Icy Sedgwick's Blog, page 82

A to Z - The Haunting

My movie-themed A-Z continues apace with Robert Wise's 1963 ghostly classic, The Haunting. Based on the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, the film tells the story of a group of paranormal investigators who find more than they bargained for when they go hunting for ghosts. Dr Markway (Richard Johnson) wants to investigate the notorious Hill House, a house described as having been "born bad", and to do so, he enlists the help of a group of people who his research indicates have been involved with the paranormal in some way. In the end, only two end up arriving, Theo (Claire Bloom) and Nell (Julie Harris), and accompanied by the guy who'll eventually inherit the house, Luke (Russ Tamblyn), they start their investigation.



Trouble is, Nell has issues with her "nerves" and soon Hill House is bringing out the worst in her - or is she bringing out the worst in Hill House? In Dale Bailey's book-length study,  American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction , he posits the idea that Shirley Jackson was the first author to remove the ghosts from the haunted house, and to make the house itself an evil entity - Hill House, in his words, was the first house to be "born bad". This is something the film plays with, and as Nell regresses into her bad memories surrounding the death of her mother and her subsequent guilt about the part she played in it, so the disturbances in the house increase.



I firmly believe The Haunting is a masterclass in representing a haunting, since the film relies on shadow, suggestion and sound to make its point. Whereas the utter balls-up of a remake in 1999 relied on poorly rendered CGI and an idiotic plot to tells its story, thereby removing all semblance of fear or suspense, the original builds up the suspense through a careful use of structure, and implication to make you imagine what could possibly be going on. It's not surprising - director Robert Wise cut his teeth working with producer Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s, working on a series of films notorious for their use of shadow and suggestion over prosthetics and gore. Val Lewton even described their process, saying that if you made a screen dark enough, people will read things into that darkness, and Robert Wise does the same - and more.



You have to remember that horror in the 1960s was different from the derivative torture-porn crap that it is today. Psycho had just revolutionised the genre by proving that not even your top billed star was safe from the chop, and both Hammer and Roger Corman were revelling in the possibilities afforded by Technicolor for lush period pieces starring Christopher Lee or Vincent Price. The Haunting isn't an anomaly by any stretch, but it does make an effort to engage with character on a deeper level than most. It also starts to fully explore the possibilities of setting, turning Hill House itself into the fifth character in the film.



I don't want to say too much because I really want you to go and watch this, if you haven't already, but two of the scariest scenes in the film rely on sound. You see nothing - but by gumdrops, you hear plenty. What do you hear? No one actually knows - it's as much up to you to interpret the sound as it is the characters within the film. Whatever I might imagine will be totally different to whatever you imagine - and that's the key. Monsters just are not scary - look at the monsters from the 1930s, they've become pop culture icons. But something you can't see, and can only imagine? Brrrr....



I'll leave you with this clip, from near the end of the film. Dr Markway, Luke, Nell and Theo have taken refuge downstairs, only something wants to join them...

A - Z - Ghostbusters

Hands up if you thought I could possibly feature any film BUT Ghostbusters for G? Sure, there are lots of other great movies beginning with G, but none of them are Ghostbusters. I remember how you could always expect to hear the theme tune at school discos (even though the film had been out about eight years by the time I ever went to one), and the cartoon series would be on after school. Ah, those were the days.



For those of you who have never seen Ghostbusters, and I sincerely hope there are none in this category, the film revolves around three parapsychology professors (plus Winston Zedmore (Ernie Hudson), a dude who just wants the paycheck) who form a company to rid New York of its resident spectres. For a fee, of course. The brainchild of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), the Ghostbusters enterprise takes up residence in an old fire station, and what looks suspiciously like a hearse is pressed into service as Ecto 1, their means of transport. Sigourney Weaver's Dana brings in a new case, in which she thinks she's seen an old Babylonian god in her fridge, and the boys set to work trying to figure it out. Turns out her apartment building was built by an occult-obsessed architect, and it was designed as a portal to another realm. You don't see that type of dwelling on these property makeover shows, do you? Anyway, the Ghostbusters have to try and avert an apocalypse, part of which involves destroying a giant marshmallow man. As you do.



Ghostbusters came out in 1984, and it's true that the visual effects look their age. Thing is, it doesn't matter. I don't need my ghosts to look real - I just want them to look cool, even if they are dated. Whether the Ghostbusters are chasing Slimer around an upscale New York hotel (named the Sedgewick, pity the name's got an extra letter), or using their proton packs, the ropey CGI just adds to the film's charm. And what charm it has! It's highly quotable (indeed, Ray Stanz's line, "Listen, can you smell something?" became a regular fixture when I used to do paranormal investigations), it's funny, and it's got Rick Moranis in it. Triple win.



I've tried really hard to provide intelligent commentary or some sort of discussion about the films I've chosen thus far, but Ghostbusters is the kind of film that just provokes childish fangirl glee in me. So sorry about that.

A to Z - Fight Club

I was a little bit stuck between films for 'F', as I usually am, but I decided on Fight Club since it's one of those films I can watch again and again, never tiring of it (which is one of my personal criteria regarding whether or not a film can be considered a 'favourite').



In a nutshell, the film stars Edward Norton, who plays the unnamed protagonist but who is often referred to be commentators as 'Jack', and Brad Pitt, who plays delightfully anarchic Tyler Durden, as well as Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, a support group junkie who becomes involved with, well, both of them. Jack and Durden strike up a friendship after Jack's apartment is trashed in a freak explosion, and soon they've begun an underground boxing group, the Fight Club. Things escalate, and soon Durden is running an anarchy organisation, Project Mayhem, hell bent on bringing down the establishments that fence in society.



Fight Club is notable as being the first film in which I ever saw Brad Pitt, and while I'd often dismissed him as nothing but a 'pretty boy', it became fairly obvious within about forty minutes of this film that the guy knows what he's doing. Durden is seductive in his chaotic ways, and Jack doesn't even seem to realise that he's swapped one routine for another; the former might be the way of capitalism and materialism, while the latter proposes itself as liberation, but they're both essentially routines. I once read a review which posited Jack as a 'misery vampire', due to his predilection for attending support groups for conditions he doesn't have, but in some ways, it is Durden who is the vampire, preying on the weak (Jack, Marla, the whole host of men that he turns into footsoldiers).



The film was originally touted as featuring 'subliminal' messages, due to the flashes of words and images during incongruous shots, but I refute that suggestion, since anything that appears on screen for long enough to be processed by the brain cannot be considered subliminal, and anything that appears for less than that doesn't get processed at all. No, Fight Club is extremely upfront about what it's trying to do. I actually don't see it as being a progressive statement in favour of individual freedom and an overthrow of the establishment - if that were the case, then Durden wouldn't need to turn the attendees of Fight Club, and later the drones of Project Mayhem, into automatons. They'd all follow him for the strength of the message alone. Instead, I can't help wondering if the film is trying to say that people need a leader.



I've since read Chuck Palahniuk's original novel, Fight Club, and I think the film is one of those rare instances where the film is more successful than the book. The characters feel more rounded in the film, more than just mouthpieces for what Palahniuk wants to say, and as a result the whole thing feels more plausible, which is extremely unsettling in a way.



The film became famous for its "rules", and really, I've broken the first two by talking about it, but I think it's equally quotable elsewhere. I've actually lost count of the number of times I've seen those "sunshine and pixie dust" life quotes on Facebook, and thought "You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else". But then that might just be me and my cynicism. It's also full of "Is that true?" moments, like the discussion about making soap - and how by adding a few household ingredients, you can make said soap a bit more...dramatic.



Anyway, I'll leave you with this clip, in which Durden really cranks up the crazy...

A to Z - Evolution

Today I'm moving on to 'E' in my A-Z of movies - I know a lot of people did E yesterday but I'm skipping Fridays to make room for my flash stories. I got a bit stuck for E, as it happens, but I wound up choosing Evolution.



Evolution was a stab at alien sci-fi by Ivan 'Ghostbusters' Reitman, and stars David Duchovny and Orlando Jones as a pair of hapless college professors who discover a new lifeform evolving on earth after a meteorite crashes into an Arizona cave system. Unfortunately the government also find out, and soon their attempts to document the obvious evolution are stymied by Julianne Moore's government scientist. It's not long before things get out of hand, and Duchovny and Jones have to come and lend a hand to save the world.



It's a daft, silly film, with a sideline in fairly immature humour, but still, it's an enjoyable watch. David Duchovny plays Ira as if Mulder never fully grew up, but Julianne Moore displays a comic touch that you don't normally get to see in her movies. Even Seann William Scott isn't that annoying as the aspiring fireman who ends up getting embroiled in the 'let's save the world' plan.



For me, the best part is the 'science' behind it. Studying the idea of evolution at school is one thing, but seeing it visually demonstrated from a single-celled organism into insects and eventually mammals, while clearly not based on reality, is still a neat idea, especially since it's the heat of the earth's atmosphere that provides the catalyst for such evolution. My favourite part has to be the sequence in the shopping mall, where the invading entity reaches the 'dinosaur' phase and attains the power of flight. It's like Jurassic Park meets Dawn of the Dead.



As films go, it was never going to be an Oscar winner, but as light entertainment goes, it's the kind of film you can drop into whenever you find it on TV somewhere. Everyone turns in solid performances, especially Moore, and I can think of worst films I could have nominated for 'E'.

#FridayFlash - Tomb Raiders

The man known as Al Shabah slipped between the pillars of
the crumbling ruin. He spotted the gaping hole across the site, the entrance
littered with discarded tools. The tomb raiders thought they’d located the lost
tomb of Mekerepsut. Al Shabah smiled – as long as they occupied themselves with
the false tomb, they wouldn’t disturb his exploration of the real one. Judging
by the silence of the site, they wouldn’t disturb him at all tonight.




The real tomb of the 22nd Dynasty princess lay at
the edge of the ruin – Al Shabah found the entrance by accident the day before.
Before the revolution, its location would have been reported to the
authorities, but now it was every man for himself. Some would call him a grave
robber, but the way Al Shabah saw it, he sold what he found to collectors, not
pawn brokers. At least he was keeping antiquities in circulation.




A quirk of ancient architecture hid the tomb’s entrance, turning
the narrow gap into a shadow cast by a nearby pillar. Al Shabah slipped through
the gap, and made his way down the tunnel. Mekerepsut’s burial came long before
the temple that hid her tomb, and given her reputation for darker magic, Al Shabah
wasn’t sure she’d be pleased to lie beneath the feet of Isis worshippers.




Al Shabah felt his way along the tunnels, his fingers
becoming his eyes. Before long, his nails scraped the smooth stone that
signalled the entrance to the tomb. He switched on his torch and breathed a
sigh of relief to see that the seal was still intact. He knelt down and forced
his hand pick into the wall. He always broke in below waist height – if anyone
came snooping around they’d expect to see a hole at eye level, not down by the
floor.




The rhythm came easily as he chiselled away at
the gaps between the bricks before prising them free, and he soon had a neat
pile of stones at his side. The hole was large enough to crawl through,
although he’d need to enlarge it to remove anything of note. He slipped a white
mask over his nose and mouth, and crawled through the gap.




Al Shabah stood up on the other side of the wall and frowned.
The tomb was smaller than he expected, its walls carved instead of painted. The
sarcophagus lay on the other side of the chamber, surrounded by statues of
animals. He thought there would be gold, or perhaps fine furniture, not a stone
menagerie. Al Shabah ran his hand over the head of a leopard – he knew a dealer
in Cairo who might give him a decent price, but removing them all would take
some time.




He flicked the beam of the torch around the tomb. A smaller chamber
lay to his right, but he would explore that after he’d looked inside the
coffin. He’d sometimes found riches hidden with the body, and someone like
Mekerepsut was bound to have plenty of amulets within her wrappings. If she was
as dark as he’d been led to believe, those amulets would fetch a fortune on the
black market.




Al Shabah smirked at his own joke as he knelt before the
sarcophagus. He pushed hard on the lid to test its weight, and it heaved aside
with a scrape of stone on stone. More carvings filled the sarcophagus, and Al
Shabah recognised snippets of familiar stories among the hieroglyphics.




It’s like they gave her something to read.




He shuddered, and leaned in to examine the coffin. Her painted
eyes stared up at him, and their slanted angle made her look sly.




Like she’s plotting something.




Al Shabah found the edge of the lid and wiggled his nails
into position. The wood of the cartonnage gave way easily, and he hooked his
fingers under the lid. He prised it upwards, and spluttered. The air smelled
old, even through his mask.




He gave himself a moment to recover, and peered into the
coffin. He expected to see a mummy, swathed in ancient cloth, perhaps weighed
down by amulets, or surrounded by shabtis. He once even found a mummy wearing
an elaborate death mask, surrounded by scrolls.




What he saw this time was an empty coffin.




“What? Someone got here first?” He swore aloud, and bent
over further, running his hand across the wood as if he might find a secret
compartment. It wasn’t unheard of.




Something tapped on his shoulder. Al Shabah stifled a shriek
and leapt to his feet. One of the grave robbers at the fake tomb must have
followed him. The thought his assailant could be armed drove a yelp from his
mouth, but then he thought of the empty coffin. Anger replaced fear.




Something long and pointed tapped on his shoulder again. The
ghost of a whisper rasped in the stale air behind him. Al Shabah spun around.
He had no time to see anything before his world imploded.




His lifeless husk would be found in three days’ time.




Three days is a long head start.



* * *


If you enjoyed this post, why not check out my post over at Nerine Dorman's blog, where you can meet Bakt en Hor, the lady in the image adorning this flash?

A to Z - Dead and Breakfast

April 1st marked the start of the A to Z blogging challenge, and I've chosen a movie theme for my posts (although I'll be skipping Fridays to make room for my Friday Flash stories). So far, I've done American Psycho, Back to the Future and Cars, and while D should theoretically have been Die Hard, I thought I'd use today to shine a light on a little gem of a horror film - Dead and Breakfast.



I came across Dead and Breakfast some years ago when my flatmate found it on sale in Music Zone. It's a comedy horror, telling the story of a group of friends who wind up in a small town on the way to a wedding. A murder is committed during the night, turning the bed and breakfast into a crime scene, and the friends into witnesses, so they're kept in the town. One of them manages to unleash a zombie curse, and one by one, the town falls victim to said curse. Unlike most zombie films in which a bite is enough to pass on the infection, in this case, part of you (be it hair, skin, blood etc.) needs to end up in a small box held by the Head Zombie.



Obviously the film has all the ingredients - town archive keeper who knows the mysterious secret behind the events, the strange owner of the bed and breakfast (played by David Carradine), the search for weapons, the attempt to lay the curse to rest, and the climactic showdown as the bed and breakfast is surrounded. Thing is, the film's strength lies in what it does with them. It adds a comedy twist to everything, providing some sick giggles as well as genuine laughs, and at no point does it take itself too seriously. It clearly loves the zombie genre in the way that it gently twists the narrative pattern, so it becomes an homage as opposed to a parody. My favourite element is the introduction of the narrator, a singing balladeer who commentates on the events of the film through song. The clip at the bottom of the post is one of his finer moments.



I often find that people who like zombie films tend to squabble over what makes them zombies - after all, the 'zombies' in 28 Days Later are simply infected, as opposed to undead, and newer zombies can apparently run, an ability denied to them in earlier films. My own favourite zombie films are the original three - White Zombie (1932) , I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966), in which voodoo plays a role and a central priest figure becomes the antagonist against which the forces of good must rally, and Dead and Breakfast veers closer to these narratives than later films.



Comedy and horror spring from very similar origins, and commentators have long commented on the close relationship between the desire to laugh and the desire to scream. When mixed together well, the resultant hybrid can excel beyond either genre on its own - after all, moments of tension are punctured either by a joke or a scare, and in Dead and Breakfast's case, the combination is spot on. It's just a shame it never caught on the way that it should have. Still, with the rise of Netflix...

A to Z - Cars

April 1st marks the start of the A to Z blogging challenge. Continuing with my cinematic theme, today is Cars. As with most of the other letters, there are a myriad of films I could have chosen, but I didn't want to just use horror films!



Cars is actually one of my favourite Pixar films. I think they've gone a little off the boil lately, but Cars was one of their high points. I know that not everyone enjoyed it, but I was brought up watching motor racing, and I think that perhaps helped add to my enjoyment of the film.



Beyond that, I think the film scores because the limelight doesn't solely rest on its hero, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) for the whole film. At the start of Cars, Lightning is a successful racer, gunning to be the first rookie to win the Piston Cup. After a three-way tie finish, it's decided that the three racers will face each other in one final race to decide the winner. En route to California, Lightning ends up on the old route 66, where he finds himself in Radiator Springs, a sleepy town that got forgotten when the interstate took the traffic away. At first, Lightning hates it, but he grows to like the town, and its inhabitants, particularly Sally (Bonnie Hunt) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). By the time he finally gets to leave, Lightning has begun to realise what it feels like to have friends.



It sounds like the kind of soppy, sentimental pap that I'd normally turn my nose up at, but somehow Cars manages to balance its message about teamwork and community with humour and motor racing, to the extent that it's become a favourite movie of mine. The graphics are astounding, and I remember my cinema companion even leaning across during the 'afternoon drive' sequence to mouth the word "Wow" as Sally and Lightning pass the waterfall.



Cars is a beautiful film, and I think its strength lies in its ensemble construction. Lightning is very much the hero, but if you removed any character, the film's strength would waver - which, in essence, simply reinforces the central message that community is key. In a fast paced world where we spend our lives dipping in and out of Twitter, choosing the quickest mode of transport to get us from A to B without truly seeing where we are, and where we often keep people around for what they can do for us, I guess it's an important idea that we sometimes slow down and admire the view with someone we actually like.



Cars Trailer

A to Z - Back to the Future

April 1st marks the start of the A to Z blogging challenge. Continuing with my cinematic theme, today is Back to the Future, easily one of my favourite films ever. I love the whole trilogy, particularly Part III in 1885, but I'm just going to talk about Part I here.



I can't remember when I first saw Back to the Future but given I saw the third one at the cinema, I must have seen it when I was fairly young. There was just something about the idea of a time machine in the form of a DeLorean that captured the imagination, even if the film does come very much within the tradition of films in which the protagonist's interference results in a life that better suits what they want.



Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) starts the film in 1985 as an aspiring guitarist in high school. His father, George, is continually pushed around by his boss, Biff Tannen, and his siblings are equally lacklustre. Marty's friend, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) invents a time machine, and Marty ends up back in 1955 where he encounters his high school aged parents. Doc Brown needs to get him back to 1985, but as they have no access to the plutonium on which the DeLorean runs, they have to wait until the night of the school dance, when Marty knows there will be a lightning storm, to generate the 1.21gigawatts the time machine needs. Will Marty get his parents together before he leaves?!



OK, so how can you not like Back to the Future?! Sure, all time travel films suffer from a central paradox, but unlike later films, in which the hero leaves something in the past/future for the next version of himself to find (see Deja Vu for a particularly nonsensical example), Marty is very much the first to time travel, and learns the hard way that you can't interfere in anything since actions in the past affect the present. OK, so it's a bit creepy that his teenaged mother gets a crush on him, and he has to engineer a meeting between her and his teenaged father - not many films flirt with incest in the 'boy meets girl' stakes, but somehow Back to the Future manages it without being icky.



Thing is, as cool as Michael J Fox makes Marty, and as awesome as Christopher Lloyd is as Doc Brown, it's actually Thomas F Wilson who steals the films for me as the various members of the Tannen family. My favourite incarnation is Buford 'Mad Dog' Tannen from Part III, but considering he plays three versions of Biff in Part I (bully Biff from 1985, then teenaged Biff from 1955, then meek and mild Biff back in new 1985), it just shows what one person can do with one character.



Back to the Future is one of those films I can watch again and again, and I love it just as much every time I watch it. Plus it has one of the best renditions of Johnny B. Goode that I've come across...

A to Z - American Psycho

April 1st marks the start of the A to Z blogging challenge. Bloggers are encouraged to spend 26 days discussing whatever they want, assuming the topic of the day matches that day's 'letter'. I was a bit stuck for what to discuss, until I decided to stick to what I know best - movies. So every day, I'm going to be discussing a film I enjoy beginning with that letter. It's not always going to be one of my favourite movies, just one I think people should see.



Now, with A, I had a few films I wanted to mention, like The Adjustment Bureau, but I decided American Psycho was a more obvious choice given my predilection for horror. I actually used American Psycho in the dissertation for my undergraduate degree, comparing and contrasting it with Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. I have read the book, but in a lot of ways, I actually think the film is more successful. For one thing, it condenses the interminable lists that characterise the book, and it manages to balance that ambiguity around whether Patrick Bateman is a homicidal maniac - or he just thinks he is.



For those who've never seen it, American Psycho tells the story of Patrick Bateman, a 1980s yuppie who works on Wall Street by day, and hangs out in clubs and bars by night. As well as doing a lot of cocaine and spending his days at work doing the crossword, Patrick also stalks and kills people, seemingly at random. He dispatches one victim with an axe, another with a chainsaw. Most of his victims are women, but that doesn't stop him killing homeless people, colleagues, and even dogs. Put it this way, Patrick Bateman is not a nice man.



American Psycho was the first film in which I ever saw Christian Bale. I've since adopted the opinion that his career has been entirely downhill from that point, as he reprises the role in every film in which he appears, but that's a side issue. In American Psycho, he's perfectly cast. He strikes that fine balance between madness and apparent normality, all while fixating on the trivia of yuppie life. Bateman is a man obsessed by superficiality - business cards are subjected to intense scrutiny, and he finds life truths buried in the trivial pop songs of Whitney Houston. This is a yuppie for whom the clothes very much make the man. His narration doesn't introduce characters according to their personality - he talks about what they do, and how they look. Appearance is everything - which sums up our American Psycho, since his appearance of normality is his strongest disguise.







Yet Bateman is also an unreliable narrator. He kills people, only to have conversations with others who claim to have lately spent time with those same victims. It's never clear if Bateman has confused them with someone else, and killed the 'wrong' person, or if he didn't kill them at all. There are only two instances where outside parties appear to be aware of what's going on, and even then, the ambiguity remains. Strangely enough, even after he's made his confession and been absolved by the continued insistence that one of his victims is alive and well, you're almost glad that he's gotten away with it.




The book is a horrible, violent piece of work, while the film relegates the nastiest violence to passing comments, or the summary of crimes that Bateman leaves on his lawyer's answering machine. As a result, the inherent queasiness involved with American Psycho is translated into that ambiguity that allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions as to Bateman's guilt or innocence, making it an altogether more worrying viewing experience.

#FridayFlash - Click Your Heels Together

Mr Shuttleworth ushered Della into his office and pointed at the seat opposite his desk. She perched on the edge of the chair, a leather wing-backed seat at odds with the dilapidated office chair at her desk. Mr Shuttleworth eased his bulk into the vast reclining chair across his own desk, a walnut behemoth covered in executive toys, and folded his hands across his stomach.



"You've never been in my office, have you?"



Della shook her head and tried not to stare. The room was light and airy, with a view over the park across the street. Reproduction Impressionist paintings hung on the beige walls, and a fish tank burbled in the corner. The room didn't match the messy office space next door, with its narrow windows and flickering strip lights.



"Relax, Della. You're not being fired. No, we've got a new initiative going on here and I wanted you to be part of it. You see, it's all about the demographics," said Mr Shuttleworth.



He launched into a speech about 'the youth', 'generation X' and other terms that Della thought were outdated five years ago. As he talked, Della looked down at her feet, her toes hidden by the desk. Red glitter coated her new shoes, glinting as the metallic flakes caught the late morning sunlight. Her boss droned on, and she caught phrases such as "team building" and "unique selling point". Della didn't really care; she was more interested in the play of light across her shoes.



"Della, are you listening to me?"



She looked up, eyes wide. She nodded, praying Mr Shuttleworth wouldn't ask her to repeat the last things he'd said. That always caught her out.



"This is an important time for the company, Della. You do want to be part of that, don't you?"



"Of course I do, Mr Shuttleworth."



Della didn't care one jot about the company but Mr Shuttleworth didn't need to know that, just like he didn't need to know about the amount of time she spent at the window in the kitchenette, finding mythical creatures in cloud formations when she was supposed to be filing invoices. Whenever the photocopier started banging and whining, she imagined the sounds of battle. The hiss of the old lift became that of a grumpy dragon, intent on swallowing her whole.



"Good. Now, as I was saying..."



Mr Shuttleworth launched into another monologue about focus groups and annual targets. Della nodded a few times to look interested but her mind wandered back to her shoes. They'd arrived that morning from an eBay seller in Basingstoke, listed as 'used - like new'. Apparently their previous owner needed to move house and was selling things they didn't need. Della couldn't imagine not needing such beautiful shoes.



She looked up at Mr Shuttleworth. He'd swivelled his chair to the side, and was gazing into the middle distance while he babbled on about whatever jargon he'd found on the internet that morning. There would be no stopping him now.



Della slid her feet together, pressing the toes against each other. She clicked the heels together and stifled a giggle. She sneaked another glance at Mr Shuttleworth and found him deep in conversation with himself. Thinking hard of her little flat, with its secondhand furniture and deep blue walls, and she closed her eyes and clicked her heels together again.



She counted to three, opened her eyes, and smiled.