ABIGAIL’S BEAUTY

When Abigail was born everyone who saw her declared they had never seen a more beautiful baby, and that might well have been true if they were half blind and not many of them in attendance. But whether they were optically deficient or not, the absolute truth as witnessed by the next door neighbour’s cat, a ginger Tom called Whiskers, using its razor-sharp claws in order to express an opinion, was that Abigail would never be anything other than ugly.

Which led to the scratches across the new born infant’s face. The cat couldn’t stand the sight of her and tried to remodel her least pleasing features with its aforementioned razor-sharp claws. This led inevitably to Abigail’s father, a hulk of a man with deficient eyesight, charging off in pursuit of Whiskers, and being a hulk of a man Whiskers found no difficulty in avoiding him before he reached the first corner.

So Abigail, less than a day old, was scarred for life, which some thought was an improvement.
“The cat was right,” spluttered the breathless father, “she’s bloody hideous.”
“Now that’s not fair,” sighed the mother as a midwife carried a placenta away, “I’ll always love her, and so will you if you know what’s good for you!”

“Just you take a good look at your daughter!” snapped the father.

“He’s right!” wittered the midwife, an elderly woman with varifocal lenses.

“Lend us your specs then,” demanded the mother, and this the midwife did. And that mother held her baby close to her own face and saw her for the monstrosity that she was.

“Crikey!” exclaimed the mother after peering good and close at her daughter, and then she smiled sweetly, “but I’ll always love her,” she sighed, “and I’m a woman of my words.”

“If I’ve got to share a home with that monstrosity then I want a divorce!” snapped her husband.
“Okay,” she said.

And so Abigail was cared for by a single mother, the father having vanished into the gloom of an eighteen-year-old blonde’s arms, and he only forty-two.

One thing a growing child with Abigail’s peculiar looks soon learns is a great deal about self -defence. She started quite young by strangling Whiskers. Now, I don’t take and pleasure in the mutilation and slaughtering of any of God’s creatures, and in this instance can’t help but feel a soupçon of sympathy for the wretched feline. But murdered is the right word to use for the outrage, and the murderer was a toddling Abigail.

The years passed and Abigail’s mother managed to get her daughter into school a year before the proper time by lying about her age. But it was a devoted act of self-defence, and there’s nobody around who could honestly blame her for that.

At school Abigail followed the Infant’s Course in Genetics and Inheritance which she found both informative and fascinating, especially when she looked at her face in the mirror and wondered what her absent father looked like. Such contemplations ate away at her little grey cells and she decided that if he might be in any way responsible for what she saw as her hideous features she’d have to see to it that he was shown the errors of his ways.

He was, but when the police tried to discover who might have done such terrible things to a respected hulk of a man they ignored the possibility that it could possibly have anything to do with the disfigured little child seen in the area.

One thing we can be certain about ugliness is that it improves with age in that an ugly young person becomes an uglier older person.

So when Abigail was eleven and ready for her secondary education the very sight of her started two rather horrific competitions. Firstly, among the boys in her year, which one would be brave enough to do it with her first and amongst the teaching staff, which one would be brave enough to keep her in front of him or her after school hours in detention because that would involve that particular teacher actually having to look at her. The truth is, nobody actually wanted to look at Abigail, she was that ugly. By the time she left school at sixteen not one boy had gone anywhere close to doing it with her and she had spent her entire secondary school five years never having to do detention.
Those were the happiest days of her life because there weren’t going to be many more. Having left school she found employment as a trainee pot-hole filler on the roads. There was plenty of opportunity for her to learn a decent trade, and one aspect of her training involved controlling the heavy diesel roller that was used to flatten the steaming filler that was dumped into the larger potholes.
And it was while she was driving that roller that she chanced to see her own reflection in its rear-view mirror.

She stared at her own reflected image for a mere moment before she made up her mind.

“Oh sod it,” she mumbled to herself, “I’ve had quite enough of looking at that!”

And she leapt down at eight miles on hour with the machine in reverse gear, and ended up getting squashed flatter than flat under the really heavy single front wheel.

It was the first time anyone thought of calling her lovely or attractive or in any way desirable as she lay there, sans breath, sans face, sans life, sans all.

Her funeral was arranged in record time on the off chance that she might not be dead, but merely sleeping. Nobody wanted to take the risk of her ugly squashed eyes opening and her shrieking out “fooled ya!” as they buried her.

© Peter Rogerson 11.06.22, edited 28.09.22