First published by O-Books, 2011
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Text copyright: Gregory Dark 2010
ISBN: 978 1 84694 881 7
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Design: Stuart Davies
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To Sue –
and, of course, her frogs
Acknowledgements
Bob Smith tendered so much help to the early drafts of Susie and the Snow-it-Alls he would be justified in claiming co-authorship. Probably it was he who contributed what you will think are the best bits!
My thanks are due too to Judy Browder, Bruce Crowther and Teresa Parrot, who all read drafts and made suggestions that contributed to what now lies before you.
A piece you would not have seen had it not been for the tireless work of Anne Piper, a friend indeed and of titan deeds. As my daughter, Lyubov, is a friend of deeds; likewise her husband, Keith; Clara Izurieta; Malachy Farren; and Sally Reading.
I owe thanks to John Hunt (boss of ‘O’-Books & totwok: the one to whom one kowtows), a publisher rare in today’s world: one with integrity.
Nick Welch’s aplomb in design is as apparent with this cover as it ever has been; so is Stuart Davies’s diligence in the book’s production. My thanks too to all those others at ‘O’-Books: Nicola Dimond, Trevor Greenfield, Catherine Harris, Kate Rowlandson, and Maria Watson.
You who are printing Susie and the Snow-it-alls also deserve my thanks. So do those of you distributing the book, selling it, delivering it … or suggesting it to friends. You are all completely indispensable to whatever success this volume might enjoy. You all help me to be my me-est me.
I am a long way yet from being that, from being my me-est me, I mean. Writing this book, though, made me me-er than I would have been had I not have written it. And I thank all those people who helped me along the way as I wrote it, and thus enabled the writing to happen.
I could not have written without the support of an entire city of helpers: all the butchers, bakers, all the candle-stick makers; all the dentists and osteopaths, the policemen and firemen, the bus drivers and car mechanics, those working in the factories manufacturing vacuum cleaners and biscuits and televisions. And on and on. Those mending the sewers or tarmacking the roads; those selling the fruit or the ice-cream; those felling the trees or bottling the ink.
I also thank those in your life who brought us together, be that parent(s), guardian, teacher, friend, whoever. I sincerely hope that by the book’s end you too will be grateful to that person.
Finally I want to thank you. The greatest book ever written is only ever as good as its reader. Without you this tome is just a lot of squiggles on paper; without your enjoyment it’s just a mish-mash of words. If it does become a book, it is thanks to you. And that is a transformation which is always worthy of thanks.
Gregory Dark, 2011
“Who is your friend? The person who Helps you to be your youest you.”
Chapter 1
“Cold is not cool,” Susie shivered to herself. “Ch-ch-chilling is not f-f-freezing. B-b-being c-c-cold, my f-f-friends,” she shouted aloud, “is n-n-not b-b-eing c-c-cool.”
The nip in the air was a scythe in the air, so sharp it could sharpen a pencil. It bit like a cut from licking an envelope: too finely to draw blood but oh so painfully.
Susie was in an otherwise deserted goal-mouth of the barren sports-ground. She was goalkeeper. And the goal she kept? They could keep it! They could blooming well keep all of it!
She had been put in goal because she was always put in goal. Susie was the last person picked for any team. Goal was reckoned where she could do less damage than anywhere else.
“In fact,” she continued brrring to herself, “cool is not cool. The only thing that is cool, in fact,” she told God, just in case God didn’t know, “is being boiling, baking HOT.”
Susie looked at her numb hands. They were turning blue. Appropriate really. It matched her team-sash. Susie was playing for the light blues.
The light blues were (to Susie’s not-really-interested surprise) hammering the dark blues. Since the kick-off all she had seen of her team-mates was a distant blur.
Susie was not a soccer enthusiast. If anything, in fact, she was a soccer ‘naf’ – a ‘naf’ is the opposite of a ‘fan’.
“Cold is not cool,” she repeated, marching the length of her goal-line like a tin soldier, left arm and left leg swinging together. “Cold is not cool, cold is not cool, cold is not cool,” she shunted, train-engine like, chuffing backwards and forwards, steam streaming from her nose and her mouth as if she were a locomotive.
She got bored with the game. She kicked Beckhamly at a tuft of much-too cheerful grass, and leaned with pretended nonchalance against the glacial goal-post.
She clutched the frog in her pocket.
Like most of her frogs, this was a present from her grandmother. Her mother called them “toys” and her grandmother “portable kisses”. Susie – albeit secretly – disliked the first description and squirmed at the second, but she usually (albeit secretly) carried one of them. The one she had with her that day bore the most ginormous scar from yellow belly to dark green back.
Her glance happened towards the sky. It was a lovely sight. It was of a sky-blue which the sky so rarely is. Into which had been splodged a pick’n’mix of clouds, as light, as white and fluffy as cotton-wool balls. The sun had about it the sadness of a has-been prize-fighter, still trying to prove a strength no-one else now believed in.
“Oh, cold is not cool,” she sang to the firmament, her ever more blueing hand grasping an air microphone. “Cold is not coo-oo-oo-l.”
One of the clouds was in the shape of a bear. No, two clouds, two bears. And there! A man with a sausage nose and a sort of oniony head. Friends? – So her grandma was always telling her – Who needed them?
“Cold is not cool,” she cha-cha-cha’d to herself as her gaze swooped over the various sights. “C-c-cold is not c-c- …”
“SU-SIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIE!!!!”
The roar jolted her back to Earth smartly enough that she was able to see the football dribble, almost apologetically, over the goal-line. Like a panther she hurled herself on it. She found herself face down in a puddle of half-frozen mud.
Miss McBain (Games) took the ball from her. “Brilliant save, Susie,” she told her. Susie, her face coated with and dripping mud, accepted the tribute demurely. “Only, see, the idea is,” Miss McBain (Games) know-it-alled, “to save the ball before it goes into the goal.”
Oh, ha-ha-ha, Miss McBain (Games). Highly droll. Totally hysterical.
Susie could hear laughter. She was a girl whose range of talents was Andes-like in its scale. Sadly, though, an ability to laugh at herself was not … let us say, one of its peaks. She glanced over to the touch-line. On which, giggling like tickled hye
nas, were Mia and Wilmer.
Ever since her arrival at the Iain Kennedy Institute, some six weeks previously, Mia and Wilmer had been a thorn in Susie’s side. Susie didn’t know why. She had, as far as she knew, done nothing to upset them. They had just seemed to take an instant dislike to her. Which had, very shortly, simmered into a hatred as seething as it was inexplicable.
Mia was tall and big. She wore pink spectacles joined at the arm with a length of grimy plaster. Wilmer was short and skinny. He had a stye in his eye, which was thus protected for the moment by a black patch. Mia and Wilmer seemed to give truth to the truism that opposites attract: Mia and Wilmer were inseparable. And, inseparably, they were the bane of Susie’s life.
Mrs Adelaide referred to them frequently as “ne’er-do-wells” and as such they were currently being punished for some misdemeanour or other. Thus, instead of freezing to death on the Arctic playing field, they were joining other transgressors in a game called ‘Hunt the Challenge Cup’. Funny sort of a punishment that was. Susie would have given her chattering eye-teeth to be undergoing that sort of a punishment.
The Challenge Cup! It had gone missing, Mrs Adelaide had announced at that morning’s assembly. Presumed stolen. What a colossal deal! It was a shiny bit of tin, for God’s sake, the blooming Challenge Cup! Not the ‘Mona Lisa’ or anything. I mean, do let’s get real here. What was all the fuss about?
But fuss there was. And a-plenty. Indeed, a fuss a-plenty, and a dragnet. Around the changing rooms, in the school itself. No nook was not nooked into, no cranny not scoured with a crannifying glass.
Schools!
Not till the day that she died would Susie understand schools. Not them, nor their constant know-it-allery, not their absurd rules, nor their even more absurd set of values. Neither their principles – nor principals!
Around the changing rooms there continued to be the beehiviest commotion.
Oh, and now we had the staff joining in as well, the entire know-it-all squadron, no doubt. There was Ms Stewart (English). Oh, and there Mr Jonson (History). What? No Phil? Well, doubtless in a minute or two. Didn’t they have any teaching to do, these teachers?
That was the problem with school – well, at any rate, one of the problems with school: Everyone was trying to be something other than what they were. Teachers were Sherlock Holmesing all over the place, Miss McBain (Games) was managing the World Cup football XI ...
She could feel glowers lasering into her from her team-mates. The ball was kicked back. “Oh, get real,” Susie wanted to tell them. “This is a game of school schoolgirl soccer.” But she didn’t say that. Instead she kept mouthing an icicled “sorry” each time a glowerer was spotted.
The sky breathed in and sucked her again into its grip. She was, Susie, so-o-o-o c-c-c-c-cold. There in the clouds, zooming through them, there was a rabbit. But with the nose of a super-sonic plane. And there, drifting regally backwards, was a unicorn. A rather beautiful and snooty unicorn, point of fact. Susie bet herself unicorns didn’t have to play blooming soccer. She bet unicorns weren’t forced outside to die from hypothermia on frozen fields.
“SUSIE!!!”
She checked the ball wasn’t already in the net. It wasn’t. Okay, that meant it had to be coming towards her. Right. So, where the hell was it?
Ah!
Poof!
It hit her square on the forehead. And cannoned to one of the defensive players who then booted it randomly up-field.
“Good save, Susie,” she heard a team-mate tell her without even a vestige of sarcasm. “Really. Good save.”
Her head still jiggling from the shock, she woozily accepted the compliment with a lop-sided grin and a shrug which sought, unsuccessfully, for an anyone-could-have-done-it modesty. She peeked over to the touch-line to see whether or not Mia and Wilmer had also witnessed that.
Of course they hadn’t. I mean, why was she surprised? If they had have seen that, that would have been fair. That would have gone some way to compensate for the fact that they had seen her humiliation. But, as anyone over six knows – anyone with even half a brain-cell – there is about as much fairness in life as there are lions in the North Pole.
Oh, and now there was an even greater kerfuffle around the changing rooms. The headmistress herself, the redoubtable Mrs Adelaide, had got herself involved – of the know-it-alls the know-it-allest.
And yes, sure enough, there was Phil.
Oh God, oh please God no, there too was Susie’s mother, Mrs Adelaide’s secretary.
All of them buzzing around the place like bees with ants in their stings.
Had any of them seen her magnificent save?
No, of course not. It was the story of Susie’s life. Her disasters were watched by an audience the size of that for a royal wedding. Her triumphs, rare in themselves, were noticed by her frogs alone.
Courtesy of Susie’s save, the light blues won 4:1. Susie got a couple of slaps on the back as she glowed towards the changing rooms, knowing that soon (and finally) she would be warm again. Those slaps were the closest Susie had ever been to be sportily feted. They felt good.
But the good they felt was short-lived indeed.
As soon as she entered the changing rooms she saw them. And as soon as she saw them she knew she was in trouble. Big trouble.
Like so many witches around a cauldron, there was a small coven huddled together. This contained Susie’s mum and Phil, Mrs Adelaide, Ms Stewart and Mr Jonson. Ms Stewart cracked her knuckles. Mr Jonson sniffed. Mia and Wilmer were basking just outside the coven’s inner core. Mrs Adelaide held Susie’s school bag.
“Ah, Susan,” Mrs Adelaide said, “I wonder if you can explain what the plinth of the Challenge Cup is doing in your satchel.”
Chapter 2
Susie was furious. But she was also terrified. “I did not steal it,” she murmured for what felt to her like the hundredth time.
And for what seemed like the thousandth time her mother wailed: “Oh Susie!” and, whilst Phil “there, there”d her and patted her snivelling shoulder, grizzled some more into her soggy Kleenex.
Susie could feel herself getting very angry. If she wasn’t careful she’d end up doing something really silly. How dare they? How dare they?
She didn’t know how the stupid plinth got into her stupid bag. She hadn’t a clue where the actual cup actually was. Neither did she care. The cup was, she was tired of saying, an object of no interest to her whatsoever: of the same interest that a boomerang would have in a buttercup. Why would she steal it?
And just suppose for a moment she had stolen it, how could they think her so dumb that she would have left the plinth in her bag? That was almost more insulting than being thought the thief.
“This is getting us nowhere,” said Mrs Adelaide, scratching the side of Susie’s frayed nerves with her thistly Scottish brogue. She smoothed back her perfectly smooth, severely combed grey hair into the tight-fisted bun which contained it. It was an affectation. Not a single hair would have had the temerity to move a millimetre on such a perfectly regimented head. “You have the weekend to consider your position, child. If on Monday you inform us of the cup’s whereabouts we will deal with the matter internally. If, however, you remain obdurate, you will leave me no alternative other than to call in the police. Do you understand me, child?”
Susie wanted to protest. She wanted to remind the headmistress she’d not yet been tried, not yet been found guilty. But she was too scared, too daunted, too intimidated.
“Do you, child, understand me?”
“Yes,” Susie managed to burble.
“‘Yes’ what, Susan?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Susie pushed out, every atom of her body rebelling against this enforced unction.
“Go,” the headmistress told her.
Susie stood and made for the door; her mother likewise.
“I did not steal it,” Susie said under her breath for the hundred and first time.
“Oh, Susie,” wailed her mother for the t
housand and oneth, as Phil “there, there”d her once again, and once again patted her shoulders. He closed the door behind them.
As the trio walked along the corridor which led to the car park, Susie could feel the rage sear within her. It felt like the monster must do in nearby Loch Ness, too scared of its own strength to show itself publicly.
The three of them marched in silence. Those walking in the opposite direction would not even look at them. Her school-friends, her colleagues. But Susie knew, the second they had passed, they would start sniggering. And pointing. And sneering. The temptation would be too great: She was the new girl, the daughter of the headmistress’s secretary, stepdaughter of the geography teacher.
The Great Challenge Cup Robber.
Suddenly there before her were Mia and Wilmer. Mia’s red sweatshirt was emblazoned with the yellow letters ‘IKI’. Above this she wore a grin of crowing smugness. Wilmer wore a similar sweatshirt – unsurprisingly, as this was the uniform. What was surprising was that his grimace was not a grin but a frown. The frown told Susie that Wilmer was not feeling triumphant: He was feeling guilty. In that moment Susie knew who had planted the plinth in her bag.
Well, she’d have to do something about that.
She thought about challenging the duo there and then. No, she decided, she needed some time to think, some time to decide what to do for the best.
* * *
It was only the remorselessly sad who could call the heap of junk which Phil used as transport a ‘car’. Susie called it the ‘shamemobile’.
As if the indignities she’d already suffered that day were not enough, she had now to live with the knowledge that an entire, albeit invisible, institute of eyes was watching her clamber into that shamemobile. An entire, albeit inaudible, tidal wave of their giggles splashed oceanically around her, engulfed her. Drowned her.
The shamemobile did not start in the manner of non-jalopy cars. The shamemobile spluttered into a reluctant life of hiccupped smoke and exhausted belches. With the wind behind it, downhill and in top gear it managed a chug. It was thus, and in silence, that they got home.
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