Then the Monumental Knitting Woman Spoke

Eileen is an institution in the nursing home. Her presence predates the actual building. Several of the older staff members are fit to remember the ancient, crumbling corridors of the old place. They were young nurses and auxiliaries back then. Eileen was already on her last legs. There is no telling what age she might be now. Eighty. Ninety. A hundred or more. The new building sits on what was once the local workhouse, serving the destitute residents of the town and its surrounding villages. When the workhouses finally closed their doors, the building was briefly -and somewhat optimistically- repurposed as a maternity hospital, then a geriatric unit and finally levelled to make way for a new nursing home equipped with all mod cons. Now, the long corridors and institutional architecture of the original building are nothing more than black and white photographs, framed and fading on the visitors’ room wall. But Eileen remembers the old set up with its starched nurses and antiseptic tang as if it were only yesterday. She does not talk of it often though sometimes she pulls the memory of it to the front of her mind and sucks upon it as one might suck on a mentholated lozenger, hoping for some kind of relief.

Eileen does not talk of anything really. She says yes to every offer of food and a perfunctory no when the staff offer to push her round the landscaped gardens for a breath of fresh air. Eileen is not senile. She is one of the few residents left in full retention of their marbles. Neither does she have any physical problems when it comes to speaking. Eileen simply does not see the point in talking for talking’s sake. She prefers to sit in the corner, by the fish tank, knitting. She finds the sound of the oxygen pump calming. She likes the way the algae collects in thick, green smears against the tank’s glass. When the tank is almost opaque it is time for the fish to be cleaned and Eileen knows another fortnight has passed.

Eileen has grown enormous. There’s no real exercise in knitting. Only her fingers move and they’ve never been one of her problem areas. Eileen’s problem areas are her thighs and her belly, her backside and arms, her tremendous bosoms which are like two flour sacks pinned to her chest, always dragging her forwards. The staff are constantly asking Eileen to reconsider her diet. They want her to eat grapefruit and tuna fish and thin slices of crackerbread which taste like salted cardboard. Eileen says no, quite firmly when they come at her with the diet food. Eileen wants to eat Jaffa cakes and swiss roll and Dairylea triangles spread on toast. Why shouldn’t Eileen eat what she wants? She is very old and will soon be dead. She has no pleasures left. Only the fish tank and food and knitting.

Eileen has been knitting the same thing for twenty three years. It is more than a blanket now. It is like a knitted ocean. It pours down her lap and across the day room floor and has to be folded up like a concertina when they wheel her back to her bedroom at night. It is every colour of the rainbow and formed from whatever scraps of wool Eileen can get her flabby fingers on. Donations from the charity box. Strands lifted from the craft cupboard. Occasionally, a jumper or scarf carefully unpicked. Visitors sporting knitwear have been warned not to linger too long in Eileen’s corner. She is liable to go at them with her scissors. Eileen isn’t fussy about what she knits with. The important thing is to keep going. Though she’s never admitted it, not even to herself, Eileen is afraid that if she ever stopped knitting, she herself might stop and that would be the end of everything.

Once, a year or so ago, on Mothering Sunday, a young boy visiting his grandmother was bold enough to approach Eileen in her corner, by the fish tank. Perhaps he was only after a close look at the goldfish. Maybe, it was Eileen herself who attracted his attention. She was, by this stage, not dissimilar to the Star Wars character, Jabba the Hutt, and young boys are always into Star Wars. The boy stood in front of Eileen’s wheelchair and stared at her. “What are you knitting?” he asked. Everyone in the room paused, drew breath and froze, waiting to hear what Eileen would say. No one had ever dared to ask what she was knitting before. She did not seem to be following any pattern or plan. Eileen glared at the young boy. You could tell she was deciding whether to answer him or not. Eventually she held her needles up so he could see row upon row of sloppy, loose stitches. “Knitting,” she said; Eileen was knitting some knitting. The young boy seemed satisfied with her answer. He went off to find his gran. Eileen returned to her knitting- both the noun and the verb of it. Each was happy in their own small way.

Inspired by Agatha Christie’s 1938 novel Appointment With Death