The Woman Next Door

Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning.

Night was the real measure of love, Hortensia thought. Anything can sparkle in the daylight. But night – that was when humanity got tested. It was always at night that she saw things between them were decrepit and ugly.

Much much later, only when Marion had children of her own, did she understand that for her parents the story, the remembering of it and the telling, was a deeper kind of touching.

Hortensia came to the realisation that the quality of her life would have benefited greatly from more anger and less resentment. Resentment was different from anger. Anger was like a dragon, burning other things. Resentment burned a hole in your stomach, burned your insides.

Hard stares from fellow students and lecturers alike; stares from people who looked through you, not at you; stares intent on disappearing you; and stares you fought by making yourself solid.

But the loss of her walk was the first sign that time was wicked and had fingers to take things.

It was known that the two women shared hedge and hatred and they pruned both with a vim that belied their ages.

Marion had avoided history. Or she'd invented her own. After all, what was history but a record of what gets noticed? Noticed, it seemed to Marion, was what life was really about. Noticing and not noticing, remembering and forgetting.

She’s going to die.’ ‘We all do eventually, Marion.’ ‘I’m worried she’ll die and come to haunt me, you know?’ ‘Ah, I see. Trust you to find a way to be the star of someone else’s death-scene. She’s the one dying, but you’re who we ought to be concerned for.