A Fractured Fairytale

Chapter 9-Fortunes

I awoke to Alfie’s shrill voice in my ear as he sung, his words splashed me like water, waking me immediately. “We are going to the fair Elsie! Get up!” His voice was so similar to a girl’s you wouldn’t of believed he was a boy. As he tugged my arm to pull me out of bed, the journal fell out of the covers and before he could lay his eyes on it, I swept it underneath the bed as fast as I could. The last thing I needed was anybody to read what I had written.

My whole body felt heavy as I rolled painfully out of bed, falling down a few stairs really did have a big impact on me. As Alfie tugged me out of bed, his hand felt warm in mine and it wasn’t long before he was pulling me around the fairground too.

Everything was so bright, causing me to squint and position my hand on my forehead to shelter my eyes from the mid-day sun. My eyes didn’t know where to look as lights flashed a variation of colours from every direction possible. Music from the carousel blended in with the tune from the Ferris wheel, creating a choir of mixed music hitting my eardrums. The horses fixed onto the spinning carousel sprung up and down, their oily black hooves dragging lightly on the ground. I half expected the horses to break away from the carousel and leap, free, into the distance like on the film Mary Poppins. My imagination had been led astray and as I tuned back into reality, I knew that that could only be true in fairytales. The poles the horses were attached to gleamed a majestic gold in the fiery sun. The sun was the only one who owned the sky today because it shone so powerfully, all the clouds had fled. There were no planes in the sky either or at least I was unable to hear them over the top of the shrieking children on the Ferris wheel. From the top of the Ferris wheel I bet all these people queuing would of looked like lines of ants. From down here, however, they pushed and shoved, more like angry wasps.

The candy floss on the stand span round slowly to attract more attention from the people swarming the fair. The helter skelter stood, proud, in the very centre of the fairground with hundreds of people gathering round to have a go. Hook a duck was planted next to the Helter Skelter with a crowd of a merely ten people. Most of them being people who thought they were lining up for other stalls, but had been mistaken. Julia aimed a painstaking smile at me, “Do you want a go on Hook a duck?” I nodded, pretending to be enthusiastic as I head over to the blinding yellow stall. Belle began to point at different things and as I said them for her she repeated the words, minus a few letters, which she failed to remember. “Heller Skelter!” she slurred, sounding drunk, which couldn’t help triggering my laugh.

As we were queuing, I couldn’t help bobbing my head up to see over the vast crowd around me. It felt as if people were coming closer and closer every second, my personal space being whisked away as they did so. The sun beat down on me, like a flame running along my body, burning my skin even though I did have a layer of sun cream on. I turned my back to the sun, still squinting as my eyes met with what looked like a tent, but smaller, which seemed as if it could only fit a maximum of three people inside. The tent looked like one you would see at a circus and stood behind some trees, which formed a cage around it, possibly making it the least obvious place you would set your eyes on at the fairground. The grass around the tent had shriveled up and died where it had had no access to any light whatsoever. It was as if the bare hands of death had stroked the patches of grass.

The tent was striped, which was no change as that seemed to be the fairground’s signature pattern, but the stripes were a dark purple, almost black, and a discoloured lilac, which caught the eyes of nobody apart from me. The purple’s were a comforting contrast to the samey yellows and reds scattered everywhere else I looked. The tent was closed in an unwelcoming fashion, the two drapes of material on the front, looked like curtains and were tied together with a plain brown rope, as if we were forbidden to venture inside. The ends of the rope were splayed out and charcoal black as if they had been dipped in a fire and licked by the flames. The letters littered into an uneven arch on the tent matched the rope, they looked as if they had been melted and some slid halfway down the front causing me to tilt my head to the side to read the words. Some letters were the pale colour of ply wood, but some had darkened with age to the kind of black you would see down a bottomless pit. The letters were mis-shaped as if they had been designed by a three year old, but eventually I managed to piece together what it said, ‘THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE’