(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.