There were other ways of looking at it. This nightmare of hers, which, being both her nurse and her son I couldn’t rightly repeat out loud. But they were spoken non-the-less, or should I say, drooled. They formed in tiny globules, unrecognizable to anyone but me, bubbles of spittle frothing near the mouth’s edge, as I spooned the croutons of her soup they came out also in the wrinkle of a smile about the eyes. This gesture, once betrayed, would disappear when spoken, the smile’s gesture being made all the more brazen by its hidden aspect, being dependent on it, as it were, so that the closest she ever came to expressing such a smile was in a kind of snort, a drawing back of words, to which I brought out a handkerchief and touched her lips. To speak a smile like that would be unseemly, and so neither of us spoke.

Once fed, I left my mother and went down into my room. I always went down into my room. Not to do so would itself be unseemly, not least since my mother was known for her farting and her cursing in her sleep. Although to say fond of isn’t right, since from that oblivion neither fondness nor its opposite can be uttered, all deciding factors made nothing of without their own consciousness, but to read next to her when she slept like that, even in the tender embrace of that worn through armchair which had known only my own body this last ten years, that had formed just the right nook for reading, had adapted itself perfectly to my tender form, living with my mother as I do alone, and without any assistance in her care, to read like that next to her would be less than pleasurable, her nightmares and her cursing in her sleep always starting as they do, not long after the oblivion takes hold. She writes her own epic novels between those short breaths, I swear, the sort of books no son should hear, her nose even tickling itself against her whiskers.

We self-sustain in sleep, and this alone is unseemly to be witness to, believe me.

When my grandfather died I remember the terrible time I had watching him when he slept. Not because he was shrinking into nothing in that large bed, the bed which grew all out of proportion every time the nurses came in to change the sheets, that became swollen and unsightly, stretched as it was with all that white, that terrible oblivion of clean sheets becoming a kind of casket, a form of transportation into the void, a gondola waiting to carry him off. It was this whiteness however I presumed forced him, as I discovered sitting there beside his bed, to pull and tug at his sheets in his sleep. From the depth of his disappearance he pulled and tugged, pulled and tugged. Now and then, a kick also, a restless foot, gnarled and paper thin, exposing a yellowed toenail. It was this restlessness with his sheets that I found difficult, not since he was struggling, he was after all not conscious enough to use the word ‘suffer’ in its proper sense. All suffering is self-conscious, and all else mere reflex, as any nurse will tell you when she’s had a couple or even before (nurses, in my part of the world are still fond of such things as nightcaps and nips, thank god). It was rather that there contained in this restlessness a private act of unseemly behavior which we all should be allowed in bed, namely, to be alone. What a universe of movements there exist in beds when people are by themselves, and even when they aren’t, what a private experience of another body to know the shape it takes, the forms it figures and breaks only to reform, the elbow searching out a cooler spot beneath the pillow, the chin, coughing against its own weight, turning to its side to catch the edge of sleep, a mouth breathing a few fine whispers, the eyebrows raised for god knows what question, what language, what activity? What the body’s shape contorts to represent, in that private world of sleep, should remain that and that alone, in sleep alone as in death. This is what I wished to afford my grandfather when he lay dying, and which I could not give. Death is never private, but a great unfurling of dirty laundry, a brutal business of bedsores and turning and the restless grimace of the soon to be diseased. That and the wetting of oxygen dried lips. In my grandfather’s case, who out of his slumber managed to raise a thumb in silent salute and thanks, the shock of comprehension and communication stunning all of us present to silence as though a ghost had spoken, this was a salutation from the world of the private for which I thanked him a thousand times and still do. Oh privacy, tenderly, let it speak to itself and for itself, this word, and when my time comes give me a ditch to die in and let the dandelions and the reeds return me to my state of innocence in that garden of Eve.

Of course, I did not stay in doors. Not always. But went my own way into the gardens and parks. Went my own way into strangers arms, and wetted my own lips with theirs. This was the way I went back to my own garden, my own private bed chambers being the rose gardens at Finsbury Park, but that is another story, and tomorrow I shall have to tend to my mother again and betray not that weak smile she shares only at certain moments, and again leave her to her sleep.