When I was born my mother took me into her newly motherly arms and said proudly, “Hello, Aurora.” My father started complaining. Aurora, he said (and I said much later on) was a silly name, a name for fairy tales and storybooks, for princesses who went to sleep for a century. If I had to be named after the sunrise, why not simply call me Dawn? Or even better, call me Sarah, or Claire, or Emma – nice normal names, he said desperately.

My mother stuck to her desires and called me Aurora, and Aurora I remained. My godmothers cooed and clucked over me in the hospital cot, as I lay asleep with fluffy black hair fuzzed up in a sort of miniature punk hairstyle. “She’s going to be a beauty,” my mum’s best friend, Godmother Number One, announced with certainty.

“She’ll come to a bad end,” Godmother Number Two, Dad’s cousin, said with equal certainty. Before disappearing into some wilderness or somewhere and not coming back – for a long while, at any rate. You’ll hear about her in a bit.

We went back home, to our neat little suburban semi-detached house, and I was installed in another cot in a pretty yellow room with mobiles and teddy bears and bright pictures on the walls. A nursery fit for a princess, murmured my mother as she tucked me in; and later that night my father complained that I was spoiled already as he tried to stop me wailing. I wailed a lot, by all accounts; howled when I was hungry and screamed when I was sleepy and cried when I wanted a cuddle. I was a normal baby. I grew regularly, my hair getting longer and losing the baby-rocker look; my teeth became real and I crawled and walked. Nothing whatsoever unusual there. No signs that later in life Fate was to take a firm hand on proceedings and turn our little house on its head.

Godmother Number One sent me money or dolls every Christmas and birthday, and sweets and chocolate when she visited. Which she did often enough. We went to the zoo and shopping, to the cinema and once to a pop concert. (I couldn’t hear anything for two days after that.) Now and again she would ask my Mum darkly, when she thought I wasn’t listening, where Godmother Number Two had got to. Mum would always shake her head and lower her voice further and mutter dark curses on her cousin-in-law’s head. I kind of forgot I had two godmothers. In any case my best friend Jenny, who happened to be Jewish, didn’t have any godmothers and thought the whole thing was a weird idea – and you know what kids are like, they follow what their friends say. Jenny and I were inseparable at primary school. In the playground we made believe and enacted out our favourite fairy tales. In Snow White she was always the wicked queen and the seven dwarves, and I was Snow White and the king. When we decided to play at Cinderella, we swapped over and I was the wicked stepmother whilst Jenny played Cinders. But for some reason, neither of us ever wanted to play Sleeping Beauty. Too boring, said Jenny; can you imagine being asleep for one hundred years? And anyway, those godmothers again. So we went back happily to Goldilocks and the Three Bears and pretended to eat porridge.

We grew up. We grew up far too quickly, now I look back at it from a distance, and stopped all too soon playing fairy tales. Instead our attentions turned to the opposite sex, and clothes, and makeup, and trying to behave like we were twenty at twelve. Work kind of drifted by. As far as I remember, the only thing that interested me at all in the first few years at secondary school was the fact that my unusual name was practically French, and that Aurore was a perfectly good name for girls across the Channel. Oh, and I got good at hockey and was selected for the school team. I liked hockey. Even when it was wet and cold and the mud pinpricked our bare, red legs in November, the hours I spent on the lopsided pitch were the best at school.

Jenny disagreed, and Jenny and I fell out. She joined up with the musical crowd and spent her breaks messing about on the piano in the music room. I saw her sometimes through the windows as I chased a ball down the sidelines. I didn’t care. I had other things to worry about – my boyfriend, the first one, for a start. And then, when he dumped me, the second one. Mum and Godmother Number One, who by now had become simply Janice, cautioned me on Being Careful and Not Drinking Too Much and Letting Him Take Advantage. Dad grunted agreements when Mum and I had these arguments over the dinner table at night. I never did work out if he was grunting in agreement with her or me.

I got my GCSEs, average ones, and went on to the local technology college to carry on playing hockey. I thought I might become a PE teacher or something, and so spend my whole life out on a hockey pitch. I broke up, painfully, with Boyfriend Number Two. He was a bastard, after all, I cried into Mum’s shoulder. She patted me on the head and told me my prince would come one day.

So life was chugging along happily on fairly normal rails until I turned eighteen. My Coming of Age. I was a perfectly average eighteen. Middle-of-the-road academic results, one thing I was very good at, a middle-class family in a Midlands suburb.

And then someone knocked at the door.

It was the weekend after my birthday. Mum and Dad were out somewhere, shopping I think, and I was curled up reading a magazine and watching Eastenders. I groaned when the knock came, and uncurled myself from the sofa and went to answer it. There, standing on the doorstep in a voluminous red cape, a blue hat perched absurdly on her head, was a woman I’d never seen before, or at least a woman I never remembered seeing before, which amounts to the same thing.

“My little Aurora!” she said. “Well, that old cow of a Janice was right about one thing, you are a beauty. Turn around and let me look at you.”

Obediently, caught by her unorthodox spell of mystery and foreignness, I turned around and faced her again. She swept back a hank of hair as black as my own and smiled broadly with carmine lips.

“I’m Ciara. Your father’s cousin. Your godmother.”

“Oh.” It was not a very intelligent thing to say, maybe, but it was all I could think of at the time. “Uh.”

“I’ve brought you a birthday present,” Godmother Number Two announced, and produced as if by magic from under her cape a box. “Go on, open it.”

“Would you like to come in?” I asked, taking the parcel with interest. Ciara beamed at me and whisked herself inside. Past her I could see a small yellow box of a car parked in the drive.

I led my newly found godmother into the lounge, where she prowled inspecting the furniture and the photographs of me at various ages whilst I busied myself with opening my birthday present. First a layer of magenta wrapping paper, followed by lilac tissue paper, and then the box. Wooden, something dark and heavy but glistening with a lustre that came not just from the varnish. On the lid there was a curious symbol set into the wood, made out of a lighter coloured wood. I stroked the box and then clicked open the catch.

“Um.” I peeled back the tissue paper and studied the present. “Ah, Ciara, what is it?”

Godmother Number Two turned from pressing buttons on the stereo player.

“It’s a spindle, of course. What did you think it was?”

I lifted the spindle out of its nest of tissue paper and turned it on my fingertip. “What … what does it do?”

“It spins. Hence the name.” Ciara pulled a lump of green wool from her cape and deftly attached it to the spindle. “Like this. Here, have a go.”

I frowned at the spindle and took it off her, spinning the wool around. I thought that if I’d been ten years younger it might have been amusing for a time. Like a spinning top.

“It’s … nice,” I managed. “Original.”

“It’s South American,” she said severely. “Very ancient Mayan craftwork. As is the box.” She took the thing off me and put it back in the box. “Go and put it in your room, and get your coat. It’s not your only present. I thought I’d take you shopping.”

I brightened up and ran off, and soon we were chugging into town in the little yellow car.

Shopping with Ciara was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. She shopped fanatically, grabbing things seemingly haphazardly off shelves and rails and actually pushing them at me. I tried on whole wardrobes and ended up with enough clothes to last me years. Trousers and tops, shoes and skirts, blouses, jeans (gorgeous skin tight ones in a very pale blue), and incongruously, though I protested I’d never wear it, a long dress of shimmering twilight velvet, covered over the bodice with miniature seed pearls. I had to admit I loved the thing, but I knew Ciara had wasted her money on it.

We got back home lateish. Mum and Dad were having a row about something in the kitchen, and as Ciara and I unloaded bags from the square canary car they eventually appeared to realise I was home. Mum opened the kitchen door.

“Aurora, honey?” She saw the bags. Then she looked higher and saw Ciara. “Jonathan.”

Dad emerged too, his mouth open to continue the dispute, but closed it, trapping air, as he too caught sight of Godmother Number Two.

“Ciara?” he said, pointlessly.

“Hi, Jonny,” Ciara said, putting the Zara bag next to the Emporio Armani one. “Aurora and I have been shopping. I decided it was time I did some godmothering.”

“It was time you came and explained where you’ve been for eighteen years,” Dad said sharply. “For Christ’s sake, Ciara, you disappeared. Nobody knew where you were.”

“Here and there,” Ciara replied lightly, dumping the last bag – Topshop – down. “And there and here. All over.”

Dad sat down, heavily, on the bottom step of the stairs. He looked tired and old all of a sudden. Ciara took off her red cape thing, revealing a turquoise cotton blouse printed madly with a random sort of batik pattern. At least I think it was batik. Anyway. She leaned against the wall and folded her arms. There was silence.

I picked up my bags and began to take them upstairs.

Ciara was gone by the time I’d finished, vanished as suddenly as she had come, and if it wasn’t for my packed wardrobe full of beautiful clothes I’d have thought I’d dreamed Godmother Number Two.

We said nothing about her. I’d seen Dad’s face. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t not the world’s most intelligent eighteen-year old, but neither am I completely stupid, and I’d seen Dad’s face. Dad never got a face like that. Dad was mild and quiet. I didn’t know what Ciara had done to get him like that. I really didn’t want to find out. Yet the spindle sat on my windowsill, a reminder of Ciara’s visit.

A month passed. Godmother Number Two was fading, if a person as colourful as Ciara could fade. Mum and Dad were celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary and decided to leave me alone in the house so they could go away for a romantic weekend. They made me promise not to have a party, afraid for carpets and the sofa and stuff. Fine by me. I didn’t want to worry about spills on said carpets and gatecrashers and all the other argument-inducing things that can happen at parties (hey, I’ve been to others, I’ve seen it happen.) I planned one quiet night in with ice cream and a good film, and one night out with friends.

I chose, self-indulgently, triple choc-chip brownie ice cream and Tom Cruise, and at eight-thirty was curled up happily on the sofa spooning ice cream slowly into my mouth and marvelling over the way Mr Cruise managed to seduce sports stars and secretaries at once. And me, for that matter.

Halfway through the film the doorbell rang. Were you expecting that? I wasn’t. Reluctantly, I got up and went to answer it.

“Go and change,” Ciara said, standing on the doorstep in a dark purple silk outfit.

I held open the door and let her in. “Hi, Ciara,” I said. She waved her hand in the air.

“No time to concern ourselves with formalities. I’m taking you out.”

“What if I don’t want to come?” I objected, but she flapped that away too.

“You and me, we’re going out.”

“It’s half-past eight, Ciara,” I said. “What are we doing? Where are we going?”

“Stop arguing, Aurora,” she said firmly. “Put on that velvet dress. Hurry up!”

I stopped the video and put away the ice-cream regretfully, and hurried upstairs to put on the twilight velvet dress and some makeup, and then hurried downstairs again, switched off lights, left others on, grabbed a key, locked the door, and clambered carefully into the buttercup-coloured tin can and off we went.

© Joanne Harris 2002