Romancing a dream of a girl

Greg looked in the rear view mirror at his daughter Suzie. Suzie sobbed and Greg felt rank.

“Dont sob!” said Greg.

Suzie began to cry.

“Dont cry!” said Greg with a little smile.

Suzie began to wail.

“Dont wail!” said Greg with a big smile.

Suzie began to scream.

Greg put on the radio and sighed. He took a nerve wracking fifteen minute break from attempting to cheer her up before pulling a silly face at her. Success – it made her giggle. Within a few minutes, it was reciprocal. She pulled a silly face at him and made him giggle. This was the first occasion four year old Suzie had been in a good mood since Greg had split up from Suzies mother. Suzies giggles and smiles gave Greg hope that starting anew in a different county might work out.

In their first weeks together in their new home, they clung to each other away from the world. Greg had been quite fond of her as a baby but hating the smell of crap, had remained aloof. Now they were alone together. Greg had never been fully confident around beautiful female bodies before but here was a girl who could stand naked before him in total trust and he felt honoured by her presence and spellbound by her playfulness. She felt like a princess who could inject magic into her fathers eyes and have it reflected back at her. They fell in love, both believing they had found their soulmate in each others arms.

He was glad to have made an impression on her, as he felt awful when Suzie cried. He felt that he might cry and the world might end. He thought that there would be no need for anger or grief, because each others presence would lead them to living happy ever after.

When he had rubbish days at work, her attention could make it go away and he was grateful. When she had rubbish days at school, his attention could make it go away and she was grateful. They gave each other confidence. She had given him the confidence to be promoted and they were in a positive spiral for a few years.

They stayed in a manic froth, running around and hugging each other. And that was where he wanted to stay forever. She grew tired of pantomimes before he did but he wouldnt hear it. When she was around seven she started frequently noticing that her and Gregs needs werent the same but he wouldnt hear it.

She began to feel irritation, anger, pity or despair at him but he wouldnt allow her to show it. He translated her behaviour as just wanting to be playful and kid around with him. Consequently, his family photographs began showing pictures like the one of him showing off on a slide and her genuinely irritated but having to look as though she was pretending to be irritated. Her personality became camp. Her not enjoying his company seemed impossible to him.

On different holidays when she was at primary school, Greg would take Suzie to dine in Paris or to share a Venetian gondola. They both enjoyed the novelty and romance of foreign places.

Back home, they treated each others feeling as precious but his overbearing presence meant that she was acting easy to please and found herself pretending to want the same things."Sleeping Beautys on. You like Sleeping Beauty!" the desperate man pathetically hinted when she was ten. She felt responsible for her fathers feelings and could only let him down gently by consoling him with sloppy kisses and soppy hugs. She had felt a cruel beast for stopping her father telling her stories at bedtime and she knew that she was the only one who would take him by the hand and allow him to see pantomimes. Kidding around with him out of pity and smiling at his jokes felt okay to her but it was wearing thin.

They were both disappointed and appalled when she grew breasts, hoping that it was just a phase. When she took over washing her own clothes – that he was glad about. He wanted to think about her as innocent and clean. He thought about sex as dirty and guilty, so anything that hinted at her becoming a woman upset him. Her father took her out of sex education classes to remain his innocent plaything.

When she was eleven, he serenaded her in a South Korean karaoke bar. He dedicated his bloated belting of ‘I cant live if living is without you’ to his daughter. She felt ill.

After work, he always wanted to feel cleansed and energized by her purity. There was now a bad atmosphere at his work, with people being overworked and the companys long term future in doubt. As work became a necessary evil, socializing with his workmates ended and he became desperate for Suzie to put things right at the end of his workday.

It left him completely reliant on his daughter, her being ‘his world’. She felt the world on her meek, hunched shoulders, protecting his feelings. She felt emotionally blackmailed into not being able to disagree with Greg or have negative feelings. If she was honest about her lack of love for Greg, he could only keel over dead.

She was now becoming embarrassed and irritated by him. She wanted to start seeing other people but Greg vetted all bad influences and all boys. The only girls that Suzie could meet up with outside school were insincerely well behaved. She didnt like having anybody around, because if her father thought Suzie was having fun, he would automatically join in and show off to Suzies friend with a goofy dance. This could change the colour of Suzies face.

When she was twelve, he took her to Canada. He enjoyed himself. She didnt. Her father put Suzie off the Rocky Mountains. She preferred the independence that The Girl Guides had given her in Britain, as it was outside of his company.

Until secondary school, Suzie had a pick of friends to choose from in her classes. She was a popular friendly girl, who could charm her way out of problems with her camp sense of humour. In the third year of secondary school, Suzie met Jean. Jean had no intention of being charmed and tediously teased Suzie all year about her being in the Guides. Jean deliberately stopped other people from hanging around with Suzie. Suzie wasnt able to lose her temper or stick up her for herself and she knew her father didnt actually take her seriously, so she put up with it.

Why had adults forced her into the Guides when they werent respected now in school? She wondered what the point of taking The Pledges to be kind and honest or serve God were, when she was now faced with a school where the most confident people were stupid bullies or hyperactive irritants, high on Red Bull and Pepsi. School was alleged to improve children but she didnt feel improved and saw no evidence among her classmates.

Slowly Greg began to feel betrayed by Suzie not giving him attention. Greg wanted to show Suzie how she needed him and he didnt need her, so he was quiet with her for a few days. She was glad. This hurt him. He couldnt hold out for long. He felt restless at not getting his daughters recognition. He went back into his habit of forcing his daughter to insincerely sound like she cared about him on a daily basis. He forcefully extracted grudgeful acknowledgments from her out of his bloody mindedness. Her polite smiles and greetings to him had faded through the years to weary fractions of grunts and contemptuous fractions of nods. She was quietly furious that he was using her whilst she was miserable at school.

He didnt think she was keeping her end of an unspoken bargain, even though she had been only four when she ‘entered’ it. Their relationship had stayed in the same polite groove for a decade but all the sincerity, warmth and fun had rotten away. He knew damned well that she was bored by history but he now insisted on taking her out on ‘educational weekends’. For months on end he drove her to local museums and English heritage sites with malice in his heart.

By the time she was thirteen, the atmosphere at his work was dire. He had been set up by his boss to manipulate his employees into thinking that if they worked hard they might keep their jobs but all the while he knew that they were going to be fired. He began to give himself the creeps. He booked a once in a lifetime trip to Africa and then looked forward to surprising Suzie with it. The thought of rekindling their relationship made him feel that his job had a point. She would be back to her usual self. Her four year old self.

He asked her if she wanted to go on holiday but she casually declined and walked off. He had asked merely as part of a long planned ritual in his head where she said yes. He always took it for granted that they liked the same things. He finally slowed himself down to take a good look at her but didnt recognize her as the girl in his imagination. She was resentful and insincere.

He resented her for resenting him and hated feeling like that. He began spoiling for a fight and trying to find a plausible trigger to make him angry.

He began secretly logging her online communication, looking for dirt. There was mention of a boy. Or was it a man? He didnt think she deserved to be happy if he wasnt the man to cause it. Greg tried to listen to The Lighthouse Family and read The Daily Express to escape from reality but he couldnt stop thinking about her thoughts being there - in a diary – so easy to just sneak in and steal. The obsession was too much and he rummaged through her room.

She had still policed her words on the internet and in her diary as she was uptight and always felt under her fathers observation. The slight move towards her inner thoughts barely hinted at the whole sordid pandemonium. But a ‘Robert’ was mentioned in the diary.

He could now rationalize that he had been right all along to rake through her private things, as his hunch had turned up an evil deed. He was jealous of another male pleasing and being pleased by his lover more than he did.

“Who is this Robert?” he thought softly.

“WHO IS THIS ROBERT?” he thought loudly.

He practiced losing his temper but it felt so uncomfortable that when he tried it on Suzie, it just came out as a bitchy huff. Both Greg and Suzie found it impossible to express anger fully and seriously. The part where he mentioned going through her diary and personal things really shocked Suzie and from this point on she began to hate him. He had betrayed her trust.

“I cannot believe you done that!” Suzie said meekly.

“Its only because I love you.” the deluded voyeur claimed. Suzie shut the door and told him to go away. She had trusted him and hed spied on her. This made her cry. She became angry and lay on her bed bitterly plotting horrid revenges upon her father.

She put a sign outside her door saying ‘Private’ for any passing emotional illiterate. He could stomach that but when she used a door wedge to wedge her door shut, he threw a tantrum. She began to feel a bit of control in the world by Greg not getting his own way. A couple of days later he forced her into a cuddle and manipulated her into saying that she loved him. She wondered what he had possibly got out of ‘loving’ someone who hadnt loved him for years. It had shrunk into a controlling obsession. She couldnt bear him touching her. His apology for going through her things had made her think he might have changed but a couple of days later she felt back at square one.

The jolly wink he gave her as he cooked her bacon left her feeling empty inside. She felt that she had been tricked into the old light hearted path. He was expecting her to go back to how he wanted her to be. The path her father was dragging her back to looked grim. Even if she did manage to lose her virginity in her forties it would be without any sense of independence, as her seventy year old father would barge in and insist on reading her 'The Gruffalo' afterwards.

In that Summer holiday, she decided to amass rebellious and obnoxious features. She was planning to horrify her father and impress Jean.

Suzie started the next school year bitter and got her insults in quickly, so that somebody else would suffer. She insulted a boy whos voice was breaking. It worked better than expected. The boy couldnt answer back, as the octave his next syllable would be in was frequently a surprise to him. He wasnt able to punch her as hed been brought up to not hit girls. Jean punched him in the arm and he got made fun of as being beaten up by girls. He was in for a horrible year and not her. That was the best she could hope for in that environment. “The guides are for little girls. I hate them.” said Suzie at school. Suzie missed being in the Girl Guides. Jean could command and insult and misbehave and get away with it. Maturity was independence and independence now looked more like Jean than the Guides, Jean being the higher force.

It was now an average day, ten years after Greg and Suzie had set up home together. Suzie looked in the mirror. She viewed her unsmiling reflection. Playfulness or joy were things that she associated with immaturity. Whatever she felt, it still hadnt gripped her soul for long enough to make her look totally hard or serious. She knew she still appeared like a grumpy Girl Guide, so she imitated Jeans open mouthed lairy eyed bitter contempt. Suzie was pleased with her mean face but knew that she couldnt feel too pleased with herself or the mean face would vanish.

As Greg drove Suzie to school, he began speaking tensely in an attempt at sounding casual.

"I suppose youll be glad to see Jean.......and Natasha....” said Greg.

Suzie apathetically snorted and wearily waited for the punchline.

".......and Robert......". She could feel him trying to spy on her face in order to read her mind. His eyes were intently staring at her in the rear view mirror, although a ghastly smile tried to obscure his intent. She angrily dropped her head to her chest and let the hair obscure her face. Her father gave her the creeps.

She got out the car and entered the school. Once he saw that she was trapped inside, her father drove to work.

She did the work necessary in the lessons. Suzie so wanted to be Jean that Suzie was ashamed at doing the work. She wanted to really change her persona, yet she didnt have enough to really appear different and horrify her father, so couldnt prematurely alarm him by ‘just’ getting bad results this term. To retain some kudos with Jean today, when teachers asked Suzie to do something, she did it really slowly.

Suzie had entered the criminal underworld coughing and spluttering through her first vile experiences of gin and cigarettes until she looked like she enjoyed them. This lunchtime she could now hold a drink and smoke without an embarrassing splutter. When she would unveil herself to her father as this criminal, she would insist on being called Suzanne and not Suzie. She had three unpleasant or new thing but Suzies hopes that she could be like Jean were an illusion. Jean was top dog and was never going to let the position go voluntarily. Anybody who Jean felt threatened her position would get vicious words to keep them down.

Suzie successfully puffed and slouched and hinted about her boyfriend Robert for a while. It was going well until Suzie lapsed into a new accent in order to sound hard. Jean sent a henchperson to painfully twist Suzies arm back. Suzie felt frustrated and insulted a small bespectacled first year girl in the corridor during lunchtime.

Suzie had made ‘Robert’ up to fit in with girls in her class but never told her father that. She hoped that thoughts of her being raped or led astray by ‘Robert’ would torture Gregs imagination.

Greg was hoping for his own showdown about Robert. One in which Greg would be able to righteously shout at Suzie and make her do what he wanted. He fantasized about having to shut her in to her room and restrain her. Maybe even bash her about a bit.

When the school day ended, Suzie took a deep breath and sighed before leaving the school door. She could feel Greg watching her every step of her walk to the car.

Greg made a couple of cheesy jokes to soften her up for his investigation. She knew that it was just a sneaky bribery trick. It depressed her to know that he thought she was that stupid and that he was trying to con information from her through deceit. "So.....who is this Robert anyway?" Greg continued with his fake smile, a grimace like sidestretch of his jaw.

Suzie angrily turned her head to face the window and let the hair hang over the part of her face visible to her father. She could feel him trying to spy on her face in order to read her mind. They had fallen out of love.