Relatively Strange

Relatively Strange

Marilyn Messik

Copyright © 2013 Marilyn Messik

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

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ISBN 978 1783067 916

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To Richard for yesterday, today and tomorrow

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

About the Author

Marilyn was a regular feature and fiction writer for national magazines when her children were small. She set up her first business, selling toys, books and party goods from home before opening first one shop then another. When she sold the shops she moved into the world of travel, focusing on accommodation in New England, USA. Her advisory, planning and booking service flourished and she concurrently launched a publishing company, producing an annual, full-colour guide.

In 2007 she set up a copywriting consultancy,
Create Communication
to help businesses shape their messages to optimum effect at the same time as debunking marketing myths and mistakes that can prove devastatingly expensive to companies of any size. She’s the author of the
Little Black Business Book
series – common sense stuff, she says, written because the crock at the end of the rainbow isn’t always packed with gold. She divides

her time now between writing website texts; press releases; speeches; advising on business strategies and working (she calls it busy-knickering) on book publishing projects, both fact and fiction.

She’s been married to her very patient husband for more years than he deserves and they have two children, five grandchildren and, somewhat to

their surprise, several grand-dogs.

Chapter One

I was five when I flew for the first time, sixteen when I killed a man. Both events were unsettling in their own way.

It took five years to stumble across my gravity defying attributes, less than five minutes to gather it wasn’t at all the sort of thing people expected. My other abilities revealed themselves gradually, often disconcertingly, over a period of years although by then I was slightly more savvy and anxious not to, if I could help it, traumatise any more family and friends than I had already.

*

I was, I think, an ordinary enough baby girl, greeted on arrival in the early 1950s by the usual anxious parental totting up of fingers and toes. Photos show me with a sparsity of dark hair brushed to a quiff, squinting into the camera like a slightly startled Mohican. Nothing odd showed then apparently.

We lived in Hendon. Nearby lived a Grandma; several Great-aunts; one really great aunt and various other relatives of assorted size, style and age. Grandma, my mother’s mother, used to visit with greasily wrapped, cloyingly sweet and sticky
halvah
from Mr Grarber the delicatessen down the road. She also held a reassuringly large stock of chocolate bars in her bottomless, brown leather handbag. Matured alongside a tube or two of Polos and some wine gums the chocolate had a distinctive taste, smell and mottled appearance which, only when I grew up, did I come to recognise as stale. I’m still a sucker for a chunk of Cadbury’s well past its sell-by.

Grandma suffered a stroke when I was small and although she recovered well, it left her with a tremor which made her head wobble fractionally but fascinatingly on her neck whenever she spoke. She was also, thereafter never very steady on her feet and fell over a lot, albeit extremely cheerfully.

“Silly bugger aren’t I?” she’d mutter, unfazed, as we hauled her up yet again, dusted her off, retrieved the handbag and straightened her hat.

Widowed, she lived with two sisters, similarly bereft, in a flat in a mansion block – Georgian Court – just along the road from us. True, if transplanted, East-Enders, although only a generation or so away from their mittel-European forbears and a lot nearer than that in attitude, they enjoyed endless games of gin rummy and kalooki played with a ruthlessness, skill and lip-chewing intensity rarely seen outside a high-stake casino.