Sons and Lovers

Opposite my house, lives a woman called Sharon. She is Sharon,
because the local policeman told me so. She is ok is Sharon; he said
when he knocked on my door to tell me he admired my hyacinths. Going up
in the world he also said, nodding at my car. Can I come in, he
said.

Sharon has three sons, two of which are large and strapping. On
weekends at midnight I see them climb out of their bedroom window,
wriggle to the porch roof and then crump silently to the floor before
loping off down the road. A van calls for them every morning save
Sunday, at 6.55. I don't need an alarm, the diesel bock bock of the
engine sufficient to rouse me.

Sharon watches television twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes I switch
on mine to discover what it is she is watching. I flick from my screen
to hers, until the colours and scene changes are in perfect
synchronisation. One time she was watching a programme about
seductresses. I listened to the sound on my set and watched hers.
Seductresses are liberated women my television whispered. Sharon has
been liberated of her husband; he took 300 paracetamol and choked on
sausage and chips in bed. The local policeman told me it was three
years ago. Imagine that, he said. She's had a tough time, has Sharon. I
heard her call her youngest son a fucker once. Imagine.

Outside Sharon's front door is a pine table, with two long benches
attached. She came out of her side door and looked at it yesterday,
quite casually, one hand on her hip, as though deciding whether to set
food upon it. I busied myself cutting the blooms off the hyacinths. I
noticed that Sharon's hair is blonder than last week, and that the
curls are looser. Her jeans are tighter lately, and she wears the shoes
of a teenager, the ones that look like those cripple shoes, built up as
though to correct a short leg.

Sharon changes her bedroom curtains every month. I don't mean she
washes them, she changes them. This month she has dusky pink voile
stretched in one piece across the window. It's decorated with
daisies.

I think the policeman fucks Sharon. He calls there too.