from the far side of the corner
We’re on the good side of the road, my mum always said, and I never asked the good side of what, the way you don’t ask. From my kitchen window I can see the corner and the start of their street, the one off the main road, and the light is different over there of an evening. Not darker. Just older, like a photograph of light. Our wheelie bins are blue and theirs are too and that’s the only thing I’m ever fully sure is the same.
You can stand at the corner in the day and it’s only a street. Brick, doors near the path, somebody’s dinner on the air. I’ve stood there with my shopping and looked down it and thought, that’s all it is, and walked home faster than I meant to.
There was a man came round to our side once, from theirs. Stood on the green a while. He was perfectly nice. He just wasn’t quite all there, the way a song is when you’ve forgotten a word in the middle and you sing on past the gap and your mouth knows but you don’t. He kept thanking me for something I hadn’t done. Then he went back round, and I was glad, and I have tried not to think about being glad.
We don’t go round past the corner after dark. Nobody’s ever said why and nobody needs telling. It goes down the years unexamined, mum to me and me to mine, the way you’d carry a coin in your pocket a lifetime and never once read the date.
I water my plants. I bring the bin in. Some evenings I stand at the window and count their houses, because you can, from here, in the good light — one, two, three, and the end one with the blue door, four. I count them so they keep being four. It costs me nothing, from here.
That’s the part I don’t say to anyone. How little it costs me.
Pull a thread:
- Halloran — Halloran, seen from outside
- Mr Ashe buys a photograph — those who travel between
- what’s left — what’s left