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Andrews UK - Isabella Fitzjohn-Moores

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96 pages

English

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A teenage girl, Charlotte, is fascinated by a stained-glass plate sunk in the pavement and she is irresistibly drawn to find her way to the room below. She discovers a long-disused chapel and makes up her mind to return when the plate is not in shadow to see the effect of direct sunlight through the coloured glass. She knows it will be an amazing experience - unforgettable - but nothing could prepare her for what happens when she steps into the beam of light and her hair is transformed to gold. It is a book that explores greed in the human nature and how it reacts when applied to the innocent and malleable. The author intended it to be a fable for adults.

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Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)

Fantasy

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	02 décembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780995467712
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE GOLDEN HAIR
Isabella Fitzjohn-Moores
Illustrated by
Samuel Lindup

First published in 2016 by
ARTHUR H. STOCKWELL LTD
Torrs Park, Ilfracombe, Devon, EX34 8BA
www.ahstockwell.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2016 Isabella Fitzjohn-Moores
The right of Isabella Fitzjohn-Moores to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg
One day a countryman going to the nest of his goose found there an egg all yellow and glittering. When he took it up it was as heavy as lead and he was going to throw it away, because he thought a trick had been played upon him. He took it home on second thoughts, and found to his delight that it was an egg of pure gold. Every morning the same thing occurred, and he soon became rich by selling his eggs. As he grew rich he grew greedy; and thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and cut it open only to find nothing.
Aesop’s Fables

Chapter 1

She was the little one, an experiment of sorts that her parents had tried to cultivate but with the tiresome chores of their everyday lives they had given up and let her roam free - or left her alone, as she would say. Her mother always told her she loved her very much. She remembered sitting by her mother’s feet under the grand marble-enveloped fire whilst her mother stroked her hair and smiled at her through a haze of afternoon wine; she did not blame her.
Her father was often away ‘on business’, though it was seldom clear what this entailed; he worked in property as far as she knew. The green felt pool table was always littered with foreboding details and fine-print black-and-white files. When he was at home, he rarely paid attention to her; she would pass by him like a ghost in the house whispering “Hello” and “How are you?” as though they were estranged acquaintances, their eyes lowered and moonlike.
One birthday her father passed her a gleaming white box. She untied the crimson ribbon from around it and laid it carefully upon the dresser beside her, admiring the deep bloody hues of the silk.
“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” His voice growled in an abyssal tone.
She tore her eyes away from the ribbon and inspected the gleaming china skin of the box. Carefully she pried it open and looked at the diamond-encrusted silver necklace that lay curled up inside, its peeping skeletal eyes as hollow as the refracted diamonds that glistened in the scales of its husk. She shut the box and placed it beside the bed, taking up the delicate ribbon and tying it around her wrist.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, it’s lovely; I just want to save it for a special occasion.”
He was a dark-haired man with tanned skin. In her pale-pink bedroom he seemed so much darker than usual.
In the hallway the ceiling hung high above like that of a church passageway, made of old ashen stone and trimmed with yellow lantern lighting. She was walking by the study on tiptoes with her hands penguin-like either side when she heard a grumbling echo pass through the crack beneath the door; it was her mother berating her father for something, or maybe the other way around. She nudged closer and hung on to their words as they hissed in stringent combat across the waxy air.
“The one year you get our daughter a present in thirteen years!”
“She’s twelve!”
“Fuck you - how would you know?”
There was a pause, though she knew what was coming.
“She doesn’t like silver. Or diamonds.”
“What girl doesn’t like diamonds?” Her father’s voice was sceptical.
“She likes gold and fire opals.”
She could tell her mother was smiling; she could feel her warmth permeating the door.
“She’s classy, our daughter, and so beautiful.” Her mother spoke almost to herself, her voice soft, riding upon the back of a fluttering dream, as thin as the smoke she could envisage swirling in the air from her father’s cigarette.
“What girl doesn’t like diamonds?” her father muttered again.
Something in her mother’s brain surged and snapped, and her daughter, hidden behind the curtain door, felt none of the hit; she had known already.
“Maybe that whore loves those empty rocks!”
There was a stillness before her mother went back to her chant, quiet and peaceful, her voice swaying side to side to the clinking of crystalline ice cubes.
“Not our daughter. She has class; she’s so beautiful. And so different, darling. She’s one of a kind.”
She wound her way around the cylinder staircase to the floor above and stepped into her haven, shutting the door behind her and turning the lock.
She felt her eyes grow weepy with tiredness once she was safely nestled in her room, yet the sharp words of her parents had cut cracks into the beams of her brain and now she could not sleep. She pulled out an edition of Rimbaud’s poems that she had lifted from the ancient and labyrinthine library that came stocked full of books when her parents bought the house before she was born. The previous owner had died, and since the shelves would have looked awfully barren without them, her mother had insisted they take the house with all the old books. As it was, the dusk-green, cobweb-snowed library became one of her favourite hiding places. the tall trunks of the laden branches gleamed with the carapaces of many tales.
The owner had a fantastic taste for horror and stories to make you sleep with the lights on, for Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Her parents had no idea what she was reading, and her mother never would have allowed her to read what she did, had she any clue who H. P. Lovecraft was. These fantastic tales became a part of her imagination, a place where she lived and found refuge among the scatterings of light that creased through the shutters’ flaking slats, waning every day to a paler hue. She would live in a different reality each time she switched the book spines over and shook out the dust between the pages in a billow of fire-fume.
Her childhood was something of a dream, wreathed in giant doll’s houses and verdant fairy gardens, paid for out of her father’s oblivious pocket. She sat one day in her room, the opaque light shedding its dust, ready for the coming summer, playing with her dolls’ houses, which were decorated as ornately and precisely as her own house. Even the milk sat in curdled mouse-sized glass pints. Few dolls lived in this rich and stately home; instead the palace was occupied by a group of unlikely friends: a small bear that lived inside a teapot on the second floor; a tiger who occasionally ate another guest; a pink rabbit; Gemma, the wooden doll who wore a pretty yellow dress; and lastly Morris, a hamster, an occasional visitor.
She found herself looking outside at the faltering light that poured from the lantern eye precariously balanced on the white-speckled sky, She took the bear in the teapot and stumbled down the cool stone steps, along a hallway to the front door, which opened out into an expansive garden. The grass was soft and limber beneath her toes as she wandered through the garden paths to her favourite place, a clandestine relic guarded by two carved pillars. Hunched trees shrouded the clearing from the rest of the world, and bright blooms of petals lay scattered on the forest floor like confetti. She fancied it was from another time.
The stone of the old round table and the cradled water spring pulled lucid waking dreams from her. She climbed upon the tepid stone of the greying table and lay still, looking up at the ruddy-barked limbs of trees as they curled inward, obscuring the sky. She felt like a princess on offer to the gods, the fountain of youth bubbling calmly by her side. In that moment she wished she was golden like the sunbeams that poured through the windows in the tree canopy.
She expected at any time to see a toothy grin perched in a tree branch or a nameless fawn approaching. She swung her feet over the edge of the table and onto the grass and stepped over to the spring. Mossy fabric cloaked the rim, and early flowers plumed white buds. She cupped her hands and drank from the water, disturbing the image of a mousy-haired pale-ivory girl. She blinked slowly and imagined the clear liquid as molten glass flowing through her veins and casting her in immortality.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” her little voice cooed, soft and undulating like her mother’s but with a lazy rasp and growl cracking the edges of it.
From their grassy bench Naomi looked across the field at the burnt umber tree.
“Um, I’m not sure it’s beautiful.” Her friend’s voice was hesitant.
“Why not? Look at it. It’s like a person reaching up and clawing the sky.”
“I don’t think it’s beautiful. I think it’s dead... and black.”
“Oh, but look how it twists against the sky; it’s so shattered and frail.”
Naomi looked at her strangely, hugging her knees and quite still compared to Charlotte, who ran her hands through her hair and tapped her feet, swaying her head and body in continual movement, a subtle dance underpin