The Man Who Wasn’t There nursery rhyme

The Man Who Wasn’t There nursery rhyme is a recurring verbal pattern in Sofia Papastergiadis’s account of caring for her mother, Rose Papastergiadis. First recalled during Rose’s wait after coming off medication and repeated when Dr Gómez says he can do nothing more for her, it gives shape to a distress that neither medical certainty nor family closeness resolves: the possibility that what is awaited may not appear.

The Rhyme and Its First Recollection

Sofia recalls the rhyme while Rose waits to discover what will happen after her medication has been withdrawn. The scene is measured by small, repeated actions: Rose watches her still-ticking gold-tone rhinestone watch, tears soft white bread into pieces, rolls them into pellets, and sucks them for hours. The bread gives her some comfort because it resembles the pills she has stopped taking. Her days are organized around waiting for new pain or another change, though neither is guaranteed to arrive.

Against that vigil, the rhyme’s missing man becomes more than a childhood memory. Sofia remembers learning it in junior school: “As I was going up the stair,” followed by “I met a man who wasn’t there.” Its return the next day, and the wish that he would stay away, makes absence both repetitive and unstable: the absent figure is expected to recur, yet his appearance cannot be relied on. Sofia uses the rhyme to voice the uncertainty of Rose’s waiting, telling her that what she expects may not come. The exchange does not settle what Rose’s symptoms mean or what will happen without the medication; it exposes how little either woman can know in advance.

The recollection follows Sofia’s description of a shattered laptop screen saver, an image of a star-filled sky that had once made her feel suspended outside time. The broken image and the rhyme’s repeated absence sit beside the continuing uncertainty of her mother’s needs. Earlier, Sofia had described Rose waking to ask for water, with several possible kinds of water and no assurance that she would choose the right one. The rhyme’s pattern of waiting therefore belongs to a wider domestic rhythm in which care continues, but its desired answer remains uncertain.

Recurrence at the End of Treatment

The rhyme returns during a later confrontation with Dr Gómez. Rose has expressed a wish to be rid of her feet; Sofia insists that this is her mother’s dark Yorkshire humour, not a literal threat. Dr Gómez says he cannot undo Rose’s words or her wish to sever parts of her body, and explains that he will reimburse a large portion of his fee. The payment is already arranged for transfer to Rose’s bank the following day. His practical decision to return money accompanies his decision to end treatment, leaving Sofia to confront what she understands as abandonment.

At this point, Sofia repeats the same four-line rhyme. Its recurrence connects Rose’s earlier, uncertain wait for something to happen with the later certainty that the doctor will not continue helping her. The man who is not there now carries the force of an absent caregiver: someone whose presence was hoped for, or whose return might matter, but who does not arrive when needed. Sofia’s response is not simply to repeat the rhyme’s wish that the figure stay away. She asks how Dr Gómez could mistake Rose’s humour for a serious demand and then leave her as if she had meant it. The repeated words register anger at the gap between what Rose intended and what the doctor heard.

Sofia’s declaration that her mother’s legs and pains are also hers makes the scene’s stakes bodily as well as medical. Earlier, she had taken Rose’s arm and limped beside her, describing her own legs as her mother’s legs; later, she notices that she sometimes limps even when she is not walking with Rose, as if her body remembers their shared pace. These moments do not make the rhyme a direct explanation of Rose’s impairment. Instead, its return sits within a narrative where presence, dependence, and bodily memory are difficult to separate.

Waiting, Memory, and Presence

The rhyme’s effect depends on repetition with a changed circumstance. In its first appearance, Rose waits for something to happen after medication has been stopped, while Sofia tries to make waiting thinkable through a remembered verse. In its second, the question is no longer only what Rose’s body will do: Sofia faces the end of the treatment relationship and the doctor’s refusal to take responsibility for her mother’s wish. Repetition preserves the earlier uncertainty but changes its emotional charge from anxious anticipation to protest.

The novel’s surrounding scenes complicate any simple equation between absence and inability. After Sofia has been crying in the sea, she sees Rose walking alone along the shore. Rose is barefoot, carrying a hat, and appears content in her own company; Sofia hesitates to approach and swims away from her. When she later returns to shore, she looks for Rose’s footprints and draws a rectangle around the first pair in the sand. This episode makes visible a possibility that the rhyme cannot predict: Rose may be present and moving independently even when Sofia has come to expect a shared pace and the work of care.

Across these scenes, the remembered verse acts as a compact measure of what cannot be known or summoned at will. Its absent man recurs in Sofia’s mind, while Rose’s condition, the doctor’s response, and the meaning of her own remembered limp resist a settled account. The rhyme does not explain these uncertainties; its repeated appearance gives them a form, marking the distance between waiting for someone to appear and learning to recognize a presence that does not arrive in the expected way.