I love a great quest. Given that I am a fantasy writer, this is probably not a surprise.
But in real life, there are few quests that are cool adventures with dragons. In real life, some quests involve trawling through folder after folder of paperwork looking for one particular sneaky document that needs to be provided to a bank. My father embarked on a quest like this once, and I was his support crew.
Picture this …
We start by taking a folder each and leafing through with a measure of enthusiasm usually reserved for trips to the dentist.
After five minutes, my father offers to make coffee. Possibly because he is bored, but more likely because he is sick of me reminding him every minute that this is a really sucky quest. If he thought leaving the room would stop me complaining, he was mistaken. It just meant I had to do it louder.
So when I did go quiet for more than a minute, he calls out from the kitchen, ‘Are you okay in there?’
When I don’t answer, he tries again. ‘I hope you’re not stealing anything!’
Seriously, he thinks I want to steal his mouldy old paperwork?
His head appears around the door frame, eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘What are you up to? Are you plotting something?’
Plotting? One might assume he means a story, but I know better. He means mischief. I’m not plotting mischief, but I have found it nonetheless.
‘What have you got this for?’ I ask, waving a blue piece of paper.
Dad squints. ‘What is it?’
‘My Death Certificate!’ I reply. ‘Is there something you’d like to tell me?’
‘What are you talking about?’ he says.
‘This is a Death Certificate,’ I say, ‘with the name “Sarah Fisher” on it. What gives?’
He mumbles something but I confess I wasn’t listening. Seems discovering that you’re dead affects your hearing.
Talk about skeletons in the closet! Well, not really. I was, in fact, buried at sea. In 1875. On the three-month journey from Scotland to Australia. I was one year old. I died of diarrhoea, apparently. I’ve often been accused of having verbal diarrhoea, but I didn’t realise that was a potentially fatal condition.
I am a fairly focused individual so I admit that I do often miss things that are going on around me. And it wouldn’t actually surprise me if I had failed to notice that I had died. But I would have thought – at some time in the last one hundred and forty-five years – that someone could have mentioned it to me.
‘It’s not you,’ my father says. ‘Coffee?’
‘Coffee?’ I say. ‘At a time like this? I just found out I died and you’re offering me coffee?’
‘It’s not you,’ he says, slurping his coffee. ‘It’s not your Death Certificate.’
‘Whose is it then?’ I say.
‘One of your ancestors. One of our ancestors.’
New quest. ‘I want to know who she is,’ I say. ‘Or who she was.’
So it takes us over half an hour, but we figure out that Sarah Fisher is one of twelve children – and the sister of my great grandfather. Another quest. Finding out what you call the sister of one’s great grandfather. According to the Devon Family History Society’s relationship chart, she would have been my Great-grandaunt Sarah.
Kind of cool, but also kind of sad.
As far as quests go, this one turned out to be more interesting than I’d expected. Maybe I’m the reincarnation of my Great-grandaunt?
Could that be a future story? Good question.