It was dark like that shop, like that cave, for a moment.
The computer sputtered and whirred into life. The wallpaper was a picture of the kind of castle that slightly mad Bavarians used to build. It took four minutes for all of the icons to load up on top of it, and by that time she’d forgotten why she even turned it on.
Regardless, it hadn’t helped. She was still thinking of armour.
Thinking now of a coat of arms also.
Thinking how that castle would be part of it, probably. And possibly a wine bottle, or maybe more classically a big bunch of grapes.
And books, obviously. There always had to be books.
The browser opened at her homepage, her online bookstore du jour. Always.
She had a quick glance at the latest suggestions, the latest ideas the algorithm tried to plant in her head, but she didn’t think that she’d buy anything, even when this tipsy. This fuzzy. This pished.
It wasn’t so much that she was trying to cut down – if need be, she could always squeeze another bookcase in the kitchen, next to the fridge, and maybe one by the door – but rather that she wasn’t sure about all these new writers that they were trying to promote, and she already had all the books – sometimes several editions – by most of the authors she truly admired.
Instead of risking something that might not be any good, or not quite good enough, she had decided now to hunt down more of the books that had inspired her favourite authors, though in many cases these weren’t so easy to come by.
Time, almost inevitably, had winnowed their numbers.
That was why she relied more on second-hand shops: they sometimes got lucky.
And second-hand books, there was more experience in them, more history, that was another thing: there was more faith. More loyalty, as there was in an old dog. If it had been read and re-read and re-read until tattered, then it was more likely to be worth her reading as well.
Some of the new covers were eye-catching, though…
Clicking off, avoiding temptation, she moved onto her social network page.
She didn’t visit it often, and when she did, it seemed as though there was always someone else she’d used to hang around with who’d got pregnant, or given birth, or got married, or taken a holiday somewhere with impossibly blue skies and improbably white sands; the pictures of which they’d nonetheless felt the need to apply a filter to, in order that they emerged even more blue and white still.
She never Liked them, those pictures.
She had seen better, she told herself.
She tried not to admit that they made her think of her dad.
She kept scrolling down.
Down.
Down.
Beyond all of that. Beyond cat videos and clickbait controversial opinion pieces about house prices, and immigration, and which cosmetics were reputed to be killing you slowly this week, or which superfood would keep you slim and trim and virtually immortal. Beyond all these signs of a life she didn’t much want to lead.
And that’s where she saw it.
Another photograph. This time of herself. Looking doe-eyed and startled, scared and ashamed. Helmet hanging impotently in her left hand. Right hand reaching upwards, too slowly, in a last vain effort to cover her face.
At least no filter was needed: with the sun on the foil, it was shiny enough.
Donna noticed the name of the person who’d uploaded it.
She hadn’t read that name for so long, she’d all but forgotten she was friends with him on here. He obviously hadn’t got pregnant or married or swanned off abroad. She probably hadn’t thought of him since she’d accepted his Friend request, a couple of years back.
Until she’d spotted his face in the crowd this morning.
He’d been a peripheral figure in the group she’d gone drinking with in the park. That was how she’d first come back into contact with him. Though, in truth, they’d barely exchanged more than a few words a night.
Before that, though – long before that – they had been in primary school together.
Working through her memory now, she thought it quite likely that he’d been her first crush.
Looking at his profile picture, she wondered what she could have seen in him, all those ages ago.
After all, he was the one who’d come up with the nickname that followed her, on and off, from the last two years of primary school and all throughout secondary: Donna Creosote.
Because, as a nine year-old, she hadn’t known what creosote was, she hadn’t understood what he found so funny. When she’d asked her dad about it, and he’d told her it was used to paint fences, she’d understood even less.
None of the other kids had known what it was either, but that hadn’t stopped them from laughing and chanting it whenever she walked by. On top of the chants and the jokes about her hair being ginger.
She found out later that Sammy himself only knew what it meant because his own dad was a landscape gardener.
Which, she found out later still, was code for him being an outdoorsy odd-job man.
She moved from his profile picture back to the image of her, defenceless in her armour. Despite the heavy coat of booze she’d replaced it with, Donna Creosote felt her face flush red and her eyes begin to sting.
She opened the ‘Send Message’ tab.
Bastard, she typed.
Dizzy, and with a rising sickness circling her tummy, she slumped on the edge of her bed. She’d taken her top off, but not her work trousers, and was too unsteady to risk heading over to the wardrobe for a clean pair of pyjamas.
Too unsteady to bend down and take off her socks.
She could see two chandeliers swinging above her, and the marble seemed slanted and slippy and cold.
12
The pages of the book were damp and warping.
The sticky tape was coming away from the spine.
Donna hadn’t put it back behind the curtain yesterday, and didn’t notice that she’d left it out on the cistern until after she’d showered.
Sitting on the toilet, she wiped the cover with her towel, but doing so only seemed to spread the condensation, not remove it. She gave up, and riffled the pages: they sprayed droplets like a dog coming out of the rain.
She turned away. Tracking the motion so closely was making her queasy.
Without looking, there was a sound like rustling leaves.
She picked a page at random and smoothed it with a prune-skinned palm. Traced back and forth along the lines with fluctuating focus; squinting at the longer words, the several-syllable constructions.
There were two words, however, that came through quite clearly.
Tower
and
Princess.
They locked her eyes firm and stopped the world spinning.
It could be, she reflected, somewhat fuzzily, that she’d gone about her questing plans the day before in entirely the wrong way. It was quite possible, all things considered, that she simply wasn’t built to be a knight.
Not because she didn’t have a penis, or broad shoulders, or hair on her chest and spots on her back.
But because her brain seemed to glow whenever a princess was mentioned, even more so than it did when she read about knights.
They were almost sacred, to Donna. They weren’t so much anachronistic as they were timeless, transcendent. They didn’t need to belong, because they were above everyone anyway. They weren’t burdened by doubts about their place in the world, didn’t always have to gallivant about the countryside, waving their lances, desperate to prove it.
If she could be one of them, she thought, then her own worries would fade.
If.
Whenever she watched Disney films, though, it wasn’t just the design of the heroic male characters that irked her, but that of the heroines as well. They wer
e all nicely-drawn, and styled to appeal to children and vaguely-pervy blokes alike. But there was one abiding flaw, to Donna’s mind, in each of them.
Not a one of them looked anything like her.
Her naked self in the mirror.
Not the fairest of them all.
Still a sheen of shower-water on her skin.
Ginger hair not yet blow-dried.
Legs not shaved for a fortnight.
Pubis a tangle of bright burnt sienna.
Those stretchmarks above her sharp-edged hips.
Despite the shower, a small tuft of t-shirt lint holding out in her navel.
Breasts not more than a handful. Despite the nakedness, nipples not cold, not hard, not perky. The room, with a bookcase blocking the window, was too close to sauna-hot for that.
Or perhaps the near-fever was another after-effect of the wine.
Her lips still had some redness on them, regardless of how much she’d scrubbed with a flannel, and then with her toothbrush, after she’d done scraping purple from her tongue and her teeth.
She closed her eyes.
Her brain bobbed and whorled in the pickle-jar murk.
She tried to swim alongside it, ride the current, take hold of it like a mermaid or a life-ring and float. Tried to grasp an image of herself in a tiara, in a shimmering satin ball gown, with matching gloves pulled halfway up along her freshly graceful arms. Her hair precisely curled and ornamental in its elegance. Her feet – no longer too big – slipped into dainty, cut-glass slippers with high heels that didn’t hurt and that she could dance in, for a change. If anyone should ask.
And beneath that regal glitz, a body beautiful.
Beneath that gown, a pair of knickers that didn’t have a picture on the front.
She chose the Pocahontas ones today.
She pulled on odd socks: one green with shocking pink diamonds, the other red with yellow smiley faces. Her mother had bought her both pairs last Christmas, ignoring the fact that she’d asked for a book.
She pulled the faded jeggings up along her stubbled calves, her stubbled thighs.
She pulled the blue-and-white-striped boob-tube down over her head, hoiked it into place above her navel – from which the lint had now been plucked – and below the collarbone she didn’t care for, and which showed too clearly both her thinness and the propensity for accidents that had plagued her in her youth.
Sometimes, I swear you do this just to get attention.
So her ever-attentive father had said.
Donna stared with scarcely-hidden disappointment at the image in the mirror.
Thought of the money her father had left her.
Decided that, yes, she could definitely still afford to go shopping for clothes.
13
The kitchen-cum-lounge looked like a siege engine had hit it.
Still feeling shell-shocked herself, she narrowly avoided standing on the de-handled pan, but the cheese-grater on the front took a sizeable bite from the dry skin of her heel and made her jump to the table, where she banged her hip on a chair.
The oven trays seemed to tilt at her, mocking her, threatening to fall off the worktop and clatter and crash.
On the front of the fridge were some magnetic letters, a few of them rearranged into buy sum more vvine!
She moved to scramble them hurriedly, taking pains as she did so to avoid the empties by the bin.
As though they were peasants. Or lepers.
Or just suspicious old hags.
Pausing once again beside the table, aiming to regain her balance, she surveyed the remainder of the damage with a defeated general’s eye: she saw the flattened beanbag, and another bottle beside it; the book underneath it, and the empty glass that occupied that book’s place upon the shelf.
And the laptop. Lid open. Screen Whitby-Jet-dark.
Had she really been on it?
The word Bastard seemed to buzz on repeat at her fingertips. Beneath the nails that could probably do with being cut. With having those calcium-lack speckles glossed over, obscured.
Still unsteady from the booze, she poured herself a glass of water. Lukewarm and unfiltered, direct from the tap.
In
three
gulps
it was finished, and she was off across the flat.
As she waited for the computer to start up, for the icons to load, Donna thought about the castle in the middle of the screen. About the fantasy and patience it must have taken to construct a thing like that.
About the talent of the architect.
About the fervour of the builders.
About the majesty – the only word, really – of the views that might be seen from any given window. About how she’d never been inside the place to know those views for sure.
How she didn’t even know if the entrance hall was marble.
How she wasn’t even certain that she wanted it to be.
Those thoughts evaporated, however, once the whirring quieted down, and she could get back on her browser and check exactly what she’d done.
The echoes in her fingertips hadn’t been lying.
But that wasn’t the only thing she could see.
She noticed also – couldn’t fail to – that the bastard had sent a message back.
Dear donna
i’m sorry for the picture and for tagging you in it. I have untagged it now and taken it down and its deleted from my phone as well… I didn’t know it was you when i was laughing. And I wasn’t really laughing at you really…I thought it looked kind of weird and cool. The helmet was good, was brillan tand when you took it off I took a picture because I was surprised because I hadn’t seen you in ages,, and i think now i’ve seen you I miss you. you can probably tell that I’m drunk I know but I honestly am sorry and i miss you and the others as well… do you see then much? I wasn’t with anyone when I Was in town….I didnt know anyone else who was laughing. I don’t have the picture anymore but i guess that I took it because I never expected anyone to do anything like thata round here…I thought it was only Americans who did superhero cosplay stuff. Were you a robot… i’m sorry im drunk.
I’m sorry.
From
Sammy Pankhurst
Donna remembered that she had written him a letter once.
In primary school.
It had been three lines long.
She had ended it with lots of love.
He had taken great pleasure in reciting its contents to the class, and any other kids who’d gathered round, in the cold of the playground at break-time.
Had taken even more in wrapping up that reading with an ad-libbed Creosote.
Do you want to meet for coffee later? she replied.
She waited.
She’d be heading into town anyway, to buy herself a ball gown, and taking a break for coffee after all that hassle might be just what she needed.
Also, despite what he’d said about her armour, she felt that she should probably explain herself a little better. So as he didn’t think her too weird. Or too lonely. Or too mad.
And what he’d said about the people from the old days, she understood the way he wondered how and where they were. She’d never really liked them much – or him, when she encountered him again, all those years after primary school and her first fairy-story broken heart – but she missed them all, and him, regardless. Sometimes.
Heedless of the lessons of the past, she longed for that past to return.
…boats against the current… wasn’t that how it went?
A fairy tale, Donna thought, just with billboards and jazz.
A sad one.
On one of her shelves, perhaps in the bathroom.
Sammy replied: ok… when’s good for you?
It was just after 11.
How
about 2:30?
Ok… where?
The café at the far end of the Kingsgate.
ok… .see you there!!
As the machine began to power down, the icons left the background clear for just a moment.
Then it all went blue.
Then it all went black.
14
The lift stopped on the tenth floor. The doors opened, grindingly as ever, and there in the space between them stood a woman with a pram.
The same woman as yesterday, albeit dressed slightly differently.
Which, Donna supposed, she might be thinking as well.
Although, if the woman did recall her face, if not her jeggings and her boob-tube, and the loose purple cardigan she’d pulled on to keep her arms warm, then there was nothing in her expression or demeanour to show it.
The baby seemed to remember, though.
It started to cry.
The woman didn’t spend the journey groundwards staring at Donna, not this time around.
But neither did she make any move to quiet her child, or to comfort it. The dummy had fallen out of its mouth and now rested on its chest, but the baby had been strapped in so tightly that its tiny fingers couldn’t reach to put it back.
Nobody in the tower block besides that woman and her child had ever, for all Donna knew, properly seen her, at least not up close, whether dressed like this, or in knight’s armour, or not. She thought about that, as the woman headed once more in the opposite direction.
She had made no effort to fit in, but neither had any of her neighbours gone out of their way to invite her to the house parties they frequently held. Despite the fact that she wasn’t asked to them, she always knew when they were happening. She stood out on her balcony some nights and looked down at other balconies on the row across from hers, watching the washing lines and the plant pots and the birdshit-spattered plastic chairs, and the people sitting on them, smoking, drinking, laughing, and she heard their music turned up loud.
Whether she knew the songs that played or not, whether she liked the songs that played or not, she found she couldn’t help but start to dance. She would dance by swaying her hips as she held onto the balcony rail. White-knuckled. She would let go of the rail sometimes and let her hips sway wilder, and, as she did so, she’d hope that no-one from the party looked up and saw.
THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE Page 4
