THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE

by Dan Micklethwaite

  She could do with being somewhere like that now, she thought, darting like a wild thing from one to the next. Like Wart as a squirrel. Young Arthur. Or as an ant, or a falcon. Anything primal like that, just to keep her mind busy. Or, rather, to let such things busy themselves in her mind, while she took a break.

  Because she overthought everything, on mornings after nights like that.

  And, in overthinking, she’d fucked things up before.

  Still, at the first mention of a prince in this story, she couldn’t help how her mind shifted to something brand new.

  To the first time.

  And the second.

  And the third.

  And the chance of more to come.

  To the future. To all the things the future might bring.

  Not just sex, and company, but houses. Children. Family.

  She’d not been wanting anything serious. Not been wanting to think of futures such as that, of futures including that other f-word, the one she didn’t like to hear.

  She might not be again, once the buzz had faded – however long that took – but for now, sitting on the toilet, naked except for the book spread out across her lap, serious was all.

  Reading, keeping her eyes trained not on the distance but on the nearer-in horizon lines of text, Donna Crick-Oakley wanted to skim to the end. To the happily ever after she knew that this book closed with.

  That dot, the full-stop that rounded off the final sentence; that was what she wanted. It was only a little speck of ink but it could cover any holes. Any gaps, any faults, any outlying data that didn’t fit the chosen trend.

  That’s what happily ever after was, she thought. A way to fudge the results, to make sure that the outcome you wanted had the highest probability. That it occupied the peak of the bell-curve on the graph.

  It was the most fantastical thing about any such story.

  The biggest lie.

  She wanted to believe it, but it was difficult today.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about statistics now, about bell-curves, about how their defining aesthetic feature was their symmetry, was that they ended at the same level as they began. On the same plateau: an x axis that, as Donna thought of it, was always set at nought.

  In fairy tales, the only common state that runs contrary to that – the only plateau raised higher than zero – is found in Sleeping Beauty. The main part of the story, as Donna knows it, takes place while the eponymous Beauty is asleep. While she’s trapped in a deep and seemingly unshakeable slumber for one hundred years.

  Whilst she cannot talk to anybody in the world during this time, nor inherit her kingdom, neither can she age. Her defining feature, beauty, does not desert her as she lays there, comatose and beyond the help of any save her one true love.

  Yet once her true love finds her, and wakes her with the miracle of his kiss, she is welcomed back to time, to consciousness. She is exposed to the ravages of entropy, against her will – because how can anybody resent dreaming for a hundred years or more?

  With a kiss, she is re-birthed into a world in which the two things that have constituted her character, her way of being – that is, her sleeping and her beauty – are already either stripped from her, or soon to be diminished.

  Such was the purity of the state that had sustained her for a century, so perfectly was she shielded from decay, that no amount of happily ever afters could give her sanctuary now.

  In comparison, that standard fairy tale get-out-of-jail-free card pales.

  It’s only a kiss, but it puts her life back in motion.

  It may set the bell-curve to rising for a little while, but there will come a point, probably soon, at which the only way is down.

  Even kisses at the end of messages were now, for Donna, an indication of where that downward turn would lead.

  x marks not the spot but the axis.

  To Donna Crick-Oakley’s mind, right now, that axis was the line her father drew when he chose to disappear.

  And that’s the thing now. Even though her father hasn’t properly been around since she started dating, he’s a constant in her head.

  Not at certain times.

  But after them.

  Around them.

  Drinking helped to block him out. Helped to stop her overthinking. Books alone were not enough. Reading was something that she got from him, was a hand-me-down, almost as much of a genetic trait as her hair. Reading was part of her. She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to. But at times like this books weren’t enough.

  Not by themselves.

  When she did it right, this mixing gave to Donna Creosote what Sleeping Beauty had, but better.

  She, at least, could dance around whilst she was blacked-out to the world.

  31

  The red wine on Donna’s lips is beautiful. She isn’t looking in a mirror, but she’s as certain as she gets. Anything about her can be beautiful today.

  She can even dress herself in foil and duct tape, if she wants to, without a speck of shame.

  She can think of herself as gorgeous.

  Because that’s what Sammy had said.

  He’d texted her at lunchtime, explaining how he wouldn’t be able to come around tonight, because he’d been late this morning, and didn’t want to anger Jim by being late tomorrow too. He’d also said that he was sorry, but that I miss you gorgeous :) x and so Donna didn’t mind.

  That much.

  She’s got him in her head, and he’s got her in his, and she’s already half-way out of it and so she doesn’t mind that much.

  The beanbag crumples underneath her, and her cotton pyjamas wrinkle against it. She runs her free hand across them both, enjoying the difference in texture, in weight.

  She hasn’t felt like getting dressed. Not properly.

  There is still just about enough food in the fridge and in the cupboards that she won’t have to bother heading out to the shop. There aren’t any more stains on her new dress in need of dry-cleaning.

  She has three good bottles of wine left in the store-cupboard.

  If she can’t see Sammy, then there’s no need to go out.

  Her mother had called about going round for dinner again tomorrow, but again she’d let it go through to answerphone. She’d erased the invitation, then turned the answerphone to mute. And drawn the curtains again, while she was standing so close. To save her having to do it later.

  As she stepped back she’d caught her heel on something that felt like a root jutting out of the floor, and nearly ended up going arse over tit. Or tit over arse. It was just one of the legs of her swivel chair, it turned out, but it could have been nasty.

  She’s much safer down here.

  There’s a small jar of green olives on the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase. A fork sticking out of the top like a flagpole, like the one on the church with the dragon slayer’s cross.

  Or a chimney. The jar itself a little cottage in another clearing up ahead.

  A chicken-leg house, like Baba Yaga’s.

  Or a bog-standard hovel, disingenuously drab, like the kind owned by Merlin the wizard himself.

  Books fan out in an arc around the front of the beanbag, as though she has already visited one of those figures and asked their advice. Pulled those disparate tomes at random from her shelves, not quite clear in the gloaming, and dealt them like a tarot hand.

  A little trick to tell her fortune.

  It’s akin to waiting at the traffic lights, for Donna.

  Red devil or green angel?

  She will simply have to smile and take it as it comes.

  She sets her wine glass down beside the jar of olives, and leans forward and flips over the book to the left. Bringing it closer to her face, she takes note of the cover – red, stretched canvas weave – and the title embossed there in faded gold print.
r />   She has read this book four times.

  She knows its narrative almost by heart.

  She is glad that she picked it, albeit accidentally.

  It takes place in a land not dissimilar to Spain, at the arse-end of the fourteenth century. It is more of a chivalric romance than a fairy tale in the strictest Brothers Grimm or Perrault manner.

  But it’s fantastical and mystical enough for it to make the grade, for Donna.

  She sips her wine and steps inside.

  32

  She discovers first the details of the dust. The swell and the squall of it, the whirling dervish ravaging across the river’s empty bed. The whipping against her stallion’s chestnut-coloured flank, and the whinny he gives in response. The stinging of the grit that slips between the eye-slits in her visor. The acrid taste of that which somehow ends up in her mouth.

  The coughing that follows.

  The tiredness that follows, that hounds her and her steed as this dust hounds the land. It saps her health, it takes her water. It steams her within her armour, and draws cracks upon her skin.

  She feels not that she’s been sleeping, but that she has been awake a hundred years. A thousand.

  The lance in her left hand is tilted only at the earth.

  After a time, the dust subsides, dissipating until it’s little more than a shadow in their past. The horse’s and hers. The land, apparently unaware that the menace has ceased its tormenting, remains steadfastly desolate, without hint of relief. Not so much as a puddle lies anywhere in sight.

  Only a palimpsest of tracks and trails, which seem so grossly over-cluttered as to be written in a foreign tongue. Any possible escape route has been lost in translation.

  As a knight accustomed to such barrenness as this, she had long ago been schooled to follow the insects and the birds to find a source of water.

  Yet the insects are doing nothing but biting her horse’s rump, and seeking out chinks in her chainmail and visor. And the birds don’t do much except wheel high above them, calling out noises that sound too much like her name.

  Raising her visor, she welcomes even this slight breeze upon her skin.

  The insects, of course, seize on the opening, speeding towards it.

  Her lashes bat back at them.

  Her breath hurricanes them away, though not for so long.

  She is weak, getting weaker, and wants only the sun upon her face a final time before she breaks.

  The flies can have her then.

  The birds and the worms and the other beasts also.

  But not before.

  She did not become a celebrated, valiant knight errant by giving up on life so easily.

  They sing her name in taverns from the bluest Aegean to the Straits of Gibraltar; from the Gothic steppes to London’s mud. Troubadours have, on making her acquaintance, been humbled into silence, before begging her to make her mark upon their scrolls, or on their harps.

  In the fame stakes, in this region, at this time, even the great Prester John has got nothing on her.

  Yet this mention of taverns gives Donna, on her beanbag, pause.

  She swigs straight from the bottle, unable now or simply too lazy to bother with the hassle of refilling her glass.

  Shame this doesn’t slake her thirst within the desert.

  If anything, it makes it worse.

  This knightly version of her is taunted by the merest thought of such a draught. Tormented by pastoral fantasies of Frenchmen, shirtless and sweating, squashing grapes between their toes.

  But, lo, what miracles might come to Donna Creosote the knight, out here in Spanish sand. The insects suddenly depart her flesh. The birds screech war-ter, war-ter now, swinging a scimitar’s arc away to the east.

  Her steed’s ears prick up. His whinnying grows louder, much more insistent.

  Donna pats his flank. She knows it too.

  It’s ok. It’s ok.

  Hauling on the reins, she alters their heading. Adding to their unexpected fortune, the scarified sandstone embankment dips up ahead, affords them a less hazardous escape from the trench than they had any right or reason to expect.

  In the sky – so harsh in its blue that it troubles the eyes – the dark dots of the birds still loiter and swirl. They are perhaps a mile away, but they have stopped again to circle. Beneath their orbit, the surface shimmers.

  Another blue, much calmer than the sky’s, is settled out there on the plain.

  It is, most assuredly, an ocean.

  Donna Creosote, the great and worthy knight, has seen her share of oceans. Recognises the verity of this vision. So closely does it resemble the other oceans she has seen, in fact, that it could be a memory.

  But, brave as ever, she trusts that it is not.

  She spurs the bony flanks of her stallion, harder and harder, but he merely whinnies once more and staggers to a stop. He’s well beyond the point of tired. His haunches are sagging and his forelegs have failed. He can’t go on, not this dehydrated.

  She dismounts, strokes her right gauntlet from dusty neck to dusty rump.

  She raises his left ear and whispers: Don’t worry. I will be back with water.

  She fully intends to.

  She is a woman of her word.

  Half a mile into this trek, half a mile out from where those bastard birds all circle, and she begins to know the weight, the beyond-the-point-of-tiredness feeling that settled on her horse.

  Iron is not fit clothing for such brimstone-heated climes as this.

  Or it is the only clothing suitable: the shackles of the damned.

  Slowly she lays down her lance, removes her armour. Helmet first, then plate by plate. Soon, she sports nothing but a coarse sacking shirt and coarse sacking pants.

  Glancing at the harsh blue of the sky again, the harsher, blanker whiteness of the sun, she guesses even this will be too much.

  Glancing at the calm of the ocean, she doesn’t think she’ll need it.

  In anticipation of the cooling tide, she sets off at a pace she can’t possibly maintain.

  And yet, a quarter mile out, there she is, still going, still running with her arms out wide to greet the waves, as though they were a husband or a father coming home.

  Such sweet potential in the burning air!

  She forgets that she has neither of those things, forgets her universe is, at present, little beyond her own weak self and a thirsty, dying horse.

  She throws her arms around that forgetting.

  She hugs it in tight to her breast.

  She is kind to it, gifts it the sound of her heart.

  Which races.

  Which war-drums.

  Which battering-ram-beats at the inner wall of her chest.

  The birds are so close now that she can hear their calls clearly.

  War-ter.

  War-ter.

  She takes comfort and confidence from the fact that they have not yet reverted to calling her name.

  She refuses to stop.

  Refuses even to slow down.

  Breath barely enters her lungs before the jolt of her feet on the sandstone expels it.

  It doesn’t matter to this fearless knight.

  Donna Creosote does not give up. Does not surrender.

  To any enemy. Man or beast or element.

  Except, it seems, despair.

  The glimmering expanse of ocean, blue and calm as eyes of all-forgiving gods, it keeps on falling further back, the nearer she gets to the place where it was.

  At first, she doesn’t want to admit that she knows what’s happening.

  But then she collapses, and has no other choice.

  The earth is not cooling and blue as she lies there: it is wretched and red.

  In the mirage she glimpses the traffic-light devil.

&n
bsp; She screams vengeance upon him before she blacks out.

  In this pause, this lull in proceedings, Donna uses the fork as a miniature lance, skewering an olive from deep in the jar.

  She bites it in half.

  The last thing she expects is to open her eyes and find herself living. The next to last thing she expects to find is someone else alongside her, living as well.

  It is a man, and he is offering her water, from a leather bag.

  She nods graciously to accept it, then snatches it out of his hand.

  He introduces himself while she quenches her thirst.

  His name is Samuel.

  Her drinking done, she gives him a smile.

  Until she remembers she’s not wearing clothes.

  Looking down the length of her sunburnt body, her feet look large again, look weird. She covers her breasts and her pubis, instinctively.

  Samuel’s eyes widen. He is embarrassed, on her behalf as much as his own. He turns away to help her hide her shame.

  They sit there on the sandstone, not talking.

  She hears the birds again overhead.

  They have come to break the silence, she thinks.

  And they will do so with a word that isn’t war-ter.

  She places her hand on the rough woollen shirt that covers his shoulder.

  Will you help me get back to my horse? Will you give my steed a drink?

  Will you give my steed a drink? repeats Donna, in the quiet of her flat.

  Woah, boy.

  Samuel grins and helps her to stand.

  33

  They sip from the same flagon of mead using separate straws.

  Around them, the tavern is a-bustle with gossip and murmurs of secrets and dangers and awestruck retellings of their magnificent deeds. The other patrons all watch them out the corners of their eyes, as if expecting another such deed to be done.

  Here too, the air burns with potential.

  Catches fire even easier, perhaps, due to the fumes of the beer and the regulars’ sweat.

  She should slow down with the wine, she thinks, holding the bottle up to the light. There’s only a quarter of it left, maybe less, and the other two bottles will have to last her all night.