So he has to live with the rosebushes forever. And with the rosebushes, at present, although these might in time vanish or fade, all those other horrors his mind projects — the two raincoated men at the door in particular. “Could we have a word with you, sir, please?”
They always said sir; they always said please.
A normal, a fulfilled life was beyond him forever — he accepted that. It was sufficient to stay undetected, allowing the hope that at some time he would become free of all but rational apprehension. There could always occur the gas explosion, the burst pipe, but these were long, long odds. He had thought of everything — how often he’d thought of everything! He was safe, except for that one-in-a-million chance. And if only he could make himself believe it, a kind of happiness must be possible.
The doorbell rang. He put down the single glass of whisky he allowed and went to the window. Whoever had rung was not visible. But he forced himself. He put on the porch light.
And they were both big, they were both wearing raincoats — coats of some type, anyway.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Can you spare us a moment? Please.”
Whatever came next he didn’t hear. He heard the words “Residents Association.”
“What did you say?”
“...and ask you if you’d sign this petition, please.”
“Though now, sir, admittedly, it’s probably too late.”
“But if you would, sir. Please.”
“What did you say?”
He didn’t hear what they replied, because he had started laughing. He went on laughing until the two men, shrugging at each other, then one muttering an uncertain “Good night,” turned away, walked out of the gate, where they halted a moment talking together. They then went on to the neighboring house.
He might not even have shut the door behind them. He was still laughing back in his sitting room. So much, he told himself, laughing, for the specters that fear creates. Another ghost had been laid. And with the doorbell vanquished, only the rosebushes remained. Those now, surely, he could soon learn to live with peacefully. He poured himself a second glass of whisky.
Meanwhile, the two men from the Residents Association were explaining to his neighbor how the Council had obtained a Compulsory Purchase Order for a road in place of the alley, which would involve digging up all their back gardens.
A Friend Who Understands
by Donald Olson
© 1981 by Donald Olson
An unusual story... “Still without a whisper of impatience in his tone he asked what it was she meant to do, and this time, in a breathless, defiant rush of words, she told him”...
For Harriet Winger the passage of time had been as uneventful, by and large, as a journey, blindfolded in a balloon, across a vast and silent desert with nothing to gauge the distance she had traveled. Nor had there been husband, children, or lovers whose changing faces might have served as guideposts of her own progress through life. She was no longer certain even of her own age. The dusty, gold-scrolled mirrors throughout the big old house on Canterbury Drive reflected the face of a woman who might have been anywhere from fifty to seventy, for though her untidy gray hair and scrawny neck revealed the truth, her face itself had retained a youthfulness that might have led one to believe nothing very dramatic had ever occurred to disturb the tranquillity of those passive features reflected in the glass.
It was a face as rarely seen in the community as anything else that lay hidden behind the severe brick façade of the Tuscan-style mansion brooding well back from the road among its unkempt lawns and gardens. And yet Harriet was disturbed, a disturbance that had progressed over the past few weeks from feelings of mild neurotic distress to frantic desperation. This latter acute stage of despair dated from the moment she first realized that Piper’s betrayal of her affection — all those years of solitary devotion! — gave every indication of becoming a permanent estrangement.
For weeks the bird had refused to respond to her endearments, had not touched his food, and remained mutely unresponsive to the frail, beseeching finger gently prodding his green- and yellow-feathered body through the bars of his antique cage in the gloomy, mahogany-burdened dining room. His spiny claws clung to the perch, his yellow head rested against the bars, his clove-seed eyes regarded her with the pitiless stare of a stranger.
Yes, Harriet had grown desperate without Piper’s constant perky squawks of sympathy and encouragement. She felt bewilderingly alone, bereft of her only source of comfort in a world dominated by the cranky, demanding presence of Uncle Emil. She heard him now — tap-tap-tap... tap-tap-tap, and she turned her drooping eyes wearily toward the great spindled staircase down which floated that imperious summons. Since Uncle Emil had lost the power of speech after a series of strokes, his only means of communicating his incessant demands for attention were by tapping his cane on the carpetless floor of his room or by clapping his hands like some Eastern potentate summoning a faithful slave. Tap-tap-tap. Clap-clap-clap. Day and night sometimes. And when she had dragged herself up the long flight of stairs more often than not all he wanted her to do was keep him company; for hours she was obliged to sit rocking away in the corner while the old man lay on his bed as mute and cheerless as Piper had become in the last few weeks.
She had borne it all with unprotesting fortitude in years past when the occasional relative or neighbor would stop in and commend her for her saintliness, her compassion, for the stoic resignation with which she wore her martyr’s crown. But now the relatives and the old neighbors had all died. Most of the adjoining houses were cut up into flats whose young occupants ignored her. But then what else could they do when she herself never stepped outside the door or answered the doorbell when anyone did venture to ring it?
The particular form her desperation took was in a feeling of horrible confinement and a morbid awareness of the tomb-like silence in which she lived. Even the clocks had betrayed her, refusing any longer to chime or tell the time. And now that Piper had joined this conspiracy of silence it had become unbearable. She was obsessed with a rage to escape. Yes, to escape before it was too late, before she herself became as stiff and silent as the massive Victorian furniture, the clocks, the bird. Escape from that endless tap-tap-tap, clap-clap-clap. Escape from the chair in Uncle Emil’s room. She would go mad if she didn’t escape.
Although the telephone still functioned — she needed that to place her grocery order — it never rang, and she had long ago stopped subscribing to the daily paper. Still she would sometimes pick up one of the old papers stacked messily in the hall and read herself to sleep over it. That the wars, accidents, births, deaths, and marriages she read about had occurred years in the past made no difference to her. Events never changed, only names.
But now one evening, driven by that furious sense of desperation, she did something quite extraordinary. Her eyes happened to fall on a personals ad in the classified section of the paper lying across her lap. It read:
Troubled? Lonely? Desperate? Need a friend who understands? Call this number.
A fragile hope invaded her mind as the word desperate leaped out at her. She was desperate. Oh, frightfully desperate. And Piper, the only friend who had understood her, had unaccountably and perversely abandoned her.