Lady in the Van

heard you. You shouldn’t say negative things.
    The interior of the van now indescribable.
March 1989
    Miss S. sits in the wheelchair trying to open the sneck of the gate with her walking-stick. She tries it with one end, then reverses the stick and tries with the other. Sitting at my table, trying to work, I watch her idly, much as one would watch an ant trying to get round some obstacle. Now she bangs on the gate to attract the attention of a passer-by. Now she is wailing. Banging and wailing. I go out. She stops wailing, and explains she has her washing to do. As I manoeuvre her through the gate I ask her if she’s fit to go. Yes, only she will need help. I explain that I can’t push her there. (Why can’t I?) No, she doesn’t want that. Would I just push her as far as the corner? I do so. Would I just push her a bit further? I explain that I can’t take her to the launderette. (And anyway there is no launderette any more so which launderette is she going to?) Eventually feeling like Fletcher Christian (only not Christian) abandoning Captain Bligh, I leave her in the wheelchair outside Mary H.’s. Someone will come along. I would be more ashamed if I did not feel, even when she is poorly, that she knows exactly what she’s about.
March 1989
    There is a thin layer of talcum powder around the back door of the van and odd bits of screwed up tissues smeared with what may or may not be shit, though there is no doubt about the main item of litter which is a stained incontinence pad. My method of retrieving these items would not be unfamiliar at Sellafield. I don rubber gloves, put each hand inside a plastic bag as an additional protection, then, having swept the faecal artefacts together, gingerly pick them up and put them in the bin.
    “Those aren’t all my rubbish,” comes a voice from the van. “Some of them blow in under the gate.”
April 1989
    Miss S. has asked me to telephone the Social Services and I tell her that a social worker will be calling.
    “What time?”
    “I don’t know. But you’re not going to be out. You haven’t been out for a week.”
    “I might be. Miracles do happen. Besides, she may not be able to talk to me. I may not be at the door end of the van. I might be at the other end.”
    “So she can talk to you there.”
    “And what if I’m in the middle?”
    Miss C. thinks her heart is failing. She calls her Mary. I find this strange, though it is of course her name.
April 1989
    A staple of Miss S.’s shopping list these days is sherbet lemons. I have a stock of them in the house but she insists I invest in yet more so that a perpetual supply of sherbet lemons may never be in doubt.
    “I’m on them now. I don’t want to have to go off them.”
    I ask her if she would like a cup of coffee.
    “Well, I wouldn’t want you to go to all that trouble. I’ll just have half a cup.”
    ♦
    Towards the end of her life Miss S. was befriended by an ex-nurse who lived locally. She put me in touch with a day centre who agreed to take Miss Shepherd in, give her a bath and a medical examination and even a bed in a single room where she could stay if she wanted. In retrospect I see I should have done something on the same lines years before, except that it was only when age and illness had weakened Miss Shepherd that she would accept such help. Even now it was not easy.
April 27, 1989
    A red ambulance calls to take Miss S. to the day centre. Miss B. talks to her for a while in the van, gradually coaxing her out and into the wheelchair, shit streaks over her swollen feet, a piece of toilet roll clinging to one scaly ankle.
    “And if I don’t like it,” she keeps asking, “can I come back?”
    I reassure her but looking at the inside of the van and trying to cope with the stench, I find it hard to see how she can go on living here much longer. Once she sees the room they are offering her, the bath, the clean sheets, I can’t imagine her wanting to come back. And indeed she makes more fuss than usual about locking the van door, which suggests she accepts that she may not be returning. I note how, with none of my distaste, the ambulance driver bends over her as he puts her on the hoist, his careful rearrangement of her greasy clothing, pulling her skirt down over her knees in the interest of modesty. The chair goes on the hoist and slowly she rises and comes into view above the level of the garden wall and is wheeled into the ambulance. There is a certain distinction about her as she