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| 2008
ProgramAuthorsVideo
Media |
Extract from
The Ghost’s Child – Sonya Hartnett
Matilda considered her hands, which were dotted with spots
and crimped with lines and lumpy with thick veins.
Her fingers had once been smooth and white as piano keys. She
said, ‘Being
old is sometimes painful, but it isn’t horrible. It’s
just what I am. When I was a girl, I looked in a mirror and saw
me. Now I’m old, but when I look in a mirror, the person
I see is still me. I’m not graceful or pretty any more,
but maybe I am something else – something just as good,
or better. Once I was an acorn, now I’m an oak tree.’ The
boy snorted, unimpressed by trees. ‘I bet when you were
a little girl, you thought old things were horrible.’
Tea-leaves
floated in a penny-sized pool of tea in the bottom of Matilda’s
cup. ‘Everything that’s young is troubled by what
is old,’ she admitted. ‘When I was small, there was
an elderly woman who lived at the bend of the road. She never
said an unkind word to me, she never even looked at me, but I
was frightened of her. She was so withered, so crumpled. I knew
she had once been a small girl too, but I couldn’t believe
it. She was oldness, and nothing else. She was like an abandoned
nest you find in a bough, tatty and disintegrating to dust. Even
now, the memory of her makes me shiver. It is strange, that oldness
is so hard to love or forgive.’ |
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