A short story written back to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, submitted as part of my final year portfolio.
Jeanie
“Do you not remember Jeanie,
Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Pluck’d from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the noonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
You should not loiter so.”
This is not a cautionary tale.
My parents thought a property in the woods was an investment; I thought it was a curse. Distant from everyone I knew at school: an hour on a bus, half an hour on another bus, with a half-hour wait watched by black pine-eyes hiding in scrubby gorse. I felt I was years removed from people as well as miles, an antiquated sixteen yearning for the contemporary – what my parents saw as idyllic I saw as out of touch. I didn’t care for the tree-sentries that flanked my window, the muttering stream that divided the clearing (semblance of a garden) from the impenetrable forest beyond.
Of course, it wasn’t really impenetrable – I forced my way in, ranged solitary through glades and rich thickets, made it my wild territory. I stopped being scared of all the ways the trees tried to trick me – they entertained me, thinking they could toy with me in my own back garden. That is, the woods were where I played, not that silly safe ring under my window. The forest helped me master the crafts of predicting a fox’s dead-bird gift and recognising a patch of ground that would devour your feet if you stood still. I was too engrossed in my world to be bothered that no one from school would come to visit (it wasn’t a journey most parents wanted their kids doing alone).
It was only when I’d turned the woods inside-out, had paced, conquered, and claimed every inch, that I started to get bored. It was in my early teens or so, the age when it’s awkward to make new friends. Especially when, by now, the only reason you’re bothered is because you’re hungry for a glimpse of something new, a white-glassy kitchen or big telly, swish things like that. I was fascinated by things inaccessible to me, the way my woods once were – I wanted the unfamiliar. I chased it relentlessly.
I tried to satisfy myself with small things. A can of coke pinched from a shop because, in ten minutes, I knew the lay of the aisles and the workers as though they were my leaves and branches. Drinking the coke back at school because I knew the secretary would believe I’d been at an appointment; I wasn’t the type to skip. Timing catching the bus to the second just to test myself, pocketing the pen sickly-sweet swiped from that secretary’s desk. Boring.
I handled my life delicately, but with purpose, turning it and examining it and planning my next move – I wanted to dip into the impenetrable again. Inspiration struck in my sixteenth December. I was waiting for my first bus, idling, the air a wall of needles I’d rather not have been facing. Somewhere a little warmer than the street was all I needed, but I’d have been bored stiff loitering in a corner shop or some grimy reception – I remember no expression crossed my face as I walked through the door, unchecked by the bouncer (knew it, step one, tick), but I felt I should have a sly smile, a toothy golden puddle. But sly smiles can’t slip through apprehensively clenched teeth, and the nerves of coming this far, though small, still bubbled in my chest. As it happened, a shy smile would have got me further in the bar, one of those new ones with exposed light-bulbs and mismatched décor, exposed copper pipes – trying to be hip and industrial, but just making it easy for me. My hints of hesitance melted. I knew exactly what to expect from the clientele: eyes singeing my back from across the room, prowling towards me before turning into the hand that touched my elbow, the cat’s face, eyes full of intent but still somehow soft and well-meaning.
Of course, predictable, he wanted to buy me a drink. He said other stuff, probably, small talk, flirtation, I didn’t need to hear it – I’d hooked him. What had I done? Nothing. Just exist. Was I longing or was I intrigued? I didn’t know what to do with this man. So I let him buy me a cocktail, middling expensive, peach something. It bloomed in my mouth, and my cheeks, and I let him stroke my hair before tumbling, hurry, scurry, out the door and on to my bus (by the second, of course).
I had owned that man. Just like I’d let the woods lap me up knowing I could leave at will, I let myself be ensnared, or so they thought. After learning to slip by ever-unseen, the slight of interest left me now wanting, needing all eyes to be on me. It was addictive to have a new haunt – illuminated by the clichéd light fittings, I reflected the naked-bulb glow till I knew I radiated a light magnetic, my own. I invited people to bathe in me, to eat up the air around me, fabricating it differently each time – I’m eighteen, I’m nineteen, I’m not from here, I’m from town, I’m from the woods. The bartenders started to know me (because I liked knowing someone else was in on the joke), they had the fruitiest, priciest drinks ready before I’d even chosen someone to pay for it. Because they knew, I knew, someone always would.
After a hard day’s work (their lives are all so hard), I guess all they want is fleshy fodder for the fantasies they resort to when they’re fucking their wives. You can tell from their eyes when they’re kneading you in their mind. My favourites are the ones who think you like it. One half of a high-school power couple falters, dumbstruck, when I don’t respond to the hand in my skirt. A man who’s been satisfying too many women to count gnaws at my neck with graceless slab-tongue. I stand up off rigid laps and leave without words, one man blurs into another’s sloppy smirk.
I made it a game – I knew I was attractive (I must have been) and I stopped aiming high and started aiming low. I’d learnt to charm, through practice and stopping before they went anywhere I’d never been before. I grew tired of tricking people into buying for me, I dared myself to trick the least likely people into thinking I liked them – I widened my net, waiting around on twilight streets to find them, and see if I could get them to like me (and I could). The leering businessmen under ugly blue hotel-lobby lights, grubby smoke plumes leaking from their obtuse mouths, scrawny ratlike twenty-somethings who saw me as some foreign being, some angel. I let them all buy me drinks, let them work me through the entire menu, crab-apple, wild cranberry – such original flavours! such exciting company! – let them stroke my hair.
It’s funny; they think they’re in control but I am. They think they’re doing me a favour. I know when I go to the bathroom to sigh and giggle at my luminescent reflection they’ll sigh at the barman – they love me because they think I like them. And then I’ll vanish and they’ll think about me forever, brassy hair and black eyes.
One last smile, all teeth, at my copper-plate-ripened likeness. I come back and I giggle and glitter and say my goodbyes – another bite at the bait tonight? No, I’m tumbling out the door (as per) but I’m tumbling a little more, that’s odd. That’s my bus! Oh- I’ve missed it, no- let me sit just for a second. Gather my- thoughts.
Something’s wrong, something’s foul – a foul in my game? that’s not allowed – this has never happened before, the man from inside comes out and helps me up off the floor. something’s wrong, something, I don’t like being helped, I’m out of my depth. I never accept lifts home, why am I in a car? what comes next? I don’t recognise my woods.
I recognise my hair, tufts of gold wire snagged on buttons, snagged on- trees. as I feebly claw back, try to claw back my ownership of the night, of anything- I’ve got none left though, my wallet seems to not be mine, my jewellery (he doesn’t know it’s cheap), my clothes, oh, my body. my body’s not mine any more either. I’m too hazy –
to do anything but become, or stay, dead weight, mud eating up my sides, I’m still and I sink. I stay greying dead, dead weight in an unfamiliar glade.
This is not a cautionary tale. It wasn’t my fault. My story isn’t some twisted fable, fear-fodder to lock yourselves away. Don’t become prey, don’t play. This is not a cautionary tale, this is just my tale.
