It was there waiting for her, patiently hiding in the dark corners of the room. Looking at her with longing just waiting for it’s moment. After all the years she’d spent chasing it off, it had finally come for her. She could smell it’s stench on her skin, feel its chill take root in her bones.
The dawn was breaking, finally. Shafts of peach light cut into the room through the crack in the haphazardly drawn curtains and she knew that the shadows would soon be gone, but that it would remain hanging like sour breath in the air as the sun travelled it’s long slow arch through the vaulted blue sky.
The pain twisted in her back and legs, sent sharp metallic slices through her brain. She wanted to move, to take the pressure off to relieve the sensation but she knew she would just have to wait. Sooner or later they would come. Full of chatter as they stripped the warm blankets from her, ripping the dignity of her night shirt off and wiping the sweat from her body with a dirty damp cloth before dragging a fresh night dress onto her skeletal form. They would come and move her upwards into a more painful position and shovel food into her. And never once would they look at her or talk to her.
Those girls with the dead eyes, who hated the work they did and the stale air that filled the corridors of purgatory. Young things that thought that age would never weaken them, as it had the breathing corpses they herded to earn drinking money. How she pitied them. What small lives they lead, when they lay where she did what would they close their eyes and remember to block out the horror of it all.
She had few regrets. Her life was a Technicolor dream. She had always known she had to make the best memories possible. She just had to close her eyes to see African bush land, a patchwork quilt of greens, browns and gold, stretching to the hazy blue horizon. She could still feel the warm dusty wind that wandered across it on her skin.
Then she’d be standing by the Atlantic Ocean, tasting the salt in the rain as it fell on Ireland’s heathered hill tops or looking up at the dizzying heights the tree tops reached in Amazonian rainforest.
Yes her work had taken her all over. In a job she had found both adventure and satisfaction. She had seen war and death and children dying in the streets. But she had done something about it. She was glad that she had at least helped changed a few lives along the way.
And she had found the two people who her heart had cherished most. She had met her husband, the doctor, with his kind eyes and hearty laugh, giving vaccinations to street kids in San Paulo. He had swept her up into his life and married her in a falling down church were they didn’t even speak English. They had kept each other strong in the face of the worst horrors and encouraged each other to celebrate the smallest victories they won against them. She would be with him again soon.
The other person was, if truth be told, the source of the one regret that kept her holding on to life. Her daughter, Grace, so beautiful and sweet and intelligent, was the light of her life. Oh Grace! She uttered the name into the dim twilight filling her room.
The child had arrived into their lives so late. Even now she was still so young. It had always seemed like they had more time, and so things had been put off. But then Her husband had died and Grace had taken it so badly, and a wall had gone up. Grace had moved away from her, and there had been no opportunities to do the things they ahd put off.
She had always meant to tell Grace, when the child was old enough to understand, but Grace was never ready and now it was getting late. How did you tell a child the truth of her origin when it was so awful. It still made her shutter to think of it now.
Maybe she deserved her never ending end. Perhaps if she had done things differently Grace would have lived a completely different life. But then they would never have had their child. All those shinning faced she had looked into over the years, all those sweet eager children, still playing when surrounded by such poverty, by death, by war. And Grace was the only one she ever brought home.
It was not their fault. He had often said that. The men would have killed Grace as well. But all she could remember when she thought of that night was the chilling choice between their lives and that of so many others. He had always told her it was not like that, that they could have nothing to save that camp. That they had saved the children and that was more than anybody could have hoped for.
But he had not looked into the faces of those masked men and stood between them and Graces mother. He had not had the chance to say or do something that might have changed the outcome of events. He had not been told to take the child and run it he wanted to live. And he had not lifted a screaming infant from their mother’s arms and turn as the sound of gun fire ripped through the air. He had not felt the splatter of that child’s mother’s blood landing on the bare skin of his calves.
She had always meant to tell Grace these things, but when was the right time to tell a child of such evil? There was so much to say and so little time left to say it…
The door to her room was thrown open and in they came, the carers, two of them in full conversation about the weekend. They turned on her radio and stared the robotic routine with only a glance in her direction.
She looked at them, Carer A had blonde hair tied back from a chubby face, the brown eyes bulging as carer A laughed at carer B’s story, carer B’s face contorted, an unhappy meeting if a big noise and small eyes, decorated with access black hair. Carer B’s thick ugly tones filled the air as they worked. They were pitiful creatures, she though as they turned her over, only half alive. The blond one bent down to meet the old woman’s eyes as the other wiped her backside and changed her incontinence pad.
“Do you think she’s still in there at all?” Carer A said softly as they straightened her up.
“Old Bitch is long gone!” Care B pronounced as the rolled her onto her back, and heaved her upward on the bed, “God knows what keeps the body going.”
“I suppose it’s just a good thing she doesn’t know whats happening to her eh?” Carer A signed a fresh nightdress was from the drawer and rolled onto a chubby hand before it grabbed the old woman’s arm and began to put the garment on.
Through the growing pain and discomforting she chuckled to herself, little did they know! She was still there alright, she was just waiting for Grace to come and then they would see. She’d scare the living delights out of them, they wouldn’t know what hit them. Just as soon as her Grace got there….If only she could find a way to get Grace to come.