Sitting there at the kitchen table, staring at the magnetic letters on the fridge, she became dimly aware that the landline was ringing.
She didn’t go to answer it.
She knew who it was.
Her mother’s voice sounded after the beep:
Hey love, it’s only me, just seeing if you fancy going out for a carvery on Sunday? Or I could cook? It’s been a while since I came round. Have you got rid of that beanbag yet? My place might be better. Bob’s really looking forward to meeting you. And he’s got a son about your age –
Donna didn’t wait for the message to finish before walking over to the beanbag with her wine.
Her mother had only started seeing Bob about two months ago, after they crossed paths – so her mother had delighted in informing her – at a curry and karaoke night down the local. And Donna had no interest in either him or his progeny.
Her mother had been with several men over the past three years, but none had got as far as being invited to move in and so, given the rarity with which she visited anyway, Donna had managed to avoid running into them.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her mother’s taste in men, she told herself.
Nor that she didn’t want her mother to be happy.
And she’d given up, this far down the line, on having her father return. Either to the country, or to the North, or to her mother, or to her.
She just didn’t want to be part of that happiness, or whatever it was that her mother kept finding.
Her mother didn’t approve of the way Donna lived, the way she read so much, the way she cleaned or didn’t clean. The way she kept bookcases in the bathroom. The way she had a beanbag instead of an armchair. The way she’d sold her TV. The way her flat was on the top floor, and the way she went out onto the balcony, which was totally unsafe. The way she dressed. The way she never even thought of doing something different with her hair, like dyeing it. The way she couldn’t get, or didn’t want, a steady job. The way she couldn’t get a steady man, and kept on picking losers (‘Bob’s a winner, love. And so’s his son.’) The way she drank wine on her own –
She raised her glass again and sipped.
– The way she never went out and met new people.
And Donna, for her part, didn’t approve of the way her mother lived, the way she didn’t read, except for glossy, trashy magazines, and the way she cleaned so often that her house reeked not of lemons but of acrid lemon fresh. The way she only kept one thing beside the toilet, and the way that thing was The Daily Star. The way she’d kept an armchair that used to be Donna’s gran’s – yes, Donna, s’gone – and didn’t sit in it but left it piled high and ragged instead with those shitty magazines. The way she stared at her TV screen so intently that anyone might think she’d had a sudden miraculous conversion and now saw the face of her lord and saviour in every soap and talent show. The way she’d traded in the family home, which Donna’s father had been forced to leave her, for a bungalow two streets away and three doors down from a woman that she hated. The way she dressed. The way she was always doing something different with her hair, always picking out the latest style and colouring from fashion columns in the paper; her hair-dye history seemed, to Donna, like a rainbow re-envisioned by the criminally insane. The way she’d kept the same steady job for years, even though, or perhaps because, she harped on about it constantly. The way she’d found a string of men, but kept on dumping them, because, she said, she needed someone younger – a fate that Donna thought would befall Bob, too. And sooner rather than later.
The way she always went out and met new people, because the old ones didn’t want to know.
Neither did Donna.
There was nothing even close to good enough for either of them around the other.
There hadn’t been for quite some time.
20
Her sixth glass of wine sloshes round in her hand and her ball gown spills shimmering across the beanbag like oil.
Donna Creosote, however, doesn’t watch the wine moving. Or the curtains shifting with the breeze between the balcony doors.
Her head lolls towards the nearest bookcase.
The titles on the spines there are beginning to dance, to tango in duplicate around their initial location. The leather of some of those bindings, the linen, the creases riven in the paperbacks seem almost like bark for a moment: oaky and thick, even dotted with lichen.
Fallen olives, from the jar that she’s been snacking on, are littered between beanbag and shelving like acorns. Or breadcrumbs. At any rate, a path.
There are fresh shoots beside it. Saplings. The carpet all ruffled, like more earth being displaced.
She leans closer, squints, as if to follow where it leads.
A clearing in the archive, between boughs, where she’d removed a book earlier and not put it back. There’s something inside it, but she’s struggling to focus.
A gingerbread house?
A gathering of outlaws, all dressed in green?
No. It’s a tree, the highest widest oldest tree in the forest, and carved on its trunk is a heart with an arrow shot through. Her initials are there, maybe, on the top side of that arrow. But beneath it, who else’s?
Not Bob’s son’s, that’s for sure.
She doesn’t want Bob’s son, and she doesn’t want Kirk, and she probably, definitely doesn’t want Sammy. And she doesn’t want any of the other boys she’s had.
Because that’s what they’d been, really: boys.
They’d seemed like adults, of course – like adults should be, as far as she knew. And all of them were older than her, which should have counted for something. But then they got childish again: they grew backwards as soon as she gave them attention.
When she hung out with men that she found herself attracted to, and they began to call her names, however jokingly, and tickle her, and began to be boys, when that happened Donna felt like she herself was nine or ten years-old again, and half-expected, whenever she walked past a wall with a boyfriend, to be pushed into it.
Putting a hand out to steady herself – the graze on her palm.
They made her feel like a girl, and where did that leave them, then?
Just two kids in the forest, and that never ended well.
Innocents, lost.
Ever since her first time, ever since she’d discovered what it was all about, she had struggled to understand why people talked about sex as one of the things that made you grown up. It felt like the opposite: it was messy and smelly and loud and all the things you got told off for being when you were younger.
It was fun.
She liked it.
She couldn’t help herself, sometimes.
But sometimes, it felt like she was a toy, a game, and they just wanted to play with her.
She’d known boys at school who’d do anything to play with their toys, of course. That wasn’t necessarily bad. As she’d hungered for break-times, so had they, she’d seen it; they’d rushed to their bags in the cloakroom, desperate to get to their latest action figure, their latest car, running out to race them or fight them on the tarmac. They took the figures to the front gates, had them climb up the bars, in a bid to reach freedom.
One of them had cried all afternoon after dropping his favourite, a Batman, out through a gap, where it had fallen on the pavement and rolled into the road. He’d loved it that much.
And yet, there was a chance he’d only loved it because it was exactly how he’d wanted it to be. It had existed entirely in relation to him.
Even if that car hadn’t come along, it would still have been abandoned eventually: put up in the attic, or given away as a hand-me-down for somebody else. If there was anyone else.
It would have stopped existing just as surely.
You couldn’t rely upon that kind of love.
Leaving you stranded in
the dark with the witch or the wolf.
Donna’s done with all that. She wants to feel like a woman, full-grown, like she owns herself, like she has some kind of control over how things play out in her life.
That’s all she’s asking.
How that meshes with being sprawled out in a princessy dress upon a beanbag, drinking wine as though it’s fizzy pop, she isn’t quite sure.
She reaches out for one of those olives.
Belches.
Feels queasy.
Maybe, she thinks, she should get some fresh air.
21
The night sky over Huddersfield is like a ripening bruise. The sound of fighting sings loudly from one of the apartments below.
This isn’t usually a worry that she has with her neighbours; she’s seldom clued in on their problems and feuds.
But their shouts rise past her balcony tonight like fireworks. Leaving certain words behind them like different coloured sparks.
fucking
Blue.
idiot
Bronze.
I
White.
can’t
Red.
Blue.
believe
Orange.
you
Yellow.
Blue.
snogged
Green.
him
Grey.
Like all the other firework displays she’s seen, it quickly springs an ache in Donna’s head.
She looks elsewhere, further out across town. Towards Castle Hill in one direction. Towards the football stadium in another. Sweeping white support bars above the blue roof like bones.
Her father had taken her to watch a match there once, when she was twelve. She remembered that he’d bought her a pie at half time and she hadn’t liked it. It had been chicken and mushroom, and she didn’t like mushrooms and she didn’t like pastry. He hadn’t asked her what she wanted before he went to buy it, but he should still have known because he was her dad.
Town had lost the match 3-2, to a late goal in injury time, and he didn’t take her again.
After the final whistle had blown and they were walking out through the turnstiles into the car park, one of her father’s friends – with whom he went, at that time, to every home game – had joked that she was bad luck.
She didn’t much like football before that, which is why her father had waited until she was twelve. She hated it after.
She sways with her hands on the balcony rail, as she gazes back towards the town centre. Clubs are flaring up like bonfires, sending out smoke signals to call in the horny.
She should be there, she thinks.
She thinks that the bass they give off is like the heartbeat of some colossal creature in the distance. Or maybe two of them. Or maybe more. Ribcages the size of that which frames the football pitch. Cocks the size of Castle Hill.
This is how such mythical beasties are made.
This is how legends are brought into being.
But Donna doesn’t go.
Instead, she keeps swaying.
She sways because she’s drunk, and not because her neighbour’s argument has a rhythm she can dance to.
She sways because she can’t stand still.
It really is a long way down, she thinks.
A very long way indeed.
22
If I’m going to be a good princess, she thinks, then I should really grow my hair.
23
Since she was knee-high to a gnat, as her grandma used to say, Donna had been able to visualise settings extraordinarily well.
Reading through her first non-illustrated books – her first good ones, anyway – she discovered that she could form an image in her mind of where a given scene was taking place. Three-dimensional. Clear. Topographically mapped. Sometimes she could even tally up the trees in a forest or garden, without having to be told how many were there. Sometimes, she even felt herself surrounded by them, the leaf shadow dappling.
There were times as a kid when she’d put this to use. Willing the landscape on her walk to school to alter, shift: parked caravans had transformed into pumpkins or carriages; boring brown fences became tangles of thorns. She occupied her place in line outside the classroom as though it were an iron maiden, the sound of chalk on the blackboard like nails on her skin.
Sometimes, when the fighting between her parents was at its worst – when they were throwing blue and purple and bronze fireworks around the kitchen – she’d hidden even deeper in her bedroom, in her wardrobe, and when she hadn’t been whisked away to Narnia, she’d shut her eyes tightly and tried to shortcut there instead.
It didn’t always work.
Back then, she found it difficult to stay focused when she was that upset. She didn’t have the same tools at her disposal as she does now.
She sets down her eighth glass of wine on the desk beside the mouse. It spills a little, leaves a bloody-looking ring on the pine.
She’ll clean it in the morning, she tells herself.
She’s busy at the minute.
Her dress swooshes as she spins on the breathless old chair.
It begins as a photograph, framed by mad Bavarian fingers.
It’s out of focus at first, and colours shiver and run.
Then the fog starts to lift, and it shows clearly: the castle.
The stippled, stubbled mass of firs and pines that line the mountainside around it. Green and amber, gold and ochre in the close-to-sunset light.
Slatey-grey of rockface showing through in streaks beneath.
How to get up there?
Only a single narrow trail wends its way around the mountain. Haunted not by ghosts but by the clattering of cart-wheels, the hammering of hooves. In the rare event of a visitor approaching, those noises resound off the hillsides for days.
The castle walls seem to spring from the massif itself. As though some mammoth Michelangelo had taken up a chisel, and, with a similarly outsized mallet, split the stone clean down to this, its strange and secret core.
This peak, Donna senses, once stood almost twice as high.
Those walls ascend, all white and grey, in imitation of what they might have called back then the heavens. They stretch up and up, tapering at last, at various levels, into lance-like pinnacles of blue-rinse shale.
Donna cannot forget the tallest tower in particular, the tiny annexe that juts from just below its tip. The annexe that, to her, has always seemed so petite as to suggest it was intended for a baby. To safeguard it from threats, perhaps, or simply make it easier for fairy godmothers to reach.
She steps into the courtyard. The iron spikes of the portcullis are behind her, and ahead is a feeling of permanent spring. The courtyard is pale-stoned and bright, and topiaries, which seem like miniatures of the cliffside firs, stand at regimented intervals and ornament its borders. A flock of birds, maybe swallows, maybe swifts, scatter arrow-winged shadows on the gravel and grass.
She doesn’t know for certain that the entrance hall is floored with marble.
But that’s how she sees it.
She is strong-willed in matters such as this.
Interior decoration.
Internalised design.
She has a strong will and cold feet.
She wears neither jewel-laden shoes nor glass slippers. She is barefoot, here, and feels the smooth chill of the marble under her soles.
She looks down at her feet, and they don’t seem too large or too weird or unwieldy.
She looks up: from the high vaulted ceiling hangs a chandelier, an inverted sculpture of the castle itself.
A wide, two-pronged stairway stretches before her. Though her naked footsteps do not echo, the brushing of her dress upon the steps behind her gives the sensation of a wave. She rides t
he crest to the first floor landing, turns a complete circle and marvels at the height of the hall, and at the detail of the carving in the ceiling stone and the pillars which help keep it up.
She is unable to decide which pathway to follow:
The one leading left. Or the one leading right.
Eyes closed, she pirouettes, she spins in her chair, committed now to going where she’s facing when she stops.
She hopes when that happens she isn’t pointed at a wall.
Or back the way she’s come.
Nowt worse than that.
Her eyelids spring open – in this fantasy only – and she’s greeted by the candlelit arch to the right.
A burst of relief.
She gambols towards it, into it, onwards, leaving freeze-frame facsimiles of herself like breadcrumbs in her wake. She whirligigs down corridors, performing waltz steps with those spectres, and with her ever-present shadow, which wears its subtle shadow dress. She careers and careens and calls out her name, sends it out like a boomerang, counting the seconds it takes to come back.
Donna Creosote.
Three seconds.
Donna Creosote.
Four.
Her running takes her at last to a large double door, which opens with only the slightest of touches.
The polished silver candelabras in this chamber give out a light-level that might be best described as mood. The furnishings are all plush velvet, mahogany, fine laces and silks. The four-poster bed is shielded by opaque draperies, which she thinks may be muslin, but which nonetheless remind her of the shower curtains she uses to save her bathroom books from damp.
This unwanted intrusion stirs her slightly in her chair.
Breathing deeply, she tries to regather her focus.
She steps forwards, thrills to feel the softness of the rug beneath her feet.
She looks around, absorbs the opulence of varnished wood and brand new oil paintings. There are three of the castle, from different perspectives, and one of the man she is hoping to meet.
THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE Page 7
