It was a miracle the woman found Darling next to the body of her
mother lying half-covered by snow at the side of the road. She picked her up
and carried her home even though she had little enough to eat herself.
The little girl could not remember her real name - her mother
called her 'darling' and that is all she knew about her family. She did not
know how old she was or how she and her mother had survived for so long and
came to be outside the little town. The woman could make a good guess but never
told Darling anything. What happened before completely left the little five
year olds mind.
Less than a year later the woman died after getting drunk and
falling in a ditch and her parents, with whom she had, had no contact for many years,
came to bury her. They found the child who they presumed was their daughter's
illegitimate offspring. The old people took Darling home with them to their
tiny flat in the city where she grew up. The old people were atheists in an
atheistic country and Darling knew nothing of God. Some children at her school
went to church.
Darling was a dull and ugly girl and left school as soon as the
teachers could get rid of her. She never made any friends and in fact seldom
spoke to anyone at all. After leaving school, she went to work in the chicken
abattoir where she stayed in the same position hanging chickens on the conveyor
belt for the next fifty years until she was asked to retire. The old people had
long before died one after the other and Darling stayed on in the flat without
her ever really noticing their absence. Even though Darling always hated bright
lights and loud noise, she found peace and meaning in her work in the noisy
brightly lit abattoir and was distraught at not being able to go to work any longer.
Throughout her life, Darling never read a book because she
couldn't really read, and didn't listen to the radio or watched television
because she found the noise distressing. Her only pleasure outside of her work
came when a travel-shop opened not far from her home and gave out free
brochures. Every week she would visit the shop and sorting carefully through
the brochures took home the ones with pictures of the beach and sea. The
pictures she cut out carefully and stuck into a big old Bible she found in a
trunk full of the old people's papers. To make space for the pictures she tore pages
out and she did this without a moment's hesitation, as the book was meaningless
to her. At night after work, she would sit and look at the pictures until it
was time to go to bed. It was her 'darling book'.
From the time her mother had died in the snow, Darling had never
been hugged or held, and she hated all animals especially dogs, so she never
kept a pet. Her life was a lonely one, with the years meaninglessly melting
away.
After she had retired, she spoke to virtually nobody at all, and
as the travel-shop had closed, she had little reason to leave the flat except
to get food and pay her accounts. Many years passed and eventually she found
her pension was too small to buy enough to eat or pay for heating in winter so
a large part of her life was spent cold and hungry. When she got sick she would
get in bed and stay there until she felt well again as she feared doctors even
more than dogs. She lived on and on, until, eventually, the entire world around
her had changed.
Darling never did a single good deed in her life. She never loved
anyone or anything. She never thought about God. She never said a prayer. She
sat and looked at her 'darling book' - pictures of happy people on beaches
stuck on words about people - for hours and hours. And she became part of the
book and the people in it.
When she was very, very old she got a terrible pain in her chest
that would not go away. It got worse and eventually she could not move for pain
and she started starving and freezing as she could not go and buy food or pay
her accounts. Lying in bed she feared the death she knew was coming. Together
with the fear, she developed a terrible regret for the life she never lived and
she let her 'darling book' drop to the floor. So she died, hungry, cold,
scared, and filled with regret. As there was no one to bury her, the state
cremated her body and burnt the few belongings she had. Not a single person
cried at her death.
The municipal worker shook his head before he threw 'The Book of
Darling' in the fire.
