Free Ripples on a Pond by Joy Dettman

city.
    That’s what she’d been doing, escaping across a minor road, when the lights had gone out for Amber Morrison. They’d been turned on in a place where white-clad angels washed her face, where gentle hands cared, where she’d been dear, and sweetie too.
    â€˜Can you remember your name, sweetie?’
    Say her name and kill that sweetie? Or choose another? No choice to be made.
    â€˜Duckworth,’ she’d said. Norman’s mother, Cecelia, had been a Duckworth before she’d become a Morrison, and in Amber’s concussed state, her mother-in-law had epitomised respectability.
    Had Amber been capable of forethought, she would have chosen Jones, Smith, or Brown. Had she recognised the woman in the second bed as Lorna Hooper, she would have risen, and, concussed or not, broken leg or not, would have run for her life.
    For three weeks, she’d failed to recognise the toothless, bandaged Lorna, and by the time she had, it had been too late to run.
    The devil looks after his own. Lorna’s sight, severely damaged in the accident, had made her reliant on little Miss Duckworth long before the two had been moved to a convalescent hospital; and when evicted from her convalescent bed, Lorna had offered Miss Duckworth her guest room in exchange for housekeeping services.
    Unsociable was too mild a word to describe Lorna Hooper. She discouraged visitors and salesmen with a padlocked gate. She confiscated balls that bounced over her fence, punctured them, stamped the air from them, before relegating them to the rubbish bin. An evil, uncharitable woman, Lorna Hooper; but after the places Amber had been, after the dregs of humanity she’d cohabited with, Lorna and her staid red-brick house in Kew were next door to paradise.
    Or had been, until a Duckworth female and her maiden daughter moved to Kew, their house barely a block away from Lorna’s. Amber had risen and almost run from the church the morning the two Duckworth women were introduced to the congregation.
    Duckworths had always stuck together. They’d come in force to old Cecelia Morrison’s funeral, had travelled miles to get there. And they’d killed Amber’s second son while they’d been there, or caused his premature birth. It was Charles Duckworth who’d brought the stray into Amber’s life and Sissy’s. Those two Duckworth women, Alma and Valda, ruined Amber’s Sunday mornings. They’d bailed her up after church one morning, determined to find a common thread that would weave Miss Elizabeth Duckworth into their clan. Amber already had a place there. She was their cousin Norman’s crazy wife. She’d met Alma Duckworth’s sister forty years ago.
    Knew she’d have to move on. Didn’t want to move on. She was comfortable, even happy, in her role as Lorna’s companion/guide dog, reader/housekeeper and general factotum.
    In late July, three weeks after Margaret’s death, Amber at Lorna’s elbow, waiting to shake the hand of the parson, her mind away with a leg of lamb she’d left roasting in the oven, a third Duckworth female, a massive draughthorse of a woman, jumped the queue, her bulk forcing Amber to step aside or to be run down. Her resemblance to Norman’s mother was uncanny.
    â€˜Lorna Hooper,’ the woman said. ‘Well, fancy running into you here.’
    Not quite the height of Lorna, four times her width, heavy jaw, carping codfish mouth. That was all Amber saw before she dodged between the queuing congregation and away from that woman.
    The organist was packing up his music. Choir members glanced at little Miss Duckworth who, keeping her head down, searched the front pew Lorna claimed as her own each Sunday. Whatever she was searching for remained lost, until the supersized woman and Lorna had shaken the hand of God’s earthly representative and were gone from the doorway. Amber didn’t rejoin the queue, but made her hasty exit