THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE

by Dan Micklethwaite

Cosy enough, Donna guessed, but no towers, no keep.

  And next to her now, on this side of the road, the revolving door of the Jobcentre Plus.

  Which it wasn’t too much of a stretch to squint at and think: Dungeon.

  She did, after all, recall its cells well.

  She’d done a stretch there for a while, after she moved out but before her dad left entirely. That was how she’d landed in the temp job for which she’d had to buy these trousers. Which she’d stuck at all of two weeks, until his payment had come through.

  Her mother kept mithering her to go back and sign on.

  That money won’t last you forever, she said.

  You need more experience on your sodding CV.

  It’ll get you out of the house and meeting new people.

  But Donna wasn’t bothered about meeting new people.

  And she had experience to spare that she’d gleaned from her books.

  Besides, surely this counted as being out of the house?

  Stopped still and so close to it, the road growled even louder; it rushed and harangued, and she was at the edge of a river in a state of near-flood. This crossing became a dock for a rickety ferry and, as she waited for that ferry, in search of further distraction, the pedestrian lights became characters from a morality play.

  The red man a devil.

  The green man an angel.

  Between them, they offered the pilgrim two distinct choices.

  One good and one bad.

  There was no amber for pilgrims, and yet Donna felt very much like she was caught in between.

  Because, watching those two figures, the binary outcome they offered, she realised that she had not planned this at all well, beyond her destination, the town centre. The timing of everything, the progression from one part to the next, began to seem arbitrary. Lacking in beauty. Lacking in craft.

  In removing the character, the concept of the knight errant, from the pages of her books, she had also separated that concept from the very things she found most appealing about it.

  The certainty of enjoyable questing.

  The certainty of the hero’s success.

  It felt too much like a choose-your-own adventure, now – a cop-out from an author who didn’t have enough faith in the story they wanted to tell.

  Her heavy boots sank down towards vole burrows, squelched amongst the reeds as she shifted her weight.

  Dragonflies shivered.

  Beyond them, and the midges, and the froth and roil of the water, she studied the lights. They weren’t one of those sets that made a noise when it was safe to cross: the ferryman was a mute, or else simply wasn’t the talkative type. Rather, you had to watch out for his wave, the slightest of gestures; you had to wait and see which of the men was aglow.

  Which, with this visor, was proving a problem.

  And – the cheese-grater’s handle having got in the way – she hadn’t managed to rig up the duct tape as a hinge.

  Donna Crick-Oakley removed her helmet again, and held it firmly in the crook of her arm. She imagined it heavy, her head still within. A ghost-story tableau at the side of the road. Or, maybe more suitably, Gawain and the Green Knight.

  Only, she wasn’t green. And neither yet was the signal.

  More’s the pity.

  Ten cars hurtled by in the space of twenty seconds, and four of them gave a long beep that Dopplered away as they passed. She thought the last one of them had shouted something as well, but she didn’t hear what.

  She wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

  Still, as her father had been fond of saying before he left the country and cut all ties: Nobody ever achieved anything by giving up and going home.

  What had he achieved since? Donna wondered.

  And pressed on.

  When the angel lit up, she took its advice and boarded the ferry. On her way, she endured the sound of five or six more car horns, stretching back along the queue. Not one of them keeping rhythm and time with the next.

  She told herself they were swans, or maybe swan-maidens.

  Jealous of her daring and her long fiery hair.

  On the opposite bank, she found herself confronted with an Oriental Supermarket – an apothecary, maybe? – and beside it a building that had been vacant for so long that she couldn’t remember its previous use. There wasn’t even a sign in the window, or any whitewashed graffiti announcing what it was going to become.

  There was only darkness inside now, and she felt drawn, strangely, closer.

  It was like the mouth of a monster, or just the cave where it lived.

  She stared into it, through her reflection, and told herself she looked fearless. At least, she did when she’d put her helmet back on. She held the pose for a moment, drawing air through her visor. Her chin and her nose were already damp from her breath, but she did her best to ignore it, to ignore everything else.

  It was in that state of focus that she noticed something shocking. Something she was more than mildly mortified to admit, even to herself.

  She did not have a sword.

  Had no weapon of any kind, in fact.

  And she was hardly trained in hand-to-hand combat, or any of the martial arts.

  After all the hours she’d spent reading of such adventures, she had omitted, in her admittedly rushed preparations, perhaps the most essential element of those heroic tales: the blade with which the dragon or the ogre would be slain.

  Even the jousters at the Royal Armouries had lances, and they were just playing.

  The less said about a shield or a coat of arms, the better.

  Under cover of the cheese grater, the knight errant blushed.

  8

  There were always setbacks in these stories, Donna was well aware of that. Always roadblocks en route to the eventual triumph. Always a healthy glimmer of doubt.

  It was good for the tension.

  Evil wouldn’t even start lurking if it didn’t have a hope in hell of coming out on top.

  And there’d be no point in knights questing, if that was the case.

  And yet, here she was.

  Still bold and still brave.

  At the bottom of Beast Market, a shortcut she preferred to the main route uphill.

  The name evoked a menagerie of mythical creatures. The patrons outside the street’s only pub looked a bit shifty, too, though there were fewer forked tongues at their table and less hybrid anatomy.

  That was something to be thankful for, she supposed.

  Which was less than could be said for the brewery mascot perched on the roof. An oversized gargoyle, drunk on the job. Always a chance he might lose his balance and fall.

  But health and safety regulations were hardly a knight errant’s remit.

  And the patrons were giving her a few funny looks.

  She felt sure there’d be more pressing problems to deal with elsewhere.

  Up ahead was the park and beside it the church. At the top of the steeple was the flag of St George, the world-famous dragon-slayer and a true inspiration.

  And though she couldn’t quite see its full shape through the holes in her mask, the building itself gave a kind of support. Lent her plans weight. This was the first, and maybe the only, example of architecture that she wouldn’t have to change.

  Certainly, the archway that led through to the steps at the side seemed sublimely medieval.

  Not so much the few teens who’d settled on those steps.

  They were more Neolithic.

  One of them stared at her from under a hood that gave the impression of a heavyset brow. He looked as though he was going to stand. Her hands tensed into fists, quite involuntarily. The foil on them crackled.

  It was probably best if she didn’t pick a fight in holy quarters, though. Right of sanctuary and all that.

 
She crossed over, hurried along a street lined with takeaways and bars. Bustled past fellow pedestrians with her back held straight and her head held high. Even though the weight of the pan was beginning to tell.

  As she reached the Kingsgate Shopping Centre, however, she faltered. It was heaving. Despite it being a weekday there were swarms of people passing both ways through the doors, or loitering around the pillars that underpinned the glassy frontage.

  And some of them were beginning to stop and stare.

  All in all, she decided, it wasn’t perhaps the best place to start searching for work. There would be security staff there already, and they were probably doing a decent job.

  She’d leave them to it.

  She darted into an arcade thoroughfare, out of the main flow, sunlight leaking in through the roof panels as through a prison cell grating.

  She could tell people were following her, albeit discreetly.

  She could feel her face getting redder and redder.

  Still, she kept her eyes front, in military fashion, and whispered over and over: I’m a knight, I’m a knight. And the clattering of her armour and the crinkling of the foil seemed to beat to that rhythm. The rush of her blood.

  More than that, though, more than knightly, Donna felt like a gladiator on the arena approach.

  She was still brave and still bold.

  She just had to stop dallying.

  She had to keep going.

  She took a deep breath.

  9

  Pigeons scamper at the sight of her as she strides into the square.

  That group is still following her, but she thinks of them now as an entourage, a band of supporters, ready to roar her to feats of great derring-do.

  And all of these others, outside a café?

  They’re just spectators, wanting to see dragons slain.

  Nowt wrong wi’ that.

  In the heart of this plaza, just ahead, is the Library: it’s one of the only spots in town that can outdo her collection, and this helps maintain her steely resolve. Well, more aluminium. She is close to the source, she feels, the home of adventure, in the shadow of a mighty cathedral of words.

  If she can’t be a knight here, if she can’t find the trail of some great epic narrative, then, in all fairness, what chance has she got?

  Looking out at the crowd, their faces fragmented and cropped through her visor, she tries to imagine herself even taller than she seemed in her bedroom – even bigger than she appeared in that empty shop window – and to be shining like some magnificent, alien diamond, cut loose from a comet in centuries past.

  She must be that kind of toughness, mustn’t she, to have ventured out unarmed?

  Indeed, even though she’s unarmed – and without a coat of arms, even – she imagines that these fair townsfolk will take her for a definitive specimen of boldness and dash, arrived at last to preserve their precious streets as urban idylls. To succeed in that regard where, to look at some of them, other would-be champions have obviously failed.

  At least, she wants to.

  Those people, though. They’re all staring at her, and at each other, a not-so-sly what the fuck doing the rounds in between.

  Is this some kind of art thing?

  You know, put together by one of those … students.

  Or is it, like, a living statue?

  But, if so, will it make use of that pan for collecting the change?

  And why is it moving?

  Is it just some kind of nutter?

  Should we call the police?

  Is this, Donna wonders, perhaps the horde she predicted?

  They do, after all, look a little bit … rough.

  But if she is the knight then that means they are the peasantry, and so, she supposes, that only makes sense. She must make allowances.

  She straightens her back again. Holds her head high.

  Crunches the foil as she tightens her hands into fists.

  Coughs. Clears her throat.

  Good people of erm, Huddersfield, I’m here to erm... I’m a brave–

  But she can’t say anymore. They’re beginning to laugh.

  It’s a young boy who starts it, but it spreads round the group quickly.

  They reach for their smartphones, and it feels like torches have been lit all around her.

  As though she is the monster and hers is the cave.

  The glinting, the glare of their lenses shatters in through her visor, all the brighter, all the worse for that. Her eyes are wet behind the metal and her vision swims with blue-green and orange-brown splotches. She’s struggling to see.

  Yet again, she will have to take off her helmet.

  Though her hoody still covers her ears, the laughter seems somehow louder. The boy stands proud at the front of the pack, pointing at her with the index finger of one hand and with his phone too big and too flat in the other.

  The rest ape his behaviour.

  It takes her back to the playground.

  The chanting.

  The name.

  She hates them.

  She doesn’t want to save them.

  She shouldn’t have come.

  She should have taken her father’s final advice.

  No chance for that now, though.

  Within the laughing faces, there’s one that she knows. Again to the playground, hands pulling her hair. Hands that she recognises, bigger and older, wrapped round a phone, recording forever this dreg of a quest. This poor lonely knight errant with no sword and no helmet and no coat of arms, and her mystery utterly, totally stripped.

  She turns away from him, from all of them.

  Feels the shutter clicks clatter her armour like spears.

  She starts to run, to sprint, panting over and over: I’m a knight, I’m a knight – but all the metal and foil of her shakes as she does so, and no longer keeps the same rhythm.

  After she’s gone, the pigeons return.

  10

  Nobody, thought Donna Crick-Oakley, had ever had such a shitty time of it while dressed up in armour.

  She hadn’t stopped running until she got back to her tower block. Not even when she reached the crossing.

  Once she got into the lift, once the doors had closed, grindingly as ever, she found herself alone, properly this time, and buckled into a crouch, gasping for breath. She could taste bile or acid like bad orange juice in her throat. She had a stitch in her side, and she was burningly aware that she needed to weep. Wanted to disappear beyond camouflage into these mirrored steel walls.

  She tried to hold off until she got home but, one floor before the top, her tear ducts gave way.

  She sprinted across the landing, ignoring the stitch, but then it took her nearly a minute to open the door. She was sobbing so hard she kept dropping the keys.

  The two baking trays and the pizza tray sat scrap-heaped on the worktop.

  The helmet, such as it was, lay upturned on the floor.

  She’d peeled off most of the duct tape, but remnants of the dark, gummy adhesive were still there, like a stain. It would come off with washing, Donna hoped, but perhaps not first time. Would probably hang around the way that grease did when she’d cooked potato smiles or breadcrumbed chicken pieces. It was a failure that she could be tasting for days.

  11

  Donna Crick-Oakley went through phases with her drinking.

  When she’d been seventeen and freshly moved out from her mother’s house, she had fallen in with a crowd who met at least twice a week in the park beside the church: they downed cheap vodka and alcopops and cans of cider that, even then, had tasted far too sickly sweet.

  When some of them left for University, and the rest had simply decided that it was better to spend more money and go out to clubs as soon as they were able, Donna had slacked off on the booze and gone ba
ck to her books. The few nights that she had gone out, she’d usually met some guy or another. Sometimes they’d been guys that her friends had been wanting.

  When they no longer invited her – except for the occasional group invite online – she took to buying a couple of bottles of wine a month, sometimes three. Sometimes four.

  Maybe two nights a week, she would pour herself a few small glasses while she read, and snack on spiced cheese and olives that she’d picked up from the supermarket.

  This had increased during the four-month period she was seeing Kirk. Probably, she’d started thinking after he left her, because being around him so often made her value her alone time all the more. And also because he enjoyed neither wine nor olives, and would only touch cheese when it was on a pizza, or a sub.

  Earlier, once the sobbing subsided, she’d pulled the stopper out of this week’s bottle, intending, mostly, just to finish it off.

  She was halfway through the next one now, and already eyeing the one after that.

  She sat squashed down into the beanbag, which she kept in her lounge area in lieu of an armchair, and looked lazily out through the balcony window.

  Her glass was out of reach, on the shelf where she’d left it as she searched for a book, so she just swigged the wine straight from the bottle.

  The book was half-beneath the beanbag, the reading abandoned after only a handful of pages.

  She’d thought that maybe she could hide there, in the yellowed dunes of those pages, in the labyrinth-wall angles of their letters and words. But it turned out that she couldn’t.

  Not really.

  Not today.

  Standing, which was made harder not only by the quicksand-sagging of the beanbag but by the tiredness in her muscles from running and the wooziness that set in with the wine, she made her way over to the small desk that she kept to the right of the window. She leaned on it, palms flat, and drew the ugly, fire-retardant curtains closed.

  She dropped into the old pneumatic chair.

  The gas had long since left the mechanism, and so she dropped low.

  She was only just above eye-level with her laptop now. It was as silver as her knightly armour had been, and she flipped open the lid to take her mind off of that.