A Writer's Wonderland [PDF] - University of Portsmouth

previous owners had no time for simple young women. Maybe that’s why we could never look
away. She had no reason to be, no reason to exist.
And whilst Stuart and I settled down to a life of journalistic success, we’ve always had
our theories. Sometime Stu still likes to pretend to be sceptical about it, he’ll scratch the back of
his neck and tell you that perhaps it was just a printing error, but I can see it in his eyes that that
little girl sits in his head as she does mine. I’ve always thought she must have been waiting for
someone, that girl, waiting for the time when two naïve adventurers would find her sitting
there, and set her free in a photograph.
The Red House burnt to the ground precisely a year after our visit there, a year after that
day when Stuart and I stumbled into a world that neither of us could have comprehended.
Maybe she didn’t need it any more. In the aftermath, I remember dipping my hand into the
ashes of the thing that had once stopped me and my friend in our steps. It had been the making
of the both of us. And since then, I’ve always thought that maybe the rage and the fear of one
lost little girl could come to define what we all need in the end.
Maybe, sometimes, we all just need to be found.
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