The Woman Next Door

Shirley knew it really was none of her business...

- KAYTE NUNN

I'm starting to feel like that man. You know, in the film with the balloons." Shirley put down the teacup, wincing at the rattle as it met its saucer. Life now was too short not to get the good crockery out, even if she was worried about breaking it. These days her hands shook more than she'd admit. She'd stopped applying lipstick, didn't want to look like one of those old women with a feathered line of Revlon Red Carpet around their mouth.

"What's that?" her granddaughter Emily looked up from her phone, thumbs still flying over its smooth surface.

"The one whose house is surrounded by skyscrapers. He attaches balloons to it." The movie was one of Shirley's favourites, but her mind was floundering as she tried recall the title. She fidgeted, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. It got cold here in winter: the wind came all the way from Antarctica.

"Oh, you mean Up?"

"Yes, that's the one," said Shirley, relieved. "Up, of course. Silly me not to remember it."

Emily stopped texting and followed her grandmother's gaze out of the window. A large canary-yellow crane swung in front of the construction site further along the street. Yet another mega-mansion being built. "Blank canvas", that's what the estate agent's signboards attached to the old houses said. Shirley didn't doubt that the day someone slapped a signboard in front of the low brick wall that bordered her single-storey cottage, it would say that.

"Want me to bring balloons, Gran?" Shirley snorted. "They're going to have to take me out of here in a box." She had arrived at the cliffside cottage as a bride, barely in her twenties. The peninsula had been quiet then, with only the cockatoos and the cicadas to shred the silence.