The Elf King’s Thingy part III

Elsewhere… about now

The room was ordinary teenage girls bedroom.

The dresser was sprue with cheap but trendy bit of makeup. The floor was a depository of used clothing and textbooks, which it turn never reached the laundry basket of the bookshelf. A non-weird collection of soft toys and old cd’s littered the place, the remnants of a childhood not quite let go, while ‘cooler’ objects fought for shelf space. The walls were covered in posters of Justin the teen idol. It did not matter which Justin as teen idols always seem to be called Justin. The curtains and the linin were remnants of an earlier time in the girls life, childish icons that she no doubt hated and her parents though were still cute and adorable… A school uniform was thrown over the back of a chair with wilful neglect and the girl herself lay on the bed staring at the object in her hands. Which unusually considering the setting was not a mobile phone.

On the whole, Anna would have felt more comfortable if it had been a phone. If it had been a phone then everything would be ordinary. Anna liked ordinary. Anna liked fitting in, fitting in was safe. That as the reason for the Justin Case posters on the wall. Everyone, for a given quantity of everyone that was exclusively teenage girls,  loved Justin Case, the teen idol of the year. He was edgy, he was cool, and he was a dreamboat, whatever that meant. She was not sure why the girls at school had started calling him a dreamboat. It was a new in word, though the term was old she was sure. It was the word that her grandmother might have used about a screen idol back in the fifties. She knew that because her Grandmother Milly suffered from dementia and thought she was sixteen years old again half the time, while going on about ‘dreamboat’ movie stars and long dead singers. Still ‘Dreamboat’ was a fresh term right now, everyone was using it who mattered, which is to say everyone in year 10 of Teesside Comp who was ‘ordinary’, which was everyone, and all the girls were into Justin, hence the posters on her bedroom wall.

Occasionally in wistful moments Anna wished that aside looking edgy, being cool and a Dreamboat, Justin Case could actually sing or had even a modicum of talent, but thankfully the posters, and having his album on download was enough to appear as ordinary as everyone else. She did not have to actually listen to the warbling idiot, or read in inevitable twitter feed full of idiotic statements that ,were he anyone other than an edgy, cool, dreamboat, would be written off as the words of a pillock…  And the nine gods knew he was a pillock, as she reminded herself on a daily basis without ever saying so out loud. Not because mentioning the nine gods would make her seem weird, but because saying anything detrimental about Justin Case would mark her out as not being ordinary…

She could think of nothing worse…

Luckily none of her school ‘friends’, for want of a better word, like for example ‘enemies’, were round her house this evening. Not that her ‘friends’ ever came round, ever since that day in primary school that had haunted her for the last seven years. Not since she did something out of the ordinary and became the subject of gossip. No one, with the exception of Heidi, her best and only real friend,  wanted to be too closely associated with Anna Kirkpatrick, for all she seemed perfectly ordinary now. Not after the thing that happened…. But as they never came round to her house she did not have to actually listen to the download of ‘Y’, Justin Case’s album. Instead she could listen to the old Sisters of Mercy Album she had ‘borrowed’ from her dad’s collection. Which is what she was doing now… While she fumbled with the object in her hands, the one her grandmother had shown her the day before.

This was not her grandma Jesston, the one living in a rerun of 1953. Nor was it Grandma Kirkpatrick who had died before Anna was born. This was the other Grandma, the one she had met seven years ago in the school yard of Loan Street Primary. The one who had told her about the nine gods. The one hovering on her ceiling right now looking down at her with that odd smile that was half caring and half hunger.

Grandma Grunswick, the one that was defiantly not ordinary at all…  

Next week ( or possibly in a couple of days) the tale of ‘The Elf king’s Thingy’ will continue,  back where we started, in the offices of de Manfess and Mr Spleen, practical lawyers to the Elf King’s court.

Authors note: This part work comprises of a first draft, without the usual editing, proof reading etc, It is somewhat raw because of this. There may be glaring errors, terrible typos and crimes of a grammatical nature. Feel free to point them out if your self-esteem requires a boost, you would certainly be proving your intellectual superiority over the author in doing so…