Author: weeks4send

Bearskins

Posted on by weeks4send

There was a booming noise coming from the pillow just below my ear, as if a tiny army were marching through the bed and up to meet me. I’d thought this before- the image was already in my head, ready for me to summon and use for exactly this kind of situation. A tiny army, inside the pillows and mattress just below my head, marching upwards, dressed in shiny red uniforms and black hats (bearskins? I think?), marching up a white spiral staircase until they reached the top. And then what would they do? Would they want me to join them, or would they attack me? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t in any position to do anything about it. I was already under. The soft white haze was sucking me in, and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything else would have to wait.

*

I don’t know how much later it was when I heard the howling. I was in bed again… or maybe still in bed. I don’t know which. A lot of time could fly by without me noticing much of anything. But I was in bed, with my eyes still closed, when I heard the noise. Ooo-ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo-oo. I’d heard that noise before, lots of times. When I was little I used to think it was wolves howling somewhere in the distance, and when we were camping out in the woods I knew it was. I kept expecting a wolf pack to suddenly appear behind the next tree, chasing after one of those little deer things (monkjacks? Jack Russells?). But then I’d got a bit older, and found out that…

Nope. It was gone again. I went back to sleep.

*

The next time, I was sitting on the sofa and watching TV. The man was beside me- he’d been the one who’d turned the telly on. I hadn’t seen him do it, but I knew he had. On the TV screen, I could see an old woman limping down the road with a walking stick. “I couldn’t run,” she said, in the voiceover, “I could barely walk…”

Bearly? No, barely. I knew what that meant. If it meant that she couldn’t walk at all, she wouldn’t have bothered saying she couldn’t run. It must mean that she could walk, but not much. She was talking about why she had to use the stick. Barely. I could barely bear it. I could barely bear the bearskins. Barely.

The man was looking over at me, so I wiped the smile off my face and looked down. Shouldn’t have done that. Should just close my eyes and sink down, as usual. Noticing things and smiling at them just led to trouble.

The man said something, but I didn’t hear what it was. He probably wasn’t talking to me, anyway.

*

I was back in bed, listening to the army marching up the stairs. Getting closer and closer to my ear. I wasn’t scared. Not now, anyway. I had been once. I’d laid in bed for about an hour, listening to the sound of marching- this would have been when I was about six or seven- and worrying about what it was. Because there were no such things as tiny armies that climbed up spiral staircases through your bed- or at least, there shouldn’t be. And I couldn’t even pluck up the courage to go downstairs and tell my mum (no, wait, this was later- it would have been my gran), because either she wouldn’t believe me, or she’d come up and hear it as well. So I stayed there, listening, knowing that if they ever actually reached the top and broke through so that I could see them, I’d probably drop dead of fright.

*

I knew my routine now. I didn’t know how long it had been this way, but it had happened enough for me to notice it now. It was the same every day. First the woman would come into my room and bring me a cup of tea (which she’d have to press into my hands, or I’d forget it was there), and then, when I’d finished, she’d help me out of bed and get me dressed. I wore the same sort of clothes pretty much every day- long-sleeved shirts and jeans, with shoes that she had to lace up to get them to stay on. Then she’d take me down to have breakfast, and the man would be there. He’d always have something for me to look at when I’d finished eating. Once it was one of those cradle things where you had four little silver balls hanging on strings, and if you pulled one back and made it crash into the others, the one on the other end would move. It had a name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. On another day, it had been one of those games with a black-and-white board made out of plastic, with little plastic Xs and Os to go on it. Noughts and crosses. He’d sat me in one of the armchairs in the living room, and shown me how you played it. He’d played game after game against himself, turning my face back towards him whenever I looked away. It wasn’t until later that I realised he’d probably wanted me to join in.

Sooner or later, the woman would come back and take me to the table to have lunch. After that, she’d take me into the garden and sit me down on the bench for a while. She’d talk to me a bit while we were out there, saying things about the plants and the weather. And sooner or later, she’d always sit down next to me on the bench, and squeeze my hand so tightly that I thought she was going to twist it off.

*

We were out in the garden when I realised something was wrong.

The woman was beside me, squeezing my hand as usual, when I started listening out for the howling. I wasn’t worried about it- I knew it wasn’t really a wolf (or, if it was, it was too far away to do me any harm.) I was just interested. I couldn’t hear it, but I heard other things- birds chirping in the trees, planes flying over us, the wind going through the grass…

As soon as I heard the wind, I felt it, too. It was ice-cold. It felt like a knife being held against my face.

The woman had let go of my hand. “Look at those clouds,” she said, pointing up at the sky, “I think it’s going to rain later on. Hope it’s not when I have to go to Tesco. I guess I could…”

I didn’t hear the rest of what she said, and I didn’t see the clouds when I looked up. All I saw was the sky, blue and wide and surrounding me from above and all around, sending down the wind to slice at my face. And behind the sky was infinity. Anything could come from there. I was completely exposed.

I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t be out here with the wind and the sky, looking at things outside of me. I should be safe in my own head, where I couldn’t see anything and nobody could hurt me. I had to get back in.

The woman saw my arms go up on each side of my head. “Danny? What’s wrong?”

Back in. Back in. Turn off. It wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to do it.

“It’s OK,” said the woman, putting her arm around my shoulders. I wished she hadn’t. The sleeve of her jumper was rough and scratchy. It felt wrong against my skin. “It’s OK. Do you want to go back inside?”

I nodded. Yeah. Back inside, away from the sky and the wind. It would be safer in there.

“OK.” She stood up, her arm still around me. “Come on, back to the house.”

*

I was in bed again. From downstairs, I could hear the man and the woman watching TV. It was that sitcom theme, the twisty saxophone one that sounded like it should be a detective show instead. A cool, film noir kind of theme tune. I couldn’t remember what the show was called. I used to know.

The man and the woman hadn’t left me alone all afternoon. They’d taken me into the living room and laid me on the sofa, and then the man had made me a cup of tea that tasted funny, and I’d gone to sleep. They’d woken me up to have dinner, which was spaghetti with melted cheese on top. They didn’t have to feed me anymore- I was OK with knives and forks now. They’d had an argument. I’d tried to keep track of what it was about, but I kept tuning out. Something about the garden and the TV. Something about me. They’d just got to the point where one of them was about to shout or burst into tears, when the woman looked over at me and put her hand on my shoulder. I must have looked as if I was panicking, because they both started to make a fuss of me. “It’s alright. We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to upset you…”

Both of them came up to help me in the bath. They weren’t arguing this time- just talking to me, making sure I was alright. I don’t really remember what they said. Then they dried me off, made me another cup, and put me to bed. And that’s where I was now.

The theme tune ended, and the actual show began. I couldn’t hear that. I pressed my ear up against the pillow, to see if I could hear the army marching again. Marching already. As we go marching on. I curled up in the middle of the mattress. It was warmer there than around the edges. In the middle, it was like a little radiator under my body. It felt a bit like my legs were melting. I remembered another time, a dark, shadowy time, when it was so cold that my blood felt like it had turned into ice, even the spit in my mouth, when my skin stung and my stomach shook and squirmed about, when I tried to curl up and get warm, but it didn’t work because the freezing wind got in everywhere, and all I was lying on was the hard grey ground. I curled up as tightly as I could in the middle of the mattress. The wind couldn’t get in here. There was no room for it.

I could hear the marching going on under my head. The army marching up the spiral staircase. I could hear every step, and they all sounded the same. Wouldn’t one of them trip, if you listened for long enough? Nobody could stay that perfect forever, no matter how well-trained they were. But every time I put my head on the pillow, it was exactly the same. Because there wasn’t actually an army, was there? There couldn’t be.

I sat up and looked at my pillow, then put my hand up and pressed it against my ear. I could still hear the marching, just as loud as I had before. There wasn’t any army. It was my heartbeat. It was me.

0

Seeing Red

Posted on by weeks4send

(A story written in my last year of university, for a course called “The Literary and Cinematic Fairy Tale.”)

The other day, I was in Waterstones, looking for some books I needed for English and RE, and I had to walk through the children’s section to get to where those were. And while I was in the children’s section, I spotted a book of fairy tales that I remembered having as a little kid. So I decided to pick it up and flick through it as a nostalgia trip, seeing how many of the stories and pictures I remembered from way back when. And then I got hooked, and the next time I checked the clock, an hour had gone by.

The thing is, you hear so many versions of, say, Cinderella or The Three Little Pigs in the first eight or nine years of your life, that by the time you reach ten you’re kind of tuning it out. You don’t really see them as stories anymore- they’re a succession of words you’ve memorised and repeated so often that they’ve lost their meaning. So you start to think of fairy tales as cutesy stories where pretty princesses twitter about and get kidnapped before being rescued and marrying handsome princes and living happily ever after. You forget how gruesome most of them are. And you can’t even blame Disney, because although their versions are seriously sanitised, they know their target audience well enough to leave some of the grue in. But your average fairy tale is a story of lives risked and sacrifices made, and the protagonists are desperate enough to do shocking things to get ahead.

I realise that I’m rambling a bit, and I’m sorry. But if I don’t put the phrase “fairy-tale” into context, then when I say that my parents had a fairy-tale marriage, you might think I meant to be nice.

Aida Hancock vs. Bluebeard

 If my mother had been Mrs Bluebeard, she wouldn’t have screamed when she found the bloody chamber. She wouldn’t have dropped the key. She’d have got angry. She’d have said that the previous wives probably killed themselves, that they were just looking for someone to listen to their sob story. She’d have said that she didn’t care what it looked like, she knew her man and he’d never do anything like that.

In the end, my dad did something exactly like that. As anyone could have told her he would.

Aida Hancock vs. Cinderella

“We all need that special magic in our lives. We’re all looking for a Prince Charming to sweep us off our feet and take us away from all this. We may talk a good game, but deep down, we’re all still that wide-eyed little girl who wants to put on her gown and slippers and go to the ball.”

That is Kelly from 12F’s take on Cinderella.

As you can see, Kelly from 12F is an idiot.

My take on Cinderella goes like this: “There was this girl whose family treated her like shit. Fortunately, she managed, through a combination of Divine intervention and her own good nature, to obtain lots of money, a nice husband, and an opportunity to rule the country along with said husband. The story doesn’t tell us if she gave her family the finger as she left, but I like to think that she did.”

I would have given my family the finger, but I was fourteen and terrified. Fortunately, my Uncle Liam gave them the verbal version for me. He never had got on with my parents, and he’d got on their case about the way they treated me plenty of times over the years, but that argument was the big one. I remember listening outside the door and feeling my stomach knot up, because I knew that this argument was going to end with some kind of massive, unprecedented change. The change was just as likely to be bad as good. So I listened as Uncle Liam told them exactly what he thought of them, while my mother whined about me doing “her little damsel in distress act” by phoning him up and getting him to come down, and my father occasionally chimed in with, “No-one tells me how to bring up my kids.” And after about an hour of this, there came the most beautiful sentences I have ever heard:

“Well, if you’re so concerned about the little madam, maybe she should go and live with you!”

“Well, maybe she should!”

And I held my breath and prayed that he wasn’t bluffing.

My mother certainly thought she was calling his bluff. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to think. Uncle Liam didn’t have any kids of his own. In fact, with the exception of me and my sisters, he didn’t seem to have much time for them. Besides, he was a single bloke living in the city. He had a successful career. He had his own life. Why would he want to disrupt that so that a bratty, hormonal teenage girl could come to live with him?

Except he wasn’t bluffing. After a little more discussion, my mother poked her head out of the door and told me to pack my things. I tried not to act too happy in case she changed her mind.

As we were leaving, Uncle Liam turned to my sisters and quietly said, “Tallie and Honour, just so you know, the offer’s always there for you to come up as well. It’s just that Aida was the one in danger.” At the time, I was glad that neither of them took him up on it, because it would have meant more hassle getting out of the house. But I feel guilty about that now. If one or both of them had come, they’d probably still be alive.

As we closed the door, my father shouted, “Yeah, good riddance.” I should have been prepared for it, but for some reason, that really hurt. It must have been the tension of the moment, since Heaven knows that’s not the nastiest thing he’s said to me. That wasn’t even the nastiest thing he’d said to me that day.

I was staring into the distance, trying to stop my eyes from stinging, when Uncle Liam put his hand on my shoulder. “Feeling’s mutual, huh, Aida?”

And that, in a nutshell, is why Liam Michael Hancock is the greatest human being I have ever met.

Unlike Cinderella’s prince, he’s not some squeaky-clean collection of superlatives. He’s sometimes lazy. He’s often pedantic. He has a tendency to rant about things he doesn’t like, even after I’ve said, “I heard you the first time.” He’s also gay, which I don’t see as a flaw (though my father most definitely did), but which would be a weird thing for the Handsome Prince to be. But when it comes to picking someone to stand in my corner, I’ll take Uncle Liam over any Handsome Prince you’ve got. They look pretty generic and useless in the Disney films.

Also, Cinderella never got to pay her Handsome Prince back. He saved her from a life of servitude and poverty, and although I’m sure their marriage was happy, she must have always felt as though they were on unequal terms, that she owed him something she could never give. That she’d got out of life more than what she put in.

I used to feel like that, but about a year after Uncle Liam took me in, I repaid my debt to him. The trouble is, I’ve been agonising over that ever since

Aida Hancock vs. Jack and the Beanstalk

In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Jack doesn’t have a father. It’s up to him to provide for his widowed mother, and to protect his home from the giant. And, after a few hiccups, I think he rises to the occasion admirably. The giant has physical strength on his side (and how), but Jack wins because Jack is smarter and quicker.

Speaking as a girl who put a knife in her father’s stomach at the age of fifteen, I think I understand Jack.

Aida Hancock vs. the Three Little Pigs

I think this is a retelling of a parable in the Bible. The wise man builds his house upon a rock and it stays up, the foolish man builds his house on sand and he loses it. This story adds anthropomorphic animals, which strikes me as faintly sacrilegious.

Anyway, it’s true. You can’t build your house on sand, or out of sticks. Now why couldn’t anyone have told my mother that?

Possibly they did and she just didn’t listen. She wasn’t big on listening to people. I can just imagine what she said: “I don’t care. I love him. We’re like Romeo and Juliet- nobody wanted them to be together either.”

And then, I like to think that whoever she was talking to pointed out that a) Romeo and Juliet ended up dead, so they’re not the best role models in the world, and b) everyone told Juliet that she couldn’t be with Romeo because their families were feuding, not because Romeo was sending her or one of her children to casualty about three times a week. I like to think they said that, but she wouldn’t have listened even if they had. She all but put her fingers in her ears and sang, “La, la, la, I’m not listening,” whenever anyone said a word against my father.

I used to think he’d fooled her. I used to think that he must have been different when they met, and by the time the nasty stuff came out, she already loved him too much to walk out. I used to think that when she defended him, she was clinging desperately to the memory of the man she’d fallen in love with, and hoping he’d change back one of these days. But the more I hear about my father in his youth, the less I think that. Twenty years ago (if Uncle Liam and Grandma Anderson are to be believed, and I think they are), he’d sit around on his friend’s sofa all day, drinking beer, with his arm around my mother’s shoulders, watching TV and talking about how all black people were criminals and how gay people were disgusting and how any woman who talked back to her husband deserved a smack in the mouth. She knew what he was like. She knew what he was like and she still married him, and she stayed married to him for eighteen years. What I’d really like to know is why.

So, because my mother loved my father so much, because she wanted to be Juliet, she built a house out of sticks for Honour, Tallie and me. She taught us how to tiptoe around him and give in to his every demand so maybe he wouldn’t lose his temper tonight. She taught us how to lie convincingly when the paramedics asked us how we’d broken our fingers. She taught us that regularly having the crap beaten out of you was better than being single.

And one day, the wolf came along and blew down the house of sticks. Fortunately, I got out early

Aida Hancock vs. Beauty and the Beast

There’s a boy called Phil in my RE class, and my friends tell me he’s got a crush on me. And while this is essentially a good thing- he’s a nice guy, and I’d definitely go out with him if he asked- I can’t help but wonder if he knows what he’s getting into. I wonder if he’d run a mile if he knew about my past (and, in particular, about a certain event two years ago). And then I wonder if the same could be said of anyone who has a crush on anyone they barely know. Everyone has secrets that they only tell people when they’re sure they know them well enough.

But there are secrets and there are secrets, and you never can tell by looking at someone whether or not they’ve got a nasty one like mine floating somewhere beneath the surface.

Two of my friends know the gory details (“gory” being the operative word), and they’ve promised to keep them to themselves. Everyone else sees me as relatively ordinary. Aida the B-student. Aida the redhead with little enough dress-sense. Aida the friendly Sixth-Former.

If they found out about Aida the abused child, they’d probably be sympathetic. But I don’t know what they’d think of Aida the attempted patricide.

And that’s the Beast’s problem. All his flaws are in his face, so he needs to try harder than anyone else to prove to Beauty that he’s worth marrying. And he does, but she only agrees to marry him after her own flaw has been exposed- that being, crap time-keeping. They can only get together and have the curse revoked when they’re on equal ground as far as flaws are concerned. So, the message I’m getting from Beauty and the Beast is that I can do one of two things. I can find a man who has the same sort of past as me and marry him. Or I can marry a man who seems normal and just not tell him that, while the putting of the knife in my father’s stomach was self-defence, the ripping of the knife out of his stomach ten seconds later (which, I knew, would cause more damage) was attempted murder.

I didn’t tell the police that second part, which is why they didn’t charge me (that, and the fact that they’d been back to my mother’s house and seen what he’d done there). Still, it’s true. The action was the same, but my intention changed wildly over those ten seconds. When I put it in, I was just thinking about stopping him from shooting me or strangling me. But when it was in, when he was squealing like a stuck pig (which, I guess, was pretty much what he was), when the knife had opened the wound but was still stopping the blood, a series of memories flashed through my mind as the red mist descended. Every nasty word he’d said, every injury he’d dealt out, every liberty he’d taken, all the cruelty, all the stupidity, all the lies and the pain and the misery that me and my sisters had to put up with throughout our whole lousy childhood…

And I ripped the knife out.

He fell to the ground, and part of me was afraid I’d murdered him, and part of me was afraid I hadn’t. It turned out he wasn’t dead, but, if you ask me, it’s intention that makes a murderer, not results. So I am.

And I’ll tell this to any man who wants to marry me. And if it makes him change his mind, I don’t think I’ll find it in my heart to blame him.

Aida Hancock vs. Sleeping Beauty (part 1 of 2)

On Sleeping Beauty’s sixteenth birthday, she snuck away from the celebrations, only to be knocked into a century-long coma, from which she was only awakened when a handsome man came along and kissed her (in the nicer versions, that is), and carried her off to marry her.

On my sixteenth birthday, I was preparing to go out with my friends, when Uncle Liam got a phone call saying that my father had hung himself in prison.

Personally, I think I got the better present.

Aida Hancock vs. Snow White

Firstly, there’s one thing I don’t like about fairy tales. Everything about them, or everything about the hero and the villain, at least, has to be so extreme. Snow White can’t just have black hair, pale skin and red lips. They have to be black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood. And if all that isn’t enough, she’s royalty too. Some girls have all the luck.

I’m not extreme. My skin’s pale pink, and my lips are slightly darker pink. My hair’s auburn if you’re being nice, and ginger if you’re not. If you’re going to compare it to a thing, it’s somewhere between a carrot and a bottle of ketchup, neither of which are exactly fairy-tale-style foodstuffs.

Anyway, this is a story about a mother who hates her daughter. Sure, there’s some other stuff about poisoned apples and magic mirrors and helpful dwarves, but where it counts, hateful mothers are what this story’s about.

See, my father, when you get right down to it, is quite simple. I think he was just pure evil. I think he only thought of other people in terms of what he could get from them, and if they were reluctant to give him it, or if they dared to ask him to give them anything in return, well, that was what his fists were for. Essentially, I think the major difference between my father and Hitler wasn’t any virtue on his part; it was lack of ambition.

My mother is more complicated. While my father hated everyone, my mother hated me. For some reason, she really took against me from the age of about eleven. She’d pick apart anything I did. If I shut the door too loudly, she’d scream at me. If I was too slow coming down to dinner, she’d scream at me. If I wanted to watch something different on TV to what Honour or Tallie wanted to watch, she’d scream at me.

I know she didn’t take against me because she was jealous of my looks. You’d have to look like a frigging toad to be jealous of my looks. I guess it could have been because I sounded off to my father more than my sisters did, but I don’t think I sounded off to him that much. Maybe it was because I didn’t have much in common with her, but that doesn’t seem enough. Most likely it was a combination of those two things.

But I had kind of a fantasy in the last few years of living at my parents’ house. I thought, Maybe Mum doesn’t like me because I’m not really Dad’s daughter. Maybe she sees me and feels guilty for cheating on him. Maybe my real father is someone who actually acts like a human being. So I’d imagine that, and I’d feel happy. Sometimes (even though it would make no sense whatsoever) I wondered if my real father was Uncle Liam.

It’s not likely. My father cheated on my mother plenty, but I don’t think she’d ever have returned the favour. And my mother and Uncle Liam didn’t even like each other, not to mention the fact that Uncle Liam isn’t attracted to women in the first place. And yet, I still catch myself imagining it’s true sometimes. It would mean even more now.

Aida Hancock vs. Rumplestiltskin

Once, my primary school put on a production of “Rumplestiltskin” where it was the miller’s daughter’s hand in marriage that was at stake, not her baby. Having thwarted Rumplestiltskin’s plans, she ended up marrying the wise servant instead of the king. I like that ending better than the normal one, because it means that she doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life with a man who was prepared to execute her for not producing enough gold for him. My sister Tallie once had a boyfriend like that.

But what I really don’t like is how everyone seems to hold the deal the miller’s daughter makes against her. She was desperate. She was going to be killed. Her father probably wouldn’t be in the king’s good books, either. She probably rationalised it- a hypothetical baby that had a significant chance of dying in infancy anyway, versus an already-living woman and her family.

(Although I personally think she was a bit of a dope for thinking, “I might not have children anyway.” There was no reliable contraception around then, and clearly the king was going to want an heir… I mean, I know this was in the days before sex education, but she’d had a rustic upbringing- she’d have been around animals, so she couldn’t have been totally naïve about where babies came from… Alright, alright, back to the point.)

My rationalisation for what I did was this- it was the life of the kindest man I’ve ever known, versus the life of the most evil. Really, that’s the only extreme thing in my life. As unlikely as it sounds, I think my Granny Hancock gave birth to a saint and a demon. Two brothers who had the same upbringing, the same parentage, generally starting from the same place… And look how differently they turned out.

Martin Hancock, who thought of other people as things he could use and batter, and Liam Hancock, who never hesitates to help out strangers and is more thoughtful towards his friends than anyone I know. Martin Hancock, who would probably have joined the Ku Klux Klan if he’d been an American, and Liam Hancock, who has never spoken a word against someone unless they personally have done something to deserve it.   Martin Hancock, who tried to kill me, and Liam Hancock, who actually loves me.

Of course, your average fairy tale would probably use the same explanation I used for my mother turning against me- one of them was fathered by someone else. Either Granny H had a virtuous first husband she never told us about, and he fathered Liam while bad old Grandpa H fathered Martin; or Liam was fathered by dear old Grandpa H, and Martin was the result of a one-night stand with the Devil (Grandpa Hancock died when I was a toddler, so I didn’t get to know him well enough to know which of these scenarios is more likely). In reality, I think the reason they were so different… Well, there probably wasn’t just one reason. It was probably a bunch of things- the age gap (almost a decade), the people they hung around with, the different sets of influences they came across, and so forth. Also, and this strikes me as significant, there’s the question of whether monsters are born or made. But if generations of scientists and philosophers still haven’t come up with a conclusive answer to that, I don’t think that me and my C-grade science GCSE are going to help.

But, given the choice between one man and the other, the saint and the demon- a choice that no-one should ever have to make- I can’t honestly say I regret the decision I made.

Aida Hancock vs. Sleeping Beauty (part 2 of 2)

The funny thing is, something exactly like this happened to my parents.

No, really. When I was nine, my father was arrested. This wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but we’d all seen it happen before. Usually it was for drug-dealing or stealing or some kind of petty thuggery. Once or twice it was even for something he’d done to us or our mother, but that never came to anything because we’d lie our heads off. But this time was different. This time, it was something he could actually go to jail for decades for. At the time, I was young enough to feel guilty for being excited at that prospect.

It took a few explanations before Honour and me understood exactly what our father had done (Tallie was older, so she got it pretty much straight away). It involved Mrs Rose, a woman from down the road. She was divorced, with two sons in my class at school, and she’d always seemed nice when we went round their house. Mrs Rose had told the police that my father had broken into her house, come into her bedroom while she was sleeping, and… Well, that was the part we got confused about. But Mrs Rose was now pregnant, and that seemed to make our mother just as angry as the fact that she’d had our father arrested.

My mother was cold with rage. I had never seen that in her before. Usually, when she was angry about something, she’d rant about it. This time she didn’t. As much as her friends tried to get her to open up, and as much as Granny Anderson insisted that this was the last straw and she should divorce him (something that usually drove my mother crazy), she stayed tight-lipped.

(About a year after I moved in with Uncle Liam, my mother did decide to divorce him, and you know what that was about? Him losing too much money when he gambled. Oh yes. All the things she put up with from him, and that was what she kicked him out for.)

Then, after two or three weeks, she went out to the pub three nights in a row. She left us in the car while she talked to some men we didn’t know.

That night, somebody broke into the Rose family’s house again.

And the next day, Mrs Rose abruptly dropped the charges against my father. He came home, and no more was said about it. And after that, the Rose boys stopped going to school, and a few days later, their house was empty. They said they all went to stay with relatives. They said Mrs Rose lost the baby. And somebody said that they saw Mrs Rose and her sons walking to the car the day they left, and one of the Rose twins had a horrible burn mark across his face.

And that night, both my parents went out to the pub and bought drinks for everyone, a celebration of their fairy-tale marriage.

Aida Hancock vs. Little Red Riding Hood

Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a girl, the most pathetic creature who was ever seen. Her uncle was excessively fond of her and her sisters, which was just as well since her parents didn’t particularly give a toss. This good man gave her his phone number, and instructed her to call it if her parents ever put her in serious danger.

One day this happened, and the girl did exactly that. So her mother, having got herself into a fit of pique, said to her, “Go, my dear, and live with your uncle. He’s a pathetic misfit much like yourself, so you’ll be good company for each other.” And although her mother’s words were harsh, the girl’s heart was cheered.

The girl and her uncle set out immediately to go to his flat, which was in another city that her mother and father never visited. And there they lived peacefully enough, for a while.

One day, as she was walking back from school, the girl met with her father, who had a very great mind to put the gun he’d somehow obtained to good use, but he dared not, because the school did not think that security was something that happened to other people. He asked her where she was going. The girl, who knew perfectly well that it was dangerous to stay and talk to a complete and utter sociopath, even if he was a member of her immediate family, said to him, “I am going home, and you’re not invited.”

“Is that far off?” said her father.

“It is to you,” answered the girl.

“Well,” said her father, “and I’ll go and see your uncle too. I’ll go this way and go you that, and we shall see who will be there first.”

The father ran as fast as he could, taking the shortest path, and the girl, knowing he meant business, ran as fast as she could to find one of her friends and get them to give her a lift home. Unfortunately, the father somehow managed to get home first. He knocked at the door: tap, tap.

“Who’s there?” said the uncle.

The father found the key, and the door opened, and then he immediately fell upon his brother and attempted to kill him, for he had already murdered his other two daughters, his ex-wife, and her new boyfriend that afternoon, and he was determined to finish the job. Fortunately, the father only succeeded in wounding the uncle, and as the uncle was trying to get away, the girl came in.

“Who’s there?” said the father.

The girl, hearing the big voice of her father, was at first afraid; but knowing her uncle to be in danger, answered, “It is your daughter, and I want you to leave my uncle alone.”

Her father cried out to her, softening his voice as much as he could, “Then come in.”

The girl opened the door.

Her father, seeing her come in, said to her, hiding himself in the kitchen, “Put your bag upon the stool, and come into the kitchen and talk to me.”

The girl went into the kitchen. She was greatly amazed to see how her father looked, for she had not seen him in about a year, and said to him, “Father, what big arms you have!”

“All the better to strangle you with, my dear.”

“Father, what big legs you have!”

“All the better to chase you with, my child.”

“Father, what a big gun you have got!”

“All the better to shoot you with!” And with that he jumped on top of his poor daughter, and made as though to shoot her. Fortunately, the girl managed to bat the gun out of his hand, and she reached into the drawer behind her, and drew out a knife.

The girl warned her father that he should leave, but he did not. So she took the knife and cut open his belly.

She had cut only one stroke when her father fell to the ground screaming. At that point, the girl stepped around him, picked up her phone from the counter, and called the police.

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, can turn out to be unexpectedly vicious little fuckers when someone they care about is threatened.

Aida Hancock vs. Hansel and Gretel

I wonder what Gretel thought when she shoved the witch in the oven. I mean, I know it was the only thing she could do, under the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t keep her up at night.

The story doesn’t say. The stories never say.

*

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t intentionally hurt another human being, physically or emotionally, in the last two years. Nor do I intend to. I’m scared that if I start, I’ll never stop.

*

As I’ve said, my looks don’t lend themselves to extremes. In real life, my hair isn’t blood-red. In real life, my skin isn’t corpse-white.

But that day two years ago was a day for blood and corpses, so that’s the image system I’m stuck with.

*

Fairy tales aren’t cutesy stories for kids. They’re stories of blood and trials by fire, stories about the fragile boundaries between this world and the next, stories about what to do when the walls come down.

*

I tell myself, I had to do it. Then I think, No, that first swipe with the knife would have taken him down. Pulling it out was your decision.

I tell myself, So what? I was justified. Then I think, Yeah, that’s exactly what the Yorkshire Ripper thought.

Some days I’m sorry I did it. Some days I’m just sorry I didn’t finish the job.

Sometimes I wish I could just pick one and go with it.

*

Most fairy tale characters do what they do and wait to be punished or rewarded. I’ve been rewarded for what I did, but I don’t know if that means it was the right thing to do.

*

My mother once accused me of doing a “little damsel in distress act.” Well, back then, it wasn’t an act. But that day two years ago was the day I stopped being a damsel in distress. Whatever else I am, I’ll never be a damsel in distress again.

*

Maybe Gretel really didn’t regret what she did to the witch. Maybe things were different in the Medieval era. Maybe people knew that desperate times (which Medieval times definitely were) called for desperate measures.

On the other hand, when I think of how people behaved in back then, maybe that’s not such a good thing.

*

Not all fairy tales end with, “and they all lived happily ever after.” But most of them end with justice having been done.

Sometimes it’s pretty harsh justice, but it’s justice nonetheless.

*

Snip, snap, snout.

My tale’s told out.

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Oh Dear, Fifteen-Year-Old Me (part four)

Posted on by weeks4send

Welcome to part four of “Memory Lives On,” in which fifteen-year-old me tries to slip in a touch of poignancy. It works about as well as you might expect.

Watching my own memorial service was pretty much the strangest experience of my life up to that point. Even now, when I’ve had more strange experiences than I can shake a stick at, it’s still in the top five.

After writing this sentence, fifteen-year-old me then made coming up with “more strange experiences than (Anja) can shake a stick at” top priority. This explains a lot about the rest of the story.

First of all, they showed the road outside my school being knee deep in flowers and the like. They were playing Everybody Hurts at such a pitch that everybody in the room really did hurt, around the eardrum area.

Like the Pearl Jam thing earlier, R.E.M. reference is there solely to have an R.E.M. reference. At least my taste in music wasn’t bad.

(Also, “flowers and the like”? I can’t think of anything that’s like flowers except, you know, flowers.)

There was a huge photo of me in the middle, probably the only one they could find where I forgot to do my “Calculating woman of mystery” smile and grinned cutely instead. It said Anja Cleary, 198_-200_: Rest in peace all over it, which at least covered up the hideous T-shirt I was wearing in the photo. I’ve really got to learn that yellow isn’t my colour.

Bloody parents, giving the media a picture of their presumed-dead daughter in an unflattering outfit. Fashion should be the top priority for grieving family members.

The voiceover somehow managed to shout over the music. “The nation grieves over the death of Anja Cleary, killed in a freak accident at a tragically young age. Today, Anja’s memorial service took place, and her friends and family expressed their sadness.”

Actually, I’d better tell the truth. It was put together pretty well. In fact, I’ll be doubly honest. If it had been anyone else on the entire planet, I think I might have cried. I don’t usually cry at stuff on the TV, so that’s saying a lot.

Behold the awkward attempt to make Anja look as though she has actual human emotions. It was worth a try.

But as it was, it was about me, and crying over my clearly non-dead self would have been a bit stupid.

Well, that’s enough of that!

Other people were. My parents for a start. Because of this, I didn’t hear all of what they said, but some of it was “Why Anja? She hadn’t done anything!”

She was a smug drunk sociopath, Mr and Mrs Cleary. It’s really all for the best.

It’s Mark that’s done something, the git, I thought. Mind you, it would be against my principles to resent someone just for marrying a woman that a psycho fancied.

“Principles,” she says. That’s a good one.

But he was being a pain in the neck at that point. The music was loud enough, without him singing along. If only he’d known all the words, and hadn’t given up and stalked off halfway through the second verse, I’d have been spared a few other horrors.

This is Anja’s primary concern upon watching footage of her parents grieving over her alleged death. Oh, and apparently their grief counts among the “horrors” that Anja wants to be spared from. You really are better off without her, Mr and Mrs C. Remember the good times, eh?

I don’t think my friend Trixie has ever cried before in her life. She’s usually a front runner for the Miss Cheerful trophy, and when she’s upset (an annual event, pretty much) she tends to spout all the swearwords under the sun rather than spoil her eyeshadow. But I think I’d have cried if she or one of my other friends had died. That didn’t make it any less strange.

I don’t think Anja gives Trixie a second thought throughout the rest of the story.

They didn’t interview her. Instead, they skipped right across to Lydia.

But enough about the people Anja allegedly cares about- let’s give her somebody she can really sneer at!

I think I’ve already mentioned that Lydia thought I was a geek. But there she was, doing her Hypocritical Cow thing for the cameras; her excitement at being on TV barely concealed. “Anja, you can’t hear this but you were really loved by everyone. You’ve been loyal and kind to us, and I’ll never forget you. You’ll always be with me.”

We will learn nothing about Lydia for the remainder of the story, since her only purpose is to be a shallow popular girl for Anja to look down her nose at, so we have no way of knowing whether or not her professed grief is sincere. Maybe she really was shocked at Anja’s supposed death. Maybe it really did force her to re-evaluate their relationship. We’ll never know, because Anja’s certainly not going to tell us.

How do you know that, super-blob? For all you know I’ve been reincarnated as a porcupine. I know it’s heartless and cynical to say…

…but why break the habit of a lifetime?

…but that’s what I always think when they say stuff like that about dead people. Also, if I turn up anywhere near Lydia when I eventually do die, I’ll be supremely put out.

“Supremely put out.”  Put out in the manner of Diana Ross, no less.

Fortunately, Lydia’s face was soon replaced by that of my cousin Svetlana. If I was going to make a list of how much I liked each of my relatives, Svetlana would be top. I think at the time of my “death” she thought of me as a bit of an annoying little kid…

Svetlana is now my favourite character.

…but since she was fairly mature and fulfilled for an eighteen-year-old I’ll let her off. She had a two-year-old son, Ben, but she’d found a job in a nightclub that paid better than jobs in nightclubs usually do, so she didn’t have many financial problems. I think in a previous life Svetlana must have been one of those mountain people with really tough lives, because she gave off an air of being tough and determined enough to cope with anything. I was a bit put out to see that my supposed death was listed under “anything.”

“Come on, Svetlana, I tuned in to see tears! Where are the tears?”

“It was really shocking,” she was saying, “I mean, you don’t expect that kind of thing to happen to your cousin, do you? Anja was, like, really spirited and energetic, and I guess you don’t really expect that kind of person to just die on you. You expect it to happen to little quiet people who you don’t notice much.”

Geez, don’t sound too emotional, Svetlana. Anyone would think that you were pleased to be rid of your smug, drunk, sociopathic cousin.

Just then, three really strange things happened.

Strange Thing number one- there was something not quite right in Svetlana’s face. She’d decided on a look for the memorial service. She was trying hard to be someone bravely coping with the loss of a young cousin, in order to hide something. But what was she hiding?

The fact that she’d had “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead” stuck in her head since the vicar started speaking.

She didn’t have anything to do with what had happened on the bus, did she?

Now that would have been a good twist. But no, she doesn’t.

The screen changed before I could work out what Svetlana was hiding. But then we got propelled straight onto Strange Thing number two. To be honest, this wasn’t as strange or as significant as numbers one and three. But it was a first for the TV coverage of the bus “accident” that they actually remembered I wasn’t the only person who’d died a tragic death.

“How dare they take a break from stroking my ego?”

I was jolted out of my suspicions about Svetlana by the voiceover saying “Gary Wolf, aged seventeen, was killed in the same accident as Anja.” Gary’s immense blue eyes grew even wider at this. If his lids had been any further apart, his eyeballs might have dropped out.

I mentioned that Gary was based on Elijah Wood, right?

“Shell!” he gasped as he slammed his sketchpad shut.

An auburn-haired girl who looked a bit like a giraffe in a padded bra was speaking angrily. The subtitle read Michelle Glass, Gary’s friend. “I don’t think Gary should take second place just because there was someone younger and cuter than him on the bus. I mean, Anja Cleary sounds like a lovely person, and of course it’s a tragedy that she died…

Even complaints about the ego-stroking turn into more ego-stroking! It’s like a black hole of self-congratulation!

(Also, “a giraffe in a padded bra”? Classy, Anja.)

…but the only difference between her and Gary was that he was two years older. Gary was an unsung hero.

We will later find out that Gary did absolutely nothing heroic in the entire time he knew Michelle.

He was the sweetest guy I’ve ever met in my life, and I’m not just saying that because he’s dead…”

I stopped listening.

“Pah! This isn’t about me!”

Michelle, like Svetlana, was hiding something, and I had enough time to work out that it was the same thing.

They didn’t want anyone to know that they were in mortal dread. Gary had seen it too, and, what’s more, he knew why Michelle was feeling it.

I now know that he was feeling it for the same reason.

We never find out exactly how Anja knows any of this. Psychic powers?

I’d never shared a room with two boys before, but then I’d never made a habit of sleeping on a mattress on the floor before. Mark and Estelle only had one spare bed, and Mr Daly had claimed it because of some bizarre health problem, which I’m 99% certain he made up.

Anja’s a doctor now!

When Estelle told him that she thought this too, he replied, “How dare you, Mrs Freeman! I’m aware that you are a great deal younger than me, but that’s no excuse to treat me like a second-class citizen.”

“OK, I’m sorry,” Estelle defended, “But I think Anja’s got more right to the spare room. Teenage girls need a lot more privacy than… than…” I could tell that she was trying to find a polite way of referring to Mr Daly, but apparently he couldn’t.

“Than fifty-year-old has-beens?” Mr Daly looked as if he was about to explode, which would have been more interesting to watch than him in the usual state. Estelle regarded him with her eyes, which are cool in every sense of the word.

“Estelle regarded him with her eyes.” As opposed to regarding him with her nostrils.

Oh, and it’s worth noting that Mr Daly is apparently only fifty, because the rest of the story insists on treating him as though he’s about two hundred.

“No, Mr Daly. Unlike some people I could mention, I don’t like to pick petty fights.”

Very mature, Estelle.

Neither of them looked as though they were going to back down, so I cut in and said that I didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. I did this partly to stop the argument, but mostly to save Joe and Gary from sharing a room with Mr Daly. Creepy though Joe was, he didn’t deserve anything as horrible as that.

Very noble, Anja.

And anyway, I could always get changed in the bathroom.

The night after the memorial service, I was sort of hovering between sleep and consciousness when I heard something. At first I just thought one of the boys must be asthmatic or something, but then I realised it was a bit too loud and squeaky for… Oh man, someone was crying.

It’s about bloody time. 

And despite the fact that my eyes couldn’t be bothered to open, it didn’t take long for me to work out that it was Gary.

I knew that I should comfort Gary or something…

“Or something.”

but considering that I couldn’t even wrench my eyelids apart it was probably a good thing that Joe got there first. It was hard to believe it was him talking. All the slime had gone from his voice, and he started talking to Gary like he was five. “Hey… Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” sniffed Gary (in the face of all the evidence), “I’m just worried about Anja.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s a demon from hell! Please don’t let her consume my soul!”

Huh? Wasn’t Anja my name?

Nope. Your name is Mary Sue.

At least Gary could be bothered to pronounce it right, unlike Mark. But why would he be crying over me?

“I saw her memorial service earlier today,” he continued, “Her family looked as if they wanted to die. Anja just looked horrified. I thought, I’ve done that to her. Joe, I’ve wrecked her life!”

“Horrified.” Right. I could really see the horror in her comments about coming back as a porcupine.

“Sh,” Joe consoled. Then he realised what Gary had actually said. “Why you?”

Gary wasn’t listening. “Jordan was right! I shouldn’t exist!”

“Who’s Jordan?”

Gary remembered that Joe was still in the room, and replied, “Someone who was right, that’s all. I shouldn’t be here, I just wreck lives like I did Anja’s…”

“Gary, I don’t know who this Jordan person is, but if he told you all that, he was wrong, alright? You’re… you’re an OK person.

“I’m not sure what I’m basing this on, since this is our first actual conversation, but trust me!”

The bus disaster wasn’t your fault. It was the fault of whoever made those lights explode. And also indirectly Mark and my Great-Aunt Jean, I guess. And I don’t know about my aunt, but Mark isn’t crying about wrecking people’s lives, is he?”

“No… He’s a bit creepy in general, isn’t he?”

Gary sniffed. “That’s because all he did was marry Estelle. He didn’t do anything really bad.”

Even though my eyes were still welded together, I could see Joe’s slimy grin in my head. “I dunno. Some people would say that stealing such a stunning girl from the other 3 billion men on the planet was a crime against humanity.”

“Stunning girl.” Because that’s how teenage boys talk about women they fancy.

“Not seriously, though. All Mark did was marry a woman he loved. And she agreed, so it wasn’t as if it was really stealing, was it? If someone else liked Estelle…”

“Not just someone,” Joe corrected, “I’d say every guy she’s ever met fancied her.”

“You’re not taking me seriously.”

“That’s because you’re being dim. Look, you haven’t wrecked Anja’s life, OK? She’s been in a better mood than anyone else for the past few days. Well, except possibly Mark. She told Estelle yesterday that this is the first exciting thing that’s ever happened to her.

This should really make Joe and Gary wonder a bit about her. But no, Gary proceeds to fall in love with her anyway. Glutton for punishment, that Gary.

So stop worrying and go to sleep!”

Gary took Joe’s advice, and I copied him.

And so should we all. Next time, we’ll learn a thing or two about Gary’s tragic backstory, and Joe’s murderous family.

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Order In The Court

Posted on by weeks4send

Order in the court; the judge is half-asleep.

We made him listen for a while, but now we’ve gone too deep.

He says he has his limits, and we can’t ask for the moon,

And if we raise our voices, he will have to clear the room.

He knows that we’re upset, and that we have a right to speak,

He knows to our eyes, our futures seem a little bleak.

He says that life is simple if you just do as you’re told,

But if you break the rules, then you’ll be left out in the cold.

Order in the court; the judge is off his meds.

I don’t think he’s listened to a single word we’ve said.

He says that those who wronged us must someday be made to pay,

But he wants to go to lunch soon, and we’re getting in his way.

He says that it might help to throw our enemies a bone.

If we didn’t act so strange, they’d leave us well alone.

So can we really blame them if they kick us in the face?

We’d have a happy life if we just knew our fucking place.

Order in the court; the judge has gone away.

He says he knows of better ways in which to spend his day.

He says he doesn’t have the time to listen to us whine.

He says that if we looked around, we’d see that things are fine.

He says we’re clearly bitter, that we’re weak and full of hate,

And if we don’t count our blessings, we might soon find it’s too late.

He says we’re unattractive when we’re spewing out our bile.

He’ll punch us in the mouth, and then he’ll order us to smile.

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Oh Dear, Fifteen-Year-Old Me (part 3)

Posted on by weeks4send

The next chapter is uncomfortably autobiographical. And yes, before anybody says so, it would be fair to call Anja a Mary Sue, albeit a pretty lazy one. A more interesting Mary Sue would have gone around solving the mystery with her secret detective powers instead of just sitting there like a lemon.

I never told any of the others that I thought that, especially not Mr Daly. If I’d told Mark, Estelle, Gary or Joe they’d have probably thought I was just suffering from concussion or something. But Mr Daly would have launched into another stupid speech about how ignorant and irresponsible the youth of today are, getting excited when they should be miserable about never seeing their family and friends again.

Yes… “Stupid speech.”

(Seriously, this could all have been solved by establishing that Anja’s parents didn’t like her much and were secretly relieved to be rid of her. Yeah, it would have been a bit Roald Dahl, but it would have been better than this.)

But before I give you a live example of one of these pathetic rants (as well as a bit of conversation from Mark, Estelle, etc), let me explain why I thought it.

My life is a lot better than a lot of other people’s lives. I’m sure there’s people who’d want to kill me for complaining, so I’ll just say that my life has been pretty good. But the thing is, right up to the bus disaster it was boring. I had quite a few friends at school, but all they seemed to want to do was whinge about their boyfriends (I whinged because I didn’t have one). We mostly seemed settled into talking about what a disgusting blob our form tutor was (hey, there’s a thought- I hope he didn’t turn up on one of those dumb memorial programmes. That would be unbearable).

She gets more sympathetic by the second, doesn’t she?

And, in my humble opinion, the boys in our area weren’t much better. Pustule-covered maggots, every last one of them. I always felt a bit separate from everyone, even my friends and relatives, as if I was the narrator and they were the actors. In school, everyone was talking about plans for the future, but I had a sneaking feeling that greatness was about to be thrust upon me.

Said every serial killer ever.

The trouble is, I’d had that feeling since I was about six, so it was beginning to wear a bit thin. It was beginning to be overtaken by a nasty suspicion that I’d end up an unfulfilled old spinster, doing whatever unfulfilled old spinsters get up to. OK, both thoughts were a little unrealistic, but they seemed very real to me. And one of them came true, remember? That’s why I thought it was cool.

Young-me really needed to learn how paragraphs worked. And “unfulfilled old spinster”? Are we living in the 1950s?

(This story ends with two women getting married to the loves of their lives in their teens or very early twenties, with little or no mention of any career plans. So maybe we are.)

But the most I thought would happen was us forming a group and suing the bus company, getting much media attention and people admiring our bravery and falling in love with us.

What bravery? And who falls in love with somebody just because they’ve sued a bus company?

And I don’t know why Anja is talking like a doge. Especially since the doge meme wouldn’t exist until ten or eleven years after I wrote this.

I didn’t imagine in my wildest dreams that we’d be involved in a murder plot. Well, actually I did imagine that sort of thing, but not realistically.

“I didn’t imagine it, except that I did.”

“You’re a perfect example of the nation’s youth! The dregs always float to the top in this backward society, getting what they don’t deserve! In my day, that never happened! You had to work for even the most basic things, let me tell you! Your aunt sounds like a respectable woman, and if she is she should have disinherited you a long time ago! You’re nothing but a wastrel!”

This was all directed at Joe, who hadn’t moved from his slouching position on the sofa since Mr Daly started.   While Gary, sitting nearby, was trembling so much that you’d think it was him getting yelled at, Joe seemed indifferent to the shouts. At some point during the rant, a knowing smirk had settled on his face.

Good to see Anja’s not the only unbearably smug one. And Mr Daly is a Daily-Mail-reader-strawman, in case you couldn’t tell.

Joe kept his gaze on Mr Daly until he’d shut up, then swivelled his brown eyes towards me. “Anja,” he said in a patronising-sounding way, “do you know what ‘narcissistic’ means?”

“Um…”

Mr Daly took my hesitation as a no. “Well, I should have guessed she wouldn’t know! She’s the same as you, always taking and never putting anything back! You’re…”

I gave him a venomous look. “I think it means ‘vain’, Joe,” I interrupted. Mr Daly was going to snap something, but then he realised I was right. He ended up in a sulk.

I’m not sure what “always taking and never putting anything back” has to do with not knowing the definition of words. I think I was just playing Daily Mail mad-libs at this point.

Joe’s smile widened. “So what’s vain about wanting to watch the news?”

“Because the news is about yourself!” Mr Daly replied, getting worked up again, “You only want to watch the television tributes to you!”

I could see why Mr Daly got so annoyed at Joe. I didn’t like it, but I could see why.

SPOILERS- Considering that Anja later develops a grudge against Joe completely at random, you’d think she’d be more understanding.

Joe had a whole aura of laziness, and his smirk suggested that everyone else was just about to walk into traps he’d set. Most annoyingly of all (to someone like Mr Daly, at least) Joe managed to make fun of people while being really, really polite to them, so he couldn’t be criticised for being rude and uncouth like other “young people” as Mr Daly put it.

We will see none of this politeness in the story.

There was something about Joe that made me feel uncomfortable, probably because I’m a girl. I didn’t like the looks he was giving me one bit.

And this plot point will go absolutely nowhere. That was a worthwhile paragraph, wasn’t it?

“They’ve barely mentioned me,” Joe laughed, “They’re too hung up on their golden girl.” I already knew he meant me, but he gave me a look that would have spelled it out to any idiot.

Mark had known Joe for ages, so he wasn’t really bothered by the slippery factor. “Got that right,” he sniggered, “You’re a celebrity, Anj. We’ve been fed so much information about you, we’ll probably know you inside out by the time this is over. Mind you, you’re more interesting than some celebs I could mention.”

“It’s probably not all true, though,” Estelle countered, not noticing her hoop earrings catching on her hair, “If any girl was as sugary-sweet as they’ve made Anja out to be, they’d probably have been out healing the sick all day.”

“Tell you what, we’ll test it,” Mark replied, “Anja, what’s your favourite flower?”

“Venus fly traps, I guess.”

Because Anja is QUIRKY and UNIQUE, got it?

“Really? Only they said in the paper it was tulips. Looks like you’re right, love.” Mark gave Estelle an amorous look as he said this. Within an hour of my meeting Estelle, Mark had told me he had absolutely no idea why she agreed to marry him, but he wasn’t complaining. As well as inheriting the mysterious look, glittering eyes and midnight black hair that had helped to make her mother a film star (I don’t know about the acting talent), Estelle had a brilliant personality, a really sharp brain and, to be honest, tonnes of money. Mark said he would have been over the moon even if she only had 10p in the bank, because he’d always thought girls like her were way out of his league. I think Mark really underestimated how likeable he was. But that’s not important.

It’s probably a bad idea to describe a character as having a “brilliant personality” in their first appearance. Even if you’ve worked out exactly how you’re going to show it, some of your readers might disagree with you about what having a “brilliant personality” actually entails. It’s risky even at the best of times.

And, of course, if you have no idea how to show it, and said character completely disappears from the narrative about halfway through because you can’t think of anything to do with her, then you’re really in trouble.

“Why did they say my favourite flower?” I asked. Estelle gave me a worried look, but I could see she was going to tell me. “Well, you see honey, they were describing your memorial service.” She could see that this was a morbid thought, but I think we’d all inwardly decided that morbid thoughts were going to be a big feature of my life now that I was meant to be dead.

Not for the first time, Joe gave me a creepy smile. “Looks like you’ll have to change your name now. You can’t have a name that’s written on a monument.” I couldn’t help imagining what my gravestone would look like. For a moment, I had a terrible desire to go and look. Then I realised what a stupid idea this would be. Not to mention the fact that I’d already been feeling strange enough recently.

Yes, Anja’s been feeling strange. Anja is clearly the person who’s suffering most in this situation.

“There’s a thought,” Mark said quickly, to distract from his friend’s bad taste, “You can use my surname if you want, but Anja isn’t exactly a common name, is it?”

I thought for a bit. “Well, I could spell it A-N-Y-A. It wouldn’t change the way you pronounce it. Or I could just drop the J and leave it like that. Um, that would. Oh, I know, I could use my middle name.”

“Didn’t think of that. So, what is it?” Estelle asked.

“Maureen.”

And this is clearly the most pressing issue at hand- which fake names to use.

In the flurry that followed (Joe grinning mockingly, Mr Daly looking sniffy, Mark pretending to be sick and Estelle giving him daggers with her cool eyes) Gary, who’d been mainly silent and doodling in his pad so far, looked up and smiled. “That’s a great name,” he whispered, “It really suits you.” He paused. “I just can’t see why anyone would want to hurt someone like you. Not unless they were jealous.”

“Well…” I ran through a list of people who hated me. There weren’t many. OK, Lydia and her dumb mates always made a point of calling me a geek, but they did that to a lot of people. My Geography teacher thought I was wasting oxygen by continuing to breathe, but again, he… Wait a minute, why had Gary said something as random as that?

Because expressing love for you and weeping are his only two character traits, Anja. Weren’t you paying attention?

And, yes. Jealousy is the only reason anyone could have to dislike Anja.  The girl’s a saint.

“There’s a point. Good on ya, short arse,” said Mark, “It sounds creepy, but we should go through the reasons why someone would want to kill us.”

Pfft, why do something as boring as that? We’ve got fake names to sort out!

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” You can probably guess who said that. Mark replied, in an irritatingly reasonable tone, “No it’s not. We’ve got to work out if someone’s plotting against us, haven’t we? You never know, more innocent- or not so innocent- lives could be at stake. I mean, we survived alright, but others might not be so lucky.” Mr Daly seemed grudgingly satisfied with this explanation, so Mark continued. “Let’s take me for a start.”

“As usual,” Estelle teased.

“True, I’m brilliant. So brilliant I can only think of one reason for people wanting to kill me. Go on,” he grinned at Gary and Mr Daly, as Estelle rolled her eyes, “Guess.”

I answered instead. “Because they were in love with Estelle?”

“Precisely.”

“Mark, I’m not the only reason for people to want to kill you!” Estelle laughed, pushing Mark gently, “I can think of others. Your jokes for a start.”

Did I mention that fifteen-year-old me had no idea where to put the comic relief?

“It’s true. I can’t think of anything else I’ve got going for me enough for people to want to bump me off to get it. My jokes aren’t really that bad.” Estelle gave him a look that told me she didn’t agree. “Look, scandalously untrue comments about my sense of humour aside,” Mark continued, “It’s pretty obvious why someone would want to kill Joe, too.”

I was pleased that someone was finally bringing this up. “Yeah. Who’s next in line for your aunt’s cash, Joe?”

Joe looked pensive, then turned his gaze right back to me. Oh man, I hope he doesn’t think I fancy him, I thought, glad when he finally started speaking.

Because, again, that’s clearly the thing you should be worried about right now!

And, again, this whole “Joe might fancy Anja” plotline goes absolutely nowhere. Because it’s stupid.

“I’m not sure,” Joe said, “My aunt told me most of it was going to me, but she didn’t say what would happen if anything happened to me. And before you say anything, yes, a lot of my family liked Estelle, but I’m not sure which ones liked her enough to want to kill her husband. Maybe all of them.”

“Maybe all of them.”

“Joe, that’s not true and you know it!” Estelle blushed. She was lying. I could tell that she knew pretty much all the men (and probably some of the women) she knew had a mad crush on her, but didn’t want to admit it in case she sounded conceited. That was the main difference between her personality and Mark’s. Mark honestly didn’t have a clue why Estelle found him attractive.

I’m glad Estelle’s so pleased to hear that Joe’s family is made up entirely of murderers.

“We’ll come back to that later,” said Mark, clearly a bit worried. I don’t think he’d realised before that being married to someone like Estelle meant that a lot of people wanted you to split up- or worse. He grabbed a cookery book from off the table, and wrote in the inside front cover.

Me- Estelle

Joe- cash

Keith-

Anja Maureen Cleary (heh heh heh)-

Gary-

“OK, Mr Daly,” Mark said to a man who clearly didn’t like being referred to as Keith, “Can you think of any reason that someone would want to kill you?” Mark’s grin subliminally added “Apart from the obvious.”

“No I can’t,” snapped the man who knew he was being insulted by a grin, “And if you’re going to ask the girl I’m afraid I shall have to leave.”

“I have a name, you know,” I snarled, but instead everyone listened to Joe, who was asking Mr Daly where he’d go if he left.

…His house?

Mr Daly gave him the look of pure hatred that people reserve for people who point out that they’ve just made an idle threat.

But… His house…

I decided to start talking, if only to stop them killing each other.

“I can’t think of anyone who hated me enough to kill me. There were some people who thought I was a pain in the butt, sure, but I thought the same of them and I didn’t blow up any buses.”

Estelle grabbed the pencil from Mark, and wrote Prob. innocent bystanders next to my name and Mr Daly’s. Mark took it back and added Research into pain-in-the-butt theory with a mischievous grin.

It is a theory worth researching, I’ll give him that.

“What did you just write, young man?” Mr Daly asked, but Mark had turned hastily towards Gary. “How about you, oh silent one?”

As Mr Daly muttered on about knowing when he wasn’t wanted and suspecting Mark to be ageist, Gary said something quietly. “You what?” Mark asked, and I think there was possibly someone in a coma in New Zealand who didn’t hear him. Gary spoke quickly and didn’t look any of us in the eye. “Nothing important. Just something dumb at school. Sorry I bothered you.” We could tell by the tone of his voice that it would be a really, really bad idea to ask him any more questions.

So they don’t bother. Hey, who needs to follow up promising leads when you can bicker with Mr Daly?

Gary looked about as stable as a 50-year-old atom bomb that nobody had bothered to deconstruct, and even a complete moron (i.e.-Mr Daly) could pick up on his fear. We needed to be careful with him, I realised, or we wouldn’t like the results.

I think we were all relieved when Estelle closed the book and suggested we order a pizza. But ten eyes were fixed on Gary to see if he did anything. I knew the thoughts in our heads were, for once, as one.

What do you know, Gary Wolf? Why are you so scared?

But they didn’t bother to ask out loud. Asking out loud is for losers.

As it turned out, when I found out what it was I could understand why Gary didn’t want to tell. In his position, I would have wanted to take a secret like that to the grave. In his position, I’d probably have blocked out the memory in the first place.

In his position, I wouldn’t have been able to live with the thoughts.

And so, at the end of the chapter, we come to Gary’s second personality trait. Next time, Gary weeps a lot, Anja completely ignores her family’s suffering, and Mr Daly is bullied for no reason. See you then!

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Oh Dear, Fifteen-Year-Old Me (part 2)

Posted on by weeks4send

The first chapter (after the prologue) is called “Terminal.” Because it involves death, and also a bus. Ah, wordplay.

I wrote that introductory bit a couple of days after the big event. Back then, I suspected it would all get blown out of proportion and lead to disaster, but now I don’t suspect that. I know that that’s what happened, and I also know that more people need to know about it so everyone can finally find out what happened. Also so I can make some money. As you’ll see at the end, I’m going through some financial troubles at the moment.

SPOILERS- There is absolutely no reason for “everyone (to) finally find out what happened” after the story’s end, any more than there was any reason to keep it secret in the first place. There’s not much reason for anything in this story.

Also, nothing gets blown out of proportion. If anything, I think most of the characters could show a little more emotion over the attempted murder of four people.

I didn’t know how we all ended up on the same bus, but I was sure it was going to become clearer after a while (I was right, as usual. Well done Anja).

Great- she’s not just a drunk sociopath, but a smug drunk sociopath. Nice going, past-me.

The way I ended up on it was pretty weird, though, and even then I didn’t think for a minute it was a coincidence. I was in a German lesson, with my eyes on the clock, willing it to be three-thirty so I could go home, when one of the office staff came in, saying that Mrs Eastoe, the head, wanted to see me in her office. This was a massive surprise for me and everyone else in the class, because the article somehow managed to get one thing right about me. I am hardworking, and a right little goody-two-shoes as well. I think I should point out, though, that this is more out of fear than respect for the rules. If I thought I had half a chance of getting away with it, I’d run amok.

I’ve no doubt you would, Miss Smug Drunk Sociopath.

But as it is I’m a wimp, so it was anyone’s guess why Mrs Eastoe wanted to see me. All the way to her office my mind kept coming up with horrible possibilities. Maybe one of my family had died. Maybe someone had committed some evil crime and blamed it on me. Maybe there were extraterrestrials in Mrs Eastoe’s office, demanding to eat whoever’s names she picked out of a hat…

This is the first instance in a pattern of past-me not having any idea where to put the comic relief.

Anja is kept waiting for an hour and a half, then told that Mrs Eastoe doesn’t want to see her after all:

She apologised for keeping me waiting this long, told me that the office must have made a mistake and checked that I’d be able to get home alright, which I could. I take the bus home and my parents don’t usually get back until about six. My little brother would probably be round his friend’s house, so he wouldn’t be worried either. If I’d disappeared completely that evening (which I did) nobody would have missed me until six-thirty.

Anja’s parents and brother will not be appearing in this story, because they spend the entire length of it thinking she’s dead! And they still haven’t been told she’s alive by the end, even though by then the villain is dead and she has no excuse for keeping the secret anymore! This renders the whole story unbelievably creepy, in case you couldn’t tell!

So anyway, at five o’clock I was waiting at the bus stop on my own. If the bus hadn’t come along only five minutes late (not the usual ten or fifteen) the dark and the silence would probably have severely creeped me out. It didn’t help that there were only four other people on the bus, all men. Well, technically Gary and Joe were boys, I guess, being as they were only a couple of years older than me, but my point was that I was the only female of the species on the bus. At least they didn’t seem to be in a gang or anything. That would probably be the dictionary definition of “creepy”, especially since it was October and already quite dark outside.

Alright, this paragraph can stay- it’s a fairly realistic reaction for a fifteen-year-old girl to have. It could do with being a bit longer, to build up the atmosphere a bit, but I didn’t care about that at the time.  I wanted to get on with making fun of the other characters.

Anyway, let me give you a mental image of this bus. At the front is whoever it was doing the driving, who would eventually turn out to be “the only survivor of the tragic accident” (or rather, the only one the papers knew about), because s/he was at the front. The seats near the front are pretty much unsittable on, due to some disgusting stains which I’m really hoping were food. Actually, I’m guessing that whoever wanted us dead got on the bus before us and made sure the seats were in this condition, forcing us all to sit near the back, so it probably was food. Anyway, that’s not important.

The whole plot hinges on the fact that none of them thought to stand. And I have no idea how the villain managed to ruin all those seats without anybody noticing.

Sitting on the first non-disgusting seat is Keith Daly, described in the papers as “a real character with many stories to tell, but underneath it all quite a lonely man.” This, as you may know, is obituary speak for “an insufferable old git who winges all the time, and can’t see why no woman in her right mind would be seen dead within a million miles of him.” Spending a few days in the same house as him was hell on earth. I think he must have had a real thing against anything modern, especially (as I later found out to my cost) women exercising their rights. Judging by the glowering gazes Estelle kept throwing him, I’d say she agreed with me.

This chapter was originally written in present-tense, which is one of the reasons it’s worded so strangely. And go ahead, fifteen-year-old-me, tell the readers which characters they should hate. They’ll never figure it out of their own.

(SPOILERS- Mr Daly’s dislike of Anja actually has very little to do with “women exercising their rights.)

That pale, enigmatic-looking person staring out of the window and drawing in a sketchpad a few seats back is Gary Wolf, although Gary Bushbaby would be more appropriate. The first thing I noticed about him was that his eyes were big, but none of the rest of him was. Gary was described in the papers as “a bright and talented child who triumphed in the face of adversity,” which, judging by what he told me later, probably means “someone who had no friends because everyone was jealous of him, was called a nerd and a geek by pretty much all the kids in school and a few of the teachers, and all in all had a fairly hellish time.” This isn’t to say that I thought Gary was a nerd and a geek. Even at the start he seemed quite nice, even if he was annoyingly shy. I could see he wasn’t one of those smart people who shove their knowledge in your face and act all superior (I think I can be one of those occasionally).

At least she’s self-aware.

And let’s just get this out of the way now- Gary is essentially Elijah Wood’s character from The Faculty, alright? In fact, every male love interest I came up with around this time was Elijah Wood’s character from The Faculty. It was a film that had a big impact on me.

(A few years before that, most of my male love interests were essentially Adam Rickitt. So it could have been worse.)

Anyway, on to the other two, sitting together at the back, talking loudly and getting damning looks from Mr Daly. Joe Foster, as I’ve said, was about Gary’s age, and the newspapers didn’t mention him a lot. All they called him was “a promising young man” and “a Jack-the-lad type who always had time for his friends.” Mostly because he never had to do a real job. Joe lived with his great aunt, who was loaded with a capital L.

Yeah, I can see where you’re going with this. Someone else who wanted the great-aunt’s money must have been involved in the “accident.” To be honest, you’re right. Well done. But there was still a big mystery over why that person would want to wipe out a whole bus just to get rid of Joe. They could have just shoved him off a cliff and made it look like an accident. Or made a heavy statue collapse on him.

Foreshadowing! Clumsy, clumsy foreshadowing!

Anyway, we’ll get to what happened in a second, so be patient. There’s still two more people to get through, although the papers really couldn’t think of anything to say about Mark, a friend who Joe was staying with. This is mainly because shouty, enthusiastic, boisterous and slightly superficial people don’t look good in obituaries. The papers couldn’t just translate Mark’s personality into obituary speak.

…We’ve just had the papers describe Joe as “a Jack-the-lad type who always had time for his friends.” Right there. In the previous paragraph.

In order to make him sound like A Tragic Loss To the World, they would have had to lie. This is kind of weird, because I think that the world would be a poorer place if there wasn’t anyone like Mark hanging around making stupid comments and never taking anything seriously. But all they could say about Mark was that he was the son-in-law of Victoria Jewel. You might not have heard of her (I hadn’t), but apparently she was in quite a few films in the 70s. Estelle’s her daughter, and I’m not sure how much she told her mum about what happened. Victoria lived in America, anyway, so she hadn’t got much chance of hearing about it from someone else.

Because e-mail doesn’t exist. Despite the fact that this story was written in 2002.

You know about the last person on the bus. Anja Cleary (i.e.- me) has been described as a lot of things since she supposedly died, but one of the most ridiculous is “beautiful.” No way am I beautiful. I’d say I was pretty, but that would be it. Well, sort of pretty. On a good day. In the right light. If you ignore my nose.

The naive young heroine never sees herself as beautiful, of course. To improve her self-esteem, she has to learn to see herself through the adoring love interest’s eyes.

Look, the point is that Joe suddenly stopped talking to Mark when we reached the first stop. A car stopped a few metres behind the bus, and someone got out. No one would have noticed him crouching conspicuously behind the bus if Joe hadn’t been looking right at him. He proceeded to save everyone’s life by screaming at us to get out now, and sliding through an open window (kind of dangerous since the bus had started to move again).

Just how big are the windows on this bus?

Mark and Joe pull the others out with them, and…

The light fixtures, which had been right above us, all exploded in unison. Then there was another explosion, from the engine or something, probably, and the back half of the bus collapsed in flames.

And at no point, in the two years after this horrific accident, did anybody bother to check for bodies. They just assumed that everybody dissolved into atoms, and held the funerals anyway. Oh, and apparently the bus driver didn’t hear Joe shouting for everybody to escape through the window, even though it seems to have happened quite a few seconds before the explosion. At the very least, wouldn’t be have looked around after the lights burst and seen that none of his passengers were there?

I can’t tell you for sure what was going through the minds of Joe, Gary, Mr Daly and Mark. But I can tell you what was going through mine.

Just before the terror and relief kicked in, I thought, This is so cool!

She’s just kidding about the terror and relief.

Also, note that, at this point, Anja doesn’t know that the bus driver survived. Classy girl, that Anja.

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Ivy (part two)

Posted on by weeks4send

(There may or may not be a part three, depending on whether or not I come up with any ideas for it.)

Because my mother worked late, I would often spend the evenings after school at Annabelle’s house. Her family were a great deal richer than mine, and it always amazed me to see how grand her house was. I also liked to talk to Annabelle’s father- he was a well-known gourmet who was constantly cooking up wonderful concoctions in the kitchen. Annabelle wasn’t interested in food, and I could see he liked that I was. Usually I would just sit and watch him cook, but sometimes he’d let me help him measure out the ingredients, or taste the food to make sure that it was “just right.”

How lucky Annabelle was to have such a father! I didn’t have any at all. From what my mother said, he’d turned out to be a stern fundamentalist who saw potential evil everywhere, especially in Mama shagging the entire rugby team for a dare. “He was such a prude,” she would tell me, “Just because he’d never been good at sport.”

“I hope when I get married,” I told Annabelle as we sat down in front of the television, “I never have an argument with my husband.”

“Then make sure you marry a man who’s had his tongue cut out,” she said sweetly as she changed the channel so we could watch Mrs Brown’s Boys.

I frowned. She was annoying me. I sometimes wondered why I stayed friends with her. But then I remembered that she had a big flat-screen TV and a fridge full of ice-cream, so everything was fine.

Suddenly, we both looked up and listened. There was the sound of a car door being slammed, followed by a loud, piercing squawk, like a parrot being stuffed into a blender.

“Mama!” I cried, leaping up to open the door.

Annabelle’s father got there before me. “Gigi!” he cried, putting an arm around Mama’s shoulders, “What a nice surprise! Would you like to join us for dinner? We were going to have liver and…”

“Mama!” I started to cry. “What’s the matter?”

Mama’s face looked bleak and haunted. “It’s your bloody grandfather!” she whispered, “I told him not to drink weedkiller! I told him what happens when hydrochloric acid reacts with potassium! But oh no, he just had to have that banana for dessert, didn’t he? Now I’ll be picking his entrails out of the rosebushes for the next ten years!”

“What are you saying?” I asked through my sobs.

“I’m sorry, Ivy,” my mother said, “Your Granddad is… dead.”

“Nooo!” I screamed, shaking my head as if it might somehow alter things.

“I’m afraid so. He exploded and took the shed with him. I found his head in one of the flowerpots…”

I wailed piteously.

“And I think his intestines ended up in the old oak tree…”

“He planted that old oak tree himself,” I whispered. Strangely, it gave me some comfort to think that Granddad was still tending to the things he loved, even in death.

“They look a bit like tinsel…”

I shook my head again. Granddad couldn’t really be dead, could he? I’d always thought that we lived in a magical world- surely the fairies and the pixies and the mysterious fanged creatures wouldn’t let him die and leave me. Surely he must still be alive somewhere… Without his intestines… Or his head…

Hmm. On second thoughts, I was OK with letting him rest in piece.

“Anyway,” said Mama, “Come along home so you can pack your bags. I want to be on the motorway by seven, so we’ve got to hurry.”

“What?” I cried, “Where are we going?”

“We’re leaving!” said Mama with a laugh, “Now that my dad’s out of the way, I’m selling the house and moving to Amsterdam to become a lap-dancer! That nice Abelard Cephalopod said he’d take us.”

I gasped. Abelard Cephalopod was a binman who lived down the road from us. He had small beady eyes, slicked-back hair, and a long, curly moustache that he liked to twirl in his fingers. I never knew what my mother saw in him, but she said he was glamorous and had connections. “Gigi, knowing the number of the kebab shop off by heart doesn’t count,” Granddad would always say, to which Mama would let out a blood-curdling roar and throw the blender at his head.

“Mama, no!” I wailed, “He’s a total crook! And he looks like a weasel!”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Ivy,” said Mama, “Deep down, he’s a delicate flower.”

Just then, Abelard Cephalopod’s rusty Ford Focus drove into Annabelle’s driveway, crushing most of their flowerbeds and running over the cat. He got out, and pointed and laughed.

“See?” said Mama, “Not every man would take the time to cheer up a mortally-wounded animal.”

Soon we were on our way, with Abelard Cephalopod telling us story after story about all the cities he’d visited. Places with glamorous names like Scunthorpe and Dunstable. It made my head spin. To think that we were leaving the little town I’d lived in all my life, and heading out into the world! How could Mama have been so foolish? If she was going to run off with a creepy binman, she could at least have picked a hot one.

“I don’t care what glamorous places you show me!” I cried, “In my heart, I’ll always belong to this beautiful place, the place where I was born!”

Abelard Cephalopod gave me a horrified look, then turned to Mama and said, “You didn’t tell me she had Tourette’s.”

Mama shook her head. “Shut your trap, Ivy,” she told me, “You’ll have plenty of time for complaining when you meet your father and his wife. Strewth, what a pair of misery-guts. Misery-gutses? What’s the plural?”

“What?” I cried, incredulous, “You never said we were going to see my father and his wife!”

“Oh, sure I did!” snapped Mama.

“No you didn’t!”

She thought about it for a second. “Huh. You’re right. Maybe it was the postman I told.” She stared into space for a moment, then clapped her hands and smiled at me. “Fantastic news, Ivy! You’re going to visit your father and his wife!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what your grandfather would have wanted,” she said piously.

“No it isn’t!”

“Damn. I was really hoping you’d fall for that. OK, if you really want to know, it’s because we don’t want to take you to Amsterdam and we’re dumping you on them instead. I’ve got a life of my own to live, and I don’t need some whiny teenager scaring off my new boyfriends.”

“What new boyfriends?” wailed Abelard Cephalopod.

“Shut up and watch the road, you. Anyway, Ivy, it’s for the best. You don’t want to grow up moving from place to place. You need a stable home so you can put your roots down.”

I frowned. “So… Why couldn’t I have stayed in Pitsea? I’m pretty sure I had some roots there.”

“You just couldn’t. So there.”

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Oh Dear, Fifteen-Year-Old Me (part one)

Posted on by weeks4send

(This series of posts originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on my Deviantart journal.  I’m putting them here so they’ll be easier to get to.)

Hiya. I’ve decided to make fun of a story I wrote when I was fifteen. We’ll see how that works out.

My reasons for doing this are threefold: First, I think it’s always good to remind yourself of how much you’ve learned, and how much you’ve still got to learn.  Second, it’s also good to remind yourself that just because somebody has written a terrible story, it doesn’t automatically mean that they’re a terrible person. Even if somebody has written a terrible story with awful moral implications, it might just mean that they weren’t paying attention to how they might come across to other people. I know I didn’t.

Third, I just thought it might be funny.  So there’s that.

So let us begin. The following story was initially called “Memory Lives On,” but was later renamed “Memory” after I realised that “Memory Lives On” didn’t make much sense. Still, I thought it was pretty clever at the time. It was supposed to be a title with a double-meaning, since it was about a group of people who’d inadvertently faked their own deaths.  “See, the newspapers are always going on about how their memory will live on forever, but little do the papers know that their memory living on will help them solve the mystery of their attempted murder! Oh, I’m so wise.” In the end, though, the main characters’ memories don’t have all that much to do with how the plot is resolved. The villain more-or-less self-destructs while the heroes spend their time wangsting about their problems. This was before I learned how plots actually worked, of course.

Anyway, enough preamble- here’s “Memory Lives On”:

“Anja Cleary is a tragic loss to her family, to her friends, and to us. The fact that a loyal, caring, intelligent, hardworking teenager could die such a tragic death is a sign of the carelessness of our times. The world needs to use the memory of this smiling blonde beauty to ensure that this kind of hideous accident never happens again. Anja’s parents and brother can now only be comforted by the thought that they now have an angel in Heaven looking down on them. Rest in peace, Anja.”- 25th October 200_

I’m not sure where I got the name “Anja Cleary” from. Or why I felt it was so important that I didn’t say which year the story took place.

The story started off as a Mickey-take about how tabloids cynically shovel on the treacle when talking about major tragedies. It’s a bit unfocused, because at the time I didn’t actually know much about tabloids and their inner workings. If I was to write it now, I’d probably emphasise the falseness of it, or bring in a few more elements about their focusing on the pretty, middle-class, white victims over everybody else. Either way, though, the whole tabloid-satire theme is quickly shoved to the side in favour of a really dull murder mystery and an even duller romance subplot. Priorities!

What a load of rubbish. I can’t believe someone would actually print that in a newspaper. It’s so saccharine it makes my teeth ache, plus it’s all wrong.

In the words of Pearl Jam, I’m still alive, but the person who wrote the article can be excused for not knowing that. The whole country thinks I’m dead. Only five other people know I’m not, and some of them are meant to be dead themselves. But Mark and Estelle’s house couldn’t be called Heaven without anyone laughing. It’s pretty cool, as houses go, but they aren’t the neatest people in the world. Mind you, I don’t think they were expecting four guests, so I’ll let them off the hook.

That’s three or four subject changes in the space of one paragraph. My English teachers must have been so proud.

The Pearl Jam reference is there purely for the sake of having a Pearl Jam reference. I did this a lot.

While we’re on the subject, people don’t become angels after they die, even really good people. Angels are completely separate beings. I learnt that in RE. I think the difference is that they don’t have free will. And besides, Satan apparently started out as an angel, so being one isn’t a guarantee of good behaviour.

This has nothing to do with anything. See what I mean about the lack of focus?

There, that’s the first and last time anything I’ve learnt in school will be applicable to real life.

Frankly, I think “applicable to real life” is stretching it a bit even there.

Although the chances of my ever seeing the inside of a school again are fairly small. So there are advantages to everyone thinking you’re dead.

One of the disadvantages is being made out to be sweet and innocent in the papers.

Is “never getting to see your loved ones again” another one?

(Seriously, that barely comes up in the story. I didn’t mean to make my main character come across as a sociopath.)

I could hardly be less sweet and innocent if I tried. Gary’s sweet and innocent, I think. I haven’t known him that long. But I’m pretty certain he’s more sweet and innocent than me.

I also didn’t mean to make her sound drunk.

Incidentally, Gary is the love interest. His two character traits are a) expressing love for Anja, and b) weeping over his tragic past. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of these is more irritating.

In fact, I told Mark earlier today that Gary might as well have had his picture plastered all over the newspapers instead of mine.

“Yeah, but you’re the obvious choice, aren’t you?” he said, “You’re the youngest and the only girl. You’re A Young Life Cut Tragically Short, see?”

“And Gary isn’t? He’s not much older than me.”

“Well… Oh, I know. You’re cuter than Gary.” As you probably know, once you get to the age of fifteen it’s very annoying to be called “cute,” but I let Mark go on. “I mean, you’re textbook cute. Gary looks cute, but he looks weird as well, so they can’t make him their Tragic Accident poster kid. Weirdness and cuteness mixed would bother the public,” he said knowledgeably.

OK, I still quite like the phrase “Tragic Accident poster kid.” But I’m not sure how often men refer to each other as “cute.”

I don’t really think Gary looks all that weird, but maybe he looks different from all his photos. I know I do. Three days before the crash, I dyed my hair strawberry-red, and there weren’t any photos taken of me between then and now. So all the photos of me give the impression that I’m blonde.

This is a bit of a handwave on my part. Apparently, dyeing your hair a different colour means that absolutely nobody will recognise you, even if they’ve known you for years.

One more thing. There was another mistake in the article.

The reason we’re in hiding is that what happened wasn’t an accident. The only accidental thing was that we all survived.

SPOILERS- There’s actually no good reason for them to be in hiding. They could easily just tell the authorities that they’re alive, go home, and let the police handle it. But then there’d be no story, and we can’t have that.

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Why?

Posted on by weeks4send

Have you seen this? That fucking headline?

The photo’s bad enough. A picture of her, all blonde hair and pink cheeks, smiling at everyone as if she’d never had a bad thought in her life. Thinking about how fucking gorgeous she is. Well, she’s not that pretty. You’re not that pretty, love. You could do with losing some weight, for a start.

But it’s the headline that drives me mad. “Why?” Just the one word, mind you. “Why?” As if it’s some deep, profound question, when the answers are fucking obvious to anyone who actually bothers to think.

What they should be asking is, what was she doing in the park in the first place? She must have known it was dangerous. But no, she thought she knew best, so she went through it instead of crossing the main road. Thought it was a shortcut. So there’s the answer to your “why?” She’s got no-one to blame but herself.

And why couldn’t she have taken a bus, anyway? The 152 goes from right outside that school she worked at to right outside her flat. I looked it up on Google Maps this morning. If she’d taken the 152, none of this would have ever happened. Alright, I know some people don’t like buses, like my niece Lucy, but that’s not the point, is it? She can’t afford a car, but she never takes the bus anywhere. I asked her why once. I said, Lucy, it’s not about convenience, it’s about whether you live or die. That’s what they don’t understand- it’s about whether you live or die. And Lucy said that she’d caught the bus every morning for five years in high school, and, after five years of being packed in like sardines with kids who stuck chewing gum in her hair and called her “four-eyes,” she decided that she just preferred walking.

But what I want to know is, what were her parents doing getting glasses for her, at that age? Because that’s what they did, my sister Edie and her husband. Dragged her to the opticians and had them slap a pair of glasses on her, just because she was squinting a bit. It wasn’t as if she was fucking blind. But no, Edie and Pete can’t have their daughter squinting, so let’s take her off to the opticians and make sure that the other kids bully her for the rest of her life. Sometimes I feel like saying to them, if your daughter ends up the same way as blonde-hair-pink-cheeks on the front page, and you feel like pointing fingers, then point them in the fucking mirror.

“Why?” it says. What I want to know is, why did she even take a job in this area? I bet you plenty of local girls would have killed for that job. I’ve read that article. She grew up in Benfleet. You can’t tell me that there weren’t any jobs in Benfleet. You can’t tell me that she wouldn’t have found one, if she’d just got off her pretty little arse and looked. It’s a nice place, too. Barely any crime. Her mum and dad must have begged her to stay. They must have begged her not to move to a place where you’re not safe in your bed at night. But she didn’t listen. I bet she never listened. I can tell, just by looking at her face, she was the sort of girl who thinks she knows everything, and everybody else is just stupid and narrow-minded. Well, look at that front page. How clever does she look now?

I bet I know just what it was. She might have grown up in a nice little town, with parents who’d give her everything she could possibly want, but they let her watch films, didn’t they? They probably bought her all the Disney films when she was a little girl. And she probably watched them over and over, until they got their hooks into her brain. Telling her that she was special, she was a perfect princess, and she was built for better things than staying at home and keeping her mum company. Telling her that, unless she went out into the world and saw absolutely everything in it, she’d be wasting her life. Well, real life isn’t a fucking Disney film, love. Most of us had worked that out by the time we were ten.

And what I’d like to know, what I’d really like to know, is, if old blonde-hair-pink-cheeks was too good for a job in Benfleet and too good for the bus, then why couldn’t she just have rented a flat closer to work? Why did she have to get one that meant she’d have to walk through the park on her way home? It was as if she wanted something bad to happen. Some people are just headed for disaster, no matter what. If it hadn’t been what happened at the park, it would have been something else. Sooner or later, something always gets them. You can’t expect anyone to be sorry.

Actually, saying that, the landlords and the estate agents don’t fucking help, putting the rent for those flats so low. They talk like it’s just good business, but really it’s tempting innocent people into a disaster area. It’s blood money, pure and simple. Blood money. And I happen to know why those particular flats are so cheap. It’s because those tight-fisted bastards can’t be bothered to fix the heating in that building. Half the time it doesn’t work, and the other half it’s clank, clank, clank, all through the night. I’ve heard stories of people not wanting to live there because they think it’s ghosts. So there’s the answer to your “Why?”- it’s because people are stupid fucking cowards.

Look at her face. Those bright eyes and that smug little grin- I can tell I wouldn’t have liked her. You can tell that she spent all her time laughing at people behind their backs. Fluttering her eyelashes at boys and then shagging their best friends, just for the fun of it. There’s something about her eyes. You can always tell, when you look at the eyes- they never fool you. You can tell she was a complete bitch. There’s something there. Something not quite right. Something actually quite evil.

In the picture, she’s got straight, shoulder-length hair, but that’s a lie, too. What the paper doesn’t tell you is that, a few months before she died, old blonde-hair-pink-cheeks decided to get her hair braided. All done up into ratty little plaits. That wouldn’t have made such a good front page, would it? They wouldn’t be asking “Why?” then. She probably loved having her hair like that, though. Probably all her friends had the same style. But that wasn’t as funny as she thought, because someone else had her hair like that, too. She probably never even knew it, but with her hair in those ugly plaits, she looked exactly like Victoria Devereaux.

And the most ridiculous thing is, that wouldn’t even have mattered if she’d just gone to the party two weeks ago. I found out about it through a friend of my son’s. My Richie and his friends were all invited, and they all went, but not old blonde-hair-pink-cheeks. They invited her to go, but she was too good for their party. And the ridiculous thing is, if she’d gone, she could have saved herself. If she’d gone, she might have met my Richie. She might have made an impression on him, and made sure that he’d never, ever mistake her for Victoria Devereaux, as long as he lived. But she didn’t go. She missed her last chance, and she probably didn’t even realise. So don’t you go asking me questions like “Why?” Not when people can be as thoughtless as that.

Actually, if you’re going to ask “Why?” then my answer is simple- “Because of Victoria Devereaux.” If Richie had never met that bitch, then everything would have been fine. You should have seen her in the mornings, walking to the estate agent’s with her face made up like a fucking clown’s and her skirt so short that you could see the cellulite on her arse cheeks. That’s always how it is, isn’t it? They can dress like whores to reel the men in, but underneath, they’re as ugly as sin.

She knew what she was doing to my Richie. She knew that every time she batted her eyelashes (which are fake, just like the rest of her) or gave him a sexy little look, she was giving him a little bit of hope. She led him on. That’s what they always do. They let men think they’re interested, and then they shoot them down just for fun. And then they’re surprised when something like this happens. Well, it’s her fault. There’s blood on her hands.

I mean, it’s the media, isn’t it? it tells them that that’s the only way to get a boyfriend. Never mind decency and self-respect, just show off your tits and they’ll come running. They tell them men want “sultry seductresses.” In other words, “whores.” I mean, when I was young, we had something called “morals,” but I suppose that sort of thing is a bit old-fashioned these days. A bit behind the times.

Well, if it’s old-fashioned, then my Richie was as old-fashioned as it gets. You’d never see him treat a girl badly. All throughout his teenage years, he was the only boy in that whole shitty school to treat girls with a bit of respect. He was the kind of boy who’d hold doors open, and carry their books for them, and walk home with them just to make sure they were safe. I’ve always said, if he’d found a girlfriend who was as sweet as him, one with manners and class, that would have been the making of him. But he never did. All the girls at his school were… Well, there’s plenty of words for them, but none I’d use in polite company. None of them appreciated him. Let’s leave it at that. None of them appreciated him. He tried so hard with them, and all they did was laugh at him behind his back. If you ask me, girls like that bring this kind of thing on themselves.

The boys were almost as bad. Little fuckers. Felt jealous, didn’t they? Because he was going on to better things, and there they were, sat at home, knowing they were going to be stuck working at Tescos for the rest of their lives. I’m sorry, but Richie was so much better than them. I know mothers always say that about their children, but he was. You could tell, just by looking at him. Most of those boys, they looked more like animals than human beings. More like pigs. As if their mothers had screwed their way through the farmyard before they were born. People like that- weak people, useless people- they always want to bring down anyone better than them. They hate being reminded of what they are, so they won’t let anyone rise above them. It hurts them. They ground him down, my Richie. He had more intelligence and drive than anyone I ever knew. He had a spark, and they tried to put it out.

So don’t ask me “why.” Don’t print stupid headlines that ask it as if it was some profound question and we’ll never truly know the answer. I just told you the answer, didn’t I? I just gave you all the answers you’ll ever need. Cause when we live in a world like this- a world where a good, decent boy can see all his potential wasted because nobody ever cared enough- then it’s no wonder that things like that happen. In fact, it’s a miracle that they don’t appen more often. When you get right down to it, the only answer to “why” is something that you should have learned when you were a baby- life just isn’t fair.

He’s a good boy, my Richie. He’s a good boy.

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Ivy (part one)

Posted on by weeks4send

(Note- I used to read far too much V.C. Andrews as a young ‘un.)

When I was a little girl, I believed that the world was a magical place.  In my mind, there were fairies at the bottom of the garden, pixies hiding in the woods, and mysterious fanged creatures at the bottom of our school swimming pool.  Actually, come to think of it, I turned out to be right about that last one.  Now that was an interesting lawsuit.  Anyway, I’ve never stopped believing that there were magical beings all around us, beings that can only be seen by the innocent and young at heart, or maybe those who’ve had too much vodka, and that, if we just believe, they will come to us in our hour of need.

If my mother heard me say such things, she’d tell me to take my head out of the clouds and come back down to earth.  That, or whack me round the head with a wooden spoon.  “There’s no such thing as magic,” my mother would say to me, “Life is nothing but a string of misery, horrible mistakes, and indigestion, so abandon all hope now.”

“But Mama,” I’d say to her, “If there’s no such thing as magic, how does the Tooth Fairy know where I live?”  I’d got her there.

“Pah!” said my mother, spitting into the sink, “Enjoy these innocent years now, me girl, because you’ll soon learn.  The world is a horrible place, full of war, and poverty, and disease, and men who say they’ll marry you but leave you two weeks before the wedding just because you were technically cheating on them, so you’re left with nothing but a baby that gives you stretchmarks and an empty bank account, and grows up to whine about her friends’ legs being bitten off during swimming lessons, honestly, like I haven’t got anything better to worry about, I have a life too, you know, Eastenders isn’t going to watch itself…”

At this point, I grew bored of marvelling at my mother’s impressive run-on sentence, and snuck out into the garden to talk to Granddad.

How I loved my grandfather!  He was always there for me, out in the garden among the trees and plants.  This was because he lived in the shed.  He’d been a famous naturalist in his youth, and he found that he didn’t feel at home unless he was surrounded by the beauty of Mother Earth at all times.  I respected his desire to live life in his own way, although I didn’t see why it meant he had to drink all the weedkiller.

“Don’t take what your mother says to heart, Ivy,” said Granddad, pouring me a cup of his homemade tea (specially brewed out of moss and dead beetles), “She’s had to put up with a lot of disappointment in life.”

“What kind of disappointment, Granddad?” I asked.

“Well, when she was a little girl, she wanted a pet unicorn.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that they didn’t exist, so I got a rhino, painted it pink, and hoped she wouldn’t notice the difference.  It gored five of our neighbours to death before she realised something was up…”  Granddad’s eyes twinkled as he told the story.  He was a sprightly old man with long white hair and apple cheeks, and I never felt safer than when I was with him.  Even if he did keep feeding me insects.

“Anyway,” he concluded, “My point is, don’t be too hard on your mother.  She’s like a beautiful, exotic bird that yearns to fly free.  And until she does, we have to put up with her squawking a lot and crapping on us from a great height.”  He poured himself another glass of Weed-B-Gone.  “Fancy a sip, Ivy?  It expands your mind.”

“Er…  I’ve got to get to school now,” I replied, backing out of the door.

When the day came that I fell in love and decided to marry, I wanted my husband to be just as wise and good as Granddad, although preferably not as full of dangerous chemicals.

I rushed to school through the roads of concrete and tarmac that we Essex folk called a dual carriageway, thinking how lucky I was to have such a beautiful home.  All the graffiti on the walls was spelled correctly, and sometimes, at night, you could look out of your window and see a pair of urban foxes, noisily shagging the night away.  Was it any wonder that I still believed that there could be magic around every corner, when I’d grown up in a place as wonderful as this?

My best friend, Annabelle Lecter, would always tell me that I was foolish to see the world around me in such a way.  “There’s nothing magical about this place,” she said in her usual pedantic manner, “Pitsea is where hopes and dreams go to die.”  Annabelle was nice enough, but unpopular because of her weight, her spots, her greasy hair, her crossed eyes, her irritating personality, and the fact that she gave off a constant smell of sardines.  However, my Granddad had always taught me to look beyond the surface to see the person within, and besides, it wasn’t as though people were exactly queuing up to be friends with the girl who still believed in pixies, either.

“Well then why is it,” I demanded, “that whenever there’s a traffic jam on the road outside my bedroom at night, I see the headlights light up the darkness like a constellation of earthbound stars?”

“I’d say it was because you’ve been licking the inside of the freezer again,” she said dryly.  “Just look at this school- boys staring at your chest all the time, popular girls laughing at your outfit, science teachers who dump piranhas into the pool and then don’t bother to tell anyone…”

I thought about it.  I agreed with Annabelle about the popular girls, the ones we both called hyenas– always grinning inanely, laughing at other people’s misfortunes, and dominating weaker members of the pack with their vestigial penises…  OK, the metaphor needed some work.  Anyway, the hyenas never included us in their gossip or invited us to their wonderful parties.  Fortunately, we were mature enough to rise about it.

“I bet they’ve all got crabs,” I said.

Annabelle giggled.  “Yeah.”

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