Anakana Schofield: Malarky

— There’s no way round it, I’m finding it very hard to be a widow, I told Grief, the counsellor woman, that Tuesday morning.

— Are you missing your husband a great deal?

— Not especially. I miss the routine of his demands it’s true, but I am plagued day and night with thoughts I’d rather be without.

— Are you afraid to be in the house alone?

— Indeed I am.

— Are you afraid someone’s going to come in and attack you?

— Indeed I am not.

— And these thoughts, do they come when you are having problems falling asleep?

— No, I said, they are with me from the first sup of tea I take to this very minute, since three days after my husband was taken.

— Tell me about these thoughts?

— You’re sure you want to know?

— I’ve heard it all, she insisted, there is nothing you can say that will surprise me.

I, disbelieving, asked again. You’re sure now?

— Absolutely.

— Men, I said. Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head.

— Well now, she said and fell silent.

She had to have been asking the Almighty for help, until finally she admitted she could think of no explanation and her recommendation was to scrub the kitchen floor very vigorously and see would a bit of distraction help.

— Pay attention to the floor and mebbe they’ll stop.

I recognized the potential a widow has to frighten people. I had frightened the poor woman something rotten.

The next week I returned.

— I have scrubbed the floor every day and I am still plagued by them.

Grief was silent another good while.

She had to be honest, she’d never come across a woman who’d experienced this. Usually a woman simply missed her husband without this interference.

— Are you turning to your faith?

— Oh God I am.

The two of us would now pray for some guidance because she was at a loss.

— Were they still the same images?

— Worse, I said. Even more of them and at filthy stuff together and now they all seem to be bald regardless of their ages. Did she think the devil might target widows?

— He might, Grief said. He very well might.

— Would it be worth looking into them Nigerian preachers, the black fellas I seen on the telly who can exorcise them from the place?

— It might, she said, it very well might.

*

The girls in my gang asked why wasn’t I going to the grief counselling any more.

— There’s something awful morbid about her. She’s the sort who’d nearly put you off being alive.

And we all laughed about it, until Joanie said be careful now I think that’s so and so, who’s married to so and so’s brother, who’s Patsy’s cousin and we’d never hear the end of it if it was to get back to her.

— It’s awful complicated being a widow, you’ve to be awful careful what you say, I told them, as I’ll tell you all now. If you are a widow, be careful what you say. I think it’s why they started talking about Jimmy in the bank.

Mebbe I said too much.

*

In the corner of Joanie’s kitchen, atop her pine table, a helicopter wobbled on a muted television, with the Afghan mountains and the Afghan mist behind it. Something of the gherkin in its green machine shape: a bulging and inaccurate feel to it.

Since the war ended, no one asked much about Jimmy, assuming him, as Our Woman had, returned to The States, until one Friday morning, a handsome postcard arrived via a German military base informing her he’d been redeployed. Afghanistan this time. She recalled the morning well: it was the same Friday Joanie suggested she apply for Meals on Wheels and she’d been angered on both counts. She had not told the girls the news of Jimmy’s redeployment, fearing it would only endorse what they might be hearing in the bank, but still she found the coincidence of it appalling. All out to get me while I’m weak. I wouldn’t tell them a thing, it’ll only be the start of something.

“Something” was suggestion: Our Woman cannot abide them. Impertinent, ill thought out, like flipping an egg before it was ready or pulling a loaf from the oven with the yeast still stretchy and wet. Get the facts, get the facts before you come at me, she wanted to sweep them all back. That a broom could hold back a population, what a grand prospect.

Gentle and all as Joanie had been about the Meals on Wheels, it had stung her hard. With her diabetes, sure she could qualify for them, did she know? And sixty, sure young as it was and indeed it was young, was as good an age as any to apply.

It was the diabetes.

The gang didn’t like the diabetes because she could no longer partake in the thick slices of fruitcake they all ate together. Will you ever be shut of it? Does it go away? The girls had asked, replacing the lid on the cake tin with a deliberate, let down rattle. Any small change to their routine created a shudder and produced the very thing she despised: a volley of suggestions delivered to deafen her with their irritation.

And down she’d go.

Concertina’d, her brain sunk to her ankles for a full twenty-four hours, how those suggestions ate away at her when she might be beating an egg or straightening a cushion. Incessantly she examined them for hidden meaning and intimation. Did they think her older than them? Would they say it if she still had a husband? Did they think her hopeless because she was a widow? She discounted that one, there were two other widows in the group, but the other widows were still dancing and she was not. I loathe the dancing. I loathe the look of those swaying couples and the heat and the hair and the smell of the smoke afterwards. Nothing would tempt me back to it. I won’t go back. But the Meals on Wheels: wasn’t that now the sort of thing infirm, incontinent people needed? She must get her hair done. She’d get her hair done and that’d settle it. The girls would talk of her hair and leave the diabetes alone.

*

Another worry. Maybe they’d figured out Jimmy. She must keep close to Patsy and her son, for it was at Patsy any leak would begin.

*

In response to this burst of punitive anxiety, she told the gang she was busy the next two days. An unusual move to startle them, for not a day passed that several of them didn’t meet. They were like tight ligaments in each other’s life, contracting, extending and sustaining the muscle of each other, house to house, tongue to ear.

The first afternoon without them she took on elaborate baking projects that mostly resulted in failure, making her feel steadily worse. A collapsed, rough-looking spanakopita sent her plunging to a new low. The spinach was climbing outside the cratered pastry, diligently clawing its way up and over the pan, while the feta cheese swum for its life at the sides. A sunken, hopeless mess. The sugar-free fruitcake came out squashed and flat as a cricket bat, as she puzzled over which ingredient exactly she had misread or misplaced. Baking powder was the culprit. It tasted worse than it appeared. The phone rang while she was outside offering these tasteless morsels to the chickens.

Let it ring, let them wonder. She took time to slowly wind back down the garden with the bucket empty, pausing to unhook her boots, customarily bash them together and position them by the mat. She would be busy for another day. The suggestions had just nudged her again. Nipped the bottom of her brain, sent a twitch down her spine into her arms, and created that unsettled feeling in her stomach of having missed a step on the stairs, that indicated the return of the thought that was never far from her all these years: would Patsy’s son have said something to someone about Jimmy? It worried her a great deal more than her son being in a war zone.