Sometimes I'm not sure she remembered who I was. No matter, I was only ever a vistor. My face and my world were changing, hers were not.

I was sad when she died. Her body was so cold and blue. I still remember where I was, lying on my bed in the old house, the late afternoon sun slanting through my window. My eyes roamed strangely over the page, not really seeing the words. I felt as if I might cry but I don't think I did. Maybe one little tear, though it was probably more in reaction to seeing her mother cry. The slow Countess. The one who never cried or showed affection to anything other than her hoarde of white cats, or her bird Master Chalk. The love, though she was unable to show it, must have been buried in that heavy brain all along, the tear proves it, but what is it worth now? Her daughter is gone, can't receive its warmth. This is what I was thinking. It was a hard scene to read. I was sad but it was more of a burn under my ribcage than a desire to cry. I saw the death coming, but didn't know it would be like this. I wanted to turn the pages backwards.

She's still in the attic now I suppose. I ought to go visit her. Maybe I'll be Steerpike and pretend to be asleep on her couch. Perhaps she won't remember that she's lived this scene before. I will be dashing and dangerous. I will be dressed in grey. She will want to know where I've come from, and I will invent her stories, each one appealing to some daydream she's had in the long dreaming years when everybody ignored her. I will addict her. I will be anything I think she wants me to be. One day I will go too far.

I've had long hair for years, partly because of her. I know we don't look alike. But I feel there's something essential we have in common. The black mass of hair and dark eyebrows are just the tip of it. There's something submerged. Some kind of affinity, as pompous at that word probably sounds. I think I was fourteen when we met, officially.

*

Fuchsia Groan is one of the central characters in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and (to a lesser extent) Titus Alone (1959) .

An extract from the second novel, Gormenghast, summarises her personality well and provides some indication of her complexity as a character: "Less formidable, yet sullen as her mother and as incalcuable is Titus' sister. Sensitive as was her father without his intellect, Fuchsia tosses her black flag of hair, bites at her childish underlip, scowls, laughs, broods, is tender, is intemperate, suspicious, and credulous all in a day. Her crimson dress inflames grey corridors, or flaring in a sunshaft through high branches makes of the deep green shadows a greeness darker yet, and a darkness greener."

Though it has been about 5 years since my initial reading of the novels, my fascination with Peake's lovingly-crafted character seems only to be growing. I can't write with any clarity about her because she's too vast a concept to me. I associate her with so many things: innocence, sadness, love, imagination, intuition, beauty, femininity, stubborness, loneliness, desperation, joy, openess, foolishness, laughter, the colour red. I think what set her apart from the beginning (as opposed to the countless other characters I have come across over the years) is the completeness of her being. Peake has created someone fully self-sufficient, someone whose life continues even when you close the book, who never fades or stops existing. It's not so much even the words on the page anymore, I can't describe it, she's just her own. I often think she must have arrived in Peake's brain one day, fully-formed and fully breathing, demanding to be written. She might have even named herself.

*

Image used is my own.