Bog Myrtle & Peat

I dreamed that I was able to visit you at your home in some large manse or country house. There were laurels at the window, and the first thing you said was that blackbirds sang in the evenings from the yews. You watched me as you said it, and I recalled from your interviews that sense of looming enquiry; how you would lay traps and wait for fools to spring them. 

I hardly knew how to expect you, and the scale and density of your shade slips through my hands as I try to record it. But if I reach far enough, I know that you were tall and a little stooped, in the latest or last months of your life. I wonder how much of you was conflated with the memory of my grandfather, who was also tall and slender; another man I only knew from clippings. 

We shook hands, but I felt nothing in your narrow bones to suggest the fire inside you. In health it was easy for you to master and preserve that exhausting niche, but in age and the sickness of forgetting, the performance tamed. You were cool enough to touch at last; the man they once called ogre and troll – irascible, incisive and obscure. Your smile was softer than I feared.

We did not sit. It wouldn’t have been right. But please, there was no need for you to quote those verses or build that wall of stories. You had already won me, and the effort strained you until at last you drew too long on a notion so that it hurt us both when you lost your way. You slipped, and bought time for yourself by asking me a question. 

How important is your home, you said. 

And I replied that I could not see beyond it. 

You began to nod, and you walked to the window saying Home is a life’s work.

Then I started to wonder if you were embarrassed. I know how you wanted this meeting to go, but now we are far from the comfort of a plan. In the old days, you might have dismissed me with a turn of your head. You would not suffer my company – not me – but this imagined version of you is lonely. You watch me from the corners of your eye, and I offer to lead you. I bring momentum to the room, and I find you funny in the gaps we lead together.

There is room for us to laugh, and in some momentary turn of confusion, you lean upon me. Perhaps that’s the most fantastical part of the dream; that you would ever lean and break from a lifetime’s performance. But here you are, with your hand on my arm looking out into my eyes and talking, not of yourself but the land and the people on it; a jumble of love and Holy lore, and then news of the leafed blade of a bronze age spear which was uncovered not far from here. It’s in the museum – would I bring it so that you could see? Your cautious eyes wide open, wide enough for me to consider doing it for you. And then the brows collapse. You’d asked too much, and worse, you’d shown that you could not walk out of this room and go yourself.

So you told me a joke, and then I saw ourselves in the dresser glass and the half-seen spines of books behind it. I could see you were tired now, so weary, and we turned to face the extra cushions in your chair; the too-many things arranged around the homely scent of urine and the moorland made of pill-jars where you spent days dreaming of birds in the April sun. 

I made to leave, but you called for Elsi and she offered me something to eat. Nothing more than bread and butter, which in any other household might have been castigation. But here it was a gesture of friendship. You asked that we should eat on a table on the lawn, but Elsi wouldn’t hear of it. As she closed the door and left, she smiled at me with a lifelong apology. Behind her, nurses pushed another resident down a linoleum corridor; I saw the red tank of a fire extinguisher, and the visiting hours pinned to the wall.

I have been awake for ten minutes, and yet already it feels like a year has passed. Your words are blurred and baggy as down, but the comfort is cold.