Low life
Sickened by myself
Jeffrey Bernard
My weekend evening home-help is a very nice, very large West Indian woman I call Cynthia. Last night, she called out to me through the hatch from the kitchen, `This tea in this pot, shall I throw it away?' I shouted back, almost screamed, 'It's not tea, it's coffee, and it's in a saucepan and not a fucking pot!' Silence descended, and then I said, 'Throw it down the lavatory and not the sink, otherwise you'll block up the bloody drains.'
There was quiet again and then I began to feel sick. It hadn't been the humidity of the day, insulin without food, no visitors and the silence — I hadn't been in the mood to listen to music — it was this awful anger and shame I get when I sometimes lose my temper at being stuck and held prisoner in my chair. Usually, when it hap- pens, and that's not really all that often, I let it pass, but I had snapped at her the night before as well and now repeating the tantrum made my eyes sting a little and I apologised to her. She was as nice as the pie that she would accidentally burn too if she made one, and went on to explain to me that it had been pointed out to her, when she trained for the job, that she must simply try to put up with the lousy tempers that the disabled sometimes lose.
She has enough trouble already. She has a one-year-old baby boy in St Mary's Hos- pital who has been made intentionally unconscious for the while by surgeons who operated on his throat last week. I had assumed that the boy — she had men- tioned him before — was much older and the fact that he had undergone the surgery on only his first birthday made it all the worse, although Cynthia herself wasn't seemingly too put out by it all.
She told me when I asked her that the baby's name is Courteney and how serious- ly and pompously West Indians name their sons. Courteney Kidd. I said to Cynthia that he already sounded like a West Indian fast bowler. She liked that and she swayed a little as she crooned something like, `Come back my baby and be as naughty as you like, just come back.' I told her that Captain Kidd was a famous pirate who sailed the Spanish Main about 300 years ago, but she already knew that although she asked me did I think Kidd had been a very bad man. I said that I thought it was probably worse to be Welsh than a pirate like Captain Henry Morgan, who was. I asked her how I rated on her care chart and she said that I wasn't too bad and that the worst and baddest tempers were to be found with those people who weren't just simple amputees but who were also losing their sight and hearing.
After a little while I said she should go and see how the fast bowler was coming along but she is always reluctant to go before her one hour is up even when there is little to do but listen to my rantings and ravings. She sat as she always does, when she's finished the washing up, on a tubular Conran chair and while I watched her won- dering how on earth she didn't flatten that S-bend steel she talked to me about the Albert Hall being haunted by two women and about how a UFO had landed in Mexi- co 40 years ago. I asked her, 'You don't really believe in all that bollocks, do you?' `I've got a very open mind,' she said, which she is always saying and which indeed she must have to visit this asylum at weekends.
To keep my hands busy, like lighting a cigarette, I gave her a nasty little plastic toy car, driven by a monkey, that came with my box of teabags. Jesus Christ. I sup- pose I shall now be thought of as being a racist, I reflected. The toy was tatty and I gave it to her I suppose to stop fidgeting with it and then for a split second I thought what Courteney Kidd really needs is a small cheque and how patronising that would be and what an awful way to forgive myself for shouting at his mother. And so my squirm-making train of thought puffed on to its terminus at the end of the Inter- Termazipan Line.
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