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Authors: Marilyn Messik

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
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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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.

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