Stories of the Street - Thirty seven

Maria always walks her two white terriers along the same route every morning, lunchtime and evening. The walk takes her part of the way along the street, turning off just before the old cinema and then brings her back onto the street near the pedestrian crossing where she takes the dogs to the other side of the street and heads back towards her house.

Maria is just half an inch above five feet tall and has that frail, unsteady appearance that would be elegant if it was not so faded and brittle. She was made a widow when she was quite young; hardly thirty years of age; and has spent the last thirty and more years on her own. Her husband had been quite well off and had invested well. She has a small flat with low outgoings, a reasonable income and has recently begun to enjoy increased income as a result of what she was told were “a couple of pension and insurance products maturing”.

She has what she calls three indulgences and two saving graces in her life.

Her saving graces are the memory of her beloved husband (someone she still misses every day) and her church, which provides her with hope, comfort and an ongoing connection with a community.

Her three indulgences are, firstly, her dogs; their unquestioning love keeps her happy and regularly spurs her on to feed them with ridiculously exotic and expensive foods. Secondly, there is her love of sweet sherry although she worries from time to time when she considers just how much she looks forward to her two glasses of this wonderful drink of an evening. Still, she can’t imagine how she would live without it!

Her third indulgence is the martial arts. She has a passion for all forms of physical combat between two people. She would never admit to it as being an obsession and insists in her private thoughts that it is a passion. It started with wrestling on TV. Every Saturday afternoon during her childhood she had watched the wrestling on the commercial TV channel with her father. They would become quite heated in their discussions as they watched the bouts taking place. Then, as the programme fell out of favour she found herself searching for other things to replace it.

She has watched every boxing match ever televised and, before the advent of the video recorder she discovered Kung Fu films and has been an avid fan of everyone from Bruce Lee to Van Damm. Now that videos and DVDs are available she has quietly filled up one cupboard in her sitting room with recorded images of men pounding the life out of other men in a thousand fast and brutal ways.

As she strolls along clucking encouragingly to her two dogs she wonders, with a wry smile, what the vicar would think if he saw her collection.