The Frame

First Clown
Who is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Second Clown
The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

Act V, Scene I, Hamlet, Shakespeare








Content Warning:
Some Adult Content, Sex References

Transcript

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The Frame

She was struggling to walk upright and steady in her eighty-sixth year. When her stoop and her shakes grew too grave to be ignored, she was given a Zimmer frame by the more devoted of her two daughters, for her June birthday. Angela Fish thought this a lousy birthday present and told her daughter, Lavender, as much, having unpapered the gift with interminable slowness. Lavender Fish felt unavoidably burdened by the expectation of care her mother had visited upon her more or less consistently ever since Daniel’s death about five years ago. Her mother’s decline had been steady and constant, a general freezing seemed finally to have taken her in its grip, and many months had now passed since her general lucidity and her stronger powers of memory and cognition had deserted her, in ultimate desertion, never to be enjoyed again. Angela required, moment upon moment, unceasing prompts and loudly enunciated guidance, step by step, in order to accomplish even the simplest of quotidian tasks: waking up, going back to bed, taking tea and tablets, eating, walking, digesting.  

While Lavender’s elegant chamber musician sister went gallivanting off around the country (and regularly around Europe)- Lavender, being the more available, the only available, of Angela’s two daughters, had few excuses as to why she could not participate in the manifold adventures of her mother’s last years of life: or, at least, any pretexts she could come up with as to why she couldn’t perform this task, that errand, this, that, or the other for her mother were seldom stronger than those of her sister. Lavender was not a wealthy woman, she was a primary school teacher, and she found the prospect of having to spend money on both the Zimmer frame and a lavish birthday gift for her mother, rather disagreeable, the Zimmer frame’s necessity, coming as it did, in June. So she thought she’d kill two birds with one stone. If such a thing were possible: perhaps a better phrase to describe her activities would be killing two beavers with one bat. Like killing two beavers with one bat, everything involving her mother was effortful, bloody, fibrous, irritating, and painful. 

Lavender had nicely wrapped the box in which the Zimmer frame had been delivered. She had ordered the Zimmer frame on Amazon, to her address, and, once it had arrived, hastened, with the mysterious box, in the car, to her mother’s bungalow. Before and after placing the Amazon order, Lavender had been viewing online pornography. She sometimes got bored, and not as everyone gets bored: it was a singular, special, and uniquely destroying boredom that sometimes settled upon her, her little life, her class at St. Xavier’s, her little house, her rare afternoon off when she’d the time to read a hundred pages of a reasonably enjoyable novel, her and her husband Martin when they watched television in the evenings and had a glass of something. She found that viewing pornography, in its transgression and in the revulsion that it awoke in her- not from any puritan scruples, nor at the commodified and perfunctory women trapped in the images- but at herself, for viewing the videos with a mesmerised zeal year on year intensifying, made her feel less bored.

The Zimmer frame, more usually contracted to, simply, “Frame”, “Walker” on certain lips if those lips were of American origin, appeared in Angela’s living room, birthed from box and red wrapping paper as though from a womb. Angela had started to unwrap it in the kitchen, but with such slowness that Lavender had been unable to stand it. With what frustration, unseen gesticulations Lavender watched her mother suspiciously flatting her palms on the gift and rubbing the paper and then prodding the gift’s firmness, knocking on it with a knuckle as if to test its sonority, and then, with great, soft reluctance, fingering the seam, as if to try and stroke the paper off the box. Lavender had briskly leant a compulsory, surly hand, taken the unwrapped and unboxed present to the living room, and presented it, like a modern art exhibit, in the room’s spacious centre. Then she had fetched Angela, walked with her that vast distance from the kitchen to the sitting room, holding her tightly by the uncertain, random right of her two arms, until the final moment of collapse into the sofa by the three bookcases joined into one big bookcase. And there it was. Made delirious by all the excitement, it did however take Angela a few long moments to realise that it was there.

The Zimmer frame, this Zimmer frame, given by Lavender, received by Angela, was an object without an iota of decoration, it was simply cold, clinical, functional. The frame was an object without merit in itself, it had nothing particularly to recommend it, it was a tool that stood in a peculiar spell of neediness, incompleteness, and self-loathing, its stainless steel lengths calling out wailingly to withered bodies disabled by age, desperately begging for a decrepit hand to reach out and grab hold of the both of its body-width handles. The frame faced forwards, symmetrical from front and back, ominous in its symmetry: and, in all honesty, ominous in its asymmetry, which showed from a side-on vantage point. Wheels aided the Zimmer frame’s forward motion, and it was kept firmly rooted to the floor by two sticks at the back, like walking sticks- the point of each tipped in a little cone of foam, and in the space between which trudged the shaky, slippered, emaciated or (as the case might be) bloated ankles, and feet. 

The living room, which Angela hardly ever entered anymore, had in its centre a large space of lion-coloured carpet, scrupulously unblemished, bordered in an array of furniture and effects, arranged evenly on all four sides of the room. The room was dim when its illumination was left to natural light alone as there lay only one flat rectangular window over the television set. There was a large lamp, tall as a man with a huge lampshade atop a thin black column, and two black sofas, a bureau, a coffee table, and four units of identical bookcase, three of which were stood in a row, while the lone fourth enviously gazed from the other side of the room like a reject, or a beggar in the street, upon its shunning siblings. Surveyed shrewdly by these various, unresponsive friends, the Zimmer frame found itself quite suddenly viewed with suspicion from within Angela’s household: a visitor, marked with newness, incandescent and aghast with unfamiliarity. How jealous the lamp must feel, how green with envy the innards of the bureau, how thin and pine the once read, once beloved books in the bookcase: the Zimmer frame would be in regular use, the mottled, weathered hands of Angela would ever be clasping its rails. How the pillar of lamp longed to feel its pole seductively creamed in suncream by Angela’s old, old woman hands. Lavender sensed so many figurative arms, reaching towards the white-haired old mistress they lived among, in weird worship and desire. 

From the sofa where she had been dropped, Angela gazed upon the Zimmer frame warily, struck dumb by its invasive, brooding presence in the centre of the room. Bar the coffin, and the shower seat, the Zimmer frame is perhaps the most damning accoutrement of age, and Angela regarded it as such, and with the added suspicion she would readily visit upon any new visitor.

“Happy Birthday, mother,” Lavender said.

“I don’t want it,” Angela said, with some labour. “It’s hideous”.

The frame seemed to dislike being talked about in this way. Nothing about its appearance changed, but it seemed somehow, miraculously, to grimace or sour, still standing there in utter motionlessness, synthetic, and joyless.

“It’s just what you need,” Lavender said. “You keep falling over, you need something to keep you steady.”

“Can’t you do that for me?” Angela said.

“Not all the time,” Lavender answered.

“Your sister?” Angela asked.

“No, she’s ever so busy.”

“Daniel?”             

“He’s been dead for years, mum…” Lavender replied, remembering with quick sadness the places of the house where her father used most regularly to walk and sit in life, places where perhaps a trace of his essence still lingered.

Angela slowly shook her silver-haired, ape-like head, her gaze downcast. Then she raised her head back up, and eyed the Zimmer frame with indescribable consternation. Lastly, she looked at Lavender, with a look like a child casting about for adult help, as if she required rescue from something that threatened her, though as to what that might be or how she should ask for rescue from it, she was in the dark. So Angel just said, rather aloofly:

“What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

Angela pointed at the Zimmer frame, stretching forth a bony finger, around which the skin was as creased and wrinkled as it had ever been. 

“The walking frame? Why would it have a name?” Lavender asked, with that odd irritation whose source she didn’t really understand. Her mother’s confusion always annoyed her, but she didn’t know why it should: something to do with the indignity of aging she supposed, the indignity of lasting, of lasting as her mother had lasted and showed every sign of continuing to last, and Lavender’s being forced to confront this indignity, of aging, of lasting, so inescapably.

“It’s looking at me,” Angela said slowly, spookily.

Lavender looked at the Zimmer frame, then back at her mother.

“No it isn’t, mum” Lavender said. “It isn’t looking at you.” 

Lavender blinked, looked at, irrevocably, by her mother’s pale-green eyes. She looked right back at them. 

“You can see me. I can see you. I can see your eyes seeing me. The frame can’t do any of that.”

“It’s undressing me, with its eyes…it’s ogling me.” Angela mewled.

“It’s an inanimate object, mum,” Lavender counselled.

Angela began to talk directly to the frame, no longer requiring the intermediary efforts of her daughter.

“You pervert. You’ll never be a part of this family! You’ll never slip my finger into a ring!”

“Mum, it’s a frame, a Zimmer frame, to help you walk. It’s to help you, it’s not going to hurt you. It couldn’t hurt a fly!” Then she exclaimed: “Ow!” and clutched at her jaw.

“Are you alright?” Angela said.

“It’s nothing. Sore teeth. I had work done recently…”

Angela didn’t understand, an uncertain panic gripped at her mouth and dazzled in her eyes.

“What does it do?” she said, referring back to the frame. “I don’t like things which make loud noises.”

“It doesn’t make any noise, mum, it’s a Zimmer frame, you walk with it,” Lavender said.

Angela guffawed and then bragged: “I learned to walk when I was two years old. I was the best at walking in the whole village, much better than you and your sister…” 

“Yes, mum but that was a long time ago. You’re old now, you keep falling. You need something to keep you up.”

“Do I?” Angela asked, with distant enigma in her voice. Then, after no reply from Lavender: “Am I?”

Neither one knew what to say to the other.

“Why don’t we take it out for a spin?” Lavender said.

The panic roared to its maximum height in Angela’s eyes.

“Out?” she echoed timorously. “Out where?” she said.

“Around the block, down to the front,” Lavender said.

“Oh, I don’t like the block. And I don’t like the front,” said Angela.

“Why not, mum?”

“This town is full of beastly men. Men who look. Whenever I go there, they look at me.”

“Oh, mama, you’re such a silly billy!”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

And so their antics went on, for some time. Lavender couldn’t entirely blame her mother for being less than delighted with her birthday gift of a Zimmer frame, but Lavender did not understand why such a feeling of threat should attach itself to the frame, why her mother should regard it as an imposter. 

It worked a treat when Lavender was finally able to persuade her mother to grasp it and walk with it: Angela was able to walk, in tiny, trembling, interminable steps, to her bedroom from the living room, with no aid but the Zimmer frame’s. Having made it so far, Angela was spent, and desired to sleep at Lavender’s authoritative encouragement.

“Come to bed, mother…beddy-byes”. Cajoled beneath the covers, Angela left the Zimmer frame at the foot of her bed and was helped the rest of the way by Lavender. Finally, knocked out, as if with general anaesthetic, by the day’s excitements, the old woman slept. Lavender departed.

Hours later, in the hush of the night, in its dark dark centre, Angela woke, unexpectedly. She didn’t know what time it was but she knew it was not the daytime, there was no daylight in the windows, no sun-source. She was fairly certain she wasn’t dead, though she lived every moment ever primed for the occasion of her death. But Angela knew life well enough to recognise this as not death, but life, in its purgatorial waking up condition: perhaps the worst condition known to the alive, among Alive’s arsenal of terrible conditions. No, she recognised the odd, confused, discomforting feelings she felt within her entire body as those belonging to life, not death. Then, she saw it. Ahead of her, at the foot of the bed where she had left it, emitting a strange soft protest, almost like a pet makes, frowning with a feeling of neglect, the Zimmer frame was looking at her. It was utterly motionless, bestirred not even by the tiniest sign of life, yet obviously alive. Angela felt scared.

“What do you want?” she cried out in a forceful whisper.

Angela had terrible hearing but she was fairly certain that the frame had said, in answer to her question: You’re disgusting. It had an eerie, deep, cry-filled voice. 

“What!” she exclaimed. “How terribly rude!” Bad manners allowed her to forget all feelings of apprehension, and she was made brazen and brave with pure outrage. She showed, pressing it like a brand upon the faceless face of the frame, a hard stare of Olympic aptitude.

The frame’s affect changed, quite suddenly. She couldn’t be sure, but the frame seemed to suggest that it was sad. I’m sad, it moaned in its deep, strange voice, more canine now than the gorilla-sound it had been. 

“Don’t worry,” she answered aloud. “You won’t feel this way forever.” She felt sorry for the frame now.

Silence was the only answer it gave.

“Perhaps you should try antidepressants, or a new pastime”.

The frame seemed to suggest that it had an alcohol problem, and it blamed its alcohol problem on an unhappy childhood, and abusive Catholic priests. They put their hands all over me. Greasebuckets. the Zimmer frame said, I don’t know my own talents. Naivety was its own aphrodisiac to those slobbering deviants. I am naïve no more.

“Bad show!” Angela said. Then she smiled: “I’m not naïve anymore either…” She was enjoying talking to the frame, she spoke with greater fluency and renewed flow, on which she felt she had lost her hold years ago, matching these qualities in the frame. Most of the time she couldn’t get a work in edgewise, the frame had so much to communicate but she was able to add: “Why don’t you hop into my bed and we can be not-naive together…” The Zimmer frame looked displeased, didn’t seem to like the idea. I blame myself, he said, I am ever sending the wrong signals. 

Hours later, and the frame had just about finished telling Angela the story of how his second marriage broke up, why he was no longer able to enjoy spelunking, the dental work he’d had done in the last year and how out of pocket he’d been left because of it, (though he had experience of so many of life’s wilder joys, had attempted a great number of intermediate to advanced sexual positions and had even paraglided in the early 2000s with David Blane, the frame had not yet experienced actual pockets) and he told Angela why he was never going to holiday in the Loire valley ever again. Angela sat up, more upright than she had sat for centuries it seemed, intently listening, like a child enjoying a bedtime story, to the Zimmer frame’s fascinating recital, the mouthless metal raconteur that he was. The frame even offered to tell Angela a graphic story from a trip he had taken to Israel in 2003, seemed crestfallen at the absence of alcohol in Angela’s house, then said it was for the best because, as already said, he had a problem, and concluded that he would do all he could to make sure Angela never had to rely on either one of her daughters ever again. He said his name was Stuart.

Deep into the night, in her house not far away, Lavender was not joined to Martin in the bed they usually shared. She was afflicted by a strange sort of self-hatred which kept her awake in the small hours of the night. She sat at the computer monitor in the study, and was half-amazed at the solitude and sense of moonlit emptiness that she found in the little room. She viewed the aggressive pornographic moving images whose bright, numbing enchantment had proved unhealthily habit-forming for Lavender. The repetitive male motions drawing out performative female cries were shorn of all significance, the woman was spread, sprawling, willingly will-less, each time, plastic, glistening, dead but for her orifices whose darkened eyes winked or wept with lubricant. As if it lay near the sandy surface of her mind, skirted round up until now but finally felt, clasped, unearthed, revealed from the sand: Lavender found that she wished to see herself in the images. She wished to see herself violated like that. Her mind moved in mysterious ways, like a god uncanonised, in darkness. She wondered if she wasn’t punishing herself for what she had done to her mother, if the Zimmer frame wasn’t a metal mesh by which to remedy the wilt of guilt, prop up that which had fallen, a medical wire holding her mother up because no hands, warm and soft and linked, whether by love or DNA to her they held, were there to do it instead. Lavender knew she had tried, as she knew she should have tried. Why such failure at the end of all travails? She went to the kitchen and poured herself a whiskey. Her teeth were hurting again. 

It was a Thursday. Thursday morning broke and Lavender hurried round to her mother’s house at about seven o’clock in the morning, before she had to be in school. Her sister sent her a text message saying that her string of quartet concerts had been an enormous success, and she was having a whale of a time and was not looking forward to seeing Lavender or their mother at Christmas. Lavender was exhilarated to receive such a text; it veritably brightened her mood, to know that her sister possessed a character of inferior stature to her own. It was all she had on her sister, the only edge she had over her. 

Entering her mother’s house with a grin, Lavender was surprised to discover that her assistance was not required. It was miraculous! She was incredulous to discover her mother already up, breakfasting and pressing coffee. Such a sight had not been seen in this house for about seven years. She was bruised in a number of places because she had fallen over several times, and her forehead was bloody with a bash she’d received from the corner of an open cupboard door while preparing breakfast, toing and froing about the kitchen in a grinning, euphoric delirium. Lavender found her mother whistling, moving about the kitchen jauntily, in her good-little-wife frilly apron, the kettle wheeshing.

“Hello, darling little girl!” Angela cried out.

Lavender grunted a greeting in response, a look composed both of incredulity and revulsion pulling her lips and cheeks in a number of different directions, and souring her in their sickle. Angela moved with song in her heart, zest in her soul, but much insecurity and precarity upon her under-used legs. She might be revitalised in affect, but she’d to cling to the countertop and the sideboard for dear life to steady herself. Her soul cried out for so much more than her legs were able to let her have.

The Zimmer frame was at the table, slotted in neatly between two of the usual chairs, an untouched bowl of bran flakes at the level of his top bars. 

“Lavender, love,” said Angela. “Thank you for all you’ve done. Thank you for setting me up with Stuart. We’ve really hit it off. Now we’re having breakfast. It’s lovely to make breakfast for a man come morning, after a very pleasant night!”

Lavender didn’t say much. “Stuart?”

“Yes, that’s his name,” Angela said, gesturing towards the Zimmer frame. I’m cold, he seemed to suggest.

 “Did you hear that, Lavender?” Angela said. “He’s cold.”

“I didn’t hear anything, mum.” 

Angela removed her dressing gown to reveal her body, blanched, folded, and shocking in its utter nakedness, underneath the soft, peach garment. Lavender, greatly perplexed, covered her eyes in sudden embarrassment as Angela wrapped Stuart the Zimmer frame in her dressing gown. Then she stumbled back, her stretched arms grasping onto the countertop for dear life, once again.

“Mother, please,” Angela began, mumbling, discomforted at being confronted so suddenly, and so unpreparedly, with this sudden revelation, up close, of her mother’s nakedness. “Don’t take off your dressing gown. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“Back to bed?” Angela echoed contemptuously. “Back to bed! It’s the morning, it’s a beautiful day…I don’t want to go back to bed. What an absurd idea! I am too much in love with life! I think I shall dance and dance and dance all the livelong day. I think I shall gather flowers and arrange them, I think I shall press all my trousers, I shall seek out as many butterflies as I can and make a note of all their species, catch the butterflies, squash them paper thin and display their wings and underwings in a book, and I shall have whiskies at the nearest pub, tear it up in there until I am ejected from the premises for being drunken and disorderly, lay my hands on whoever will let me in the lamplit street, and come home singing and shouting. I have never felt so joyous my dear, I am vivacity itself! Perhaps I shall go out into public with Stuart, and we shall kiss and kiss and act saucy against a lamppost, surrounded by nothing but strangers, strangers…” Her words came frolicking from her mouth and she wished to frolic in kind. But she could not.

Bathroom, Stuart the frame said. I need to have another go.

Angela helped him on his way, saying: “Yes, my dear”, slowly, slowly moving in the direction of the bathroom. Lavender didn’t notice as she was rummaging in the fridge for something to drink. Angela parked the frame inside the bathroom and totteringly left it to its business. She managed to close the door, closing the Zimmer frame within. She called out to her Stuart that she was just outside, and then she fell over. 

“Help,” she mewed from the floor. 

Lavender didn’t notice the fall as she was diluting a squash, but the call summoned her swiftly, quasi-automatically. She appeared in the corridor and beheld her mother rolling about, her arms spread in undignified crucifixion, attempting to roll her withered frame upright.

“Where’s the Zimmer frame, mum?” Lavender said.

The reply came, muffled and wheezing, from her supine position: “Stuart’s using the lavatory. He’ll be a while. Gets quite constipated you know.”

“Mother, that’s madness, you do realise that don’t you?” Lavender petitioned, beginning to help her mother up. Her body was astonishingly thin and brittle and toneless. “You’re going a bit doolally aren’t you, mum?”

Hoisted most of the way back onto her knock-knees and shuddering slippered feet, Angela’s face changed sharply and she struck out at her daughter, slapping her across the face. It was a fair, sharp slap. The impacted area smarted, stung a little, reddened.

“Don’t you speak to me like that, mam.” Angela snapped, somehow mustering an ire she had not been able to command for about forty years. 

It was amazing the bite in her soft, old woman’s hands, and in her tone of voice, should she will it there. Perhaps her mother had fire left in her, Lavender thought, more fire yet, perhaps she was fuller of fire than even she knew herself. And the harbinger? the object, the source, the oracle: an ordinary Zimmer frame. Constructed in the bowels of some vast, smoggy factory, somewhere faraway, standing in the distant, unknowable margins of the East, made perhaps by sweatshop labour; where did the ore become ferrous metal? what hand held the screwdriver, screwed in the screws, arranged the parts, melted, moulded the plastic handles? was this Zimmer frame the work of sweat-shop labour? Then flown in, in the holding bay of a DHL flight over the seas, unboxed in her mother’s living room, never having seen the world. Maybe orthopaedics specialist Justin O. Zimmer was trying to reach Angela, Lavender’s mother, or perhaps trying to reach Lavender? Maybe he was handsome, maybe he looked dapper and dashing in his boater? Maybe he was obsequious. Maybe he was a pervert, a gerontophile, definition: one with a paraphilic and exclusive sexual attraction to the elderly. Perhaps it had all been a ruse to win the trust and affection of the old, touch them inappropriately at their most vulnerable.

Lavender half-forgot that her mother had just struck her. Angela had managed to stand, using the help she’d received from her daughter about three-quarters of the way, and she leant, bent almost half a right angle, her head against the bathroom door.

“Are you done, Stuart?” Angela called out. “Have you finished in there?”

I need help cleaning up after myself, the deep voice said, muffled, through the door.

“I’m coming in,” Angela said, levering down the door handle with much difficulty, and then using her whole upper body, breastless as Lavender had ever seen a woman be, her upper as naked as her lower body, to push open the door. Lavender hung back, continuing to watch her mother’s deranged activities with considerable pity and a sense of helpless impotence. Just as Lavender poignantly remembered her father’s struggles, saw, in her mind’s eye, a several decades younger, abler Angela walk with Daniel into the bathroom to do for him what he could no longer do on his own, the present Angela cried out, grabbed at her heart as though it were a shard she wished to dislodge, and fell forwards onto her face. A spasm briefly animated Angela’s legs and then she was still. The Zimmer frame stood passively before the toilet bowl, standing over Angela’s flat, face-down body on the floor. The morning splashed a shadow of the Zimmer frame upon Angela’s white, white hair.

There was no movement from Angela.

“Mum…” said Lavender, entering the bathroom. There was no response, so she tried the more formal “Mother…”

No reply. The corpse had nothing to say, or add, or reply, no further cause to plead, no further defence of its lived life to be made, no last confession: nor the means to utter any of these things.

“Mother…” Lavender enquired to the room, the dull, deathly air about the corpse somehow tensed, giving to Lavender’s single utterance as it sounded, a feeling of eerie and almost unbearable loneliness. No answer from the corpse, though Lavender wasn’t yet sure it was a corpse, and the Zimmer frame somehow facelessly and noiselessly and humourlessly sniggering, looking over the worn-out nude carcass of the woman whose frame he had tried to uphold in life. Her body was blanched, sunless, and folded in creased flesh, fleshy but without, quite without, fleshly vitality. The peach robe had fallen off the Zimmer frame, and lay equally posthumous on the space of carpet between the kitchen and the bathroom. 

“Mother?” came the last lonely enquiry to the air, her mother’s perfectly prostrate body, the Zimmer frame.

What to do, what to do? Lavender thought and muttered to herself. First, she clothed her mother. Pulse or not, mother must be clothed. Lavender grew weary more than she grew repulsed, by the weird, white spectacle of her mother’s nakedness. Her mother had the least bottomly bottom Lavender had ever seen. Not only her nether self, but all of her, perfectly nude, was the antithesis of those pornographic bodies she watched for reasons unknown. Angela’s bottom wasn’t the round, symmetrical, bi-partite thing, with its two cheeks and black, vertical smile in the middle; it was flat, its deflation was superlative, and the central exit (which Lavender assumed had never served as an entrance for anything- other than perhaps the occasional suppository) was almost non-existent, the vertical smile was a worried, melted squiggle. Lavender could sense no breath in the body that had died so unexpectedly and so abruptly, she knew there was no pulse, but she knew it without feeling for one. No more of this: Lavender clothed her mother in the peach garment. Afterwards, she lifted her mother’s head a little, supporting her beneath the chin, she didn’t like the knobbly feel of it in her hand. Lavender looked at her mother’s face: the expression was perfectly vacant and the tone of the skin was greying, drying, anything sanguine finally sucked from it. 

Lavender felt a silence, a softness come upon her. The house was noiseless, stilled, as if stopped in time: and, still or in motion, Lavender’s quietness was more quiet. She stepped furtively, nosed her way along the corridor and listened to the world with twitching ears, she was predatory, crepuscular, criminal like a cuckoo planting things in places they shouldn’t be planted. She simply dragged her mother along the floor, in the peach robe, her hands in her mother’s armpits, pulling the sere dereliction of that post-mortem, eighty-six year old female frame along the floor, leaving the Zimmer frame, blank and eyeless and impersonal by the toilet, having not used it.

Lavender lifted her mother into bed. Angela was heavy with the drowse and deep, endless relaxant of her deadness. The hardening of rigor mortis, the barbed intrusion of the skeleton into flesh was not yet upon her. Lavender folded up her mother’s arms, and propped her mother up in her bed. The old, white haired, motionless cavity of a woman stared a long, empty stare down the length of the corridor, all the way to its end, where sunshine stood bright, and half-invasive in the front door’s frosted glass.

“Goodbye mum,” Lavender said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay. Have a nice, good sleep.” She turned to leave, began to leave, and then turned back, adding: “Everything will be better in the morning.”

Lavender turned back the way she was going, away from her mother. Though her mother was dead, and Lavender knew that the dead have no faculties, something tingled like a chill, like a chuckle of ice on her nape, as though she sensed a living thing a few feet away from her, before she even saw it: what was that? It took Lavender a few moments to realise that she had the deepest sense that she was being looked at from behind. She felt that she was seen. But the gaze was not behind her. There was another, different watcher in that house. And Lavender discovered as much, as the Zimmer frame slid eerily, spectrally, almost revoltingly smoothly upon its wheels from the bathroom where it had watched the old woman perish, and into the corridor. Lavender watched in horror as the Zimmer frame slowly, and with murderous, diabolic slowness, moved towards her. Closer, closer it edged towards its horrified watcher. Trapped between two stares, one dead and one very much alive, one once animate inanimate and the other once inanimate now animate, one human and one object, two frames, who had helped each other in life, held the devoted daughter in their sights, ensnared her, unwilling or unable to set her free. And Lavender could not help but feel that she was the prey for something malign and hateful that she had admitted…that she had admitted into her life? into this house? With real horror, Lavender realised that the two were not so very different. How many the hours of her life that she had spent within this house! labouring at something whose futility seemed to have found its summative expression in her mother’s walking frame. A walking frame that moved of its own accord. Until a few seconds ago, the notion was absurd. Now it was as real as real could be. As the Zimmer frame came closer, and closer, ever closer, as it closed in on Lavender, crossing the last yards of carpet between her and it, Lavender stood her ground. She knew she would be able to bear it, whatever punishments it could visit upon her, she could bear them. Facing the frown of emptiness that approached her, approached her, and showed every sign when it had finally approached as far as it could approach, of wishing to do her harm, Lavender did not flinch, or cry out, or run away. The Zimmer frame was upon her. But she knew what she had to do. She simply reached out, grasped both rails, and lifted it up. She could feel that there was no life in it, no possibility of personality, no capability of violence.

She carried the Zimmer frame. She was surprised to find that it elated her, the discovery that it had no power over her, for she had no need of it. She walked with it, she didn’t require its aid to walk. She placed it at the foot of her mother’s bed, contented that her mother’s last hours of life seemed to have been happy ones. In fact there was a strange smile on her mother’s lips. She was smiling. 

Lavender wondered if she should tape the Zimmer frame to the floor, or the nearest bedpost, just to be safe. She looked for Sellotape in a kitchen drawer but couldn’t find any. She counselled herself that the Zimmer frame showed no sign of life and told herself not to worry. 

She always knew this day would come, and she had feared it. But it was easier than she had thought it would be. She sat by her deceased mother for a while, and wondered if the spectacle of that deceased body could teach her anything. She was about to text her sister the news, and call Martin, but she found that she didn’t wish to share this death, with anyone. She wanted this death all to herself, and she would have her fill of it. Yes, she would. And she was happy. They wouldn’t understand her happiness, they would reproach her for it.

She left her mother and the Zimmer frame, kindred responsive as porcelain, at the far end of the corridor. They had both been claimed by the dead. As Lavender went into the world, and wondered whether she might do any of those things her mother had purposed in her last minutes to do, closing the door behind her, she couldn’t help but feel a little gratitude for what the Zimmer frame had done. It had got her mother through a hard time. It seemed to have set her free, and made her see. Yes! She saw now. She was walking quite fast. She was swift with the airy grace of being articulate. She was articulate, to herself: Lavender had always felt spectatorial, she had always had a sense of being peripheral, of being a figure who stands on the periphery of the vast vision of life, watching it. She saw things and wanted to be seen. Maybe that’s what it was all about…the pornography, and the voyeurism, and the cautions she’d been given for loitering outside St. Xavier’s school though she hadn’t worked there for seven years. Martin didn’t care. She and him barely touched. He kept his eyes on the screen. And back when she and her sister were young! Watching concert after concert dotingly, having to adore and applaud her talented musician sister. So what do you do then, what’s your interest? I don’t know really, well, I’m still just exploring really. Two marriages, the second of which had barely lasted a year. The two abusive priests, the therapy. David Blane, the intifada, the caves: news programs she’d watched, so much of her life glued to screens. Her news was The News. The man she’d poisoned on that gondola in the Loire. He kept making eyes at her, sending unwanted kisses her way. All the dental work she’d had done, her poor teeth. She was walking fast, she had no idea where. Her shadow walked with her. She stopped. Caught her breath. 

“Stuart,” she said, the two syllables barely more than breath. The sunlight twinkled everywhere. 

It is time to live, she thought, It is my time. She saw a car coming towards her on the road. An unfashionable green car, speeding it looked like. It approached her and she prepared to jump in front of it. She’d ruin her legs. She’d get to him, her Stuart. She’d have him. He’d be hers. Disabled sex, she’d even searched for amateur film of that kind once. She’d struggle to walk but he’d keep her up. She’d kiss him all over his frames. She’d be the perfect lover, he’d be the perfect lover. It was all perfect! Out she leapt in front of the green car, her thoughts on fire, everything fast, her heart thunderous. 

A few moments later the green car stopped, and the man got out, and he fell to his knees. A few onlookers had watched the accident. Someone put a hand over her child’s eyes. When paramedics arrived on the scene, they were mystified to discover a Zimmer frame on the pavement, watching. An assistant medic, who secretly wanted to be a writer, wrote in her notes that a strange visitor had watched what happened, that the Zimmer frame seemed to have contentedly borne witness to the death; but that she suspected it wasn’t the first.