INTRODUCTION
The girl opened her eyes. At first she failed to focus and nothing seemed familiar. She found herself between a wall and the back of a car - and for some reason she was surprised to realise that she could name the car - a Honda CV . This made no sense at all because everything else around her was unfamiliar, as though she had landed in a strange land - or even on a strange planet!
Gradually she was regaining her vision, but she still felt light headed and most decidedly not herself. When she gathered her faculties a little bit more, she was even more surprised to realise that she was well able to move and function, even though she could see copious amounts of blood pooling around her. Her purse was gone, of course, but her bag with her mobile phone, her credit cards and her car keys were still there - open and tipped out, but not taken, like the purse. The purse had only contained some loose change - her St. Christopher, a broken Tara brooch, the house keys, and one of a pair of quite expensive earrings, the other one had been lost many moons ago. Well good luck to the mugger with that then - not very useful pickings for their trouble. But try as she might, she could not make her fingers work - she did not seem to have any kind of mechanism for performing the ordinary task of retrieving the bag or its scattered contents.
She got to her feet - not now at all hampered by her increasingly troublesome osteoarthritis, which had been coming on over the past couple of years. She felt good - strangely good. She felt ‘loose’, kind of supple (a feeling she had not had for a good few years!). She glided, rather than walked, so her limbs were decidedly improved by the attack, but the same, apparently, could not be said for her vision. She had never worn glasses - except perhaps just to be sure for driving - and her eyesight had always been one of her assets - but now she seemed only to be able to see things through a kind of haze. Somehow as she focussed a bit more, looking back she could plainly see a person - a very broken person, certainly a woman, getting on in years, perhaps late 50’s early 60’s, ashy blonde (probably was really grey, but bottled) - lying there, where she had got up from. The woman was plainly dead as a dodo - and here was she feeling light as a bird. Still, don’t look a gift horse in the gob … it was a long time since she had felt so … liberated, yes that was the word, pretentious perhaps, but yes, liberated. She had better move on - leave the poor ol’ one on the ground, whoever she was, and live again!
