Emma Alone In the House
Chapter 1 A house that Becomes Her Own
There once lived a girl all alone in a house. Why did she live all alone? Well, her father had left her alone. He went far away one day when his umbrella got stuck in the rainy clouds – and the little girl Emma never saw him again. The clouds must have pulled him over to another world, that one of the worlds beyond. People who are carried away by rain clouds, whether by their umbrella or just their nose, never come back. It’s a common fact.
And Emma’s mother . . . as for Emma’s mother . . . Emma’s mother had gone away even before her dad. One day Emma’s mother had lost her ring. When she went looking for it, she found it in a place just on the tiny ledge above the mouth of the thresher of the newspaper recycling machine. Emma’s family used to have a newspaper recycling machine outside to the left of the house. And they shouldn’t have had one in the first place. They had believed a silly gypsy and his monkey who had come by selling newspaper recycling machines – the monkey had told Emma’s Mum and Dad that they needed a newspaper recycler because new paper was getting too expensive.
Mum hadn’t wanted one really, it was Dad. Well, Mum lost her life because of this recycler. She put her hand into the thresher although she had only wanted to touch the ring, her wedding ring, that lay small on the ledge above the mouth of the thresher. Most people when they lose a hand can survive. But poor little Emma’s Mum lost first her hand, then her arm, then – shoulder, and then just half a minute later there was nothing left of her. Just her soul, which of course watched by and shook and rattled the machine – so it did, but the machine wouldn’t budge or stop. Emma’s Mum still wearing her glasses and dressed in her pale blue nightgown was a spirit now and couldn’t move anything.
This was quite a long time ago, when it happened. Emma had been seven. Now she was nine. And her Mum had already flown away to do things she had never done before in her lifetime when she had been alive. There were so many things she had not been able to do because of not having had the money, having to study hard at university, and there were a lot of things she never did before because the thought and possibility had never before entered her mind. Emma couldn’t go herself because no money was left to her when her parents died. At least not for her to use. It was all in a saving’s bank, to get if she was still going to a good girl by then, with all her teeth and not skipped out brushing her teeth before going to bed. She was going to have to reach seventy years old. Yes! Seventy! It was seventy that had been the instructions, supposedly, that her father had left in the bank! Yet it had been a mistake, and the banker knew but couldn’t change it. At the time when Emma’s father had been at the bank to give these instructions, he had had a sore finger from biting on his nails since he had been worrying about several things at the time. So he couldn’t write. And because his teeth had become worn out from biting on his nails, he couldn’t speak so well anymore. What he could say very well though, obviously, was the word “seventy”, and that was what the banker had understood. Though Emma’s dad really meant to say 17. Emma really was supposed to inherit her dad’s money at seventeen, if ever he should die young.
So Emma died penniless. It was good though, just at the right time, when a friend of her father’s returned a donkey that used to be her father’s. It dropped pound coins as its poo, and never pooed any dark stuff! The money did have a smell to it though. Emma stacked it up in the garden shed. It became lots and lots but she never spent it all at once even though it started to smell pretty bad. Emma listened to the voice of her parents at the back of her mind, telling her to be careful. But then when the stench was getting pretty scary, she took two wheelbarrows of it and threw it over a ridge into a brook. The coins were well-cleaned then. A few days later she dried them up and had a logistics company pack it all up into crates to take to a lamp-making artisan to make her a new lamp to stand beside grandfather’s armchair, the lamps you’ve always imagined in fairytale castles, made of glass with pictures on them. It cost £5000. Mummy and Daddy never would have had that money, but Emma had just wanted to get rid of some of the stock in her garden shed. Never would she be a penniless orphan with the help of her donkey. “Wow, there are one hundred pennies inside a one pound coin,” Emma thought out loud. She was very proud it could no longer be said that her parents left her penniless. She had more pennies in each one pound coin than she cared to count, and they became more and more every day, she had to store them in the basement.
But Emma knew life was hard and you had to be tight – hold your money tight and close your eyes as tight as you could whenever you walked past the toy shop, the bakery selling cakes and doughnuts! If only there was no such thing as money, yet of course, without money you’d have to keep catching crows and field mice in her backyard – which was what she had had to live off from the first few months before the donkey came. After this she became strictly vegetarian, she felt so bad having set poison out for those poor innocent creatures to be killed so she could eat them.
Good thing Emma did not have to pay rent or a mortgage – the house was paid off. And the house was run by solar and wind and geothermal energy.
Because life was so good at home, even without her parents, Emma stopped going to school when she was nine. One day after nearly a whole year, the thought came to her that she wouldn’t need to go to school anymore if she wanted to have a good future – as her parents used to tell her. Her donkey pooed enough coins so she could afford to buy a school one day when she grew up. She was going to start a school where things could be the way she would like them to be. Christmas holidays starting the first of December so you’d have lots of time to make hand-crafted decorations at home and bake for the children in the orphanage and write cards to everybody you have ever met in your life since you were three years old, with pictures. Emma never had any time to do things like these, while she was going to school. And she also wanted a one week holiday on her birthday. Of course, all the other children in the class should have the same on their birthday.
It would be too much at once to tell details of how she would choose which classes to teach and what the text books would be like and what school outing trips there’d be. Emma was a girl who already started making school text books – all subjects, Arithmetic, English, History, Geography – ever since she was six years old. The school she would open would have its own text books – and of course whoever wanted to make textbooks and assignments for other children could do so – there would be a class anytime for a child who really wanted to be the teacher with a textbook they had made themselves and assignments.
Emma also planned what animals were going to live at the school. Every child would sit beside their closest pet animal, if it be a lamb that followed you everywhere, a puppy dog that needed to stay sitting in your lap because it would chew up all the children’s shoes while they were wearing them; whether it be a budgie, a parrot that needed you to repeat everything the teacher taught at the front of the classroom because it only listened to you and wouldn’t learn from anybody else. There would no doubt be some boys with snakes around their necks – that would be allowed.
And if you were a bully, you got to sit in an alligator’s mouth and still have to listen to the teacher and do your assignments – in the dark. Of course, while you were inside there, you were allowed a mini computer lap top – the teacher’s spare one, and could type instead of write, because writing with a pencil would irritate the alligator’s mouth too much and he would definitely swallow you, even if you had become a good girl or boy. That would be against the school rules, getting swallowed by an alligator – because at school alligators would have been taught not to eat humans, they were special alligators with lots of loving care. If they swallowed you, it would be your fault.
These were only some of the revolutionary ideas Emma had written down in the “Comments and Suggestions” book at school the last day she knew she was leaving for good. The “Comments and Suggestions” book was just as you’d imagine it, a plain hard-covered notebook, on a bookstand like a pulpit just next to the head teacher’s office door, nothing more. You could write with a pen on a string to make something more of it though. The funny thing is only children who are thinking of leaving school tended to write in this book and so the book had been there since the school opened in 1967. There had only been two other children before Emma who had written in it and only one page each. Their suggestions merely stayed suggestions written in the book. Emma was optimistic though and knew her ideas were by far more brilliant than any teacher could think up. Of course just because of this she would not make her stay in school any longer than the next day – or maybe sooner.
“Emma dear, aren’t you going to be late for you next class?” It was Mrs. Carnegie, with gentle yet hard-working face, Emma’s most friendly teacher – or not exactly a teacher, she was the cleaner.
Emma gasped, bit the pen on a string like a little dog who is afraid of having not deserved his bone he had dug up. Emma had her hair in a pony-tail that day and her hair was a light golden brown and straight. It was what stopped her turning her head around as she heard someone say something to her. Her ponytail was too heavy.
Emma had written five pages. Her writing was tall and didn’t write on the lines but floated so that she wrote just below the line above. All her lower case a’s, d’s, g’s, o’s looked like they had a little kangaroo bulging out of them to the left with a fist punch.
“And if there is any girl named Mirabel who needs to show different faces to people, one face for every teacher, one for you when she is your best friend by herself, one when she is in a group who all like using me to make themselves feel they can be powerful in this world where nobody knows where they’re at – and let’s not forget a special face for when she’s sleeping, then there’s one thing that can help her wear all her different faces all at once. And that’s called the Face Stretcher which she can wear. It’s a wooden frame, the perimeter of a cube that you wear around your head with a few pegs stretching your face out to the left and back and to the right and back until your face can’t take the strain by the skin anymore and just replicates itself three times or four times or however many replications come out. Many people are not just two-faced. I know I am as well. I always have to pretend I’m always good to the teacher. And that’s why I’m leaving school. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.
“If the teacher doesn’t recognize the need for a girl named Mirabel to wear one of these, in the classroom, she should be stuffed inside Teddy Ruckspin, our teddy bear story-teller in the Quiet Reading Corner. And sit in the quiet corner so that I can be the teacher instead. If I’m still too little to be a teacher and anyway I can always play pretend school at home, then I want Mrs. Carnegie the cleaner to be our teacher. At least she is always humble and smells nice like cleaning agents and doesn’t have those strange perfume smells or bad breath.”
The house Emma lived in was pale yellow wood, New-England style, with white gables and veranda. Emma did not live in a zone where there were tornados. She did not live where there had been an earthquake after the great Continental Divide which she was proud to know had been the biggest earthquake ever. But she wanted a secure home, since so much had been taken away from her – her mother, then her father. And many more things that of course were not so important and well-loved. She did not know this was the reason why not long after her father left she started sewing end to end the suspenders together in her father’s drawers, all the elastic waist bands her mother had, and the sturdy scarves together with some old baby wipes found in an old box which had been for Emma before she became toilet-trained which were tear-proof no matter how hard you pulled to stretch. And when Emma had sewn them together, on Great Grandma Belina’s sewing machine, a Singer, in the attic, a long long long strip was formed. She went outside and stretched the long strip all around the walls of the house. The house had seven corners. Oh, I forgot to mention, she had also sewn a few belts in as part of it. She actually had a longer strip than she had thought and needed to cut off some pieces and sew them back, upstairs on the sewing machine, but in the end, she could buckle one end of a belt to the other end of another belt as the ends of the whole strip around the house came together. This way, the house was better kept together and wouldn’t start falling apart or tearing off into the sky. It was very important for the security of the house. Also, the house needed visibly to be marked as her house.
Emma’s house was one that had many different colours and shapes of flowers growing tall and riotous around it. And Emma also added a series of miniature sun dials on the cement walk along one side of it. And occasionally when the donkey had pooed more money than usual, one day – because she had bought dog food to feed it the day before – Emma treated herself to some lollipops – not to eat but for her house. She obtained them by staunchly launching on a walk to the bus stop to ride into town to shops. That was absolutely necessary, there was no other way she could buy them. Emma had no internet connection at home because she lived an old-fashioned life. Lollipops were one of those old-fashioned things part of her way of life – the big round ones with the colourful swirls on the sides. They were meant to decorate the walls of her house and it was so wonderful to like decorations so much that you licked them and made them look less-store bought. Most of them Emma left nearly the same size before she had begun licking them. So they looked just right to her as she stuck them all around the house along the walls. When it rained, they possibly could stay sticking to the walls because Emma had swallowed a bottle of clear liquid glue before she had begun licking the lollipops. Of course, on purpose, not by accident! Only babies swallow things that are toxic and could kill them. No, Emma knew the glue wasn’t bad for her, she was nine years old and it said “non-toxic” on the label. She knew it would come out of her tongue when she licked the lollipops she bought for her house. She had to press a bit hard at times, to squeeze the glue out a bit better – after all, it came out of her taste buds. But no, Emma knew but she knew only by reasoning and not by experience – which is what happens to a lot of children who have gone to school. The whole glue coming out of your tongue if you swallowed it was logical but not real.
Nevertheless, the lollipops stuck to the walls anyhow, in the rain, in a miraculous way. They made the house look amazing.
Emma also collected every trimming she made of her finger nails and her toe nails – separately finger nails and toe nails. These were a design to go along with the tight band going around the house. The finger nails jotting above, in different designs but mostly chicken feet. And the toe nails going along below, showing off the big toe’s clipping which is always the toughest to clip through with the silver clipper and sometimes just jumps out far and goes lost when it finally does cut off.
The house was hers. She dreamed of having a Hansel and Gretel house, all covered with sweets but she didn’t want to see the Social Worker who came by, Mrs. Astor, making an exclamation about something so unrealistic and far-fetched. And Emma was too shy to show off. Also, remember, her savings in the bank were going to buying a school when she grew up. Few people can afford to buy a house in their lifetime, and a school is at least five times the size of a house – especially the school that Emma envisioned. This was Emma’s aspiration as a child. However once she got over the trauma of control over children’s minds which she experienced at school, she believed there should be no schools at all.
Emma also remembered her father when he decorated the Christmas tree. Not too much of anything, and in good balance with enough spaces in between. “The other folks have Jumble-sale Christmas trees, Emma.” Emma looked at her house proudly after gluing maybe the fourth batch of fingernail clippings on the walls, tilting her head to her left, and she said to herself this is how her father would have arranged them.
And to be self-sustainable, like her father used to talk about but without doing anything for it, Emma came to the idea very soon after he went away that what her father had been talking about really could be put into action. Her Dad used to talk about planting his own garden, but the soil wasn’t very good where they lived and the jacket potatoes never came to grow bigger than mini-potatoes – which to Emma’s father weren’t worth trying to plant a second time even though the jacket potatoes grown only to be mini-potatoes were cooked and eaten and were pretty good. But because Emma had so much money piled up in the shed made by her pooing donkey, she decided she was going to defeat her father’s depression about the potatoes and the soil. If the soil was so bad here, you could buy quality soil, couldn’t you?
It wasn’t as simple and without meeting some almost heart-stopping challenges which could have prevented Emma from beating her father’s failure. The worst thing was when she arrived at the big garden centre and a question suddenly came at her from nowhere: “Where do you live, little girl?” asked someone. Emma stared back at a very rough-eyed big garden centre man, with a sun-burned bald head – grey hair frizzled from the sunburn on the sides. It was hard to say whether he was muscular or if he was fat. He had stepped over suddenly out of nowhere.
Emma clenched the reign of her donkey, “Moo”, and began to see things spin a little. Where did she live? Nobody was supposed to know she lived on her own alone. And this was just the kind of stranger Emma was afraid of. Maybe Emma hadn’t cared to notice garden centre people before when she had come here with her dad. Now she was all on her own. She could have sworn this man was covered in tattoos everywhere though you couldn’t see any because his sleeves were long. She was sure that he smoked, his skin looked that way. And he even had a gold tooth on the side! Emma’s knees shook. They seemed to have changed staff here at the garden centre just because it was her doomsday.
“Well, aren’t you going to have your soil delivered to your house?” the man said in reproach and with that familiar condescending glimmer Emma knew she hated.
“I’ve got my donkey.” Her voice came out strong, a bit angry. “You can put two sacks of the soil on his back. I’ve seen donkeys carry very fat men.”
The garden man’s eyes squinted. He laughed until his face turned red like his bald head and then Emma had to smile too. When he looked back at her, the condescending glimmer was gone. He actually was someone with a warm heart and liked children.
And because of this, Emma remembered to be careful in case he might be a paedophile. She tried not to look panicked.
“Okay, we’ll put your packs of soil on your donkey’s back.” He went to the big garden shopping trolley and was about to unload a sack of soil when he stopped and asked, “What did you say the name of your donkey was?”
Emma knew he was going to think this was funny too. “Moo,” she answered.
“Oh, so now you’re talking like a cow!” commented the friendly man with the burned skin.
“No. My donkey’s called Moo.”
The garden man laughed – then grinned back. “Moo! What do you call a donkey Moo for? Have you ever heard it moo?”
Emma smiled, putting on a little bit of a cute-show she always knew well to do, though all she said was truthful and on her heart. “It’s because I’ve always liked cows. I wish I could have a cow... Cows have such big gentle eyes. We wouldn’t have any milk without them.” Her eyes suddenly widened out from their suspicious squinting. She lost her fearfulness and wariness and suddenly became like she was when she got talking – no matter who it was she was talking to. “Do you know, in the olden days, girls wearing aprons with their hair in gold braids with ribbons would sit on a wooden stool – an old-fashioned wood stool, and milk the cow with their own hands? Nowadays, it’s these machines which milk the cow and the milk goes up through these tubes and into something that looks like a petrol tank at the station – except a lot bigger – there it gets pasteurised and homogenized. I saw this on Teli. Louis Pasteur, he was the first person to ever pasteurise milk. I think milk must taste really strange before it’s pasteurised. Have you ever lived on a farm before?”
The grinning red-faced and sun-burned scalp didn’t seem to know he was supposed to answer. But then he did. “Ahh . . . no.”
Emma was a little sad. “See, that’s why everyone should have a cow. The milk we taste now has lots of taste of those tubes it goes through – rubber and plastic. And those machines it goes through! You know, you have to spray machines with oil to make them work properly. Why we’re drinking is oily, rubber-tasting milk! I want my own cow – and because they have such big gentle eyes and they poo big paddies and not gold coi – “
The man pretended to be credulously surprised. “Gold coins? So your donkey poos gold coins?” Emma smiled, pressed her lips bitingly to pretend she was shy making up a childish lie. The garden man laughed good-naturedly and began lifting the sacks of soil off the trolley and – oh, the donkey stammered with his hooves with the sudden weight! The donkey had had an easy, spoiled life – hadn’t had to work. What do you expect of an animal who makes his own money – inside his own body?
Of course, Emma did not tell the man that her donkey really dropped coins when he pooed! He didn’t go moo, but Moo the donkey could poo! Emma had been a little worried when the garden man had looked so surprised at how shining new the coins were which Emma had paid with. And he had noticed a little bit of slime on one of them. Emma realized she was going to have to sell her coins to get proper bank notes. Where could she do that? She hoped it wouldn’t be too expensive.
“Do you think the man who invented homogenized milk was homosexual?” Emma had always wanted to know this. She randomly hoped this scary-not-so-scary stranger knew the answer.
Well, Donkey Moo carried the two sacks of soil to go home, and they were going to have to come back to pick up the other twelve sacks.
Chapter Two: What Emma Does So She Doesn’t Have to Go to Shops
Once Emma realized she didn’t need to go to school anymore and stopped going, the vision her father had spoken about, proclaiming that everybody should become self-sustainable, Emma realized she really was grown-up. She was only nine years old, it was going to be almost another twelve months before her birthday again and she’d be ten, but she was really quite grown up, like the animals in Beatrix Potter books - they do things on their own. She also thought a lot about Paddington bear. She was doing her house keeping and living at home just like Paddington bear.
It had been lots of fun to go grocery shopping, the last two years, doing all the important things, by herself, and she could manage everything superbly well. Yet, she became euphorically struck by visions of becoming self-sustainable. That’s what the soil she bought was for.
“Just so I won’t have to go grocery shopping for potatoes again – any jacket potatoes nor mini-potatoes.” She stabbed a beetroot into the soil. The garden spade had already caused the poor girl two blisters on her hands even though she was wearing gloves. She had planted the garden pretty well for herself. It had taken only two days. Even better than planting a garden pretty well, she had succeeded training her bulbs and seeds really pretty well, over a few days, in the Lavoratory Laboratory. This is what she called the nursery for the seeds and bulbs before they went out to be planted in the garden. She called the bathroom in the house the Lavoratory now because it rhymed with laboratory. She had worked like a gene biologist, training seeds and bulbs in the Lavoratory Laboratory. Emma believed she had discovered the technology to manipulate the genes of these seeds and bulbs. All she wanted as an outcome were hardy plants which would grow in the winter, while other plants remained dormant. She just wanted to harvest fruits and vegetables from her garden throughout the winter when she needed them, be there snow or ice – or there usually wasn’t any snow or ice anyway. Emma wanted to be self-sustaining during winter, with fresh fruits and vegetables.
Emma had needed to keep the seeds and bulbs in the bath tub – of course, one batch at a time since they could not all fit in the bathtub at once, and she kept them in cold water, pouring ice cubes over them as well from the freezer in the kitchen. Several times during the day and before going to bed at night, she went to check if the water was still cold. She also sung the bulbs and seeds Christmas songs. She even took her recorder and played – which she enjoyed very much. She could have played piano downstairs but the bulbs and seeds wouldn’t be able to hear it. I mean, it was vibrations that seeds could feel – the piano was too far away for the vibrations of music to reach them. Bulbs and seeds have sensitive sensory receptors inside their shells, but you still need to consider they aren’t as sensitive as a Richtor scale.
If there hadn’t been any global warming yet, Emma would have put the bulbs and seeds in the freezer – and the freezer was in the kitchen, but she was sure her poor bulbs and seeds wouldn’t ever have to survive any winter outside as cold as a freezer.
It used to be as cold as inside the freezer, even colder, when Emma’s parents were growing up. But now, winters were just very wet and windy, and only cold as ice-cubes.
Was it working, Emma’s scheme for manipulating the genes of plants at the early stage of their lives? Well, that was something to wait and see when the winter comes. Right now it was still summer. In case it failed and Emma would have no gene-manipulated fresh fruits and vegetables to eat throughout the winter, there was a back-up nursery of other kids of plants she would depend on. Emma was growing very important kinds of food inside the house. When you looked in the basement, turning on the lights so you wouldn’t step on a spider by accident, there you’d find a seaweed plantation. This was something Emma liked to eat ever since her family had watched what Asian children eat, on television.
That had been when Emma was six years old. The next time her Mum and Dad went into town they had to stop by at the Asian store and buy some seaweed. They only had it dried, in flat sheets of paper! “Never mind,” Mum and Dad had said, “I’m sure when you grow up you will travel the world and find lots of seaweed to taste for the first time, in restaurants or in swimming pools. You won’t have to waste your money buying any. And you might not even need to travel all the way to Asia! Something like this isn’t worth buying, Emma dear. It’s a waste of money to buy food that looks like paper when we’ve got plenty of paper at home. All you have to do is colour it green!”
Emma was weighed heavy with the insult. However, she recovered rapidly with the help of some rapid action: when her Mum and Dad weren’t looking, she grabbed one of the packets of dried seaweed in flat sheets off the shelf and on the way out of the store dropped a few broken butter cookies onto the counter. In good will because she knew she was stealing. And the Chinese store attendant looked back at her in astonishment and couldn’t say anything – the child was with all feeling of good will captivating any grown-up’s attention and appreciation.
“Hello, old lady,” Emma said – even though the woman was really only in truth thirty-nine and it was the first time in her life ever she had been called an old lady! As an Asian, she was always complimented by mistakes other people made thinking she was a teenager and even asking her ID borrowing adult videos. This woman went to check in a mirror, once Emma left the shop, to see if anything had changed much.
“Here's some Danish butter cookies . . . my parents went to Denmark on their honeymoon. We eat Danish butter cookies at home, it’s something from Denmark. Can I please have some of your seaweed? I can’t give you any money. My parents never give me any pocket money like other parents do. They say I’m going to grow up anyway and then I can buy whatever I want. But I want to have some things now, before I grow up. Dolls and toys the very best. But seaweed is something Asian children eat. I want it too.
“This is all the Danish butter cookies I have in my pocket. They look kind of like coins, don’t they? They’re even bigger.”
Emma tried in her pocket again, and came out with only a few more crumbs sticking to her fingers, and a little ball of fuzz or thread. Her hands were soft and like the hands of children’s with their innocent, loving touch.
The lady at the shop thought this child really amazingly cute and brilliant, and this lady liked children even though she had had two abortions. She wasn’t the owner of the store, but she planned in advance to start giving people not their exact change the next few purchases, just so it wouldn’t matter to give away a pack of seaweed.
Her English wasn’t so good. “Yeh, yeh.” She didn’t say more but covered the child’s little hand over the pack of seaweed, assuringly and with generous gesture, and also child-like earnestness.
Emma knew perfectly well that biscuits no longer inside their package were far less valuable than seaweed still inside the package. If only she had an unopened pack of biscuits with her! It was a bit of a sly thing trading used material with brand new and pretending to be perfectly innocent about it because she was a child on the outside. She didn’t feel a child but very grown up being devious like this. Suddenly Emma realized that being six years old meant she had many more years being at this advantage of still looking a child to everyone!
When Emma came out of the shop, beaming and skipping and hoping her parents would be proud of her deviousness and how the shop keeper factually was tricked and let Emma take a pack of seaweed with her, Emma’s Mum and Dad didn’t made Emma go back to the store and give back the seaweed. They just chuckled and then were quiet a looked very guilty. Emma was delighted when there came another time for shopping at the Asian shop and Emma’s Mum and Dad went right up to the counter while Emma stayed in the car. They came back with ten bags full of seaweed packages. They paid with a cheque.
This was how money and cheques and the whole thing became ridiculous to her. If you paid for something using Danish butter biscuits, your parents panicked and became fools and started paying money for something you weren’t allowed to have before. This was one of the things Emma needed to become self-sustainable in. Money was something only fools paid with.
And above all, Emma had been insulted about her Danish butter biscuits not being the grown-up thing to pay with. Why were they supposed to be the best thing of all things – exclusively – to pay with?
Producing her own seaweed was an act of rebellion against those vainglorious conceited metal coins which weren’t even real gold - and those smelly bank notes which were unethical because they weren’t even recycled. The basement had plenty of natural light and it was damp enough, just the dampness by the sea. And two old tin bath basins two generations had taken baths in: Great-Grandma Belina and her family as well as Grandma Edith, Grandpa Farley and their family. They were always filled with water just right for the seaweed to grow in. They grew to be harvested every three weeks.
And for protein sustenance, Emma grew fish. She had a fish farm. It was a real fish farm, of course, not something in the basement. Behind Emma’s house, past the wise oak tree, just at the bottom where the big huge backyard dropped over a ridge into the wilderness of green green moor land, ran a creek. It was always the cleanest creek there had ever been because Emma’s mum and dad had concerned themselves over the environment and therefore had tied nets just at the boundaries of their property where the creek ran through so that no rubbish could ever float onto their property. That part of the stream was marked their property. Emma also went swimming there when it was warm weather.
How the fish farm started hadn’t been by Emma’s brilliancy at all. It had been by a miracle. One day, Emma sat by the creek, crying and missing her parents after they had disappeared, one fish appeared out of nowhere and leaped right in front of her. It must have jumped over the net – really high for a fish. A fish can’t make it that high unless he’s a magic fish.
Emma liked fish. She also of course thought of her health and how she needed to eat properly. She was still growing, and wanted to jump on the trampoline in the backyard and skip rope around the house and along the road up to the motorway. Those were three kilometres. There were lots of things she wanted to do and of which she could do lots more of than before when her parents were still alive. Athletes and body-builders drink protein shakes. Emma wasn’t doing anything athletes do – she jumped on the trampoline, skipped rope, slid down the stairs in the house on the sofa cushion seats. She jumped on her parents’ bed, swung on the swing outside. Of course she did lots of crazy dancing to all kinds of music and sweated till in the mirror it looked she didn’t have any fringe anymore. Emma didn’t believe protein shakes were good for you. They couldn’t possibly be good for you. They were processed food and had sugar in them. So she ate fish. When there were enough fish in the stream where a magic fish had first arrived after her father disappeared, she could catch the fish with an old fishing rod from the attic, look for earth worms as bait. It was easy.
Now that her parents weren’t there anymore, she could have fires inside the house – Inside her room. There was the old cat litter box from that time Emma had rescued a baby fox left abandoned on the moors, when she was just five years old (her parents had let her keep it as an animal of the wild that would have died if she hadn’t been there to foster it. Besides this, Emma was never allowed to have any pets).
Yes, well, the little box was till there, and Emma made a fire in it, just with matches and this was so exciting, not just to have fire in your room, but to have a cooking fire to roast your dinner over. Of course, in lovely weather, she made bonfires outside.
Emma felt kind of bad eating fish. She knew she shouldn’t because fish eat humans – the ashes of old Mrs. Plankton, a friend of her parents’ who had died. And her children, Janet and Grim, had made Mrs. Plankton’s body burn and become ashes so that Mrs. Plankton’s dream would come true. Supposedly, her dream had been to be scattered over the ocean. Emma of course could picture in what way the harmless different kinds of fish would nip to the surface, just like at a pond or in people’s aquariums.
“Yes, the ashes will be eaten by the fish,” Emma’s Mum had answered when Emma asked.
Emma knew she needed to get enough protein. It was scary living alone, there were so many things you needed to think of when nobody else was thinking of them for you. If you didn’t think of them yourself and do them, you wouldn’t be taking care of yourself. And if you didn’t take care of yourself, lots of bad things might happen. Like you might die, suddenly. Emma knew about that.
And besides this, life was terribly romantic living just like Princess Sophie, the hidden princess living in a little castle that had grown out of one of her toy castles when she was little.
There was a story Emma had thought out. A make-believe story. Emma was a romantic. And a bit of a narcissist – she thought she was pretty as a princess in a fairytale. A fairytale which was the greatest and best-loved fairytale in a far away kingdom. This fairytale had never been filmed yet, though Emma wished she would see it. The story of a princess with long golden braids that coiled around her on the ground when she sat; all around her were blue-green leaves growing on walls and doors of her castle garden. In the reflection of the windows – which were not over-grown with leaves because the leaves didn’t grow that way – were the birds that flew in the blue sky. The princess’s name was Sophie. She lived a long time ago. She had been a lot like Snow White and like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. First, she had been walking over the lily pads over a pond, her parents the King and Queen far behind in the cottage they had come to with Princess Sophie for a hot summer’s day. This is the story Emma had thought out – just a short one, about Princess Sophie. With her golden braids hanging tied together at the back, Princess Sophie decided sitting idle because it was such warm weather actually made the heat seem worse. And so she got up and remembered how she always wanted to do things on her own and play and take on challenges and conquests. She was just that kind of child. When she walked over the lily pads, carrying her basket of toys she was planning to play with on the little island in the middle of the pretty pond, the lily pad suddenly gave a slip, and all of a sudden, the little princess didn’t see the water over which the green lily pad floated, but she saw air, clouds. She looked around her; she was in the clouds, in the sky. She fell with her hands holding the lily pad around the edges so she wouldn’t fall off. It was quite an altitude – sometimes the clouds thinned and then she could see beneath her green and lines for rivers like on a map! Her beautiful golden braids were always with her, so she didn’t feel too strange. The lily pad was flying through the clouds.
Next, what happened, the lily pad tipped and so tipped her basket of toys. The toys fell out!
Looking, watching them fall down below, the toys grew smaller and smaller until they suddenly began growing bigger again. And they grew bigger and bigger. Then her fairytale book – which is not exactly a toy but had been inside her toy basket, opened up on a page with a picture of a beautiful enchanted forest. The miniature toy castle in the basket, something like a Polly Pockets, flew over top of the page of the enchanted forest!
Princess Sophie noticed. And she blinked her eyes as a light suddenly turned on inside the tower of the toy castle. She stared at the light – which maybe she shouldn’t have, but who knows what would have happened had she not stared at it. Because what happened as she stared at the light is she got sucked into it! And she found herself not flying through the clouds, like on a hover board, but plummeting inside through a tunnel of light, like Dorothy’s tornado. Or it could have been the rabbit’s hole without any furniture.
When Princess Sophie landed, she landed just still looking at the light in the tower of her Polly pocket castle. The dimensions started to change all of a sudden – and then the castle simply had turned into a real castle, on a hill, and Sophie no longer could stare just at the light in the tower on the left side. And there were trees around it, hills. Princess Sophie gazed behind her, to her left and right – big trees and they smelled like pine and cedar even though there were deciduous trees too. She was in the enchanted forest in the picture inside her fairytale book!
That is what made the fairytale about beautiful Princess Sophie the best one Emma could imagine. Princess Sophie could travel and find her miniature pretend things become real in new and different worlds. And she was at home in each of them. And her toy dolls and figurines turned into her company of playmates – a dog, a teddy bear, a pony, a doll, and of course they could all talk. That was the end.
Emma imagined she was going to look just like her when Emma grew up.
Emma didn’t live in a castle like she imagined Princess Sophie lived in. Emma didn’t look like Princess Sophie at all. She didn’t have golden braids and fairy blue eyes. But she was pretty too; another princess, and precious. The adoration and shining jewel of the people of a kingdom – though this kingdom was nowhere in real life.
Yet, if Emma also had not caught on the enthusiasm and pride that her father had had when he talked about becoming self-sufficient, perhaps Emma would have just dreamed away and never done anything was really hard work like grow seaweed in her basement … and when she wanted to grill some fish, fishing she would go in her backyard for the children of that magic fish that had jumped over the net in the stream that one day. She grew all the plants she could want to eat in a garden which also grew throughout winter time. Emma was self-sufficient all year long.
So you see, having lots of money because of a donkey that pooed one pound coins every day wasn’t so important anymore. Being self-sustainable was far better. This was the most admirable thing to strive for in life and this Emma had accomplished it. She was only nine years old. She became independent of stores and the produce of others certainly was something she could be proud of. It was an achievement for someone who wasn’t even a man and who wasn’t a woman, she was only a child.
It was a very sad thing that her father had been carried away by his umbrella and that mean cloud. Because it was a tragedy, Emma had to stay really happy and make up for the sadness and the loss. She was happy and proud that she was doing so well on her own. She was going to keep in mind all the good things her father used to say. It was a shameful thing to be carried away by a dark rain cloud. Emma didn’t want her father to have any shame, it had not been his fault and he had prepared Emma well to make it on her own and nobody had helped her or given her advice. Of course, this is a story made up and not real: you can be assured that children can’t make it on their own like this, that’s why I wanted to make it up because I wish I could have made it on my own like this after I lost my parents!
