Lazy girls

Briar Rose lived in a castle and her future was clearly mapped out.
On her fifteenth birthday her parents were away from home. Growing
bored, she climbed a long, winding staircase that she had never
explored before, which led to a little room where an old woman, a
former tattooist, lived all by herself, polishing her needles and
occasionally adding drops of solvent to her little bottles of coloured
inks, so they would never dry up.

"Oh, how pretty!" Briar Rose exclaimed upon entering the tower room and
seeing all the colourful bottles ranged along the windowsill. The old
woman soon persuaded her to have a tattoo, but although Briar Rose was
excited by the idea of being permanently marked, in a way that her
parents would certainly not approve of (if they found out about it),
she rather timidly opted for a tiny pink rose with green leaves, in a
place which would always be hidden by her clothes.

This angered the old woman, who in her declining years passed the time
pleasantly dreaming of the huge and fantastic tattoos she had pinned in
the olden days, when her skills were famed far and wide, from corner to
corner of the three-cornered kingdom. Giraffes before giraffes were
ever heard of, bananas likewise and fire-breathing dragons with long,
intricate tails. The scales on those dragons - the sheer labour of it!
Now all forgotten. So, in revenge, she pricked Briar Rose with a
poisoned needle.

The princess started to feel drowsy halfway down the stairs and she
fell asleep on the coverlet of her grand bed, which was embroidered
with metal threads reputed to be gold, not even bothering to get
between the damask sheets. And so then - you know what happened. The
queen and the king, just back from their Citybreak in Bucharest, fell
asleep in the hallway among the unpacked suitcases. The harassed GP,
summoned to attend to her young majesty, unexpectedly got his heart's
desire - the sleep he had so longed for during his 48-hour stints as a
junior house doctor.

The cook, the sous-chefs, the butler, the under-butler, the head
gardener and all the under-gardeners, the kitchen maid, the princess's
nurse, etc, all fell asleep at their posts and dreamed of their
salaries being automatically paid into their bank accounts by standing
order, month after month for a hundred years. The roses growing outside
the castle windows went completely bonkers, first breaking the slim
wooden posts to which they were firmly secured and swallowing the
secateurs, then scooting up the ancient mellow walls until at last they
waved triumphantly above the battlements and spent the ensuing decades
growing ever thicker and more tangled.

A hundred years passed. Many brave princes perished among the thorns,
while trying to hack their way through. At last came one who was
nothing special, but just happened to arrive at the right time, when
the hundred years were up. The brambles melted at his touch. Wandering
through the palace, now crumbled into rack and ruin, at last he saw a
pretty girl lying on a rusty coverlet. The prince bent down and kissed
her lightly. She stirred and spoke.

"Oh, I was just having such a nice dream - won't you please leave me
alone." She turned over and went back to sleep.

Meanwhile, just down the road, a girl called Cinders because of her
great love of open fireplaces was pleasurably wriggling her bare toes
in the ashes, which she had deliberately scattered across the
hearthstones. They felt so soft and silky. Her two sisters had put on
their best clothes and gone out for the evening, so Cinders was at
liberty to do what she pleased. No more nagging about the benefits of
modern central heating and Servowarm's special winter offer - look,
Cinders, at this catalogue. She had burned the catalogue. It was
contributing to the pleasant blaze now leaping up the chimney.
Then alas to her dismay her fairy godmother appeared. This fairy
godmother had a way of interrupting Cinders's reveries in various
guises; this time she resembled the ex-Prime Minister, with bouffant
grey hair and a low, earnest way of talking.

"Cinderella, you SHALL go to the ball!"

"Oh must I?"

"And you shall dance in these beautiful cut-glass shoes. Don't talk to
me like that, you ungrateful child. Don't you realise, this is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance... "

Cinders turned back to the fire; resting her chin between her hands,
she gazed deep into the flames. She could see dancing dragons, bananas,
giraffes... Fed up with being ignored, the fairy godmother stamped her
foot and vanished again. That was the moment it first occurred to
Cinders to wonder whether a girl could ever become a tattooist...
probably not, she decided. At any rate, it was high time she found
herself a job, left home and got a mortgage on her own fireplace.
Before consigning a newspaper to the flames, she flicked through the
job ads.

She was an online sub-editor, working for a city news agency, turning
screeds of untidy articles into words of pure gold. The writers often
called her Sue, which was not her name but that of her predecessor in
the job. She pricked her finger while trying to staple an awkward
corner and up swelled a bead of blood. It was lunchtime so she got her
coat and walked down to the river, where she liked to watch the barges
going past. Seven Canada geese flew in formation across the sky. Some
treasure hunters had dug a neat cube-shaped hole in the mud, at least
5ft deep, and one of them was now standing in it, wielding his metal
detector.

Words will never come to my rescue, she thought. Neither my own nor
other people's. Time goes so fast. My life is bright blood, flowing
away.