| Shuffling
the tiles
by Sherri Turner
You’d think it would get easier after all this time, but
it doesn’t. Not at all. It’s the hope, you see. It gets in
the way of acceptance like an over eager bouncer at a nightclub, jutting
out its chin and refusing to relent. If you let it in, the acceptance,
then you have lost. And I never give up without a fight.
We have the board set out between us and have each chosen our seven tiles.
It is her turn first and I wait patiently as the clawed fingers rearrange
the tiles with a speed that belies their appearance.
‘I’ve got all the bad letters again,’ she says, before
laying down K-N-I-F-E with the E on the starting point so that the K just
reaches the double letter square. 34 points. She always complains about
the letters. Never satisfied. Too many vowels, too many consonants, always
something wrong. But she gets the good words nonetheless. That’s
one thing that hasn’t changed, one thing that feeds the hope.
It’s a different part of the brain, they tell me, when I ask how
she can still play Scrabble yet not know who I am. Different functions
in different parts, like rooms in a house. I find it hard to understand.
She has such a store of rules and words and still has the ability to spot
the good ones amongst the random letters on her rack. Yet the place for
storing names and faces and recent history is all empty, wiped, useless.
She is starting to get restless as I decide on my word. While we are playing
she can focus on the game and lose herself in it, but if I take too long
then she drifts back to this world, the one she is really lost in, and
begins to fret. I take my turn quickly to avoid a scene. I’ve been
there before and can’t bear to see it again.
She would start to look around and realise that she didn’t know
where she was. Then she would turn on me.
‘Who are you?’ she would cry. ‘Where’s my lovely
house? What have you done with my things?’
Then she would look around for help and shout for the police. Once she
attacked me and left long scratches down my face. There’s still
a slight scar. You can only see it in a certain light, but sometimes I
pass a mirror and catch sight of the constant reminder of who we have
become.
The word I have chosen in my haste is quite small: F-E-W. Only ten points.
‘That’s not very good,’ she says. ‘You’ve
wasted that W. Not even on a double letter square.’ She returns
to her letter rack, pleased that she is already ahead, and immediately
she is engrossed again, her brow furrowed in concentration.
Other people here seem to have good spells and bad spells. I have seen
visitors greeted with joy and shunned moments later. I have seen hugs
one minute and heard curses the next. But it’s not like that for
me. Every time she is the same. The nurses say that she remembers her
house and will chat about the war and rationing and when she went dancing
as a girl. She will ask when she can go home and tell them about the flowers
in her garden and the curtains she always liked. Sometimes she will cry
quietly and refuse any comfort. But she never asks about family or friends.
The only people she knows now, and then only vaguely, are the ones she
sees every day.
I can’t come every day, so she only realises who I am when I fetch
the board. I’m not actually sure if she knows it’s the same
person each time. Maybe she just enjoys the game and doesn’t care
who she plays with. But I tell myself that it’s enough that I know
who she is and that for a little while she is less confused and hopeless.
The words keep coming, spreading across the board in an impressive array
of vocabulary and imagination. Views; Still; Lazy (triple letter for the
Z, she gloats). I try jack and she pounces on it with glee.
‘You can’t have that. It’s a proper noun. A name. It’s
not allowed.’
Proper noun? Where did that come from? I can barely remember my English
grammar and yet she, who doesn’t even remember being married, can
spout it chapter and verse. I stifle my surprise and point out that it’s
also what you use to lift up a car and she reluctantly relents, but not
without a retaliatory dig.
‘You’ve wasted that J as well,’ she says. ‘It’s
no use you having all the good letters if you waste them.’
I’d laugh if I weren’t so sad.
I used to try and use the game to jog her memory. I would scour my rack
for anything that could take her back, make her remember me. It sometimes
seemed uncanny, the words that came up, but I suppose after all these
years, and games that numbered in their hundreds, it wasn’t really
strange that so many of them were relevant. So I would find beach or school
or plait and I’d play the word then, trying to be casual, follow
it up with a ‘Do you remember...’
‘Oh, look,’ I would say, as though I’d only just noticed
it. ‘Do you remember when we used to go to that beach with all the
windbreaks?’ Or ‘Do you remember when I won that race at the
school sports day?’ Or ‘Do you remember how I hated it when
you made me wear my hair in plaits?’
But she never did. She’d just look at me with her face as empty
as a blank tile. If I pushed her, she would get upset.
‘Why would I remember that?’ she would say through quivering
lips. ‘I don’t know you. Leave me alone.’
And a nurse would come over with tea to calm her and take me to one side
and gently let me know that I wasn’t helping. So I stopped the follow
up, but I still find the words when I can. It’s that hope thing
again.
I think she must be getting tired now, as her words are starting to get
smaller and she’s missing a lot of the special squares. Line; men;
not. I start to worry that she is getting worse and that soon I will lose
this too. But it’s all I have left of her and I can’t let
it go so easily.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘You can do better than that. I’m
going to win at this rate.’
She lifts her head and glares at me.
‘You are not going to win,’ she says.
I am relieved that she still has that level of resolve, but wish she had
chosen other words to express it. No one wins in the end, but there are
some ways of losing that are much more cruel than others.
I’ve nearly had enough for today. I feel guilty that my ability
to be here is so limited but it’s a difficult façade to maintain.
Some days I can pretend that I have seen something, an indication that
maybe tomorrow she will be better. Other days it’s like swimming
through the treacle she used to bake into my favourite tarts.
The game is nearly over anyway and I take another look at my letters so
that I don’t keep her waiting. She has put down C-U-P for her turn,
and I am about to play H-O-E when I see it and change my word to H-O-P-E.
I would like that to be a message from somewhere, a sign, but I stopped
believing in those a long time ago. Still, it reminds me of what I have
promised myself – that I will never give up hope. That each time
I visit I will wipe the slate of all the previous times, just as she does,
and start each day afresh with love and gratitude and, yes, hope. What
else can I do?
A little yelp of joy escapes her thin lips as she sees what I have played.
She gathers her tiles as quickly as she can and places them triumphantly
on the board before settling back in her chair to await my reaction. Using
the H from ‘hope’ she has spelled out D-A-U-G-H-T-E-R. It
is a marvellous word by anyone’s standards, especially so close
to the end of the game. I realise that she must have been saving the letters
and that is why her last few words have been poor.
She beams at me and there is a twinkle in her eyes I haven’t seen
for a long time. It is almost too much for me to believe. Sometimes the
letters do come right, it seems. Sometimes the hope is justified. Has
she been waiting for the right letters all this time to tell me that she
knows; that underneath, somewhere, she has known all along? I want to
reach out to her and hold her. I want to say: ‘Yes, Mum, it’s
me. I’m your daughter.’ But she speaks before I can.
‘Fifty bonus points for using all my letters,’ she says. ‘Have
I won?’
There are so few tiles left in the bag and I am so far behind that there
is no point in continuing. The words are dry in my throat as I confirm
that she is indeed the winner and I realise that, to her, it was just
a good word after all. Just a word.
We clear the board and start to shuffle the tiles, ready for the next
game.
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