A Light Goes Out

Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

The cornices did not match the solid white of the ceiling. She couldn’t be sure if it was her eyes because she was losing faith in them. Last night she had seen her grandmother again, and she had been dead for thirty years. She knew it was thirty because she had heard talk on Tuesday, when they had assumed her asleep, of a surprise party and her mother had often said ‘Thank God you were nine and old enough to remember Granny.’ Something else her mother had said on Tuesday: ‘It’s not fair. She’s not even forty.’ She couldn’t recall to whom her mother had been speaking, but it had to be her sister or father. Jess, it would be Jess, since her father would not have been able to hold it in and lately there was one reason or another as to why he couldn’t come or had to leave not long after he’d arrived. She didn’t blame him. In her thirty nine years and counting – oh God was she counting – men had revealed their weaknesses in so many ways and Dad’s generation had a complicated relationship with their emotions at the best of times. It’s important to be kind and understanding when people are trying to be likewise in your presence.

Perhaps some dust had got into the paint or they had used a fresh pot on the cornices. They would have had to use a brush rather than a roller, so it might be something to do with the strokes. The more she looked – those bloody eyes again – the less confident she was about the colour. It was more to do with shade. The word penumbra appeared from nowhere, a ghost from a book read long ago in a hotel – a sort of hotel – in Switzerland. Funny really, because the book had been about a hotel in Switzerland, but then again that would be why she had found it in the library. It was something to do with a horizon, or when one colour bleeds into another in a painting of a horizon or sky or something like that. She had found a dictionary in which the first definition had been related to astronomy and she had had to read on to understand that the writer had been talking about shadows and edges. So that was why the word had appeared: the cornice was the edge and the mismatch was like a shadow. Kudos to her brain for not giving up.

Granny’s favourite seat was the one in the window, but sometimes she sat on the commode if someone had forgotten to shut it away. Whose job was that? A couple of weeks ago, Granny had lain next to her. She never spoke, which was strange because her memories were of a woman who had liked to talk. And sing, which was where she might have got that from. Granny knew lullabies and skipping songs and she had one about the days of the week. She kept chocolate limes that had gone soft in her pockets, and biscuits in a tin on top of the piano that no one played. The tin sat on a lace doily that matched the antimacassar, which was a word you would never forget. The piano smelled of polish and so did Granny, even though she was dead. The brain which was not giving up reminded her that the room was cleaned twice a day. It was hard to avoid the smell of whatever it was they sprayed from those clear plastic bottles. Whoever did the cleaning liked to leave the windows open. Granny had a sewing basket for running repairs and that was where she kept the plasters. Granny did a lot of there, there, let me kiss it better, it’s only a graze, you’ll forget about the pain soon enough.

Everyone liked the window seat and everyone was keen to tell her about the beautiful gardens and make sure she was up to date with the weather. She liked it too, but it was such a fuss having to ask someone to help her over there and it was too tiring without proper support for her back. You had to kind of twist your chest to get the best view and what she had discovered was the idea of the window seat was preferable to the reality. Besides, she had looked out of so many windows and she knew what to expect if no one was on hand to report on the lawn and the birds and the sun. There had been a time that whenever she looked out of one, she knew that down below would be a crowd or group of girls searching for her face. Mostly girls, but sometimes men; boyfriends, fathers. Also, crouched behind bushes and bins or standing next to motorcycles not caring who could see them, men with notebooks and cameras. Shouting her name, asking questions more suited to friendship than tabloid brutality.

It had been brutal for the most part, although the rule was you could never point that out. Behind the smiles were editors baying for stories or blood and hold the front page if they got both. It’s only a game, that’s what they had told her. She’d gone out with one of them for a while, but had not been able to figure out if it was work or love or love of work. It hadn’t ended well and after that he hadn’t held back. Now he was writing about the good times. She didn’t blame him for doing his job, and maybe that was what she had been doing: going along with it all, young and, for a while, not giving a fuck. The slow retreat from the headlines had been a relief. Not slow, partial. Because there was always someone digging through the ashes of your career in search of an angle that might interest someone and the curse of this age from which Granny would recoil is that someone is always interested. Longevity, her manager had once said, is all about persistence. But she had never asked for it, although now it would be nice. Instead of being persistent she had tried to fade away – she was alive to the irony – and it turned out that the person being persistent was the one who had followed her to this place and got the scoop of a lifetime. She prayed he would give the family a break and write something kind.