Excerpt from 'Daisy Weal and the Outside Place'
Daisy Weal and the Outside Place
Daisy Weal was ambling along the road, which as we explained in the previous short story was something that she did more and more often, with her mind everywhere except where she was going. She was humming softly to herself, concentrating just long enough to jump over the cracks in the pavement. Well everyone knows that you explode if you step on a crack, so it was pretty important to make sure that you didn’t.
She was idly musing on the fact that it had been almost two years since her environmental obsession and the outbreak of people going green and growing long yellow ears, and almost a year since she had found the millions. The fifty thousand pounds reward that she had been given, and of course handed over to her parents, had resulted in several nice pieces of jewellery, but little else. The ‘little else’ was from choice, because there was nothing else that she wanted.
It was true that she had the ability to have anything she wanted at any time, but to her credit such a thing had never even crossed her mind. Mostly she had been born that way, but since birth it had certainly been the influence of her mother that reinforced in her the strong sense of right and wrong that she possessed.
By now, crack avoidance had become almost automatic as her mind continued its wanderings, but all the idle thoughts were suddenly interrupted and she was brought to an abrupt halt.
A face looked up at her from the ground. It was only a brief glimpse before it disappeared again, but it had been enough to bring her to an involuntary stop, with her full attention back in her head again. She was not to know until later that this was her first encounter with an ‘outside’ place.
For several minutes she stood, staring down, with her glance darting from side to side to make sure that it was not some other influence that had disturbed her daydreaming. When nothing became obvious, she carefully stepped around that particular paving slab, and making sure she stepped over all the cracks, she started walking forward again.
She had only gone about three or four steps, when the face appeared again almost under her foot as it was about to land on the slab. By a herculean effort she managed not to step down, but in doing so fell over and skidded across the ground to come to a stop, lying half way over a crack. She closed her eyes waiting for the explosion, but when none came after a few seconds, she opened them again and got up.
She looked around to ensure there were no spectators and then, finding the right thoughts, she ran her hands down over her dress and the couple of rips that were there disappeared, and then gritting her teeth against the pain until she could block it, healed the several scrapes on her knees and elbows. Having assured herself that there was no sign of the incident, she tentatively outstretched one foot and placed it on the crack, but nothing happened and not quite believing it, she started jumping up and down on them.
After a few enthusiastic jumps and the lack of smoking remains in her shoes, she vowed that Alfie would be in serious trouble when she next saw him. It was he that had been insistent about the danger of jumping on cracks, and she was beginning to think that she was an idiot for believing him. That’s half the trouble, she thought, nearly a grownup mind and the instincts of a kid, you can never be sure that everything you hear is true.
From the corner of her eye there was a flash and the face appeared again, but when she turned towards it, it was gone. She started to head towards the place where she had last seen it, but her attention was caught by the strident howl of a passing ambulance. She touched her head and then bent down and touched her toes, while at the same time muttering,
“Touch your head, touch your toes. Never go in one of those.”
She turned her head at the sound of a chuckle, and a passing elderly lady remarked,
“I haven’t heard that for donkey’s years. Mind you we said that for funeral hearses. It was something like ‘touch your collar, never holler ‘til you see a dog’ for an ambulance… can’t be sure of the holler though.”