Thunderstone E-Book

Nancy Campbell

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 321

Beschreibung

*WINNER OF THE ACKERLEY PRIZE 2023* 'Here is a writer who knows better than most of us how to live.' Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings 'There is just one object I want to carry inside the van... It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a Thunderstone. I place this fossil on the windowsill, its surface gleaming like cat's eyes ahead of me on a dark road.' In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. There is no plumbed water and no electricity point in the wilds beyond its eggshell walls. As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in this unconventional place. But when illness and uncertainty loom once more, she must discover a way to hold on to beauty and wonder, to anchor herself in this safe space - her shelter from the storm. ___ 'The most thoughtful and soothing book I've read this year.' Daily Mail 'A beautiful and often very funny account of hope and healing in the face of illness and uncertainty.'TLS 'How to find beauty and wonder even in the most trying of circumstances'The Scotsman 'An uplifting, heart-filled read full of hope and love.' Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding

Leseprobe

‘Any book by Nancy Campbell has to be worth reading.’

Dervla Murphy

‘A humbling, honest, raw and deeply moving book that reminds us what it means to be alive. What it means to be human, to be ill, to be in communion with all with which we share this earth . . . how we dance through the songs we are given – no matter how dark or troubling the lines may be.’

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

‘Such a compelling account of deliberate living, in the best tradition of Thoreau, Dillard and Roger Deakin. Nancy Campbell’s deep knowledge of art, nature and other cultures is completely transporting, even while her story is set over a single year in a small caravan marooned in middle England. She blends the intensely local with the wider world with such skill. I couldn’t put it down.’

Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure For Sleep

‘One has the rare sense, reading this book, of a work that emerged fully formed. Vivid, intense, wry and clarified, as Campbell steps fully into the frame, she simultaneously makes a case for empty spaces: for the gaps, absences and edgelands through which change first comes . . . If this is a story of grief and illness, loneliness and heartache, one is left with the feeling that here is a writer who knows better than most of us how to live.’

Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

‘Nancy Campbell renders her life through the eyes of a poet from the midst of hardship, in scenes that are by turns humbling, humorous and exquisite. Her words dazzle like mica in the flow of a muddy river.’

Sarah Thomas, author of The Raven’s Nest

‘Peppering her poetic prose with fascinating stories and close observations of the natural world, Nancy Campbell brings us into the woods with her as she wrestles with the practicalities and emotional fallout of living alone in a remote caravan. As Campbell rebuilds her life she explores deeper issues of belonging, friendship and how to live with courage.’

Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding

‘Thunderstone goes well beyond mere memoir. Nancy is a badass, a wild woman corralling experiences of poetry, humanity and the natural world to shape visions of new ways forward for us all. Her forgotten nettle-patch beyond the boundaries of civilisation becomes a resonant setting for what is a work of the richest travel literature, written from a place of deliberate isolation. You carry it with you, long after finishing.’

Matthew Teller, author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem

‘The terra nova Nancy Campbell discovers in Thunderstone lies close to home – a pocket of overlooked and semi-derelict land alongside a railway line and canal in Oxford . . . This isn’t the city she has known, on and off, for two decades; but from the vantage point of her new home, she can see it, and the world that stretches beyond, through a fresh lens.’

James Attlee, author of Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown

‘Nancy Campbell writes of a world that has been shattered and reassembled, weaving intricate new patterns from the debris of the old. A writer of quiet strength, clarity and empathy, with a traveller’s eye for detail and the precision of a poet, she is the wisest and kindest of guides through heartbreak and beyond.’

Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish

THUNDERSTONE

OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

Fifty Words for Snow

The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate

Disko Bay

Navigations

Doverodde: Twenty Days in Denmark

How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet

for Sarah Bodmancomrade and collaborator

all these and most other kinds of stony bodies which are formed thus strangely figured, do owe their formation and figuration, not to any kind of Plastick virtue inherent in the earth, but to the shells of certain Shell-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, Earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place, and there to be fill’d with some kind of Mudd or Clay, or petrifying Water, or some other substance, which in tract of time has been settled together and hardned in those shelly mounds into those shaped substances we now find them.

ROBERT HOOKEMICROGRAPHIA; OR, SOME PHYSIOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF MINUTE BODIES MADE BY MAGNIFYING GLASSES, WITH OBSERVATIONS AND INQUIRIES THEREUPON

CONTENTS

October 2019, and aftermath

June

July

August

September

Acknowledgements

Notes

October 2019, and aftermath

‘Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,’ [Margaret] said. ‘This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilisation that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth.’

E. M. FORSTERHOWARDS END

What is your name? says the nurse.

Anna, says Anna.

Can you tell me who this is? The nurse points at me. I sit on the plastic hospital chair, my chin sunk into the collar of my coat, haggard after travelling overnight from Munich.

Nancy. Anna pronounces the two syllables carefully. There’s warmth in her voice. No rising intonation, no question. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a stronger sense of what it is to be loved than at this moment. But love isn’t what I want now.

Where are you, Anna? says the nurse.

In the pub, says Anna.

As the first rumours of a virus in Wuhan circled the world, I was sitting on the fifth floor of an Oxford hospital, watching my partner as she slept. Anna’s face was wan, her arms mottled by deep bruises. A baroque arrangement of tubes surrounded the bed, like briars in the fairy tale. Anna’s life had been saved by a rare procedure known as mechanical thrombectomy, which sends a catheter through the blood vessels to siphon clots from the brain. I imagined the surgeon’s intricate manoeuvres. As in the movies when the actor finds the combination to a safe in a race against the clock, turning a dial by torchlight in a dark room.

When Anna awoke monster was one of the few words she could say. Monster! with a look of incomprehension and terror at her own act of speech. What dark forest was she lost in? Did she mean herself or me – or something else? As the days passed she found other words, and strung them together for me to unravel: In the pub. You have a beautiful theme.

Nurses came with tests: first, a piece of paper on which was a pattern of stars. Anna was instructed to draw circles around each of them. Since her right arm was paralysed, she took the pen in her left hand, and scribbled out all the stars. ‘Let’s try again,’ said the nurse kindly, as if it didn’t really matter, presenting Anna with an identical sheet, and explaining the task once more. Anna struck through the stars furiously, as if wishing to obliterate a whole galaxy. When I left the ward, the nurse followed me. Beside the machine where you put in a coin and got a cup of bad coffee, she gave me a leaflet called What is Communication?

She said: ‘You do know, that Anna has very severe aphasia?’

I did know. I didn’t.

I put a coin in the machine, and hesitated.

‘The coffee’s shit,’ said a voice behind me. ‘My dad likes the hot chocolate.’

I punched the button for hot chocolate.

Boiling water spluttered onto the milk powder. I turned to see a man in his sixties, dressed in water-sports shorts and a T-shirt that said Oxford Kayak Tours. He exuded the confidence of a consultant.

‘Thanks for the advice. It looks disgusting.’

He shrugged. ‘You could bring her a Thermos.’

I gazed across a row of beds covered in identical blue blankets. A window ran the length of the ward, and I watched weather moving across the valley, sheets of rain muting the autumn colours of the distant woods. Oxford’s dreaming spires are spoken of more often than the soft hills that hem them in. When I first arrived in the city as a student, a college doctor warned me that my lungs would miss the air of the northern moors: the Vale of the White Horse contains pollution like smoke in a bowl. The doctor could have applied his theory to people, too. I didn’t intend to stay once my studies ended, but however many times I left, circumstances would draw me back. The long chalk range of the Chilterns, to the south and east, and the low scarp slope of the Berkshire Downs were gently but persuasively encircling. Through twenty years of travels, Oxford remained my poste restante.

Anna had allowed me the freedom to travel, but recently she had seemed to care less whether I returned. We were slipping out of each other’s orbit with an ominously steady trajectory. I worked away from home more and more, and when I was offered a fellowship in Germany, I took it. Anna did not come.

A few months later, I was hosting a dinner for a wild cohort of artists in my apartment in the Künstlerhaus, a converted baroque palace beside the River Regnitz. I heard myself talking wistfully about my partner, who being an interpreter was so much better at languages than I was, then making excuses for her absence that did not even convince me as I uttered them. Later, while rinsing the delicate wine glasses, I resolved to travel back to England to have a conversation about The Future, which might mean Separating.

The night before I was due to leave, I received the phone call. The one that comes from an unknown number and rings and rings until you know you have to answer. My suitcase was already packed.

In our basement flat, I begin to unravel the disarray that amassed before Anna’s hospitalisation. The briars had grown until they hid the whole castle. Scans of Anna’s brain have revealed that she’s suffered at least one ‘undocumented’ stroke in the last few years. Such a neutral word. Behind it lies an incomprehensible enormity: that Anna experienced brain trauma and did not receive help, that we continued to struggle through the days oblivious to her needs. I flick back through the calendar in my mind, again and again, wondering which moment things changed. I view our lives together in a different light. The behaviour that puzzled and disturbed me: why every time I left for a few days the flat descended into chaos, so that I dreaded returning home; the dishes unwashed, the loose change scattered over the floor, the unopened mail stuffed down the back of the bed and the sofa, inside books; one hundred small tasks begun and never completed; the spice rack that never made it onto the kitchen wall; the escalating library fines; all the mysterious tote bags lying around, each filled with lunches that were never eaten, a banana and a Müller yoghurt and a bottle of fizzy drink – some several months old, a black coagulation of the organic and the almost imperishable. In among the ordure, I find pockets of sanity even more heartbreaking than the mess: notebooks, in which Anna had written out her favourite poems since she was a teenager; her violin case; a box full of beautiful hand-painted wooden cups, the inside lacquered gold, wrapped in a Moscow newspaper from 2002.

As I stand among the junk, the realisation comes to me that Anna has been ill for a very long time. Perhaps as long as I’ve known her. I trace quirks of character back, wondering at their significance. An impatience of background music. That listlessness and torpor, which botched a final stab at romance this summer. I’d booked a boutique hotel in Paris, but Anna didn’t want to get up to catch the Eurostar, so I went alone, to a muted enjoyment of the king-sized bed, the luxuriant claw-footed bath. My annoyance dissolves in horror that I did not see how ill my partner was. Could I have prevented her stroke with better care? I was scrupulous on my travels, precise in my observations of other places, but where had my attention been when I was at home?

During the shortest days of the year, I rattle between the damp Oxford flat and my rooms in the Künstlerhaus, aware that one represents a possible future, and one does not – but which? I put my money and my hopes on the Künstlerhaus, as I must in order to keep moving, although both seem equally dreamlike. The rose garden by the Regnitz a glistening daydream, and hospital vigils a dimly remembered nightmare. No one can choose what dreams they dream, or when they wake from them. I can board a train, but I cannot leave these visions behind.

The howl is an animal that stalks me now. A silent, unpredictable, chest-wrenching, bent-double, dribbling-out-of-a-mouth-that-will-not-close sorrow. Like all illegal and dangerous, unconventional and unsightly pets, like the packs of suburban pythons or tower-block tigers, it needs to be kept hidden away. But my howl won’t stay locked in the basement we once shared. The smallest whiff of nostalgia lures it out. I’m in the ward at lunchtime when the aide brings Anna egg mayonnaise sandwiches, cut into tiny crustless triangles for patients who are in danger of choking on their food. I remember the picnics I made our first summer together. In her honour, I elevated egg mayonnaise to a high art. No dill, no mustard now. No cracked black pepper. No thinly sliced radishes. Anna makes a face, and sends the plate away.

Later that afternoon, waiting in a November rainstorm for the number 10 bus (always infrequent), the howl breaks up and out until I seem to be melting into the oncoming night and torrential rain. I’m ecstatic with grief, oblivious to the street.

The traffic lights turn red. A silver Toyota stops, and the driver rolls down the window.

‘You all right, love?’ I recognise the hot-chocolate man. Headlights twinkle on the gutter. I gulp. The howl is angry to be interrupted. It is far too soon.

‘Yes.’ The lie hurts, my ears ring as if I’m a diver surfacing with the bends. Realising I may need an excuse, I add, ‘I was just in the hospital.’

‘Me too. Where do you need to get to? I’ll give you a lift.’

I drop weakly into the passenger seat, and buckle up. His car smells of Opal Fruits.

The lights change. A vague memory of normal behaviour prompts me to ask: What do you do?

‘At the moment, I’m looking after my mam and dad. But usually I buy and sell things,’ he says mysteriously.

‘What sort of things?’ I ask. Looking sideways, I notice he steers with one wrist on the wheel.

‘Oh, vintage cigars, photographs, all sorts of stuff. I got started with conkers in the school playground. Used to soak them in vinegar so they were invincible weapons. I was making a killing. The head teacher announced in assembly: “Will the little boy who is selling conkers please stop it?” So I had to pack it in.’

‘Fools,’ I say. ‘They should have put you in charge of the tuck shop.’

He drops me at the corner by the war memorial. Then, an after-thought, ‘What’s your name?’

I tell him.

‘You can call me Sven,’ he says, and drops a beat. ‘Short for Svengali.’ With a high yelp, the kind of laughter you hear from those who are desperate or deeply despairing, he hits the accelerator. I have a feeling that Sven and I are going to walk the same road for some time. But I will definitely not share his moccasins.

The definition of shock was unknown to me. I drifted through the days in a haze of bland apathy, missing deadlines, failing to answer emails. In her memoir of the aftermath of her son’s death, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, poet Denise Riley writes of grief as a rupture, ‘this curious sense of being pulled right outside of time, as if beached in a clear light’. To resist those tides of timelessness I kept a new timetable saved on my desktop, so I could track Anna’s relentless schedule in rehab. Physio to help with mobility, and other activities to adapt to reduced mobility. Craft. Speech and Language Therapy. (Someone who had often told me of the thrills of simultaneous interpreting, Anna now seemed to be interpreting herself, reaching deep within to slowly excavate a language no one else knew.) Understanding Your Stroke, a course to build empowerment and autonomy. After a few weeks, Understanding Your Stroke disappeared. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Did you graduate?’

‘It was rubbish. The psychologist he. She was rubbish. I did not wish to do it.’

I laugh at Anna’s characteristic hauteur, unchanged by stroke. Thirty minutes of someone lecturing you on your brain injury might indeed be more tedious than the daytime television on the ward.

We sit side by side on her bed. The foam mattress sighs when I settle on to it. Over the winter I’ve got used to hospital beds, articulated like model dinosaurs, their surprise elevations at a button’s touch. For a few months, the nurses locked the sides of the bed to prevent Anna falling out. It is a relief when these barricades – and other safeguards against everything going wrong – start to come down.

We run out of things to say quite quickly. We had so very little to say to each other before, and now that there’s such an enormous event to discuss, there are no words. We never held much store in chit-chat. Besides, Anna gets so tired, and I get so distressed.

Therefore, we only say essential things.

Today I am beating around the essential thing, the thing I’d hoped to discuss in different circumstances months ago – that I consider our relationship over, but I am still here, on her team. I meant to tell her last time, and the time before that. I didn’t have the courage. And I was wary in case the news might affect her recovery. I cannot procrastinate any longer. Now even the kind doctors are asking about The Future. Is our flat adaptable? I point out that we don’t own our flat. We can barely cover the rent, let alone make improvements, if the landlords allowed us to do so. The kind doctors seem surprised to be faced with a couple so unsettled and impoverished and I feel a gnawing sense that I have not done life right, not at all.

Now it looks as though I am going to do it even less right, by casting an explosive device into the midst of Anna’s recovery. But I cannot hide from my heart. I believe in telling the truth, even a hard truth – especially to the people I’m closest to, who are inevitably those I will hurt most. Duplicity is too insulting. When the truth is told, everyone can share equally in a story. As I voice my doubts, I realise that, of course, Anna has long had her own.

‘Yes,’ she says, with a faraway look. ‘We just missed our window.’

She takes my hand and squeezes it, hard. There is a long silence.

‘Well, I’ll go now,’ I say.

‘I’ll see you out.’

‘No really, it’s okay.’ I know what a palaver getting into the wheelchair is, and she needs that energy for other things. Anyway, the wheelchair seems to have disappeared. Another problem to solve. I will ask the nurse.

By way of answer she swings her legs heavily off the bed, first the left, and then the right. Slowly she eases her feet onto the ground, as if unsure that it is really there. Slowly she shifts her weight forwards, until both feet bear her up. She is standing.

My exhausted heart wrenches again. To see someone who has been prone for months stand independently upright is like a remembered piece of music. The music is uplifting, and also slightly ominous – a Wagner overture perhaps. I’m afraid Anna will fall, and if she falls, she can’t reach out to brace herself. The sight seems to contravene and confuse all concepts of space, as when you look at your surroundings from upside down or try to cut your own hair in a mirror. Surely our positions are somehow reversed, and I’ve been laid flat out on the floor.

‘Come on then,’ she says.

And with not a little pride she lifts her right foot and places it down gently, and then her left, and she is walking. Her concentration as intense as that of an astronaut, removed from the gravity of a familiar planet. Astronauts train for years to enter space, but descent is different hurdle altogether. ‘Returning to Earth brings with it a great sense of heaviness,’ wrote Buzz Aldrin, describing his life after the first moon voyage, ‘and a need for careful movement.’ Beside me, slowly, heavily, in her baggy leggings, down the blue linoleum corridor to the doors that lead into the winter night – and to our flat, and my train to Brussels, to the reading at the Literaturhaus. We move side by side, and despite now being severed, at last, being more separate than we’ve been for a decade, we are still so close that I sense each impending trip, feel in my own body the constant efforts Anna makes to correct her balance. Balance is the ongoing repair of the body’s endless falling. The rawness of our (now, at last) shared anguish is an odd bond in an environment where drugs and television are provided to minimise pain. At the nurse’s station we pause and she leans on my arm for a few seconds.

‘Hello, Anna, making a run for it?’ says the nurse.

‘Please can you let Nancy out?’ she says with dignity. The security doors can only be opened by staff.

The door sighs shut behind me and I look back through the small squares of wire-reinforced glass. Anna stands in the corridor of the institution that has been her home for some months now, looking after me. We pause, separated by the grid. Then, lifting her right leg as if a great weight is tethered to it, and setting it down, she turns and begins the long journey back to her room.

‘It’s easy to find, just drive through the main entrance and take a right after the giant sunflowers.’

I always gave pedantic directions when booking the taxi, but drivers still got lost in the hospital grounds. As the date of Anna’s discharge approached, she sometimes spent an afternoon at the flat, so she could practise Living at Home. (It was a terrifying prospect; the physiotherapists were bombarding Anna with questions about the safety of steps and showers.) I’d await a phone call from an irritated taxi driver, implying the Centre for Enablement and Spasticity Clinic did not exist.

As we waited by the hospital entrance one afternoon Anna asked if I would continue to live with her for one more year, but now as her primary carer. ‘I can’t do this alone,’ she said.

What had happened to The Future? I’d been too preoccupied with keeping the howl in check to make any plans at all. As the black saloon cruised through the drab streets behind the golf course, I made my decision. In honour of our former conspiracy, I said yes.

In Germany I pack my books into boxes. I return to Oxford via readings in Barcelona and Madrid, travelling across a frightened Europe as the first cases of Covid are confirmed. At each airport I can feel border doors slamming behind me. It’s raining at Heathrow. The coach speeds down the M40 and through the Stokenchurch Gap, the grand chasm in the steep chalk cliffs that opens onto the Vale of the White Horse. The crumbling white walls of 88-million-year-old stone pass in a blur, and ahead lie the wide fields and low hedges of Oxfordshire, the outline of the Wittenham Clumps, above which cumulous clouds gather, and a horizon disappearing west towards Wales. The coach rolls down Headington Hill, under chestnut trees bursting into spring green. I walk the final mile along the Iffley Road and past the Greyfriars, my suitcase rumbling through puddles behind me. The hipster baker who keeps irregular hours is closing for the night. He’s left a crate of unsold sourdough baguettes on the pavement with a handwritten sign: Help yourself. I do. Bread and salt, the symbols of housewarming across so many cultures. A welcome-home gift. Maybe everything is going to be all right.

Who was I kidding? I unlock the front door, and find our corridor under an inch of sewage.

Anna was discharged a few days before lockdown. Due to the pandemic all outpatient therapies were written off, and her support worker was not permitted to visit. The Stroke Association hotline was silent. After living on the ward for months, she was suddenly alone. We were suddenly alone.

The first weeks were terrifying. Anna smashed every single glass we owned, she put pizzas in the oven still on their polystyrene bases, and pulled up the tulip bulbs I had planted in pots on the patio. Everything was a weed to her. One evening I heard a squeak in the other room, then silence. I rushed through to find her standing holding the curtain. It was in flames. I snatched it off the rails, bundled it up into a ball, doused it in the washing-up bowl. That night, I worried about sparks moving under the carpet, spreading secretly through the apartment and trapping us in an inferno.

It was not really a flat for the uncoupled, and despite Anna’s generous offer I didn’t think it would work to continue to share a bed. I pulled a bookcase out at an angle from the wall by the kitchen to make a private corner, and threw some blankets down on the tiles. From this perspective, before I fell asleep, I could see black mould creeping over the skirting board. The mould was a souvenir of the sewage. Like a bad conscience, every time I wiped it away, it returned.

I established a routine, unaware that it would continue for months: qi gong each morning, moving as much of our bodies as we could; then meals, equally slow and sombre. Anna had arrived home in a taxi, with a bin bag containing her clothes, and two wooden objects she had made in Craft: a birdhouse and a chopping board. The latter was a kitchen aid for her one-handed future. A spike extruded ferociously from one corner, to keep vegetables in place under the knife. Anna had hero-worshipped the debonair food writer Michael Ruhlman, but now she turned to the example of Michelin-starred chef Michael Caines, who lost his right hand in a car accident. She set out to learn to cook again, and spent hours meticulously chopping onions and leeks pinioned on the spike. These efforts were grimly rewarded; silent tears accompanied dishes to the table, the plates soon pushed away, our appetites gone.

Cherry trees blossomed and the avenues grew greener. Children painted rainbows in windows facing the street. It did not rain.

Questions arose: Can a paralysed limb feel pain? Where did those new bruises keep coming from, and should we tell someone? The changes to Anna’s body were apparent, but what scribbled stars were shooting through her mind?

Ambulance sirens sounded more frequent but further away. The ice-cream van twinkled round its flat lure every day. People began to talk of things not ever going back to normal.

I read Anna’s discharge letter. Perhaps it would have some answers. After several pages listing the physical repercussions of the stroke, it crashed to a conclusion with ‘cognitive assessment’. ‘In comparison to the patient’s estimated pre-morbid functioning, the results indicated changes to aspects of memory, processing speed, abstract reasoning, and flexibility of thinking. The results were fed back to the patient, but she had difficulty coming to terms that some changes had occurred.’

Some stroke survivors experience lability – intense emotional reactions, such as laughing or crying. The word labile comes from Latin labilis to fall and, yes, there was a vertigo about Anna’s uncontrollable weeping. She seemed to have drifted very far away. I felt unmoored, not knowing whether the tears were a true reflection of her psychological state or if she was experiencing a disruption in her brain’s neural network. Either way, I felt powerless. When someone is crying in another room, you hear only the middle pitch of the agony, not the silent shudders and the tired ebbs of emotion. Anna’s sharp howls were punctuated by a long silence each side that I knew was beyond solace.

As if degrees of weeping were a shared line of communication, the slightest setback sent me into a maelstrom too. I tried to hide my distress from Anna, but every night, after she’d gone to sleep, I wriggled down into my sleeping bag behind the bookcase and wept.

In the bathroom, I take Anna’s right arm lightly in my own and ease it away from her side. This is her dominant hand, also once commonly found holding a cigarette, sharpening a Blackwing pencil, balancing a Sabatier knife, stroking a keypad. This is the hand she fucked me with. Her fingers now have an instinctive resistance to me that the rest of her body has never demonstrated. They curl back when I touch her. This is how I discover that paralysis does not mean no movement. Anna has made an excellent fist. But a fist is not what is needed now.

I swizzle the lever on the silver nail clippers, and prise her little finger straight. An iron fist: she winces. Three swift clicks to pare down the pale lacuna. She inhales sharply. I’m nervous about cutting her. The skin is too soft: a velvet glove. These nails are thicker than those on her left hand, as if grown with greater concentration. I work along the nails, scraping musty gunk out from under them. We’re all being told to wash our hands more often, but Anna is definitely not doing so. How to wash your hands with one hand? Like the old joke about silent applause. Was it even a joke? I can’t remember.

Anna lowers her right hand gingerly into the sink by holding it in her left as if it is strange to her, and gasps when it hits the lukewarm water. Her arm has grown so thin. I soap my own hands and swoosh them around hers, holding them in mine as I did in former times.

Day blurs into day. The nights grow longer again. I begin to see a therapist. It offers a more companionable way of weeping. We talk of alchemy, and what is underneath the dross. I wake myself in the night to write down my dreams. I dream the world has been taken over by a pandemic. The fact of living through a pandemic seems so implausible that I disbelieve the dream even as I dream it, but when I wake it is the only aspect of the dream true to reality.

Reality becomes virtual and moves online to smaller and smaller screens, and work becomes streams and threads and scrolls from which people can never go home – people are already at home. And they stay at home, unless they are in hospital – and there are more people in the hospitals than the hospitals can hold.

Sometimes our neighbours bang pans in the street. Soon it will be a new year. I am really looking forward to ringing out the old one. I order a bottle of good red wine, and we plan a feast that would not disgrace the repeat episodes of Floyd on France we’ve been watching. On the last morning of 2020 I take Anna her coffee and toast as usual. I double-take at the sight of what is in the bed.

‘It’s worse than it looks.’

‘Oh my god. Do you mean it’s not as bad as it looks?’

‘No. I mean, yes.’

Anna’s hair is matted to her skull, her face is smeared with blood. There are streaks of blood across the floor. Her left eye is blackened and puffy and is not looking at me. At least she is able to sit up.

‘What on earth happened?’

‘I think I fainted. I’m fine.’

‘I’m sure you’re fine, but we should get someone to check everything out. Especially as tomorrow is a holiday.’

I call for medical advice, on the smartphone that is increasingly my only connection with The World. Anna’s coffee goes cold as we sit side by side, answering the routine questions. Are you bleeding? Are you in pain? Anna looks exasperated. She is always in pain.

‘Can you get yourself to hospital?’ asks the operator.

‘Well . . .’ says Anna.

‘No,’ I say firmly.

I wash the blood from her hair, rinsing again and again with a teacup until the water swirling down the sink runs clear. Just in time. A top-notch ambulance team arrives and whisks Anna away to A&E. Late in the evening she is escorted home with stitches in her eyebrow and a new diagnosis to add to her collection: a fractured zygomatic bone. New year, new scars.

A friend sends me a parcel. Inside the brown paper is a little square of striped linen tied with string and, inside that, two heads of dried yarrow. The minuscule star-shaped flowers are light pink on one sprig, on the other dusty white. Sarah writes that she found the yarrow growing among the grass on a Neolithic tomb in Scotland. Now, on my short daily walk down to the Thames, I notice yarrow everywhere in hedges and verges. It is a plant of visions: the stalks are scattered to tell the I Ching; applied to the eyelids, it is said to bring sixth sight. The Ancient Greeks believed Chiron the centaur once taught Achilles its use as a balm for wounds; it was rumoured to originate not from pollen but the particles of rust he scraped from his spear during the Trojan War. The botanical name Achillea millefolium translates as ‘Achilles’ thousand-leaved herb’ but it is also known as woundwort, nosebleed plant (it starts and stops them), old man’s pepper, devil’s nettle, sanguinary, thousand-leaf and thousand-seal, bloodwort, herbe militaris, knight’s milfoil. Starlings line their nests with the leaves, and lovers should place them under their pillow to bring good fortune.

Even in the most cramped and temporary city digs I have tried to find a means of growing things. Now iridescent bulbs hover in hourglass jars on our windowsill, catching the winter light, sending their roots swirling down into the waters below. A surprise effusion of blue and white to scent the warm room. Watching the hyacinths grow, knowing yarrow is hidden in my pocket, my anxiety diminishes. We are lucky to have outdoor space, a shady backyard, but the landlords have conspired to cover every inch of soil with gravel or concrete. This doesn’t dissuade me. I order narcissus and snowdrop bulbs, and bury them in yoghurt cartons. In spring when the days start to lengthen I plant lettuce seeds in egg boxes, placing each seed gently a few millimetres away from the next. Distancing.

Two weeks later, tiny leaves sprout from the compost.

I post on social media asking for advice on assembling the grow-home. It was one of Anna’s last purchases before her stroke, and I can’t find the instructions. The many hollow metal struts that somehow interlock and hold up the plastic canopy lie in a heap on the paving slabs, like a game of giant Jenga. I have no opponent, and I never do discover how to slot them into place. I transplant the seedlings to a window box: this offers less protection from the elements than a grow-home, but I hope for the best.

A family of foxes digs an earth in the scrubland beyond the fence. The goldfinches and sparrows and the fox with half a tail are our only companions.

At night I am woken by our neighbour’s garage light, which flickers on every time a wild creature passes. It stays lit for longer than any animal would linger, then there is darkness again.

The traditional lands of the Naskapi people are the tundra and forest of the Labrador coast. In winter they hunt caribou on the vast plains of the interior, but herds cannot feed where the snow becomes too deep or too firmly packed by the wind. They move on. Naskapi hunters traditionally use the scapular bone or shoulder blade of a caribou as a divination tool, a map to determine where to travel next.

First the hunter must dream of herds of caribou. This is encouraged through sweat bathing, and a mesmeric rhythm is established by drumming or rattle shaking to induce visions. The dreams are often vague regarding the location of the herd, and so on waking from the trance, the hunter consults a clean, dry caribou scapula. The bone is placed over a fire so that it cracks and scorches. These chance fissures are then ‘read’ to determine the location of caribou and the route to be followed towards them. Thus the hunt moves to new pastures rather than going over old, depleted territory.

Sometimes the scapula will give an answer the hunters do not wish to hear, but there are ways to circumvent the original augury, by performing further rituals. Sometimes, if the reader has incurred the spirits’ wrath, the scapula lies.

I peel a ruby grapefruit and share out the segments between us.

‘What do you want from life, hon?’ I ask.

Anna looks as serious as the question demands, and says, ‘I want to live with grace. It is hard to have grace now, but I will do my best.’

I struggle to keep my cool in the face of this devastating display of fortitude, and continue my questions as planned. ‘Should we stay together? This arrangement seems to work okay.’ I can’t imagine any other life at present. But Anna is more practical.

‘Yes. I mean no. We should live apart. You can visit me any time,’ she adds kindly.

I don’t have a scapula, but I have downloaded an I Ching app for my phone.

I ask it the same question, and the response comes back: thunder over thunder. Poplar fluff, like snow. In winter the thunder sleeps beneath the earth. Now at the turning point it arises slowly. Know all movement is reinforced by rest. For the return to health after illness, look to the return to understanding. Only after estrangement will it come.

We are listening to Desert Island Discs. An elderly etymologist is telling Lauren Laverne about his difficult childhood. The radio is a good preventive against tears. Today, lunch is tomato soup and half a bagel each.

Jewish mythology relates that in the womb the soul knows all the secrets of heaven, but at birth an angel presses a fingertip just above the child’s lip, which seals each of us to silence. The impression of the angel’s finger is lasting: it becomes the philtrum. Our faces bear the mark of all the knowledge we cannot express.