Page 2 of Mad Mabel

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.

2

“Elsa?”

When you are as ancient as I am, the days are predictable. Early each morning, for example, I know I’ll hear a few crazies singing as they make their way home from a night out at the bars. I know I’ll see Mrs. Nguyen from two doors down scurry past my window on her way to the nail salon. I know I’ll hear Nugget, Ishaan’s godforsaken Chihuahua, yapping for her breakfast. And so on and so forth. A lot of people think old folk find comfort in such sameness, and perhaps some of them do. Not me. I like change. Usually. Then again, the arrival of theenfant terriblePersephone on the street is one change that has me yearning for days of yore.

“ELSA!”

I should, I suppose, take my share of responsibility. After all, I leave myself open to this sort of harassment by choosing to spend time on my porch of a morning. Unfortunately, as quaint as myterrace home is, it is measly in natural light and a woman has to get her vitamin D from somewhere.

“It’s Elsie,” I tell the child. “Else to my friends, which you are not. Elsa to no one.”

Daphne and I are on the front porch, open novels in our laps, trying to find relief from Nugget’s vile yapping. Honest to God, it’s the kind of noise that could make a woman insane.Yap. Yap. Yap.Equally spaced. No pauses. Highly pitched, vulnerable and vicious all at once. The only consolation is that the noise helps distract me from the article.

“Forget about it,” Daphne keeps saying. “Put the silly article out of your mind.”

And I do, for short periods. But my mind keeps getting drawn back to it like a fly to manure. I’m aware that people know my story, of course—I am a footnote in practically every article written about childhood evils. The difference is that while I am free to engage with or ignore those articles from the safety of my relative anonymity, now that Joan—or whoever put that note under my door—knows where I live, I feel exposed in a way I haven’t been since I was fifteen years old.

As for the article itself, it had some inaccuracies, but I’d seen plenty worse. They got my name right, and my parents’ names. They knew I was a reclusive child, and that I spent time in hospital. And, of course, they were correct in reporting that, over the course of my young life, everyone around me died. Without the latter detail, of course, the former would be entirely immaterial.

“But I like Elsa!” Persephone whines. “FromFrozen.”

“I like Maleficent.” I turn the page of my novel. “Can I call you that?”

The child giggles. So does Daphne. For pity’s sake.

Persephone is seven years old, daughter of Roxanne—the very attractive woman who moved in to number 5 a couple of months ago. The child’s father doesn’t appear to be in the picture, though therehasbeen a string of unsavory men in and out of the place at all hours of the night.

“I like the sex,” Roxanne told me when I raised an eyebrow at her, after watching her wave off yet another fellow one Saturday morning.

“Good for you, dear,” Daphne had told her cheerily, giving a little air punch.

“Is he your boyfriend?” I inquired.

Roxanne wrinkled her nose. “God, no. No boyfriends for me.”

“Chicks before dicks,” Daphne agreed. “Holes before poles.”

I’ll admit, I chuckled at that. (Poor Joan, who had been walking by at the time, had just about passed out.)

I wonder if it’s the sex or the child that makes Roxanne so tired. Every time I see her the poor girl has bags under her eyes. I sympathize, and yet it has to be said she has a fairly laissez-faire attitude to parenting, making herself scarce as Persephone terrorizes the street—going from neighbor to neighbor, demanding gold coin donations for school fundraisers or handing out substandard pictures she’d drawn and then returning to ensure they’d been properly displayed. One has to wonder where the child gets her audacity.

“Elsa!”

I sigh and peer over the top of my glasses at her.“What? ”

“I have to interview an old person for my homework.”

Persephone, clearly, is ill-named. Anyone could tell you that a name like Persephone comes with a burden of expectation. A Persephone is lithe with golden hair, searching eyes, and a pensive,troubled spirit. This child is chubby and has a mouse-brown bob and smallish eyes; plain as a mud fence. She’s also missing enough teeth that she resembles a sixteenth-century beggar. The child should have been named Medusa. Or Tempestas.

“And?” I prompt.

“And…” She stares demonstrably at Daphne and me. “You’re old.”

Daphne snorts. “Elsie’s older. She’ll do the interview.”

The child looks at me. “Will you do it?”