybe they tried to phone me but the battery has died. Was there more than one person? They probably looked in and saw nothing going on. Piles of unopened mail beneath the letter box. The car unmoved for quite some time now. The plants overgrown in the window boxes, unusually untended. The grass uncut. The look of abandonment. I know they will come back. They must.

I saw shadows in the night. There was a summer storm and the branches of the trees shrouded the house, bending and swaying and creating a looping chorus of curious singsong. It happened at half past midnight, like everything does, because that’s when the clock stopped. As they say in Withnail and I, Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

The house is sweating. The windows haven’t been opened. A single drop crashed down from the gutter onto the porch roof like a thunder bolt. Condensation is creeping up the walls.

The sun came up, as it always does, lighting the room with reflections and yellow cheer.

Vehicles parked up outside. It was early. There were voices. A battering ram must have been used to break down the kitchen door – once, twice, three times. Then a huge crashing noise. Footsteps. Doors opening. More voices.

There are two men in my bedroom now. I recognize one of them. He used to play golf with my father. They are wearing masks and one of them, the younger one, momentarily gags when he enters. They have plastic gloves. They work quickly and quietly, once they’ve lifted the bedclothes clinging to my limbs.

As they handle me my body sighs. My flesh is fragile. It has withered from lack of use, but is preserved in airlessness.

I want to shout at them that I’m claustrophobic but they can’t hear me and they don’t care. They encase me in a heavy black bag. The zip crackles loudly and I know what Gilbert would say about that because he once spoke to me in a dream. In a Little Lord Fauntleroy voice he said, ‘Mama, please say issue not ish-oo because it sounds so harsh and our ears are so sensitive.’ They lift him from the end of the bed with gloved hands and put him gently in a cat cave near the toy box. Then they cart my physical form encased in impersonal plastic down the stairs, with much difficulty, trying to avoid hitting the paintings and movie poster on the stairwell. I want to tell them, Please don’t. Don’t take me away. Leave me in peace on my bed to be with Gilbert, my loyal friend who stayed to the end. I am at home here. The words don’t come.

There is a hollowed egg-shaped impression in the bedclothes where I spent so long lying in the foetal position, facing the west side of the house, the gable end that overlooks a line of overgrowing evergreens, planted to stem the tide of water from the drain backfilled by the thuggish neighbours who spent a decade terrorizing me before the bank threw them out. I finally regained my safe silent solitary haven, away from the wicked world of people who hate single women.

Everything spins in the solar system. Mostly in the same direction. What happens in the world when you stop spinning? When you stop?

My husk is gone. Deflated.

This is how it ends.

I don’t want to die. I have died.

And I am in the very atmosphere. I am in the filigree deposits of skin particles and hair, the bones, the plaster, the paint, the chintzy wallpaper and fading fabric. I occupy and supply the very architecture of meaning that attaches to this home’s elements. The walls, the materials, the textures, the very being. I am the emotions and thoughts that govern this house, as it breathes and out.

I am substance. I am sensation.

I’m still here.