Oh.
Yeah, it’s a really good idea. I think we’ll go with ‘Pie-on-Demand’, because it’s what people want, really. Sets us apart from the supermarkets, makes it feel like they’re getting value for money, you know. And gives them control, kind of thing. The personal touch, Jim calls it.
Yeah, I can see why that would appeal.
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s a good idea.
He smiled at that, and she noticed that his teeth were still pretty white and not all that crooked.
Do you like pies? Fish pies, I mean? Because we’re doing a test-run of Pie-on-Demand this next weekend, I think, but we haven’t announced it on the stall yet, so if you get your order in now, we can get you fixed up before anyone else. I can try to get you a discount too, if you’d like?
Erm, I don’t really like pies, no. I’m sorry. I don’t like the pastry. When it’s hard, it’s all flaky and gets stuck to the roof of my mouth, and when it gets soggy it just tastes – it just doesn’t taste very nice to me.
Do you not even like admiral’s pies?
No, I’m sorry.
Do you know which ones they are? They really don’t have pastry. There’s sometimes a bit, round the sides, but the top part’s all potato. Mashed potato, sometimes with cheese. You said you liked cheese, right?
Yeah, I like cheese, but I’m not really too keen on the mash, either. Sorry.
Oh, right.
I’m sorry. I’m sure they are really good, if you like that kind of thing.
They are. It’s ok.
Thanks for the coffee, though.
It’s ok, no worries.
Ok.
Anyway –
The smile was gone now. The cheeks were a little red again.
Yeah?
Do you ever see any of the others? Do you go out with them or anything?
I did, for a while, but haven’t seen any of them for over a year or so now, I don’t think.
Oh. That’s a shame. That’s not good.
Well, it is how it is. How about you? Do you ever see them?
No. Not really, no.
Ah.
It was hard to keep in touch, when they went off to uni and things, you know?
Yeah.
I’ll message them from time to time, and ask how they are, but I don’t get many replies.
Yeah.
I wanted to try and arrange a meet-up over Christmas. It didn’t come off, though. I sent a message round to everybody – didn’t you get it?
No, I don’t think I did.
Oh, maybe I didn’t send it to you, then. If that’s the case, sorry. I must just have forgot, I didn’t mean it as if I didn’t want you to come or anything.
It’s ok. You don’t have to say sorry all the time.
Ok. I’m thinking of trying to arrange another meet-up for the summer, so I’ll invite you to that, definitely. I figure that, because it isn’t Christmas, people shouldn’t have so much family stuff to do, family parties and things, so it should be easier to find a time that everyone can make, you know?
Hopefully.
She sipped at her cappuccino, but it was just the foam on the bottom that was left. His latté was nearly gone, too, though she couldn’t think when he’d had time to drink it. She licked the foam off her lip.
He watched her.
I’m sorry about yesterday, by the way.
It’s ok, it was a misunderstanding. Don’t worry about it.
Ok, but I am sorry. I didn’t know it would hurt you so much to put that picture up. And I didn’t mean to laugh at you, really. I didn’t know it was you. I was laughing with –
It’s ok. Really.
Ok? Ok.
I think I’m going to go home now, though, because I’ve got a book club later, and I need to cook and eat beforehand and everything.
But this has been nice.
Thanks, it has. I’m glad you think so.
Ok.
And I was kind of thinking it would be good to do it again. You know, to keep in touch, to keep the spirit of the group together. Until we can all meet up in the summer, you know?
Ok.
Ok?
Ok. Well, I’d best be going. It was good to see you.
It was great to see you too. Hope you enjoy your book group.
Thanks. Enjoy your... good luck with your pies.
Thanks, Donna. See you soon.
Bye.
17
Donna Crick-Oakley did not have a book group to go to.
What she did have was an odd feeling that she’d agreed to the possibility of seeing him again.
She quite wanted some wine, and to curl up in her dress.
18
Sitting on the edge of her bed, Donna studied her reflection.
She stood and twirled, awkwardly, in the small space between.
How do I look? she asked the mirror.
Do I look like a princess?
It didn’t reply.
She had showered for the second time that day. Beneath the waterfall, she’d shaved her legs. In the changing room, the dress had rubbed and caught against the stubble, but with her shins and knees and thighs all smooth it rested on those legs just fine.
No static.
No sparks.
Not even when spinning.
Though it remained uneasy on her hips, no matter how she tried to shape it with her hands. It fell into sharp and strange creases, as if those hips and the stretchmarks around them gave off a powerful magnetic field that couldn’t be denied.
If only.
Still, she couldn’t really complain at small niggles like that, not when it made such a difference to her complexion: it lent an almost airbrushed creaminess to her features and it made the green-brown colour pop more brightly from her eyes; it made her lips seem fuller, far more red. In throwing a little shadow on her cleavage, it made her breasts seem more than just a handful.
She cupped them, for a second.
She really did feel better in this dress. Sexier, even. Happier, too.
Was happiness equivalent to princess-hood?
How could she tell?
There were happy princesses in the books she’d read, of course, particularly in the ones that she’d read over and over. But there were miserable ones as well. Tragic cases. Damsels that remained very much in distress.
It was a long while, she realised, since she’d properly looked at a picture of a princess – the small plasticated prints of them on her knickers didn’t count – and though she thought she’d had a pretty solid idea of them in her head, she found she was no longer quite certain how they should be.
Or whether a single dress, by itself, was a passable solution.
The silver, no-face mannequins that modelled them had hardly had a regal bearing. Hadn’t sported any jewellery in particular, or worn those pointy hats that had at one time been the height of princess fashion.
Her first and only other princess dress had come with one of those – her mum made it from two empty tubes of kitchen roll, cut and artfully arranged together, with pink crepe paper draped around in place of silk.
Her mum made the rest of the dress as well. Stitched it together from bits of a blouse and an old satin dressing gown that was long past its best. Donna put it on sometimes, when they sent her upstairs. She had played out in the back garden with it, too, and been reprimanded for getting mud on the hem and a grass-stain down the side.
She had felt sometimes like an ugly sister, even though she was an only child.
The apparel doth oft proclaim the man, her dad used to say.
Bloody Shakespeare.
If she didn’t fasten the top button on her school shirt in the morning and push her tie right up, her dad used to tell her off. Tell her that
no daughter of his was going to leave the house dressed like a scruff.
If she had her shirt tucked out when he came to listen to her read, he’d ask, in deadly earnest, if she’d been like that all day.
It was possible that her own dress sense, her own habits, weren’t quite up to scratch. That there might not be any way to fashion herself as a fairy tale princess without at least paying heed to the pictures she’d seen. Illustrations and photographs, Disney or not.
After all, that was the only way that her mother had been able to design the first one, wasn’t it?
They had sometimes watched those films together, when her dad was out, at the football, or at an educational conference or a parents’ evening, or a pub. Her mum had sometimes sung along, so loud that Donna couldn’t hear the actors.
The house had been littered with picture books and, when Donna was four or five or six, with tracings of those pictures that she’d made herself. She would colour them in and then hold them up to a window, so that they shone like angels or martyrs or saints in stained glass.
Red and green. Other colours.
Some nights, her dad would come back late from work – another cause for argument – and arrive with a shopping bag holding even more books. After navigating the maelstrom of the kitchen, he would empty the contents carefully onto her bed like a pedlar displaying his wares, then shuffle them, and fan them out before her in his big, red-ink-stained hands.
Pick a card, any card…
One would always stick out more than the others, of course, and she gathered that this was the one he wanted to hear most himself. Sometimes she’d oblige; sometimes she wouldn’t. It depended which future she thought looked the best.
Against the old adage, she judged by their covers.
At first, these gifts were chock-a-block with illustrations; then, as she grew, so these pictures diminished in quantity until there were only frontispieces, and then finally just the words.
Her intellectual evolution.
She went from holding up the pictures to show him, like her teacher did, displaying them like cavemen did with charcoal paintings, all the way to reading seriously, as if giving a speech in assembly, or delivering a eulogy in church, like her dad had given at her grandma’s funeral.
In this latter phase, if she was reading a play, he’d often join in, insisting that they apportion the characters between them. He’d criticize her for not doing different voices, for the mispronunciation of certain words; he’d stop, at seemingly random intervals, to quiz her about the meaning of this or that archaic phrase.
Bloody Shakespeare.
It was about that time, she thought, that she must have taken more of a shine to maths. Enjoying the solitude of it, the pure mental engagement. The answers that were the same in any language, any age.
It was about then that she began to argue with her dad, telling him she’d much rather just read in her head.
Overhearing her mum: She’s a young woman now, Charles. She does need her privacy.
She had been running away from those pictures for years because they denied her imaginative licence, because they never looked how she wanted them to. Which is, they never looked like her.
Now, she thought perhaps the problem might be on her side of the equation. That it was she who didn’t look enough like them, because she’d never paid enough attention, because she’d turned her back on their example. Because – as both her parents would have said – she’d cut off her nose to spite her face.
She flopped back on her bed and rolled across it to the other side. Her eyes were closed as she did so, and her dress gave out a sound like the rustling of leaves, as if she was tumbling down a woodland knoll in autumn, gathering grass-stains.
Not that they’d show up much on this colour.
She kept her oldest books in the bookcase in the far corner of her room, well away from the door and the side of the bed where any male visitors would usually sleep. Forensically, archaeologically, she moved down through the strata, until she was crouched low enough to inspect the first shelf.
Her back resting against the bed, her gown bunched up above her knees so that she didn’t catch or crease it on the lines between her bookish tiling, she stroked her fingertips across the lined-up spines like tracing cracks and whorls in bark. Her hands came back dusty, almost mossy, and she couldn’t find anywhere to wipe it off. Her dress wouldn’t do, and neither would the glossy covers underneath her. She reached behind her instead, rubbed it away on the not-quite-so-clean sheets.
Though she hadn’t read any of these volumes in ages – probably hadn’t even taken them out for a clean in eighteen months – Donna knew that they were the most obvious repositories for the images she wanted.
The ideas, as well.
The ideas for how she’d hold herself, alone and in potential company; for how she’d sit, and stand, and eat, in same. For how she’d be when she was merry, or uncertain, or afraid; for which shoes she’d wear, and what kind of jewellery might best accompany her dress; for what makeup, if any. The ideas for how she’d be and how she might best lean in to kiss, in proper princess style, the man who’d come to save her.
She blew and swept the dust from the tops and sides and lower edges of the books, each in turn, and flicked their pages open tenderly, as though they were as antiqued and battered as her poor second-hand strays, and hadn’t in the first place been printed on thick, child-proof paper, strong almost as armour, with an equally tough outer shell.
She looked upon the pictures as though they’d been brought to her, been salvaged from an attic or a cellar or a vault someplace, a farmhouse, where they’d been given in lieu of payment for milk, or bacon maybe, in some more trusting long ago. As though they were oil paintings: old and cracked perhaps, but gorgeous in their mastery of form and neoclassical technique.
She wanted them to be that way, to mean that much.
She wanted to see them, without deception, how they’d appeared when she was reading with her father at her side.
In Cinderella’s peasant garb, Donna discerned more than a little of her former self. In this particular version, the first five or six times that she appeared, Cinders wore a patched-up blue skirt that was fraying at the hem. Above, she wore a white blouse, with a hole at one elbow, and an apron, light caramel, like roughly tanned leather: closer to a blacksmith’s outfit than to what Donna guessed would have been in vogue for servant girls back then.
In the glamorous confection she wore to the Prince’s ball, however, Donna could see something of the self-image she longed for. This gown (shown across the next four pages) was pink, rather than the green that Donna was currently dressed in. But the style, minus the bustle at the back, was at least something similar, in that it stretched as closely to the ground as it could while still affording a little space for her glass slippers to show through and sparkle.
For all the cultural import of such footwear, Donna had yet to see any for sale on the High Street.
A slight wrinkle in her plans, perhaps, but not to worry.
The sequinned flats in her wardrobe would do for now.
Snow White’s clothes were less openly suited to fancy party situations, but they represented, at least between the covers of this book, a more upmarket variation on older European daywear.
Possibly, Donna thought, in order to avoid embarrassment on a level with her knight errant escapade, she could adapt to something similar when she next went into town.
Beauty – that is, Belle – began this version of her tale dressed in much the same manner. But then just past the halfway point she moved into party-dress mode, being entertained as she was by the wild boar-like Beast. It was a multi-tiered red number, with white elbow-length gloves; a red ribbon in her hair, and a ruby rose pendant adorning her neck.
The dress was comparable to Donna’s only in the depth and richness of its colour, but
at least the necklace might have more present applications.
Rapunzel didn’t really get to wear a ball gown.
Not in the children’s book that Donna had.
But neither was she condemned to simply scabby peasant clothing. Rather, she wore what Donna could best equate to being the princessy equivalent of tracky bottoms and a hoody. A smart dress and sensible shoes, but without a bustle, or too much make-up, or a tiara. Which, while reflecting the fact that she was unaware of her lineage, remained the kind of thing that someone of such lineage might plausibly slob out in at the weekend, when taking a break from all other duties.
Only, Rapunzel had no other duties.
Her sole calling was to walk and sit and sleep within her small home at the top of a tower. Was to cradle her chin in her hands on the windowsill, while her long golden locks fluttered out in the breeze.
Waiting for a man to discover her, and to use those locks then as a ladder to climb.
In search of love.
True or not.
Waiting to pass, it could be said, from one form of captivity to the next.
Although, these stories seemed to say, was there much point in being a princess if you didn’t wish to find a prince?
Indeed, at that book’s closing, when she had done so, Rapunzel certainly looked happy.
And Donna felt, wanted to feel, that she could learn a lot from that picture about how a princess ought to smile.
There was still a slight hurdle, however, that stopped her believing she could ever quite be like them. Like Rapunzel and Cinders and Snow White and Belle. Those fantastical damsels.
It was a little thing, really, but it made a big difference.
Not one of those damsels had ginger hair.
19
It was a good red.
Although, as she held it up to the light, it looked mainly dark inside the bottle, and the empty shoulders of the bottle glowed a sickly shade of green.
Champagne would have been more suitable, she guessed, but she didn’t have any in, and besides, she didn’t really like it. She just needed something, she felt, a bottle of something, to smash against the hull of this new part of her journey; to christen this dress, this new way of life.
THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE Page 6
