Intrusive, but always ready to lend a hand. the Chronicler of Last Chances, turns out to be more a gentle giant. Her noisy neighbour Daddy Fat-tail, a.k.a. Marie had anticipated most of the bleaker and nastier sides to her new neighbourhood. It seems fitting that she has ended up here long ago her schoolteacher had foreseen things would not work out well for her. Leaving the mouldy doctor’s surgery behind, Marie moves to Confituurwijk, the notorious jam district, a disadvantaged neighbourhood where dogs are buried in front gardens, where Flemish hit songs from next door make it impossible to practise her recorder, where people eat sliced white bread with chocolate spread or jam because they can’t afford charcuterie and where revealing that you are unemployed is met with a deep sigh of relief. It is in those moments that she decides never to let a man into the house and not to become a woman. Growing up beside a father who drowns his sorrow in drink, Marie conducts their conversations via the intercom of his former clinic.

“She had not married a doctor to fall into disgrace,” Marie notes about her mother, whom she had previously lost to suicide. He simply could not continue to live with a medical blunder he had made in the past his wife even less so. We find her selling the family home, where her father, the village doctor and a fan of Virginia Woolf, took his own life. We soon learn that Marie, in her early twenties, has not been spared life’s difficulties.

Confituurwijk by Femke Vindevogel