Grimshaw’s hat outside our living-room window and opened the door before she knocked. No coat? I said. Oh, lovie, it’s just one door to the next, she said, stepping over the sill and plucking off her hat. She was an old bird, a bottom-heavy chicken hopping into the henhouse, her legs grown skinny with age and a scalp like a pink rubber bathing cap showing through her hair. Forty years your nana and I’ve been side by next, she said, batting at the feathers in her hat. Forty years I’ve lived here. Me sister died in the front room, and me husband died in the bedroom, and me mother died in the loo. It don’t bother me none, death don’t mean nothin’ to me. She set her hat on the sideboard and plopped herself down in her usual corner of the couch. I’m eighty-two, me. You’d never know it, would you? You’ll never go, the doctor says, we’ll have to shoot you. I stooped and looked anxiously at my hair in the peeling old mirror above the sideboard. New Year’s. I was going alone on the coach to spend the night at Oldham, there was to be a party.
What do You think about Reading By Lightning (2008)?
