I have lost count of the times I have recently taken mother to her hospital appointments.
This time it was for a colonoscopy. It turns out she has the colon of a young woman. Has it ever been used, I wonder! The photographs of her inner tubes, I never hoped to see, were embarrassing and made me feel rather awkward.
‘There is nowt up wi’ rait folk’, we both heard the voice of Nana say as we walked back to the car where dad was being a dutiful chauffeur.
Deb’s popped in when we arrived home.
She was carrying two half dozen boxes of eggs freshly served from the endless supply of rescue chickens running around her back passage. Apparently they get on perfectly well with her two miniature shetland ponies, her bull massif and the pit bull she took off a drug dealer who was wanted for some despicable crime, absconded to Spain and threw himself over an 18 storey balcony when he thought he could fly on his cocktail of class A crap he regularly injected into his already messed up life. Debs was delighted. At least the pit bull was safe and free from his cruelty.
Animals are her life, especially horses. She has a stallion that she loves and visits every day to muck out, feed and talk to. At least she gets a friendly welcome and an incredibly intuitive conversation from Stallion for, when she goes home, her husband hasn’t shifted from his armchair and simply grunts if he acknowledges her at all. She complained that the heating bill was £1130 for the past three months as he still complained of being cold. It is a big house though. But still, I’d throw him a horse blanket!
‘These are for you’, Debs said as she offered the box of eggs to mum. Looking into my eyes her kindness shone, ‘and these are for you’. Delighted at her gift I smiled and thanked her amid the telling of more stories about how she has rescued her son from his stupid life with stupid people and settled him into the caravan she has fenced in to garden at the end of the driveway. ‘He lives in my fridge though’, she smiled.
Mum walked her to the end of the drive and dad who had sat at the kitchen table listening to her animated tales turned to my smiling face. ‘You’ve got Mrs. Bird’s eggs’, he said and repeated it several times like he was slowly enjoying the wry humour. He made me feel like I had taken them without permission. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Well Debs calls here with a half dozen, then pops to Mrs. Bird with the other half’.
‘Oh’, I say, embarrassed for the second time today. ‘I’ve got Mrs. Bird’s eggs’, how bloody awkward.