The Life and Times of Norma D

Whilst I'm resurrecting these old manuscripts here's another one - The Life and Times of Norma D. also written in 2006.


The Life and Times of Norma D.
PART ONE
Chapter One

Norma Doyle’s confusion fed the anxiety that fed the shaking of her nail-gnarled, detergent worn hands.
It hadn’t always been like this. But it had ever been ‘easy’ either. She had never been easy - not in a sexual sense, God forbid, (as she would say), but within herself. But the shaking hands, they were a recent development, and too hard to hide when you were a midwife. A long favoured saying of Norma’s was ‘the delivery of new life requires stability’, and that meant a good steady pair of hands. These very words were now a tangled umbilical cord wrapped around her neck - squeezing the life out of her. Not that too many people were noticing. Not nowadays. Figures were being noticed. Of the numerical kind. Stats. Targets. The bottom line. Those of the nurses and midwives who were middle aged and beyond and could still remember different days of faded glory, all the more glorious because of the stark contrast with their current situation. They had started with different figures - their own, slim, svelte; quick and efficient. They had kept those hips and calves in trim, envious shape, as idealized in romantic hospital dramas and even sexualized to a whole generation of young men by Barbara Windsor and the Carry On films. But now many of them, sluggish with apathy, had become overweight; waddling, smoking, scowling. Not fitter, bitter. Norma didn’t waddle. Or smoke. Or binge drink. Norma had actually lost weight over the years, but it was that particular type of thinness borne from ‘bad nerves’ And one day, like a twig, she snapped.
It had been a typical week at the hospital. Several agency staff made up the maternity workforce; agency staff whose faces changed from day to day – week to week – along with their accents. Very few of them could hit the ground running, as it were, and Norma, ever-cautious, would find herself having to keep a sharp eye on her unfamiliar colleagues – not that she was the assertive type – but she would, when vigilant, stealthily correct the mistakes of these transients, of which there were many, far too many for one meek silent midwife. But the week had been pretty much like any other, stress, attempted hyper-vigilance; but then the day came when it all became too much.

Norma had just delivered two halves of babies. That is, she had ran from one delivery theatre to check on the contractions of a wailing indecipherable Somali woman who had been brought in against her own wishes, and then she’d had to run half a mile of polished corridor to Jade, a fifteen year old who had no idea who the father of her first child was. (When the son was handed to her she was able to narrow it down to one of two white boys, and thus eliminate the one Asian). It was seven am when Norma made her way to the rest room with a can of Sprite, something she didn’t usually drink, but felt compelled towards for the sugar rush. She had been on duty since ten the previous night. It was nothing new of course. But what had been a dull ache at the beginning of that week had turned into a throb of resentment, a cactus of anger, fizzing throughout her being. Norma felt her face redden as the chemicals of anger surged around her thin, overworked body. ‘Calm down’, she urged herself. But her words had no effect, if anything they served only to aggravate the state in which she now stewed, like a lamb to the slaughter. And then Imelda, the large Malaysian matron, had entered the rest room wearing a look of exasperation, as though Norma was an errant child who was forever testing her infinitely more important adult patience.
Norma could remember Imelda’s first day at the hospital five years earlier. She had been just one of the handful of agency nurses sent to cover for the week. Imelda had thrived ever since, becoming a matron only six months ago. Norma remembered. And, it seemed to her, that Imelda had long forgotten. And, when the Minister of State for Health had visited the hospital three months before, it was Imelda who had shook his hand, smiled in all the right places and had her photo taken, whilst Norma had been somewhere far in the background.
‘Where’s your paperwork?’ she asked. Norma sighed and looked up at her. ‘I’m going to stay on and do it,’ she had replied. She began to fiddle with the ring pull. But Norma’s heart soared. It was only then that Norma conceded to herself that the sugar laden drink may not have been a good idea. She usually stuck to water – or milk, not that either one would have made much difference under the circumstances.
‘You know we all under pressure…’ Imelda began, still looming over her by the half open doorway.
“Well. Some more than others, especially those who have been here for a long time,” Norma replied.
“What that does mean?” Imelda demanded to know. Norma didn’t correct her on the order of her words. “Norma Dale, are you being racist, mmm?”
“It’s DOYLE actually, D-O-Y-L-E.”
“Well, Mrs. Doyle, yur superior needs your paperwork on time, you’re holding up the flow of the process… no-one immune to the process…”
“It’s MISS, not, it’s Norma, damn you, woman…” and it was at that moment the red mist that had been lodged in Norma Doyle’s solar plexus shot upwards, like the exploding mercury from a thermometer, and up through her head, turning into a shower of red rage whose red mist now descended over her eyes – blinding her to all but the immediate priority of this expression of rage. Some call it madness. Norma lobbed the three quarters full can of Sprite across the room. It hit the large dirty window and bounced back; it was reinforced glass. Norma didn’t, couldn’t, take the time to evaluate the damage. She had turned into the banshee her mother had always called her when she was younger, but which she had never actually been until now. She opened her mouth and roared in what could only be described as an expression of primeval rage. Imelda backed out of the ‘rest’ room, wide-eyed, onto the corridor. Norma followed her out and continued to roar, but added screaming and spitting. Imelda continued her slow backwards pace until she stood amidst the two-way pedestrian traffic of the main corridor that to the right led to maternity or to the left, the exit. Norma had become like an uncaged wild animal that had to be captured.
***
Instead of continuing to work downstairs as the ever-reliable, if stressed midwife, Norma now paced the small side room on the Miller Ward of the psychiatric unit. She had been sectioned for twenty-eight days, a decision which had been fuelled by Imelda’s statement that had begun by stating she had noticed her ‘strange’ behaviour weeks before, and that today’s incident was its culmination.
It wasn’t quite what Norma had expected at ten the previous evening when she had arrived to work. But she had deterioriated after she had blacked out; violent, apparently. Life was full of surprises, she told herself. But she knew that wasn’t true. Her life hadn’t been full of surprises at all, at least, not until this occurrence.

NEED NORMA SURVEYING THE MILLER WARD. The first thing that went through Norma’s mind as she became more aware of her situation was who was going to tell her mother that she wouldn’t be visiting her for the next twenty-eight days? She managed to calm what felt like an increasingly glass shattering (inner) voice long enough, firstly, to convince the Miller staff that it was imperative she make a phone call, and then to make the phone call to her mother’s key worker, Patty, at the Sunny Glades care home in Willesden, a woman whom Norma had always felt intimidated by.
“Hello Norma, how are you love? Are we to expect you? Your mother has done well this afternoon, art therapy,” the West Indian voice declared with a mixture of pride and no-nonsense.
“That’s grand,” Norma replied.
“Yes, potato prints mainly, paint everywhere.”
“I see, very… very good. Now listen, I don’t want to upset her or anything but I won’t be there today…”
“Oh?”
“Or tomorrow, in fact, I’ll be tied up for the next twenty-eight days.” And that’s when Norma fell into the sobs of a wounded child. Patty offered only regular spaced ‘there there’s’ Once Norma had found a calm spot upon which to rest long enough to explain that she had been placed under section, even though she’d only snapped and lobbed a can of Sprite against a window and then become a (violent) banshee, she recognised the slight change of tone in Patty’s voice. It was the tone reserved for strange old patients like her mother when in a particularly difficult space. But Norma didn’t say anything for fear of reinforcing even more an image of lunacy. She just accepted the reassurances that her mother was in good hands.
“Well, you shall have to focus on getting yourself well again,” Patty said. Norma put the phone down in the manned ward office. She made no attempt to move but lowered her head and picked at her pathetic gnarled and raggedy fingernails and asked herself, what if she too would have to resort to afternoons of potato prints? She allowed herself to be guided out of the office by what seemed to me no more than a student. They trundled out, Norma’s head still bowed,to join the lingering line of muttering ward shufflers.
***
Maeve stared at the television in the smaller of two dayrooms in the Sunny Glades care home. The children’s TV presenter jumped around with a bowl of custard in one hand and a wobbly red jelly in the other – a comedic balancing act which didn’t so much as evoke the hint of a giggle from Maeve Doyle.
***

Norma had never, in all her forty-four years, known a period of twenty-eight days to pass so quickly, especially as she was still in the same building in which she worked, had worked. But then, she reasoned, there had been plenty of meds - downers mainly, which made her hitherto anxious mind a relatively hospitable oasis of dreamlike scenery - she recalled many afternoons of the four week period when, having been told there was no group therapy due to ‘lack of resources’ she was able to sit back and just let her mind wander into a hitherto unknown and unexplored landscape consisting of boulevards, avenues, promenades even, and a thankful lack of the concrete cul de sacs she hadn’t before realised she had become so familiar with. During one fertile afternoon of dream travel she recollected a short story she had written for English class in her second year at St. Joseph’s R.C. technical high school for girls. The exercise was to write a story for a main character from a favourite novel. She had chosen Jane Eyre, along with the rest of the class, a heroine more in tune with their own lives than the middle-class Elizabeth Bennett could ever be. She had produced a four-page story in which Jane was set in 1972, with flowing hair and platform shoes with magic powers. When she had submitted it for marking, however, she had blushed a repressed Catholic schoolgirl scarlet at her teacher’s remarks that loose hair in Victorian times signified a loose woman, and that the magic powers may signify drug taking. Her teacher was much more open and liberal than the other teachers. There had even been rumours of her being ‘passionate’ and liberal, which, whilst in keeping with the times of disco-dancing and glitter balls, was still something from an alien land to the overseeing nuns. Nevertheless, Norma had been shocked at such an interpretation and even more shocked that perhaps her subconscious motives, or her sly side as her mother had frequently termed it with a scowl, could reveal so much - if that’s what it was. She had been extra careful ever since. But this afternoon of freedom saw Jane, in platforms, hot pants and long flowing hair, taken by a giant hand to join Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds. Bright. Sparkly. Shiny. Full of promise.
***
Day twenty-seven arrived and Norma was ushered into a PRIVATE - STAFF ONLY room. She cautiously approached the standard high backed chair upholstered in wipe down material usually found in old peoples homes.
“Hi, hi, hello,” she said, trying to sustain at least a few seconds of meaningful, mentally healthy eye contact with each of the three people present, one middle-aged man, one woman in her sixties, and one who couldn’t be more than mid-thirties. The man, more like an accountant, looked up from a file in front of him and gave a slight nod, more of a reflex built over the years in the same job than by any sincere salutation. The woman in her thirties gave a wide smile of sympathy, the stresses and strains not yet succeeded in dragging her down, and whose smile could, if she had been alone have resulted in yet another breakdown for Norma, yet not the manic can of soft drink lobbing banshee kind, but more the deep, fall on the floor huddled in the corner with snot and tears kind. The older woman just sat stone still - a silver Mont Blanc, drawing attention to itself, ready and waiting to either release or restrain.
“Norma Doyle?” the man asked, glancing up for a second again as Norma took her seat.
“Yes?” Norma asked.
“Can you confirm your date of birth for us please?” the thirty something asked. Was Norma Doyle with it enough to be able to state her correct date of birth?
“19th March nineteen sixty two.”
“So, how have you found the help you’ve had access to during your stay with us?” the older woman asked.
“The help? Yes, well, I have been helped, I think I just needed a break - “
“The Miller Ward isn’t the usual destination of choice for midwives seeking breaks,” the older woman said, in what felt clearly like an accusation, how on earth could you, Norma Doyle, forty-four years of age and a childless spinster, have allowed yourself to break down?”
The thirty something offered another smile.
“We gather you were stressed for quite a while beforehand?” the older woman asked.
“Yes, yes, I was, I suppose, finding it quite difficult to cope - but I’m ok now.”
“Well now, there’s the issue of your work, isn’t there?” asked the man.
“Mmmm, well, I’m not sure, I mean, maybe I should try and find something else…”
“I read in your last appraisal notes that you said you were finding the pace of change within the hospital particularly difficult to cope with, is this true?” the thirty something asked.
Norma knew that comment would come back to haunt her. Her mother had always said you had to be careful what you said - walls had ears.
“Well, it’s true, yes, I have to admit it, I was finding it all - “
“What did you find particularly difficult? You know we all have to cope with change in one form or another, as the saying goes, the only constant thing in life is change,” the man said. Norma had watched enough police series to know that there was usually bad cop, good cop scenarios. She felt unduly weighted against in this room of bad-good-bad cop.
“Well, there was much more paperwork…” Norma said, but no sooner had the trail of words left her mouth than she felt their mockery jabbing her, like a cruel nun’s pencil in the chest.
“Paperwork?” the older woman asked.
“Well, things weren’t like that when I first became a midwife you know…” Norma felt her face heating up and she told herself to be careful - this wasn’t the time or place to instigate a one woman crusade against change within the NHS. Not that the leadership of such a crusade would ever be assigned to her.
“It wasn’t like that in my day, eh!” the man said and glanced sideways at the older woman.
***
Norma Doyle was duly discharged back into the community, along with a three-month sick note and access to six NHS funded counselling sessions.
***
Chapter Two
Within an hour of being released from the Miller Ward Norma found herself seated on yet another high-backed chair. This was Sunny Glades, a care home whose reality bore no resemblance to its name. Her mother sat beside her and muttered undecipherables to no one in particular.
“So, mother, I hope you weren’t too upset… I missed you…” Norma’s voice collapsed and broke off. The first stream of tears ran over her drug plumped cheeks. Her hands panicked for a tissue and rifled around her chaotic bag.
“Look at me mother, what am I to do? I’ve got myself into a right pickle,” she said amidst another flow of tears. Patty walked in and switched on the TV. Countdown was on, the big illuminated timer ticked away in beat to the familiar music.
“She needs the stimulation,” Patty said and turned to face Norma. “Oh dear, are you ok? Do you have tissues?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine, I’m alright - just a few tears, nothing to get het up about,” Norma said and dragged a moist ball of tissue across her face in a no-nonsense manner she hoped would have a no-nonsense affect on her emotions.
“That’s it dear, you wipe away those tears now. So. Are you going back to work?” Patty asked, now plumping up the cushions behind Mrs. Doyle’s back. Norma felt the descent of a veil of shame.
“Erm, no, I mean, yes, yes, but they’ve said to take a bit of time off, given me a sick note…”
“Well. Yes. That’s right, they did right, it is the NHS after all, isn’t it?” Patty said and raised her left eyebrow.
Norma held Patty’s gaze for only a second or so then darted her eyes back to her mother, then to Countdown.
“Well, well, so how’s she been then? Has she been fretting after me or anything…?”
“Well there have been days when she’s just put on her coat and wanted to leave all by herself. As if! And then there’s been days when she’s been glued to the TV, she fixes her eyes on those Channel Five afternoon films and she’s as happy as Larry,” Patty said.
“Oh.”
It wasn’t until Norma had kissed her mother goodbye and was waiting at the bus stop, in the grey drizzling London rain, that she rewound and replayed the scene in which Patty had raised her eyebrow at her and said something about it was a good job the NHS had put her on sick, because they couldn’t have such an unstable, unpredictable, unwell person working for them; oh no, they couldn’t have that. Norma felt a fizzing surge of resentment in the pit of her stomach. OR had Patty meant that the NHS was so under funded, in such a bad state already that… was she being even more sarcastic? Was that it? The bus finally arrived. Norma sat one seat behind that marked for the elderly and those with disabilities. She stared out of the window at the grey North London streets of Willesden and Kilburn, brightened only by garish plastic and neon-lit shop signs. Did Patty think she should be looking after her mother at home? Is that what she thought? Is that what she thought all the Sunny Glades residents needed? The tender, loving, dutiful care of family - in the Family Home? But she had to admit it was only what she herself really thought. Was that what they called projection? Still. And it was only what the nurses at the hospital had thought whenever the old patients were left without visitors, get well cards or flowers. She, along with many of the nurses, had this idealistic image of the much loved, much wanted grandparent, cared for in a warm, loving home full of grandchildren, like an Tuscan advert for pasta sauce. It was all total shite, really, she now bravely concluded. Actually, Norma had reached this contrary conclusion long before - when she had tried to look after her own mother, when she had first gone ‘a bit funny’. But, apart from a home-help sent by social services, Norma had tried to juggle the situation by also working. It was also around about the time when bringing a continuous stream of new life into the world felt somehow disturbing to Norma. She had begun the vocation, for that’s what it had been, originally, with a sense of the spiritual; the miracle of New Life. Amen. Hallelujah. But then…
***
Norma entered the communal entrance of the converted Victorian terrace house in which she had rented a ‘spacious’ studio flat for the past nine years. It was the home, albeit rented, that she had ‘progressed’ onto once she had moved out of the nurses’ block at the hospital. Most of the other nurses who moved out of the block did so to get married, or to move in with their boyfriend, or had managed to find an adequate deposit to put down on their own small place - a place cheap enough usually only found miles from work, in which case many ended up leaving the hospital too. Then there were those like Norma who just craved their own space and so settled on a bedsit or studio, paying anything from £100 to £160 per week for the privilege - which amounted to sometimes over two thirds of their pay. She had been on the council waiting list but had been forgotten. Norma had never been the type to badger or make a nuisance of herself. Well, not until the Sprite can incident.
Norma scanned through the post, stacked up on the old brown chest in the hallway, next to everyone else’s. None of it was personal, just bills, circulars and statements. She entered her own ‘spacious’ studio flat and, for the first time she really smelled the place. The smell of the flat, of her belongings, of herself, hit her. It seemed like a mixture of charity shop and a trace of cheap white musk. She stood at the door, for it was from here she could see almost the entire space anyway, and took in this space, her ‘home’. And she felt a shame that could only be described as hazchem toxic. It was a shame that emanated from the very core of who she was. She asked herself what on earth she had been doing with her life. What had the past forty-three years amounted to? This? Was this IT? THIS? She had never even been abroad, well, only to the west of Ireland to see her parents families. And Wales. Not even Scotland. Not even to Spain. And then she knew what she was going to do with her time off - she was going to give herself, and her ‘space’ a new image. That was it, that’s what would help, a new image, a redecoration. Didn’t they say a change was as good as a rest? She would have to think about it first though, but before even that she would have to give the place a good going over. Twenty-eight days of neglect had fallen on the place.

After cleaning out and binning the decaying contents of the fridge and bin, and giving the place a good dust and vacuum Norma made a cup of tea and methodically sorted through each item of post and placed in a grease and tea stained, dog eared blue cardboard folder that she kept in the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers. There had always been an issue with storage.
Norma sat on the sofa bed and didn’t bother to even turn on the lamp as evening progressed into near darkness. All she did was stare at the beige walls that hadn’t been given anything more than a quick wipe down since she moved in. ‘Yellow?’ she wondered - it was a colour quite popular for bathrooms on all the TV home improvement shows. She had never seen Carol Smilie or Linda Barker, or any other TV interior decorator ever ‘do up’ a bedsit or a studio flat. The voices of her neighbours, in the next door studio travelled through the walls; two gay men who had moved in less than two years before. Neither had ever gone out of their way to be friendly. Whenever Norma passed them on the stairs they would always fall into camp whispers and ridiculous camp laughter. She had supposed she just wasn’t cool enough for them. She was a million miles away from that Grace, from Will and Grace, that was for sure. Norma didn’t like them. They didn’t like Norma. Norma didn’t like them because they didn’t like her. They were rude and garish and superficial, and couldn’t even be bothered to pretend for the sake of good neighbourly relations. She had lived there over seven years longer than them. Damn it! The new colour scheme definitely wouldn’t be pink. The only colour that she really wanted was a deep crimson, of the type found in old private libraries and Mayfair gentlemen’s clubs - the crimson that was framed by a train of gold, offset by the dark green leather bindings of antique books. Grand. Much too grand for a Kilburn studio - a glorified bedsit.
*
D.I.Y. superstores are never cheerful places to visit, especially not on a wet Wednesday. Even when all the couples are out at work, earning the money to improve their homes, and you are off work and have the time to stroll around the aisles at leisure. Norma pushed a shopping cart around that was three times the size of the regular supermarket variety, six times the size of the small supermarket carts aimed at the single shopper which held more than a basket but nowhere near as much as the regular family size. The aisles were three times as wide as those at Tesco. All in all it had the effect of making Norma feel like a lost little girl in a world of the oversized, and overbearing. No, DIY superstores were never cheerful places to visit. This was compounded by the characterless muzac and aisles of anonymous flat packs. It reminded her of a particularly realistic American ‘art house’ film in which the (usually disturbed) character just strolls around the big old D.I.Y. warehouse - the emptiness of the scene reflecting the emptiness of the character and his/her downbeat life. That’s how it felt. That’s how it was.
Norma settled on magnolia. It was the safer option, and a million miles from crimson and gold.
*