Page 15 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
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Twisted Sister
Local author Cass Leigh’s newest novel,Nocturnally Yours,will please all her fans but is not for the faint-hearted – or weak-stomached…
Westery and District Voice
March, and Max’s phone calls had dwindled further to perfunctory golf bulletins (may all his niblicks crumble to dust), and though I expected he still possessed a manner that could charm the birds from the trees,he had ceased to waste any of it on me.
Had Prince Charming come along at this point (or even a reasonably attractive frog) I would have been easy meat, especially in view of the fact that my egg count was so far one hit and one miss, and heading for the clincher: watch this space.
As Meat Loaf so aptly put it, life’s a lemon and I want my money back.
But despite the zigzag crevasse slowlyopening between us, you’d still think Max would have managed to give me the news of Rosemary’s accident before I heard about it from someone else, wouldn’t you?
Well he didn’t, and to make it worse the someone else was Jane, maliciously pleased to discover that she was first with theinformation. While her phone calls had always been of the circling-hornet variety, this one had a scorpion stingin its tail.
That’s Jane for you, but you’ll have to take my word for it, since if you met her I expect you too would think she was the sweetest, most unselfish, truly beautiful person you’d ever met: an angel come amongst us. Sometimes I suspect her of having studied the Dark Arts to achieve this result.
To understand the relationship between my fair, angelic, successful,andrespectably marriedtwin and myself (and we are so non-identical it is hard to believe we’re even related), you need look no further than the opening pages of my very first novelTwisted Sister, where only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
I dedicated this book to Miss Josepha Brand, one of the wealthier members of Pa’s flock, since she paid for me to go away to boarding school; though whether shedid it from some stirring of compassion, or because Pa’s preoccupation with casting out my devil was taking up too much of his time, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, she gave me an escape ladder that led to university, teaching and writing, even if I finally burned the rungs behind me by becoming Max’s mistress.
Twisted Sister, Chapter One
Once upon a time a baby was born, as fair, sweet andgood as a cherub, the longed-for daughter after four sons. And then, unexpectedly following hard on her heels,came a second girl-child, dark and clearly devil-spawned.
A changeling, or at best a throw-back to some disreputable gypsy ancestor that her fire-and-brimstone godly parents would have preferred to pretend never existed.
In other times, other places, she would simply have been quietlydisposed of, but that not being possible her parents moved their family of golden-haired children, together with the cuckoo in the nest, to a remote part of Scotland.
There the father could practise his own rigid version of a faith that was harsh, unforgiving and stark, and as his followers slowly moved into the nearby houses there grew up a sort of community about him. He wanted for nothing,for he was a tall, austerely handsome, charismatic man, and his growing flock featured many widows and divorcees of independent means.
It is a tribute to the physical stamina of both babies that they survived a baptism of total immersion in an icy loch, Julie pale and quiet but Carla angrily screaming her protest.
Afterwards while they slept, Julie’s fairy godmother scattered her crib with magicdust, rose petals and witty bon mots before airily rising and winging away, complacent in the knowledge that her protégée would flourish.
Sole attendant at Carla’s hastily borrowed cot was the Angel of Death, who flew over heavily, letting fall a crystalline powdering of ground bones and hollow laughter, before landing with the heavy deliberation of a vulture to grip the crib in pale bony hands.
Who invited her? Was she just passing, and, sensing a party of the muted kind so suited to her tastes, gatecrashed?
However it was, finding herself thrust into the role of sole sponsor she hastily bestowed what gifts she could muster on the baby’s restless head.
‘Ah yes,’ she muttered, peering down at the sleeping infant with wall-eyes like milky marbles, ‘She looks like a horror writer in themaking to me.’
Was the baby that ugly? Surely not, though it is hard to tell from the one faded photo of Carla that lies loose in the album charting Julie’s precious babyhood.
But perhaps it was the only gift she had to give, caught on the hop, as it were, before, flapping ponderously, she became airborne and drifted away on the breeze like a crumpled black rag.
See what I mean? You’d haveto read the rest of it to decide just who is the twisted sister.
Suffice it to say that when you’ve been brought up from the cradle to believe you are inherently bad, evil, and devil-spawned, and even your mother takes a dislike to you for no reason other than it’s her side of the family with the gypsy blood, it doesn’t give you much incentive to change; so it was fortunate that I discoveredan outlet for my darker imaginings in my writing.
First I scared the living daylights out of my schoolmates (which made me, for the first time, strangely popular), and then I began to have the odd (very odd) story published, until finally, not long after I’d moved to Westery and my first teaching post,Twisted Sisterwas accepted.
Now evil paid the bills: not lavishly, but well enough to enableme to give up the teaching long ago, and I’d never taken money from Max even on those rare occasions when he’d actually offered it, because I’d rather be a Best-kept Secret than a Best-kept Woman.
Meanwhile Jane, on the strength of her poetry books (and she writes poetry like there’s a word famine), and the literary merit in which I was so singularly lacking, had been teaching one day a weekon a postgraduate creative writing course at the same university as her husband and Max.
