We took our granny to the home of the elderly when she was
seventy. For the next fifteen years, she sat in the same wheelchair next to the
same window, gazing out over the same flowerbeds. She consumed, mainly, cups of
tea. Occasionally, she would have a chocolate digestive with them. We visited
every Friday, but she hardly spoke a word. I wondered if she still recognised
us. The nurse said she had Parkinsons, Alzhemiers, and rapid-cycle bipolar
disorder. There was nothing rapid about her, if you asked me. Her glazed-over
eyes were as lifeless and watery as the tea she drank. She had become an empty
old shell. They pushed her to bed at night and they pushed her back to the
window in the mornings. They pushed her along the corridors as they had pushed
a thousand weary souls before.
One Friday, Granny wasn't there. The wheelchair was, but she
wasn't in it. And this is where, according to the policeman present, the
mystery begins. I feared the worst. I feared that she had somehow fallen, or
perhaps maybe jumped, through the window. It was, after all, as wide open as
wide open could get. But there wasn't a body in the flowerbeds, not even an old
woman shape left behind. There was nothing, but she was gone. As gone as Lord
Lucan or Elvis. As gone as Houdini during a vanishing act. And this is where
the sightings begin.
The first one is an account by a lollipop man working the
crosswords at a local primary school. He said he saw an elderly woman in
flowery pyjamas skipping across the road. He said she was both skipping and
whistling at the same time. She moved, according to him, with the speed and
grace of a prom queen on powerful stimulants. Like a teenage ballerina on her
way to the gala, he said.
The second was a CCTV recording inside the Co-op on Wimpole
Road. She was seen stealing a loaf of sliced bread and making off out of the
store without bothering to queue up and pay for it. She was also spotted soon
after at the local canal, sitting with her feet in the water, casually feeding
the ducks. When a groundsman approached her, she pushed him in and made good
her escape over a hedgerow, soaring over it like a hop skip and jumper of
Olympic standards. It gets worse. A lot worse.
Within that same hour she was seen passing over a busy
motorway on a bicycle with a basket on the front, like the one in E.T. This was
the point where I had to sit down to fully ingest what was happening with my
simple, senile granny. She pedalled over ten miles – ten miles! – to a
neighbouring town, where she entered an ice-skating rink and hired a pair of
size five boots. I quite clearly remembered my granny's shoe size, but there
was no history to my knowledge of any ice-skating experience. Apparently, she
did several laps unassisted and attracted quite an audience, leaving via a fire
exit and setting off all the alarms in the process.
Her next activity was an outdoor yoga session in the park.
She joined in with a community gathering, practising moderate exercise and
mindfulness. The rest of the class were impressed by her fluid agility. They
said that the light of the day drifted around her different postures. The way
she moved, she reminded them of The Karate Kid.
Next thing she did was book herself into a daytime champagne
spray party. Some bigwig chief exec was throwing a bash in a public function
room. Granny couldn't resist popping in for free refreshments. Along with
everyone else, she was soaked to the bone by the time she left, so she showered
off at the leisure centre next door, doing a few lengths of the pool while she
was in there. Backstroke, I believe, at quite an accomplished pace. Maybe she
was drunk and maybe she wasn't. It's unclear how much drinking actually takes
place at those spray parties. The attendant said he had to give her a verbal
warning for bombing into the shallow end.
After her dip in the pool, she went for a game of bingo and
won over a thousand pounds. After buying some fresh pyjamas and new slippers,
she handed the remainder into a Salvation Army box. They said she had a golden
soul and that the ether of the atmosphere was shifting around her as if she
were some kind of spiritual messenger from another realm.
How she had not been detained by the authorities by this
time was beyond me. I was hearing, but I wasn't believing. She was eighty five
years old, for the love of God. Surely we couldn't be talking about the same
woman. There had been a mix-up, this was a mistake, it was all an elaborate
set-up. The police officer informing me of all this was a prankster, hired to
play out the details of this joke. She was still here really, sat in her
wheelchair somewhere else on the ward, blending in with the furniture as she
had for the last fifteen years. I was the subject of a hoax. Except the
policeman was real. I knew it in my heart. It was etched all over his face,
deep within the lines of his puzzlement. My granny had not only disappeared
from the second floor of a nursing home, but gone on a sheer bonkers rampage of
unimaginable scope. And most surprising of all the utter madness, somehow, was
the fact that she hadn't paid for a loaf of bread. Granny – stealing! Never
mind all the otherworldly frolics, this perhaps was the hardest piece of the
jigsaw to get my head around.
They never found her, alas. All she left behind was a pile
of pyjamas and slippers on the precipice of a hill at the white cliffs of
Dover. How she got down there remains unclear, it wouldn't surprise me if she
hitch-hiked in a truck. The true mystery is if she tried swimming the English Channel
or not, for what chance did an ordinary old woman have of conquering those
waves? The chances were slim to none, but it was fast becoming apparent that my
granny was no ordinary woman. She was a maverick, a dynamo, a freak show, a
magician. As yet no body has been recovered, and there are no reports of her at
Calais.
Maybe she is still swimming in the waves, and maybe, just
maybe, the light of the day is still drifting around her.
©
ATD 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment