Nicki Perrin gazed ponderously at Suzie and wondered. Suzie stared back blankly. She had blue eyes with an everlasting but icy sparkle, a tiny nose, thick black hair tied in pig-tails, and a small red mouth. She was all of 10 inches tall, was made of hard plastic with movable arms and legs, and had a pink, rubber face. She was only a doll to everyone else, but to Nicki she was real, as real as her best friend Lucy Verdi who owned her, and who had agreed that Suzie needed to spend time with her own friends from the Perrin Family – Cheryl, Edith, Amy and Simone, and the rag dolls Becky and Luke. “I really need to find David,” Nicki muttered to herself, and bit her nail in thought. She was about eight years old, a little old for dolls perhaps, but Nicki didn’t treat dolls the way…
The night before had been…well a night! Dr Bryan Higgins had slept on the beach – he had been so ‘smashed’ and he hadn’t…
Cross eyed Mara, his brother Nata and their cousin, a gangling, mute simpleton, called Gaja loaded the last iron barrel onto the bulla-cart and…
It had been a sweltering day; wheeling his bicycle up a slope that was nearly quarter of a mile of merciless grey, dusty road…
