Click Clack

Lillian was sitting at her desk when the bomb went off.  The splitting white light threw her to the ground in perfect copy of her seated position - knees bent, hands poised as if still at the keyboard, her back hunched forward.  The top of her head hit the radiator, she felt the hard edge of iron against her skull, but the window hadn’t shattered, there were no shards of glass around her or screams from the pavement outside and that world carried on as normal.  She tried to move.  Her left arm jerked forward and fell limply to the floor.  She was eighty-four.  Retirement had never interested her.  She didn’t know it would end like this. 

Her right side was missing completely as if she were lying on a log of dead flesh.  Spit fell out of her mouth and trickled to the carpet.  With one eye she saw the face of her watch.  It was seven twenty-three.  She heard footsteps in the hall, voices saying, “Bye, see you tomorrow,” and “night.”  She grunted when what she meant to say was, “Help”.   Then she thought, that was a moment of panic.  I’ve got to calm down.  I can get out of this.  But she couldn’t.

The door slammed, the floor shook and there was silence.  She waited for the next footsteps but there were none.  She thought, I can’t die on this floor, my head jammed against the radiator.  The others in my office said, night, bye, see you tomorrow just like the people upstairs.  They didn’t think, Lillian will be on the floor in an hour from now or through that wall is a woman in distress.  They thought, time to go home, it’s late.  She stared at the underside of her desk, the place her knees had touched when she was upright.  Late had never held meaning for her.  For fifty years she’d looked at her watch and realised she’d missed supper.  

At ten past eight the phone rang.  It trilled it’s startling call amongst the empty chairs and screens gone black.  Three, four, five rings and it stopped.  She thought, they think I’m on my way home.

She’d come to London in the fifties.  She’d studied, succeeded, started her own business and met a man with whom she’d had six children but it hadn’t stopped her.  She’d arranged a system of help that had let her work; a housekeeper, nannies, au pairs and home helps - there was always someone to pick them up and cook their supper, she made sure they were never left alone.  She told them, “You don’t know how lucky you are.  Some children don’t have shoes.”  But they’d complained and pushed each other over.  They’d knelt by the letterbox, waiting. 

The phone rang again at five to nine.  First she thought, surely now, this time, they’ll realise and later when it sang out at nine-thirty, please.  But she’d never taken notice of their distress.  She’d ignored their attempts to reach her.  They’d grown up and left home, their father had died and the house of many bedrooms had reared empty above her.  They said, “come and live with us” but she’d refused, and when their calls had gone unanswered they’d learnt to shrug their shoulders and say, “she’s all right.  She’s probably working.” 

The temperature dropped and a chill set into her bones, slowly freezing her to her carpet ledge like a mountaineer defeated while the street grew quiet, the traffic thinned and night began.  She cried.  It wasn’t like her but her limbs were dead and her voice was broken.  Soaked in sweat turned cold she watched her life in pictures flick across her darkened mind, not the one she’d lived but the one she had coming: a chair in a window, a blanket across her knees, half dumb and fractured in the house she wouldn’t leave, unable to say no to soup, a nurse knitting in the corner while her children came and went; bedrooms she’d never see again, stairs she’d never climb.  Her children would say to their friends, “It’s what she wanted,” and to each other, “She wouldn’t listen.”  She tasted salt.  With the back of her good hand she wiped the tear away. 

She’d built a business out of nothing, she’d had six children; paralysis wouldn’t to stop her, an office floor and her head pressed into the radiator wouldn’t stand in her way, she would rather die.  But the hours ticked by, the night grew slowly thick with waking dawn and no one came.  She passed in and out of dreams where nothing mattered.  She thought the lumber heavy limbs were not her own.  She woke and thought, why am I here? and then remembered.  She slept and slipped away, slowly fading on her office floor and didn’t hear the day begin, the door slam but an inch enlivened by the sudden jerk of hands, the sound of voices, she felt her body lift.  She knew the ambulance rocked. 

Her children rushed to the hospital.  They said, “Don’t worry, mum.  We’ll look after you.”  When she came back to earth enough to sit upright in a chair and eat soup they said, “We’ve arranged everything.” 

Sunlight streaked through the window onto her lap in the house she wouldn’t leave.  The blanket across her knees was warm.  A nurse sat behind her knitting.  Click clack went the needles.  Click clack.