“And I’m vain?” asked Miss Chief.
“Meaning?” Susie asked.
“Guy Fawkes night, Susie,” duh-hed Miss Chief.
“Oh,” said Susie, a little abashed, “right.”
“Right,” said Miss Chief and laughed.
Susie tried to share her laughter. She couldn’t.
“Guy Fawkes night?” asked Nespa and Mimimi together.
“It’s a British thing,” explained Bluemerang.
“A bit like,” O’Nestly said to Mimimi, “your Fourth of July or your …” Nespa’s “… Bastille Day.”
“Guy Fawkes night,” Susie said to herself. “And I thought it was for me.” She tried to laugh. All that emerged from her throat, though, was a sort of strangulated chuckle.
Chapter 57
The scratches on her hands Susie’s mother attributed to her ‘escape’ via the apple tree. It was the suntan which bemused her. And Phil. They wondered first whether it weren’t make-up. Then they thought she must have taken something. But the only things there were to take were safely locked away in a cupboard.
If, though, Susie’s instant suntan was a puzzle, the change which had taken place inside her … well that was a conundrum.
It was almost like one of those sci-fi tales, where an alien had taken possession of an earthling’s body. It wasn’t that there was anything obvious or flagrant about the change – but then there never is. The nuance and whisper of her change, though, were so plentiful as to constitute (almost) an entire change of personality.
* * *
The shamemobile chugged up ‘the’ hill. Susie snorted to herself. That had seemed such a big deal such a short time ago. But it wasn’t a short time. She had to remember that.
Phil heard the snort. “Never mind, munchkin,” he told her in his kind, conciliatory way. “One day you’ll make it.”
“Oh, that?” she said. “That’s not important any more.”
Phil and her mother glanced at each other. What had happened to the girl?
* * *
Mrs Adelaide started her school day by giving Susie’s mother the list of tasks she, Susie’s mother, had for that day. This was an appointment Susie had, despite the protests of her mother, been insistent she gatecrash. Phil was there, it felt to her, as her warder.
“I do not recall,” brogued Mrs Adelaide, “having invited you, Susan, to join us.”
“You found the Challenge Cup, I understand,” Susie told her. She wouldn’t allow her voice to falter.
“You will be so good, Susan, as to wait outside until I summon you. And you may use that time to wipe from your face whatever goo it is presently covering it. I shall see you after assembly.”
“But …”
“Go now, please, Susan.”
“Mrs Adelaide …”
“I am not in the habit of repeating myself.” She indicated to Phil that he should remove his step-daughter.
“Exceeding not clever, munchkin,” Phil told her as they marched along the long corridor to the hall of morning assembly. But it wasn’t an interminable corridor, this one, not a Snow-it Hall corridor. It was just a long, dreary, school corridor.
“Sometimes, Phil,” she told him, “you just have to do things, you know, because they’re the right things to do.”
“Act in haste,” he proverbed at her, “repent at leisure.”
“Don’t act,” she countered, “and repent it always.”
* * *
“And finally,” said Mrs Adelaide at the end of her usual assembly address, “you will all, I’m sure, be delighted to know that the Challenge Cup has been returned to us. Nothing more need be said of the matter.”
“Excuse me,” Susie said from her seat. She had chosen an aisle seat deliberately. In the row before her she could see Wilmer and Mia squirming physically. “Yes, it does. More does need to be said of the matter. Actually quite a lot more needs to be said.” She started to walk towards the stage. She was nervous.Terrified. Her legs were jelly-like. But she would not let herself shake; she would not let herself quake.
Of course she was terrified. What she was doing, that was a terrifying thing to do. But she’d had experience now of public speaking. Audiences no longer held the kind of terror for her that they once had. And Mrs Adelaide … well, Ma’am Elaide she wasn’t.
“You will, Susan, return to your seat. And I do mean right now.”
“In the most public and humiliating way,” Susie said, progressing towards the stage, “you accused me, Mrs Adelaide, of stealing the Challenge Cup. You virtually arrested me for it. An apology of like publicness would, would it not, be in order?”
“Sit down, Susan. I will not warn you again.”
“You see, I thought that didn’t matter, thought it was just me, that sort of stuff. Full, so I thought myself, of my own stuff. Ego mad. But that’s not it, Mrs Adelaide. I see that now.
“See, I could never understand why the world was so unfair.” She mounted the three steps that led to the platform. There she took up a position where she could address Mrs Adelaide, her fellow pupils, Phil and her mother. She had O’Nestly in her pocket.
Back in the dungeons of Dunster Fryin, Mr E was sitting astride Corniun’s tusk, holding onto her ears for all that he was worth. They were using her x-ray eyes to witness the scene. As much as he possibly could he was sending her all the strength with which he was endowed.
Susie was too daunted, though, to be able to feel – or do – anything beyond what she was presently doing. An appendectomy at that moment would have released into the (electric) atmosphere about ten zillion butterflies. She knew only what had to be done, and that it had to be she who did it.
“It wasn’t just that the world was unfair,” she continued, “but that it was so unfair. It was unfair too at so many levels. Not even fairness was fairly distributed. Even justice seemed to favour the already privileged, even even-handedness. It didn’t make sense.
“And the unfairness of the world, that’s getting worse. If geography, Phil, teaches us anything, it teaches us that. The hungry are getting hungrier and the well-fed are getting fatter. Why?
“Well, one reason is because we don’t want to make a fuss. We allow the slight injustices to pass without drawing attention to them.
“You know what I learnt this weekend?
“Well, I learnt a lot of things actually. But probably the most important thing I learnt is that there are no small injustices.
“I used to be moaned at a lot because I moaned a lot about life being unfair. And I used to think that wasn’t fair either.
“But I was wrong. Until right now. Because if I want my life to be fairer then I have to want life to be fairer for you too. It won’t work in any other way. So much of life is so unfair, why? Because we allow so much of it to be: we, the all of us ‘we’. We can start making it fairer, maybe not a lot. But the little we can do to make life fairer is an important little. And one way we can start making it a little fairer is by protesting when it is unfair. By standing on our feet and protesting.
“That’s not a right we have in an emocracy – sorry, in a democracy – it’s a responsibility we have to it. And if we do not protest against injustice, democracy will have become eroded. It has already been eroded enough. You still owe me a public apology, Mrs Adelaide.”
“You will report to my office, Susan. You will report there directly.”
“She’ll want to expel me,” Susie told the school. “It’s your choice whether or not she does.”
She started to walk off the stage.
And she tripped on one of the steps and fell splat on the floor.
From the crowd came a gasp, in the midst of which Susie could hear a titter explode from Mia. And then from Wilmer.
Susie started to shake. Sobs appeared to possess her. Mia and Wilmer stopped their tittering. The whole school seemed to hold its breath. Slowly, slowly Susie lifted her face from the floor.
And the whole school could see that she was se
ized not of sobs but of laughter. She was, in fact, doubled-up with laughter.
This gave permission for all the pupils to laugh.
And once that had started– despite themselves –, the teachers too started to laugh.
And then indeed there was an explosion – of laughter. Uproarious laughter.
Of guff-haw-hawing laughter. Of belly-laughing like-a-jelly laughing. Laughter which made the eyes water and the ribs ache. Cleansing laughter. Whatever the mire with which your outside is coated, laugh and the inside of you is clean. The inside of Susie was spick-and-span, bright as a new pin, scrubbed GLEAMING by this laughter.
The whole school was laughing.
Except Mrs Adelaide, whose dignity was approaching dingity as she left the hall of the now howling hyenas.
Back in the dungeons of Dunster Fryin, Corniun was cheering.
And Mr E was laughing.
Quite as hard as Susie was. As was the whole of the Iain Kennedy Institute.
And in Dunster Fryin Mr E continued laughing.
But the object of his laughter had turned into something else entirely!
* * * The End * * *
Other books by Gregory Dark
Also for younger readers:
Charming!
Or
If the glass slipper fits
It’s the story they didn’t want you to hear!
Finally Prince Charming talks!
The man was a cross between James Bond and Martin Luther King. Yet what is it we know about him? That he fits a mean glass slipper! And that’s it.
For generations, Prince Charming has been the Watson to the Holmes of Cinderella – maybe even Charles to Diana. Far from being the nothing character of legend, however, the prince had the spirit of an unbroken horse. He was a loose cannon, one whose every move seemed dogged with intrigue and adventure. And love? Yes, there were (shock, horror!) other girlfriends before Cinderella. But his romantic adventures are only part of his story. It’s not for nothing his story’s never been told. Until now, that is.
Charming’s times were a lot less fairy-taley than fairy-tales would have us believe. Is there something familiar about those times? Something even contemporary? Well, if the glass slipper fits …
The Millennium Trilogy:
The Prophet of the New Millennium
A search for principles in an unprincipled age
Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet is an acknowledged classic. Millions have read it. But it is now of a different age. The Prophet of the New Millennium is offered as a complement to the original – a complement not a sequel. The style is redolent, but it is a book which stands by itself as: A political and moral atlas of, and for, today.
That “today” is one where the line becomes ever hazier between ethics and expedience.
The Prophet of the New Millennium seeks to bring principles into the 21st century. Not by defining them. But by helping us frame our questions. It aims to help us separate for ourselves truth from fantasy, and sanity from delusion – to find our own sense in a world of ever more dangerous nonsense.
The God of the New Millennium
A search for balance in an age of spin
Only the mad or bad – or politicians! – would seek to deny that mankind is currently facing the greatest crisis (and crises) in its history.
Philosophy's first adage was that you cannot plan for a future without understanding the past.
In this, his new book, Gregory Dark takes a new look at our yesterday … in the hope that such will lead to a less cataclysmic tomorrow.
For too long man has ceded spiritual power to priests and temporal power to politicians and generals. It’s one of the principle reasons why we’re in the parlous and perilous position today. If our tomorrow is going to be any better, it is not our right but our duty to reclaim that power – each and every one of us.
The God of the New Millennium, though, is no dreary dialectic. The discussion evolves within a narrative of tenderness and poetry, of sacrifice and death – most of all of life.
The God of the New Millennium leaves us asking of ourselves the biggest, and most vital, question of today – one that decides whether or not there is even a tomorrow: Do we have what it takes to do what it takes?
Man of the New Millennium
A search for us in an age of me
Man of the New Millennium is a book for us: the millions and millions of people who want to see the end of mancruel and the start of mankind. The probably billion or so of us in this world, exasperated and disenchanted by worn-out templates, trying to find new ones.
Wrapped in the most gentle of narratives, Man of the New Millennium leads us through the maze of history’s travesties and today’s duplicities to a future with a future, to a future whose potential is our potential, our potential as a species, and that potential special to all of us individually.
Man of the New Millennium is a search for us in an age of me; it is a text for humanity in fictional dress; it is a book which changes hope from an ill-defined aspiration to a realisable ambition. It is a book of today which guarantees a quality tomorrow.
Titus and Roni
Two parents who, in facing death, face life. Perhaps for the first time.
As well as being a parent Titus is a grandparent: He is kidnapped with his grandson by guerillas in Colombia. Roni is a Scots woman whose son, in 24 hours, will be executed in the United States by lethal injection.
Written with Dark's customary polish, Titus and Roni is as elegant in its telling as it is electric in its tale.
Al’s Well
Until Life Us Do Part
The mid-life crisis becomes the lifetime’s crisis.
The fling becomes the affair ... the affair becomes the love affair
...
The love affair becomes the murder. Set within the châteaux and vineyards of Southern France, ‘Al’s Well’ is a story of many kinds of love: of sexual passion and emotional desperation; of cravings for romance and danger and fulfilment; of lusts simultaneously for the intimate and the superficial; of proscribed love buttressing married love.
At one level, ‘Al’s Well’ is the tale of the adulterous affair between the sassy American, Trove, and the geeky Englishman, Mike. At another, it chronicles the consequent deepening of the relationship of Trove with her sculptor husband, Al. At all levels, ‘Al’s Well’ is love under the microscope – but a microscope of lenses either shaking with laughter or crumpled in tears ... or both.
Gregory Dark already enjoys a reputation for prose of enormous wit, charm and beauty. These qualities are again in abundance in this, his first book of which romantic love is the central theme.
www.gregorydark.net
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