2
“Elsa?”
When you are as ancient as I am, the days are predictable. Early each morning, for example, I know I’ll hear a few crazies singing as they make their way home from a night out at the bars. I know I’ll see Mrs. Nguyen from two doors down scurry past my window on her way to the nail salon. I know I’ll hear Nugget, Ishaan’s godforsaken Chihuahua, yapping for her breakfast. And so on and so forth. A lot of people think old folk find comfort in such sameness, and perhaps some of them do. Not me. I like change. Usually. Then again, the arrival of the enfant terrible Persephone on the street is one change that has me yearning for days of yore.
“ELSA!”
I should, I suppose, take my share of responsibility. After all, I leave myself open to this sort of harassment by choosing to spend time on my porch of a morning. Unfortunately, as quaint as my terrace home is, it is measly in natural light and a woman has to get her vitamin D from somewhere.
“It’s Elsie,” I tell the child. “Else to my friends, which you are not. Elsa to no one.”
Daphne and I are on the front porch, open novels in our laps, trying to find relief from Nugget’s vile yapping. Honest to God, it’s the kind of noise that could make a woman insane. Yap. Yap. Yap. Equally spaced. No pauses.
Highly pitched, vulnerable and vicious all at once. The only consolation is that the noise helps distract me from the article.
“Forget about it,” Daphne keeps saying. “Put the silly article out of your mind.”
And I do, for short periods. But my mind keeps getting drawn back to it like a fly to manure. I’m aware that people know my story, of course—I am a footnote in practically every article written about childhood evils. The difference is that while I am free to engage with or ignore those articles from the safety of my relative anonymity, now that Joan—or whoever put that note under my door—knows where I live, I feel exposed in a way I haven’t been since I was fifteen years old.
As for the article itself, it had some inaccuracies, but I’d seen plenty worse. They got my name right, and my parents’ names. They knew I was a reclusive child, and that I spent time in hospital. And, of course, they were correct in reporting that, over the course of my young life, everyone around me died. Without the latter detail, of course, the former would be entirely immaterial.
“But I like Elsa!” Persephone whines. “From Frozen.”
“I like Maleficent.” I turn the page of my novel. “Can I call you that?”
The child giggles. So does Daphne. For pity’s sake.
Persephone is seven years old, daughter of Roxanne—the very attractive woman who moved in to number 5 a couple of months ago. The child’s father doesn’t appear to be in the picture, though there has been a string of unsavory men in and out of the place at all hours of the night.
“I like the sex,” Roxanne told me when I raised an eyebrow at her, after watching her wave off yet another fellow one Saturday morning.
“Good for you, dear,” Daphne had told her cheerily, giving a little air
punch.
“Is he your boyfriend?” I inquired.
Roxanne wrinkled her nose. “God, no. No boyfriends for me.”
“Chicks before dicks,” Daphne agreed. “Holes before poles.”
I’ll admit, I chuckled at that. (Poor Joan, who had been walking by at the time, had just about passed out.) I wonder if it’s the sex or the child that makes Roxanne so tired. Every time I see her the poor girl has bags under her eyes. I sympathize, and yet it has to be said she has a fairly laissez-faire attitude to parenting, making herself scarce as Persephone terrorizes the street—going from neighbor to neighbor, demanding gold coin donations for school fundraisers or handing out substandard pictures she’d drawn and
then returning to ensure they’d been properly displayed. One has to wonder
where the child gets her audacity.
“Elsa!”
I sigh and peer over the top of my glasses at her. “What? ”
“I have to interview an old person for my homework.”
Persephone, clearly, is ill-named. Anyone could tell you that a name like Persephone comes with a burden of expectation. A Persephone is lithe with golden hair, searching eyes, and a pensive, troubled spirit. This child is chubby and has a mouse-brown bob and smallish eyes; plain as a mud fence. She’s also missing enough teeth that she resembles a sixteenth- century beggar. The child should have been named Medusa. Or Tempestas.
“And?” I prompt.
“And …” She stares demonstrably at Daphne and me. “You’re old.”
Daphne snorts. “Elsie’s older. She’ll do the interview.”
The child looks at me. “Will you do it?”
“Corsets she will!”
I give Daphne the stink eye. Traitor.
I wave to Peter, aka Pete the Greek, who is on his way home from a trip to Aldi, judging by the shopping bags. Peter lives directly opposite me. He’s sixty-six years old and he spends most of his time drinking coffee and playing Tavli on his porch. The only time he ever leaves his house is to line up outside Aldi to purchase a television set or an automatic dog-feeder or whatever happens to be on sale that week. Upon his return, he always holds up his wares for me to admire, and I dutifully oblige because I’m fond of Peter. Occasionally he tries to sell me a coffee machine (because now he has three, all paid for in cash), but I draw the line. I’m not that fond of Peter.
“Elsie!” he calls out. “Did you see that they’ve got long-handled hedge trimmers on special at Aldi this week? Not a bad price.”
“Is that right?” I say. No need to point out that Peter doesn’t have a hedge, nor does he have so much as a plant in his entire courtyard. Typical Greek, he paved the thing to within an inch of its life the moment he moved in.
“Is that bloody dog still barking?” he says.
“Hasn’t stopped all day.”
Peter is instantly up in arms. “We should call the council,” he says.
Peter loves being up in arms. So do I, truth be told. It’s a magnificent feeling. Superior-like.
Peter disappears inside his house. Once he’s gone I notice Persephone is observing me closely. “You smile whenever Peter’s around.”
“What? Nonsense.”
“You do.”
I’m about to protest further, but there’s no point, the child has moved on.
She climbs into the chair opposite, right onto Daphne’s lap. Daphne beams.
Unlike me, she’s always had a soft spot for children.
“Right then,” Persephone says, her pencil poised over a clipboard. “Why don’t we nip this in the butt?”
I take a slow, deep breath and let it out with otherworldly patience. “The bud.”
She ignores me. “How old are you, Elsie?”
“How old do you think I am?”
She takes a moment to assess me. “I’d say … 167.”
“At least,” Daphne adds.
I give them both the stink eye. “I’m eighty-one.”
“Eighty-one.” Persephone is skeptical, but she writes it down. It feels unethical to dislike a child this much. “Now. Tell me something interesting.
About the olden days.”
She gazes up at me as if expecting tales of riding dinosaurs and etching our ABCs into stone, Fred Flintstone–style.
“Such as?” I ask.
She thinks for a moment. “Something gory.”
I find myself wondering if it might have been Persephone who put that article under my door. “Such as …?”
“Emma’s grandpa went to war and got shot in the leg!”
Persephone seems delighted about this, even forming a little gun using her thumb and forefinger and aiming it at her thigh. Daphne joins in, firing
her own set of finger guns.
“Is that right?”
“Oh yes … there was blood and guts everywhere.”
“Guts? In his leg?”
“Everywhere,” she says. “Oh! And Teddy’s yiayia didn’t even have TV when she was little!” She frowns, considering this a moment. “She must
have watched her phone.”
“Or her iPad?” Daphne offers.
It occurs to me that Persephone has been thrust into my life by virtue of some sort of karmic force. As you know, I haven’t been a perfect citizen.
And yet, I would be hard-pressed to find a hardened criminal of the worst variety who was deserving of this kind of torture.
“You know who you should interview?” I said, in a moment of genius.
“Ishaan!”
Ishaan, who is ninety-three, is my nemesis. He has lived next door for twenty-five years. He lived with Old Jim until five years ago when Jim died. Mates, Jim and Old Ishaan used to say whenever their living arrangements came up. We’re mates from university days. As if I cared what Old Ishaan and Jim got up to. After Jim died, some bright spark decided to give Ishaan a demonic Chihuahua to keep him company. Ishaan has aged a lot since Old Jim died. The only time I see him these days is when he shuffles outside in his brown terry cloth robe to retrieve his vitamin deliveries. (Ishaan has never met a vitamin he didn’t like. He is forever ordering them on iHerb. Fine by me, it is a free country after all. If he wants to give his last remaining dollars to charlatans for the privilege of turning his piss yellow, I wish him well.) “He’s dead,” Persephone says.
Daphne and I exchange a look. “I beg your pardon?”
“Dead,” she says louder. “D. E. D.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” she says impatiently, “he didn’t answer when I knocked on the door before.”
“So you assumed he was dead?” Daphne says.
“He’s old,” Persephone says. It was as if she were trying to explain math to a pair of stupid children. “You said so yourself. Old people die.”
“Old people also take naps,” I tell her, looking toward Ishaan’s.
“But his boxes of vitamins are piled up on the doorstep,” Persephone says.
“Nugget has been barking more than usual,” Daphne adds.
I sigh, then heave myself out of my chair.
“Where are you going?” Persephone calls after me.
“Where do you think I’m going? I’m going to check if Ishaan is dead.”
“But we have an interview to do!”
“I’ll tell you one thing, if the old bastard has even a breath left in him, he’s going to do this bloody interview.”
“And what if he is dead?” Persephone asks.
I pause. “Then I’ll kill him.”
I really shouldn’t say stuff like that. It’s those kinds of comments that can land a girl in hot water. I should know.
Have you ever noticed there are two types of postal workers? There are the extremely helpful kind. The ones who pat the dogs, stow the package somewhere out of the rain, wait the extra minute for the elderly people to get to the door. And then there’s Dwayne, our postman.
Dwayne, if you don’t mind. Not Wayne. Not Dane. Dwayne. As if his mother had a stroke while filling in his birth certificate and the scrawl next to the name Wayne looked a little like a D.
As I arrive at Ishaan’s gate, Dwayne pulls up on his scooter and retrieves a small square box from his satchel. More vitamins, no doubt.
“Not home?” Dwayne asks.
I point to the small pile of boxes already on Ishaan’s doormat.
“Apparently not. I can take it.”
“Can’t. Needs to be signed for.”
For pity’s sake. As if someone is going to steal his bloody vitamins.
“I’ll sign,” I say.
“Are you Ishaan Patel?”
“There is nothing less attractive,” I tell Dwayne, “than a humorless man.”
Dwayne returns the box to his satchel and moves to the next house, and I turn to the small pile of boxes already on Ishaan’s doormat.
I rap on the door with the old knocker.
“When was the last time you saw Ishaan?” I ask Peter, who is wheeling his rubbish bin, and mine, out to the mouth of the lane for collection.
“Ishaan?” He thinks a moment. “Must have been a couple of days ago.
He was bent over retrieving a package from his doorstep when I walked past. When he’d noticed me he shouted: ‘Vitamin C!’ Not ‘Good morning.
Have you ever thought about taking vitamin C?’ Or even ‘Looky here, my vitamin C has arrived.’ Just ‘Vitamin C!’ Then he disappeared back inside his house. Between you and me, Blind Freddy could see that Ishaan needs something a lot stronger than vitamin C.”
“Ne’er has a bigger truth been uttered. Thanks, Peter.”
He moves along, unperturbed, and I go to the window and peer inside. It is impossible to see anything through the dirty net curtains.
I return to my place, past Daphne and Persephone, who are still on my porch. The floorboards creak as I make my way down the hallway—if I were any younger I’d have worried I might need to redo the floors. I pass my bedroom, wallpapered in the once-vibrant orange and brown shades that were the height of fashion in the ’70s; the bathroom, with its avocado- colored sink and toilet; the spare bedroom, door closed as always. I make my way into the back room, made up of a kitchen, a mishmash of orange laminate and cheap wooden cabinets; a dining corner, comprised of one small, lacquered round table and four threadbare chairs; and a lounge room, with vintage armchair and couch, both upholstered in a faded tweed.
Through the back door is a small brick-paved courtyard and Hills Hoist.
Ishaan and I share a fence line on one side, and the palings face him, so I climb onto the bottom rung and peer over.
Nugget sees me and begins barking hysterically.
“Ishaan!” I call out, leaning over the top. “You there?”
No response. Then again, Ishaan is hard of hearing, and he’d be hard- pressed to hear me at the best of times, let alone over the top of Nugget’s barking.
“You’re going to jump over?” Daphne asks, suddenly behind me.
“I guess I’ll have to.”
It’s true that I’m eighty-one years old, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m not your average eighty-one-year-old. I start climbing. It’s pretty easy. My knees crack a little, and the weathered wood presses into my old hands uncomfortably, but it’s fine until I get to the top. I’d hoped to see some sort of ledge, or chair, or BBQ area that I could step onto, but there is merely a drop straight down to a weedy-looking garden bed below.
“Do you see anything, Elsa?” Persephone calls.
“Elsie,” I correct. “And yes, I see an incensed dog.”
Having Persephone on my side of the fence is all the motivation I need.
I don’t give myself time to consider whether I might break a hip or my neck, or even how I will explain that I’m rappelling into Ishaan’s back garden down the track. I also don’t take the time to consider that, perhaps, a call to the police to conduct a welfare check might be a better idea.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t occur to me until I’m sliding down Ishaan’s side of the fence, catching my ankle painfully on a shard of wood or nail.
“Shit!”
“I’m telling my mum,” Persephone calls. “You sweared.”
“Fuck off,” I reply.
Daphne chortles.
I stand straight. To my surprise, Nugget doesn’t take a chunk out of my ankle, or even my slacks. Instead, she looks at me intently, then runs back toward the house.
One thing I hadn’t considered until now was what I would do once I got into Ishaan’s backyard. I don’t typically consider myself a fools-rush-in sort. Perhaps I’m experiencing some of the Alzheimer’s-induced madness that I read about recently in Pensioner’s Weekly.
“What are you doing now?” Daphne calls.
“I’ll just … go rap on the back door, I guess,” I tell her, and myself.
But as it turns out, I don’t need to rap, because Ishaan’s back door is glass, and through it I see him lying on the kitchen floor. He’s in his brown terry cloth dressing gown, and his skin is the dirty white color of the linoleum floor. His eyes are open and unblinking.
Nugget watches him, her nose pressed up against the glass, her energetic little body suddenly drained of energy. For the first time all day, she doesn’t yap.
