Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

Readers who might have missed Episode 1 – November 2010 – may wish to catch it here https://pigsarms.com.au/2010/11/22/the-castle-episode-one-the-florist/

Similarly, Readers, Episode 2 – April last year – is here https://pigsarms.com.au/2011/04/02/the-castle-episode-2-wooden-%E2%80%93-it-%E2%80%93-be-%E2%80%93-nice-%E2%80%93-to-%E2%80%93-get-%E2%80%93-on-%E2%80%93-with-%E2%80%93-your-%E2%80%93-neighbours/

 

Suse opens her eyes.  She begins to speak again and there is no apparent lapse of reason or fault of logic between the sentence on which Suse succumbed to slumber and this next. Who is there to know other than her audience of one she had been mid-sentence and nodded off recounting to her interviewer the rules of the workplace Suse knows in its every corner and nook.  Her eyes beneath lank  eyelashes are a tranquil hazel flecked with the colours of the spectrum and all their shades including there is violet. Her lightly freckled face is pale representing more than any other aspect of her existence a life spent indoors. Nothing is prettier than Suse’s hair however dulled from an imaginable bounty of flecks of gold, bronze and titanium naturally curling and tousled about a casually inserted pair of hairpins. Suse is the princess in the tower who has come down for coffee, petite, pale, polite.

It is as her eyelids lift she speaks.

“No-one much who has not been there would understand we have rules,” she advises, “they are not allowed to kiss.”

Something in her demeanour advises as equally, informs, educates. Her mind is resolute with kind intention. It lacks no clarity in respect of kindness.

Her listener dares not shift her cramped position where she has sat almost breathless while her interviewee napped. She encourages description.

“The client cannot kiss you? How do you manage that? Surely..how…do you have problems enforcing that?”

The steaming coffee is a warmer Suse has embraced as if her small hands need to be thawed.

“No.” She declares her preparedness to communicate, steadfast, resolute, a reliable source of information in this instance of a real and barely imagined world between the two women seated at the table. She explains her clients are regulars because she has been working so long. She has been given privileges. They can be trusted. By and large, customers do heed the rules in the first instance.

“I feel sorry for them, why they are there, who they are, what they tell me, how they live. They say thank you.”

She waves one hand free of the coffee mug before replacing it.

“We don’t have much here at home but, you know, we are lucky we have this.”

Behind Suse, past where sunlight is playing at the tips of her hair the oak tree on the gullyside opposite the stark verandah off the empty coconut wood kitchen and a sun room has caught a gust of wind and translated it into song, through the rustling of its leaves. The brief trill followed by the o, so characteristic klok-klok-klok of the song of a tui has never ceased. A parlour piano can be heard starting up as if in the hidden distance behind the oak tree tinkling without the intervention of human hands. Sight unseen. It is of water beginning to flow and racing, of the tumble of cracking ice and snow melting, of branches breaking and being swept into the melee that the piano is singing.

 

Sandshoe

15/2/2012