Excerpt of Half Broken Things by Morag Joss
(Page 3 of 6)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
But all these things seemed content in their imperfections; they were
not shouting out to be mended the way new things are. New things so
often break before there has been time for them to fade and crumble.
Here, it was as if the things had simply been around long enough to be
dropped or bent or knocked, and every one of these minute, accidental
events had been patiently absorbed, as if the things knew themselves to
be acceptable and thought beautiful just as they were. If objects could
give contented sighs, that's what these would have done. I wanted to
be like that. I wondered if I, also fading and crumbling as everything
does in the end, could be like that. Yes, I remember wondering that
right from the start, in those first few days of January.
The third day, like the first two, slipped away and got lost somewhere
in the folds of the afternoon. As before, Jean had made the dusting of
the objects in the house last for most of the morning. She had vacuumed
the floors again and cleaned her bathroom, unnecessarily. After her
lunch of milky instant coffee and biscuits she tidied round the kitchen.
When she could fool herself no longer that there was anything left to do
she mounted the carved wooden stairs and walked the upper floors, again
feeling mildly inquisitive, as if the house and the rest of the day
might be conspiring to withhold something from her. Again, pointlessly,
she tried the three doors she knew to be locked. Then she wandered with
less purpose, pausing here and there, her vague eyes watching how light
displaced time in the many other rooms of the house. Light entered by
the mullioned windows, stretched over floors and panelled walls and lay
down across empty beds. It lay as cold and silent as a held breath over
furniture and objects and over Jean lingering in each doorway; it
claimed space usually taken by hours and minutes which, outside,
continued to pass. Through windows to the west Jean saw how the wind was
moving the bare trees that bordered the fields; through the south
windows she watched grass shivering in the paddock, watched as clouds
pasted onto the sky bulged and heaved a little. Inside, the afternoon
aged; its folds sank and deepened, closed over the last of the daylight
and sucked it in. When it was quite dark Jean walked again from room to
room, touching things gently and drawing curtains. So the third day
passed, with Jean watching as it seemed not to do so, unaware that she
was waiting.
She was keeping the letter from the agency in the pocket of her thick
new cardigan, the Christmas present she had bought and wrapped for
herself so that she would have something to open 'from my niece Jenny
in Australia' in front of the other residents on Christmas morning.
For this year, finding herself again between house-sitting jobs over
the holiday, she had been obliged to spend Christmas at the Ardenleigh
Guest House. It was Jean's fifth Christmas there in eighteen years,
and Jenny had sprung into being the very first time when, one day at
breakfast, a depressed old lady had invited Jean to agree with her that
Christmas was quite dreadful when you were getting on and nobody wanted
you. It had sounded like an accusation; Jean had then been in her late
forties but suspected she looked older. She ignored the assumption about
her age and concentrated on the 'unwanted' allegation. She heard
herself saying, Oh, but I didn't have to come here! In fact my . . .
my niece begged me to come to her! But I told her oh no, I shan't come
this year, thank you, dear. Thank you, Jenny dear, I said, but no,
I'll make other arrangements. And then of course the old lady had
asked her why. Oh, well. Well, she's having a baby soon, her third. So
I thought, it wouldn't be fair to add to the workload this year. Then
she added, in a voice loaded with dread, You see, she's not having an
easy pregnancy.
Excerpted
from Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Copyright © 2005 by
Morag Joss. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
