Tonight, the knot snagged and wouldn’t loosen. In fact, it just got tighter and tighter the more he struggled with it, and so as he spilled out, so did his life.
When his wife came into the room, exhausted, her hands red and cracked by domestic travails, and on her tongue yet another lashing pending for her wastrel husband, she stopped and stared. At the noose. The bloated, blue and grey face above it, barely recognizable, and it was as if a thousand bars of lead had been lifted from her shoulders.
Let the dogs howl outside all night. Let the fires rage. She was free and her life ahead was all her own and nobody else’s. For ever and ever again.
A week later a neighbour would see her pass on the street and would say to friends that evening how Nissala had suddenly become beautiful, stunning, in fact, filled with vitality, looking years and years younger. Like a dead flower suddenly reborn, a blossom fierce under the brilliant warm sunlight.
And then the two gossipy old women would fall silent, both thinking the same dark thoughts, the delicious what-if and maybe-she notions that made life so much fun, and gave them plenty to talk about, besides.
In the meantime, scores of children would stay innocent for a little longer than they would have otherwise done.
Widow Lebbil was a reasonable woman most of the time. But on occasion this gentle calm twisted into something malign, something so bound up in rage that it overwhelmed its cause. The same thing triggered her incandescent fury, the same thing every time.
Fat Saborgan lived above her, and around this time every night — when decent people should be sleeping though truth be told who could do that on this insane night when the mad revelry in the streets sounded out of control — he’d start running about up there, back and forth, round and round, this way and that.
Who could sleep below that thunder?
And so she worked her way out of bed, groaning at her aching hips, took one of her canes and, standing on a rickety chair, pounded against the ceiling. Her voice was too thin, too frail — he’d never hear if she yelled up at him. Only the cane would do. And she knew he heard her, she knew he did, but did it make any difference?
No! Never!
She couldn’t go on with this. She couldn’t!
Thump thump scrape thump scrape thump thump — and so she pounded and pounded and pounded, her arms on fire, her shoulders cramping. Pounded and pounded.
