LOST

Safe as houses was her favourite tag

but at over ninety she was lost

in that steep-pitched, pebble-rendered semi,

floundering, too, since her husband died

trying to start his turquoise Cortina banger.

Slim, slick-haired, tight-suited, eighty-nine,

they called him Tear-Arse Eddie, terror

of the local roads. Police found

half a grand stitched inside his jacket.

High time to move her to a home,

her daughter told me, as if that was that.

Neighbours, who should mind their business

liked her pluck in carrying on regardless,

her backyard rites of broom and shovel,

the way she scraped and scrabbled for coal

from ramshackle bunker, poked up weeds and litter,

clattered out plates and cups for daughter,

who shouted in daily at four, and out at five.

In the small hours she’d come alive

and pace about with a swansong, racked

and cheerless as draughts moaning through a crack.

When rain dribbled down her bay window

she sat with opaque under-water stare,

watching her life trickle back. I’d wave,

and to wake her from that lonely deluge,

call in, brew a pot of strong, loose tea.

Yet her vacant eyes like blue-yoked eggs

gazed right through me and my chatter

at splashing traffic and bent, wet heads.

‘Anything you need, Molly?’ ‘Larder’s stuffed,’

her stock answer, waiting for me to leave

before she lurched off with giant strides,

jaw and stick thrust out, for odds and ends

or bargain Scotch for Eddie’s safe return,

her silvered head with its skull-tight skin

so frail and intent, her frame that yawed

like a rudderless yacht, and left me helpless,

watching and praying from a distant shore.