Observatory Mansions Read Online Free PDF Page A

completely living for fiction for such a long time that fiction had become, for her, reality. Despite the colours that poured out of Miss Higg’s television set there was something black and white about her, something almost moth-like in her pale, dry, youthless skin and in her dark, dusty clothes; she was a woman without moisture. And Claire Higg had contrived to completely forget what Claire Higg looked like. There were no mirrors in flat sixteen where she lived.
    Her flat consisted of six rooms, but she occupied only four of them, the other rooms growing ever-thicker rugs of dust in her absence. If she were to have walked into those other rooms she would not have been able to recognize them, she would be sure that she was somewhere else, that she had got lost. The other rooms were not fenced off from the rest of her flat, not at all, but there was a certain point in her flat that she had not crossed for quite some time. Nothing stopped her from crossing to the other side, she just didn’t. There was nothing for her there. All that she needed she had in her four rooms: kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, bedroom. She spent the majority of her days sitting in the warm comfort of her favourite armchair, facing and enjoying the friendliness that poured out of her television set. Her days were happy there. They were spent among friends. Among characters from soap operas. She loved them all, even the villains. Inside that magical television box were such beautiful colours, such beautiful people, such beautiful lives. Outside there was only little Miss Higg. But that did not matter to her. Since most of the day was spent amongst beautiful characters the remainder of the day could be spent thinking about those beautifulcharacters. Her brain would replay the day’s events, and she would giggle, tut-tut, cry and sigh with her loved ones once more. It was a full life. The days were so busy, in each one she had to cram funerals, weddings, births, scandals, love affairs, parties by the pool, important meetings in enormous offices, walks on the beach, rides on horses, surfing on the waves, tantrums, tears, kisses, the occasional prelude to sex and much else besides. When she went to sleep, she went smilingly to ready herself for another full day.
    Miss Higg’s magnolia-painted walls were once – before they were hers, when their windows looked out on to parkland filled with nonchalant cattle – decorated with a series of hunting prints. Now they were spotted with photographs carefully scissored out of magazines, pinioned there by blue tack, drawing pins and sewing needles. One man occurred particularly frequently: moustached, with a toothy grin and bronzed flesh. This man was also to be found on her mantelpiece, clamped between the glass and wood of a picture frame. This portrait included the hand of another alien person that rested on his right shoulder. The photograph had been cut so that the other person, certainly female, was lost. In her small kitchen, with its diminutive gas stove and baby refrigerator, Miss Higg exhibited a cork pin board on which were displayed more cut-outs of her television heroes.
    There was a rectangular mark on one of her magnolia walls where a photograph had once lived. This photograph was from Miss Higg’s very own, and once very real, life. A passport photograph of a sickly looking man: Alec Magnitt, former resident of flat nineteen. Deceased. On the back of the photograph was an epigraph which read – Claire, Claire, I love you so . And signed: A. Magnitt, flat nineteen, Observatory Mansions . But the photograph was no longer there (lot 770).
    On that particular evening, Miss Higg’s transmission having ended and the news broadcast just beginning, aninconvenience she never watched or listened to, Miss Higg turned down the volume of her television set and heard a knocking on her door.

An unscheduled programme replacing the
nine o’clock news .
    Who? She wondered.
    It’s Peter, came the response.