The Bench

‘Why a park bench?’ asked Claire, ‘Why does it have to be in a park?’
She asked the question because she had always imagined that the bench would be by the sea somewhere, up high maybe, on a cliff, perhaps even within a graveyard, a quiet spot in which you could look at the immensity of that angry blue and feel however you needed to feel. Of course, the bench would be for her mainly. She doubted that Ben would have time, what with the kids and the job and the wife and the coffee machine and the bread-maker, and ironing his shirts and polishing his car. And they were the only two. Or, there had been three of them, and then it was more like two of them anyway, when Ben got married, and soon there’d be one of them. And so she’d need the bench to get used to this, and for her it would be fine to sit quietly on it; she had nothing tying her to anything. Yes, the bench was hers. And she wanted it by the sea.
There was no immediate reply. The body on the bed remained still, but the eyelids closed on the face, gently and fully, and then there was a sigh, which through the quiet scraping rattle of her breath managed to have traces of that full, deep sigh of her mother’s which Claire had heard all her life. The sigh said: Don’t you know anything? Have I taught you nothing? Is there no hope for you at all? Claire knew that her mother would say something shortly, and perhaps the pain of seeing how hard this was for her, how dampened her anger had become, and with her anger gone had gone also that vibrant battling force which she had always maintained, that made her turn away. To her left she saw a bed just like the one her mother was in; to her right she saw a bed just like the one her mother was in. Two metres either direction had her looking at other bodies, curled under their white blankets. She had some idea that some people in hospital would speak to these people, would use the company that had been inflicted upon them to soften the experience with little smiles and the sharing of tales from the past, or at least of complaints about the instant mashed potato they’d been served for dinner the night before. Claire knew that her mother never spoke to them. Not that she could have done easily with words at the moment, but she could have done with her eyes or with a tilt of a question in her face, and yet she would not have. And neither, for that matter, had Claire herself. She didn’t even know their names. They were part of the enemy, they were part of the set-up , they ought to just disappear. And given that they did not do this, it was best to imagine they didn’t exist, that they were just there for show.
‘There’s people in parks.’ There it was, then, the response to the question, what she’d been waiting for. The voice was creaky and quiet; the words punched out through frail lungs. Of course, thought Claire, thinking of her quiet bench up in the graveyard crumpling under her, its slats splitting, leaving a rip in her skirt and a line of splinters leading up her bare legs, and her half squatted and half fallen in the middle of an upside down spiky triangle of wood. Of course, people. She wants them to come past, the pushchairs from John Lewis, the sticky lolly eating girls and boys, the harassed mums with their stands of hair falling softly around their flushed faces, the kind fathers with their Birkenstocks on; offering to take the pram for them, pausing in front of the bench to give their tired warm women a kiss, laughing at them with their eyes, with a touch of a hand. Perhaps a break, for the whole family, to wipe off the icelolly traces, to sit close, to rest the rucksack of jumpers and kagouls, just in case, to smile gimpily around, what a nice day at the park, how lucky that there’s a bench here, let’s take a photo, do you want to have a go little jimmy darling? Yes, of course. People. That’s who the bench was for, people like Ben had managed to become.
‘What do you want inscribed on it?’ asked Claire, and steeled herself for a few more moments looking around this ward which she tried so hard not to look around, as it followed her all the time, whether she was in the hospital or not. This time, however, the answer came straight away. ‘Nothing’. It was said with the fatigue of someone stating something so obvious that it really ought not to demand the effort of saying it at all, but given that the extraordinarily stupid question had been presented, the best tactic was to answer as quickly as possible so as to get the inevitably frustrating moment out of the way. Claire even wondered if they had had this conversation before, for this heaviness in her mother’s voice, and yet she had no memory of it. In Claire’s mind, she was sat on the floor still surrounded by the splinters of that broken bench, eyes squeezing out tears, and she gently rose up and looked out at the sea, and then back at the just-collapsed bench, at the back of it, where she was sure there had been an inscription. She wasn’t quite sure what it had said, but maybe merely In loving Memory of, what everyone writes, yet with her mother’s name, because they needn’t always be so different from everyone else after all, and this is what people did is it not? Really Claire might have liked it to say ‘For my Children,’ or “For Claire’, but this isn’t what people write on these benches, even though she knew that the bench was for her. At least, she would have known it was for her, for her loving memories, which is why ‘In loving memory of’ would have been fine. The broken bench has a smooth wooden continuation along it. It is a normal bench. And it is totally broken; at least, it could be fixed, but it would surely cost much more than it was worth, and someone soon enough would come and replace it with a new one. Or not, Claire realized, they may decide that hardly anyone used it anyway, and so there was no point.
‘Nothing at all?’ she said, despite being aware that questioning something that had clearly been decided was so obvious, was both pointless and guaranteed to inspire some anger, that she imagined would surely be a bad idea for her mother in this state. She was doing it anyway though she thought. Her mother was already angry just from having seen her: her folded arms, her smudged eyeliner, her small weighty frown, the frayed bits at the ends of her plimsolls. They were all infuriating her mother by the second; evidence as they were of that unlikely and terrible coupling that only Claire could manage: uptight clenching unfriendliness arm in arm with an inability to sort herself out as everyone else had.
No reply. Of course, it didn’t merit one. There was a silence in which Claire closed her eyes too, to join her mother, who still had her eyelids firmly and delicately down. She felt the failure of this, certain that her mother would feel her eyes shutting, her shutting out of the world, her not standing up to the situation. Couldn’t quite manage it, could you Claire, not quite. I mean you came and you tried to take it on, this situation, but no, you copped out and shut yourself off, look at you sat in your chair, clamping those arms over you, no warmth in you is there, none at all. Shut it all out, off you go. Claire breathed, feeling something rising in her and focusing everything she had on keeping it inside. If you have to, cry later, she told herself, don’t let her see, don’t let her see. When she opened her eyes, her mother’s were still closed, and Claire had no way of knowing if she had glimpsed Claire’s weakness in those moments, through a small window that the eye-shutting had drawn the curtain from, briefly, before snapping them shut again, and hiding herself inside in order to look up again. She felt exposed, none the less, as though she were suddenly naked. She waited a little longer, and then, in a voice much smaller than she had realized it might be:
‘But, mum, no one will know.’
She turned, then, and to hide the depth in her sigh and the rising which came back, dangerously, making her want to focus herself on something else, something fresh and far away from this creeping, immense and vibrating desperation. Over the ward were more beds, one two and three. There was a nurse. Claire heard her voice through the air, tinny as though from a poor quality television which had been slowed down, so that it was a squeaky drawl,; ‘ Well, let’s have a look at you, then, ooh much better, ooh lovely. Aren’t you doing well?’ The desperation inside her tensed, and filled, and Claire moved her head to the left, and to the right, taking in the steely metal bedframes, the crisply ironed blue of the nurse’s outfit. Aren’t you doing well, she heard again, and she didn’t know if she just imagined hearing it, or if the nurse said it again, just to be sure that the failing ears she was speaking to had grasped her words. What is this? She thought, with an urgency which dizzied her, and she felt her foot which had been on the floor seek it more firmly, and the leg that she had crossed over the other leg begin to prickle with pins and needles, to match the furious firing of her mind. What is this, Aren’t you doing well? What are they, these neatly arranged beds, this daily onslaught of routine, these timely smiles and chats? Claire wanted to stand, but she knew in herself that she would have fallen if she had, and yet she wanted to, for to sit, quietly, amongst such a show, such a false charade of continuation amongst the closeness of extermination, of the end, of that finishing line on which you can sit and pass out your final accusations and eek out your final bitterness, was her playing the same game, yes, exactly, talking about benches and such as though this person would be there, as though there was a way to feel and a way to remember, as though the facts were not that they were about to die, actually, and that they would be nowhere and those left behind would have a few more years left and then they would die also, and yet the nurses would still speak with their syrup, spreading it over their shiny floors.
In that uncanny way which her mother had always had of following what she was thinking about, before arriving at a completely different conclusion, as though she might happen across the same shop as Claire at the same time but decide upon a bright red dress for her, when Claire would have chosen a faded blue shirt, her mother replied.
‘I’ll know’, she said.