Can we go tomorrow?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Grania after supper, ‘but I really feel I should ask your daddy about this first.’
‘If it’s what I want,’ Aurora pouted, ‘he won’t say no, will he?’
‘I’m sure he won’t, but I just need to make sure. Story?’
‘Yes, please,’ Aurora said eagerly as Grania took her hand and they climbed the stairs. ‘Do you know
The Sleeping Beauty
, about the princess I’m named after? I’d love to dance that part one day,’ she said dreamily.
‘And I’m sure you will, sweetheart.’
After Aurora had subsided, Grania went downstairs and opened the door to Alexander’s study. She checked the contact list for his phone number and dialled it. His voicemail clicked in immediately.
‘Hello, Alexander, it’s Grania Ryan here. Aurora is very well indeed, and I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wantedto check that it was all right for Aurora to take some dancing lessons. The one she did today she really enjoyed, and she wants to continue. Perhaps you could give me a quick call back or even send me a text, and –’ Grania thought about it swiftly before she said – ‘if I don’t hear from you in the next two or three days, I’ll take it that it’s fine. Hope all is well with you, bye.’
Despite herself, Grania felt apprehensive as she climbed into bed at eleven that night. Her senses were alert to hear footsteps along the corridor, and however hard she tried, sleep would not come. At three o’clock – the time she had woken on the previous nights – Grania tiptoed into Aurora’s room to find the child peacefully asleep. Tiptoeing back out again, she reached for the heavy pile of envelopes her mother had given to her. Undoing the string that bound them together, she opened the first one, and began to read …
Aurora
So, the story has begun. And some of our characters are in place. Including me, of course. As usual, I take centre stage. I look back and see what a precocious child I was. But also ‘troubled’, for which adults forgive a lot.
I will not spoil the story by giving too much away about my midnight wanderings. But I have put in a little for ‘effect’, especially about me. Besides, in Act Two of The Sleeping Beauty, the gossamer curtain between reality and dreams is opened by Princess Aurora herself, with the help of the Lilac Fairy.
Who is to say what is real or imagined?
I told you from the start I believed in magic.
I’ve also discovered today that not only am I named after a princess in a fairy tale, but a mystical set of lights that brighten the night sky. I like the idea of being a star, shining down forever from the heavens, although I’m quite glad my second name isn’t ‘Borealis’.
Now, we move back in time, and I must start to exercise my writing powers more proficiently. Up until this point, I’ve known the living, breathing protagonists:
Grania, who grieved so much for the baby she had lost, and was in such a muddle about the man she loved. I can see now how vulnerable she was. Easy prey for a child needing a mother, and a handsome father struggling to cope.
Kathleen, whose past knowledge makes her desperate, yet impotent, to protect her child.
And Matt, dear Matt, so confused and helpless, and at the mercy of the strange breed, which men, it seems to me, can’t do with or without
–
Women.
We will meet many females in the next hundred pages. We will meet good men and bad, too – a cast of characters to do justice to any fairy tale. It was a darker time then, a time when little value was placed on human life, when survival for the most part was all we strove for.
I wish I could say that we have learned our lesson.
But humans rarely look back to the past, until they have made the same mistakes. By which time their opinions are considered irrelevant, as they are apparently too old to understand the young. Which is why the human race will remain as flawed yet as magical as we are.
We are returning now to that
‘Perhaps,’ said Grania after supper, ‘but I really feel I should ask your daddy about this first.’
‘If it’s what I want,’ Aurora pouted, ‘he won’t say no, will he?’
‘I’m sure he won’t, but I just need to make sure. Story?’
‘Yes, please,’ Aurora said eagerly as Grania took her hand and they climbed the stairs. ‘Do you know
The Sleeping Beauty
, about the princess I’m named after? I’d love to dance that part one day,’ she said dreamily.
‘And I’m sure you will, sweetheart.’
After Aurora had subsided, Grania went downstairs and opened the door to Alexander’s study. She checked the contact list for his phone number and dialled it. His voicemail clicked in immediately.
‘Hello, Alexander, it’s Grania Ryan here. Aurora is very well indeed, and I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wantedto check that it was all right for Aurora to take some dancing lessons. The one she did today she really enjoyed, and she wants to continue. Perhaps you could give me a quick call back or even send me a text, and –’ Grania thought about it swiftly before she said – ‘if I don’t hear from you in the next two or three days, I’ll take it that it’s fine. Hope all is well with you, bye.’
Despite herself, Grania felt apprehensive as she climbed into bed at eleven that night. Her senses were alert to hear footsteps along the corridor, and however hard she tried, sleep would not come. At three o’clock – the time she had woken on the previous nights – Grania tiptoed into Aurora’s room to find the child peacefully asleep. Tiptoeing back out again, she reached for the heavy pile of envelopes her mother had given to her. Undoing the string that bound them together, she opened the first one, and began to read …
Aurora
So, the story has begun. And some of our characters are in place. Including me, of course. As usual, I take centre stage. I look back and see what a precocious child I was. But also ‘troubled’, for which adults forgive a lot.
I will not spoil the story by giving too much away about my midnight wanderings. But I have put in a little for ‘effect’, especially about me. Besides, in Act Two of The Sleeping Beauty, the gossamer curtain between reality and dreams is opened by Princess Aurora herself, with the help of the Lilac Fairy.
Who is to say what is real or imagined?
I told you from the start I believed in magic.
I’ve also discovered today that not only am I named after a princess in a fairy tale, but a mystical set of lights that brighten the night sky. I like the idea of being a star, shining down forever from the heavens, although I’m quite glad my second name isn’t ‘Borealis’.
Now, we move back in time, and I must start to exercise my writing powers more proficiently. Up until this point, I’ve known the living, breathing protagonists:
Grania, who grieved so much for the baby she had lost, and was in such a muddle about the man she loved. I can see now how vulnerable she was. Easy prey for a child needing a mother, and a handsome father struggling to cope.
Kathleen, whose past knowledge makes her desperate, yet impotent, to protect her child.
And Matt, dear Matt, so confused and helpless, and at the mercy of the strange breed, which men, it seems to me, can’t do with or without
–
Women.
We will meet many females in the next hundred pages. We will meet good men and bad, too – a cast of characters to do justice to any fairy tale. It was a darker time then, a time when little value was placed on human life, when survival for the most part was all we strove for.
I wish I could say that we have learned our lesson.
But humans rarely look back to the past, until they have made the same mistakes. By which time their opinions are considered irrelevant, as they are apparently too old to understand the young. Which is why the human race will remain as flawed yet as magical as we are.
We are returning now to that
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