Marion didn’t feel up to dinner but she ought to eat, ought not to starve. She lay on her back on the guest-house bed. There was a stain on the ceiling, not a new one; they’d fixed the leak, but left the mark – nice, real classy. This is what it feels like to be an old woman, discarded by your own family. Money. The only thing with the power to bring some respite to old age. And maybe love. Although Max was a bastard and, for all the children she’d gone and had, not one of them gave a toss. Feeling desperate, Marion, staying horizontal, reached for her cellphone and punched out Stefano’s numbers. His mailbox was still full. And his voice-message pointedly unfriendly, as if he’d recorded it especially for her.
The phone rang. Sarah Clarke. As if there wasn’t enough to worry about, now there was the upcoming committee meeting. Should she send out a cancellation email? Sarah wanted to know. Marion fretted. She felt in no state to head up a meeting. And yet there were pressing committee matters. After the claim notice in the Gazette, mediations had commenced between the two parties, the Samsodiens and the Von Struikers. Marion had explained to Ludmilla that it was crucial the committee be kept up to date with the events – the outcome of the claim would affect them all. The first mediation had taken place and Marion had convinced Ludmilla to attend the upcoming committee meeting and give feedback. Meanwhile Beulah Gierdien had written another letter. It felt like such sore luck to be indisposed at such an exciting time in the committee’s history. Marion had been head of Talk Shop club in high school several years running and fancied herself an underexposed orator.
‘Well?’
‘Huh?’
‘Should I cancel?’
‘Oh … damn that woman!’
Sarah chuckled.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It’s not her fault.’
‘Whose – Hortensia’s?’
‘Yes. That you were knocked unconscious.’
‘Don’t be na?ve, Sarah, of course it is. Whose else fault could it be?’
They opted to postpone the meeting for a few days.
Marion ate her dinner, glancing, worriedly, at her phone every few minutes. No Marelena. Had she forgotten, or was she avoiding giving her bad news. Marion found it difficult to call her and find out.
After the lousy meal she walked down the guest-house corridor, her footsteps dampened by the carpet, which was in a colour she had no name for, mildewed in the corners. Her skin crawled. Literally, as if it was crawling away from the onslaught of ugliness. Since she’d arrived at the guest house she’d seen the back of the head of a guest and a couple at dinner – too in love to notice that they were in a dump. Apart from those encounters the place was deserted.
Marion reached her door and her cellphone rang. The lawyer. Marion walked into the stifled air of her room and took the short call, updating her on what her ridiculous life now hinged on – a pathetic string of insurance claims.
After the lawyer, Marion dialled Marelena’s number but it just rang; she didn’t leave a message. Her stomach knotted, but she couldn’t work out whether that was the regrettable meal she’d just eaten or fear. If the painting was destroyed, maybe she could make a claim. Except there was no record of the painting. Which was why she’d concocted the idea to hide it from the sharks in the first place. Now the lack of a record of the painting meant she couldn’t claim for it. Anyway, even if she could claim for it, the sharks would get that in the end. Since the botched attempt at Peter’s funeral Hortensia had presented a solid wall, with no holes for Marion to slip a request for a favour through. Why was she stalling when so much was at stake? And around and around and around. Why didn’t she, Marion, just die? Why couldn’t something kill her – she’d lived long enough, surely.
In another year she would be eighty-two. Her parents had died before then, living separate lives in the same old-age home, quiet in their bitterness and hate. Why couldn’t she have followed their example? Why did she have to live longer? What was the point anyway? You can’t die, but you haven’t got the money to live properly, the money to act as balm to your misery. What was the point of it all? You needed money – life was much too glaring without the shade of lots of cash.
Marion left the lights off, she walked to the dresser. It wasn’t yet properly dark outside and some light beat its way through the washed-out curtains. The photograph on the shabby surface looked at her, its frame scuffed, a scratch through her father’s face, but otherwise fine. Apparently Agnes had gathered the stuff into a small box. The same box Marion found upon waking up at the guest house. That and a hurriedly packed suitcase of clothing and toiletries. Why had she taken out the portrait and put it here on the dresser? Here where her parents could watch her the whole time. She smiled. What did it matter where she put it, they would always be watching her, regardless. And although divided in almost everything else, her parents, dead or alive, watched their daughter with the same singular emotion – fatigue. She’d made them weary.