Bessie and Eileen

It would not be surprising if people who live in wheelchairs would always be overweight but surprisingly, they are not.  Some of them are wispy and tiny.  How they stay like that is not easy to decide since many of them have appetites like ostriches.  But there are not many between these whippets and the ‘heavies’.

 

Bessie was one of the overweight brigade.  She was a most unique shape; she was not five foot tall and as wide as tall.  But her legs were quite astonishing; undressing her to get her ready for bed was an entertainment.  Her little short legs must have been no more than twenty two inches and she had small neat ankles.  The legs tapered elegantly as far as her knees and suddenly and abruptly swelled out to the middle of her thighs to about four times the girth of her slender ankles.  She looked as though she would have been more comfortable upside down.

 

Eileen was barely five feet tall and weighed rather under eight stones.  It was her misfortune that Bessie was her passenger to the dining room, but the path was smooth and straight for most of the way and just a right angled bend near the door to the room where all the seats were arrayed according to whose seat it was for the week.  So Eileen started off cheerfully enough, pushing her plum pudding of a passenger and joining in the never ending conversation with a short comment of assent or dissent whichever seemed appropriate.  She had reached the end of the long walkway beside the still water of the swimming pool, gleaming silver in the fading light.  She trod gently on to one of the stays on the back of the chair to tip it slightly to turn the wheels to the fresh angle and inadvertently caught Bessie’s foot on the opposite wall.  With a jerk, the chair stopped suddenly and gently rolled backwards with the luckless Eileen clinging to the handle and heaving unsuccessfully to try and stop its backwards roll.  The chair stopped against a shallow ridge around the edge of the pool but Eileen, at last loosening her hands from their grip on the handle slipped without ceremony and with a gentle splash into the water.  Chris coming around the corner from the dining room appeared at this moment and without a pause dashed towards the spot.  Bessie sitting upright like a plump Buddha, gazed as he came, she thought, towards her.  She was somewhat aggrieved.  She turned a peevish face to Chris.  “She stopped talking to me”, she complained, “and now she has gone somewhere and has left me here”.  Chris ignored her and with all the speed he could muster, kneeled on the wet slippery tiles and reached two strong hands to Eileen who was hanging desperately to the bar on the side of the bath.  One mighty pull and a soaked Eileen was hauled unceremoniously beside him.  Bessie turned her head and gazed with fascination at the pair.  Chris, his shirt soaked and Eileen, her clothes clinging to her slight body like a skin.  Bessie with a moment’s hesitation, looked with fascination at the spectacle and then wonderingly asked, “where have you been?”.  Getting no immediate answer, she added “You look all wet”.

 

After Eileen, having arrived dried, warmed and newly garbed in fresh clothing, back into the dining room fifteen minutes later, began to relate her tale, she was reprimanded gently by a companion.  “Bessie can walk a bit you know”, someone told her.  “You should have asked her to get out of the chair so that you could turn it easily”.  Eileen looked at the speaker in scorn, her grey eyes blazing. 

 

“Why couldn’t someone have told me that before”, she demanded.  “She could have walked all the way and could have pushed me in the chair”.  This response was met with gust of mirth but it was not such an outrageous suggestion after all.