Second Hand Jane

By

Smashwords
Edition

Copyright ©
2013 by Michelle Vernal

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Second
-Hand Jane
is a work of fiction. All characters and events
portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on any real
persons living or dead.

To: Niall
Fitzpatrick

From: Jessica
Baré

Subject: First
Draft Amy’s Story

This story
starts with a children’s book published in 1969, a fairy tale
bought by a mother in Northern Ireland on behalf of her youngest
child to give to his sister for Christmas 1976. It’s no fairy
story, though, nor is it just the sad relaying of brutal facts that
ended in Lisburn in 1983. It might have finished there, though, if
not for her family and had that little book not found its way to
me. I don’t mean to sound proprietary because neither the book nor
the story I am going to tell you belongs to me. This is Amy’s story
and in order to tell it to you, I have to begin where it all
began.

My full name
is Jessica Jane Baré or Second-hand Jane as my friends have started
to call me. Why? Well, it’s because I love the pre-loved—just like
that old cliché, someone else’s junk is my treasure. My real
passion, though, is for old children’s books—it’s something about
the smell of them, I think. It conjures up the innocence of a
bygone era of children called Dick and Ann and tea at five o’clock,
trapped forever within their much-thumbed pages. I covet the
Ladybird Series 606D books in particular—the classic fairy tales
every child grows up with: Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Elves and the
Shoemaker, and most pertinent of all, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs. It wasn’t the bold black typeface, however, that had me
poring over the books as a child and hoarding them as an adult but
Eric Winters’ fabulously detailed illustrations. They brought those
stories to life and were the source of a childhood fascination with
witches, fairies, princes, and princesses. The delicate colours of
the foxgloves planted by the thatched cottage’s flag stone path,
the grand white Bavarian styled castles in which as a little girl I
had no doubt I would one day grow up to live in, were a world away
from the suburban pocket of New Zealand I inhabited. When a young
imagination is fuelled, though, the impossible becomes possible.
Good versed evil within those pages and always won. If only we
could hold onto that analogy forever.

I often
wonder, when I open my books to find another boy or girl’s mark
inside, whether that faceless child felt the magic, too. Who were
they, these little people who had scribbled their names inside
books long since forgotten by adulthood?

Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs arrived with neither pomp nor ceremony but rather
by mail thanks to an online auction I was determined to win. Inside
the tatty cover, in precise, big print was the dedication:

To Amy with
love from Owen Christmas 1973

Beneath this,
scrawled in orange pencil pressed deep into the cardboard, she had
forever made her mark:

Amy Aherne

Glenariff
Farm

Ballymcguinness

6 years
old

As I looked at
the scribbled inscription, I began to wonder. Who was she, this
six-year-old girl from the seventies? Was she a dreamer like me,
who was now learning the hard way that princes don’t just pop up
every day and that there are an awful lot of frogs out there? Or
perhaps she was a realist who didn’t believe in a man supplying her
with a ready-made happy ever after? Might we have been friends if
we had met? Where was she now? What had she grown up to do with her
life?

I felt a
compulsion that was almost a physical tug. It was one that I have
never felt before—this overwhelming need to know. I would find her
and tell the story that lay within the name inscribed in the
storybook.

What I found,
though, was not at all what I expected.

“Oi, nice
slippers, love!” A broad Dublin twang shouted down from the
heavens.

A lack of
privacy was the downside of apartment living, Jess thought as her
gaze shot upwards to scan the myriad windows overlooking the
courtyard. She was rewarded by the sight of a lad with a crew cut
who looked far too young to be the proud owner of such a bulbous
drinker’s nose. His purpose, judging by the plume of smoke he had
just exhaled through his nostrils, for hanging out the window on a
Saturday morning was not to spy on other residents but to have a
sly smoke.

Having been
there and done that, Jess shrugged. Each to their own was her motto
because she, better than most, knew what it felt like to always
have someone else sticking their ten cents’ worth in. As her
mother’s face floated before her, she gave Puff the Magic Dragon a
little curtsey and got an excited wolf whistle in return before
opening the door to her block and disappearing inside.

It was true,
she mused as she waited for the lift, that along with a sagging
bottom and boobs, age—almost as though it were compensation—brought
confidence. There was a time when she would have blushed a shade of
beetroot upon being whistled at like that. That was back in the
days when men were still allowed to down tools on building sites in
order to harass the young women hurrying past. Funny, too, how when
you were a nubile, barely post-teen strutting your stuff around
Auckland’s CBD, you took those whistles for granted—almost as your
due—and then when you reached a certain age, you became
pathetically grateful for them.

Jess knew that before the morning was out
she’d be texting her best pals with the exciting news that she had
received a wolf whistle
and…wait for it…
she was wearing her
elephant suit, as her friends liked to refer to her Penney’s
tracksuit ensemble.

Her apartment
was housed on the second floor of the Sandbank Wing of the
Riverside complex. Although she often joked that by the state of
the Liffey when the tide were out, perhaps the
Smelly Mud Flat Apartments
or
Abandoned Shopping Trolleys
Apartments
might have
been more apt names. Being on the second floor was something that
made her feel happier when she spied the diehard smokers like ole
randy, big nose boy—her reasoning being that if there was a fire,
at least she had the option of jumping.

This cheery
trail of thought was interrupted as the lift door opened and
disgorged Gemma from across the hall. She looked to be a woman on a
mission, judging by the water bottle in hand and the amount of
skin-tight black spandex on display.

“Morning,
Jess!” chirruped the svelte redhead with the bouncy ponytail and
perky everything else. “Glad to see you’re up and at it.” She gave
Jess’s track pants and slippers the once-over. “Well, kind of
anyway.”

“We can’t all
be gym bunnies like you, Gem. Besides, you’ll do yourself an injury
on that cross-trainer one of these days. Just you mark my words.”
Pushing past her, she stepped inside the lift. “Besides, my old
bones have a good ten years on yours.”

Gemma laughed.
“Listen to you—you sound like my Gran and she at least does
aqua-aerobics twice a week! You really should come with me, you
know.” She winked conspiratorially. “There’s lots of hotties
there.”

“Yeah, yeah.
I’ll think about it,” Jess muttered, hitting number two. She had no
intention of breaking the golden rule by which she lived her life.
No man would ever see her in spandex nor would she get hot and
sweaty in front of the opposite sex unless there was something fun
in it for her!

“You’ve been
saying that since Easter and we’re into September already, so why
don’t you put your money where…” Gemma’s voice trailed off as the
doors slid shut in her face.

Gemma was
right, she supposed. She did sound like a granny, even though she
had only just turned thirty-four, which in this day and age of
forty being the new thirty meant that technically she was
twenty-four. Cheering up at that thought, Jess let herself into her
apartment.

***

The tired
hardback cover peered up at her as she tossed the paper the book
had been wrapped in onto the floor—she’d pick it up later. Being a
slob on a Saturday was every single girl’s prerogative. She stroked
the cover reverently; this was it!—the copy she needed to complete
her collection. The rest of the Ladybird books were piled into the
worn, leather suitcase she’d swooped on after spotting it at one of
her favourite local second-hand haunts.

The collection the case contained wasn’t
overly valuable, given that most of them had someone else’s name
scribbled inside. What was it with kids needing to put their mark
on everything? It was this graffiti that devalued the little they
were worth. For Jess, though, their value wasn’t monetary; it was
magical. She could pore over her tattered copy of
Cinderella
for an age, mesmerised by
Cinder’s beautiful ball gowns. There was just something so
enchanting about the whole idea of living a life of rags to
riches.

Oh, she knew
that these days such stories weren’t considered PC but in her
opinion, things in that department had gone too far. Take, for
instance, the day her local library had banned Enid Blyton’s Noddy
books. Sacrilege! To say she had been heartbroken at the
ridiculousness of it was an understatement. How on earth was a
child supposed to make the connection between the Golliwogs and
black people? And it had certainly never crossed her mind that
Noddy’s relationship with Big Ears was based on anything other than
platonic friendship.

She understood
now, though, that this was because kids don’t view the world the
way adults do. With kids, there are no hidden agendas. But then
it’s not the children who pay for the books, is it?

Jess dismounted
her high horse at the remembered injustice of it all as the phone
began to jangle.

“Hey, it’s me.
What are you doing?—Harry, put that down!?” Brianna shrieked and
Jess, holding the phone away from her ear, grinned at the mental
picture her friend’s tone invoked.

“The book
arrived.”

“
Snow White
—the one you bought off eBid?”

“That’s the
one.”

Brianna could
see the romance in collecting old books, unlike their mutual friend
Nora who, upon spying the vintage suitcase and its contents for the
first time, had exclaimed, “What on earth do you want with that old
pile of mouldy shite? Honestly, Jess, you’ll be coming home with
second-hand smalls next.” A second-hand Jane Nora was not.

“Yes, and oh
Brie, it’s just gorgeous.” She began flicking through the little
book’s pages, gazing at the pictures as she did so. “You want to
see the wee cottage in the woods; it’s…”

“Like something
out of a fairy story,” Brianna finished for her with a laugh that
was cut short. Jess could make out some sort of scuffling noise
which was swiftly followed by, “Harry Price, you give that to Mammy
right now! If Daddy catches you playing with his new razor, there
will be murder.” She gave a heartfelt sigh that sounded like a
long, slow hiss down the phone line. “Whatever you do, Jess, don’t
ever have children.”

“Ha! It would
be the Immaculate Conception if I did and did I hear you right? Did
you say Harry was playing with a razor?” She was mildly
alarmed—Brianna had a laidback parenting style but that was a bit
much, even by her standards.

“It’s electric
and he’s pretending to shave like Daddy.”

“Phew, that’s
alright then. Oh and Brie, if perchance I do meet Prince Charming
before the menopause and have babies, then I hope they’re as
gorgeous as your Harry. Put him on for me, will you?”

“Huh! Not so
gorgeous at five o’clock this morning when he decided to pay us a
visit. Honestly, the concept of a weekend being for sleeping in is
completely foreign to him—wait a minute… Harry, love, it’s your
Aunty Jess wanting to say hello.”