the fairytale is dead.

This piece was written in 2007. It was for a diaries and autobiographies class. I used old journals and old memories to piece it together.

the fairytale is dead



My knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. In a town with a name I can’t pronounce, I haven’t been comfortable for a while. Or clean. I haven’t been comfortable or clean since I was somewhere with a name I could pronounce. Pronounce properly, without struggle. Right now I am struggling. It’s been ten hours and eleven thousand minutes and my knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since last night when I got a pie from the bus terminus, except it wasn’t the kind of pie I was familiar with, the kind of pie I knew from back home. It was flatter and brown and had some yellow on the top, and, thinking back, I’m not entirely convinced it was a pie. It was a mistake to buy it. It was a mistake to pay seven Euros for it. It was also a mistake to eat it so quickly. I ate it quickly because the bus driver growled at me when I tried to eat it in the bus and I was too scared to make her wait for me to eat it and too hungry to throw it away. It was a mistake to eat it so quickly because I can now feel it, sitting, whole, in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t been to the toilet in three days. Everything I’ve eaten in the past week has either given me diarrhoea or indigestion and I’m too scared to eat anything else in case the nine-hour trip I have ahead of me is jeopardised. I farted before, and tried to blame it on the old man behind me. It wasn’t noisy, my farts are rarely noisy and often unnoticeable, but I hadn’t been to the toilet for three days, so it wasn’t like a normal fart. It was just gas, of course, I didn’t shit myself, but gas has different consistencies, and this was definitely on the thicker side. It was like in that film, The Ten Commandments, when the green mist that is the Angel of Death settles over Egypt, and all the first-born sons die. It was like that, except it wasn’t green, but I could definitely sense its presence, and I could sense that those around me sensed its presence. Everyone screwed up their noses and shifted slightly in their seats. It smelt like boiled lamb. And Communism. This whole country smells like boiled lamb and Communism. The bus pulls into a roadside diner and we’re give ten minutes to stretch our legs. I make a dash for the toilet but I’m too late and there’s already a queue of people at the port-a-loo. Everyone is standing very still, jaws set, concentrating. We’re on the other side of the world and all of a sudden shitting becomes the only thing you can think about.

I wander into the newsagency and browse through a few trashy magazine before the old lady behind the counter snarls at me. I buy a bottle of water and some chewing gum and a some tissues and then I spot a notebook and think it might be good to write in a journal or something, so I buy that too. The bus driver is blasting her horn and begins to pull away from the rest stop so I’m sprinting across the carpark and I have to chase the bus a few metres and then I just manage to jump on through the open door, and then she breaks suddenly and I fall over and my things go everywhere.

Once upon a time lived a big girl named Cathelijn. She grew up in a little house full of little people. Her father was a farmer and her mother helped her father be a farmer. She had six older brothers and sisters. Her family was not very wealthy, and so Cathelijn was made to wear Betje’s hand-me-down clothes. Sadly, Cathelijn was no less than three times bigger than her older sister. Cathelijn’s mother taught her to sew when she was six, and so Cathelijn would spend her afternoons sewing all her hand-me-down dresses together to make one big dress that was just the right size.

On her 13th birthday, Cathelijn’s family bought nine beautiful white horses, one for each of the family. They would be going on a holiday together and the horses were to be their mode of transport. Her brothers and sisters mounted their beasts with ease. Cathelijn struggled atop her horse, who, under her weight, stumbled forward a few paces and collapsed. As the animal lay dying on the ground, and her sisters giggled into their hands, her mother announced – “You’ll have to go and stay with your grandmother while we’re away”.

Grandma Gerdina was an artist, and her house was filled with paintings and drawings of flowers and faces. Her favourite thing to do, though, above all others, was to sculpt. Gerdina used clay and metal and dirt and dough and foodscraps to make her sculptures. Sometimes they would go in the garden and the birds would eat them. Other times she would pull them apart and make something else out of the same material. When Cathelijn arrived, Gerdina was sitting in her workshed, busying herself on her latest project – a giant viking ship, intricately carved from the wood of the trees in her garden. It was the size of a big dinner table, and had a wooden floor and a wooden mast and, on its nose, a big wooden dragon was roaring.

Every day for many weeks, Gerdina would work on the ship, carving away at its fine edges, whilst Cathelijn sat in the corner, making a viking helmet from the wood scraps her grandmother gave her. Gerdina would tell her granddaughter the story of Anke, a Viking warrior who commandeered her own ship and sailed the seas seeking adventure and exploring far off lands and places. She told her about the people Anke stole from, and the people she saved. And then she told her about how Anke died, and about how her family placed her body onto her boat and set it on fire before putting it out to sea.

One Saturday morning, Cathelijn got up to fix her grandmother some breakfast. She made eggs and tea and toast and put the whole meal on a big tray, like she usually did on Saturdays, and took it into her grandmother’s room.

But when Cathelijn went into Gerdina’s room, the old woman wasn’t sitting up like she usually was on a Saturday morning, planning her next project, surrounded by sketches. She didn’t have her notebook out, or her pencils, and she wasn’t propped up on two pillows, and her glasses weren’t perched gently on the edge of her nose, and she wasn’t smiling warmly. She was dead.

Cathelijn sat down on the bed and cried for a little while. Then she had a sip of her grandmother’s tea, and a bite of the toast, and a taste of the eggs. The toast was good, but the eggs weren’t very tasty at all, the sour berries adding a horrid flavour to the whole meal. After breakfast, Cathelijn busied herself around the house, cleaning and washing. She’d been thinking her grandmother would be dead soon, and so had been planning for it. A bag was packed under the bed, and a carefully chosen outfit hanging on the back of her bedroom door.

When the cleaning was finished, and the dishes were all washed, and the fire was well and truly out, Cathelijn decided it was time. She went to her room and pulled her travel bag from under the bed. She stripped down to her underclothes and got dressed again in the outfit she had chosen for this occasion.

She pushed the ship out of the workshop and into the yard, and then from the yard all the way down the hill to the edge of the forest, through the forest and into a clearing. She paused for a moment to catch her breath. Then out of the clearing and into more of the forest, and she kept pushing the whole time, until the sun was nearly setting. When she reached the water, the last golden rays of daylight were disappearing over the horizon. She cut open the cotton sack that she was dragging behind her and manoeuvred her grandmother’s stiff body onto the deck of the ship. Cathelijn took the viking helmet off her head and placed it gently on Gerdina’s, sweeping a few grey hairs off the old woman’s face. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of matches, and she lit one and threw it onto the ship and pushed it out to sea. The fire smouldered for a little while, and then caught onto Gerdina’s cotton dress, and the flames got bigger and bigger, and the boat moved further out toward the horizon.


Three days earlier, in a bookstore in Zadar, I devour the shop's English-language section, the whole two shelves of it. My bags spill around me and I’m on the floor surrounded by books and magazines. I read everything, trying furiously to absorb it all, knowing I can’t afford to buy books and should really be looking for somewhere to sleep. I don’t look for somewhere to sleep, though. I buy six books instead. Six books by the same author, one of those series' about men and women and relationships and Labradors and the baby that brings them all together into one dysfunctional yet happy family who somehow manage to afford a warehouse loft conversion in Notting Hill while working part-time as writers or sculptors or graphic designers. The books aren't particularly highbrow, and after reading a few chapters I begin to wonder how they got published in the first place, but they're in English and I haven't heard or spoken English in a very long time, so I feel like these books, these six books, are going to save my life. I buy them, and as the cashier rings up the total I try and do the sums in my head - how much I spent minus the cost of dinner plus a cheap room multiplied by a packet of rolling tobacco equals I'm fucked. I've just fucked myself and all I have to show for it are six shit books.

On my way out of the store I spot a seventh. It’s a book of Beatles lyrics. It’s only five Euro and I’ve already spent so much money that it seems cheap. I dog-ear the songs we sang together and scribble a note on the inside cover. I tell myself that I'll post it later and now, sitting on the bus three days later with the lyric book in my hands, I promise myself again that at the next rest stop I will post it.


Kanat had two sets of drumsticks. One good pair and one bad pair. The bad pair were the colour of bleached bones, brittle and covered in chips and bruises. The good pair were red and robust, and so shiny that he could see his face in the reflection. Every day, after lessons had finished, the School Band would gather with the choir in the hall, and after they had tuned their instruments and warmed their voices, they would be silent. The bandmaster, Luba, a very tall, very thin man with jet black hair and a clean face, would sweep into the room and . He would conduct the band with a long metal baton that he would spend minutes shining before each rehearsal, while the band waited for him in silence. He would tap his music stand four times, nod curtly just once, and the band would play. Kanat drummed in perfect time, using his best red drumsticks. The choir would join in and sing about crimson scarves and marching toward victory. These were the only songs that the children were allowed to play and sing.

Each afternoon, halfway through rehearsal, Luba would raise his hands in a call for silence and announce a ten minute break. He would go outside the hall and smoke cigarettes in the cold air. When this hapenned, Kanat would do two things. Always two things, and always in the same order. First, he would loosen his tie. The others followed his lead. Then, he would collect from his schoolbag his brittle and bruised drumsticks. He would strike them together four times and begin to play. None of the children in the choir knew what the words to the songs meant, but Paul McCartney and John Lennon were known even in this small town. Luba would be gone for exactly four minutes, and the song went for three minutes and forty seconds, so if the group were quick enough, they could easily fit in a banned song before the break was over. But one day, the day on which this story is set, Luba came back early. The band members fell silent, one by one, as each of them in turn noticed the man's dark shape walking toward them. Kanat, though, with his eyes closed, continued to drum loudly and with wild abandon. When he finally noticed those around him had stopped playing, heopened his eyes. Kanat looked at Luba and Luba stared right back at Kanat.

Later that night, when Kanat was walking home, a group of men stepped out from behind a tree and hit the schoolboy with hammers until he bled. From then on, Kanat could only play drums with one hand.

Twenty-five years later, Kanat and his wife Elly and their friend, an Australian teenager, sit in a poky flat in north-west London, in a building full of grubby little people, on a street called Penny Lane. They drink vodka and water, and they tell him they don't know much about British music, so the boy pulls out his iPod and tells them he has to play them a song, a great song by this great band, a song that their street has got to be named after. Elly tries to stop him playing the song, but before she has a chance to say anything, Paul McCartney's voice is filling the small kitchen. The boy is singing and dancing, waving his arms above his head, but Elly is watching her husband. His eyes are filled with tears, and he is smiling from ear to ear.


I wake up somewhere just outside Split because I can feel something rustling against my legs, and my first thought, before I even open my eyes, is to pull my bag close to my chest and say a small prayer. Not a prayer, as such, but something like a prayer, a sort of wish, asked for with earnest. Please, always ask nicely, I’ve only got a few hundred kilometres to go. When I open my eyes, expecting the worst – expecting a knife, or a twisted smile or, at the very least, an old man in a trenchcoat – it’s not that bad at all. I open my eyes and instead of a murderer or a pervert or a robber, its just Piotr, and he’s got a little photo album, and he’s pointing. Piotr is the guy who has been sitting next to me since we left Dubvrovnik, the Polish guy who talks with a heavy accent, has a cleft lip and no teeth. I can’t understand most of what he says. He keeps talking to me, though, and I keep nodding earnestly. He shows me a scar on his arm, and explains that it came from the piece of glass that pierced him when the train next to his on the Underground exploded. I show him a scar on my eyebrow from when Lachlan Bull smacked me in the head with a Transformer when I was seven.
While I struggle to understand why this man I don’t know would wake me up to show me photos of other people I don’t know, he starts talking with his heavy accent and I just start nodding. He’s pointing at a picture of a house, and then of a tree, and then of a barn, and then of that same barn on fire. He keeps flicking through the pictures and pointing and muttering something about each of them, and I keep nodding, and then he stops. He stops on a picture that looks a lot like most of the other pictures, just craggy countryside and broken buildings. But then I see the little black ball on the ground, the mangy little puppy dog sleeping on a rock with his little puppy eyes closed tight against the wind. Piotr doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks at the picture, and then he turns the page and there’s another barn with its roof on fire.


Piotr Gabka was a simple man with simple tastes. He had a vegetable that grew just enough leafy vegetables for tomorrow night’s dinner. His house was little and clean and, though lacking a woman’s touch, was always warm with the fire carefully stoked.

Every day he would go walking through his fields, admiring the trees and the flowers. One day, Piotr was out walking in one of the furthest fields in the west, where the horizon was interrupted only by a row of tall paperbark trees, and a run-down wooden building once used to keep hay. He loved this part of his property because, although it was particularly wild, it was still beautiful. He rarely walked there because the paths had become covered with weeds and the angry roots of old trees, so it was no longer safe. It was the only piece of land he couldn’t see from his kitchen window.

While he was there, walking, he found a small pup lying in the sun, gnawing on an old chicken bone. The pup was lean and short-haired, with ears that stuck straight up in the air. The pup froze and stared at the old man a second, before resuming work on the bone. Piotr reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of bread he was keeping as a snack. The puppy ran over and snatched it away, chewing on it until his mouth was covered in foam. Piot patted the dog goodnight and scurried home.

The next day, Piotr went back with some more bread. The puppy ate it all up. The day after that he went back again, this time with some vegetables from the garden, all chopped up and cooked in a stew. Piot visited the puppy on its patch of land every day for many many months, until the puppy grew into a dog. Every day, without fail, the pair would meet by the rock, Piotr always carring a plate full of food which the dog devoured as if starving. Every day Piotr got a little thinner as the food he saved for himself became less and less. Soon all he ate for dinner was a cup of sweet tea and yesterday’s bread. Piotr didn’t mind, though. He felt best when lying in bed at night, a dull hunger inside him, in the knowledge that his friend was sleeping somewhere on a full stomach. He looked forward to seeing him every day, and every day the dog was there.

Except one day, when it wasn’t. It was gone. Piotr called to it and waited for several hours, until the sun was down. The dog never came. It stayed away for three nights, and then, as suddenly as it had disappeared, it was back, and this time with a friend. Piotr saw the friends for the first time as he approached the rock. A second black body was lying, stretched out on the grass. Piotr had continued to arrive at their meeting place each night in the hope that the dog would return. As Piotr approached the dogs, they both stood to attention. From inside the belly of the boy, he heard a low growl. Teeth bared and eyes white, they both started barking loudly, snapping their jaws at the old man. Piotr dropped the terracotta bowl he was carrying, and the dogs’ food sprayed everywhere. Then, as Piotr took one small step back, the dogs leapt. They grabbed at the old man’s clothes, nipping at his heels and biting at his hands. Piotr turned to run and the dogs chased him, barking madly. Eventually, when Piotr was wheezing from running, and his hands bloody from the bites, he stopped and turned to look at the animals. They had walked back to their rock, and stood on its top, starting back at him. Piotr limped back to the house.


Gripping the bus’s address system with one hammy fist, the driver clears her voice and announces that Thankyou for using Samborcek Buses and it has been a pleasure driving us and we are nearing our final stop and could everyone please could collect their bags and rubbish etc. She switches off the microphone and pulls her raggedy old shawl tight around her shoulders.

Our last stop is Zagreb airport. I hope they have nice toilets. A whole lot of people got off at the previous stop, my Polish friend included. He patted me on the head and insisted I was a Good Boy, and then left. I’m getting closer, now. I pack up my books and magazines and iPod and put my journal in my bag. The woman next to me is napping on her husband's shoulder. His eyes watch the road in front, and the headphones in his ears play the same song over and over again, his walkman nestled in the palm of his twisted and broken hand.

But the bus never gets to where it’s going. We only fall short by about 20km, which is a pretty good effort considering the age and condition of the bus. But then again it wouldn’t have mattered if we got halfway or only ten minutes down the road, because either way we never got where we were going. An old man being chased by a dog runs in front of the bus, and we swerve to miss him, but we hit him anyway. The man is tossed against a tree and he dies, and then the bus, which is going quite fast at the time, plows through the road barrier and sails over the edge of the cliff and bursts into flames. The dog, a mangy thing riddled with fleas, wags its tail furiously and sticks its head out over the edge, looking down at the mess of flames and twisted metal. He turns around three times, does a wee, and then runs off in the direction of the mountains.