Chapter 1
My name is Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick and I am eighty-one years old.
I want it on the record that I don’t look eighty-one.
Not because I’m particularly attractive or youthful-looking—on the contrary, I’ve seen hairless mole rats more attractive—but because if storybooks are anything to go by (and I, for one, believe they are), eighty-one-year-olds are frail, birdlike creatures with silver hair who call people “dear” and go inside the bank to speak to an “actual person” rather than use the much more convenient ATM.
At six feet tall with broad shoulders and a sturdy backbone, no one would ever accuse me of being birdlike—unless the bird in question was an ostrich.
My hair is reddish-gray, and I call people “dipshit” with far more regularity than “dear.” Most importantly, I adore the ATM.
Who wouldn’t? I’m eighty-one years old, and I don’t want to spend the precious time I have left in a stuffy, air-conditioned room talking to a power-tripping branch manager called Barry through plexiglass.
I digress.
I’ve lived on Kenny Lane for close to sixty years.
Kenny Lane is a peculiar little cobbled street on the periphery of central Melbourne, made up of the back doors of restaurants and half a dozen single-fronted terrace homes, each adorned with intricately tiled porches and wrought iron fences in varying states of disrepair.
The tiny front gardens tell diverse stories: mine meticulously tended with blooming roses, the rest ranging from untamed beauty to sparse weed patches.
Parking is limited to a single row along one side, and any nonresident who dares to park their vehicle in these public spots is destined to suffer the wrath of Mrs. Nguyen.
(I’ve yet to see a person make this mistake twice.)
The houses are close enough together that I could throw a tennis ball back and forth with residents opposite me if I was so inclined, which, needless to say, I am not.
In fact, beyond the necessary interactions of neighbors—accusations of stealing space in each other’s rubbish bins, lobbing dog droppings over the fence when Nugget does her business in my front garden, and shared complaints about the dreadful postman Dwayne—we don’t interact at all, which is exactly how I like it.
It’s a funny little street, to be sure. But it’s home to me.
The only real home I’ve ever had. And while I consider myself flexible about a lot of things, I’m not flexible about Kenny Lane.
In fact, I’ll tell you something for nothing: The only way anyone is going to get me out of this street is in a mahogany box. An extra-long one.
I am dangling a Lady Grey tea bag in hot water when I see it. From the kitchen I have a direct eyeline down the long corridor to the front door, under which I see a protruding piece of paper.
“Well, well, looky here,” I say to Daphne, who sits patiently at my round table, waiting for her cuppa. “Must be another letter from Joan.”
Joan at number 3 is sixty-odd, has a neat gray bob, polished black orthotic footwear, and darting, suspicious eyes.
Since the day she moved in, I’ve been receiving notes underneath my door: about my porch security light shining into her bedroom window, about the placement of my rubbish bins, about my roses creeping too far over the fence line into the laneway.
If I wasn’t so full of myself I might have feared she didn’t like me.
Joan’s nephew, she is forever at pains to point out, is a partner in a law firm.
She’s managed to include this detail in every one of her letters.
Your nephew sounds marvelous, I replied to her last note. But I’m assuming he’s going to be a little young for me, and besides, I’m not looking to date at this time.
Daphne snorted her tea when I read that out to her.
In the year she’s lived on the street, I’ve never heard Joan speak. Not a word. Each time I shout, “Good morning,” she scurries away like a rat in a sewer. I suppose Joan is more of a pen pal than a neighbor.
“I wonder what I’ve done this time?” I say.
“Perhaps she’s discovered our cannabis racket?” Daphne muses. “You don’t think she knows a lawyer, do you?”
We chuckle wickedly.
I shuffle toward the door, thinking this will make for most enjoyable conversation while we have our afternoon cuppa. I might read out the letter using a voice akin to the Queen’s to make Daphne laugh.
Daphne laughs easily, a grossly underrated quality.
Also grossly underrated are the bizarre outfits she wears.
Today it’s a magenta T-shirt with a bedazzled Eiffel Tower on the front.
The rims of her glasses are magenta, just like her shirt.
Daphne has always been quirky but it feels more pronounced somehow now that she is an old lady.
The comfort she brings me, too, feels more pronounced.
If my life is a jagged graph of highs and lows, she is the thick, solid line right down the middle.
Not a black line either, nothing as dull as that. Daphne’s line is magenta.
I bend to retrieve the note, supporting my temperamental lumbar spine. I’d planned to wait until I was sitting down to open it, it’s folded in half, but as I straighten, it opens itself, having not been folded with enough passion along the line. Arthritis playing up, is it, Joan?
I lift my glasses from the chain around my neck and perch them on my nose.
It’s a photocopy of an old news article.
A very old news article. It must have been copied many times because much of the font is blurred, impossible to read.
I can make out the headline, though, clear as day.
The sight of it makes me feel lightheaded, like I might faint.
“What is it?” Daphne asks.
I turn the page around to face her. She reads the headline slowly, her mouth bending around each word silently as she squints at the page. Finally, her lips stop moving and her eyes find mine.
“Someone knows,” I say unnecessarily. “Someone knows who I am.”
This is a love story, by the way. It may not seem like it, what with all the blood and guts and murder, but nevertheless, that’s what it is. And there is no greater love story than that of platonic female love. The kind of love I have with Daphne.
We aren’t lesbians, before you start. Frankly, I find it appalling that people would assume such a thing—not that I take issue with lesbians, each to their own, I say, but because people have so little regard for female friendship that they can’t fathom a closeness such as we have without the romantic element. More fool them.
There will be those who disagree with me, of course.
People who say romantic love trumps platonic female friendship.
Or parental love. Or love of self. Those people are just giving away the fact that they’ve never experienced true platonic female friendship.
The kind of friendship you’d do anything to preserve—fight, steal. Even kill.
Here’s a little-spoken fact for you: Friends are like oxygen.
If you’ve been blessed enough to have always been surrounded by friends, you might think I’m overplaying this.
I don’t blame you. If you’d always been surrounded by air, you wouldn’t think to credit it for your very existence either.
But I’ve spent much of my life gasping for breath, so I promise you, it’s true.
Friends are like oxygen. And the only reason I’m still alive is Daphne.