What's Wrong With Suzy

We started going out with each other on Dec 1 2000, so New Year's
Day 2001 would be our one month anniversary. It was particularly
special to Suzy, because she said she hadn't had had a boyfriend for
more than a couple of weeks before. She was convinced that there must
be something wrong with her, but I assured her there wasn't. She was a
very beautiful young woman, very intelligent, warm, fragile and funny.
She was a daydreamer and was often a bit scatty, always claiming things
had gone missing - like my phone number, even when it was stored on her
phone - but she was a very, very special girl and I loved her.

She was shy and old-fashioned, because she had been raised by her
grandmother, but I finally convinced her that December 31 would be the
perfect night to consummate our love. I had set the scene. Romantic
music, wine, candles. I made dinner. I had spent the entire afternoon
cleaning and making sure everything was perfect.

She came round at nine and we ate the dinner I had made and she told me
how happy I had made her, how no-one else had done anything like this
for her before.

Excited, drunk and in-love, I sauntered into the kitchen to open the
second bottle of white wine. It was ten minutes to midnight.

"Come on, slowcoach," Suzy called from my bedroom.

I carried the bottle of wine in one hand and two, oversize wineglasses
in the other. I turned the kitchen light off with my nose and carried
all the goods, teetering, back to my room.

Suzy was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at me in the
doorway with a broad, expectant smile on her face.

Crouching next to her was a dwarfish, old woman in a dark-blue dress.
Her hair was cropped and coal-black, in contrast to her thin, blue lips
and her pale, hollow cheeks. She was gazing at the back of Suzy's head
with a sad little smile and then she looked towards me.

The bottle of wine was first to hit the ground.

Then the two wine glasses, which broke.

"Clumsy!" chided Suzy, good-humouredly, and got on her hands and knees
to pick up the bottle, which had splashed its contents over carpet.
"Get some toilet paper for the wine," she said, picking up the shards
of broken glass. "And can you put the heating on?" she asked. "It's
gone freezing in here."

I stood there like an idiot, mouth open.

Suzy stopped what she was doing and looked at me.

"What?" she said.

"What!?" she almost screamed, and she looked at me as though she had
seen the look on my face a dozen times before and could neither
decipher nor bear it.

She followed my line of sight, but she saw nothing, not the repulsive
creature I saw.

The old woman licked her lips with a black tongue like the tail of an
eel and said in quick, rasping tones: "You're not to touch her! Do you
understand!?"

I choked on my breath.

Then she turned her heavy, black gaze onto Suzy. "She's my little
girl."

We never made it to a month, Suzy and I. We were one minute short when
she ran out of the flat, crying. She told me I was just like all the
others and that if her grandmother had been alive she would never have
let this happen.

I didn't doubt it. Not for a second.