THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE

by Dan Micklethwaite

  And that was the problem.

  Donna didn’t see the point in her escape becoming more like what she was escaping. If anything, she thought, real life could stand to be much more like her books.

  Perhaps then she’d actually be inclined to go out and take part.

  With that in mind – always at the back of her mind but especially brightly and sharply this morning – she looked down at the story, the words on the page. Maybe eight times was too many to read the same thing, no matter how great its pleasures, or to try hiding away in the same old spot.

  Maybe it was time she stopped hiding entirely.

  Maybe, she thought, as she stood up from the toilet, it was time she went out and tried changing the world.

  5

  Nobody had ever accused Donna Crick-Oakley of being adventurous, but adventurous was what she very much intended to become.

  Of course, she couldn’t just go out adventuring dressed as she was.

  Not least because, well, she wasn’t.

  There was a full-length mirror on her wardrobe door, the only space that she could find for it to fit. Forgetting her purpose for a moment, she started searching with harsh eyes for the parts of her that must have displeased Kirk and the four men before him. And the countless others who’d decided against.

  She didn’t have to search long.

  She unwound the towel from around her hair, let it unravel and frame her cheeks.

  She called it red. Strawberry blonde. Auburn.

  They, the other kids, had called it ginger.

  Ginger was a spice. Was a Spice Girl, if it came to that. It was something that you put in biscuits, or in tea, or in curries, or on terrible, and terribly catchy, hit singles in the late 1990’s. It wasn’t her.

  But that wasn’t her choice.

  She’d got the feeling that perhaps it was something that her boyfriends tolerated, rather than desired, and none of them had ever really outright praised it; a couple of them, Kirk, surprisingly, not included, had made well-meaning jokes about it from time to time.

  Beneath the fraying ends, her collarbone was too noticeable.

  The result of being thin, of being lanky. Now.

  And the result of an accident she’d had when she was seven-and-three-quarter years old. Falling off her bike. Tumbling over the handlebars and into the tarmac, which, as ever, failed to forgive.

  There had been crying, and her tears had done magic and united her parents. Or reunited them. Maybe. Her father had been especially joyful, because her injury and subsequent trip to the hospital had necessitated his leaving school early, ducking out on a training day. Cutting class, he’d called it – one of the few times she could remember him showing a kind of throwback teenage glee.

  He’d still brought a book with him, though. He’d already had it in the car. He pulled it out of a shopping bag like a white rabbit, like a tarot card announcing an unavoidable fate. Donna had read it, whispered it, in the waiting room, though she couldn’t recall now which book it had been. Only remembered sitting at the edge of a rough plastic chair, gritting her teeth, willing a nurse, any nurse, to call out her name.

  To say to her: It’s Ok. The doctor will see you now.

  When she’d been fat, in her early teens, her breasts had been larger. It was a shame that everything else about her had been larger as well, and so any benefits those C-cups might have given her were rendered moot and insubstantial.

  Now, depending on the man, and on how much she’d recently been eating, they struggled to register as even a good handful.

  The boyfriend before Kirk hadn’t seemed to mind, had told her he thought they were wonderful, perky. He had spent enough time toying with the nipples, drawing a fingertip round them in spirograph circles, his own erection noticeably heightened when those nipples were at their longest and hardest and he reached out with his tongue.

  But Kirk hadn’t given them much consideration at all.

  At the sides of what she still referred to as her tummy, just above her hips, there were stretchmarks. Sometimes she thought they looked like dragon-scratches, as though she’d been ambushed. The bad kind of surprise.

  She had long wanted to wake up to a good surprise, to catch a glimpse of those spaces around her hips and find the stretchmarks flattened, gone.

  She had long been frustrated.

  Those hips themselves were problematic.

  Again, back when she’d been a bigger girl, they’d been fuller, and, she had thought, seemed more viably fecund. She had looked at herself in mirrors then, and, along with the paunch of puppy fat she carried, it had been easy to imagine herself as a soon-to-be mother.

  Now, her hips were bony and angular, and were not, Donna thought, of the kind that anyone would look at and label ‘child-bearing’.

  Her knickers were the site of the most striking and the most secret of her hypocrisies.

  She owned hardly any that weren’t emblazoned with the face of some cartoon character or other.

  When this had been pointed out to her, and she had been forced to defend yet again her stance as regards Disney, she’d protested that on underwear those cartoons didn’t explicitly form part of a story. They weren’t trying to influence her perception of a classic character type as located within a classic story structure. They were simply cool, cute drawings.

  This argument had not been bought, entirely, by either of the parties involved.

  As she thought about it now, it seemed to Donna that she chose underwear like this because she had difficulty seeing herself as sexy, and couldn’t seriously consider purchasing some fancy lace knickers from one of those lingerie stores.

  And yet, she remained aware that she had difficulty seeing herself as sexy because she didn’t wear fancy lace knickers.

  Beside today’s cartoon face, there were small curls of ginger hair. Auburn hair. Red. Doubling back on themselves, reaching up and around the elastic at the top of her thighs.

  In the mirror, Belle looked back all bearded. Beastly.

  Donna was aware too that most men nowadays didn’t seem to find that attractive, but she had not had time, nor reason, to trim or shave or wax, of late. Either there or on her legs.

  She took small comfort in knowing that Kirk hadn’t been in any position to complain.

  The purple and silver polish on her toenails was cracked and peeling. It looked as though she’d stubbed her toes and the bruises hadn’t cleared.

  Even without those blemishes, her feet were nobody’s prize. They were thin – like the rest of her, now – and long. Slightly longer than her forearm, in fact, and so whenever she looked too closely at them she felt a little like a freak.

  She always shut her eyes when she had those feet naked on top of her books at bedtime.

  That allowed her to visualise the castle better, too.

  Sometimes.

  Sometimes, in the entrance hall, she could even see the chandelier.

  6

  Donna Crick-Oakley had never been clothes-shopping with anyone apart from her mother – who had never, by Donna’s reckoning, done a capable job.

  Her mother was colour-blind, but stubborn in her refusal to admit it. She also had a fondness for shoulder pads and frills.

  As a consequence, the contents of Donna’s wardrobe didn’t really suit her plan.

  After all, one could not wear a blue-and-white-striped boob-tube and expect to be taken seriously as a knight errant.

  Ditto for plaid mini-skirts.

  Double-ditto for jeggings that had worn down at the knees.

  Indeed, she reflected, it might well have been better to approach this from the opposite direction: to rummage through the dressing-up box first and then adapt her choice of character accordingly.

  But Donna didn’t want to do that.

  She was set on being a knight.

>   Not simply because, from a lot of the books she’d read, she knew that a great deal of the finest and most fantastic quests began with their involvement. But also because, if she was going make this change in Huddersfield, she’d prefer to be in armour.

  Of course, these days, the traditional suit of armour could be – and often was – swapped for any number of other uniforms, but Donna had always been a sucker for the classic styling. There was just something about the chainmail, the curved and detailed metal of the breastplate and the helmet, which struck her as incontrovertibly heroic.

  Mystical, too.

  Anachronistic.

  Anarchic, even.

  The first time she’d actually seen some, in the flesh, moving around rather than just behind glass, her little mind went so far as to suspect some kind of witchcraft. She was eight, and her dad had taken her to see a jousting tournament at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. The contestants, as they rode into the ring, hadn’t quite seemed to belong to the same world as the crowd: as though they’d burst out of history and back into life. Or, maybe more likely, had dragged the crowd with them to some place in between.

  They were outliers, renegades, the unusual suspects.

  And they were all the more appealing, to Donna, for that.

  She had never really fit in anywhere either.

  And yet they gave her hope of being cool just the same.

  However, the closest things she could find were an old pair of work trousers, a shade lighter than charcoal, that had only seen service twice, and a grey hoody that she wore, by her mother’s tally, far too often.

  Not exactly a combination to inspire epic poems.

  For starters, neither of them was anywhere near shiny enough.

  Wearing the work pants – which, unfortunately, she had no time to iron – she bore the hoody to the kitchen like a folded-up flag, like a prize to present to the tournament victor. She spread it out on the table.

  There were no slogans or logos on its front for her to cover, nor on the back. Nevertheless, she did think that it could do with more in the way of armour-plating. The colour grey’s close proximity to steel, and the thickness of the fabric, would not in themselves prove sufficient protection.

  Should the massed hordes of her hometown rise up in pursuit.

  Perhaps a baking tray, then.

  Or two.

  And another.

  And some aluminium foil, possibly, to provide that much-needed shine.

  Donna Crick-Oakley always kept well-stocked with duct tape, not only to keep the more mangy of her novels together, but also to help shore up deficiencies in her bookcase shelves. She used it now to fix a baking tray breadthways across the chest area of the hoody, and a small pizza tray covering the lower torso. She stuck a larger baking tray lengthways to cover the spine.

  She taped the aluminium foil around the sleeves, trying not to pinch the fabric too tightly. She applied the same sheathing technique to her charcoal-grey trousers, trying not to tourniquet herself in the process and thereby stop the circulation to her hairy legs and freaky feet.

  And what about hiding those feet?

  She had a pair of silver, sequinned flats somewhere – possibly buried at the bottom of her wardrobe – but she wasn’t sure they’d really go. They were probably too dainty for the kind of derring-do that might occur.

  Somewhere else, there was a pair of old Doc Martens but they, to be honest, were a little too… purple. She could always cover them with foil or duct tape as well, of course, but she wasn’t sure what that would do to the leather.

  Still, she supposed that wouldn’t matter, if everything went as she hoped.

  It was only when she was trying these out, standing in front of the mirror, that she realised that she was going to need something to cover her head, to complete the ensemble.

  Probably the most helmet-like items she possessed were the three pans – small, medium and large, in proper Goldilocks fashion – that hung on a rack she’d fixed over the hob.

  She pulled up her hood before she tried them for size.

  The medium one fit best. Just right, in fact.

  In order to avoid any awkwardness, however, and to avoid being party to the accidental blinding of any tall folks out in town, she opted to unscrew and set aside the handle.

  Yet she felt there was still something missing.

  A visor.

  All the best helmets should have one of those.

  A colander would be too large and unwieldy, that much was obvious. Not to mention just a little too daft. Besides, it seemed more Civil War and not quite chivalric. Of all the other things in her kitchen that might provide the necessary amount of both protection and mystery, only two seemed vaguely viable: a slotted metal fish-slice and a large, flat cheese-grater.

  The latter, by the looks of it, had more surface-area, and so it was that which she duct-taped in front of her face.

  With her bare hands. Which wouldn’t do.

  She used the last of the tape to wrap what was left of the foil around her palms, across her knuckles, the way a boxer might beneath their gloves. That was all she could think of for gauntlets, as she didn’t have any suitable gloves of her own.

  Except for some almost wire-wool-looking ones that she’d bought as part of an exfoliation regime which hadn’t yet, if she was honest, really got going. They were a bit itchy, and seemed to take more skin off her fingers than anywhere else.

  Standing in front of the mirror for the third time, peering at herself through the holes in her makeshift visor, she was half proud and yet still half disappointed. It was certainly a good effort, she felt, for the hour or so it had taken. And she more or less looked the part.

  But it wasn’t quite up to the Royal Armouries’ standard.

  Still, she guessed those performers had a blacksmith they could call on, or some other skilled metal-worker. And such smiths, as far as Donna was aware, did not, even nowadays, have to work where they cooked.

  The only other alternative, as far as Donna could see, was to pay a visit to her mother. To ask politely to borrow her sewing machine and a selection of the sparkly cloth that she kept bundled in boxes under the stairs. A monstrous commingling of outgrown boleros; an archive of spandex and rayon and sateen.

  She went with the grey hoody and the aluminium and the baking tray and the pan without its handle and the cheese-grater fitted as a visor to the front.

  Which she felt made her look just about knightly enough.

  7

  Usually, if Donna Crick-Oakley left her flat, she did so at times when nobody else was likely to be leaving theirs.

  Today, setting out at half-past ten, too late for work but too early for lunch, she anticipated being in the lift on her own, surrounded by the still-surprisingly-shiny, graffiti-free walls and, in those surroundings, looking perfectly at home.

  She was to be frustrated.

  Two floors down, out of twelve, the lift came to a halt. The doors parted, grindingly as ever, and there stood a woman, maybe her own age, with a child in a pram.

  Donna had never seen this other woman before and so she assumed that the other woman had, in turn, never seen her. They had certainly never been introduced, nor held a conversation. Not even small talk.

  Donna was struggling to see her now, in truth, with the cheese grater in the way, but the few features she could make out did not look particularly impressed. It wasn’t an ideal way to meet a neighbour, she had to admit.

  Respectfully and carefully, she took off her helmet and stepped back against the wall, offering the woman more space in the lift. The foil of her gauntlets crackled as she did so.

  The child started crying.

  The woman made no attempt to quiet her offspring, but simply stared at Donna. Head cocked to the side and a sly What the fuck? on the tip of her tongue, albeit never quite making
it out.

  The woman was wearing bright cyan joggers with four stripes down each side, and a lime green tee that didn’t quite cover her midriff; she had a clutch of black-inked hearts and stars tattooed like a status update on her inside left wrist.

  What the fuck? indeed, Donna thought.

  When the lift reached the ground floor, the woman wheeled her still-wailing child to the exit. On her way, Donna thought she heard the woman start to mutter something but, with her hood still covering her ears, she couldn’t be sure.

  She waited for the woman to leave before putting the helmet back on and following her out through the door.

  The woman turned right and Donna turned left.

  The brand new knight errant felt her boldness returning.

  She would need it, she thought.

  There was a big road to cross.

  Traffic looked even more cram-jammed down here than it usually did from her balcony, but in spite of its density it was still flowing fast. There would be no way to pass from this side to the other without using the traffic lights, a good fifty metres ahead.

  The distance seemed to stretch, seemed hazardous on its own, fragmented as it was through the visor, and all the cars speeding past her set her on edge. She knew she had to do something to keep her mind steady.

  Rattling forwards, she told herself: I’m a knight, I’m a knight, and she began to think about her progress in much more medieval terms. Not vocabulary-wise, for Chaucer did not rank among her favourite authors, but rather she envisioned her surroundings as they might have been back then.

  On the other side of the road, she could make out a betting shop.

  Inside, fat men in felt jerkins jangled pouches of gold.

  Skinny men sagged out through the oak door in defeat.

  A few buildings down, an estate agent’s crowded window.

  Scraps of vellum and bark showcased various hovels, available on a ‘buy to let the peasants work’ basis, ranging from your basic wattle and daub to your fancier, sturdier timber and thatch.