Authors: Dianne Touchell
Creepy and Maud (18 page)
Every effort has been made to secure permissions where necessary. The sources of quoted material are cited within the text, except in chapter SIX: Creepy’s message to Maud is from
The Lost World
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), and in chapter TWENTY-EIGHT: Creepy’s message to Maud is from ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope (1712).
The quote from ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’ by Philip K. Dick, copyright ©1978, is used by permission of Philip K. Dick Estate.
The quote from
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac, copyright ©1955, 1957; renewed ©1983 by Stella Kerouac, renewed ©1985 by Stella Kerouac and Jan Kerouac, is used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The quote in chapter TWENTY by P.J. O’Rourke, copyright ©, is used by permission Grove/Atlantic Inc. New York.
Dianne Touchell is a middle child who feared Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—and any other stranger who threatened to break into the house at night. She has worked, among other things, as a nightclub singer, a fish and chip shop counter girl (not with Pauline Hanson) and a bookseller. Dianne would rather talk to her dog than answer the phone.
I am in love with the girl next door. Our windows are almost opposite each other’s, over the side fence.
I call her Maud. That’s not her real name but that’s what I call her. She’s sort of shortish and curvy. Titian hair. No freckles. A dark, smudgy birthmark on the back of her left calf. A nose piercing her dad knows about and a bellybutton piercing I assume he doesn’t. All right, so I have spent a bit of time looking in there.
Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now, that’s creepy.
