Yellow Mama E zine

Scraps

by Paul Radcliffe

         You don't have to believe in ghosts. It is completely up to you.  You don't see electricity but you still believe the light will come on when you press the switch. But as for an animal's ghost?  A cat? There is no argument, because I have seen one. I still do, since you ask. I can explain if you have a moment. 
           We see ghosts most days, and we think of them often.  They are not dreadful ghouls from a cheap horror film that somehow lodged in our imaginations. They are not hiding in the shadows, wailing occasionally to remind the privileged living of the injustices they suffered when they walked the same paths.  No. What we see, and think of more than we like to admit, are the ghosts of our former selves. Lost to everything but memory, but safe and secure in our past when life seemed simpler and the complications and sadness of age seemed academic. Days when the sun shone more brightly and the birdsong more joyful.                The leaves of autumn fell more slowly then, catching the pale sunlight. Frosts were harsher but winter had its own beauty, and when it came it was easier to understand that spring was not too far away. Spring would always come and life would go on. As we get older, we realise that one day spring would come—and go—but we would not be there to see it. There is a sadness to it, of course there is, but perhaps if we are lucky—there may be acceptance… May. 
         We do not live forever, but we sometimes live our lives as though we do. There is always tomorrow. There is always another day. So we tell ourselves, even as evening closes around us; because the truth is far harder. We are haunted every day. Our lives crumble like an old building of cracked windows and stained brickwork. What is the world when we are not in it? So we think, and we look for signs in the sky. A smiling face in the clouds or a pattern in the stars. Or, as in all the best—or worst—ghost stories—we return to the places that meant most to us in the days when the sun was shining. 
           And I was no exception to this unwritten rule. What we think of as the small things are not so small. Life is a patchwork quilt of memories that we choose to visit in death. Our lives often end in overcrowded hospitals, our frail bodies reduced to shells behind plastic screens and the last things we hear are ringing telephones. Choirs of angels struggle to be heard above the noise of the wards. I am familiar with the ways of hospitals, and in the end more than I would like. 
           There are a few traditions that barely linger in what I have sometimes heard called 'the cathedrals of life and death’. Some have gone forever. Do you know, for example, that in a room where a patient was about to die—and that, be assured, is not an exact science—was for a window to be left slightly open in order for the soon to be deceased's parting soul to leave. It still happens, I suppose. 
           I am no expert on what happens after death—let us say I am still learning—but I do have a little knowledge of time. We confront our ageing selves every time we look in the mirror, but what brings the passage of time home—to the point where we can no longer ignore it—is how it affects those we know. Or knew. 
          I worked in an old hospital for many years. It was, officially, Saint Luciana's Infirmary. It was, I think it's safe to say, widely respected in the local community, but it has long since been replaced by the mega structures of the new district hospital. Luciana's had a personal feel to it that I loved, and so I stayed. I trained as a nurse. I still have the metal badge to prove it, a little tarnished now. ‘Saint Luciana's’ in elaborate lettering. And a lamp.           For the local people, who were born and often died there, it was just Lucy's.  And Lucy's, like many such places in the past, had been built on a grassy hill overlooking the nearby town. It had grown haphazardly as the needs of the citizenry expanded. There was a cosy, friendly feel to the place, and the staff, by and large, knew each other by face if not name. Whatever the advantages of the newer hospitals—and in the time leading up to Lucy's closure we were reminded of them frequently—something was lost when Lucy's closed. 
         I have mentioned that I trained there. It was a happy time, but it was also a long time ago as my failing sight and aching knees sometimes see fit to remind me.  Or at least they did. In the days when I was a staff nurse, the grounds at Lucy's were kept tidy by various gardeners, most of whom we knew by name. At the edge of the grounds, there was a ring of trees and bushes that bordered the lawns. Their leaves would fall and form a red and gold carpet at the edge of the grounds. When I think of my time there, it is as if I am walking through a living art gallery of faces, of shades and impressions. Frost on the glass of my small room in Thakeley House, the hospital residence. The stern warning against visitors after 9pm. The smell of the cut grass in summer. And the work, of course. The pallor of the dying. The poor souls of the afflicted, tubes hanging from noses, call bells ringing and the breaks in the hospital canteen. Colleagues leaving. People promoted. One day succeeding another and shift work that blurs the weeks into months and the months into years. And we look in the mirror and see what time has done to us. And what it will do.
            Time also took its toll on Lucy's. I finished working there a year or so before its successor opened, but by then the endearing old institution was a mockery of what it had been. As the new hospital opened, there was not an immediate decanting of patients and staff into new wards (despite the overused term 'seamless', which we who remained at Lucy's heard on a regular basis). The grounds grew unkempt, maintenance reduced, and finally Lucy's closed. 
          Soon after, my husband died. I had seen death before, and he had some shameless abdominal malignancy that wore him down to the bone and I knew what was coming. Medical staff now go to seminars about that Serious Conversation. But I didn't need it. And so I began a life alone, and —as is the habit of the old—increasingly looked back on happier times. 
           Every day, Haunted by memories. Lucy's was, well, not abandoned, but mothballed. Boarded up and seemingly blindfolded until some use could be found. And remarkably, it could. It had a brief and absurd incarnation as—incredibly—a music school. The shades of the dead of Lucy's, serenaded by out-of-tune cellos and violins that on the few occasions I heard them, seemed to be begging for mercy. 
          I heard them because it was my habit, after my husband died, to walk up to the hill on an old path—increasingly overgrown— which led to an old ironwork bench. Its green paint was peeling, and it faced toward the bushes that now increasingly encroached on the once tidy lawns. The bench was spotted with moss and lichen, and a coil of iron work in the shape of leaves and acorns. And I sat on that bench, and remembered. Autumn, many years ago, and sitting there, looking toward the bushes as a faint sunset eased through the leaves. I would sit there, with the lights of Lucy's behind me seemingly there forever. There was a carpet of leaves at the edge of the bushes. 
          I would sit there, eating sandwiches on my break. And Scraps would emerge. A white cat with reddish pink eyes. I suppose he was a stray, as he seems to be now. He would emerge from the bushes, and I would hear that familiar swishing, crunching sound that can't be avoided when treading on dried leaves. He would pause and look at me. Clear message. Feed me. So I would throw him pieces of sandwich and he would eat them. We had our breaks at set times, and so it became almost a routine. I didn't know his name, so I called him Scraps. It suited him. Some weeks later I was moved to another ward, and a different shift, and although I still went to the same bench, I did not see him again. Just a few weeks, long ago. But the memory of Scraps remains. 
          I am unwell now, as befits my age. I will not trouble you with the diagnosis. Suffice to say it is undignified and painful, though I hope to be spared the worst excesses of both. It is, I am told, a matter of months or weeks, but I still take my walks and finish, catching my breath, on that old iron bench. I sit there now, counting down the remaining sunsets. And Scraps emerges, and crosses the dry leaves towards me. He does not sit, aloof and waiting as once he did. There is no sound as he comes toward me. The dry leaves are undisturbed. Our eyes meet, and Scraps, in the manner of cats showing affection, rubs against my tired legs. And he springs and sits on my lap, though I feel no weight. And time passes. He gracefully gets down and walks back, soundlessly, toward the bushes. Before he disappears into the greenery, he looks back once. I stand slowly, and walk toward the path home. I will come here tomorrow, and Scraps will be here. 
         I do not know how many more tomorrows remain for me. Scraps, I think, has a clearer idea. I do not tell anyone what to believe, except for this. When the night is falling, you would do well to remember the small things. And perhaps count your sunsets. As I do now. But not for long. 

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     Paul Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions. Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations. He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring feeding and practicing hypnosis.

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      Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Ángeles. His artwork has appeared over the years in Medusa’s Kitchen, Nerve Cowboy, The Dope Fiend Daily, and Rogue Wolf Press, Venus in Scorpio Poetry E-Zine.