On 8 June 2005 I experienced my very own personal epiphany. Standing in my lounge room while Jeff Buckley crooned about love being not a victory march but a cold and broken hallelujah, I at long last discovered what it meant to be a neighbour.
I live two doors down from possibly the crankiest old woman in Australia. The first time I met her, she yelled at me.
One night at tea I pondered who on earth could be hammering at such a time. When finally I ventured outside, it dawned on me that someone had done the unthinkable. Someone had parked a car in front of my neighbour’s house.
This land, according to her, is hers. She does not have a car, but she tells me the space is needed should she want the ambulance. There is no arguing with her that the ambulance had all the room it needed on the road. There is not a rational bone in her ageing body.
I called the police that night. She was banging and yelling, and I was concerned about the damage she was inflicting on somebody’s new Four Wheel Drive, and her withered hand.
A month ago there was a knock on the door. The gentleman from across the road tells me my cranky neighbour would like a woman to come and help her. She has had a fall and is waiting for the ambulance.
I find her sitting on a chair. A clothes horse sits in the lounge and she asks me to hang out her smalls while she waits. ‘They are clean,’ she tells me over and over. ‘I have an automatic washer.’
I assure her that hanging out washing is not at all foreign to me, and I am not afraid of her smalls.
My neighbour is gone for a long time. I am tempted to park in front of her house but I do not. Others do so in peace. We don’t really miss her. We, my neighbour Peter and I, suspect she will not return home.
Then one day I hear a familiar high-pitched irrational yelling. She is already telling off the taxi driver who has dropped her home.
I am surprised to see her back into her regular routine straight away. Every day she goes to the shops on her own, grabs a bag of goodies and the paper. I often see her sitting