Read by the author (57 minutes into podcast, here)
I live just over the road from them; directly opposite. If I wanted to, which of course I don’t, I could see right into their lounge from my bedroom window. I’d have to stand on a chair and climb on my chest of drawers to do it, but it would be possible.
The old one is a bit wild nowadays, if I can put it like that. She’s developed a strange, intense look about her. And a mad laugh-come-cackle. With the middle one it’s more of a general crumbling. An overall dishevelment. She used to be an attractive young woman, but now it’s like she resists her beauty. And the youngest one too, having been such a quiet, biddable child, has loosened. Now she walks around barefoot and I can tell, even from this distance, often neglects to put on a bra.
Sometimes we’d talk for hours, in her garden, or in the lounge on their slightly beaten-up sofas. Even then, the whole place had an air of being slightly beaten-up. All the doors had dents in, holes in fact, right through the (admittedly cheap) plywood. I always wondered how you’d put a hole through a plywood door. And why?
Plywood holes or not, she was extremely pleasant, and you can’t grumble in the face of a fresh fruit Pavlova. Nor an extremely chocolaty ring, which I had more than once.
I haven't been inside the house for years of course, but from the outside it looks like it too is sliding gently toward rack and ruin. The wisteria is overgrown. The weeds in the front garden are out of control and the buddleia down the side of the house is enormous – you could garrotte yourself on its tendrils. The shed is warped and rotting and the fence is buckling under the weight of the honeysuckle that’s colonised it. And at night, the windows of the house glow with candles instead of electric bulbs. They’ve even draped a mass of fairy lights all over their front bushes. It looks like perpetual bloody Christmas over there, but the pagan kind.
There’s also the cat. Harry. He too has changed since our coffee morning days. Now, he follows them everywhere, like a familiar, especially the older one, even when she just pops outside to do the bins. Or if she visits the neighbours – the ones next door to me – he goes too. I’ve seen them on occasion, through the small crack in my garden fence, huddled together in the conservatory. Harry perched on the sofa looking almost human, lacking only a cup of coffee and a pair of opposable thumbs.
And he looks at me, the cat. With a judgement that wasn’t there before. I know that sounds unlikely, but it’s true. I think it’s because of the time I asked the older one if she could keep the little bastard out of my shrubs. I’m certain he was deliberately saving up his shits and depositing them in my geraniums. She apologised and said she’d try to divert him, but it didn’t work of course. He still shits in my geraniums, and all over the marigolds, but now I swear he does it with enthusiasm. It’s awful to be hated even by a cat.
This change, this descent into a general looseness, really gathered pace when the husband left. Which makes sense of course. Ordinarily I’m of the opinion (and I am aware that my opinion counts for very little in these matters) that families should stay together no matter what. There are obvious exceptions, of course. If one of them is a murderer for example. Or if someone decides to stretch their earlobes to grotesque proportions with those horrific looking earring things. In either of those instances a speedy separation is clearly essential. But he was a teacher – a head of department in fact. The special needs department of all things, which I thought was fabulous. Strong and clever, but with a gentle side. And he had a moustache. But not like the ones the young, unwashed men have – a real one – a moustache without irony.
He was her second husband but, despite her precariously high hopes, things weren’t quite right from the off. There were arguments as soon as he moved in, big ones. But couples fight all the time don’t they? And everything always seemed fine when we had our coffee mornings, holes in plywood doors notwithstanding. Sometimes though, the sounds coming from the house were not like those of an ordinary argument. Sometimes they were alarming. Slams, and bangs and cries and shrieks of what sounded like pain. And once, after a terrible disagreement, he ran across the drive, banging on all the neighbours’ garage doors, shrieking and wailing like a very ill person. In the end the middle one, then just a tiny girl, came out and calmed him down. She talked to him, somehow soothing him to silence, until eventually she was able to take him by the hand and lead him back inside. She was barefoot and wearing yellow pyjamas, and looked so small next to the bulk of him.
There was something peculiar between him and the middle one from the very beginning. He seemed to both admire and despise her, although why you’d feel either of those things about a child baffled me. Whether it was directly to do with him or not I don’t know, but once she had to be taken to hospital late into the night. There had been a horrible commotion all evening, and the reason I suspected his involvement was that he’d run out of the house and then sped away in his car. Directly after that, the mother emerged with the child who was wrapped in a blanket and whose face was dotted in blood. She wasn’t crying. She was impassive and – I’ll never forget the sight of it – she had a lump on her head the size of a tennis ball. It looked like she’d grown an antler.
I was worried, so I looked it up in my Family Health Encyclopaedia, and after that I felt a little better. Apparently if the lump goes outward, that’s good. If it goes in, that’s when you have to worry. ‘In’ is where the brain is, you see.
Then there was another time, years later, when I was on my way into Budgens and I saw him push her – the middle one again – out of his car. The car was moving at the time, not fast enough to cause serious injury, just a graze if anything, but there was still a terrible violence to it. Despite my reluctance to interfere I wanted to go over to see if she was ok, so I resolved to abandon my shopping. Instead, I would go into Budgens as planned, but walk straight back out, as if I’d just popped in for a Mars bar. Then I’d ‘bump’ into her and tactfully check how she was. I’d walk her home, talk to her mother, or failing that invite her to mine and make her a hot cup of tea. I went inside and quickly bought said Mars bar – to make my story credible – but by the time I came out, she’d gone. And I felt as if I’d failed. Because I had.
Just before he left for good, there was an evening when the police came. The older one had been shrieking for hours, and I’d heard cries from the middle one intermittently too. The little one, when I saw her, was just silent and green. I know because in the commotion they all ended up outside. Him dragging and slamming things, dragging and slamming them, to and from cars, in and out of doors. There was blood coming from the middle one's knees because he’d hauled her across the gravel. I saw him do it. She’d been in her car with the little one in the backseat, I presume trying to get her away from it all. But before the keys even met the ignition he got to her, and that’s when her knees got torn. She tried to resist of course, but he was much too strong.
It wasn’t like they didn’t fight back. My goodness, they did. Especially the old one, all talons and teeth, flailing and kicking, fighting like her daughters’ lives depended on it. And perhaps they did.
The police didn’t take him away that night, though I’ve often wondered why not. It all just … fizzled out. After the police finally left he drove off, as he always did, and the three of them just picked each other up and went back inside. And the stillness and the silence descended again. It always frightened me how quickly things would go back to normal. It made me question if what I’d seen had happened at all.
He eventually came back of course, and kept coming back over the months that followed. But after that night his presence gradually faded until finally he all but disappeared. Now, nearly 10 years on, he only visits on Christmas morning and on the little one’s birthday.
I stopped going round for coffee. The old one kept inviting me, as she always had, but somehow I felt too embarrassed to accept. We haven’t spoken properly for years now, though she still sends me a birthday card every year and waves when she sees me across the street.
Since he left, in which time the wisteria has run riot and the shed has half-collapsed, and the weeds have burgeoned and the hollyhocks have multiplied so far and wide that in the summer you can hardly see the front path let alone walk down it, these women have morphed into shapes that terrify me. They are so wild, and strong, and bound by a love that’s clearly been forged in some kind of hell. When I look at them it’s obvious to me why men used to burn us. We really can be magic. And our power is alarming.
There are still all manner of strange sounds that drift to me from across the road, and sometimes I find myself startled, pupils dilated, chest tight, ready this time to take action, this time to get in the way of whatever violence is imminent. But more often than not, now, whatever the commotion, it’s followed by laughter. A raucous cackle of laughter, very far from ladylike and all the better for it. Sometimes they laugh like that late into the night, all huddled around a fire pit, like proper witches. I should be irritated by the racket, but instead I find myself pinned to my bed by their noise, eyes wide with silent tears, gripped in relief and delight.
One day, perhaps, I will find my way back down their hollyhock-smothered path, and I will dare to knock on the door and say hello. Perhaps I will take my own baked offering, and perhaps the old one will welcome me as she always used to. And perhaps we can sit in the beaten-up house, and I can learn to laugh nothing like a lady. And perhaps, one day, when I’m able, I can tell them that I’m sorry. For everything that I didn’t do.
(c) Lizzie Muncey, 2024
Lizzie Muncey is an Actor/Writer. Her play Superhero Snailboy, which started at the Edinburgh Fringe, toured nationally & she writes regularly in collaboration with theatre company She Said Jump. Acting work includes The Mousetrap (St Martin’s Theatre), Nigel Slater’s Toast (The Other Palace), Beauty & the Beast (National Theatre), Doctors, & Call the Midwife. This is her first short story!
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