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The rain isn’t the same here. Nothing is the same. After the lack of chaos, the order, the queues, the unscented air, it is the rain I notice the most. At home the rain would fall with unprecedented urgency. Every time the heavens opened was like the first time. Surely, it had never rained this much before? Here the rain is just rain. It lacks passion.

The girl who comes to see me in the morning is my favourite. Coral, a delicate name for a girl who is anything but. She lifts me in and out of the bath with ease. At first, I was ashamed of my nakedness but now I don’t think about it. We have no secrets, Coral and I. As she soaps and rinses she confides that she is thinking of leaving her girlfriend, that since they had their child – the product of a good friend and a turkey baster, the girlfriend has become clingy and jealous and possessive. This is not the woman she fell in love with. Sometimes, when she is sleeping or laughing or when she thinks Coral isn’t looking, a glimpse of the old her shines through and Coral doesn’t know how she can ever think of leaving her. Then there is the child, a son with the solid and sensible name of William. What would become of him? It is a world I am not used to, one that I never gave much thought to at home, but in this unfamiliar country it is commonplace.

After my bath when Coral has expertly hoisted and dried and dressed me, we breakfast together and look over the papers. Coral always reads us our horoscope, we are the same sign, Aries.

‘Today is not a good day to make rash decisions,’ she reads. ‘Look on the bright side, make a list, buy a loved one some flowers. Sometimes it is better to put things off until tomorrow.’

‘Hmph,’ she says as she refolds the paper in such a way that I will be able to read it later, without it falling apart.

Occasionally, over breakfast and after the horoscope, she asks me about India, I show her my photos, my keepsakes, but today Coral is not in the mood for talking about anything other than herself.

‘I guess that I should make more of an effort to understand her. She’s just had a baby, it’s bound to put a strain on her, on her emotions, on us.’ She looks sad. Coral would have loved to have carried the child, but as physically strong as she is on the outside, her insides don’t match. She is the opposite of me in every way.

Before she leaves, she puts me in front of the TV, comfortable in front of Jeremy Kyle. I am astounded by this programme. I cannot get enough of the intolerance, the insolence, the anger.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow Harry, ok? Same time as usual. Don’t let that bitch get to you this afternoon.’

And with that she is gone. She always slams the door a little too hard, makes the windowpanes rattle. I always know when she is here and when she is not.

The rain today is bitter – a spinster aunt, the spit from her wicked tongue lashes on the block of flats. I am one flat cocooned in many. I am in a box locked away on the other side of the world.

When Coral first came, she thought she had the wrong house. The wrong man.

‘They told me you’d just moved over here from India.’ Her accent jars, but it’s something you get used to. ‘I was expecting an Indian.’ To Coral, one old man who needs bathing is as good as another. Later, as she gets to know me, she asks questions, lots of questions.

‘I’ve never met an English Indian before,’ she says. ‘Plenty like me, the other way round, but never like you.’ I shrug, an expression I still have full mastery of, and it is a shrug that says that I’ve never met a lesbian with a turkey-basted baby before.

‘We’re a right pair we are,’ she says, laughing. Sometimes she comes and drops by on an evening, a weekend, when she has her time off. She’ll pop by the shops and bring me a treat, check that I have everything I need. The one who comes in the afternoon, who does my shopping, sometimes forgets the little things I like, but Coral never forgets.

‘Why would she do that, Harry? What can she get out of denying an old man simple pleasures?’

I think she complained to the agency, because for three weeks after that, I got everything I asked for. No smile though, no attempt at conversation but I don’t mind. Coral and I enjoy hating her together.

The day passes slowly, as days tend to do here. I don’t know my neighbours. Apart from Coral, nobody pops in. At home, I knew everyone and everyone knew me. I had friends, servants that were my family. Mamie had been with my family since she was born, ten years and one month after me. She looked after me my whole life. When she passed, I became a stranger in my own house, the house she’d kept for me all those years. There is nothing quite so distressing as being lost in the familiar. Suffocating in your own air.

When Coral comes the next morning, she is happier. We look at my few photos as we take breakfast. She is fascinated by the country that she belongs to, but has never visited.

‘Who is this, Harry?’ she asks, leaning forward and wiping spittle from my chin. The photo in her hands is over 30 years old, discovered hidden in the middle of Mamie’s bible, when I was clearing. There it was, just there in the middle of all her ordinary things was something so extraordinary it took my breath away. The bible fell open at a well worn passage and the photo and some letters fluttered to the floor. I felt as if I were reading her diary as I leafed through the old papers, desecrating her secret things by setting my eyes on them. The photo is worn on the corners, the picture rubbed away in places to reveal the cardboard at the back. Mamie, younger but not young, holding a light skinned baby in her arms. The date on the back, September 1976.

The words are harder to form than normal. They don’t queue patiently in my mouth, waiting for the previous word to crawl out before taking their turn. My thoughts try and tumble out all at once. I end up forming no words at all, just a high pitched keening.

‘It’s all right love,’ Coral says, wrapping a meaty arm around my shoulder. ‘It’s all right.’

We put the photos away after that, and Coral tries to cheer me up by regaling me with stories of her neighbours, a couple worthy of Jeremy Kyle even if there is little basis in the stories that Coral swears are not exaggerated, but I feel must be.

When I first stepped off the plane, the lack of colour shocked me. How could one country be so grey? I went through the ordered airport, with my British Passport, the stewardess smiled.

‘Welcome home sir.’

I didn’t know how to explain that this was not my home. I looked as if I belonged. Perhaps that was enough? It is an interesting concept, being assigned a country of origin by a stranger based on the colour of your skin. It seems so arbitrary. What’s next? Occupation by hair colour? On the tube into the city I saw Indian women in traditional dress, saris muted by heavy anoraks. A shame, I thought, what a shame.

My days pass as all the days before them have passed. My life is a copy of the day before, an endless parade of yesterdays. I am resigned to this now. Being upset or angry is pointless. Events outside my control have led me here. At home, we would call this God’s way. Fate. Here they call it Sod’s Law. Gods and sods. It is a different way of thinking.

‘Didn’t you ever think about having children, Harry?’ Coral asks, as we proudly leaf through photos of William’s milestones, first tooth, first steps, first birthday. He is a good lad, she tells me. No bother at all and even if he was, she wouldn’t mind. He’s her boy. The only boy she’s ever loved. The truth is, I didn’t think about children. I didn’t really think about anyone other than myself, my own needs, my wants. I didn’t think about children at all until Mamie passed and I found the papers that would send me on my journey. When the jigsaw pieces of my life fell into place.

All it took was a photo and a letter. Dear Cousin, we have arrived safely and in good health by the grace of God. We trust you are well and do not come to regret this momentous decision, which has been the greatest gift to us. The baby is healthy and she has been so placid on this long journey. Please accept our good wishes and eternal gratitude. With love, and God bless.

Perhaps the imagination of an old man grows more fertile once he stops working? Perhaps it is the certainty of youth that keeps our thoughts firmly grounded in reality? Is that why I let my mind wander to such a tenuous conclusion? Perhaps, as Mamie often told me, I have more money than sense. Perhaps that is why I find myself here.

That is why I find myself here. Chasing a whim. A ghost child. Paler than usual.

This morning, it is not Coral, but Emma, the afternoon girl. She is thin and spiteful. There is a perfect word to describe her but I cannot think of it right now. When I was younger, and I forgot something, I would laugh it off and say, oh, how silly, I must remember to remember next time! Now, I cannot laugh it off. I can’t remember ever being so absent minded before now, and think, I have only forgotten this because I am old. There can be no other possible explanation.

Emma doesn’t attempt to explain Coral’s absence, even though I would dearly like to know. I feel as if I have been abandoned, and Emma is the wicked stepmother. She reminds me of the rain in this country. Grey and cold.

I do not get a proper bath this morning. My breakfast is porridge, a hateful substance roughly spooned into my mouth. We do not read the headlines or the horoscopes, although I hear the papers thunk tantalisingly through the letter box and onto the mat. I am plonked in my chair, my walker in the kitchen, the shopping channel on loudly, the remote control just out of my reach. Emma leaves so quickly and so quietly, the door whispering shut, that I wonder if she has really left at all. Perhaps she is stood in the doorway watching me. Perhaps that is the kind of thing she enjoys. I can think of no other reason why someone would do that.

I sit there, staring, calculating the difference between me and the remote control, the strength of my legs. I have not walked unaided for so long that I begin to think it is just because I’ve been told that I can’t. That it is my brain stopping me. It is not far to the remote control. Mind over matter. I can do this, I have to. My brain is one of the only bits of me that, for the most part, works properly. It cannot take this banality, this cruel and unusual punishment. I decide that I can take no more so with as much heave as my arms can muster I stand up and move forward and within a matter of minutes I have my prize and am back in my chair, barely breathless. I click the TV off and the silence covers me, a welcome blanket.

It is a cliché to say that the minutes are like hours, but that is the way that they feel. They limp forward. This is not living. This is existing until death, but death is playing hard to get. I would gladly be seduced, it is my time. God’s joke is keeping me alive. Ha ha ha.

It is not very long, although it feels like much longer, that with my victorious capture of the remote control still fresh in my mind I decide to go for gold, the papers. I plan my route, the sofa, the door, the radiator, all tools I can use to keep myself upright and moving towards my goal. I can do this. I have done many things in my time, surely I can negotiate my way to the front door, pick up the papers from the mat and make my way back. Surely I can do that.

I make it as far as the hall before my legs buckle and give way. I topple, cheek grazing the carpet, the soft crack of my hip shattering, a wave of pain lapping over me. At first, I try to control it, to breath with it. In, out, in, out. My mind drifts and I think of boats, of Mamie’s cousins and the baby on a boat. The light skinned baby I didn’t know existed. Mamie only left my employ once, for a period of 5 months when she told me she had to care for a relative. When she came back, she was different. A steady sadness I had not seen in her before. I didn’t notice at the time, but looking back, it seems so obvious. I slip in and out of consciousness and time jumps and tricks me, the ticking of the carriage clock in the hall in time with my heart. It seems to be morning, night and then morning again. I dream of babies being taken overseas. I dream I follow, 30 years too late. I dream I find the baby and she shouts at me for not knowing she existed, for not providing, for letting Mamie die. I dream that Mamie and I were married by the priest in the middle of a monsoon. When I lean in to kiss her, she beeps at me.

When I wake, I am in an ambulance, oxygen being pumped into my nose and mouth, my body strapped to a board, wires snaking up to a machine that regulates my heart. I cannot turn my head but out of the corner of my eye I see Coral. She is stroking my hand and crying.

‘Oh Harry,’ she says, ‘oh Harry.’

HELEN DUFFIN’s ambition was to be published before her 30th birthday, and, at 29, with this story in Mslexia, she has now achieved that goal. She blogs at www.thebijouraconteur.blogspot.com and works as a team manager at a benefit advice company. Writing time is anywhere between 0-10 hours a week – often inhibited by the internet or her ‘to read’ pile – but working with a writing coach has helped her set realistic goals. With a publication under her belt – and tickets to Las Vegas and the Glastonbury Festival, 2010 is already looking promising.

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