Читать книгу The Door - Диана Невидаль - Страница 3

● Appearance:

Eyes: Brown-green, squinting

As much as Clio would like to believe that her eyes change colour according to her mood, the fact is that most of the time they look brown with some greenery. Only those closest and most attentive to details can see specks of yellow and even occasional flashes of grey and blue in them.

Hair: Colour light green, pastel; hair cut just above the shoulders

The awe some ladies feel over their kilometre-long braids brings a condescending smile to Clio’s face. She herself had long ago decided that hair is not the same with hands – it would grow back. Although, daring to cut off a metre of her hair for the first time was also rather scary. And the decision to be a full-head greenery came to her one new strand at a time.

Skin: Pale

Clio is sometimes sad that even in the height of summer she can’t be as tanned as the many lucky people whose pictures she sees in the newsfeed from time to time. However, this quickly passes. Especially quickly, when she reminds herself that that’s not what makes her sad. More likely, what saddens her is that they have the opportunity to go to the seashore for a month and live the fuller lives than she can afford.

However, she likes her aristocratic pallor. At least, that was the conclusion she drew after an incident with one of her former colleagues. She only clenched her teeth tightly, and with great difficulty resisted an urge to punch the one who asked her so aggressively caring: «Why are you so pale? You don’t leave the house at all, do you?»

Height: 165 cm

Style of clothing: Varied – the main idea is to wear something interesting

She doesn’t like the basic things. Clio is always looking for something unique, something interesting, something that others don’t have. There is only a handful of plain T-shirts in her wardrobe; mostly all of her clothes are covered in prints of different characters or have some kind of interesting story behind them.

Clio doesn’t shy away from running through thrift shops to find something you can’t find in the nearest mall.

● Age: 29 years

Our heroine does not look or feel her age. She is frightened by the big and inescapable approaching three-oh-zero. Clio remembers all too well not believing that there is life after thirty. However, when her back starts to seize up or she gets a headache from a sudden change of the weather, Clio feels being at least seventy-three.

Birthday: 1 February

Being born in the harshest month of the year is not the most fortunate thing. All the more so because, as luck would have it, this is the day on which her city has been experiencing severe frosts for years. Not just «the perfect time to go to the cottage, take a jacuzzi and jump in the snow afterwards» frosts, but «no sane person would go out today» frosts.

Zodiac sign: Aquarius

Some people believe in horoscopes, some don’t, and that’s ok. But it just so happens that Clio’s traits largely match the description of a typical Aquarius.

Education: Higher education, humanities (major not specified)

Why tell what your degree was in if your job has nothing to do with it? It wasn’t that Clio didn’t like her major – she’d honed her skills in masterful cheating and covering up cutting classes, learned a couple of new and interesting things and met a lot of cool people.

But she didn’t enter the university because she wanted to dedicate her life to this unspecified profession.

Work: In the office, call centre

Clio has a hard time talking to people all day long. So the call centre is clearly not her dream job, but we have what we have.

If you still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, it’s hard to go into some narrow field. Because to be really successful at something, you have to put your whole life into it. And you don’t want to put it into something that is not you.

And yet you still want to put food on your plate.

Body build: Average – not skinny, but not chubby either

At this point, you’re probably getting a rough idea of what kind of person Clio is. But you don’t know about her laziness yet. And what lazy person wouldn’t prefer ordering pizza and watching a new episode of a great show to cooking a complicated meal?

Besides, it’s a great pleasure to eat, and a hedonist can’t do without it.

She also cannot run, squat or lift enough to transform all those unhealthy meals into abs, because she is so lazy (or, as Clio calls it, «self-caring») and extremely convincing when it comes to it.

Additional skills: Partially music, dance, painting, almost any creative activity

Clio is a creative person, who as a child has studied dance, singing, clay modelling and musical instruments, but gave it all up when she got bored. She is talented and, despite not completing all her classes, she can draw, sing and dance quite well.

Ironically, unlike the ancient Greek muse she is named after, she has a big problem with history. Names, dates and events desperately resist being juxtaposed with each other. They are getting mixed up and are refusing to line up in the right order.

Hobbies: Watching movies/TV-series/cartoons, playing games

Movies, TV-series and other visual content are worlds that Clio has always escaped to from ours. There are a lot of these worlds, and in almost every one of them there are characters who are like family to her. She cares about each of them as if they were as real as you and me, and she is more often seen in tears because of what happens in a film or a book rather than because of the real-life problems.

● Notable personal qualities:

Intelligence: Thanks to her intelligence and wit, she could afford to skip school and university for many years and still graduate without any bad marks.

Lazy: So lazy that she even puts on make-up quite rarely. Between having extra-time to sleep and preening her feathers, she always chooses sleep. As you can imagine, doing laundry/cleaning/dishwashing/anything else that needs to be done with any kind of consistency is torture for such a person.

Hedonism: After years of philosophical research, Clio has decided that the meaning of life is in the pleasure. Or, to put it another way, hedonism.

Selfishness: For some reason, this word is perceived as a swear word, but Clio considers it a normal self-care. As one example, she doesn’t quite understand when people talk about a job they love – is that even possible?

If they do, they must be the energizer activists who are ready to give up their last shirt «for the common good». But Clio doesn’t want to «give back to the society», she wants to be paid and to buy stuff she wants.

Ok, maybe, her favourite job would be the one where with a minimum of effort she could get the most for herself.

Adaptability: With this set of traits, a person has no choice but to learn to adapt. This includes the ability to mimic the surrounding people, to find a way out of tricky situations, and to fit her behaviours into what the situation demands.

Belief in Miracle: Despite the many times life has tripped Clio up, despite the many times she has vowed to stop believing in the supernatural, it seems to be impossible to squeeze out the magic fairytale of her by any means. Naturally, she is fascinated by witchcraft and sorcery, which makes life in a world without magic a wildly depressing experience.

The torment of choice: Clio doesn’t like to choose. She doesn’t like to choose what to wear, where to eat, or what to be when she grows up.

Longing: All her life, our heroine has felt that she has to be somewhere else. That this world is not really for her. That she can’t learn to fly here. This feeling is not a constant weight nailing her to the ground, but rather a sub-tone, a quiet ceaseless squeaking noise that accompanies Clio throughout her life.

This is why a random song, a thought, or even a whiff of wind can make a person suddenly and inexplicably cry, even though nothing seems to be wrong. But the rest of the time, too, her eyes betray this longing: occasionally Clio can be seen staring off into the distance. To somewhere where she is not.