THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE

by Dan Micklethwaite

  The Less than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote

  by Dan Micklethwaite

  Imprint

  Copyright © Dan Micklethwaite 2016

  First published in 2016 by Bluemoose Books Ltd 25 Sackville Street Hebden Bridge West Yorkshire HX7 7DJ

  www.bluemoosebooks.com

  All rights reserved Unauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978-1-910422-17-5

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-910422-18-2

  Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press

  Dedication

  For my parents

  1

  Nobody had ever accused Donna Crick-Oakley of being adventurous.

  A slut, yes. A thickie. A dreamer. A quiet one. A fat bitch (before she lost weight). A skinny bitch (after). A nutter. A swot. A stick-in-the-mud. An accident waiting to happen. A cry-baby. A silly cow. A giant waste of time.

  All of the above, but never adventurous.

  The fact was, when given a choice between real life and books, Donna Crick-Oakley chose books every time.

  Of course, she hadn’t sprung forth from the womb being able to read, and had never devoted the entirety of her days to the practice. It was more the case that when real life disappointed her she selected certain stories as her preferred location of retreat.

  The other kids hadn’t liked that she always seemed to get more fun from paper than she ever did from them. And other adults didn’t seem to like it, either.

  At least, Kirk hadn’t seemed to.

  But she kept on choosing books.

  She chose books because they never left her lonely the way that Kirk had left her lonely. Because company was often nothing of the kind, whereas a good book always was.

  She chose books for the smell of fresh-pressed pages, or for the yellow-brown musk of library mould, but always for the breathy kiss of paper rustling. She chose books because some of them held prose that made her weep, or poetry that winded her, and words that made her heart skip beats.

  She chose books because some came ready-made with characters that seemed like perfect versions of herself, all of them little proofs that somehow, somewhere, it might just be possible for her to be better: to be popular, powerful, sexy and smart.

  She chose books because they lied to her with more conviction than real people ever had.

  Her flat, in a tower block, was full of them.

  Three thousand, four hundred and seventy-two of them.

  Mostly fairy tale, fantasy, medieval romance and myth.

  There were three rooms – an open-plan kitchen-cum-lounge, a bedroom, and a bathroom – and she kept at least two tall bookcases in each. Even in the bathroom, much to the surprise and amusement of her occasional guests.

  To stop the books getting damp, she’d fixed shower curtains to the front of the bookcase by the toilet and the one by the sink. She’d hoped to find transparent ones but had settled instead for an opaque beige, so whenever she reached behind them she was never quite sure which book she’d get.

  She’d read most of them before, of course, but she still enjoyed surprises.

  So long as the surprises didn’t involve an ambush set by bandits, Vikings, highwaymen or dragons.

  In her bedroom, the bookcases and wardrobe that covered the walls were packed solid, and she’d resorted to storing her surplus in less regular ways.

  At painstaking length and effort, she had gathered all the works in her collection that were the same depth: roughly three-fifty pages, from front cover to back. And then she’d covered the floor with a kind of erudite rug.

  She may have been at the highest level of the tower block but, in here at least, she had the lowest ceiling.

  When Kirk had first visited, he’d scoffed at this system, dedicating whole minutes of the evening to asking why she had so many books, why she had books in the bathroom, why she had books like a big cardboardy carpet spread out across her bedroom floor.

  The sex, when it came, wasn’t impressive.

  As a single girl, she didn’t spend her time on social networking or dating sites searching for her next potential beau.

  She didn’t cycle through her Friends list, studying the profile of each boy on there – the ones with whom she hadn’t already had some kind of encounter – wondering if they were likewise lonely, if they’d be up for a bit of fun. And, if so, what they’d be like, and if they too would refuse to remove their socks on account of book covers being sticky.

  Not any more.

  She certainly didn’t stand on her balcony, staring down across the rooftops of Huddersfield, telling herself: My prince is out there. Somewhere. Before bursting into song.

  Not then.

  She just read.

  It was her father, an English teacher, who started her with that.

  Ever since she could remember, he had come home from school ranting about the rising rate of illiteracy, and about how kids these days were, mostly, stupid fuckers. Every night since she could remember, her mother had reprimanded him for using foul language, they’d argued for half an hour, on average, and the fights had generally concluded with her father vowing: No daughter of mine is going to grow up like that: as a… a thickie!

  After that, almost every night she could remember, he had come into her room and ordered her to read something to him, for another half an hour.

  This, he claimed, had the dual benefit of helping her intellectually, and calming him down enough that he could stomach whatever slop your mother’s going to put on the table tonight.

  There had been a few breaks in this practice, of course, a litany of small defections: to geography, for about a week; to history; to an after-school hockey club, on and off for several years. A few times, she had even thrown herself wholeheartedly into mathematics, discovering an unexpected aptitude for figures. An affinity for algebra, once she got to that level.

  But something in the turn of textbook pages always brought her back.

  And so, rather than redoubling her efforts and vowing to rid herself of everything to do with such stories as soon as she was able, Donna Crick-Oakley simply climbed further in. She had found in them the most effective evasion, the most delightful deliverance from the turmoil that was, until her parents’ inevitable divorce, her family home.

  Two months after that divorce, and five years before today, her father had decided that she, just like her mother, was a giant waste of time, and that he had no interest in seeing either of them any longer. He’d moved away. Down south at first, and then out of the country.

  Before he left, however, he had been mandated by the court to pay them both a sum in lieu of maintenance. He was given the option to either pay the sum in advance, or deposit it in monthly instalments.

  He chose the former option. Another kind of surprise that Donna didn’t like.

  Despite her mother’s vicious and repeated questioning of how he’d managed to keep such an amount squirrelled away, no explanation was ever provided.

  He just stayed quiet, expressionless, and signed the court papers.

  Left a six-figure phantom in place of a husband and dad.

  Two weeks later, as an acknowledgement of some lingering paternal bond, or debt, he sent her a letter, along with the sizeable cheque:

  Dear Donna,

  If you still want to take your daddy’s advice, I would suggest using
this to get the hell out of Huddersfield and never looking back. There’s nothing even close to good enough there for a daughter of mine.

  What’s left of my love,

  Charles Oakley

  x

  But she used the money instead to make a life out of books.

  2

  Nobody believed Donna Crick-Oakley when she told them she didn’t much care for Disney films.

  How could she not?

  They were full of fairy stories.

  Weren’t fairy stories her thing?

  Her failure to like them wasn’t absolute.

  She enjoyed the beginnings of the earlier ones. The first minute or so, when the camera focused in on a tenderly-rendered image of a leather-bound tome; when the cover opened, independently, the magic behind the motion subtly implied. When the camera found those four small yet special words: Once upon a time…

  Where Disney films fell down, for her – in fact, where most films fell down – lay in their decision to abandon that string of words thereafter. Through their insistence on providing pictorial representations of things that she would prefer to imagine, they lost her interest, offended her, even, on some level.

  She did not, when she read of a prince – charming or otherwise – think of him as having dark hair and no lines on his face. She did not think of him as having hair that was flaxen or brown or grey, or purple either, but that wasn’t really the point.

  Books allowed for the possibility that her idea of Prince Charming might change.

  Disney films didn’t.

  Whenever she found herself watching them, usually with a new man, she tended to drift off, to move away from the plot and the action into wondering if the cartoon Cinderella really did fall for her Prince Charming the first time they met. If the dream bloke the would-be princess had built up in her head was in fact completely different from the one that she’d found. Or who had found her.

  If, when she’d first learnt to touch herself, she’d had another face in mind.

  As regards her own situation with Kirk, that had certainly been the case.

  As it had with the other four men she’d slept with, for that matter.

  She didn’t think Kirk was likely to be anyone’s idea of a prince, charming or otherwise. He had blue eyes, but he hid them behind bright and shiny red and black glasses. He was well-built, especially his upper-body, but he covered his potentially appealing attributes with crumpled, age-inappropriate T-shirts, and also with backne.

  He didn’t have dark hair, at least, but then he also didn’t wash it.

  This resulted in what her mother would call a hodgepodge, which looked to Donna like a mix between dreadlocks and dead hamsters. A state regrettably replicated at his less-than-spectacular crotch.

  And he had criticised her apartment.

  To calm herself, to pull herself back from the edge of such thoughts, she liked, before going to bed, to take off her socks and press her toes against the book covers.

  They weren’t sticky at all.

  They felt expensive, like marble tiles, the kind they might have in the foyers of five-star hotels, perched on the edge of bright azure oceans.

  Or in the entrance halls of castles. The kind that slightly mad Bavarians once built on top of grimly timbered Alps.

  3

  Nobody now seemed to see eye-to-eye with Donna Crick-Oakley on the issues that mattered to her most.

  Her mum didn’t, anyway.

  The few occasions that Donna actually sanctioned a visit, she was told it was time she grew up and got rid.

  Books in the bathroom? Really? They’ll get damp. They’ll go mouldy, and who’ll take them off your hands then? Not charity shops, that’s for sure. They can’t make money for starving homeless refugee children with water-damaged goods. Rotting copies of Narnia aren’t going to put rice on anybody’s plate.

  And as for your bedroom...

  Was this why so many books wound up in charity shops? Donna wondered.

  For the sake of a little more space?

  Some nights, even after the calm of her feet on the marble, that question weighed so heavy that she couldn’t get to sleep.

  Why didn’t people seem to want books beside them at all times, just in case?

  Just in case they were too alone. Just in case they were ill and watching TV would make too many too-loud noises. Just in case they’d had a shitty day at school or at work, or at the weekend, when by rights their problems should have had the decency to cut them some slack and leave them alone. Just in case they got stood up by a dickhead with spots on his back and no fashion sense. Just in case some bitch broke their heart. Just in case they wanted to open a bottle of wine, but needed somebody to share it with. Just in case they remembered a line, out of the blue, and felt the urgent want to rummage through shelf after shelf until they found where it lived. Just in case they wanted to keep reading after they’d searched out that sentence.

  Just in case they needed something in their life that they could turn to in times of stagnation, for ideas, and for answers, and for hope.

  4

  Nobody, least of all Donna Crick-Oakley, expected that she would turn to books for ideas in quite such a way.

  In the mornings, rather than taking the time to reacquaint her feet with the literary lino she’d installed, she was generally eager to get up and wash.

  Such had been her need for bookcase space that she’d set one up in front of the window, meaning that even when it wasn’t too warm outside – which, this being West Yorkshire, was more often than not – it was still fairly close to baking in her room. Though the temperature dropped during the night, she would quite often wake feeling clammy with sweat.

  This morning, she took her shower as usual. She scrubbed herself thoroughly but quickly with a loofah, not paying too much attention to her body as she did so.

  Then, having dried herself, she eased onto the clean wooden horseshoe of the toilet seat, and fumbled behind the shower curtain that covered the bookcase to her left.

  She withdrew a hefty second-hand volume which she knew, having already read it seven times, involved witches, dragons, knights – one braver, bolder and generally better than all others – kings, counts, princesses – one more pretty, more perfect and more predisposed to getting herself in distress than all others – stallions, wolves, woodcutters, and a not-particularly-witty talking toad.

  The buying of second-hand books was, for Donna, somewhat akin to pet rescue. Had this volume been a dog, it might have been bloated and balding and missing some teeth.

  Yet such was her compassion for afflicted creatures that, upon noticing the book there on the charity shop shelf, its raggedy spine bandaged to its body with peeling strips of parcel tape, she’d been unable to leave the premises without it.

  She had brought only a small handbag, so the poor mangy thing was left poking out of the top, its spine lolling like a tongue to make the most of fresh air.

  Now it sat coddled upon the softness of her palms.

  The miracle of such stories, to Donna, was that they could be opened to pretty much any page and the essence of what was visible would be more or less the same. There was always some manner of evil, doing that lurking thing it does. There was always somebody in need of saving from that evil. There was always somebody – or a queue of somebodies – ready to save that poor, imperilled soul.

  There was always questing to be done, in short, to have a chance to set things right.

  And Donna liked it when that happened.

  She used to know quite a few people who’d liked that as well, but gone about it differently.

  Some had spent most of their money on amassing stacks of discs for console play. They’d spend hours upon their parents’ sofas, slashing at demons or pumping blue plasma streams into alien hordes.

  Others had saved their penni
es to subscribe to online roleplaying games. Games that offered not only the option to create an avatar from scratch, but of choosing whether that character would be good, or whether they’d get busy lurking. You could step inside and sway the story, they’d told her. You could go beyond the story and fill in all of the free-roaming gaps. You could wander the land on your own, if you wanted to, and not do much of anything. Or you could go down to market with the rest of your guild.

  If you spent enough hours in that game-world, they’d said, it was pretty much like real life.

  Only better, because you could do really cool things like go hunting orcs, and then trade orc hides for gold, and then use that gold to buy bigger swords to go hunting trolls with.

  At the behest of a boyfriend two before Kirk, she had given these online RPGs a shot.

  Make your own avatar, he’d said, have a go at the training. See if you can get the hang of all the controls. It was keyboard and mouse only.

  Twenty minutes became two hours, became five or six hours, daily. Between that and the books she still read, she barely had any time left for him. Not outside of the game. Then they began to grow distant inside it as well. After he caught her Sorceress-class character flirting in text-speak with a Ranger, he called her a slut and said he hoped she got herpes. Then he shut down his laptop, downed his cola and left.

  He phoned her a few days later to apologise, to say he sincerely hoped she never, ever, ever got herpes, or gonorrhoea, or any other STI, and that he honestly didn’t think she was the kind of girl who would. He said he hoped as well that she forgave him and still wanted to see him again. Even if they were only really good friends and never did it again or anything like that.

  But maybe they could still snog, or just cuddle up in front of a film on the sofa?

  No. The damage had been done. She deleted her game account. She deleted his number. She blocked him on her social network page, and stopped checking her newsfeed so often after that.

  It was pretty much like real life, they’d told her.