Post by kate on Aug 28, 2009 12:22:04 GMT
Title: Lookaftering
AUTHOR: Potato
RATING: PG
DISTRIBUTION: here and neighboursfans only otherwise I may well sue. Just saying that in case really, because I'm a paranoiac.
FEEDBACK: I like nice feedback. Don't tell me if you think it's crap, I'm a bit precious and may cry.
DISCLAIMER: These characters were created by Neighbours. The title is from an album of the same name by Vashti Bunyan.
SUMMARY: Declan tells India a story.
PAIRING/CHARACTERS: Declan, India, Rebecca.
YEAR: 1980 something (in a non-Neighbours kind of way)-present.
SPOILERS: Lots.
NOTES: I'm not going to write out who all the characters are because I think that's part of the thing, but if the consensus is that it's too confusing who everyone is, let me know. Oh and I've never done a one shot before so sorry if it's crap.
DATE: 27/08/09
Night time. The crickets are chirping and that's what tells us we need to go to bed.
I'm going to tell you a story now baby. It's long and it's sad and it has things that you won't understand till you are grown. It concerns things that I wish so much I had asked before and things which I never knew until it was too late.
I'm tired and it's late and I want you to sleep. I've tried singing and dancing and you just don't want to sleep.
I'm so tired. I didn't know it was possible to be this tired.
I don't know what to say to you. I don't know what to do.
If I tell you the best story I know will you please, please, go to sleep?
---
The best story I know starts with a girl. Once upon a time, it starts…
Once upon a time there was a girl called Bridget. She was beautiful and funny and everyone wanted to know her…
-----
It's no good.
It's so quiet in here, I feel stupid.
I can't tell stories. I can't tell jokes. I hate the sound of my voice and I always forget the good bits.
Listen to those crickets. It sounds like they're laughing.
Everybody keeps saying I should talk to you. As if you're listening. As if you're going to nod along. If you are any child of mine you probably won't. I don't know what you can relate to and I don't know what you like.
But we're just stuck with each other now and if you want to know me you will have to know about her.
--
If I told you it was about a baby like you, can you relate to that India?
The story started with a baby on a doorstep, but that wasn't how it sounds.
The story started with fledgling love and broken homes, grief that seemed to keep coming and coming.
The baby was sitting there but the woman couldn't walk away. She knew what this made her. I know now that she must have known. But she was so tired and so full of worry she could hardly think.
And there were all these questions. Was she doing this for the baby? Was she doing this for herself? Was she doing it for the scowling king or queen who were waiting for her at home or for the semi-sober monster who had refused to love her or the baby, but who she wanted more than anything to save?
She didn't know what the answer was.
She was too tired for reasoning. All she could think of was that it wasn't supposed to feel like this.
She picked up the baby. It wasn't love. It was duty and guilt.
She didn't start off like this. She had been bubbly and sweet with greeny eyes, but being a mother at seventeen will grind a person down and she couldn't quite remember how to be happy or even a human anymore.
A woman in white had given her a magic cure. She was a nice woman but sometimes potions, they just don't work. The lady had been insistent though:if she kept on going back for more, she would one day soon know how to make the whole thing right.
The baby was starting to wimper. She panicked. She couldn't leave it now, there was someone coming. She had been away with the fairies and forgotten to feed it again. She couldn't leave him now, the moment to do it had passed and she was left with the pounding, stabbing guilt again until the next time when the thought occurred to her- another doorstep, another church pew.
She remembered what the woman in white had said. The potion would make her forget these thoughts if she kept on coming back for them.
Could a potion teach her to love? Could it teach her to become something she wasn't old, wise or equipped enough to be?
-----
Listen to those ducks quacking. I came here so we could have some quiet so I could finish the story I started last night.
I'm going to tell you something now- and you're not allowed to remind me of this when you're grown up enough to take the mick- but when I was a baby I was scared of those ducks.
I'm scared of lots of things. Being scared, being crap. I think it's important that you know that about your dad. It's important that you're never under any illusion about that.
I'm a coward sometimes. Maybe that's why I can't seem to tell you about it in any way other than a story.
So here we go again.
---
Life went on in the faraway land. In a neighbouring district, a neighbouring land, another baby was teething. He grumbled and wept and he tugged on his mother's finger. She pulled funny faces and the baby smiled but it was never long before he folded his face up and sobbed again.
He was a bad baby. He didn't mean to be, and he was going to grow up to be a good-looking fellow, but it was generally accepted that he was bad.
He wouldn't go to sleep when his mama told him to sleep. He terrorised the cats and made even the dogs cry by pulling on their tails. He made his mother cry and his grandparents shake their heads in irritation.
But worst of all he made his mother sad and he didn't know how to stop it. So he didn't.
-----
A few years passed. A baby on a doorstep again. A different baby, a different doorstep but the same unhappy woman with the greeny eyes.
This baby was silent and obedient and good, like mums and dads sometimes wish babies would be.
She had been sat there, as she had been a few times now, and she could still not walk away. The door was a shiney and red one. She had seen the people who lived there and had decided that this was a good house. They were smiley and kind-looking, well-dressed and always had visits by friends.
She stood on the step, now, as before, but still she couldn't walk away. This time, though, it wasn't duty or guilt. It was because her legs couldn't seem to carry her anymore. The potion was wearing down, you see, and the magic was all but gone.
She sat down and shivered.
The monster was gone now, and so were the king and queen. They ate biscuits and drank coco in a faraway castle while their daughter was drowning and grieving and dying.
The woman closed her eyes and thought of the monster that she had loved; the sometimes-kind eyes that she had given everything to, to the cost of everyone else. Eyes that she would never see again. She opened her own, looked down at the baby, then shut them again in pain. Another life that bound her to a kingdom of misery that she wanted to leave. Another life to be responsible for and the potion still wasn't teaching her to do it. She covered her eyes and leant against the wall. She fell asleep and dreamed about nothing. Sometimes those are the bestest kind of dreams there are.
The little boy, the baby she couldn't bring herself to leave those years ago, had followed her and now came to sit with her. He was a good child too- not like the other one. He was serious and had greeny eyes like yours. His clothes were quite dirty because his mama didn't wash them. He didn't cry or scream about it because he knew of nothing else.
He shook his mother but she wasn't waking up. The dream about nothing must have been too good.
He picked up his baby sister and he cried. He was a baby himself but he knew what was right. He didn't know what it was but he knew he had to do it. The beautiful lady was somewhere inside the lifeless soul on the side of the road, but he knew he wasn't going to see her again.
He was only five and he hadn't even been enrolled in school but he knew what she had been about to do and he knew he had to do something.
She wasn't quite gone but she wasn't coming back.
He wrapped up the baby and gave the instinct he had a name.
It wasn't duty or guilt. It was lookaftering.
-----
Some more years passed and in the good home in the good neighbourhood the bad baby with the bad temper was still a bad boy. He did nothing right and because of the bad things he kept on doing they could never stay anywhere for more than a month.
His mother would never admit that but his aunties and uncles and teachers told him that was true. The lady was beautiful and serene they said. She didn't deserve a child like this.
This was a baby who only thought of himself. He got given a goldfish one time. He didn't know what to with it. Lookaftering was not for him.
---
I'm sorry baby. This is the worst told story I bet you've ever heard. I know you've heard some good ones. Your mum- she told you good ones.
But stick with it. I want you to remember this stuff well.
---
So the years had passed and the bad baby was now a bad boy and the baby on the doorstep was a girl now- the most beautiful and silly and funny little girl at that.
She had curly dark hair like yours is starting to be, and the prettiest smile. The smile came like a flash over her face (which was sometimes a bit like thunder) and it made people happy even when they had no reason to be.
She stole sweets straight from the counter and pulled faces at strangers and they still loved her even though they very often didn't want to.
They didn't want to love her because the girl was a pest. And she was sometimes a liar and sometimes a thief. Now you and I know that all children deserve love but sometimes they don't get it and that's the one thing that makes the world so sad.
It was why the baby on the doorstep was now a little girl on a doorstep.
It was why the little boy and the girl had to move from place to place to find something that most babies like you or even I were born with.
The first place they thought would be home forever: it wasn't and so they moved on.
The second they hoped the same but the dream was fading fast. They moved again.
At the third place they went to, they knew that forever was not the thing that they tell you it is. The boy was getting old and he was getting wise. Love was a myth or a fairytale for him and not one that he believed in. And because this was not a real fairy tale the hardship didn't just come in threes. The boy and girl went to a fourth house and a fifth and still not one to call home.
Then one day a woman and a man arrived at the place where children who don't have love went to live and they came and they shook their hands.
The boy looked away and the woman looked sad.
The little girl wasn't scared of anything but she was scared for the boy. He seemed tired and the little girl couldn't tell- she wasn't psychic, it isn't that kind of story- but he didn't seem to dream for himself anymore. That was a bad thing. It meant he wasn't a child anymore.
His face was quiet and solemn. The pictures that he was asked to draw were neat and blank.
They all got in a car. They sat in a house and they didn't know what to talk about, so they didn't. The boy looked away again and went back to his dreams of nothing. The woman offered the little girl a pink dolly and she hardly knew what to do with it.
The woman started to cry. The little boy sighed and and tutted and frowned and the little girl thought and thought and, even though she was the cleverest girl there was, she just didn't know what to do.
They sat and they sat.
The man showed her a book about elephants and she had an idea.
She made a decision.
It was her turn now. She had to do try her hardest to make these people happy again. She was good and kind like her mother had been before the potion had set in; kind, like her brother had been to her from the day she was born.
Love was not a noun for her. It wasn't a gift that you could keep. That didn't mean she didn't know how to love. I don't think you'll understand that- you're only a baby. How do I explain this? Love was something that she did.
She taught herself to love.
Love was what she did.
She loved and she was loved and she taught others to love.
She loved her brother and your grandma and grandad and she taught them to be happy again.
She didn't know about love but she knew about lookaftering.
---
And then she met that little boy who had never know anything but love but who hadn't known what to do with it and she taught him all about it too.
She taught him even though she hadn't needed to because when he met her he loved her already but it didn't stop her trying once she had decided, because, as I've told you, she was a pain in the bum like that.
He was mean to her sometimes as bad boys sometimes are and after all these things and all this hurt he was the only person who could make her cry. When she did, it made him feel like dying, so he tried his hardest not to let her again.
But then things seemed to go in circles in this story. The good girl and the bad boy, even though he was good now, seemed helpless to stop something that had been set in place. That thing was you and you were a crazily beautiful little thing but, I think you'll agree, quite a troublesome one.
But you weren't trouble to the girl. She knew just how to sort you out, like she'd somehow just been born with it, just like a baby turtle knows straight away to crawl into the sea…
______________________________
And I'm crying again.
Those horrible crickets that we hate have stopped chirping now. I almost wish they'd start again.
The light just came on in grandma's room. I guess she's probably listening.
She's probably wondering what I'm going to say next.
She's probably thinking I've missed something out. A hole in this story.
I suppose I don't need to tell you that. You know because you've been right here through all of it. You know exactly how this ends. I know because even though you have teeny little hands and fingers, your brain is as big as your mama's was. Nothing escapes you.
You know.
I know you know because how can you not when your dad is crying all the time. It's not right.
I know you know because of the troubled little looks you give me when you look like you're reaching for your mama and then seem to stop. Is it because you know it makes me sad?
You know. And you know that skill that your mama knew, and your uncle knew, and my mum knew, and Steph and Miss Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy knew but which I just can't seem to figure out.
You know how to look after me, to win me round, to almost make me forget what's missing.
I don't know much these days but I know that that's not right. I know that that's not the way round it's supposed to be.
I can't carry on now. Your grandma has got up and has turned on the radio. She thinks she's taking my mind off things but instead I just can't hear myself think. She doesn't like this story. I know why. I think she's scared of what the ending to the story will be. She knows it can't end that well.
----
It's quieter now. Here.
We went on a lovely trip didn't we?
And now we're there. In a place your mum must have known very well. It was where she grew up. If things had happened differently we might have all come to this place together.
The crickets here are louder than they ever were at home. There are also birds and cows braying and horses whinnying. On the other side of the door there are people talking loudly. People who love you and one or two of them may even look a bit like you. They're jabbering away so loudly. I wonder what they'd say if they knew I was here.
But it's now or never.
Now is the time to tell you what I missed off the ending.
What I missed from the story was the bit about the unmendable tear in the chain, the giant heart shaped ticketate that had been silvery rather than pink because the girl who made it hated things of that colour more than pickles and carrots and all the other things she hated.
What happened was the chain got ripped.
What happened was…
Oh christ. The people the other side of the door have gone quiet. I'm going to have to make this quick, I don't want them to hear me crying.
I don't want you to have to see your daddy cry anymore and that's why we're here.
We're here because I know too much about love now to keep feeding you these fairy stories. I'm not so arrogant to think that the next person in the lookaftering chain was meant to be me.
If she knew what I was about to do it would break her heart. But she will never know because she's gone. There's no fairytale in that bit. I wish there was but there's not. She has left us, you and me, to figure things out for ourselves.
The part of the story with me in it is ending now, but I don't want you to be sad about that. You can be angry one day but you're not allowed to be sad.
It ends with a baby in a happy home, it ends with a different old king and queen with the little baby they always dreamed of.
The story ends with a baby on a doorstep.
AUTHOR: Potato
RATING: PG
DISTRIBUTION: here and neighboursfans only otherwise I may well sue. Just saying that in case really, because I'm a paranoiac.
FEEDBACK: I like nice feedback. Don't tell me if you think it's crap, I'm a bit precious and may cry.
DISCLAIMER: These characters were created by Neighbours. The title is from an album of the same name by Vashti Bunyan.
SUMMARY: Declan tells India a story.
PAIRING/CHARACTERS: Declan, India, Rebecca.
YEAR: 1980 something (in a non-Neighbours kind of way)-present.
SPOILERS: Lots.
NOTES: I'm not going to write out who all the characters are because I think that's part of the thing, but if the consensus is that it's too confusing who everyone is, let me know. Oh and I've never done a one shot before so sorry if it's crap.
DATE: 27/08/09
Night time. The crickets are chirping and that's what tells us we need to go to bed.
I'm going to tell you a story now baby. It's long and it's sad and it has things that you won't understand till you are grown. It concerns things that I wish so much I had asked before and things which I never knew until it was too late.
I'm tired and it's late and I want you to sleep. I've tried singing and dancing and you just don't want to sleep.
I'm so tired. I didn't know it was possible to be this tired.
I don't know what to say to you. I don't know what to do.
If I tell you the best story I know will you please, please, go to sleep?
---
The best story I know starts with a girl. Once upon a time, it starts…
Once upon a time there was a girl called Bridget. She was beautiful and funny and everyone wanted to know her…
-----
It's no good.
It's so quiet in here, I feel stupid.
I can't tell stories. I can't tell jokes. I hate the sound of my voice and I always forget the good bits.
Listen to those crickets. It sounds like they're laughing.
Everybody keeps saying I should talk to you. As if you're listening. As if you're going to nod along. If you are any child of mine you probably won't. I don't know what you can relate to and I don't know what you like.
But we're just stuck with each other now and if you want to know me you will have to know about her.
--
If I told you it was about a baby like you, can you relate to that India?
The story started with a baby on a doorstep, but that wasn't how it sounds.
The story started with fledgling love and broken homes, grief that seemed to keep coming and coming.
The baby was sitting there but the woman couldn't walk away. She knew what this made her. I know now that she must have known. But she was so tired and so full of worry she could hardly think.
And there were all these questions. Was she doing this for the baby? Was she doing this for herself? Was she doing it for the scowling king or queen who were waiting for her at home or for the semi-sober monster who had refused to love her or the baby, but who she wanted more than anything to save?
She didn't know what the answer was.
She was too tired for reasoning. All she could think of was that it wasn't supposed to feel like this.
She picked up the baby. It wasn't love. It was duty and guilt.
She didn't start off like this. She had been bubbly and sweet with greeny eyes, but being a mother at seventeen will grind a person down and she couldn't quite remember how to be happy or even a human anymore.
A woman in white had given her a magic cure. She was a nice woman but sometimes potions, they just don't work. The lady had been insistent though:if she kept on going back for more, she would one day soon know how to make the whole thing right.
The baby was starting to wimper. She panicked. She couldn't leave it now, there was someone coming. She had been away with the fairies and forgotten to feed it again. She couldn't leave him now, the moment to do it had passed and she was left with the pounding, stabbing guilt again until the next time when the thought occurred to her- another doorstep, another church pew.
She remembered what the woman in white had said. The potion would make her forget these thoughts if she kept on coming back for them.
Could a potion teach her to love? Could it teach her to become something she wasn't old, wise or equipped enough to be?
-----
Listen to those ducks quacking. I came here so we could have some quiet so I could finish the story I started last night.
I'm going to tell you something now- and you're not allowed to remind me of this when you're grown up enough to take the mick- but when I was a baby I was scared of those ducks.
I'm scared of lots of things. Being scared, being crap. I think it's important that you know that about your dad. It's important that you're never under any illusion about that.
I'm a coward sometimes. Maybe that's why I can't seem to tell you about it in any way other than a story.
So here we go again.
---
Life went on in the faraway land. In a neighbouring district, a neighbouring land, another baby was teething. He grumbled and wept and he tugged on his mother's finger. She pulled funny faces and the baby smiled but it was never long before he folded his face up and sobbed again.
He was a bad baby. He didn't mean to be, and he was going to grow up to be a good-looking fellow, but it was generally accepted that he was bad.
He wouldn't go to sleep when his mama told him to sleep. He terrorised the cats and made even the dogs cry by pulling on their tails. He made his mother cry and his grandparents shake their heads in irritation.
But worst of all he made his mother sad and he didn't know how to stop it. So he didn't.
-----
A few years passed. A baby on a doorstep again. A different baby, a different doorstep but the same unhappy woman with the greeny eyes.
This baby was silent and obedient and good, like mums and dads sometimes wish babies would be.
She had been sat there, as she had been a few times now, and she could still not walk away. The door was a shiney and red one. She had seen the people who lived there and had decided that this was a good house. They were smiley and kind-looking, well-dressed and always had visits by friends.
She stood on the step, now, as before, but still she couldn't walk away. This time, though, it wasn't duty or guilt. It was because her legs couldn't seem to carry her anymore. The potion was wearing down, you see, and the magic was all but gone.
She sat down and shivered.
The monster was gone now, and so were the king and queen. They ate biscuits and drank coco in a faraway castle while their daughter was drowning and grieving and dying.
The woman closed her eyes and thought of the monster that she had loved; the sometimes-kind eyes that she had given everything to, to the cost of everyone else. Eyes that she would never see again. She opened her own, looked down at the baby, then shut them again in pain. Another life that bound her to a kingdom of misery that she wanted to leave. Another life to be responsible for and the potion still wasn't teaching her to do it. She covered her eyes and leant against the wall. She fell asleep and dreamed about nothing. Sometimes those are the bestest kind of dreams there are.
The little boy, the baby she couldn't bring herself to leave those years ago, had followed her and now came to sit with her. He was a good child too- not like the other one. He was serious and had greeny eyes like yours. His clothes were quite dirty because his mama didn't wash them. He didn't cry or scream about it because he knew of nothing else.
He shook his mother but she wasn't waking up. The dream about nothing must have been too good.
He picked up his baby sister and he cried. He was a baby himself but he knew what was right. He didn't know what it was but he knew he had to do it. The beautiful lady was somewhere inside the lifeless soul on the side of the road, but he knew he wasn't going to see her again.
He was only five and he hadn't even been enrolled in school but he knew what she had been about to do and he knew he had to do something.
She wasn't quite gone but she wasn't coming back.
He wrapped up the baby and gave the instinct he had a name.
It wasn't duty or guilt. It was lookaftering.
-----
Some more years passed and in the good home in the good neighbourhood the bad baby with the bad temper was still a bad boy. He did nothing right and because of the bad things he kept on doing they could never stay anywhere for more than a month.
His mother would never admit that but his aunties and uncles and teachers told him that was true. The lady was beautiful and serene they said. She didn't deserve a child like this.
This was a baby who only thought of himself. He got given a goldfish one time. He didn't know what to with it. Lookaftering was not for him.
---
I'm sorry baby. This is the worst told story I bet you've ever heard. I know you've heard some good ones. Your mum- she told you good ones.
But stick with it. I want you to remember this stuff well.
---
So the years had passed and the bad baby was now a bad boy and the baby on the doorstep was a girl now- the most beautiful and silly and funny little girl at that.
She had curly dark hair like yours is starting to be, and the prettiest smile. The smile came like a flash over her face (which was sometimes a bit like thunder) and it made people happy even when they had no reason to be.
She stole sweets straight from the counter and pulled faces at strangers and they still loved her even though they very often didn't want to.
They didn't want to love her because the girl was a pest. And she was sometimes a liar and sometimes a thief. Now you and I know that all children deserve love but sometimes they don't get it and that's the one thing that makes the world so sad.
It was why the baby on the doorstep was now a little girl on a doorstep.
It was why the little boy and the girl had to move from place to place to find something that most babies like you or even I were born with.
The first place they thought would be home forever: it wasn't and so they moved on.
The second they hoped the same but the dream was fading fast. They moved again.
At the third place they went to, they knew that forever was not the thing that they tell you it is. The boy was getting old and he was getting wise. Love was a myth or a fairytale for him and not one that he believed in. And because this was not a real fairy tale the hardship didn't just come in threes. The boy and girl went to a fourth house and a fifth and still not one to call home.
Then one day a woman and a man arrived at the place where children who don't have love went to live and they came and they shook their hands.
The boy looked away and the woman looked sad.
The little girl wasn't scared of anything but she was scared for the boy. He seemed tired and the little girl couldn't tell- she wasn't psychic, it isn't that kind of story- but he didn't seem to dream for himself anymore. That was a bad thing. It meant he wasn't a child anymore.
His face was quiet and solemn. The pictures that he was asked to draw were neat and blank.
They all got in a car. They sat in a house and they didn't know what to talk about, so they didn't. The boy looked away again and went back to his dreams of nothing. The woman offered the little girl a pink dolly and she hardly knew what to do with it.
The woman started to cry. The little boy sighed and and tutted and frowned and the little girl thought and thought and, even though she was the cleverest girl there was, she just didn't know what to do.
They sat and they sat.
The man showed her a book about elephants and she had an idea.
She made a decision.
It was her turn now. She had to do try her hardest to make these people happy again. She was good and kind like her mother had been before the potion had set in; kind, like her brother had been to her from the day she was born.
Love was not a noun for her. It wasn't a gift that you could keep. That didn't mean she didn't know how to love. I don't think you'll understand that- you're only a baby. How do I explain this? Love was something that she did.
She taught herself to love.
Love was what she did.
She loved and she was loved and she taught others to love.
She loved her brother and your grandma and grandad and she taught them to be happy again.
She didn't know about love but she knew about lookaftering.
---
And then she met that little boy who had never know anything but love but who hadn't known what to do with it and she taught him all about it too.
She taught him even though she hadn't needed to because when he met her he loved her already but it didn't stop her trying once she had decided, because, as I've told you, she was a pain in the bum like that.
He was mean to her sometimes as bad boys sometimes are and after all these things and all this hurt he was the only person who could make her cry. When she did, it made him feel like dying, so he tried his hardest not to let her again.
But then things seemed to go in circles in this story. The good girl and the bad boy, even though he was good now, seemed helpless to stop something that had been set in place. That thing was you and you were a crazily beautiful little thing but, I think you'll agree, quite a troublesome one.
But you weren't trouble to the girl. She knew just how to sort you out, like she'd somehow just been born with it, just like a baby turtle knows straight away to crawl into the sea…
______________________________
And I'm crying again.
Those horrible crickets that we hate have stopped chirping now. I almost wish they'd start again.
The light just came on in grandma's room. I guess she's probably listening.
She's probably wondering what I'm going to say next.
She's probably thinking I've missed something out. A hole in this story.
I suppose I don't need to tell you that. You know because you've been right here through all of it. You know exactly how this ends. I know because even though you have teeny little hands and fingers, your brain is as big as your mama's was. Nothing escapes you.
You know.
I know you know because how can you not when your dad is crying all the time. It's not right.
I know you know because of the troubled little looks you give me when you look like you're reaching for your mama and then seem to stop. Is it because you know it makes me sad?
You know. And you know that skill that your mama knew, and your uncle knew, and my mum knew, and Steph and Miss Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy knew but which I just can't seem to figure out.
You know how to look after me, to win me round, to almost make me forget what's missing.
I don't know much these days but I know that that's not right. I know that that's not the way round it's supposed to be.
I can't carry on now. Your grandma has got up and has turned on the radio. She thinks she's taking my mind off things but instead I just can't hear myself think. She doesn't like this story. I know why. I think she's scared of what the ending to the story will be. She knows it can't end that well.
----
It's quieter now. Here.
We went on a lovely trip didn't we?
And now we're there. In a place your mum must have known very well. It was where she grew up. If things had happened differently we might have all come to this place together.
The crickets here are louder than they ever were at home. There are also birds and cows braying and horses whinnying. On the other side of the door there are people talking loudly. People who love you and one or two of them may even look a bit like you. They're jabbering away so loudly. I wonder what they'd say if they knew I was here.
But it's now or never.
Now is the time to tell you what I missed off the ending.
What I missed from the story was the bit about the unmendable tear in the chain, the giant heart shaped ticketate that had been silvery rather than pink because the girl who made it hated things of that colour more than pickles and carrots and all the other things she hated.
What happened was the chain got ripped.
What happened was…
Oh christ. The people the other side of the door have gone quiet. I'm going to have to make this quick, I don't want them to hear me crying.
I don't want you to have to see your daddy cry anymore and that's why we're here.
We're here because I know too much about love now to keep feeding you these fairy stories. I'm not so arrogant to think that the next person in the lookaftering chain was meant to be me.
If she knew what I was about to do it would break her heart. But she will never know because she's gone. There's no fairytale in that bit. I wish there was but there's not. She has left us, you and me, to figure things out for ourselves.
The part of the story with me in it is ending now, but I don't want you to be sad about that. You can be angry one day but you're not allowed to be sad.
It ends with a baby in a happy home, it ends with a different old king and queen with the little baby they always dreamed of.
The story ends with a baby on a doorstep.