The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

that I’ll become wild and odd. Like that horrible fig tree we had in our back garden – the one which was so thoroughly strange and alien that I had to get someone to chop it down.

Losing one’s husband really is a complete bummer 
    L osing one’s husband really is a complete bummer. But let’s look on the bright side. I’ve actually lost a little weight. Oh, there’s loss of all sorts going on around here. Mind you, I wasn’t particularly chunky to begin with. And unfortunately, after a certain age, when you lose a few pounds you don’t look any younger. Just pinched and scrawny. And those mad, staring eyes don’t help.
    Sometimes I’d just be grateful if I could sit still for five minutes at a time without wanting to jump out of the window. I’ve seen a counsellor once or twice and, at Ginny’s insistence, a whole host of hippie healer-types. I’ve been acupunctured, cranially manipulated, have had my feet and earlobes squeezed. And when, five minutes into whatever session I’m having, I begin to sigh or quietly sob I can detect a definite aura of smugness in my practitioner. They’re thinking, Well, it didn’t take me long to crack this one. All I’ll say is, they overestimate their achievement. These days it doesn’t take much to get me going – a lost cat/dog poster, sellotaped to a lamppost … daytime telly … about four bars of Rachmaninov … pretty much anything.
    It’s not that my healers’ vanity particularly offends me. At worst, I’ve paid someone forty quid to rub my feet or knead my shoulders. If they want to imagine that, alongthe way, they’ve tweaked my crystals or realigned my chakras, well let ’em. I can think of a lot of worse ways of spending my cash.
    Ten years ago – maybe more – I went along to a couple of evening classes in which we received solemn instruction in the art of sitting and breathing, etc. There was the odd minute or two in the midst of all that Omming when, if nothing else, the steady resonance in my skull was so sonically pleasing and all-pervading that any coherent thoughts were simply shaken off the shelf.
    I’ve had another crack at it lately just as a way of trying to calm myself down. But, pleasant though it is, I have the feeling that I contain within me such vast reservoirs of pain and anguish that I could Omm non-stop from now till Christmas and I still wouldn’t have drained off more than a tiny fraction of the stuff.
    Probably the only point in my life when I’ve actually sat still for any length of time and felt quite happy, and perhaps come closest to a meditative state, was a year or two in my early twenties when I did a bit of life modelling for a friend of a friend. Simply writing that down seems, frankly, ridiculous. Like recording that I once did a stint as a secret agent or trained to be an astronaut. Life modelling now seems impossibly bohemian. The truth is I was terribly strait-laced – a rather serious young woman. And my entire family would have felt obliged to commit hara-kiri if they’d thought I’d been paid to do so much as remove a sandal. Which was perhaps the point.
    A girlfriend of mine had been posing for this particularpainter but had to give it up as she was leaving town and asked if I fancied taking over. I went in to meet her – the painter, whose name was Annie – just for a cup of tea in the first instance, to see how we got along, and presumably for her to give me a quick once-over. But I remember my first proper session and climbing those narrow wooden stairs up to her studio above a shop and her leading me over to a screen for me to change.
    I’d taken a dressing gown, as instructed. I undressed and put it on. Then I crept out and we chatted for another couple of minutes. Then Annie said something like, ‘Right. Shall we get on?’
    She showed me where she wanted me to stand and turned