At the end of my shift today I put a bunch of tools in a carrier bag and head over to Mary’s flat across the road. A few times over the years she’s called upon me to assemble IKEA furniture she’s had delivered. Today it’s to take one of those items apart – a no longer needed single bed.
I’ve never been able to quite work out the specifics of Mary’s living arrangements. As far as I can tell, she lives with her two adult daughters and teenage grand-daughter in a spick and span, man-free, two-bedroom flat. Presumably men have featured in the lives of these women at some point in the past; to assemble wardrobes, change spotlight bulbs, sire children. Simple jobs requiring minimal skill, taking no more than a couple of hours, that’s what we’re good for apparently, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. Aside from occasional usefuless, we’d only dirty up the place. Mary’s flat is immaculately clean and I use that term deliberately, with all it’s spritual connotations.
When I encounter a gossamer cloud of fluff while taking the bed apart, I’m at a loss to explain its existence. Surely it couldn’t have come from this household? These are lint-free people. They’re not like you or I. In Mary’s flat, the lint sparkles ethereally like fairy-dust; something rarely seen and, if ever witnessed by an outsider like myself, marvelled at incredulously. I don’t mention it to Mary, for fear she would die of shame. I especially don’t try to make light of it by contrasting it with my own world of grime, for fear that she would drop to her knees and beg me to let her come round and clean.
A tiny, sprite-like, seventy-year-old Irish woman with a fervour for life that I’ve only seen matched in small children, Mary zips around town on her constant errands, praising The Lord for everything she sees. It’s all a gift to her. Everything is a miracle. Mary is the most grateful person I’ve ever met.
After disassembling the now-unwanted bed and covertly fly-tipping its components out to the nearest communal waste bin – at her request (she clenched her hands together and prayed that we – meaning I – wouldn’t get in trouble), Mary pressed a crisp ten pound note into my hand, blessed me and gave thanks to the flowers, new mothers, the sky, the moon, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
It was lovely to see her again after the last couple of years. She told me that she hadn’t, personally, been bothered by it all; she had missed her prayer group and meeting with friends but she had never worried for her own health.
“I’m a vegan,” she explained, “but my daughters are very conscientious and they kept me safe. Ah,” she said, “it’ll all be over soon, you’ll see.”
Community Corner 