Ice Dancing Episode 4

And then the first time I went back in years, I was with Joe. And that was different too. But everything was different with Joe. Or I thought so. Afterwards, I thought about his silences and wondered if I had misinterpreted them. One thing’s sure, though. He came gliding into my life and changed everything. He didn’t intend for it to happen any more than I did. I think it took us both by surprise. Like a bolt of lightning. Like a puck to the head, as Joe would say.

I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. But that’s what we always say, isn’t it? I expect that’s what somebody else said about Joe all those years ago, rationalising the damage. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Sometimes I still catch myself thinking, isn’t line dancing better? Safer? Isn’t it? Where you rely on yourself and you don’t touch anyone else at all?

Louise

My dear friend Louise had died the previous spring while the weather was still cold.

She was eighty-seven, quite old really. A good innings, as people said. But she didn’t look it, not until she became very ill, anyway.

At first, she found it harder to walk up to the farm for her mid morning cup of coffee. Pains in her legs, she said, vaguely. “Must be rheumatism.”

Sometimes I would go and pick her up in the car. More often I would just go down and have my coffee with her instead. Louise always had good coffee. She used to buy the beans in one of the Italian cafes in town and grind them herself.

Then I took to getting more and more of her groceries for her, whereas before it had just been the heavier things. She had always prided herself on being able to walk to and from the village stores for her newspaper and the few things she needed each day, but it began to be harder for her to get back up the hill.

I can remember driving home from town one morning in autumn and seeing Louise sitting on a boulder by the side of the road, her grey head in its red woolly hat bent low over her knees.

She looked like a small gnome, wizened and shrivelled.

Shocked, I pulled up, got out and took her in my arms.

“What’s the matter, Louise? Are you not well?”

She focused on me with difficulty and tried to smile but when she spoke, her voice was husky.

“Oh Helen! I just felt exhausted all of a sudden. I don’t know why. The legs just went from under me.”

I got her into the car, took her home to her cottage and called the doctor, in spite of her protests that she would be “just fine”.

Hospital appointments

The house smelled stuffy and a bit sour and that wasn’t like Louise either. She may have liked clutter. I liked it myself, but it was always clean clutter.

Then there were hospital appointments, and soon blood tests and X-rays gave place to CT Scans. I felt scared and panicky, the way you do in the face of serious illness, grasping at straws of hope.

First they said there was no tumour. They were sure there was no tumour. Then maybe there was a tumour. Or perhaps there was more than one. And suddenly the disease seemed to take wing and fly through her body. The hospital wasn’t a good place for her to be. Too used to patching people up and sending them home, the young staff seemed fazed by incurable illness and almost impatient with the intractable nature of her suffering.

Just before Christmas, we managed to get her into the local hospice. She kept saying, “This is like a five star hotel, Helen,” which was true enough. It was sweet smelling and comfortable. They would even co-ordinate the colour of her crocheted bedspread with her nightie. They kept her free from pain, free from fear and indignity, but by the end of February she was dead.

I was with her at the end. You think it’ll be terrifying but it wasn’t, not in the hospice. It was like a prolonged departure, infinitely sad but in no way frightening. By the time she died, we had said all our goodbyes.

I missed her though. Desperately. Still do. But back then, I felt bereft. Does that sound foolish? My own parents are both dead and I was an only child, like Fiona.

I’ve got one elderly unmarried uncle living in a flat in Glasgow and that’s about it in terms of relatives.

We used to have big family gatherings up at the farm, but they were all Sandy’s family, not mine. Half the people in the parish seemed to be related to Sandy in one way or another. Cut one, they all bleed. That’s what they say in the village.

“It’s all right for you,” I kept telling him, “But I’m an orphan” and he used to laugh but I was only half joking. When I lost Louise, I was orphaned all over again.

Louise Marshall was my friend, an even closer friend than Annie, and I could tell her anything. I would go to her when I was feeling depressed, when the farm was getting me down, and she would always cheer me up.

“You’re a fine young woman, Helen Breckenridge,” she would tell me in that forthright way she had.

When I protested that I wasn’t really young, she would say, “Well you are to me!” and she was convincing, even if I didn’t always believe her. “And you’re so bright. Don’t you let anybody put you down. One of these days you’ll show them all. You’ve a lot of living to do yet, lass!”

Youthful and energetic

She had been in that cottage below the farm for as long as I could remember. When I had married Sandy and moved up to Drumbrethan, eighteen years earlier, she was there to welcome me with a bunch of flowers and cuttings and plants from her garden to get mine established: pieris, buddleia, old scented roses, geraniums, peppery phlox, foxgloves and lots more.

She was already sixty-nine then, but she still seemed very youthful and energetic. She had a dog at the time, a wiry terrier called Teddy, and I would see her striding through the fields with the dog at her heels.

Sandy’s mother had only ever grown rigid rows of leeks and cabbages, but it was Louise who gave me my flowers.

I remember driving home from town one morning and seeing Louise... She looked like a small gnome, wizened and shrivelled

More tomorrow.

Ice Dancing by Catherine Czerkawska, Dyrock Publishing, £9.99 and Kindle E-reader from £2.99. For more of her books, including The Posy Ring and A Proper Person To Be Detained, see www. saraband.net