Human Remains

they felt like it, and banged the door, and sat outside my house on the pavement, or even once on my fence, until they broke it. They would drive up and down the street on their motorcycles, or sit smoking and drinking from cans and shouting and throwing things at each other.
    I was afraid of running out of money and not being able to buy food or keep the house warm.
    I grew to be afraid of going out.
    I was afraid of the woman who came from Social Services once to check up on me. She said she had heard I might need some extra help. I told her I did not, but she kept talking and talking until I asked her to leave. In fact I told her to fuck off. She wasn’t expecting to hear that and she tried to tell me off. She said she had a right to a pleasant working environment the same as anyone else and that there was no need for me to be rude. I said there was no need for her to speak to me in my own home as though I was an imbecile, and that I had asked her to leave nicely and she had ignored me.
    At that time I was brave – and when she went and I locked the door behind her I laughed for a little while. It had been a long time since I used that word, and it felt good. It felt like being young again.
    Forty years ago I was running a pub by the docks. It was a rough place. We had some nights where hardly anyone came in, and other nights when a ship or two had put in to shore when the place was full and people were spilling out on to the street outside. We had working girls in, too. When my husband Stan was alive he used to try to send them on their way, but as far as I was concerned their money was as good as anyone else’s. What they did to earn a crust was neither here nor there.
    We had fights all the time. It was part of the plan for them when they came off a ship – get drunk, find a girl, get into a fight, sober up, back to the ship in time for the tide. If we were lucky they took their disagreements outside; if we were unlucky the odd chair and several glasses might get broken. Once a young lad was stabbed. That was terrible; he lived, though. Was fine, after. A few stitches and on his way.
    Back in those days I wasn’t afraid of anything. I lived every day as it came and I expected there to be bad days; I knew I would get through them just the same as I 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