Free Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean

that did not suggest hunger. It must have been early evening, the people relaxed without the need for entertainment. They all seemed to be perched as if watching, but there was nothing to watch.
    'How lovely,' she said.
    She was able to peep inside quite a few of the houses and see into them. Each of them had lace at the windows and many of them had frippery, fabric and lace over the chairs and tables. The houses were painted the colours you found in a box of chalks: solid blues, reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. Inside, the furniture was useful; she saw the very things her own children laughed at her generation for, plastic homewares and useful coverings. She spied the ends of legs or a portion of a back, a head turning, an arm reaching as the lacy curtains blew this way and that. She wished for herself the life that was lived inside them.
    Poor! she thought, spitting out the word. They have no televisions, that's it! She tutted and tusked. 'Now
don't go thinking that these people are good, Dorothy,' she warned herself, 'no people is either good or bad, no matter what they have or don't have...' But wasn't it easier to be good when you didn't have so much to worry about, wasn't it just easier? Hadn't people been better once? With their front doors open, small things to celebrate. The girls told her it was rose-tinted nonsense.
    'There was still crime back then, Mother,' they told her. The granddaughter would explain to Dorothy how media this-and-that and how the police forces this-and-the-other and how it was all different and yet all the same.
    'I wish I could get myself kidnapped,' she said, stopping to rummage around the bottom of her bag for a lone Murray Mint. She found one and stood, sucking on her sweet like a duck gobbling bread.

15
    J AN WAS AWAKE . It was the evening, they had gone to bed drunk, before the sunset, agreeing to rise for dinner. His wife slept, silent and solid beside him, the fan causing a small ripple of white sheet to flicker over a freckled shoulder. He had his head on the pillow, but was lying on his side so that he could feel, quite palpably, the pulsing of an artery in his neck. He could hear it too. It sounded like a clock ticking. It did more for him than a solitary thought could do and so he waited there until he had what he needed from it, then
he turned and looked at his wife. A small trickle of saliva lay across her cheek and he knew the smell of it, the dead breath creeping out under cover of liquid.
    He really did want an armistice. He had called her, in their time together, fraud, coward, liar, and he knew that these might apply to him also. It was no good calling her these things, when the fact was that he was lying there beside her. They were complicit. He'd spent each day with her amassing evidence to prove himself better than her and dying had served him up another way to be better, to be more right. That was the truth of it. He was a fool.
    He got up to smoke a cigarette on the balcony. He had taken up smoking again in the last month. He took a beer from the fridge and sat in the dull black heat of their balcony with the door open, careless of the air conditioning seeping out and the warm air stealing in. He wanted her to smell the smoke; he wanted her to mind him.
    He had seen at dinner that George was impressed with Annemieke. As she aged Annemieke's face was decked with excessive emotion, like an old maid's Christmas tree—loaded, angry, ready to let something tumble. Her eyes were strained, mascara weighed heavily on lashes, but she still looked good. She looked better without make-up. Her eyes were the grey of the North Sea she had looked at many times from her mother's apartment in Blankenberge. They used to make him think of a drop of ink on to watercolour paper, dark at first, fading outwards.
    Of course, old George liked the way she looked. Men liked her because she looked like she would provide the entertainment. Her fellow Dutch or Belgian women chose to wear stern,