"RED" by Alessandra Azzaroni

STORY LAST UPDATED ON 24/03/2002

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Written in Australia.

PROLOGUE

You can try your hardest, but quite often nothing will come of your efforts. You can strain yourself to the point of self-combustion, but what good will come of it?
    Trying really doesn't get you anywhere. In the end, isn't "try" just another word for "fail"? If you don't succeed, you'll have "tried", meaning "failed". There is no in-between, which is why there is no trying.
    I thought I'd tried my best. And in a way, I succeeded. In fact, I achieved my goal. But with it came a price almost too horrible for me to bear. And it just about ruined my mother.
    So don't try. Just succeed. Or you'll fail in the worst way possible.

CHAPTER ONE

I remember clearly the day everything started, when everything went downhill. Life's like that, though, isn't it? Sometimes you forget the happier times of your life, but you never forget the sad.
    It's just that the day had been going so well, then boom - the good just disappeared, replaced with the pain that carried on.
    Admittedly, I'd always distanced myself from my parents. And my mother distanced herself from her parents. My father's parents were dead, though. Can't remember how, but I think I only saw them a few times when I was younger.
    My mother's parents were a bit traditional. Too traditional. They expected my mother to grow up and marry an Anglo-Saxon, or an Anglo-Saxon Australian when she moved here when she was eighteen. It was a spur-of-the-moment whim when Mother had set out with a few of her friends. They just up and left Sussex for Melbourne, and didn't warn their families.
    Needless to say, my grandparents weren't too happy about that. Things got worse, though. Mother got married at the age of nineteen, and she didn't even tell her family until I was two. Father's parents and his relatives attended the wedding, though. They were such nice people that they had no objections to the marriage.
    Richard and Eleanor Burton, however, were a different story. Father had just completed medical school, so he applied for a position back in Sussex and won it. So we upped and moved continents.
    Mother called one day to let her parents know that she was coming over. As parents often get, my grandparents missed their daughter and still loved her, even though she'd hurt them. So Mother came, but brought two uninvited guests: Father and I.
    Richard and Eleanor Burton had never expected their beloved daughter Debra to marry a man of Asian descent. They had expected she'd marry a man of British descent. Never anything else. It was only when I was much older that my mother described to me what racism was. And she said that her prim-and-proper parents in Sussex were racists.
    We continued living in Sussex, however, until I was about twelve, and during those ten years there, we barely ever saw Mother's parents. However, Father found out about a position vacant lecturing at Monash University in Melbourne, so we moved back, where we'd been living since.

Incomplete

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