SHORT STORY
There are many things about… Mary
Short quirky stories about Mary
When we first moved to the neighbourhood with two very young children in tow, I came to know our neighbour Mary. A stout, silvery-white hair woman in her late 40s. There are many things I couuld tell you about Mary. For a start, I used to observe Mary out of our tall glass windows from the upstairs bedroom of our detached house. With a newborn in my arms and irregular sleeping hours, you could say that I watched Mary quite often.
Mary’s original Queenslander (going back to the 60s, maybe even way before was so old that its asbestos had to be removed not long after we moved in) sat at the front of a modest strip of land, tucked away behind a parking lot for the corner shops. She has lived in this same house all her life. Her long backyard garden lay next to our haphazard double-storey at the end of a long driveway, with another residential at the front. Her long patch of beautiful green, separated by the construction of a wooden fence, is home to local trees, rodents and birds living along the rectangular perimeters of the property.
Every morning, Mary carried out a bucket of water to top up the bird bath at the edge of her little green Eden where the rainbow lorikeets, pigeons, magpies butcher birds and even the occasional kookaburra gather. Together, the birds rouse a cacophony of chirping and cawing to greet the first blue light of day. Around mid-morning, she trudged outside to hang out the laundry on the Hills Hoist before disappearing back into the house for some bird food to feed her gathering of birds. She’d recognised some of them, and also gave them names.
When I saw her yesterday, she said she had stopped feeding the pigeons. I glanced out of her back door and saw around six to eight of them looking rather well-fed, probably on the three-star mince from Aldi, that she had requested for me to get. The round fat things, three times their usual size, looked like they were sunbathing, still not moving, just sitting, waiting. I guess they must be waiting for their meal.
Seeing that I was still staring, she quipped from behind, in a tragic tone, “The crows kill ’em, rip off their heads, it’s horrible.”
“How terrible,” I say. After a pause, I added, “Do they eat them too?”
“Aw, they pick around, then leave their carcasses.”
“Horrible,” I say quietly.
Horrible is the word I would use to describe the situation with Mary these days. She was looking frail and smaller in stature compared to my last memory of our previous meeting — her robustness, arms plump with age and life, had diminished — the cancer had spread. The edginess of her curt remarks running over her down-to-earth dry humour were more mellow than usual. That quality of hers that first drew me in, to her. She’d give me snippets of her stories about the loiterers in the neighbourhood. She’d be the first to call the police at any sight and sound of disturbances. I was often grateful for her interventions, although most of the time, I scarcely paid much attention to what was really happening.
Nine years on, I still hadn’t a clue about Mary. Out of the blue, she texted me with the news of her advanced cancer, which she later said she had known all along for two years now, but did nothing about. At a loss for words, I go to see her and find myself crying buckets and blowing my congested nose with her new box of Eucalyptus tissues. As if to give us both ample warning of what is to come, she had a moment earlier said that she just bought it from the shops.
Oh, Mary. My heart sank.
When I bade her farewell, I held her as tightly as I could and told her to let me know beforehand when she intends to … or, will decide to… as if there were other more gentle ways of putting it… kick the bucket, so to speak. She said there is a process for these things with a faraway look in her eyes.
A process. I let that sink in for a bit before letting her go.
Until next time, dear Mary.
