Jazzled!

It's my life...

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Visiting time


The first thing I’d better say is that I don’t always tell the truth. It’s not that I mean to lie or anything, just that something starts off some fantasy and it feels so real that afterwards it’s hard to tell the difference between what happened and what didn’t. So now that’s out the way you can’t say you weren’t warned.

Danny’s real enough though. I went to see him today, in that place. I hate it there – all their rat smiles and a hardness that comes from coping with the ones who couldn’t take it for whatever reason. If you knocked against one of them a bit would chip off. I don’t envy them that job though. I’d look after Danny if I was allowed – not that he needs the sort of care some of them do. He can wash and dress himself, clean his teeth, take himself to the toilet, eat with a knife and fork and when he’s out of there he’ll be his old self again, I know he will.

I found him in the TV room. He was the only one looking out of the window, blue sky like it was painted on and pigeons picking in the grass. I went up behind him and put my arms around his waist and he shook himself like a dog out of water, turned around and just looked at me as if he didn’t know me. ‘Danny, it’s Jazz,’ I said holding his hands, but he pulled them away, asked what I wanted. ‘I’ve come to see you,’ I said, and his lovely eyes, so black with no pupil to notice, all dead and not a feeling in them. At least there was nothing hard there, although give him too much longer in that place and I wouldn’t rule it out. Maybe it’s what they’ve got him on that’s blanking him out like that. I took his hand again, uncurled the long brown fingers one by one, got out the packet of Omega 3 capsules and gave it to him. ‘Stick them in your pocket, don’t let anyone see,’ I said. I told him; ‘One a day and don’t forget to take them, they’ll make you better. You were getting better before you smashed up that woman's room and they brought you back here.’

At least he can’t buy puff where he is now, that’s something, and I had this idea that I’d get a place and he could move in with me when they let him out but when I told him that he turned back to the window and told me to go away. After that I couldn’t make him talk to me so I just went.

On the way home in the dark I found a little hedgehog, very still. I bent down to look at it wondering if I ought to take it home and put it in a box of leaves or newspaper to hibernate – shouldn’t it be doing that by now? While I was thinking about how to pick it up without being prickled it ran across the road and almost got squashed by a car – and that would have been my fault – but it turned at the last second and ran under a parked car and I left it. I wish I’d brought it back – it’s hellish cold out there tonight.