The seals grew bigger. From the top of the town Patient Iris could hear them bark at night. Not like dogs; grunting coughs like old men in the park. They were getting bigger because they were pregnant. The whiskered seals with large, inscrutable eyes, beached on the useless docks.
‘Imagine,’ says Patient Iris suddenly. ‘Imagine giving birth on sheer ice. Imagine being born on sheer ice. You come out of blubbery safety, straight into snow. The seals try to cover each other, but…’
Her friend decides Iris’s mind is wandering. Tomorrow she will visit her in person. She begins to end the phone call. She wants Iris to put down the phone in case she needs to phone herself an ambulance. She knows Patient Iris all too well and how she likes to do things for herself.
Patient Iris has been kneading the bedsores as she talks. Down the side of her leg, through stiff white cotton, fresh stains of primrose and carmine bloom.
Patient Iris puts down the phone and thinks.
One night when the seals were barking out their birth pangs, she left the house in her nightie and slippers and walked down to the docks.
The dark, slumped shapes, dividing and reproducing, unabashed on the exposed span of gleaming ice. The high pig squeals of baby seals. The mothers rolling over, moist with their own cooling gels, careful not to slip and crush their children.
Patient Iris met a woman, a hag, really, with great hooped skirts and a basket of herring on her back. She said her name was Dolly. She was a lunatic, screaming the odds at the clock face when it struck the hour. In her basket the fish slipped and goggled their frozen eyes as Dolly jogged about to keep warm.
‘I keep sailors inside my skirts. That’s why I wear them so big. So they can hide inside and dodge the draft. They needn’t have to go to sea. Or do what they don’t want.’
Dolly’s face was like a coconut, the hairs growing thick inside the grooves so she’d never be able to shave them if she tried.
Tonight Iris’s oldest living friend dreams of Iris turning yellow and sitting by the phone. The moonlight shines off stark Roman walls and drops into her room.
Patient Iris is still, asleep sitting up, looking dead already. Apart from the slight hiss of breath, which issues as smoke from her open mouth. She is awkward in her chair, doubled up with her precious jumble of ruined organs preserved in that clatter of limbs. She looks just as uncomfortable as those cashiers posing in their shopping trolleys, arms and legs akimbo and waving their champagne glasses and oversized cheques as photographers’ bulbs go off.
Patient Iris’s friend of many years dreams that this winter will be cold. Colder even than that winter before the town was bombed and Tyne Dock was sheeted over in ice.
Colder still and the men decide to down tools and abandon the Roman remains till spring. It is so cold that it frightens them. This kind of weather will crystallise fragments of lost souls in the air. They rekindle themselves and brighten jewellike when it comes in dark. Centurions gather on the ramparts in their leather skirts with the wind whistling through them, their eyes dead quartz.
In the cold imagined by Iris’s friend, the Roman remains can complete themselves.
Old outlines glisten silver on the air, tugging at each other like a big top going up. They stir the air to recall what once stood there. Moisture freezes, clicks into place and recreates a fabulous ice palace on the reconstructed site at the top of the town above the docks.
Patient Iris’s window is open and the time is right for irises to open. Unseasonably, perhaps, even dangerously, in midwinter. But what does Patient Iris care for danger now?
She is open to the elements. Her sores expose her to the harshest that the north can offer.
The cold of the north heals up Patient Iris for ever. Her gasping, fishlike internal organs stop collapsing and freeze. Her bedsores harden. Iris reaches with one arthritic hand to splash a little scent behind each ear before she allows the cold to come over her entirely.
Scent catches at each earlobe and dangles there, perfect crystal earrings. And now Patient Iris is sealed for ever. The fate of those at extremes, like here, at the top of the hill.
She decides to pop out for a walk. It is the first time she has fancied walking in ages. Perhaps Dolly is still out there somewhere, saving sailors, or Roman centurions, under her voluminous skirts.
Patient Iris stops by the docks to see the seal mothers return and, sure enough, she is rewarded by the sight of their stolid hard-working, bodies.
She is much braver now that her phone is left off the hook and she can wear her bedsores as jewellery. She will skate over the ice to see how the burgeoning families are doing. She will talk the snorting, whiskered mothers through a difficult night, as their children are slapped out like old shoes onto the bloodied glass.
ARIEL’S TASTY DOG
That afternoon he had a bit of a walk down town with Simon and Kerry. He didn’t get down the precinct much. Turned out it hadn’t changed since they used to hang about there, Saturday afternoons. Today they walked down with the pushchair and a shopping list. He didn’t have anything better waiting.
‘I bet there’s a lot of shopping you have to get,’ he said, ‘with a baby, ey? I bet there’s loads that the likes of me wouldn’t even think of.’
Kerry looked at him. They were halfway up Swaledale Avenue. The nunnery had been knocked down and there was a little street of private houses there now. Simon remarked on it. Both he and Ray remembered jumping the wall of the nunnery on the way home from school, and not getting chased.
‘She costs
