Mother and Daughter sketch

Her mother was a poet, a well-read woman who recited beautifully despite the fact that she could never remember the writers' names. And her daughter was a musician. She claimed not to sing, not to play, but she did both in secret. Norman had heard her. Not that he had to, because she spoke in staccato and walked in legato and her artistic affiliations were obvious.

She missed her home country. That was obvious, too. She hated her mother and her new father, she hated regime and she hated anarchy. With hazel eyes and brown hair, she looked fairly unassuming, but she had a tongue like a whip. Sheltered and condescending, with a no-nonsense attitude, she dashed through the halls and left nothing in her haste. She spoke with words like justice and freedom and vacancy, hands flying around her, jittery. Sometimes she watched the stars outside despite not being able to name them all.

Her mother was different. She smoked cigars on the balcony, white smoke cutting the sky above her before disappearing. She spoke with a hunched back and a wary voice, and she walked with a self-disapproving manner. Norman had heard her speak to herself, or perhaps to the world, about how useless she was and how there was nothing she ever achieved. But she never did anything about it, simply hunched, bird-like, in the darkened corners of the manor. And although she was very much alive, she was already hanging from the ceiling with a rope around her neck.

Norman himself knew only that about the two women. Mother and daughter, poet and musician, one was the other without her flaws. They were both warriors, or they had been, and they were both royalty, or they had been. Paradoxes humanised, they spoke of passion as though it were a dead thing. But Norman could see it in their eyes as they listened to oration after oration about this country's pillars of faith and how they were pockmarked and scabbed and war-torn. The daughter longed to tear them down, and the mother yearned for a brighter future, but they were both the same thing at the end.