Euro Disney Sucks....

*an extract from my 'work in progress' novel....

Photo: me at Disneyland Florida aged 8. It was amazing!

A winter school trip to Eurodisney and the pecking order was put to the test. The park was washed out, shades of granite and cement, queues, bone-cold, faded costumes, fizzling fireworks, soggy fast-food; world’s apart from the technicolour sparkle of Lorna’s childhood family holiday to DisneyLand Florida. They were headed for a new ride called Oblivion. The girls walked in formation like ducks, crunched their fat-bottomed New Balance and Nikes through cat-ice and grubby snow, came to a grey stone fountain with a flaking Tinkerbell perched at the top, patches of stone, where the turquoise had chipped, tipping forward, her large chest and tiny waist emphasising her precarious pose, Katherine and Lorna walked in tandem at the front of the group, the gaggle of their girl group a foot behind.

‘Let’s see who they follow, you go that way,’ instructed Katherine. Lorna circled the fountain clockwise, sprinklings of grit and dirt and slush beneath her feet, crackled underfoot, screams above and distant, muffled giggles and movement in her peripheral vision. 

They regrouped at the top of the circle. 

‘All followed me,’ stated Katherine.

Lorna shrugged and said, ‘so’. Bitch, hissed Le Petit Gazelle, the small chatty beast that lived inside her chest.

   Lorna began to wonder then whether Katherine was actually ‘a nice and genuine person, on our wavelength,’ as her grandmother was so fond of putting it. Lorna pictured these wavelengths. Rays of snaking light reaching out from her body towards Katherine’s, at a few inches from Katherine a watery forcefield would repel Lorna’s shining waves, bouncing and scattering them across the ether. 

    Now she cracks open the top of her mini Cab Sav and pours half the liquid into the plastic cup. The teenage boy next to her is asleep, his head forward and leant towards her, she can smell the slight mustiness of his hair. Three, Drei, Tres. The magic number. A heavy tang of wine pools in her mouth. Years of experience had led her to the formula, whether she was drinking beer, wine spirits, or a mix of, at drink number six she would be drunk, the point of no return, three a good place to be, buzzed not blotto. At three she blossomed like a wilting flower stuck into boiling water, head raised in shock.

‘You’re acting, like, totally mental,’ Katherine had said to her one night as she sat swaying on a bench at the Alford Ponds. 

‘Yep! Yep! Yep! Good!’ she replied. A more entertaining version of herself discovered in a bottle of merry mix.

‘You want to be a weirdo, eurgh,’ Katherine said with a tone that implied she was wiping dog’s shit off her shoe. 

   Lorna sips, exhales deeply. On the tiny screen Ally shakes her tiny hips around in an oxymoronic way that seems to Lorna both wild and utterly controlled. Ally is talking to her therapist about how ‘hot’ the syncopated rhythm of Turn the Beat Around playing in the bar had caused her to become ‘sizzling’, she says and pouts like an attractive fish. She tells her male therapist how she had taken the Abercrombie model home to her apartment, there’s a kiss and grope flashback. Ally tells the surprisingly opinionated therapist how she had pulled away, stopped it, told the model ‘the three words’ that the therapist asserts ‘a man never wants to hear ‘it’s too soon.’ The therapist appalled at Ally’s lack of consent.

 ‘Unbelievable, the characters spend their whole time asking each other to dance, that’s not life,’ Lorna hears her father say. Some long ago version of herself, the moody teenager, some other version of him, the grumpy father. He walks into the lounge. Dog-tired, Lorna realises now. He is in his black suit, wide, purple tie, shiny, shiny shoes. His eyes puffy, his breath sour. He slumps down on the couch next to her like a puppet released. Lorna glances down at his feet, his shoes are still on, something Lorna and her mother could not stand.

 Her long-ago father asks her when this nonsense will finish, when could he put the news on?

‘Why do you even watch the news anyway? You can’t change anything?’ Lorna had said and stomped up to her bedroom to call Isabelle.

Thank you very much for reading as always, I truly appreciate it! Other serendipitously ordered extracts from this same novel can be found here or for something completely different here’s some Haikus I wrote in collab with a creative friend. And please do get involved, ‘like’ ‘share’ ‘comment’ ‘re-stack’ and all that jazz! Cheers!

Love,

Emma x o x o

*context: the protagonist is currently on a plane travelling to New York remembering various things.