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Diane would live to be 104 and die in her sleep, in her own bed, in the room where she had been born. All this was known, although not to her. However, she had a granite certainty about a long life and peaceful death that implied a spill-over of information. She was fifty two and this week she would cease to menstruate: she didn't know that either, although she thought it was about time. She had bled for exactly seven days out of twenty eight for precisely forty years - unless it was a leap year, in which case she bled for eight days in February. Thus the universe accommodated her. Insomnia, the heaviness of her periods, and frequent sleepwalking had inclined her against marriage, although there had been plenty of nocturnal experience: she was not virginal. She'd decided there would be too much fuss involved in waking the poor fellow up to change the stained bedding, and she eschewed the humiliation of being guided back to bed by a bleary man who'd been awakened by his perambulating bride
There was a barn owl in one of her sheds that wouldn't fly. Partly this was because the rescue centre had held on to it too long before passing it to her, but there was always a problem with owls. Badgers, bats, hedgehogs, no problem, foxes she didn't take: the noise and smell weren't fair to her neighbours, but owls were buggers. This one had damaged its pinion feathers on barbed wire. It should have been out on its own a week ago, but it refused to use its wings, preferring to hop inelegantly from its perch to her shoulder. They all did that. Once she had endured a young tawny owl sitting on her shoulder every night for a month while she waited for its flight feathers to grow, but she had been younger and more sentimental then. Not totally soft: she had only allowed the baby owl in the kitchen where the floor could be mopped easily, but even so, she wouldn't do the washing up with an owl on her shoulder these days.
She tapped her front teeth with her pen, glanced at the mortgage request form and wrote 'agreed' across the top. No need to plough through the details: she'd known Justin Bridger all his life and if he applied for a mortgage he'd have made sure beforehand that he could afford it.
'Right then,' she said out loud, 'you'll fly tonight or I'll know the reason why.' She glared through the frosted glass of her little cubicle as if she could see the recalcitrant bird. Beyond the dimpled pane, a bank customer queuing for Spanish pesetas inched into the line of her vision and immediately ducked his head and tucked in his elbows, guilt-ridden for a personal failing he couldn't identify but felt profoundly embarrassed over. For the rest of his life he dreamt compulsively of flying over moonlit landscapes.
That evening Diane walked to Soundthwaite wood in her plastic mackintosh, with the owl on her shoulder. On the next night the moon would be full, so she had cool light to guide her and she knew the woods with the deep clarity that fisherman feel for shoals and reefs. She had no fear, walking alone in the striped darkness of tree trunks. Under these trees she had made love with many men. The meetings ended with a passion and affection that allowed her to look them and their wives in the eye without shame. Men came to her without words, and left without guilt, feeling that they had fulfilled a need as primal and simple as breathing or sleeping. Few came more than once and she accepted that, as she accepted all things, calmly but warmly. She smiled at every memory, even when the memory was as vague as a stranger's pale body hovering over hers on a bed of bluebells that gave a crushed scent of chilly desire and left green slime on her back and calves.
She lifted her arm and looked sideways at the owl. Like all owls, it felt compelled to sit at highest possible point and sidled up her arm to the wrist, where it paused, gazing at her with lucent yellow eyes. It ducked its head, paying homage, and then faced resolutely forward and flew, low, silent ... gone.
The universe turned. Diane turned, heading for home. In the moment when her back was to the moon, the pivot of reality tilted. It was no longer likely that this woman could be all-mother, moon goddess, childless night hunter. So she was not. The universe stripped her of divinity and - spinning on its own axis of necessity - remade the lunar deity in a twelve year old child in a far land. The girl would bleed once a month for seven days, unless it was a leap year. She would never have a child. Men would come to her in the dark, and all creatures would stand safe in her shadow, making obeisance to her place in the universal scheme.
Diane walked home, feeling at once lighter and older.
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