The Pygmy Giant

by Sandra Davies

“But it says ‘proceeds from the sale of house and contents plus twenty thousand pounds to each of my two sons,’ that’s only …” and here David had the grace to acknowledge with a self-conscious grimace the inappropriateness of that ‘only’, if not the greed.

Impatient at the interruption his younger sibling asked, “Only what?”

“Only what Dad left her, three years ago. The exact wording of his will. There should be more.”

“What more?”

“Well, there were those books she was supposed to have written – actually wrote apparently – don’t know what, I never read any of them…”

“Oh yeah, I remember her always scribbling… and then she got herself a computer, didn’t she?”

“Thing is, I remember Dad saying, five years or so before he died, that she’d earned more than him the previous year. He’d meant to sound pleased but I got the impression he was less than happy about it.”

“Royalties I suppose, and suchlike. Advances?”

“And maybe film rights, or TV – she did go to America a couple of times didn’t she?”

“Christ yes, so she did! Smartened herself up quite a bit after he died. So where’s the money from all that then?”

“Precisely. We’ll have to ask the solicitor – she probably didn’t instruct him properly.”

But the solicitor had no knowledge of any other will. Nor of any nom de plume, of any other bequest, of any lover, of any daughter. Or of any other life led by the recently deceased.

–

Sandra Davies has been writing for a year, and now has four books available on Blurb. She is a printmaker interested in family history and lives in Teesside.