The title is a little cheeky, as actually, it’s not the title of the story at all. Instead, I am resurrecting a story that I began last year and that got buried in my obscene workload. My workload has not eased up and is in fact quite considerably worse. But that just means I have to procrastinate harder.
I hope that those of you who were reading this story will resume the practice and those who have not come across it before will start up again.
With all the usual warnings, then, here is chapter three of A Story About a Girl on Holiday with Her Family
The three parts of chapter one are found
here and here and
here.
The two of chapter two
here and
here.
I really like it when people leave me a comment. Particularly if it’s useful.
Anyway, like I said:
[align=center]A Story About a Girl on Holiday with Her Family
Chapter Three[/align]
Poppy sat cross-legged on her bed, skimming a magazine rested in her lap. The magazine passed the hem of her nightdress and was sweaty against her skin. Thomas was asleep with his hand held on his chest. His handheld was still on. The meal had finished quickly and Poppy had immediately excused herself; skiing was much harder work than she’d expected. “Gravity,” she thought, “must be utterly exhausted, dragging me down the mountain.”
A knock came on the door, hollow and loud, and Poppy shot to pull the duvet over her legs to cover her Goodnite. She was sure it could be seen under her nightdress from the door. It hardly mattered: Mr Gerrard jutted his head through the haloed crack in the door to say, “Goodnight.” He smiled at his daughter and his son, and indicated for Poppy to turn off her bedside lamp. He shut the door softly. It irritated Poppy when her father told her to turn off her light, especially when she was so patently still reading, but she lacked the energy to make a stand and flipped the switch. She stretched out her legs into the receptive darkness and let her magazine slip to the floor. She adjusted her leak guards a little to accommodate the change in her position and rolled onto her front to fall asleep.
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The morning came cold and dim. Had Poppy not already awoken she would hardly have noticed the sun finally rising behind the smothering snow clouds, from which drifted innumerable and dense snowflakes of such a size that had Poppy not been able to see how gently they fell, she might have thought them impossibly heavy.
She got out of her bed, pulling her nightdress as low as possible over her thighs. She moved towards the bathroom, but stubbed her toe on the foot of Thomas’ bed. She began to yell before she could check herself, producing a strange strangled sound as she tried. Thomas sat up in bed, pushing his covers aside and stretching his arms in a single movement. He was going to ask his sister if she was okay, but when he opened his mouth his throat was unendurably dry and he said nothing, but gaped like a silent toad. Poppy, on the other hand, had reached the light switch and looking at her brother said, “You’ve wet the bed again, Tom.”
Her voice was empty of derision, but Thomas was wary, “Mum says it’s just the altitude.”
Poppy made a little exhalation of doubt and self-consciously tugged at her hemline.
“Whatever,” Thomas said, “you will wet the bed every night anyway.”
Poppy looked horrified. Thomas wasn’t supposed to know that.
“Shut up Tom!” she began, outraged, “Don’t be silly: I’m older than you!”
“I saw your nappies in the bin and in the drawers,” he said.
Poppy began to cry, but slipped the Goodnite, dense with the night’s use, off from under her nightdress and onto the floor. She kicked it into the bin: there was no point in trying to hide what wasn’t a secret.
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Breakfast was subdued. Everyone was at the table, but aside from Mrs Gerrard’s shard draughts from her coffee cup, the only thing to emanate from anybody’s mouth was a sizeable portion of Dominic’s food. Poppy had to attend the table in her thermals. She could see William watch the fabric clinging to her body, but Jack hardly sent a peep in her direction. Refusing to allow so trivial a detail to ruin her day so very, very early in its course, Poppy finished her breakfast and went to fetch her ski suit from the drying line upon which it had been hung the previous night. Poppy noticed that not a single other member of the group had washed their ski suit quite as early in the trip, but optimistically considered that no-one important would have seen and moreover, cleanliness was not immediate evidence of incontinence.
Finishing zipping her top half, Poppy walked out of the front door, waiting for her brother and father to walk with her to the meeting point. They were still not ready and Poppy sighed, waiting, though in fact it would been her own insistence that Mr Gerrard fastened her ski boots that would exacerbate the delay.
Eventually stepping out into the thick snow, Poppy found that she could see very little. The lift pylons had vanished into the thick emptiness and later in the day, when she took her first chair lift, Poppy found both to her wonder and terror that she could see nothing beneath her but an enveloping, yet depthless, white abyss.
It was enormously cold on the lifts. The children in the group found that small accumulations of snow built up in every wrinkle of their clothing. Poppy was grateful to go inside when the stopped for lunch.
The instructor clearly less than willing to re-enter the blizzard, lunch dragged on for hours. Poppy talked to another girl about the unbearable Scottish boy, who entertained himself and the younger children by squashing his leftover chips into the floor beneath his violent orange ski boots.
Nonetheless, the inevitable moment came when the children went to the loo – Poppy struggling to keep her sleeves from the damp floor – and piled on their damp layers to ski for the afternoon. Hardly an hour had passed before they stopped again. The younger children were crying for the cold and wet and Poppy herself was glad of the hot chocolate she ordered in the warm smelling restaurant. She felt it certainly contributed to the inner warmth that protected her from the elements on the final ski home. Yet it was with abject despair that she also credited it with the collapse In her will power that saw her wet herself uncontrollably as she began the tiny walk from frigid piste to welcoming chalet.
Tears welled up beneath her goggles and Poppy’s inner thighs became incredibly cold very quickly. Thomas, following just behind, could see nothing through the thick snow. His mind was full of his own pain; he had been unable to see the shape of the snow and his body ached with the resonance of irregularities in the surface of the mountain and frequent close contact with that surface.
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The chalet was empty, even of staff, when Poppy and Thomas at last tripped through the door. The silence was thick like the snow that still obscured every window and it felt to Poppy as if every sound she made, however slight, was instantly very noticeable, yet entirely stifled. This was of little concern for Poppy, however, and despite her Jacuzzi privileges, she swallowed the stairs and locked herself in her bathroom before Thomas had even made the disappointing discovery that the table was, as of yet, bare.
Poppy fortified her snowbound sanctuary by fogging the windows on the inside as well by running the shower at its hottest setting. She slumped out of her ski suit and hung it on the back of the door before peeling the frozen leggings from her goose-bumped legs. She kicked these into the corner of the room with her underwear. Less ashamed of them, she discarded her tops where she stood before slumping in the bath under the hammering shower.
Not wanting her mother to know that she had wet her pants for the second day in a row, Poppy got out of the bath when she heard the busy clatters of other people beginning to return to the chalet. She quickly dropped her wet clothes into her draining bathwater in order that they might receive at the least the most cursory of rinses. She then went about hanging them over the radiator. It had snowed hard and it would hardly be a lie for her to say – were anyone to ask – that they’d simply wet through with the weather.
The bathroom all in order, Poppy pulled a clean towel around her shoulders and went to the dresser to put on some clothes. A second later she was stepping out of her bedroom door to ask her mother where she had put her blue dress, when she saw the most unwelcome sight she could possibly have imagined. Standing on the stairs, looking right at her door, was Jack. Jack in his swimming shorts with his muscular torso. Her… She touched at her head and felt the towel wrapped up like a ridiculous turban, drying her hair. She glanced down at her bare feet and then up here bare legs until she had confirmed that she wore only her underwear. She swallowed back tears as she marched into her parents’ room without looking at Jack, who was grinning in the way that people do when they have no idea at all how to act. And then Poppy threw herself, to her mother’s disdain, on Mr and Mrs Gerrard’s bed and screamed into the pillows until her mouth was dry and the pillowcase sodden.
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At dinner that night Poppy stared at her plate, still furious with the world. She was exhausted and she was moritified that Jack would have seen her flushed from the heat of the shower, in her scrappiest underwear, with no makeup and… It was a shame that she did not look up even for a second to see the jealous looks divulging positive reports that William shot as he glanced back and forth between Poppy and his older brother.
Already Will was beginning to feel that once again he had been cruelly presented with a girl who was so self-absorbed as to preclude even the most unfulfilling of conversation. A girl lacking even the most uniquely rudimentary awareness of the world beyond her fringe. He found himself in a position that is so infuriatingly prevalent in human interaction. He found himself confronting a behaviour that is not limited to the female sex, but arises in all instances wherein individuals ignore the world around them to concentrate only on that which they think is relevant to their very selves that very moment. Will liked to think that he was different, yet as with everyone else around the dinner table that evening, he was so oblivious to so much that occurred that it would not be unreasonable to suggest that Poppy’s maddening behaviour was nothing more momentous than the world turning full circle.
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The world did continue to turn, which suited Poppy up to a point, as she was nothing short of desperate for time to pass and mend her discomposure. On the other hand, doubtless she might have wished that once asleep time left her in the moment, if only for a little while longer. However, time was not so obliging and when Poppy awoke the following morning her mouth retained the feeling of last night’s toothpaste. Yawning, she sat up to stretch out her arms and saw her brother’s bed empty. When she had finished yawning Poppy’s ears pricked and cleared a little, began to hear the voices and clinking crockery that informed Poppy that she was about to be the last to breakfast.
Poppy hopped out of bed and trotted out of her room onto the stairs, enjoying the doughy feeling of her feet against the cold terracotta tiles of the floor. Quite why Poppy was so chirpy that morning was not entirely obvious – perhaps she felt as if she had drained her complete capacity for unhappiness the previous evening – but her mood, whatever the cause, was brought thudding to Earth when Mrs Pugh was the first to say, “Good morning, Poppy.”
“Nice of you to grace us with your presence,” chimed in Mr Gerrard, who suddenly looked sheepish as if he worried that his daughter might not find his admonishment strictly to her taste.
He needn’t have worried as Poppy had not heard but a single word of what he had said. From the moment that the ‘g’ of Mrs Pugh’s ‘good’ has hit her ear and then ricocheted through her skull as if it had been gunshot, Poppy had been deaf to the world.
In a sickening escalation of the day before, bit-by-bit she became aware that she was wearing her nightdress. In itself this was no bad thing; Poppy thought it to be pretty and better than that, rather flattering. Indeed, compared to the evening before it was infinitely happier for a boy, for Jack, to see her in her nightdress. Her hair was a mess, but that was how she – like to many girls of her type and situation – thought it suited her best. The problem that had silently, but quite immediately and firmly decimated Poppy’s appetite and made her palms sweat was the clammy feeling that was pulsating between her thighs, as if it were determined to explode into the view of everyone in the room. She couldn’t turn back upstairs: how would she explain that? She had just come down. But her nightdress suddenly seemed to very short and her wet Goodnite so incredibly heavy, threatening to slide to her ankles at any moment.
Poppy shuffled to the table. Halfway there – and the journey seemed interminable – she remembered to flash a weak smile at the table and to thank God that she had gone pale rather than flushed.
“You look a touch ill, Pops,” said Mrs Gerrard and Mr Pugh was forced to give Will a stern glare as he began a mercilessly sarcastic ‘Awww’.
“I’m just a bit tired, Mummy,” replied Poppy, holding the hems of her nightdress down as she took to her seat, desperate to avoid the potential calamity of its rising up. She hoped that no-one had noticed the outline of her Goodnite through the fabric as the nightdress was quite figure hugging at the hips. Poppy had never regretted that before.
Poppy picked at her croissant agonisingly slowly. The table had no cloth and she forced the bottom of her nightdress between her thighs and attempted to clamp her knees shut, though the Goodnite, swollen, fought against her.
Gradually, the Pugh boys began to trickle away to get ready under the eye of Mrs Pugh and Thomas left the table with his mother who did not trust him to brush his teeth, put on sun cream, or indeed, to do anything much at all. Left with the two fathers, Poppy carefully stoof up from the table; Mr Pugh needed to know nothing. But as she began to shuffle away her father pulled her into a neck-breaking hug and said, “I hope you’ve had enough brekkie, Pops. You’ve got a long day’s skiing ahead, you need your energy,” he loosened his grip a little, “you’re a big girl!”
Poppy was too mortified to be annoyed that her father would patronise her so severely. He’d pulled the back of her nightdress right up to the small of her back and now Mr Pugh and all the chalet staff were certain to know about he problem. She fought free and fled, once again choking back tears and hoping that everyone who had been in that room possessed more tact and exercised more discretion with relation to such matters than she might have done in such a situation.
The balcony curtains at breakfast had been wide open, but it was only in her bedroom, through bleary eyes, that Poppy looked out of the window and saw that it was snowing as heavily as the day before. That would mean a similar day.
Poppy grabbed her things from their pinewood drawers, cupboards and shelves and sloped into the bathroom to get ready for the day. She attempted to steal herself and brushed her teeth, washed her faced, applied some sun cream. She lifted off her nightdress and dropped her Goodnite to the floor with a wet slap. She took a long look at herself in the mirror and stepped into the clean Goodnite she had brought with her. She put on her thermals and snuggled into her ski suit, which was now dry throughout. Poppy plastered a smile that became more of an awkward grin across her face and went to put her ski boots on with the others.
I look forward to reading more ^-^