THE BEAUTIFUL MELANIE

A baby is born to be so beautiful...

Everyone declared how absolutely beautiful Melanie Sparrow was when she was born one February evening in 1983. There never had been, they said, such a beautiful baby. And when the little lass deigned to smile for the first time hearts were so warmed by the joy in her eyes that one grandparent dropped down dead in front of her whilst another merely fainted. Even her parents were overcome as they clutched each other tightly and thanked every one of the thousands of gods worshipped by mankind over the years for the beauty of the child in their arms.

And to trace the story of her life there can be no doubt hat it is one filled with perfect beauty.

As a schoolgirl at Junior school her teacher, Mr Mathis, was so overcome by her sheer perfection that he went home at the end of the first day of her being in his class, took one look at his own daughter (a pretty little lass called Sally Mathis) and found himself in a dichotomy: either, her thought, arrange plastic surgery for Sally, or kill her. He chose a third option and committed suicide instead, which was probably a mistake of judgement on his part because Melanie quite liked him and was sorely upset by his demise. But he wasn’t to know that.

At her next school, at the secondary school across town, another teacher, Miss Fogarty, became almost instantly besotted by everything about Melanie that she resigned her post and took up vows in a nunnery instead, before finally falling desperately in love with a statue of the virgin Mary in the nunnery’s chapel. Even though there was no physical indication that the blessed Mary felt anything for her, Miss Fogarty spent the rest of her life waiting for the day when she would. She lived well into her nineties, which was hardly a blessing

And so to adulthood and, if it was possible Melanie became even more beautiful. It’s very difficult for a mere man to explain how beautiful she became but suffice it for me to say her hair, long and luscious, always smelt of roses, her complexion, peachy and unmarked by any kind of blemish shone day in and day out and Anthony Beaufort fell so deeply in love with her that that his own grandma said he absolutely must marry the girl pronto.

So he married her or his inheritance might be at risk and she entered one of the most prestigious families in the county, only to discover that besides being wealthy and prestigious they were a group of tow-rags unworthy of so much as a glimpse at her. But bad luck. She had become one of them, and so she had to find a way out, and trying to escape from anything once your embroiled in a family like the Beauforts even if the son of the family was an Anthony, and fair minded as well as being well endowed, is never easy even for the beautiful.

So she bought herself a computer and began a search for ideas. It was the early part of the twenty-first century and ideas abounded.

At first the suggestions she discovered lurking in a dark corner of the web involved killing Anthony and winning her escape that way with a substantial inheritance herself,,but she couldn’t do that because besides having a perfectly beautiful body she had a perfectly beautiful mind, and people with perfectly beautiful minds can’t tolerate the idea of killing anyone, not even a Beaufort.

But there are human weasels on the Internet, and she met a whole host of them, men and women with broken thoughts and surrealistic suggestions. At first she was appalled until one Dickie Jenkins got through to her.

It was Dickie’s idea that families like the Beauforts with far too much of the wealth of the country ought to be eliminated and their wealth spread amongst the down and outs and useless. That way, he suggested, down would no longer be out and useless would become useful and all of society would be rosy. Homelessness would become a thing of the past (which made her think of the dozen or so empty rooms in the Beaufort residence) and the sun would always shine.

She started off by inventing a group of social helpers, of like-minded philanthropists with avatars that smiled benevolently onto the world. Speaking of avatars, she had created one of her own which downplayed her own physical attraction by giving her a gigantic scar across her face, going from ear to ear, which she described as being created by the blade of evil. And as for Dickie Jenkins, his avatar suggested manliness, decency and oversized genitals, which appealed to her.

And it was without the scar that she arranged to meet her first inspiration, the philanthropic Dickie Jenkins in a smoke-stained old pub glorying in the name Angel Steps.

Talk about a grotty pub! Spit and sawdust had nothing to do with it and the landlord and only barman that she could see was dour, unfriendly and hated her instantly because her beauty was undimmed and not the kind of thing he wanted anywhere near his pub. And when it actually turned out that he was Dickie Jenkins and nothing like his avatar she was shocked.

“Where’s your scar then?” he leered at her after they’d both discovered who the other was.

“It’s an avatar, silly, and anyway, where’s your big bulge?” she asked in reply, and she stormed out of the Angel Steps without even taking one sip of the drink she had ordered before knowing who it was she had ordered it from.

“Hey!” he called after her from the bar, dirty tea-towel in one hand and a shocked look on his face.

She spun round. “What?” she squawked, not used to this kind of meeting.

“You haven’t paid!” he replied.

It was then that she smiled her radiantly beautiful smile and inevitably he collapsed, mentally, sunk to his knees, and forgave her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and reaching into her handbag she produced a quite large domination note. “Here, take this, keep the change and, for goodness sake, grow some balls!” she added spitefully.

And she returned to her home at Beaufort Manor, deciding that there could be no doubt that it was certainly a great deal preferable to a pub like Angel Steps.

“Where have you been, darling?” asked husband Anthony Beaufort from his seat in the lounge where he was doing something with a pile of papers.

“Nowhere, lover of mine,” she replied, and then, thoughtfully, added, “I’m off to our bedroom and I really want you to join me.”

“Really? What for?” he asked.

“Don’t ask! Just come and make sure your trousers are round your ankles by the time you reach the door!” she said, suddenly smiling.

“What? In the afternoon?” he muttered. “I’ve never heard of anything like it!”

But it was because she was so damned beautiful that he did what she asked, went beyond it actually, because by the time he reached their bedroom door on the second floor his trousers were completely off and neatly folded.

© Peter Rogerson 11.02.24

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