Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,3

of herself on display. This is how she feels most of the time now; always blowzy, always overstuffed. She can’t stop touching the flesh that rolls over the waistband of her skirt, or fingering the mounds that form on either side of her bra straps. She looks at her legs as she peels off her stockings in the evenings; everything is dragging downwards – the heaviness of her thighs has settled lower around her knees and calves; the bones of her ankles are going under. She tells herself there’s nothing to worry about when she’s out in public, when she’s dressed, with lipstick. But here, standing in the main street, in front of the glass … She looks at herself side on, sees her ear and her head above it where patches of dry white scalp show through between the curls of her permanent. The curls don’t look like hair; they look like something made out of hair that has been stored in the back of a cupboard. She moves closer to the glass, examines the deep grooves in the skin around her mouth where it meets the deflated flesh of her lips. The lines around her mouth and the scored skin between her eyes – a fork mark – make her look angry and tired; tired in a way that sleep can’t fix. Her finger is on her lip, in that private place underneath the nostrils.

‘Morning.’

Betty reaches out and steadies herself against the glass.

‘You right there?’

She turns around. Harry removes the pipe from his mouth with one hand and puts it back again with the other.

‘Trying to remember my list, and that.’

He nods, takes a few puffs on his unlit pipe and stands awkwardly. Betty looks down at his boots. Harry kicks up one leg and knocks his pipe out against the raised heel. They both look up again. Harry coughs.

‘Been hot.’

‘Hotter last week though.’

‘True.’

Betty lifts her hand and pats a curl against her neck. Harry looks off down the street, looks back at her, coughs again.

‘I’ve mice in the shed – can you get Michael to bring Louie over?’

Betty nods and smiles. Harry touches his hat and walks away. She parts the fly strips at the co-op door and takes a basket from the stack.

For God’s sake, she says to herself, for God’s sake, woman, who do you think you are?

Who does she think she is? Betty Reynolds is a woman of forty-five, is the mother of Little Hazel and Michael, is an aide at the Acacia Court Home for the Aged. She rents a small house on the outskirts of Cohuna next to a dairy farm. She drives a Vauxhall. She came here pregnant with Little Hazel, Michael still in short pants by her side. The people of Cohuna assume that she must have had, at some stage, a husband – perhaps killed in the war? Apart from her work and her children Betty keeps to herself. She wears no rings. She doesn’t correct people when they call her Mrs Reynolds, but she refers to herself as just Betty or, where possible, Michael and Hazel’s mum. And there are times when this seems remarkable to her – that she is so convincingly in the present – that she carries no mark, or gives off no hint, of the difficulties of her past.

The people of Cohuna have not seen Betty Reynolds hopeful as she dabs on her lipstick in the morning and then resigned as she wipes it off at night. They have not seen the pile of lipstick-stained tissues that grows day after day in the cheap cane rubbish bin under her dresser to be emptied on Saturday and used to light the fire. They have not seen her undressing in front of the wardrobe mirror, slowly removing her slip, cupping her large, pale breasts in her hands, plucking the hairs that have started to grow around the nipples. They have not seen her grimacing at the exquisite sting of the tweezers, then having to soothe the skin with cold cream and finding herself overcome. Finding herself standing in front of the mirror scolding and hating herself and wondering who she is hurting herself for, and why her body is turning into something else before she has had a chance to discover what it was before. And then getting into bed with scenes replaying in her head from so long ago she is no longer sure if they are memory or fantasy. She cries often, in her