Anchor of the Suburbs Kirsty Logan
It was halfway through the spring of ’84 when Sandra decided that she was going to become an anchoress. ‘I am going to live,’ she announced one evening during the advert break of our nightly TV soaps, ‘in the crawlspace beside the laundry room.’ She warned us that being an anchoress included refusing all contact except food in the morning, removal of her bucket in the evening, and the weekly updates on the TV soaps. Our mother was displeased: ‘I did not buy a house at this address, complete with jacuzzi and wide driveway, to spend my time emptying slop buckets. Oh no, little miss anchoress; it's a long time since I stopped cleaning up your do-do, and you won't catch me starting now.’ The row was postponed when Sandra realised that she was missing Eastenders, the most vital of the soaps. The next morning, Sandra lined up her anchoress supplies in a row outside the laundry room: a bucket, a selection of Danielle Steele novels, a blanket, and a refllable water bottle. ‘You won’t make it to the end of spring,’ I shouted through the crack of my bedroom door. ‘I hope you catch the swine fu and die!’ Sandra shouted back through the wall of the crawlspace. She seemed to remember the live-and-let-live philosophy that had sent her to the anchorage in the frst place, and added – ‘I take it back!’ Her outburst was understandable: we had all lived together at the same address for thirteen years, and old habits are hard to forget. I watched Sandra potter about with the rest of her supplies, but I refused to help; if she wanted to be fragile and holy, she could do it herself. That evening Sandra put out her bucket of refuse, complete with its neat cling-flm lid, for our mother to empty. I arranged my desk chair so I could see it through the gap in the door; I knew there was going to be a row and I didn’t want to miss it. My mother had a variety of ways to address issues with her children, and none of them was pleasant. I settled into my chair, ready to spring up and join the fght if it looked exciting enough. ‘If this is the way we must live,’ said our mother cheerfully as she picked up the bucket and went to empty it, ‘then so be it.’ I waited for an hour, still sure that I was going to catch Sandra breaking her anchoress rules of quiet refection, but the crawlspace stayed silent all night. Every day I tried to catch Sandra cheating on her anchoress duties, sure that she was too weak to stick to them. I even glanced in her refuse bucket to make sure she hadn’t been sneaking in contraband: Twix bars, gossip magazines, or notes from friends. She didn’t even come out in May, when the TV soap awards were live on Channel 3. Mum and I had a row over whether we should put the TV nearer the door so that Sandra could hear it, but then Sandra just sang hymns loudly until we turned the volume back down. Spring soon turned to summer and Sandra was still living in the crawlspace, still leaving out her