Story
The Girl from Sadbury
A story, a little imagined · fifteen short chapters
Once there was a girl who was born in a sad town, moved house more times than she had teeth, and one night fell out of bed and kept on falling, into a country that turned out to be made of everything she had ever written down.
I. Falling out of bed
12 December 2012 · 22:25The girl was born in Sadbury, a town so sad that even the pigeons walked with their heads down. She lived for a while at her grandmother’s house, the one up on the hill, and she had the habit of falling out of bed.
One night she fell out while everyone slept. Her father was lying on the very edge of the bed, so small and so quiet that he did not wake. She sat on the floor against the wall, knees to her chest, and said nothing. She looked up at the bed and waited for someone to notice her. Nobody did. She was very afraid of the dark, and of the crocodiles that lived under the bed, and of the wolf from the story of the goat and her three kids, whose voice she was always practising to recognise in case he came to the door pretending to be her mother.
Her mother was a princess. She was very tall, in a long pale dress, with golden hair and a small crown that caught the light, and everyone in Sadbury said how lucky the girl was. At night, though, on the wall behind the bed, the princess’s shadow was much taller than the princess, and its fingers were very long.
20 November 2012When the princess was upset, the girl ran away and hid, and prayed for visitors. Visitors were the best thing that could happen in that house, because whenever someone knocked at the door, the princess put her face back on.
When there were no visitors, the princess did not need her face. She hit the girl with whatever she found nearby, with her fists, with her feet. Afterwards she pushed her into the corner, on her knees, and left her there for hours, not allowed to eat, not allowed to get up. And her father sat very still at the princess’s feet and looked at the floor.
9 October 2012Only once that she could remember did the princess ask the girl to sleep beside her. The girl lay on the very edge of the bed all night and did not move.
Her father was small and quiet, and he got a little smaller every year. He hid: on the very edge of the bed, behind the sofa cushions, behind the smoke of his cigarette. Sometimes, when the princess was looking the other way, he took the girl aside and whispered an explanation. Then he went back into hiding, and usually told the princess everything.
But when she was small, she did not see any of this. She saw a beautiful mother and a quiet father, like everyone else’s. The shadows came later, slowly, the way your eyes get used to the dark, and only then did she see what had been standing in them all along.
She waited so long that the wall behind her went soft, like a curtain. She leaned back, and the floor was not there anymore, and she fell, slowly, past the crocodiles (who were smaller than she had feared, and quite bored), past the records she knew by heart, every word, past a shelf where someone was already putting away the records she would one day be too old for.
12 December 2012Her doll was missing some eyelashes. The girl had not done anything to her. She had not wanted to hurt her.
2008She landed in a house with no telephone. Her grandmother was there, younger, sewing. She had half a wedding dress. “Where is the other half?” asked the girl. Her grandmother did not answer. Somewhere a phone was ringing, and then another, and then the girl was not sure if it was ringing or if she only had the impression. When it really did ring, she didn’t know how to hold it in her hands, or how best to answer. Or maybe the call was for someone else. Or maybe nobody was calling at all.
Her grandmother put the half dress around the girl’s shoulders, like a cloak, and pointed to the door.
II. More moves than teeth
November 2012 · 23:00Outside, the road went everywhere at once, the way roads do when you are carried along them as a baby. At three months the girl was carried to Rustmouth, where the river was brown and the sky smelled of iron. At eleven months she was carried to Little Hushing, a village full of girls.
There were so many girls in that house, and they argued so much, that the first sentence the girl ever learned was not “I’m hungry” but “you keep quiet, why are you butting in”. She said it at the table, holding out her bowl. It worked, more or less.
After a year the road turned to Brinewick, where everything tasted faintly of salt. Nobody there could mind the girl, so the youngest girl from Little Hushing came along to mind her. She brought lice. After her came an old woman who drank the plum brandy from the cupboard and filled the bottle back up with water, so that for a whole winter the grown-ups wondered why their brandy had gone so polite.
Then, a year and a bit later, back to Sadbury, as if the map had been folded the wrong way. At every crossroads there was a signpost to Normalton. The girl had lived there once, for a short while, and liked it best of all. She had a vague feeling that if only they had struggled to stay in Normalton, she might have turned out “normal”. But the signposts all pointed in slightly different directions, and none of the roads went there twice.
31 October 2012When they left Normalton, she was so sad to be going back to Sadbury that she imagined coming back one day to the old block of flats, roller-skating perfectly, or riding proudly on a horse. She did not know why a horse. Maybe because it is impressive. She had only ever drawn one house: a big one with a vineyard behind it, because that, the princess said, was where they were going to live. They moved into a small flat by the station in Sadbury instead.
In Normalton she did her homework at a neighbour girl’s house, completely on her own for the first time, and changed out of her home clothes there before going out. She liked the shortest boy in the class, because he was funny and his ears stuck out like the handles of a jug. She fitted in. Once, in new shoes with very high soles that she had begged for, she tripped in the street, and when she turned and saw a lady behind her she slipped into the first doorway and pretended to read the letterboxes. The lady came into exactly that doorway. “Excuse me,” said the girl, “do the Ashworths live here?” The Ashworths lived only in a book she had read. The shame.
24 October 2012Then it was back to Sadbury, where people threw their rubbish at her: burrs in her hair, rough boys, mean girls, gangs from different blocks of flats at war. She got into rock music, and walked round their part of town so they would see that she was rock and mean too, and let her in. She had always dreamed of belonging to a group: of being pulled in, of laughing together. It came to nothing.
III. The thirsty forest
2008Past Brinewick the road ran into a burning field. The girl walked across it barefoot. Black thistles, dry and sharp, bit into her feet. The sun pressed down like a hand. The shapes around her bent and mixed by laws she did not know, and her hands looked for something to hold, found nothing, and gave up.
Then the stories came to meet her. A girl in a silk dress ran past to meet her prince. A rooster stood on a fence crying for his purse with two coins. There were golden apples, and a white horse with a strange rider who smiled at her, and a small house with seven very small beds. And there was a forest, so much beauty gathered in one place, and in the forest a well. The well had been kind to a kind girl once, and had kept cold, clear water for her on her way home.
“Ma-ma,” the girl whispered, “water.” But the well said: not yet. Not on the way out. Only on the way home.
IV. The gate of quiet
November 2012Beyond the forest stood a school, and in front of the school a gate. The girl had been a very talkative child. Only the princess had understood her, or said she had. At the gate, a keeper asked for her voice, the way some places ask you to leave your umbrella. She would get it back, he said, when she had become the best in her class.
Years later she asked the princess: “So when did I stop talking?” And the princess said: “Well, I think when you started school.”
20 November 2012From the moment she started school, she knew she was not allowed to answer back. So she kept quiet. It seemed to be the thing she did best, and she grew fond of it. Even later, when she met someone new, she would be quiet for a while, and pretty, and clever, and only afterwards come back to herself.
12 December 2012She gave up her toy, because the princess’s goddaughter had broken hers. She gave up her bike too, and the computer. She was the good sister. Yes. She got very upset when the princess made her perform these wonderful acts of charity. Apparently, said the princess, she had been asking for a beating. She usually got one. Her father never said anything.
The princess said she had spoiled her too much. “Mom, news flash,” the girl wrote, in capitals: THAT IS NOT SPOILING! IT ISN’T. SIMPLE AS THAT. Did the princess really think that someone spoiled as a child would not know how to share, or would always be looking for approval? The princess, tall and smiling, sent her religious messages every morning.
Later she heard a nicer explanation in a television series. She had been gifted, and that was why she got bored so quickly. Yes, that sounded nicer: she had been gifted. It lasted until high school, when she got even more bored.
She remembered her father on the sofa in the living room, small, half hidden by the cushions, and the time he nearly set the house on fire by falling asleep with a cigarette, and the meals she cooked for him when the princess was away.
In high school she had hoped to meet someone like her, or even herself, and not figuratively. Not that she liked herself; she just thought she would get along best with her. How much she had to lie, over the years, to get along with her best friends. All three (3) of them.
2007Inside, she kept a very short record of each year, on the back of her report card:
9th grade: I don’t remember.
10th grade: I got a guitar. It was nice, but it’s not for me.
11th grade: I understood. I grew up.
12th grade: I don’t remember.
Monday 17 September 2007When she finally walked out of the gate, they were all standing there as in an old family photograph: the classmates, the teachers, the form teacher, the parents, people she had seen only once, all equally awkward, not sure whether to say hello, keep quiet, look at the ground or smile. Some of them had contradicted her for years. Others had agreed with her without listening. She could not decide which had cost her more. Could she have grown up somewhere else? No. She had grown up right there, in the centre. She put her hands on her forehead and walked on.
V. The City of Hours
2007The next city was built entirely of hours, and none of them would let her catch them. She took a room in a tall building. She wanted nothing but a single room, preferably to be alone in, and vegetarian food, and in the City of Hours this counted as being very demanding.
November 2012Many days and nights in that building turned her into a monster. She dressed in black, or very seriously, and dyed her hair black. She did not get along with anyone at the university. Her first project with two classmates ended in failure, or rather in the stress she caused them. She decided it was not because she had been spoiled: that answer was too easy for the people around her.
late October 2012Her marks went in waves: a 6, then a 10; a 5, then a hundred points. The middle way was rare. On her first evening with the other girls in the building she cried until she could not breathe, and afterwards she ate her pastries alone in the park, because offering some to the girls in her room was too frightening. She loved giving presents. She just did not know how to give them.
A girl from another city asked how she lived. When she said she worked from her room and rarely went out, the girl said: “How sad.” Why?
December 2012Her flatmates stressed her out, or rather their noisy, excessive habits did. Maybe she would be better off in a room lined with pillows.
28 October 2012Once the flatmates gave a party. People danced, or swayed, in the middle of the room to a playlist called Music that makes you feel better. The girl tidied up as it happened, wiped the desk, and put the bottles where they could not spill. By eleven everyone else was merry, and she discovered that it is lovely to be the only clear head in the room: she saw them all in moments they would never remember. She stole their moments. She moved back and forth to the music, and maybe it looked like dancing.
She slept in the afternoons so she could work at night, and then at night her nerves would not let her start on her colours. In the evenings, every evening, she washed her hands ten times after eating a piece of flatbread, one after another, out of boredom. Then she went out and walked the streets for hours, light, as if she had no body. At a table in a café, everyone was smoking, all trying to flick the ash, all missing the ashtray, all with nothing to say. She stopped smoking just to show them how they looked.
2007 – 2008Once her hair got tangled; it recovered overnight. Once she drank a beer and it solved nothing, and then two coffees, or three; if it isn’t one, it’s more. She worked out a theory: if something happens once, it may happen a second time, and if it happens a second time, it will certainly happen a third. Then she fell silent, and stayed silent for twenty-three hours, until the room no longer had walls, because she had been living only in thoughts.
2008She studied the verb “to sleep”. What is the verb, what is sleep? Whenever she was half asleep like that, someone came and woke her, and the fun was over. In her dreams a man with no face at all would appear. “You’ll never get to know me,” she told him.
2007She was almost twenty, and her life repeated itself day after day, comfortable, holding her in place like a pincer. Now and then the pincer loosened a little, and she made plans, some honest and some selfish, knowing the honest ones would get watered down on the way. If she was meant to fall, she asked only not to feel the fall.
The telephone in her room rang and rang. Calls upon calls. Fewer of them were for her. Tomorrow, another day. Hours.
24 September 2007In the end a fog came down over the City of Hours. When she was alone, it did not bother her. But to talk to someone you need a thread, and some clarity, and she had neither, and nobody wanted to sit with her in the fog. Other people seemed to lift it between them without any effort. She apologised to everyone. Then she decided to stay in bed until half past eleven.
1 November 2012Years later she found the diary she had kept in that building. She had had a better vocabulary then, and horrible feelings. She would never go back.
VI. The Tower of Control
2008On the edge of the City stood a tower, and over its door was carved: Everything is control. Control is everything.
The door was locked. She had lost the password. She sat on the steps for a long time and then, quite suddenly, got the password back. It was the most successful thing that had happened all year.
Inside, the tower was full of examinations. She got a 2 on one she had studied for, or thought she had. The people who learned things quickly, she decided, were made for those things. She dragged herself up the stairs, wondering what had been made for her.
On the second floor she gave her word, and wrote it on the wall: if it is broken, the word will no longer be a word. The next day she gave another one, and wrote that down too.
On the third floor she tried very hard not to be a control freak. She wanted to be more herself, the way she knew Herself, the way no one else knew her. If this made no sense, it was because she had forgotten the subject and changed the predicates on the way up. On the wall, in her own handwriting, someone had written:
On the fourth floor there was a machine that made moments. She asked it: why don’t I have moments like these? Am I the one who makes them? Do I make them for you? Do I do this for pleasure? Do I do this? The machine did not answer. It was her.
27 September 2012On the fifth floor was a hall full of learned people from across the sea, and she had to stand up and introduce herself. She opened her mouth knowing that by the time she closed it she would have said something silly, and she did: she said she liked riding her bike, and “please come to my talk, if only to see me”. Afterwards nobody came up to her. Nobody ever came up to her. Was it the talk, or her face, or her crooked mouth? So, in conclusion, she wrote, what should I do?
6 October 2012On the sixth floor she spent a whole day turning all her lists into matrices, for nothing. In the end all she had was a picture cut into pieces, each piece twice, but at least she had them. Then she broke the code, and the matrices went quiet.
2014On the seventh floor someone had written on the walls in red ink: A drunk person is happier than one who isn’t. A person who knows is sadder than one who doesn’t. And lower down: The quarrel appears. Then it disappears. And lower still: We are sand. Or stardust.
At the top was a small spell in an old machine language. It compared, divided, put a zero in a box, and then said jmp _continuare, which means: go back and keep going. So she went back down the stairs and kept going.
VII. The harbour of ships
2008Her eyes hurt from all the stairs. It was tiredness, constant tension. “Let’s talk about ships now,” she said, and walked down to the harbour.
The harbour was full of lazy people, and she was one of them. But wasn’t laziness the very root of progress? If humanity had had no lazy people, everyone would still be walking everywhere instead of riding bicycles. Still, laziness was taking her over completely, and worse, it kept her awake, and when she did fall asleep, the neighbours woke her by banging on the walls. Thanks once again.
2008 · 6:02 – 6:20It was 6:02. Then it was 6:20. In that interval, half a day went by. She told herself, again and again, that she had to work, hoping it would print itself on her subconscious. In a cabin on one of the ships she found boxes of photographs, she did not know how many, and saw in them a girl from before ninth grade, someone she no longer was and never had been, and felt very good.
Restlessness came in with the tide. The morning’s hopes she destroyed in the afternoon and revived in the evening in a completely different light. Insomnia kept her in place: it would not let her go mad, and it would not let her move on. Everyone at the harbour had weapons, she noticed, but nobody had the instructions.
2009She wanted to run away from all of them, with a skilful leap, worthy of admiration. But where would her part be in it? Last night she had whimpered for water. “Please encourage me when I do something good,” she wrote on a scrap of sail. “A little friendship, please. Or give me ten minutes for remembering.” She folded it and dropped it in the water, and wrote underneath, for herself: I’ll write again when what I think makes sense.
VIII. The bus of long coats
2010From the harbour a bus went inland. On it, the girl had a private game that was not exactly a game. Everyone who got on seemed to be organising themselves, stop by stop, to surround her, so that at the second-to-last stop they could all pull out their weapons together. They wore coats down to the ground. One of them always sat behind her, at exactly the angle she could not calculate.
She was so busy watching them that she forgot her stop, and found, from under the huge sticker that covered half the window, that the bus had been standing at it for 0.4 minutes. She grabbed her bag and threw herself out of the door, and smiled. She had got away again.
She changed to a tram. On the tram she saw a girl with freckles and blue eyes, and for a moment her head filled with fog so bright that she was afraid it was madness. It was only happiness. She got off and ran, and that afternoon, for once, she slept.
The next evening she walked home with a song in her headphones, a man who could not stop singing, and a sentence in her head: burn what you have adored, adore what you have burned. She had the money for the building fees in her pocket. In the window of a second-hand shop sat a toy rabbit. She walked on. Then she walked back. It was 19.5 lei. The man sold it to her for 15. “I had the building fees on me,” she told him, “and look, I’m buying myself a toy.” He laughed out loud. She carried the rabbit home under her arm, and could feel her cat waiting for her.
At home she had one friend on the internet. The friend’s name was Everyone. It was her. And so, transitively, she was everyone.
Everyone could not find the remote for the air conditioning.
Everyone recommended knowing before speaking. Everyone also recommended speaking before knowing.
IX. Outside the ark
2009Then it rained, the way it rains at the end of a world, and a great ark came floating down the street, taking two of everything. The girl watched it go by. She suspected, quite calmly, that she would probably stay outside.
Someone had slammed a door on her. Then she remembered that she had slammed it herself. For a little while now she had been the victim of a stupid mechanism of constraints.
Behind the door there was a box, welded shut, with a small figure sitting inside it. On the lid someone had written: teach me to, and then a word scribbled out so hard it became a cloud, and then: and I’ll do anything you want.
2011When the water went down, she laid stepping stones across the mud, very short ones, one at a time, because everyone needs short time goals. And she sat on the last stone and waited for her problems to delete themselves, one letter at a time.
X. The field without end
16 January 2013Grown-ups had always told her: when you feel bad, close your eyes and picture a place where you are happy. And they always gave the same example, a wide field of flowers. Now the girl came to that field. It went on forever, and she was alone in it, and she panicked. It is impossible, she decided, to stand alone in a field without end and feel all right.
undatedSo she walked out of it the other way, into other dreams.
The first was about a country that no longer exists. In it she set something on fire, tried to catch a plane, and went into a bar to apologise to the barmaid. Then came a visa: she would be sent to a team, to lead it. She was sorry to be changing her life, but it seemed a good reason, that someone else was setting her path. She missed the plane anyway. No phone, no money, no Bramble. Meanwhile the princess had arrived back home, looking for her.
The second was more practical. She was visiting Autumn Parva with her cat, Bramble, who had come along for the trip. A woman walked through the room and put the girl’s phone in her pocket. The girl ran after her and caught her, but when she came back, the door to Autumn Parva was gone, and she was standing in a basement exactly like the one at Muddle Cross, where everyone gets lost. They missed the train. Bramble refused to leave, and in the dream the girl was paying him to stay, somewhere by the turbines of a nuclear power plant.
In the third dream she was building a world of her own. She bought two Moon spheres and set them beside a lake. A plane fell near the lake. Something began between the two spheres. And in the place where the plane had almost been, the dream ran out of page.
9 October 2012Another night she dreamed she had to dance in a competition and did not know the steps. How is that even possible.
15 November 2012When she was little she had been proud of her ugly dreams, because the princess read them, and everything happened the way the princess said. When it did not, the princess changed the reading. Nobody can prove a reading wrong.
30 July 2013Years later she dreamed of the princess once more. The princess took her to the most solemn place there was, a huge room under a metal dome, and opened the door, and fluff from the trees came flying in and filled the room. “You know it isn’t real,” said the girl. “It’s only fluff.” “No,” said the princess. “That is how it looks when you don’t believe.” “Look closely,” said the girl. “Please. Look closer.”
In the last dream she was falling asleep next to someone, and he showed her all the planets in their order, by their shapes. Geometric, she wrote when she woke up. Then she crossed it out and wrote grammatical. Then she was not sure.
XI. Beyond the hills
2 November 2012 · 3:00 – 5:00She woke at three in the morning in a strange room, and by five she was still awake, writing in the dark. Somewhere beyond the hills, people said, there was a film about two girls, and she could not wait to see it, and she hoped the characters would not be exaggerated. In the dark she lost the line of the notebook, and her sentences went slowly downhill.
6 November 2012She crossed the hills a few days later and saw it. Twice, even.
11 November 2012A few days after that she watched a film about an exorcism. It was morning, so she reasoned she ought not to be scared.
5 December 2012Someone on the other side taught her to stop saying “I want…, I want.” “Try: it would be preferable if…” It was true. You cannot always say I want.
December 2012On the other side lived very polite people. A friend’s girlfriend asked whether she was enjoying her coffee. After a few seconds the girl realised she was drinking milk, and answered: no. She had a logic, she knew, but it lived on the surface, in the form of results. It produced a great many correct answers and a great many reactions that were not.
26 December 2012At Christmas she went home, and survived. On the last morning the princess looked at her with her eyes far away, turned somewhere else, and the girl braced herself for something serious. She could feel the shadow on the wall behind her getting taller. “You slept well,” said the princess, “because everything here has been blessed.” The girl ought to have the places she went to blessed too. And there was a man across the ocean who could give her a cleansing over the webcam. He made you close your eyes, a little like hypnosis, and asked you about colours: red, grey, black or white. Black, obviously, was bad, and white was good. Then you sat with your eyes closed while he rubbed his hands together. He also accepted bank transfers.
The princess had already sent her the man’s address, and was going to tell him to expect her. It was the girl’s choice, of course. The princess had never had religion at school, under the old regime, and regretted it. The girl asked her, nicely, to stop thinking she was above her, and her father too, who rolled his eyes now and then from somewhere behind the sofa, and to stop handing her their secret as the one true solution, sprinkled with a little hypnosis and a few rituals. She could not write about anything else when it came to the two of them, because they could not talk about anything else either.
On the way out she looked back, and for the first time she saw it without the shadow’s help. The princess was a wolf. Perhaps she always had been.
January 2013After New Year she stayed on her own in the City of Hours for two days. She did not want to go home.
3 January 2013Someone told her she had changed her voice again, when she spoke to his mother. It was true. She had a slightly different voice for every person she spoke to, and she could hear herself doing it. Knowing made it harder, not easier, to stop.
6 January 2013In the end she went home after all, and on the train back to the City of Hours she met a girl who looked as if she had a cold. “Are you all right?” “No,” said the girl. “Do you want me to tell you why?” She had talked to a boy for six months from a city far away, and then came one perfect night in the City of Hours. She went home to the capital, came back the very next day, and the boy told her she was too much for him. Now she was on her way to Grimley, a town so grey that even its name sounded tired, to see a friend.
The girl had wanted to finish an episode of her cartoon, headphones in. Instead the stranger sat down next to her and took her hand, the one she had just used to steady herself on the way to the toilet, so she switched hands. She told the stranger she had a lovely voice, and the stranger was happy that someone was playing along with her film. She had read a great many books. The girl, meanwhile, had watched a great many cartoons.
The stranger told her not to get attached to people, and gave her a fat Russian book with God in it. The train crawled past Sadbury, because the station was being rebuilt. “It’s going this slowly for the two of us,” the girl said, with the syllables out of step, like a moment in a film, and the stranger answered the same way. The girl did not understand what she said. She hugged her tighter. She smelled a little of sweat, and the girl told her she would remember her smell, the buttons on her blouse, her hat and her dry lips.
When the girl got off, the stranger called after her from the door: “See you in Brightlights.” Meanwhile a man had come in, saying it was too crowded next door. Of course: what could beat two twenty-four-year-old girls, when next door it was nothing but old women?
18 January 2013Back in the City of Hours, the friend’s girlfriend from the milk, who laughed a great deal for reasons the girl never understood, offered her sarmale like the princess’s. The girl said she did not eat meat. The girlfriend insisted. The girl explained again. The girlfriend understood at last, and offered her sarmale without meat. The girl had thought that would be the end of it. She refused once more.
XII. The register of relations
2014In the last town there was an office, and in the office a clerk who kept the Register of Relations, the same kind of list she would one day build at work, to teach machines who did what to whom. He opened a file and began to read aloud. Victim, one. Place, two. Time, three. Target, four. Artifact, five. Agent, six… He read for a very long time: Instrument, Person, Attacker, Vehicle, Price, Seller, Buyer, Beneficiary, Giver, Recipient, Money, Crime, Prosecutor, Adjudicator, Defendant, Plaintiff. Everyone she had met on the road was in it, under one name or another. The last entry was Sentence, twenty-eight, and after it the cursor blinked, and blinked, and waited.
The girl pointed at the names until her pointing finger hurt. What makes pointing hazardous? Pain in the pointing finger. Really, is that even possible? It hurts.
She looked for herself in the register and could not find her place anywhere.
21 January 2014It was in that town that her cat Pip died, on a table at the vet’s. The vet was young, at the very start of her career, and had never lost an animal before. Afterwards her parents took the vet a box of chocolates, for the sake of Pip’s soul, and she cried. The girl could not see how that was supposed to make anyone feel better. She could not stop seeing him on the table.
That evening she drew a shape in red and blue pencil, with a small pink circle in the middle, and wrote underneath: Pip died here.
The princess, very tall on the telephone, said it would help her grow up a little. The girl answered that she did not see what it mattered to anyone if she never grew up. Then she noticed she had fallen into the old trap again, the one where she did anything to please the princess. C’est fini, she wrote, in French, with her left hand. On the wall behind her, the shadow was exactly her own size.
XIII. The way home
30 January 2013On the clerk’s desk lay a letter with her name on it. She had been accepted. She would begin on the fourth of February. She was excited and frightened and nervous all at once, and wrote down only one wish for herself: I want to be OK.
In the background, a play about angels was running that she had liked very much. On the desk lay a book by a famous professor from a faraway university who did not believe in anything he could not see. She did not think she would finish it. Still, she was glad of him. At least he would never come to her door to make her kiss his hand, or sip from a spoon that every old woman in Sadbury had already licked.
summer 2013That summer, in the margin of some notes about measuring the distance between two pictures, she drew a small hooded figure with a long tail, and an arrow pointing at it: I need to pull myself together.
1 September 2013That September she had a desk among other people, with her screen facing the door so that everyone could see what she was doing. (What was she doing?) She could not wait for an office of her own. The only closeness she could stand was her own. And she found that you cannot redo a life the way you redo a program, by deleting everything and writing it again.
2014“And what do you want to be?” asked the clerk. “In the future,” said the girl, “a teacher, or a nanny.” He introduced her to some new people, and she noticed, with a strange lift of the heart, how glad she was not to be like them.
2014So she went to learn how teaching is taught. In her notebook she wrote down falling bodies, differential equations, activités cognitives d’interprétation, that there are books which show you how to teach computing, and at the bottom, underlined twice: must send an email to see what they do in the second semester.
Each time she went home, her father was a little smaller. He sat on the sofa, half hidden by the cushions, with his cigarette, and every year there was more sofa and less of him. One evening she stood in the doorway and watched him become what he had always been: a mouse.
XIV. The mouse’s voice
autumn 2020Years later, far away, in the middle of the night, the telephone rang. It was the princess. The mouse was in hospital, she said. He couldn’t breathe. The girl asked what, and why, and how, and the princess only said it again: he couldn’t breathe.
The girl got up, dressed, and sat on the floor in a corner of the dark living room, knees to her chest, the way she used to sit against the wall beside the bed when she was small. There was nobody on the edge of the bed now. Even the dark did not hide her. She looked for numbers to call. The princess said she could not do it; her heart would not take it. So the girl made the calls. Nobody tells you how frightening the music is while you wait on hold. A man said the mouse was fine and would soon be sent home. The next day a woman said he had been moved to intensive care, and that he was not fine at all. “What can I do?” asked the girl. “Pray,” said the woman.
Once, she heard his voice. The first time she called him he did not answer, nor the second time. The third time someone must have held the telephone for him. “How are you, Dad?” “I’m all right, don’t worry. They’ve put me in a room with some other people. It’s fine.” He was not sad, or frightened, or at least he did not show it. But his voice had no breath in it. It was the smallest it had ever been. She cried, and asked him to take care of himself, and hung up still crying.
Then they told her they had tried to bring him back. She did not believe them. It was hard to go and collect his identity card, and hard to listen to the woman who handed it over.
5 January 2021For months afterwards she was caught in a dream she could not wake up from, and she did not even try. She could not write it down; she could not even say it in her head. The princess said that making a fuss about what happens to you is selfish: you should keep quiet and be strong, and expect nothing from anyone. So the girl wrote it down anyway, a little at a time, where nobody could criticise her. When someone she loved came in and asked what she was writing, she said: “Some ideas.”
Every time she wrote, she noticed that she wrote like him. She had his handwriting, not the princess’s, and she was glad of it.
spring 2021“Hello again, Dad,” she wrote, six months later. “I wish it were only six months since I last saw you, and not six months since I will never be able to see you again.” He had been the one who held everything up, so quietly that she had hardly talked to him at all. He used to remind her of the princess’s birthday, and he got so excited about his own.
Among his things she found the name he had for the princess. He called her principessa.
3 December 2021Then many months of blank pages.
I dream of you, and I feel as if I see you often,
as if I’m going to see you soon.
The strange thing is that I don’t believe it’s possible.
The strange thing is that I can believe it’s possible.
In 2019 she had hoped he would see her grown up.
summer 2022Close to his birthday she wrote to him again. She was sorry she had not saved him; it seemed to her she had not even tried. And she was sorry she had so often blamed the princess. “I know you loved her,” she wrote.
When the mouse was gone, she found out how much he had stood between them, small as he was, half hidden as he was. He had not protected her much. But now there was nobody at all on the edge of the bed. The princess leaned on her for everything, and came closer and closer, into every room, until there was hardly a room left that was the girl’s own.
XV. The well
Then she was thirsty, very thirsty, and she remembered the well. She walked back through the forest, and this time the well was waiting for her with cold, clear water, the way it waits for anyone on the way home.
This time she did not call for anyone.
Behind her, a voice said: “Mummy’s little girl, wake up. You had a nightmare.” It was a very good voice. It was almost exactly right. But the girl had been practising since she was very small, and she knew that voice at once. It was the wolf’s. She did not turn round. She did not open the door.
She drank the water herself, from her own hands.
Then she sat down in the dark beside the well, and waited for it to frighten her. It did not. The dark had never done anything to her. The crocodiles had been bored all along, and the thing under the bed had only ever been the bed. What had frightened her was never in the dark. It was in the house, close enough to touch, and it had a crown and a sweet voice, and a mouse sitting quietly at its feet.
When she woke, she was in a room of her own, in a town that did not have a name yet. Nobody was standing over her. She had not left the light on. Far off, at the very edge of things, very small, she thought she saw the mouse, and she waved, and he almost waved back.
13 December 2014One winter evening she wrote the wrong year at the top of the page, and laughed at herself. She had cut up and rearranged all her notebooks, and come back to the first one. She decided to gather everything she had ever written and drawn and put it all in one place, so that someone, one day, would have the trouble of sorting it out. Then again, who would read it? Maybe, if she were famous, someone would bother to publish her. To publish me, she wrote, and found it funny.
nowShe had moved house more times than she had teeth, and she would move many more. She never did find her place. But she kept the half wedding dress, and the rabbit, and the password, and every one of the words she had given; and whenever someone asked her where she was from, she said Sadbury, and nothing more. She had learned that people do not really listen. They have their own lives, their own beds to fall out of, and their own worlds underneath. So she stopped telling the rest, except here.
The wolf used to live inside the house. But now she has learned his voice, and he can no longer hide inside the princess costume. Now she lives in a house of her own, and sometimes the voice still comes and knocks: a very sweet voice, crooked smiles, and a paw reaching in through the crack under the door. She does not open the door anymore.