Notes from a Room

Roy at the Boar gave me shifts behind the bar. I sent applications and picked up the odd translation and editing job. The rest of the time went on walks in the countryside, church and worrying about money.

One day my sister rang from Copenhagen to say our mother had had a massive stroke and was in hospital. She can’t speak, she said. After we rang off I booked a flight. When I landed the next evening I took a cab from the airport to the hospital.

It smelled of disinfectant and cooking from the kitchen. Signs pointed the way to the neurology and stroke units. A grey-faced man in a dressing gown shuffled down the corridor pushing an IV pole. My mother was in a two-bed room. One of her eyes was half open, the other shut. Her mouth hung slack and her legs were swollen under the sheet. A nurse was checking the drip and the monitor. The TV on the wall was playing a quiz show on mute. My sister looked up at me from a chair with an expression I’d never seen before.

A gaunt month followed. We got to know the nurses’ shifts. From time to time my mother’s eyes cleared, she smiled, and we made out a few words. The doctor spoke about rehabilitation. My sister didn’t believe him. She’s not coming back, she said, I know her. I spoke to the hospital chaplain and tried to pray, but the words went thin in the clinical air, as if they belonged back among stone and stained glass, not by this bed. If they couldn’t live here, I thought, what were they for?

I took the bus to the hospital in the mornings and let myself into my mother’s flat in the afternoons. I slept on the sofa bed at night. It was strange to be there alone. The cupboards were full of things that should have been thrown out years ago: a dozen plant pots, bills and letters dating back to the nineties, a jar of buttons she’d had since we were children, keys without locks. I went up to the loft, which was full of furniture and knickknacks from their years abroad. I spoke to the neighbours, called the utility companies, kept her friends updated.

Towards the end the consultant asked us into a little relatives’ room off the ward. He said there was nothing more they could do except give her morphine. They moved her to palliative care in a separate wing. The drip was removed. The room was quieter there. Just the bed, our chairs and her groans carrying down the corridor. We’d never seen pain like it. My sister was with her when she died, in the middle of the night. In the morning there was just the bed and the chairs.

*

We arranged the funeral, spoke to the family lawyer and auctioneers, contacted estate agents and started clearing the flat. When I’d done what I could, I went back to Norwich, where my plants had died and more admin was waiting for me.

The flat sold quickly. After thirty years of rocketing Copenhagen prices it fetched five times what my parents had paid. It took the lawyer several months to sort out the estate. By Christmas, which I spent at my sister’s, it was done.

I was free – in one sense at least.

The last of my steady freelance work fell through on a Tuesday. A short email: changes in the industry, thanks for everything, maybe in future. There wasn’t much to fall through, but the floor still gave way. I got jumpy and filled in an online form for benefits. A week later an appointment letter arrived, summoning me to a back-to-work session at a business hotel near the airport.

A lobby with a scent of air freshener and a coffee machine. Low armchairs, framed pictures of cities at night. I told the receptionist what I was there for. She pointed me to the conference suite.

In the room there were rows of chairs facing a flipchart and a projector screen. A table with jugs of water, cups, plates of biscuits still wrapped in plastic. We sat scattered across the rows. A woman at the front fiddled with the laptop. She wore a lanyard and a card that said Facilitator under her name.

Welcome, she said, when the projector finally worked. Thank you all for coming. Today is about taking ownership of your future. She clicked. A slide appeared: a stock photo of someone in a field, arms spread wide. Underneath: Reframing Redundancy as Opportunity.

We went round and introduced ourselves with our backgrounds. She wrote words on the flipchart. Communications, education, retail, hospitality, care. Then she drew a circle and wrote in the middle: Transferable skills.

Think in terms of your skill set, she said, not job titles. You’re not just a teacher or a carer. You’re adaptable, solution-focused. You have a personal brand.

A wiry man in my row leaned back restlessly in his chair, let out a noise and muttered something. I felt a tug to join in, roll my eyes, but the last thing I wanted was to sneer. I’ve done enough of that for one lifetime.

We were given handouts with boxes to fill in. My key strengths. My unique selling point. My three-month goals. The facilitator walked up and down the rows, bending to look at our papers, nodding. Great, she said. That’s really strong. You’re an asset. The jugs of water sweated on the table. The projector hummed. I watched my hand write phrases from the business texts I’d spent years translating and writing.

At the end she thanked us again and told us to stay positive. This is a journey, she said. You’re here because you have potential. We filtered out into the car park without speaking. Lorries rolled past on the ring road. The Holiday Inn behind us might have been anywhere on earth.

*

I cycled to evensong at the Cathedral, taking my time. A few tourists walked around taking pictures. The priests and choir entered the nave. We stood as they filed into their stalls.

O Lord, open thou our lips.

And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.

The words were as familiar as the hotel slogans, but they did something else. They told me I was dust. The choir sang the psalm. The days of man are but as grass. The lines sat heavy and right in the air.

We knelt for the prayers. They asked mercy for war-torn peoples, for those who labour, for the lonely, the unemployed.

After the grace we went out separately into the cool dusk. The city was the same: crisp packets and cans on the street, migrant Deliveroo drivers on modified electric bikes. In the bookies’ window a screen rolled through odds for the weekend matches. Two economies, I thought: this one and that slower, stranger one, where even days like this are said to be taken up and worked on in a higher order, out of sight. I felt a draught of joy on the way home.

I saw the Italian man again in Julian’s church the other day. His beard had gone grey. I approached him after mass. He didn’t remember me from when he was in his bliss. Giuliano was his name. I know, he said, that’s why she called me. We went for tea in a café round the corner. He was timid now, worn. He told me he’d gone back to Italy after that first visit, but still felt drawn to Norwich, and had moved over to work as a carer. He talked about his shifts, the elderly people on his ward, the broken boiler in the flat he was renting. The first time I come here I stay all the day in the cell, he said. Now is different. Now I work. I have people to wash, to dress. Old people. I am tired. I still go to the church but now I don’t have so much time. I pray when I work. For me is difficult. He took a folded service sheet from his pocket, smoothed it on the table and put his finger under a baptism notice. On Sunday I am godfather in the Cathedral for my friend, he said. You can come.

I did. We met by the west door and went in together. We sat near the aisle. After the sermon the verger led the parents, godfather and priest down to the font. Giuliano walked with them, solemn, and the congregation turned to watch. The baby in a white frilly dress stared up at the high ceiling. She made a small noise. The mother adjusted her bonnet. The priest spoke and asked questions of the parents and godfather, who answered for her. We all wander far from God and lose our way. Do you turn away from sin? I do. Do you reject evil? I do. Water was poured over the little one’s head, the sign of the cross traced on her forehead in oil – on a face that couldn’t focus. She was being drawn into a story she knew nothing about.

We took Communion, then gathered outside. The family invited me to their house, but I declined and walked to the Boar’s Head. It was almost empty. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a pint. I got that uneasy Sunday afternoon feeling: I should be doing something productive, like sending job applications. The service sheet was still in my pocket. I put it on the bar and set my glass on it without thinking. I worried about the child, who now too was signed up to promises none of us could keep.

A couple of the regulars came in. One had just got divorced. I commiserated and bought him a drink. We bought each other drinks. Others turned up. We all drank, turned on our stools, laughed, went outside to smoke, came back. The chat turned silly. I had a squabble with an atheist who spotted the service sheet. I made one of those sudden half-cut decisions, went home, ate and slept. When I woke up it was dark and my head was woolly. The day had started out so beautifully, in good faith.

*

The next morning, with no work, I went to Communion at Julian’s. There were four other regulars. Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith… I haven’t turned away from sin, I thought, I turn to it, the Enemy whispers in my ear every day. Forgive us all that is past and grant that we may serve you in newness of life… We gave each other the peace, took the Eucharist and went our ways. On the walk home the empty mood came over me again, the one in which nothing seems to matter and you might as well do what you want. The cars, shops and people were distant, as if behind glass. I looked into the Boar’s Head, but it was closed, thankfully. I paused, sat on an empty beer keg and rolled a cigarette. This mood, I thought – this void – is also a space something else might pass through, if I can hold it open.

*

Ah, then let me talk to you for a while, Lord. Mend the years of damage I’ve done to the parts of me that can still hear you. Clean the soul I make daily efforts to soil. I ask this while most of me resists it. Left to myself I lead myself astray.

The words we repeat in your places are very old. We try to make them new by saying them again. But I can’t sit and wait for as long as it takes. The mood comes and I escape from you, back to the streets, the pub. Hidden God, who knows me better than I know myself, help me get under the surface to where you live. Let me start over.

At Felkirk there was a visitor who riled me. He talked during the silent meals. The Brothers reminded him to keep silence. He made a show of saying sorry but forgot the next minute and continued to whisper about his hometown’s local politics, the food, anything. It was as if the silence was intolerable to him. The services seemed easier for him to bear, since there were readings and visitors can join in with the hymns and antiphons. I listened to him and felt irritation rising – then got a hint of how the Brothers checked themselves. One of them glanced at him, then away, his face settling back into neutrality. I imagined it was a minor inconvenience to them compared to whatever else they had to endure in that place, some of them for decades. Daily denials within the same walls: the same faces, the same routines grinding away at their self-image. The communal life seemed shaped to prevent anyone marking themselves out from others. The cassocks, the rows at table, the patterns of standing and sitting together during the offices: all designed to help them cast off their social costumes, speak to God in their true voices and welcome each guest as an equal, whether a local, an asylum seeker or a posh priest from Oxford.

I remembered something I’d read about the command to love your neighbour – not certain types of people or those you happen to like, but whoever happens to be there. Each person bears a hidden maker’s mark, like sheets of paper with different words on them but all carrying the same faint watermark you only see when you hold them up to the light. The chatty visitor, the Brothers, me – beneath our various performances, the same mark.

Today on the train I got that old frightening feeling. Suddenly it’s as if I fall out of life and the things around me are unreal, far off. Nothing in particular seems to bring it on. My body was in a seat, making the usual movements, but I was somewhere else. I looked at the other passengers – people staring out of the window or into space – and wondered whether they’d felt this too. Did their jobs, families, routines, surroundings ever suddenly seem strange and senseless to them? Did they ever slip out of their own lives for no reason?

I was coming back to Norwich from the House of the Resurrection Anglo-Catholic monastery in Felkirk, where I’d spent a week with the Brothers, going to church and eating with them, mostly in silence. The community isn’t exactly isolated. There’s a college, visiting retreatants and staff. It’s by a busy road and the town is nearby. Sometimes you hear a train horn. Yet the Brothers commit to spending the rest of their lives there. The backbone is the four daily offices: mattins, mass, evensong and compline. You’re given a schedule of services, meals and silent hours.

The number of Brothers in the community has dwindled. Thirty years ago there were a hundred, now there are twenty. They seemed stern at first, like dons or schoolmasters who’d put their lives in order, but they were happy to chat when it was allowed. In the refectory we sat in rows at long tables, eating in silence during breakfast and dinner. We were bodies sitting in rows, chewing: the Brethren in their cassocks, me in my jeans. I couldn’t tell what went on inside them when they bowed their heads for grace and efficiently cleared the tables. They were gracious and refused help: they had a system. The pamphlet in my room said their shared life was meant to be suffused with prayer: eating, singing plainsong in the church, gardening, greeting guests. Near-identical routines, day in day out. From the outside the timetable looked impossibly dull and empty. But it felt like only the bit above the waterline; the rest of their lives must have been under the surface.

Had they slipped out of their lives when they were in the world? Was that why they were there?

I’d set out to follow their schedule for the full week. I lasted four days before I had to go to the pub. Getting a taste of their discipline, if only as a tourist, did me good, but now I felt that weird emptiness again, a thinning out. I got confused when I had to change trains. Yet it felt oddly pointed, that absence, as if it were hinting at something. At what?

*

I remembered the Italian man I once met in the cell attached to Julian’s church in Norwich, where the medieval anchoress sat for decades meditating on her visions. He smiled and his eyes shone. He was blissful. He said he could see her and talk to her, that she’d called him to this place from Italy. He’d been staying there all day for a week, he said. I mumbled some polite words and went on my way, dismissing him as mentally ill. I think about him sometimes, now I’ve started going to mass there, and wonder what became of him. Did Fr Richard talk him down, like he sometimes has to with enthusiastic pilgrims? Did he go back home, gradually return to his familiar life and forget about Julian of Norwich? Did he end up in a psychiatric ward? Did he change his life, leave everything behind to become a priest or monk?

*

Julian most likely grew up in Norwich. She would have felt at home here. At the age of thirty she received the showings for which she’d prayed as a young woman. In the course of these visions she nearly died, with her mother and others at her bedside, along with a curate who read her the last rites. She recovered, and asked to be enclosed – to be formally called out of ordinary life, in a ceremony that involved the singing of the Office of the Dead, as if it were her funeral. Though her cell was close to the river and Norwich was a lively, trading city, she lived a life apart for the rest of her days, in prayer. A woman in a room. Outside, a small garden where heavy-laden folk turned up at her window to unburden themselves to her and ask for counsel. Inside, a different, hidden life. What would those people really have seen? Did they come away satisfied?

*

I started going to the Cathedral last year, seemingly on a whim. At first I only went to evensong. I felt blank and bored. I didn’t know about the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis. I didn’t bother to look up the Psalms they sang from the Book of Common Prayer. I just sat there. It was a chore, but for some reason I kept going. It was something to do before I went to the pub.

After a while, the language worked its way into me. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and in thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night… I started going to Communion in the mornings. Since AI was taking over my profession and work was drying up, I had plenty of time.

I began to feel something, though I knew my feelings weren’t to be trusted. It was to do with the building, the words, music and liturgy. I now took more of an interest and even looked forward to them. The words grabbed me, especially during the weekly services in the side chapel when they used the old language. The Eucharist became an event, even when tourists walked by chatting. I started learning the routines, memorised the prayers, crossed myself at the appropriate times. During Lent the next year, I spoke to one of the Cathedral canons about getting confirmed at Easter. The priests were distant, formal. I liked that about them. They weren’t friends but envoys, as it were: go-betweens.

After Easter, I kept going to services, from low to high churches. I began to realise that this strange tradition can lead you into a middle place where neither the things here below nor the things above seem quite real. But the prayers and readings speak of what lies ahead, if we press on: treasures laid up, a mercy that’s out of this world, love folding over love. Not eternal rest so much as an ever-fresh moment, sometimes felt even here and now.