It’d been a busy day.
Susanna got up at six o’clock this morning because she couldn’t stay in bed any longer for excitement. She woke her parents and opened her presents, and helped her mother make the cake, and decorated it herself and left her mother to clear up afterwards. She played with her new toys between floods of visiting relatives. Then she helped with lunch, and ate lunch, and put on her party dress and had her hair brushed and decorated with a pretty hairband, and bounced around the house until her friends arrived. Then she bounced around the house with them, and they played with her new toys, and then Susanna’s dad took them all to the cinema, and then bowling, and they ate pizza in the café in the bowling alley. And they talked and laughed and yelled and laughed and played with their balloons and their food and laughed until Susanna’s father thought he would be deaf for the rest of his life.
Now finally, at eight o’clock in the evening, they were alone again. The dark had fallen outside the frosty window, and the father sat in the kitchen washing the pots, staring listlessly into the water, exhausted. The mother sat by the fire in the sitting room reading a novel when her little girl skipped into the room with a picture book and a smile on her face. She pushed her mother’s novel out of the way and clambered up onto her lap, handing her the picture book. Her mother took it, put her arms around the girl and held the book in front of the two of them, but did not open it. She said,
“Did you enjoy your birthday, Susanna?”
“Yes, Mummy,” the girl said sweetly, grinning round at her. And then, remembering her manners, she said, “Thank you for my presents.”
“You’re welcome, sweetie,” her mother said, smiling. “Is it good to be six?”
Susanna nodded eagerly, but the weariness from the day was clear in her contented little face. She patted the book and looked at her mother, who said, thoughtfully,
“Now that you are six, what is it you would like to be when you are forty?”
“A fairy!” Susanna cried happily.
“A fairy,” her mother chuckled. “That’s lovely.”
And then she opened the book and proceeded to read her daughter to sleep.
*
A year passed.
Now here she was again, seven years old, after another busy birthday, and her father was in the kitchen reading his newspaper, and her mother was in the sitting room by the fire knitting. Again Susanna scrambled onto her mother’s knee and handed her a book to read.
“Mummy, will you read to me?”
“Of course, sweetie. Have you had a good birthday?”
“Yes it was very – yes I really, really, really liked it.”
“Good. What’s it like being seven?”
“Big,” Susanna replied shortly.
Her mother smiled. “And what would you like it to be like when you’re forty?”
This time Susanna thought about it. “That’s really old,” she said after a minute. Her mother laughed, and tried not to think that she would be forty soon.
“Not as old as, say, ninety.”
“That’s really, really, really old!”
“Yes, but what would you like to be when you’re forty?”
“I’d like to be a princess.”
“Really?” She should’ve expected that. “And how would become a princess?”
“I’d marry a prince,” Susanna said, as if it was obvious. Her mother supposed it would be, to a girl who’d watched so many Disney Princess films.
“Oh? Which prince?” her mother asked, wondering whether her daughter would say Prince William or Prince Harry.
“Prince Charming!” Susanna said, and her mother realised that at this age, there were no princes in the world other than Prince Charming, not even the Princes William and Harry. “Can we read now, Mummy?”
“Yes, dear. Once upon a time…”
*
In the year that followed, a lot happened. Susanna started Junior School, and came home one day to tell her mother shyly that she’d made friends with a boy in her class called Archie and one day they were going to get married and live happily ever after. Yet another day, she came home and told her mother in tears that some of the girls were being mean to her.
When she made friends with these girls, she invited them to her eighth birthday party, along with Archie and a few other friends. As it turned out, these girls only went for the cake. Susanna’s eighth birthday was when she learned that life isn’t perfect.
That evening, she went and curled up on her mother’s lap and put her arms around her and buried her face in her shoulder. She gave her no book to read, not this year. Her mother held her and rocked her as Susanna said,
“Why do they not like me?”
To which her mother replied, after a minute’s thought, “I don’t know, dear. Some people aren’t very nice. Unfortunately that’s just the way it is.”
“Why?”
“Because everybody’s different and that’s just how some people turn out. Not very nice. Besides, not everybody’s parents are very nice. That might make them a not very nice person.”
“I have nice parents,” Susanna said, and her mother smiled and hugged her only daughter closer.
“Good,” she said. “We do try to be nice.”
“I don’t ever want to be not nice like that,” Susanna declared, shaking her head.
“No, I hope you’re not ever like that. What would you like to be instead?”
“Nice,” Susanna replied simply. “And friendly and kind.”
“What about when you’re older? When you’re forty, what would you like to be by the time you’re forty?”
And Susanna said, “Didn’t you ask me that last year?”
“I did. But things change in a year. Now that you’re a bit older, what would you like to be by the time you’re forty?”
Her daughter stared off at the far wall with a slight crease between her eyebrows. Eventually she said, absently,
“Princesses aren’t like Cinderella and Snow White anymore, are they? Like, the princesses in magazines and things, they don’t look like princesses, do they, with big ball gowns and tiaras and…things. Do they?”
“No, my dear, princesses aren’t like the ones in fairytales.”
Susanna wrinkled her nose. “Then I don’t want to be a princess.”
“What do you want to be, then?” her mother asked her softly.
“I don’t know,” Susanna admitted.
“What about… An actress? Or a singer? A musician? A writer? An artist? What about a vet, or a doctor? A teacher? A designer? Maybe an astronaut? A chef? A horse rider? Or an explorer? I know, what about a ballerina?” But as her mother listed each one as she thought of them, Susanna just shook her head.
“I don’t know, Mummy,” she said. “Well, really, I’d like to be a fairy. Or a dragon trainer.”
“A ballerina can be similar to a fairy.”
Susanna thought about that, then said quickly, “No. No it’s not, Mummy.”
“Okay, then.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
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