"The Crystal Ball" by Jess Hyslop

The old man was vile. He had lumpy skin the colour of rotting pears and the texture of oily rubber. His eyes were large, bulbous and bloated and they bulged even more when he sat down each day in the dingy, suffocating kitchen and stuffed down rotting pears. It was because he stuffed down so many rotting pears that he had so few teeth, and that the teeth he did have were brown and withered like dead leaves. When he grinned his teeth stood out in the cavernous, glistening red mouth like dirty icebergs out of a stormy sea. The young girl had lots of time to examine the old man"s grotesque teeth because the time he grinned most was when he was beating her.

He beat her every day, right after he"d finished stuffing down his rotting pears in the kitchen. It did not matter whether she had done anything wrong or not because everything she did displeased the old man, so she had always done something wrong. Even when she"s tried being extra nice to the old man and fetched him some fresh, juicy, ripe pears from the market he"d found excuse to beat her.

"Ripe pears?" he had exclaimed in a screeching, warbling shriek. "Ripe pears? Did I tell you I wanted ripe pears? What made you think I would want ripe pears? Now you"ve gone and wasted my money on something I don"t even want!" Then his swollen eyes had narrowed and he said, "I bet you only went and bought the ripe pears for yourself! I"ve seen the way you look at my rotting pears - you"ve never ever tried one!"

The young girl cowering in the corner with her long, lank, dirty hair covering her face, hazarded, "But you never let me have any of your ripe pears, so I couldn"t try one if I wanted to."

"Aha!" the old man cried. "And now you"re trying to point the finger at me! Me, your guardian and protector! You"d try and deprive an old man of his pears, would you?"

"No, no," the young girl protested weakly. "Look, I bought you some more."

"But you didn"t buy them for me - you only bought them because you think you"re too good to eat rotting pears!"

It was no good to argue with the old man. He never listened, and yet he heard every word the young girl said and used it against her. His astounding use of illogic was thrown in her face like a battering ram and her pure, simple, innocent logic quivered before it, broke and fled. She was helpless.

When something like this happened, and even when it didn"t, the old man would beat her. He would knock her down on the hard stone floor again and again, grinning his malicious, terrible grin and displaying his malformed teeth. And after the beating the young girl"s long hair would fall across her face and hide away her pale, delicate skin that had bloomed all over with blue-black-purple flowers.

That was when the old man would go into the dilapidated garage at the side of the house and gaze into his crystal ball. The young girl was not supposed to know about the crystal ball - the old man always locked the door of the garage with a grimy key, whether he was in or out of it. But the young girl would sneak round to the back of the garage where the rubbish bins were propped up against the crumbling bricks. There was a small window above them, and if she climbed onto the bins and stood on tiptoe she could just manage to peek through the murky glass and see the old man in front of his crystal ball.

The crystal ball was the only clean thing in the whole house. When the young girl spied through the garage window, she could not keep her eyes off it. It was a large, luminous, silvery orb shining in the centre of the world. Dancing opalescent mists swirled and twisted beneath the perfect surface. To the young girl, it seemed a beautiful pearl hidden inside the ugly shell of the garage. She was entranced.

The old man could not take his eyes off the crystal ball either. He sat in front of it every evening, and his horrible frog-like eyes were huge in his leathery face, glued to the images he saw there. The young girl could tell that he saw pictures in the crystal ball, not just swirling mists, because he would snicker and giggle as he watched them. Sometimes he clapped his greasy hands together greedily and rocked backwards and forwards on his ricketty chair.

Then, at precisely eleven "o" clock, the old man would tear himself away from the crystal ball, get up off his creaky chair, open the door, go out, close it again, lock it with the grimy key, and go back to the house to go to bed. So at precisely five to eleven the young girl would leave her perch on the bins and sneak back into the house so that she"d be there in case the old man wanted to beat her again before he went to bed.

But one day she decided she didn"t want to be there if the old man decided he wanted to beat her. She didn"t even want to be there if he didn"t want to. Where she did want to be was inside the garage with the crystal ball.

So at eleven "o" clock that evening, when the old man left the garage, the young girl squirmed in through the tiny window and climbed down to the floor of the garage. She rushed over to the crystal ball. It was even more beautiful and shiny and perfect than she had ever seen it. She put her battered face close to it and tried to see the pictures in it that she was sure the old man saw. But the only thing the young girl could see were the swirling mists roiling around inside. Disappointed, she leant forward and picked up the silvery pearl in her white, pasty hands. It felt warm and comforting and pulsed gently against her fingertips.

Suddenly, the door of the garage flew open and the old man stormed in. When he saw the young girl holding his crystal ball he stopped stock still like a shocked statue. His face slowly turned crimson, and he let out a scream.

"What are you doing?" he screamed. "What are you doing? What are you doing?"

"Nothing!" the young girl screamed back, terrified and desperate and proud and determined. "Nothing! Nothing!"

Then the old man walked towards her and the young girl had never seen the expression on his face that was there then. He was afraid. There was a thin film of shiny sweat on his slimy forehead and his thin lips were drawn back and trembling.

"Please," the old man pleaded. "Put it down. Please, please..."

Then the young girl suddenly understood why the old man beat her. She looked into the crystal ball and saw the pictures bursting bright and clear in its depths. She understood and, because she understood, she dropped the crystal ball.

And in that moment, when the old man fell forward with a startled, horrified shriek, and the crystal ball blossomed on the floor into a million glittering shards, for the first time in her life the young girl experienced pure, uninhibited happiness.