Lady in the Van

agrees guardedly.
    “So you’re 77.”
    “Yes. How did you know?”
    “I saw it once when you filled out the census form.”
    I give her a bottle of whisky, explaining that it’s just to rub on.
    “Oh. Thank you.”
    Pause.
    “Mr Bennett. Don’t tell anybody.”
    “About the whisky?”
    “No. About my birthday.”
    Pause.
    “Mr Bennett.”
    “Yes?”
    “About the whisky either.”
March 1988
    “I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning,” says Miss S. kneeling in front of a Kienholz-like tableau of filth and decay.
    She says she has been discussing the possibility of a bungalow with the social worker to which she would be prepared to contribute ‘a few hundred or so’. It’s possible that the bungalow might be made of asbestos, “but I could wear a mask. I wouldn’t mind that and of course it would be much better from the fire point of view.”
    Hands in mittens made from old socks. A sanitary towel drying over the ring and a glossy leaflet from the Halifax offering ‘fabulous investment opportunities’.
April 1988
    Miss S. asks me to get Tom M. to take a photograph of her for her new bus-pass.
    “That would make a comedy, you know. Sitting on a bus and your bus-pass out of date. You could make a fortune out of that with very little work involved, possibly. I was a born tragedian,” she says, “or a comedian possibly. One or the other anyway. But I didn’t realise it at the time. Big feet.”
    She pushes out her red unstockinged ankles.
    “Big hands.”
    The fingers stained brown.
    “Tall. People trip over me. That’s comedy. I wish they didn’t, of course. I’d like it easier but there it is. I’m not suggesting you do it,” she says hastily, feeling perhaps she’s come too near self-revelation, “only it might make people laugh.”
    All of this is said with a straight face and no hint of a smile, sitting in the wheelchair with her hands pressed between her knees and her baseball cap on.
May 1988
    Miss S. sits in her wheelchair in the road, paintpot in hand, dabbing at the bodywork of the Reliant which she will shortly enter, start and rev for a contented half-hour before switching off and paddling down the road in her wheelchair. She has been nattering at Tom M. to mend the clutch, but there are conditions: it mustn’t be on Sunday, which is the feast of St Peter and St Paul and a day of obligation. Nor can it be the following Sunday apparently, through the Feast of the Assumption falling on the Monday and being transferred back to the previous day. Amid all the chaos of her life and now, I think, more or less incontinent she trips with fanatical precision through this liturgical minefield.
September 1988
    Miss S. has started thinking about a flat again, though not the one the Council offered her a few years ago. This time she has her eye on something much closer to home. My home. We had been talking in the hall and I left her sitting on the step in the hall while I came back to work. This is often what happens, me sitting at my table, wanting to get on, Miss S. sitting outside rambling. This time she goes on talking about the flat, soliloquising almost, but knowing that I can hear:
    “It need only be a little flat, even a room possibly. Of course, I can’t manage stairs, so it would have to be on the ground floor. Though I’d pay to have a lift put in.” (Louder.) “And the lift wouldn’t be wasted. They’d have it for their old age. And they’ll have to be thinking about their old age quite soon.”
    The tone of it is somehow familiar from years ago. Then I realise it’s like one of the meant-to-be-overheard soliloquies of Richmal Crompton’s William.
    Her outfit this morning: orange skirt, made out of three or four large dusters; a striped blue satin jacket; a green headscarf, blue eyeshield topped off by a khaki peaked cap with a skull-and-crossbones badge and Rambo across the peak.
February 1989
    Miss S.’s religion is an odd mixture of traditional faith and a belief in the power of positive thinking. This morning, as ever, the Reliant battery is running low and she asks me to fix it. The usual argument takes place:
    Me:
    Well, of course it’s run down. It will run down unless you run the car. Revving up doesn’t charge it. The wheels have to go round.
    Miss S.:
    Stop talking like that. This car is not the same. There are miracles. There is faith. Negative thoughts don’t help. She presses the starter again and it coughs weakly. There, you see. The devil’s