Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Daphne turned the corner, heaved the shopping bag back onto her shoulder, sucked in a lungful of hot, dusty air, and took off again with her house now in sight.
A walk to the shops had seemed like a good idea, save the environment and all that, but it really was stinking hot. Every so often the tar on the road would feel sticky under her sandshoe and she could feel a trickle of sweat running down the back of her neck. Black T-shirt and jeans were probably not the best choice for an outdoor adventure.
As she neared her house she spied the neighbour’s child playing in the gravel that ran up the middle of their concrete driveway. She was focussed on building roads, and little dwellings made with sticks and leaves, and a creek lined with shiny blue marbles but looked up as Daphne checked the mail.
‘Hello there’, Daphne said, but as usual the girl just stared at her with big, brown eyes that were almost black. ‘This kid is weird’, she thought, but smiled in what she hoped was a benign and friendly fashion. Kids always made her feel a bit uneasy. They watched and judged you, all the while working out how they could manipulate you. She couldn’t see the appeal.
Dropping the shopping on the front porch, she rummaged blindly in her overly large bag for her keys while looking over the front yard. It was overgrown with weeds and long grass, brown and yellow from the summer and crisp to the touch. A ‘tinder box’, she thought wryly, as she struggled with the lock and pushed the door open with her hip. Calico immediately sprung through the open door, meowing and winding around himself around her calves in a perfect figure eight and making walking near impossible.
“For fuck’s sake Calico, move!’ she barked, as she tried to manoeuvre down the hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house. She pulled a can of tuna from the shelf under the sink, peeled the lid back and put it into the cat’s bowl before it killed her. She could see the headline now: ‘Mad Cat Lady Killed by Pussy’.
Daphne shoved the cheese, orange juice, grapes and yoghurt in the fridge, grabbed a beer, and headed for the back porch. This was her favourite part of the house. The porch itself was filled with pots of different shapes, sizes and colours that also spilled into the garden. Having rented for years she had grown plants in pots, her own mobile garden. She took a swig of beer, put it on the plank of wood on bricks that substituted as a table, and took a few minutes to bucket water into the pots.
She had only been in the house for six weeks. Her first foray into the property market. It was a deceased estate and had been empty for almost three years while relatives argued over how much they were each entitled to.
According to the real estate brochure, it was ‘charming with the potential to make your own mark!!!’. (Real estate agents love to use a lot of exclamation marks, because houses are very exciting!) In reality, this translated to ‘way too orange and green, sad and neglected, not quite old enough or cute enough to be retro and in desperate need of renovating’.
It wasn’t at all what she was looking to buy, but something about this slightly broken and neglected house got under her skin and she’d jumped in head first.
Iris, Daphne, Rose, Jasmine, River and and Lily.