Ordinary Miracles by Grace Wynne-Jones

late, will you?’
    They look like two contented kids, all snug and cosy. I smile indulgently and go back to my room. Then I sit on my bed in a daze, thinking about what just nearly happened.
    ‘It was my fault of course,’ I think. ‘Going into his room wearing a see-through nightie. Any man would have thought it was a come on. But Charlie isn’t any man. That’s becoming uncomfortably clear. He’s so – he’s…no, no. I can’t allow myself to think like this. Life’s too much of a muddle as it is.’
    I banish the incident from my mind, but it returns, uncensored, just as I drift off into sleep. It’s been so, so long since I felt like that.
    My toes curl at the memory.

Chapter 11
     
     
     
    Susan says she’s going to write a Mills and Boon novel. She was going to try one of their ‘Medical Romances’. Now it looks like she might turn her hero into an engineer, a rancher, or a film director. She’s not sure if she’s going to go for the frequent sex or sex at the end format, but it’s going to be set in Africa.
    A lot of those novels are set in exotic locations. While the heroine feels the hardness of the man she despises – the man who has crept up on her and forced her to kiss him with a fever of passion that grips her entire body – there are usually cicadas chirping in the background. We have long discussions about when the hero should pounce on the heroine, and where. We both agree that he has a huge penis.
    Susan has decided to try her hand at romantic novels because she wants to live somewhere warm. The Irish winter is getting to her. She’s working in an old folk’s home at the moment – the place where my Dad spent his last five months – and I think that may be getting to her too. She’s up to her neck in bed pans and walking frames and incontinency pads.
    ‘Life is so short, Jasmine,’ she says. ‘So short.’
    There’s an old lady in the home whom she insists I must meet. She’s a real character, apparently. She’s unsure of how she spent the last half hour, but she knows an enormous a mount about hunt balls. Hilda – that’s her name – also wanders. They have to keep the front door on one of those small chains to prevent her from gallivanting off on her walking frame. Susan thinks this is most unfair. She thinks Hilda should be allowed to gallivant if she wants to and take her chances with the traffic.
    I’ve been putting the visit off because I know it will bring up memories and I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with them yet. All those hours sitting at Dad’s bedside wondering if he knew I was there. The hot, stuffy feel of the place and the sense of time hanging heavy in the air, along with the smell of baking and talc and urine. Sometimes, when they changed Dad’s pads, I used to go to the television room and sit with the residents. A lot of them didn’t know what was on the television – they just sat there on enforced breaks from their beds.
    There were some people I could talk with, though, and they usually wanted me to change channels. The remote control was a complete mystery to them and they perked up hopefully as the pictures switched from news to snooker to antiques to chicken casseroles.
    ‘Is that the programme you want?’ I’d ask eventually. ‘Yes. Yes. That’s the one we like,’ they’d say. It was usually some gameshow. It seemed to me a terrible injustice that the last years of their lives should be spent watching people win automatic washing machines.
    But what should they have been doing instead? What should we all do with these precious years we’ve been given? That’s the question that’s been dogging me for the past year. Susan’s right, all this stuff I’ve been going through isn’t just to do with Cait Carmody. It was so much easier when I thought it was.
    I’ve bought a book about visualisation. One of the things it says is that visualising things as you would like them to be can help you clarify your life values and goals. So