Tidetown Read Free

though it is still midmorning. Mayor Bruin has long given up on trying to entice his only child from her room until she is good and ready. Angelica picks up her least favourite doll, Harmony, and drips hot candle wax onto the doll’s hair and forehead, anointing her as the Chief Prosecutor.
    â€˜Queen’s Counsel,’ she whispers into Harmony’s sizzling ear, ‘a rare honour, but fully deserved.’
    Then she picks up Cruela, her favourite: a raggedly-taggedly doll, all wild matted black hair and broken skin. She spits into her face and rubs the moisture around Cruela’s eyes.
    â€˜To bring you wisdom and fine words, Chief Defendant and Order of the Viper.’
    She places the two dolls at their allotted places on the rug in the fiery ring. They sit in silence opposite each other. The wax from the candle runs onto Angelica’s chubby dimpled fingers. She feels the heat, then watches the liquid solidify and whiten.
    â€˜Time to bring the court to order,’ she declares, putting a curly ginger clown’s wig on her head. ‘Be upstanding for Judge Angelica.’
    She grabs the other dolls and assorted toys (tortoise, one-legged dinosaur, gorilla, carthorse, pig-suckling-piglets, headless cowgirl, armless cowboy – both recently tortured by Redskins) and selects a motley crew to sit as the jury. The remaining figurines and odds and ends of toys are the audience, plopped unceremoniously in a heap to the side, precariously close to the candle flames.
    â€˜Now bring on the defendants,’ demands Judge Angelica.
    Carefully, reverently, she opens the clasp of a large wooden box sitting in place of honour on the table beside her diamond-shaped bed. One by one, she lifts the two identical handmade dolls, designed and crafted for her sixteenth birthday. Each is beautifully dressed in a tartan smock, black patent-leather shoes, with a bright yellow beret (almost a halo). Each has long silky black hair, a beguiling smile and coal-black eyes.
    Angelica places the twins in the ring opposite the two lawyer dolls.
    â€˜Court in session!’ she shouts.
    The case of the Fishcutter twins, the most lauded of all Tidetown’s scandals, has fascinated Angelica from the moment she first heard of it. At fourteen years old the twins were the same age as she, and were accused of committing an act she’d held only as a wild fantasy: the murder of a father. Her nighttime reading of Gothic novels, horror and true crime stories was replaced by scouring her father’s newspapers for updates on the trial. She slavered over all the little details. She kept every cutting, every photo, every artist’s impression of the courtroom. On the day when Judge Omega, the highest lawman in the land, decreed sentence would be passed, Angelica left home before dawn, rode her beloved horse to town, settled him in livery and waited at the gates of the courtroom. When the Fishcutter twins were brought up from the cells she almost fainted at the sight of them in the flesh. Then the light bulb of a camera flashed in her eyes. Next day, the photo that took up half the front page of the Tidetown Chronicle showed a mesmerised Angelica beautifully positioned between the twins. Her father, putty as always in her hands, used his standing and influence in the community to obtain the original and had the picture gilt framed and hung above her bed (carefully out of sight of adult visitors).
    After the Fishcutter twins were convicted and imprisoned Angelica pleaded with her father to become their penpal. As with all her requests he soon acceded, even though it cost him a case of vintage sherry from his much coveted wine cellar to convince the old prison governor to stretch the rules. So, ever since the first month of their sentences, the twins would receive a weekly letter from Angelica. The twins replied, albeit sporadically, for they were more than wise and cunning enough to see potential future value in nurturing a