The time it takes the kettle to boil 01/12/21

 The glare of the street lamp lapses in shadows across my sparsely furnished bedroom. I imagine, as I feel rather than see the pictureless walls constructed around me, who Jennie saw creeping across her yellow wallpaper. Ever since Manchester City Council pledged a ‘clean up’ and improvement operation of this city, that bloody street lamp has been there. It mocks me from the outside in. Even with the lace curtains drawn. 

They do all of these urban improvements for the young people these days, not the old beggars like us. They don’t care about our safety on the streets; we’re not expected to be out much past sunset anyway. Where would we possibly be going? 

It’s not exactly like we’re in any fit state to paint the town red recently. Not with my hips. 

Andy Burnham seems to be doing a pretty good job of that himself. Although he is preaching to the choir a bit, especially with the socialist rowdiness of the Manchester youth. Even my grandson has started banging on about Karl and Friedrich. He sits there on family visits, with his precariously balanced beret and slim fit turtleneck, and talks about the emancipation of the proletariat. As if he’s ever done a day’s work in his life. He was even quoting from ‘Mask of Anarchy’ the other week. Oh I do love him of course; he is my grandson. But he is a daft buggar. I sit and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ in the right places, as if I wasn’t one of the ones protesting at the picket lines because of bloody Thatcher.  

These days it’s less striking at the pits, and more striking numbers off a grid. Bingo has been moved to 4:30 on a Wednesday and we all get the minibus there together. Moyra is unlikely to leave her room for anything else at this point. Less risk that way, they say. Even our sons and daughters agree. 

‘Less risk of what?’ I want to ask my son Henry, when he repeats this to me. Risk that we’ll actually be able to use our own bloody city? Risk that we’ll not just fade away almost as naturally as night passing into day? 

See they do all this, all the extra tram stops and street lights and cycle lanes, all for the young people. The students who move here for 3 year intervals, maybe 4 if we’re unlucky, and block up the public transport and the ‘hipster’ cafes. There they sit, over some sort of fancy pants latte and bloody quinoa salad-y thingymjig (I still don’t know how to pronounce it), as if interpreting the hidden feminism in Byron’s poetry is the most important thing in the world. Get a real job for goodness sake. These kids wouldn’t know the meaning of the word ‘graft’ even if they took a minute to think about it. Instead their youthful minds are filled with unoriginal ideas of revolutions that will never happen, how to balance the social and the scholarly, and what type of fake milk liquified crap they want in their coffee. Universities: just a melting pot of repetitive chatter and diverse privilege. 

It’s 2:30am now and the light is unbearable. I’ve tossed and turned on my side of the bed for the past hour. Short of slipping a valium, I’m out of any other ideas. I couldn’t do that anyway; I’m allowed to keep them in my bathroom cabinet but Henry counts them. He’d only ask me about it tomorrow when he drops the grandkids off, and we’d have to have the same conversation that we’ve had a million times before. Maybe that would put me to sleep actually, if only he was here now. At least someone would be. 

Eventually, with a deep sigh, I reach over to switch her bedside lamp on. I don’t need to; the room is already bathed in the obnoxious glow of urbanisation. It’s just a force of habit. I lie for a moment, and contemplate the new shadows that have found their way onto the walls around me. It’s not long before I decide that that’s a rabbit hole I don’t particularly want to go down tonight, and swing my legs round to face the door. As I slip my feet into my slippers I imagine what I must look like, hunched over the edge of the bed in bloody silk pyjamas. They were a present from the grandchildren last Christmas, and quite an expensive one I’d imagine. I think Henry and his partner, Char, thought it was a nice gesture, but it just feels like a guilty gesture. Another bar of the gilded care home cage they’ve trapped us in. Well, just me now. 

After the count of three I manage to focus the strength in my once strong, runner’s legs  - now scrawny sticks on the bottom of my body - and stand upright. I wrap my thin linen dressing gown around my soldiers and hobble slowly towards the door and out into the corridor. Gone are the days when I would stride with purpose. Now I hobble with trepidation. Still, there are some perks. It means my slippered shuffle is quieter, and therefore more difficult to detect by the nurse who’s supposed to be on duty. 

She’s not there tonight anyway. She’s only young, early 20s I reckon, and her face is usually illuminated by the blue glow of her mobile telephone. I sometimes hear snippets of conversations between her and whoever it is on the other side. Snatched ‘I miss yous’ and smiled ‘I love yous’, with the promise of ‘see you later’ that sounds like the first beginnings of romance. Not that I begrudge her mind you, we were all young once. 

‘A Cuppa, that’ll do me,’ I think as I move slowly across the paisley printed carpet. There’s five of us ‘old boys’ on this floor. Five more above, 4 of whom are in couples, and five more below. Maybe four now actually. The residents change so often it’s hard to keep track. There’s only one kitchen though. It’s downstairs next to the common room in what used to be a grand ballroom. Now a bland looking dining room for the elderly, with food trays and haphazardly placed antique armchairs. And that same oppressively yellow wallpaper. It’s not the colour of sun, it’s the colour of piss. And it puts off my appetite. Not that there’s much of that left now anyway. 

I move through the uriniferous space as quickly as I can towards the kitchen. I’m already mentally selecting my favourite mug from the cupboard and stirring in several sweeteners to freshly boiled water. I used to have 3 sugars at least, but then the Mrs got me on this sweetener stuff instead and well, you know how women are. They’re always right even though we never want to admit it. Truth be told the sugars were a bit too sweet for me anyway, but you know what they say: ‘Old habits die hard’. Not people though. They fade away almost before the time it takes the kettle to boil. 

I lean against the counter as I wait, and as the steam starts to rise I gaze once more out of the window. You can’t directly see the bulb of my damned street lamp from this side of the building. Instead, pools of light seem to ripple and murmur between the oaks of the avenue outside. They trickle intermittently between parked cars and residential homes until they peter off into the park at the end of the street. I imagine them joining together into one cascade, or maybe separating like lots of little rivulets, and swirling in and out of swing sets and seesaws. Once, no maybe twice, around the roundabout.  Past the animals in their cages in the petting zoo, with no time to stop and rest on our bench that we used to occupy for hours at a time.  

In my mind, eventually this light stream finds the park’s pond, which is more of a lake really. And after dancing with the swans and diving with the fishes, it skims the surface until it comes to a stop somewhere in the middle. Far from the edges where it can’t be caught and can just, sink. 

They say sunlight can penetrate water as deep as 1,000 meters, but it becomes insignificant and difficult to distinguish after about 200. I have no idea how deep the park’s pond is but, as I turn away from my empty mug and towards the door of the care home, still clad in silk pyjamas and grandad slippers, I wonder if anyone will be able to distinguish me.