ellen bell

My landlord's house has a post-war, make-do-and-mend, aesthetic - a hotch-potch of chipped Victoriana, heavy dark oak furniture, fogged prints, tiled fireplaces with gas fires (that emit that muggy smell of hot dust when switched on) a haphazard scattering of plastic toys, fridge magnets, pens with fluffy tops and ticking clocks. I like it. It is a home.

I had forgotten how much I am comforted by the sound of ticking clocks. The grandfather clock belonged to his grandparents. Their pictures hang next to it. Serious faces - squared features in sepia tones. The clock chimes on the hour, every hour. I don't hear it when I sleep.

My present life finds its ground in the detail. An elderly woman in a health food cafe eating soup, a silk headscarf tied tightly in a neat bow under her chin, a pink transparent one on top of this, holding it fast. A seagull overhead, its white belly suddenly caught by the early morning sun - a shock of white. The clamouring, hissy chattering of the starlings under the pier just before they begin their wild dance in the sky. A large pebble on the pavement painted red. The girl, who like me who walks the prom every morning, shouting a greeting to me just a little too loud. The man jogging with his white standard poodle - the dog, like a Parisian mademoiselle, high-stepping, vain and aloof.

And snapshots from Radio 4: my company in the cold, stone-tiled back kitchen. A ex-street dweller being interviewed, the shame of it still cutting, still bleeding.

'Homelessness begins inside you.'

And reading an article about Jeremy Deller in the Guardian.

'Artists aren't special people', he states. He doesn't want to make things - there are too many things. He tried working in an office. I remember reading about another artist, who didn't want a job and it was this imperative that drove him to make work. So singular. So sure of themselves.

I am applying for work in offices. I watch the process at a distance. How will it feel? How does it feel? I try to squeeze the last 49 years of my odd little life into the kind of shape that will fit, that will suffice. My soft, tender little life. Is it purely ego that compels artists, writers, poets to make work? Is such creativity merely fuelled by a compunction to test their existence, to claim attention, to find a presence in another person's space?

I watch her dying. Her life is now wholly contained in that bed, that pink, too warm, room. I bring her travel brochures of the Gower, the Mumbles and Swansea Bay. She pours over them, pointing at the pictures, soundlessly mouthing the names of the beaches - that lost landscape of her childhood.

We ask her too many questions. She cannot remember. Songs come easily enough as do the names of those places. What is left but a hollow carcass, a frame that holds a barely beating heart and organs that are failing? Her stories will soon be lost. He revisits them with her, daily. Her face, sometimes teethless sometimes not, lifts itself into a beaming smile at his gentle prodding -his slow retelling of those endless episodes of nostalgic lightness. Such a kind sharing. A reigniting of what she is, the best of her. He doesn't want to let her go.

We are just stories. Our stories. Mostly small, inconsequential stories.

He hadn't realised I was still upstairs. We both agree we need a system in place that lets him know when I am out. A green rubber duck on the top shelf of his desk in the hall. The duck moved to the lower shelf means I am not in. Not within, without. Out. Out in that fresh, wild air.