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Met online with my lovely writing group today, and, as we frequently do, we did a picture exercise. This involves finding a random picture* and writing about it for a set time. Peter is a master at this, and usually finds us four or five pictures to choose from. This time Chris joked “Someone will show off by writing a story tying together all the pictures”. Of course I took that as a challenge. These are the pictures, this is the story. It was written in twenty minutes, so it’s as rough as a bear’s bum, but I’m quite pleased with it.

She sits by the open window for most of the day, staring out, head resting on one hand as she dreams her days away.  The other residents of the block wave and smile to her as they pass, or exchange a few words “You good today, ma’am?  You enjoying the sun?”  “How are you today, Mother?  How is your arthritis?”  “Do you need anything, Ma? I’m off shopping, is there anything you want?” If they have time, they stop to rest before dragging their bodies weary from work, their heavy bags, up the winding stair from landing to landing to their apartments.  On the few occasions she leaves her own apartment, she passes the stairs, winding to the top of this big, elegant building.  When she was little, she and her brothers would race each other to the top and then back down again, clattering and shouting until their father or mother snapped at them to be quiet.  When her nieces and nephews were small they would climb up and drop hazelnuts from above, trying to hit the centre of the tiled roundel at the foot of the stairs.  Occasionally they would drop them on the heads of the other residents, prompting complaints.   The memory makes her smile. 

Often the residents have their children with her when they stop on their way home; she hands them sweets from the jar she keeps on the window sill and winks at them “Don’t tell your parents, now!”  And mother or father will smile back at her in the pleasure of a shared joke.  Black faces, brown faces, yellow faces, she beams at all of them and they beam back at her.  When they rest before they climb the stairs to their homes, they often talk to her, sometimes about their days, their troubles, their small joys and pleasures, but often also about their homes, the places they come from.  She sees through their eyes countries she has never visited, animals she has never seen, landscapes foreign and exotic but, she can tell, in the words of those who speak to her of their lost homelands, loved, so loved.  The wide courtyard of the apartment block blooms with flowers, with fish, with birds, with mountains and narrow city streets, with animals and plants, with food, with smells, with long twilights full of insects and bright clear mornings full of birdsong and long noondays drowsy with heat. 

She sees their homes through their eyes, she who has hardly been further than the front door of the building since the day she fell.  Swinging on the cast iron bannisters, her foot slipped and she crashed to the tiles below.  Not a huge fall, not even one storey, but enough to break her back and put an end to her racing days forever.  No more running up and down the stairs for her.  Her brothers left and she remained, first with her parents, then alone, managing round the familiar apartment on crutches, neighbours shopping for her.  At first after her parents died she was lonely, so lonely, except when her brothers and their families came to stay, of course, but then the residential area, which had been smart and desirable when her parents bought this apartment, started to go downhill.  The straitlaced respectable middle-class couples moved out and gradually first poorer people, then immigrants, moved in.  At first she watched from the window in fear at these strange people, concerned that they might harm her in some unspecified way, rob her, or otherwise take advantage of her weakness.  But instead they smiled and waved.  She started to smile back, then to wave, then, after a small Vietnamese woman knocked on her door one day with a gift of fish stew, she opened the window and waited so she could say “Good day”.  And now she has ten, twenty, thirty friends she sees every day, who inquire after her health and fetch her shopping and share their food, and their dreams of their homes so far away.  She has never travelled in her body far from this apartment, but in her mind now she travels everywhere, back to all their homelands, the colours and scents and sounds vivid in her mind while she gazes from her window onto the world. 

*We usually use this site.