Lalia and Feral Nana - The start

Lalia’s face drooped. Her small nose and rounded cheeks, smacked pink by the icy wind and rain, were pulled down by a fixed and frankly ferocious frown. Her eyes, sheltered under heavy lids, flicked from puddle to puddle watching their surfaces jump and vibrate under the hammering of bulbous raindrops, some she’d sworn were bigger than marbles. When she recounted this to her Grandmother the hostile woman had simply made an uninterested grunt, her eye brows lifting momentarily in disdain, before her face returned to its usual state of reserved spite. Lalia’s Grandmother was an odd and awful woman of 89, with a face made ugly by it being void of any love or any vague affection at all. Her constant unshifting mope had lined and wrinkled her face. Her forehead was thoroughly creased and mounted amongst these creases drooped one thick, black, furrowed eyebrow. Two large cheek bones were highly set making the long slope of her glum mouth prominently morose. Cupped under her disgruntled mouth was a rounded chin, peppered with grey, white and black hairs. In a sense it was an almost ape like face. Lalia observed frequently that her Grandmother’s stance and facial structure almost mirrored that of a Silver Back Gorilla - though her temperament was undoubtedly worse. A thick, protruding bottom lip hung under a top lip set in a tight frown. Stern amber eyes, shadowed by an overhanging brow bone, would flit and dart, like agitated caged animals pacing back and forth. In fact Lalia after some trouble obtained a picture of a Silver Back Gorilla’s face from an old copy of National Geographic and would hold it up next to her Grandmother when she slept, grinning. Mrs Catturato’s bestial appearance only added to her menace. In the little town in the English countryside that both the vile Grandmother and Lalia herself lived, many names and titles did the Grandmother have. Nervous parents would quicken their pace, hands on their children, past Mrs. Catturato’s front garden. Their hearts would thump with parental anxiety as they thought of her nestled in an armchair, behind the screen of overgrown aspidistras that concealed the windows to number 17 Circo Road. Children, with big swirling lollipops and blue, red and yellow tricycles would laugh and sing “Old Grannie Catturato’s face is stony, her feet have claws, her hands are bony, she eats flies, worms and spiders, slugs and snails and cicadas, cats and mice, bees and dogs, run, hide or you’ll end up a frog!” When Grandmother Catturato made one of her infrequent trips to the bank or perhaps the butchers, she would hobble down the street, and if a dog, cat, crow, snail, worm or even so much as a fly were to cross her path, her arm would strike out, wielding her wooden sharp ended walking stick. Little boys and girls would get thwacked on the back of the legs, and squeal home to their mothers. Dogs and cats would get clipped on their tails, crows were swiftly wacked on their wings, and as for snails and worms, not to mention flies; well, Grandmother Catturato would squish them with a stomp of her boots or a quick, precise fling of her dark mahogany walking stick, upon the top of which was an plump, round emerald. It was the same hand, with which she held that stick, that clung limply yet immovably to Lalia’s hand. The grip was like an iron padlock, static, cold, inanimate and yet completely inescapable. Lalia’s feet twitched and itched to be removed from their little boots and skip and leap through the cobblestoned streets, diving in an out of each puddle in skittish elation. She could not see the harm in it for her stockings were already soaked and her boots were full of water. Lalia sighed, making sure there was no noise in this action, so as not to provoke a heavy emerald encrusted thwack on the back of the legs. She tilted her head back to gaze at the dense lowering ashen sky, sunless in an unshifting outstretch, that clung to the edges of the horizon, the same as that slimy fish of a hand clung to Lalia’s. Bringing her head down, dragging her vision along with it, her eyes fell on a young boy, sheltered in the warmth, behind the rose tinted glass shop window of the bakers across the road. He was dressed in a bright yellow mackintosh and had removed his matching yellow rain hat from atop his head and was craning his neck to discern the cornucopia of cakes and pastries that decorated three walls of the bakers. Upon the fourth glass windowed wall Lalia’s eyes read ‘Il Errante Bestia Panificio’ (‘the wandering beast bakery’) in pale blue delicate script. The boy raised his arm and elongated a finger in the direction of a lemon sponge cake, with pale yellow icing and sugar lemon sweets upon its top, which were encircled in peaked white frosting. A thick set, thick moustachioed, tanned faced baker followed his point and his face broke out in a gratified smile, his eyes made slits by his pinkish round cheeks being pushed up. His golden eyes, mirroring the warm glow of the bakery, were alike two suns rising over the arches of his great cheeks. The warmth of the bakery made the cold wet of the street and the cold wet of her Grandmother’s hand all the more cold and all the more wet. She wondered when the coach would plod down the bumpy lane on its lumpy rubber hooves and give a tinny moan and puff a great billow of steam from its ventilated mouth, like a disgruntled cow wheezing its hot breath into the cold air. She let out another silent sigh and her gaze caught and followed a flock of red breasted birds spiralling and fliting across the clouded sky, instinctively free, their red breasts alike autumn leaves spiralling through the air on the unseen currents of wind. Lalia could feel the breeze catch on their wings, cool and lifting, raising them in an interweaving flux of feathers. She closed her eyes and was with them, above the green sea of fields, streaming through the bows of jaded cypress trees like fish through aquamarine labyrinths of seaweed. Soaring, licking the belly of the sky, with her brothers and sisters in innate and ingrained unison. A piercing metallic screech wretched Lalia from the skies in her mind and threw her back into her sodden stockings and water-logged boots - the bovine bus that was to take them to Florence for the day had arrived, two hours late. Lalia pre-empted the day. A day of sitting wordlessly in a noisy coffee bar, watching her Grandmother inhale cappuccino after latte after macchiato after cappu-mocha-cino-latte’s, while all of the Florian magnificence lay just out of her grasp beyond the doors of the cafe. She was hauled onto the coach like a sack of potatoes, and only when her Grandmother had dropped her into her seat did she release the grip on her hand. It was an outdated and lethargic looking coach. The worn seats were covered in an almost luminous sun yellow plastic and dotted in dirt blackened chewing gum, it was so much so that it appeared the material of the seats were dotted by design, and not splattered in ancient wads of gum. The floor was grey-black and bumpy, like a badly tarmacked road, with patches of sticky brown and white encrusted blue-green mould in the places that were damp. To Lalia’s left was and haggard and dozing old man, his worn fedora hat tilted down over his eyes, leaving only his shrunken mouth visible, from which dangled a long discoloured strand of drool that jiggled and bounced with the rolling jolt of the bus. He had pulled the tattered piece of cloth that hung from the railing above the window across, denying Lalia of the view for all but one hole in the curtain, no bigger than a five pence, like flickering torrential avalanche of ever shifting colour. To her right, the wobbling bulk of her Grandmother juddered, rising and falling with breath, but never falling enough as to allow Lalia to see past. It was a cruel act in taking the window seat, as the Grandmother did not glance out the glass once, and children so love and appreciate looking out of windows, watching the landscape melting past. Lalia lay her head back, put her hands together and twiddled her thumbs. She drew her head back and gazed around the drab, greasy and yet artificially bright interior of the vehicle. Tattered and forlornly fluttering posters of bright eyed white teethed holiday makers on their coach to Rome, Tuscany or Pisa were hanging of the walls. In rotund writing the words - “Trova la libertà , la natura e la pace . Godetevi Italia con Adventure allenatori , Est . 1930” - (Find freedom, nature and peace. Enjoy Italy with Adventure Coaches, Est. 1930) lay at an angle at the bottom of the page in bright sky blue. The posters were pale and washed out from decades of sun, making the people look ghostly and the backgrounds full of mist. On the back of every chair were gummed up, dusty old ashtrays, within which one could find an array of forgotten items. In the ashtray on the back of the chair in front of Lalia there was a crumpled advert, limp and thin with age and damp. Upon it there were pictures of great striped tigers leaping through blazing hoops, an enormous brown bear with a red fez hat riding a green bicycle, men with swollen muscles and leopard print leotards raising caged lions above their heads, clowns with mincing poodles at their heels, all in ruffles and hats and an awfully shrewish looking man, no bigger than Lalia was, with a whip four times his height. The little shrew of a man was the ring leader, you could tell by his velvet red tailed coat and top hat, and his whip. He looked a crooked man, with a long beaklike nose that jutted out from between his thoroughly bewhiskered brow and unshaven chin. His eyes were tiny crab like eyes, shiny and black like wet tar. Lalia wondered how such a dwarf of a man could run an entire circus. The advert was outdated, but it seemed that the circus had passed through Tuscany once. Lalia screwed it up and put it back into the ashtray on the seat in front of her. A fly buzzed dreamily by in her peripheral vision and made its way to the tear in the cloth hanging from the rail by the somnolent old man with the bubbling oozing mouth. The fly stopped short of the glass, and readied itself with a realigning of its wings, drew back a slight and then slammed it’s little head against the window pane. Lalia winced slightly. The fly drew back again and again smashed itself into the glass. Back and forth, back and forth the fly heaved and threw itself again and again with a strained and frantic “BZT-BZZZ-BZT-BZZ-BZT.” If Lalia’s Grandma had been awake the fly would not have lasted long, and at this Lalia wondered what was more gruesome an ending for the fly, to be squashed against the emerald of her Grandma’s walking stick or to spend the interminable future bumping against the glass of this depressing coach. Lalia felt very troubled today and the trapped fly, who was still buzzing furiously, had made her last bit of optimism leak out of her tear ducts. She sunk into a state of woeful misery and recounted her life in her head. She was now 6 years old and had nothing to show for it. She had no friends, as all the village children thought she was the spawn of the malevolent woman that crept about the corn fields waiting to pounce on children when they passed and gobbled them down quicker that one could open one’s mouth to say “Stop that you brute, put the poor boy down!”. Even if Lalia was to have a friend, say some poor unsuspecting child was invited round for tea, the table had been religiously and meticulously set; a symmetrical pattern of forks, knives, plates, spoons, cups and napkins. The focal point YET TO BE WRITTEN