Page 18 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
2) I’ll always be just the Sister of the more famous Jane and her pared-down poetry.
Conclusion:
I feel strongly that I have to write these things. Maybe I’ll never get on the Booker short list, but with a bit of luck I could be laughing all the way to the bank, even if I’m never quite in the Stephen King league.
My roots were in the graveyard, so let Janemake with the harp in the rarefied atmosphere above.
Draping a nylon cobweb over one black velvet-shrouded shoulder (think early Kate Bush on a bad day) I snarled at my image in the mirror, which is more than most vampires can do, and went out to deliver a Ghastly Greeting.
As Orla is fond of saying, Song Language’s motto is ‘We serve you right.’
As I stepped out of my front door all girdedup to sing for my supper, Mrs Bridges’ upstairs window flew open and she leaned out perilously far, her loose grey hair dangling like a dingy unravelled bellrope.
‘The fuzzy-wuzzies are coming!’ she screeched.
Shouts and rhythmic thumping noises came from the room behind her.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and screamed: ‘MRS BRIDGES, TURNZULUOFF!’
‘What? Is that you, Cass? Are they afteryou? The fuz—’
‘THE VIDEO – IT’S ONLY THE VIDEO!’
She looked down at me, confused.
Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to explain how politically incorrect her terms of reference were, either?
‘THE VIDEO, MRS BRIDGES!’
She turned and vanished, and the sound abruptly ceased, only to be replaced a few moments later by her reedy soprano warbling along toThe Sound Of Music.
‘I am sixteen, goingon seventeen …’
Yeah, right. Sixteen going on seventy-nine.
The room throbbed with a strange beat, and greenish light pulsated as the familiar figure of her neighbour swiftly aged before her eyes, adolescent to elderly woman in seconds, before crumbling to dust with a soft sigh…
Not that I wanted Mrs Bridges to turn to dust, because I was quite fond of the noisy old bat, and she was knittingme a nice, big warm cobweb to wear on those chillier Crypt-ogram occasions.
‘Oh, it’s only you, Cass!’ Chrissie Fowkes said, peeping out of her front door like a timid albino gerbil. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’
‘You did, but I’ve stopped now.’
‘Oh?’ she said doubtfully, then came out a bit further, clutching her tightly and squarely packaged baby. It was making noises like a kettle slowlycoming to the boil.
‘How’s my little Birdie?’
‘She never seems to stop screaming, and now she’s got this really peculiar rash. Do you want to see it?’
‘No, I think I’ll pass on that one, thanks.’
‘Do you think she’s possessed?’ she asked fearfully.
‘No more than other children,’ I reassured her, and then left quickly before she could show me the rash, or Birdsong demonstrate her lung capacity.
If Birdie hadn’t put me off the urge to procreate, nothing would.
