WRITTEN ON MY HEART
Juliet Blair

An ordinary Monday morning. Three generations of Collins women were at the breakfast table in the sunny kitchen. Tony (my son) had left earlier, and now Janine was fighting the usual battle to get Aimee to stop dawdling and get ready for school. Me? I’d wait till they’d both gone, and have breakfast in peace. Sometimes being an age pensioner has its advantages.
To fill in the time, I did what I usually do. I grabbed something to read – the only thing handy, the cereal box. But something was wrong. I didn’t recognise a single word. I didn’t even recognise a single letter. I blinked, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
“Janine.” My daughter-in law, who was filling out a permission note, looked up, annoyed. I’d been getting impatient reactions from her a lot lately. But I persisted.
“Janine, did you buy this cereal at the Korean grocery?”
“Oh, hell. I’ve lost my place. Is it important?”
“Janine. The writing. Can you see anything wrong with the writing?”
Janine glanced at the packet. “No. I can’t. I bought it at Woolworths, where else?”
Aimee picked up the package. “’Crunchy muesli with luscious apricot pieces,’” she read. “See Nan? It’s fine.”
I was starting to panic now. “The paper! Where’s the paper?” Aimee handed it to me. The headlines were a black nightmare of incomprehensibility. The letters even seemed to change shape as I watched.
“Nan! What’s up?” said Aimee, and “Come on, Aimee! We’re late!” said Janine, at the same time.
“‘I – ” I said , and stopped. “I can’t read,” I faltered. It was like announcing my own death.
Janine finally registered that something really was wrong. To her credit, she didn’t hesitate. “Get your bag, Aimee. Mum, just come as you are. We’re going to the hospital.”
“Yes, we’d better,” I said, in a calm voice that did not seem to be my own. “I think I’ve had a stroke.”

The emergency waiting-room provided entertainment on a huge screen. A vast, toothy male face shouted about bargains, and was replaced by a cartoon cat chasing a mouse. Yesterday, I’d have escaped into a book. No question of that now.
At least we weren’t there for long. In practically no time I was in a four-bed ward, staring at the ceiling, calm, blank, fatalistic. After a time that might have been anything from one hour to three, a young man came rushing in. “Are you my doctor?” I asked, as if from a great, weary distance.
The young man moaned, as if in pain. “Mum, it’s Tony!” he whispered. Then he threw his arms around me and burst into tears, the first time I’d seen him cry since he was ten.
I was so far out of it, I wasn’t even horrified at what I’d said.

Scans. Tests. They confirmed that it had been a stroke. A small one, in a limited area. I accepted this dully, like everything else. The one test that brought me to life wasn’t an official test at all.
Jenny, one of the night nurses, was the comforter of the sleepless. “I can’t stop thinking,” I told her in response to some gentle questioning, “about what I’ve lost. The written word – books – they were my life. Before I retired last year, I was a librarian. I read and read. I helped others read. Never again. Never again. How can I live?”
“You might recover,” she said. “Some people do.”
I shook my head. The last scan had shown a disconnection between the visual and written language centres in my brain. I didn’t think there would be any way of reversing that.
“Well, try to look on the bright side,” Jenny said. “How’s your writing?”
I stared at her as if she was mad. “I can’t read,” I said. “So how could I write?”
“You might be surprised. Sign your name. Here, just try it.”
I put pen to paper, sure that only a meaningless scribble would emerge. My signature, Lyn Collins. I felt my hand write it, with its usual confidence. Jenny was beaming with pleasure. “Jenny, Jenny, thank you. You’re a star!” I wrote. Then I reached for my reading glasses. Disappointment rose in me like bile. “It’s gibberish!” I cried.
“No,” said Jenny. “It says I’m a star. Not true, but. . .”
I grabbed the paper. I couldn’t recognise even a single letter in the words I’d just written.
I burst into tears.

All three of my young people came to sign me out of hospital and drive me to Rehab a week later. I would be given exercises to strengthen my weak right leg, and would learn basic living skills as a non-reader. Alexia sine agraphia, that’s what I had. Rare, but not unknown. Loss of reading without loss of writing. Why couldn’t it have been the other way round? Not being able to write I could have lived with.
I had the front seat, because of my leg. The streets slipped by the car window. Familiar? Unfamiliar? I couldn’t decide even this. Certainly I couldn’t read any of the signs, though the letters didn’t change shape, and seemed like something I had seen before.
Tony was driving, his hands confident on the wheel. “I’ll never be able to drive again,” I said with sudden realisation. Road signs were now just colours and shapes, and I’d lost an eighth of my field of vision, though I hadn’t realised it till the test results came back.
The impending loss of my licence was another blow, though nothing compared to not being able to read. My poor little car, Vicky (number plate VIC 412) would have to be sold. Unless –
“Aimee! It’s only a year till you’ll be practising for your P-plates. Would you like to take over Vicky, now I can’t drive her any more?”
“Oh, Nan, can I really? Serena and Kate will be green. They won’t be getting a car for years.”
“And neither will you, young lady. Your grandmother –” Janine spat out the word– “has seen fit to make an offer without clearing it with either of your parents. You’re not having your own car before you’ve even gone for your L-plates, and that’s flat. I didn’t have a car till I was twenty-two.”
“So I can’t either, is that it? You’re a jealous bitch, you know that?”
A lot more was said, but I didn’t hear it. I had my hands over my ears.
I knew we’d arrived when I felt the car stop. Tony helped me out, and Janine took his place behind the wheel. “Satisfied now?” she hissed at me, and swerved down the driveway, accelerating as she went.
Tony gazed after her and sighed. “She’ll calm down,” he said. “Let’s just get you settled now.”

I was settled in Rehab in a bright, pleasant room. The patient in the next bed was not much older than I was, early seventies maybe. She’d had a stroke too. She could say only two words: ‘Wow!’ and ‘Shit!’ Once she could shuffle a few metres with a walker, she would go to a nursing home. And I’d been feeling sorry for myself!
The speech pathologist said I didn’t need her services – I could talk her into the ground, she said. I asked her if she did reading recovery.
“No, that would be Thuy,” she said. “You should see her. If you could even learn to read words like ‘Exit’ and ‘Platform’ it could make a lot of difference to your life.”
Thuy was a quietly spoken, very slim young woman, with a Vietnamese face and an Australian accent. She asked me to call her Therese. She brought out some cards with letters of the alphabet. I couldn’t remember a single one. Except Z. I seemed to have an affinity for Z.
“Don’t give up, Lyn,” said Therese, though she looked a bit discouraged herself. “One good thing – unlike most alexia patients, you can still write.”
I grimaced. “A consolation prize. They never really console you, do they?”
“I guess not,” she said. “But you might be able to use this ability. There’s a man in Canada with your condition called Howard Engel who reads by copying letters onto the back of his teeth with his tongue.”
I tried it. “He must have a more sensitive tongue than I have,” I said. “I could never do that.”
She left the letters with me, anyway. Put perhaps I could trace the outlines with a finger or a pen. If I could remember what those outlines were. Maybe some sort of mnemonic?

When Leila came back the next day, I’d made up a rhyme, with the help of which I’d learned four letters.

A is an apple with one side squashed flat.
B is a ball standing next to a bat.
C is the curve of a new crescent moon,
D is a dumpling that sits in a spoon.

As I drew the letter with my right hand, I was able to pick it out among the cards scattered on the table with my left, as I said the name and visualised the picture.
“Great!” said Leila. “Do some more.”
So I did, and had ready for next time:

E is an egg that is laid by a hen.
F is a feather, or else a quill pen.
G is the goggles we wear in the pool,
H is a handle attached to a tool.

Now I had a new method: tracing the letter in the air with my finger. That day, slowly, painfully, and with a lot of help from Leila, I read my first sentence:
‘abe had a bad egg.’

I rang Tony to tell him about my triumph – a kindergarten-level achievement, a triumph! But it was, oh, it was! and the next afternoon, Aimee came to see me after school. She’d brought me a present – a teddy bear holding a red velvet heart. I could read – with air-tracing – ten letters now, and I showed her this with pride. How are the mighty fallen!
“Great! Nan, you’re going to get there!”
She laughed at my mnemonic verses. “Nan! After all the time you spent teaching me what was and wasn’t doggerel!”
“Sometimes,” I told her, “doggerel is just what’s needed.”
Then she moved on to what was really on her mind – the car. “Don’t sell it in a hurry,” she said. “You might drive again. Even if not, if it’s in the garage in a year or two’s time, it’ll be mine by default. And about that fight with Mum, just ignore it. Act as if it never happened. That’s what I do.”

When she had gone, I hugged the teddy bear, which made me feel closer to Aimee, and thought about what she’d said. Ignore it? We’d been sweeping our differences under the carpet for too long already, Janine and I. The trouble was that no two women as different as we are should ever be sharing a house. I think we’d both known it even before I sold my house, but Tony had been so insistent. “Mum, you can have family around you now Dad’s gone. And Aimee can have someone at home after school.” Numb with grief, I’d accepted. But now, something had to change. But what?

At the end of the second week, I went on my first excursion. A helper drove me to the supermarket, where I had to buy four items that I’d memorised. EBBS. That’s how I remembered them.
The February heat blasted me in the face as I stepped out the door. But that was nothing to the blast of the supermarket. Such clutter and chaos! So many people! Trolleys being wheeled straight at me! Bright coloured posters with meaningless words. Tango music, too loud, cut off in mid-note for an announcement. I couldn’t cope with this. I headed for the door.
A heavy middle-aged woman blocked my path. “Let me through!” I almost screamed.
“Lyn! Lyn, it’s Helen.”
Uh, oh. My minder. I’m so bad about faces since the big S.
“Have you had enough? I’ll drive you back if you like.”
Believe me, I was tempted. “No,” I said at last. “I’ll finish what we started.”
“Good girl.”
Good sixty-nine-year-old girl. Where else could you be called that but in a hospital? I went back the way I’d come.
First: I had to read, however slowly, the sign above Aisle 1.
I couldn’t do it. There were too many words. If I couldn’t walk, I thought, I’d get wheelchair assistance. But non-readers? Not a bit of help for them. It’s as if we weren’t really handicapped, just being lazy or stupid.
After long searching, I finally had the eggs, butter and bread. One more: strawberry jam. I picked up a jar of something red, but it didn’t seem quite right. I held the jar in one hand, and started tracing letters in the air with the other.
People pushed past me as I stood blocking the aisle. One small person said loudly. “Mum, is that poor lady sick in the head?’
“Sh, Madison. Don’t be rude. Come along.”
Enough. I was taking this jar, right or wrong. By the time I got through the checkout, I was exhausted but triumphant. That is, till I was back in my room, and Helen told me that my bread was raisin toast, and the ‘jam’ was pasta sauce.
But accuracy could wait. The first thing I had to do was find an alternative to tracing letters in the air. If people were going to think me insane, I’d have to stay home. On the palm of my hand? No, I needed that other hand. On the surface of my wallet, inside my handbag? No,too small. I scanned the room for ideas. On the hospital-smooth pillow was Aimee’s teddy bear.
“Yesss!” I said aloud.
With my manicure scissors I unpicked the red velvet heart from the fat paws. It fitted exactly into the top of my handbag. And the velvet had a texture that was just right for giving me the feel of the letter shapes. I begged Helen to let me try again at the supermarket, and this time I got everything right. No-one noticed my hand, secretly tracing letters inside my bag.
I used the heart the next day in my reading with Leila, and it helped me to do better. “You’ll be going home soon,” she said. “Luckily you have family to look after you.”
Family to look after me? Tony, working sixty hours a week? Aimee, aged fifteen? Janine, who was undoubtedly dreading my return? And now, I suddenly realised, I’d be a prisoner in the house, unable to walk far, read street signs easily, or drive.
Then I did something I’m still proud of. With painful slowness, I looked up Palm Gardens Retirement Village in the yellow pages, rang the number, which cut out on me twice, and finally spoke to the manageress. She promised to send someone to talk to me the next day.
Then with a sigh of relief I went back to my book, an Aussie Nibble (for beginning readers), which with luck and pluck I might finish by halfway through next week.

When the family arrived at the weekend I had my next step all mapped out. One-bedroom unit booked; deposit put down; furniture catalogues all over the bed as I excitedly dashed, in my mind, from cottage-style to ultra-modern and back again. Table, chairs, sofa. And a desk for Aimee to do her homework. The village was near the station, so she could stay with me after school until Janine finished work.
“Right on!” Aimee said. “Waiting two hours in the library sucks.”
Tony looked disappointed. Janine just looked bewildered. “Please be happy for me, all of you,” I said. “I’m really happy for myself.”

All this happened almost a year ago. Last week I had my birthday: the big Seven-O. It found me happier than I’ve been for years.
I love my unit. I’ve made friends here, though I avoid any community activity that keeps me out after three forty-five, when Aimee arrives every weekday. Janine picks her up on the way home from work. Now we’re not in the same house, a wary but genuine friendship has grown up between us. This, I think, can only improve as time goes on.
On my birthday – a Saturday – they turned out in force. Well, three people isn’t exactly a force, but they filled my small living-room to bursting. Janine brought a cake in the shape of an open book. Tony brought me audio versions of three of my favourite books. Bless him for knowing which ones they were. He thinks I should ‘read’ this way, instead of bothering with the painful process of deciphering print. But for me, nothing replaces a book. I still read for pleasure, even though it takes me as long to read a short story as it once took me to read a novel. Aimee brought me another teddy bear exactly like the last one.
“You’ve been reading so much,” she said, “that the nap’s nearly worn off that old heart. I had to buy a whole bear to get you a new one. Oh, and I got you this card.”
The card was a Valentine’s Day card, with ‘Valentine’s’ crossed out and ‘Birth’ substituted. “The front of the card’s not so hot,” said Aimee. “I bought it for the verse inside. Read it to us. Come on.”
Read aloud? “I’ll be slow,” I said.
“We’ve got time,” said Aimee.
So, with one hand on my luxurious new velvet cushion, I read, painfully but accurately:

‘I loved you once, I love you now, I loved you from the start.
And all the things you are to me are written on my heart.’
“See?” said Aimee. “Sometimes, doggerel is just what’s needed.”