As promised, Part n of Susie's Doll. Better late than never, I hope. Not a particularly long one, I'm afraid, and probably a bit odd. Oh well. Enjoy.
------------------------------------------
n
She’s in a field. Not a field like the ones they had outside her school, back in the days when she went to school, or even like the ones Uncle Casper had taken her to when she was smaller, to show her the sheep and the chickens and cows. This field was wide open, stretching further than she could imagine walking, and surrounded by thick woodland on each side. She’s in the middle. There’s a slightly raised area of ground, which is what she finds herself standing upon. She turns round, full circle, looking for something, anything she can find, anything to familiarise herself. She looks up: a single magpie floats down from above and lands far to her left. One for sorrow; she’ll have to look for more. She stares at the sky, then at the trees around the field, then at the field itself. Nothing.
She sits down and sighs. The sigh echoes off the air and back into her eardrums a million times louder. She lies back onto the grass. The ground’s wet from the morning dew but she doesn’t think it’s still morning. It must be the dew, though, because although it’s cloudy it doesn’t seem to have rained for a while. The grass is long and unkempt but patchy, not thick. She uproots a piece from the ground, splits it carefully down the middle, lodges it between her thumbs and brings it to her mouth. She purses her lips to the blade of grass and blows, as if into a trumpet. The noise makes her smile – if there were others around, she may have laughed out loud, but she would feel silly doing that alone. She makes the noise again, and again, and again, making each squeak last longer than the previous. She lies back again.
Now, in the sky above, she sees another magpie; it flutters down and lands metres away from where the other sits. Two for joy. Better. Morning, mister Magpie. Morning, mister Magpie. She looks up again; another is steadily declining from the white above. Three for a girl? This one lands a little further away from the rest of the group. It scuttles around on its flimsy feet for a few seconds then flaps up again, landing closer to her this time, and staring intently into her eyes. Focus. She looks up again and sees another magpie, and another for that matter, floating down towards her, like the first sprinklings of a black snow. They land perfectly adjacent, both staring, both still. Two more – they’re coming in pairs now – land to the other side of her, then two more again. Each magpie stares into her deep, fiery eyes, silent and unnerving. Then, slowly, they begin to approach, walking more like humans now – no, not humans, automatons, programmed pieces of magpie metal, out to complete their set task. They trudge together, steadily, accurately forming a ring around her. She looks up, left, right, down; she finds no escape. She closer her eyes and counts - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten – but they’re still there when she draws back her eyelids. Come on. Focus. Again – one, two, three, four, fi-
Updates! Yes. Back to non-pretentious chapter numbers/names now. Another reasonably short one but everything's about to get going a little bit. Hope you like it. Please pass the link on to other forumites etc that you think might enjoy.
Would anyone be interested in reading another thing I'm planning on starting work on soon? It's more the sort of thing you'd usually find here, though it's not specifically about depression/self-harm/whatever. More rooted in reality and more about 'ordinary people' and suchlike though. Would anyone be interested in another episodic thing going on? I'm getting right back into this writing malarkey. Let us know.
Once again, enjoy, comments appreciated as always!
________________________________ 2
On Christmas Day when she was five, Susie’s uncle had come round for dinner. He had been away for two years, travelling the world, “seeing all there is to see,” her mum had said. Susie had met her uncle before, but didn’t remember him. “Ooh, he remembers you,” everyone in her family had told her, as if forgetting something from your infanthood was some sort of horrible crime. She put on an excited front, but in reality she was somewhat dubious about meeting her uncle. She’d never been fond of newcomers.
She had awoke at nine in the morning. Her mum and dad had been up since six expecting her to come bounding down the stairs to see what ‘Santa’ had brought, but she fancied sleeping in. Her mum and dad kept up the façade, and Susie went along with it. She’d seen one of her presents in her dad’s wardrobe the year before. But it made her parents happy that she believed, so on she went on believing for them.
Susie draped her dressing gown – pink with blue polka dots. She hated it – over her shoulders and walked nonchalantly down the stairs. She got to the living room, stopped, took a deep breath, and put on her best excited face. She opened the door.
“Susie! Merry Christmas!” her mum and dad grinned in unison. It was as if they’d been rehearsing the timing all year. The both got up and showered Susie in hugs. She’d never been a touchy-feely person, but she hugged them back. It was Christmas after all, and back then it had all been happy families. “Do you want to see what Santa’s brought you?” her dad asked, too enthusiastically, as he walked over to the bulging, novelty-sized stocking hanging from the mantelpiece. Susie noticed the bottle of sherry on the hearth was significantly emptier than it had been after she poured the small glass next to the mince pie the previous evening. She dutifully followed her dad, forced grin still stuck to her face.
Later, she became bored of the etch-a-sketch, the My Little Pony set and the videos that had been in the stocking (although she ate the chocolate coins straight away while she unwrapped the rest). But one present that day was rarely to leave her side again.
Susie’s uncle arrived while she was upstairs getting dressed an hour or so later. She heard the door, she heard the dog go insane, then she head her mum shout “Casper!” starting in dog-whistle pitch and gliding down to almost a rumble. She pulled on her Christmas tree socks that had also been in the stocking and trotted downstairs to meet this new relative of hers. Instantly, Susie was pleasantly surprised.
Uncle Casper was a short man with long, shaggy grey hair and a beard. He was wearing an electric blue collared shirt with huge black cufflinks and scruffy grey jeans with grass stains on the knees. On his feet, he wore big, brown boots with faded yellow laces. The contrast with her conservatively dressed parents was spectacular. Susie admired his individuality and how comfortable he was with stepping away from the norm, even at her young age. This man was going to be her type of person.
Susie’s dad was in the kitchen, running around and swearing about the potatoes, and so Susie herself was next to be greeted. His eye caught hers. “Now then, precious,” he said smiling. Susie remembered now how he had never crouched down as other adults have – perhaps because he was reasonably short himself – he simply reached his hand down to shake hers. She remembered liking how he treated her on a level, even right down to their initial greeting. She always had hated condescension, something she would later learn her uncle Casper had a distaste for too. “You won’t remember me, will you?”
Susie said no.
“How are you, then?” Uncle Casper had traces of an Irish accent in his voice, not that she was old enough to know it was an Irish accent at her age. “Having a good Christmas so far?”
”I’ve only just got up,” Susie told him. Uncle Casper laughed, a deep, hearty laugh that she could tell was – as her mum used to say – with her, not at her.
Uncle Casper wasn’t the only one coming round for Christmas dinner. It was a tradition in Susie’s family: the whole lot came round to eat and catch up. Grandma Liz, Grandma Eileen and Granddad David, Uncle Richard and Auntie Joan. They had to extend the dining room table and bring in chairs from all over the house, crowding round the food like pigs round a trough. By half eleven, they had all filtered in. Susie hated how much excessive attention she received on such occasions. Relatives who never usually glanced in her direction all flocking round her, crowding her space and making childish noises, commenting on how she'd grown and asking each other, ooh, would she end up as tall as her mother, did they think?. It wasn't necessary: the way Susie saw it, if she grew as tall as her mother, then so be it. It wasn't a live-or-die situation.
Other little girls her age would of course lap up the attention in an instant, revelling in an ocean of compliments and flattery. But other little girls played with Barbies and owned little pink plastic mugs and had make-believe tea parties with their teddy bears. Susie had realised from a very early age that she wasn't like other little girls, and had long become accustomed to the fact. She was intelligent beyond her years, reasoning things in a fairly adult way. She had always preferred to sit quietly in a corner and listen to her parents converse with their friends, than spend time engage in recreation with her own peers. People thought that was weird; but Susie just saw it as the way she was.
The family gathered round and exchanged presents. Susie only got a few – ‘Santa’ had already been, of course – and they were largely as expected. A Barbie, incredibly – hadn’t Auntie Joan worked out yet that Susie didn’t play with dolls? – and a couple of childish books. Her mum got a new blender from Grandma Liz and seemed to be over the moon about it. Her dad got a new golf club, which he acted very pleased about but later moaned that it was a sh*t brand.
After the commotion had died down, Susie’s uncle took her to one side. She hadn’t received anything from him, but then she hadn’t really expected to, not knowing him and everything. But sure enough, he took a rather large parcel from his rucksack. “Here you go, Suze,” he said, “Your mum tells me you’re not usually into these but this one’s pretty special. I bought it from a stall in Egypt. I reckon it might be magic… Open it. See what you think.”
Susie was curious. She began to carefully remove the wrapping paper.
“It’s not much,” apologised Uncle Casper, “the money’s been a little thin…”
Susie discarded the paper and stared at the doll in her hands.
The doll stared back.
*
Now, Susie awoke to a knock at the door. Groggily, she rolled over to her left and opened her eyes as he door slowly swung open. Was someone along to clean the floor already? What time was it? Or was Nurse Graham back to inflict misery on the room once again? But no, not this time. The man entering the room was dressed in garish purple jogging bottoms and a tight white T-shirt. He had shaggy grey hair and a beard.
I'm really loving this; it's getting quite exciting =)
And I'd love to read the other thing you're going to be writing too. Whatever you write I'll be interested in reading 'cause I love the way you write.
The only time you will find real light is when you're searching in the dark..
