the last page

The ticking clock on the mantle, over the old wet wood gathered in the spring by a young man I paid five pounds to spend on sweets and things. A magazine, a football.
The logs that spit from the wet that got in the roof of the shed. Where the rats nestled and slept through the winter that was too long and hard and choked the life out the flowers and stormed about the garden rattling the windows.
The snow that bit its teeth into everything and gnawed at me in the night when the house was cold and creaked and I lay in the dark and thought of all the people that I knew that had gone. Like spent light bulbs, who flickered out and died, in armchairs and hospital beds. With rough gasps like back firing cars, coughing to get going again, but just whimpering and dying there, spilling their scalding tea on tartan blankets and eyes shrinking back to reveal the open mouths of dilated pupils as their souls flew out, up to an unaffected God.
Blue in the afternoon as the light set under the curtain crack, and found a few days later when the milk bottles sat uncollected and going off on the doorstep and junk mail post grew on their doormat.
The ticking clock on the mantle above the fire that cracks. It's joyous rhythm like a juvenile up to no good. Tossing a blade in his hands, following you about, waiting for you to trip and then he'll get you, he'll dig it into your bones or your heart, give it a snap and a tug, just give him the chance.

When I was young we went up to the city to watch the lights being turned on on the tree, the streets swelled with people, toffee apples and ginger beer, roast chestnuts and boats on the river, the boom of fireworks exploding, gasps from the crowd.
The lights went on and everybody cheered, I held my fathers hand in my mitten. My hat pulled down low by my mother so I wouldn't catch cold.
Sleeping on the train all the way home, waking in the morning in bed, put there still sleeping by my parents.
The fire cracks and I wake again, you're an old lady says the mirror, I can see wisps of grey hair above the frame. I can see the Christmas tree twinkling with the electric lights that my son put up before he went back to his family.
I twiddle my thumbs, hear the ticking clock and the birds calling in the garden an hour before night is really here.
The television, like a boring drunk, talks away nonsense in the corner of the room. Talking of game shows or earthquakes.
I leave the fire to burn to ash, I go to my room and slip into a cold bed.
I say my prayers to the room and in the dark I lay, floating like a body on a sea on a completely black night. I do not feel that I am sleeping and waking, I'm drowning and coming up gasping for breath. All night.
Till it is five in the morning and in the dark in my dressing gown I wander like a mummy through a tomb, about the rooms of my silent house. Among the things that the woman who lived here owned, some of which are a complete mystery to me now.
I am more like a sinking ship than a mind, more a caterpillar than a butterfly, more like a maggot than a fly.
I look at this old stooped-over heap wrapped in rags, shuffling in pink slippers.
Oh God what am I? Someone has been stealing pieces of me these last fifty years, and leaving behind someone else entirely. Who is this, standing in the shadows, breathing like cattle on a cold morning.
I cry, WHO ARE YOU? Give me back the woman! With dresses that hung so well, light falling on my long hair, turning to a band on a long warm night on the veranda while men as strong and firm as marble statues sat back and drank and watched, smoking their cigarettes and gulping down their whiskey. And in the morning lipstick smeared on their lips, they wrapped their arms around me and whispered lies that fell like honey in my ears.
This nag doesn't remember what the light in a man's eyes looks like. But I swear I do.
I leave her in the mirror glass, she shrinks into the kitchen and puts on a light.
I boil the tea and read the bible in the armchair and wait for the day to wake.

Twiddling my thumbs on a bench in the shopping centre waiting on the taxi.
The supermarket bags gathered around me like children in a storm.
Cancer, the doctor said, like an announcement to claim lost luggage.
The word strikes in my heart like a hammer to a bell and it rings a shrill sound that shakes my bones.
Children run around, adolescents hold hands and walk about in gangs. Prams wheel by and mothers talk together while businessmen pass with sandwich boxes swinging in supermarket bags, talking on phones, and I sit here unseen, thinking about X rays and doctors appointments.
I am being robbed in plain sight and all any of these people in their white gowns with their ballpoint pens and charts and frowns can do is keep an inventory of what is being taken from me. I am being strip-mined from the inside, until the hillside collapses.
Sometimes at four in the morning I feel a terror grip me and I think, How can I die? I am alive now. How can it be that one day I won't be here?
I should be able to blink and wake myself up and it will all go away, but there it is, it is ridiculous. I am going to sort of vanish, there will be something left behind, there will be a body and bed clothes but that's not me. I lay in my bed and think, this room will still be here, these things, my clothes, my hats, my walking stick will all be here, but I won't, and so they will all be pointless and won’t make any sense without me. How is that possible? Isn't that the greatest mystery, how someone can be, and love and hurt and feel one minute and then just be an object, like a chair or a stone, the next.
But then the sun comes up and the fear fades away with the beautiful light that comes over the hills. The world and the people, my garden and the smells of the flowers in the dew remind me that for now I am here. I will not float off just yet to some unseen God to have to answer for myself.
On the bench, twiddling my thumbs, resting with my eyes closed, I think how when I was eighteen my friend had a motorbike.
I sat on the back with my arms around the waist of his leather jacket and we rode down the country lanes, splashing through the brown muddy puddles and past the barking dogs. The trees blurring and the sky as blue as the eyes of someone you love.
I held my head back and my hair whipped about and I laughed so much with terrified excitement.
Sitting here with shopping bags, waiting on a taxi, I think about all the moments that led between then and now, and still I don't know how I got to this last page, nor what the book was about.