Author name: Charlotte French

They say ‘Write what you know’ and in Agnes Treading Water I did—to a degree. Don’t let your imagination run away with you now. I’m not Agnes and her story is not mine. We have a few touch points is all. The most obvious—I live just north of Coffs Harbour, the town she visits in Australia.And I too grew up in the town where she lives. Söderköping, which is the correct Swedish for South Hamlet, is an old town and rich in history that dates back to the middle ages. You find reminders of its heritage all through the area.

Mum sits on the hard verandah floor with her rounded back to me, feet on the concrete steps down to the bronzed lawn, shoulders slumped and arms slack by her side—weighed down and emptied out. I wonder if she’s cried yet.

It was a modest funeral without tears. A group of gentlemen from the nursing home came and two previous neighbours, Betty from next door and Mrs Karlson in the downstairs apartment, both with their walkers. Mum had managed to organise all the finer details over the phone; an oak coffin, a simple arrangement of white lilies, Chopin, and a sepia portrait of Grandma at Mum’s age, not a great likeness but the same deep set eyes, the same reticent smile. Mum is prettier, I must tell her that. 

I’d seen him the previous day,  in a photo online—a nameless, spotty, and speckled cocker-spaniel cross with gangly legs, oversized paws, and glassy brown eyes. And he’d looked straight through the camera into my heart. So, Wednesday the 23rd of March, last year, we drove up the mountains towards Armidale discussing names on the way. A petrol station in Guyra was the pickup point. When the farmhand handed me Banjo, his whole body was shaking with fear. Only minutes later he was curious and keen to lick my arm, while I signed over my life.

The long drive home, our new baby slept on my lap. Oh, bliss!
Oh bliss? Don’t think so. We’d bought him his very own crate (long gone now because he only slept there at night, didn’t see it as his safe space, and outgrew it anyway).

The kitchen shears were delivered on a silver plate with the gin three minutes after he delivered his gift, seven minutes after he pulled her chair out, sliding his hand down the small of her back—his touch too familiar, too sensual, too sickening. The pair of stainless steel blades were small, curved and sharp. The gin, icy blue like the Antarctic ocean.
Thirty years. Snip. 
It wasn’t her pearl anniversary, but that’s what he’d bought her—three of them on a silver chain. She lifted out the necklace with finger and thumb, held it up, made it swing a little. Looked closer. Smiled an approval. He sipped his Dom Perignon, watching while she fastened it behind her neck.
He toasted her.
She blew him a slow-motion kiss.