THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE

by Dan Micklethwaite

  She moves closer to the bed, brushes the curtains aside like a mist, strokes her fingers on the linen.

  She crawls across the mattress, buzzing and breathless as it dips with her weight.

  She lies on her back, head resting on pillows.

  She doesn’t make a move to unfasten her gown.

  She wants to be undressed by mad Bavarian fingers.

  Wants to be held by mad Bavarian hands.

  Wants it so badly that, unbalanced, she tilts and then tumbles the old chair too far.

  Donna sprawls on the floor beside the legs of her desk. Unhurt, or at least too drunk to feel it.

  It takes her a couple of minutes to right herself, to disentangle herself from the swivel chair, and by the time she has done that, the castle is gone. Is just a double-vision photo in the distance of the screen.

  There is still a glass of wine, or maybe two, beside her mouse.

  After a few faulty clicks, she opens her browser.

  She smiles and takes another sip.

  24

  Most of the vomit had fallen into the bowl.

  Her hair, had it been longer, would have followed it down.

  Her left ear was pressed against the horseshoe of the seat, and she could hear her blood pounding in her head like the sea in a shell. Like all of the ocean, compressed and then shaken.

  No, like wind through the canopy, the rattle of leaves.

  Coming to, she thought she felt something touch at her shoulder, her neck, and she jerked herself upright, but there wasn’t anything there.

  Apart from a mess.

  Rogue chunks and liquid had spattered the floor, left and right, and splashed up at the shower curtains guarding her books.

  She stood up, being careful not to step in any.

  Surviving as far as the sink, the bathroom mirror, she could see the red line that arced down from just below her temple to the left side of her chin.

  She rubbed at it, tenderly at first, and then roughly.

  It would be a few minutes yet before it faded.

  Her eyes were red, too.

  Her eyelids were puffy.

  Sleep was like PVA glue in the lashes.

  She remembered painting that glue across her hands in art class, age six or seven. Peeling it off and setting it down on the desk like the grasp of a ghost. Or like a chrysalis, she used to think, before joining her thumbs and flapping her fingers like butterfly wings.

  She let cold water trickle through them now. She cupped it in her palms and raised it, swept it up across her wine-stained lips.

  Her teeth felt mossed and sweaty.

  Her tongue felt similar, but denser and worse.

  Squeezing toothpaste on the brush – white with a streak of gelatinous green – she felt the inevitable headache approaching. It sped up as it neared and arrived like a punch.

  She remembered falling over, somewhere.

  She remembered drinking far too much.

  The join between her sticky teeth and her sticky gums was livid as the bristles ran against it. When she spat, there were flecks of pink wrapped up and writhing in the almost-iridescent green.

  When she was finished, her mouth tasted salty, not at all like mint or minty fresh.

  She would have to clean it again. Rinse and repeat.

  She would have to clean up the toilet and the tiling and the bookcase, she knew, but she couldn’t face it yet.

  The living area, after the harsh glare of the bathroom light, was pleasingly dim. Almost pitch black, in fact, in some areas. Almost, she thought, as she stood there, leaned there, in the doorway, as though she was right back in front of that shop-window cave.

  No, she thought, relying on the wall to help her edge into the kitchen: as though she was deeper in that forest, as though she had followed those breadcrumbs, those acorns, but not yet made her way back.

  Had she really eaten an olive off the carpet? she wondered.

  Ugh. She desperately hoped she was recalling that wrong.

  She couldn’t remember much else, beyond that point. Arguments. Wine. The broad strokes, but no details.

  She winced as her palm slapped against the front of the fridge. Colder than the rest of the wall. Rougher. A tangle of little magnetic letters on the front of it, unclear in the gloom, and she imagined them fungi, or just cracks in the bark. Couldn’t help it.

  The gurgle of coolant like trickling sap.

  Too loud.

  She swallowed.

  Well, she tried, but her mouth still felt desiccated, her tongue like dried fruit.

  She pushed off from the fridge and pinballed across to the coffee and mugs. The kettle, by the sink, was still half-full with water. She flicked the switch, waited, listened to it hiss.

  It reminded her of her grandma: her breath, her confusion, as she got near the end.

  Only sixty-three when it happened, early-onset dementia.

  ‘s’gone. She remembered.

  Yes, Donna, ‘s’gone.

  As she rooted through the cupboards looking for a clean enough mug, she noticed that the two oven trays and the pizza tray were still stacked in the sink. The places where the duct tape residue hadn’t come away were covered now with a fine layer of dust.

  A medium-sized pan was balanced on the strip of worktop behind the sink, between the taps. A large cheese-grater stuck up from the front of it, wonky. It looked a bit like a sculpture she remembered seeing one time. Found art, she thought was the technical term.

  Though it looked kind of like a castle, too.

  The silhouette of one.

  That is, if she squinted, and let the headache do the rest.

  Coffee steamed her forehead and her eyelids as she leaned over the cup.

  She thought it might ease the aching, but it didn’t really help.

  Still uneasy, she picked her way across what seemed at the minute an interminable gulf, the metre-wide gap between worktop and table. Stumbling, she set her coffee down too heavily and spilled some on her fingers. Winced. Gasped.

  Bastard.

  She shoved the oven trays aside and ran her hand beneath the cold tap, like her parents had always told her to do. It stung – it really fucking stung – but at least it didn’t seem, in this light, to be coming up in a blister.

  The word bastard was still on her mind when she returned to her seat, drying her hand on the tea towel. She wiped the towel across the table, around the damp side of the cup. Threw it back towards the worktop.

  Missed.

  But she wasn’t about to bend down for it now.

  The word bastard kept circling, wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Even worse than the sickness, it hassled her head.

  Squinting up at the fridge, in this light, she could almost swear that those letters were shifting to form it. Carved in the bark. On one side of the arrow.

  She blew on her coffee, took a long sip. She could taste it better than the toothpaste, but that still wasn’t much. She didn’t really drink it for the flavour, though. She drank it, mostly, just to help her wake up in the morning, and then to help her stay awake and read a little more at night.

  But she hadn’t read a book properly for two days now.

  She’d had other things to do, she thought.

  Which made a change.

  If she had been reading last night, she’d be a lot less fucked up today. She didn’t often get too drunk when she was reading, because too much wine was guaranteed to make the words all fall apart. Let the stories get loose from behind those small black-ink bars.

  There were times that was ok, of course, but she had to be careful not to get carried away.

  Everything in moderation, her Grandma used to tell her.

  Except love, Donna. You can never get enough of that. A sly little wink. A sly lit
tle laugh.

  Used to tell her that it was important to have lots of friends. Make the most of them while you’re young, because they won’t be around for long after.

  Her Christmas card list, she said once, had shrunk to the size of a joke from a cracker.

  The few occasions when Donna talked online to friends these days, she liked to have a drink beside her. Drinking filled the gaps between responses.

  Drinking took her back to how it used to be when they’d met up in the park.

  Sometimes she didn’t even buy red wine to drink, just cheap imported beer and bargain-brand cider.

  Sometimes she just drank and surfed the internet for stupid shit and cat photos that didn’t make her laugh.

  She might have been doing that last night, she thought.

  She’d clearly been too rat-arsed to do much of owt else.

  She checked over her shoulder, squinting in the dimness towards the open laptop. It was darker still than the surroundings, but the blue LED above the keyboard was flashing, letting her know that she hadn’t shut it down before bed.

  Or rather, before bathroom.

  Skin prickling, Donna shuffled towards the pull of that light, that will o’ the wisp, taking care not to trip over the beanbag en route. Balancing her coffee with an egg and spoon grace, barely, she told herself, spilling a drop.

  Reaching the desk, she pushed the button to wake the machine. Slumped down in the chair. As she waited, she noticed the ring of red wine beneath last night’s glass.

  The list of things she had to clean kept growing and growing.

  It seemed she’d sent Sammy a message last night.

  You wanna come over? x

  Was all that it said.

  25

  Hi, sorry I didn’t reply last night, had to get an early night because I’m working. I’m on my lunch break now, are you ok.. do you still want me to come over? x

  He had replied.

  With a kiss.

  Bastard.

  She said it half to him and half to herself.

  Maybe even sixty-forty. Weighted heavier to her.

  She always did this.

  That is, she had always done this in the past.

  Got lonely, got drunk, sent out a random invitation. Either in person or by text, or by email, or by just plain phoning up. Invariably hearing Please leave your message after the tone, and not even considering doing anything but. Going on for a minute, sometimes, about how she thought the guy in question was a good guy and I like talking to you and do you want to spend time together? I want to spend time with you because you’re a good guy and on and on until the message service cut her off.

  That was how things had happened with Kirk.

  Donna Crick-Oakley had called him after she’d been up late swilling cider, probably a week after first meeting him and not being impressed. She’d told him she thought he was a hottie, and asked him, in her broadest Yorkshire accent, did he want to ‘ave some fun?

  This had been at half-two in the morning, and so it wasn’t perhaps surprising it had gone through to answerphone, and Kirk hadn’t got back in touch with her until half-eight the morning after, just before he left for work.

  He hadn’t phoned her, though. He’d texted.

  Donna :) hows you this morning? Wish i hadn’t been asleep last night!! I think you’re a hottie too girl! Wanna meet later :)

  At least, she thought, he hadn’t put a kiss.

  Thinking back now, though, two smiley faces seemed a grim foreshadowing of what was to come. Always over-eager, always too excited about playing with a certain part of his toy to stop and consider that his toy might have things beyond that playing on its mind.

  And another thing about Kirk was that he texted her too much. Sent her texts like that first one, sent her texts asking how she was doing, all of the time.

  Donna, for all that she liked reading, did not like reading texts.

  The boyfriend before Kirk, he hadn’t texted much at all.

  Which had been good.

  At first.

  But then, on a whim one morning, she had checked his phone and found that he’d been sending all his texts to someone else.

  Bitch.

  The other three, they hadn’t really been relationships, she guessed. There’d been a few dates and a few fucks with each of them, but not much more than that.

  One of them had been a part of the group who hung out in the park, though, and that was kind of why she’d stopped going.

  He hadn’t taken her saying not again to him too well.

  Still, she always did this.

  And, given the message on her screen, it seemed she wasn’t about to stop.

  Was a guy like Sammy really right for her, though, for what she was wanting?

  Did she know what she was wanting?

  She knew what she’d been wanting last night. At least, she could guess.

  And she was prepared to admit to herself she was lonely.

  But she didn’t want anything serious.

  And the reply that Sammy had sent seemed hesitant, apologetic, even. Not something that she wanted. Even worse for her, from past experience, than being over-eager.

  But maybe that hesitance was his try at being respectful. Maybe that meant he was closer to being manly than any of the others. That he’d treat her fairly and fuck her right.

  Maybe it meant he was lonely too, and horny too, but just like herself didn’t want to be hurt.

  Yes, that would be nice, she typed. How about half 7?

  Then, thinking on, she sent: Please bring some wine :) x

  26

  Donna pushed the vacuum cleaner around the carpet by the beanbag, resisting the nagging temptation to dance. To spin the long-handled machine around on its pivot, rehearsing, perhaps, some moves for tonight.

  It wasn’t too difficult to hold back, in the end, given how skewwhiff her tummy still felt. Which had been made worse again by having to deal with the mess in the bathroom, and wasn’t exactly being helped by the creeping aroma of bleach.

  Indeed, it was quite likely that on any other day she’d have already gone back to bed. Maybe taken a book with her, for comfort, but probably not. Just curled up beneath the covers, in her pyjamas, embracing the warmth for a change as she sweated it out.

  No simpler detox.

  But she hadn’t really left herself that option here. She could still cancel, of course, or perhaps try and postpone until tomorrow. Though that wasn’t exactly the best way to start. And it would depend on a lie, because she couldn’t give him the actual reason: a lass who got that drunk on her own wasn’t likely to appeal.

  Neither was a lass who lived in her own filth.

  Going at the bottom of the bookcase with the brush attachment, she sucked up the remaining two olives she hadn’t salvaged last night. They rattled in the chamber and then stopped, as if pulped. She swept the brush across the spines, the dust jackets, surprised at how rough they still looked when she’d done. A couple of times she heard a noise like a twig snapping, but when she looked inside she couldn’t see any signs. Just a tangle of thread. She carried on up the shelves.

  Donna moved the empty bottles into the store cupboard along with the rest. She should probably take them out to recycle at some point, but the longer she left it the more of a problem it was. Didn’t have time to make several trips to the ground floor at the moment, and besides, it wasn’t as if she’d have cause to go in there tonight.

  The sink, on the other hand, could scarce be avoided: the pan and the oven trays were still lingering there. She set on with the scouring pad to try remove all the gunk, even using some old rubber gloves so it didn’t just transfer to her hands. There was far too much foam, though, and the bubbles went everywhere, floating up by her face; one even popped in her eye.

  She remembe
red that at some point she’d thought bubbles were fairies, that they held fairies, that it was cruel and unusual to force them to clean.

  On the last point at least, her thoughts hadn’t altered.

  Leaving the cookware to soak, fighting the urge to say sod it and just go for a nap, she made herself crack on with clearing up the cupboards, and then she straightened the letters on the door of the fridge. She toyed with the idea of putting them in alphabetical order, but thought that might be taking it a little too far. This was, after all, about being as un-weird as possible.

  Besides, that would probably take quite a while, given how there were several of each letter, and it was already getting on for quarter past four. She wanted to leave enough time to get herself sorted.

  To shower.

  To shave her legs.

  To find the right necklace to go with her dress.

  She lifted her jewellery box out of the second drawer in her bedside table, and set it down on her lap. There was a tiny ballerina on top who was supposed to pirouette a few times if you pressed a small button, though the mechanism had jammed years ago and all she did nowadays was tremble a little, as though she had stage fright or was going into shock. The music no longer played when Donna opened the lid.

  She’d been meaning to get a new one for ages, but she didn’t really take it out that often and so the thought had kept slipping her mind. She tended to think how many books she could get for the price of those earrings, or the cost of that bracelet, and so rarely added anything to the collection inside.

  Not that her mother gave her any credit for that budgeting strategy.

  At any rate, the box wasn’t as old as some of the trinkets it carried, most of them either being gifts from as far back as her christening, or else handed down after her grandma had died.

  She held up a couple of silver chains to the glare from the bulb, trying to work out which of them caught the light better. Which of them sparkled as much as she thought a princess’ should.

  The one with the amethyst, she decided. White gold drizzled round it like honey or milk.

  Fixing it around her neck, she turned to examine herself in the mirror. But it wasn’t the gem that caught her eye so much as the dried-in island of vomit at the bottom of her dress.