Maybe This Time

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I love Kafka and here we have a Kafkaesque sense of alienation – not to mention narrative experiments galore! Outwardly normal events slip into drama before they tip into horror. These oblique tales exert a fascinating hold over the reader.

Whenever I left the house, they lay on their jetty and when I came back, hours later, they were still lying there. In the sun, in the shade, in the wind and rain. Day in, day out, every day. There were two gardens of empty, rundown houses with a few trees and hedges between us. Reeds and driftwood were washed up along the shores. Their jetty was no different from the others. A fence of wooden planks protected them from the wind and their neighbours’ eyes. A pot of lobelias sat on a shelf attached to the planks. Behind it, a plastic palm tree waved above the water. This tree belonged to the little girl one jetty over. The girl couldn’t get enough of climbing up and jumping into the water, going under and resurfacing, screaming and going wild with excitement.

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