Speedrun to normalcy

In which I pick an elderly man up off the ground and wonder what love is

After a moment standing at the door to take a picture and finish my India Instagram story, I entered the house on Victoria Road just after seven AM on the last Saturday of November. I slung my backpack on the floor, opened it, and began to mete out the things I had bought in India, all the different sweets and sundries, the bags and jewellery and spent more time than I needed arranging it all on the table, making it look like I had come back from my trip with a bounty, that I had not forgotten about my family while I was away. I sorted my clothes and began a load of laundry almost immediately, feeling like I was on a speedrun to normalcy, like I could get everything done and dusted before the girls woke up.

As I was unpacking dirty clothes, a neighbour from across the road knocked on the door and asked if I could help her. The elderly man next door to us, Lyn, had fallen and she couldn't pick him up. Lyn has been frail for many years now and when I see him standing at the bottom of the walkway up to the back of the terrace house, I always ask him how he's doing and he smiles and gives me a thumbs up, always in a parka and hat, even in the late summer when the temperature is well into the teens.

I've never been fully inside Lyn's house. Earlier in the Spring, I had heard him shouting in his kitchen for help, and had stood by the door for a few hours waiting for an ambulance to come and then for the firefighters with axes to break down his locked door. Even then, I saw only as far as the kitchen, full of empty boxes and cans, the linoleum floor the same as the one our house must have had at some point. Lyn was friends, he said, with a man who had lived in our house for many years, but left in the nineties to move in with a girlfriend in Erdington. This was the man that had filled a hole in our back garden which had been a bomb shelter during the war. Lyn said all of the houses on Victoria Road had one.

The woman from across the road has been caring for Lyn, making him dinner sometimes and helping with various tasks, because he has, as far as anyone can tell, no relatives in the city. He's told Yoko and me about a niece, who he has gone to visit, but this was several years ago now, well before Covid. He is fiercely private, but will occasionally ask me to photocopy different medical records for him, some of them very old and hand-written, from his time in the navy in the sixties and seventies, and though I don't look at anything he gives me carefully, you can tell he now has a multitude of health problems.

The neighbour let me in through the front door, and complimented the shirt I was wearing, the one I had bought in India and I said, "Thanks, I've just returned from India."

She was surprised, "Oh? When?"

"Now," I said, "Literally, twenty minutes ago."

We went into the living room and there was Lyn on the ground, sitting in front of his reclining chair.

"He's just been to India," the neighbour said to Lyn and I said, "Hello, Lyn, looks like you're having a bit of a problem" and he said, "Yes, very sorry to trouble you."

I'm impressed sometimes how British British people remain even in difficult circumstances. This was not the first time I've picked an elderly British person off the ground, and in my previous experience, it was the same: "Terribly sorry to bother you" as I think, Fucking hell, you've been like this for three hours?

I took a moment to assess the inside of the house, given my curiosity, and it did not disappoint, stacked with books and papers and the furniture and carpet not changed since the eighties, but warmer and cleaner than I expected it to be. Lyn was in his parka and hat and had been stuck for a while, the neighbour said, more than an hour and I said, "We're going to get you up, Lyn, don't worry."

When I was pushing John, the elderly vicar who passed away last year, to church every week in a wheelchair, I spent some time watching YouTube videos about how to pick up elderly people in a way that wouldn't hurt them, so I said to Lyn what I had learned in the video, telling him exactly where I was going to touch him and making sure he was okay with it. The neighbour was sceptical, "I don't think you'll be able to get him up like that" but sure enough, after I counted down and I bent my knees, we were able to get him back in the chair, though he briefly cried out in pain, before thanking us profusely. The neighbour stayed, said she would wait for the ambulance, and I told Lyn that if he needed anything of course Yoko and I were only a phone call away.

The girls all woke up and we celebrated my return — the gifts were all right, even the necklace I got for Yoko which I had doubted the moment after I bought it, and I immediately reinserted myself into the family taxi service, insisting on taking Mei to her next engagement and to pick up Mia later. Still a Calvinist, a Protestant, I felt the need to make amends for the time away, even though, it seemed, no one resented me for going and had, as far as I could tell, not particularly felt my absence except when the oven blew, and even then, Yoko was quickly able to sort it out.

Lyn has not returned from the hospital. Yoko talked to him on the phone, and called on Christmas and he didn't answer and we both sat in silence, wondering what this meant. Then the neighbour across the road saw me after Christmas and said she was going to see Lyn in the hospital on this birthday and if we wanted to — and here she added some hedging about how she was hesitating to ask because she wasn't sure if she should ask — she would bring him a birthday card from us. We just needed to stick it through her door and I said, "Yes, of course."

We went to dinner on Monday and walking back stopped at several shops looking at cards and wondering what was appropriate. We settled on one that said nothing, but had a green pattern on it and took it home to sign. Yoko wrote a kind message and left it open for me, to put in happy birthday and then I paused wondering if I should write the thing I normally write on cards like this: "We love you"; if this was the appropriate sentiment to write in a card for an old next door neighbour who seems to want nothing to do with anything in the world, if he can avoid it.

What is love. I pick an elderly man up off the ground and put him in his chair. I stand by his door while he lies on the linoleum floor of his kitchen, assuring him the ambulance will come soon, even though I have no real idea how long it will be. I keep asking if he's okay, and he keeps saying that he is and he's sorry to be a bother, really, I'm free to go if I need to. "No," I say, standing in the garden, touching the door handle, "it is not a bother. I'll wait until they come."