From the book...

 

A word of warning: forget everything you think you know about witches. And know this: not all witches are created equal.

I’m no witch but I know enough to consider myself a bit of an expert. If I were one of them, I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of this anyway. So, you should consider yourself in a fortunate position. Not everyone has the opportunity to be party to this kind of information. I’ll try to keep it short, but we still have a lot to cover.

Some of what I have to say will probably seem unimportant or insignificant. I can’t be the judge of that. I feel it necessary to impart all I know. I have no idea how long my memory will last and need to pass it on before it gets lost. Maybe you can do something with what I’m about to tell you. At any rate, I feel the pressure of time and don’t know how long we will have together.

So let’s get started...

 

 

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From the book...

 

Anaïs Blue hated her name.

Not the first part. She thought the name Anaïs was kind of cool. It had something mysterious about it. It was different. It was foreign. It made her feel important. It was very close to its more common counterpart, the name Anna, but unusual enough to be special. She was secretly proud to carry the name Anaïs and completely content with being its bearer. It was the name Blue that she had a problem with.

Firstly, she hated the colour itself. She didn’t think it was beautiful. She couldn’t stand the sight of it and, worst of all, it was everywhere. When she looked up, it was there; when she looked through glass, everything was tinted with it; when she went to the beach, it was as far as she could see. She hated it because it was inescapable. It was too ordinary. As with her first name, she liked things to be different. Blue was too common. She preferred the colour purple.

Anaïs would have painted the sky purple. Which, incidentally, it was on occasions. However, occasionally wasn’t enough. It had to be all the time. It had to be permanent. Everything blue should be replaced with purple. She would have truckloads of it dumped into the ocean. She would have skywriters spray the heavens with it. She would have blue barred from the planet. She was even willing to live with an excess of green to get it done. And green was her second-most-hated colour. But if she had to make a choice, she would live in a world that was entirely green rather than in this blue-green one.

Her greatest frustration was that she did have the power to change things. She was a witch. She was capable of the most amazing things. She could change people into animals and vice versa. Or, at least, give them the impression it was happening. She could make huge objects disappear. Once she had taken the Empire State Building and put it smack-bang in the middle of London. People were surprised. That was until her caretaker made her put it back and flush the memories of those who had seen it. But the one thing she wanted above all others eluded her. It was an enormous disappointment to her that she didn’t have the power to change colour.

Her number one goal was to find the incantation or potion with which to do that. She had tried all the avenues open to her. She had done extensive research and experimented with various concoctions. She had attempted to make contact with those who were more experienced. All to no avail.

She had only found one way to do it. Colours could be changed on an individual basis. So to achieve her goal she would have to personally cast a spell on every living thing on the planet. Casting the spell was not the problem; that was easy. In fact, it was one of the most basic spells. Even the most inexperienced novice could cast the spell to make someone see something in a different colour . Casting it en masse was beyond her capabilities. The best she had achieved was at a Rolling Stones concert. Fifty thousand people was a special achievement. But it was a long way off her ultimate goal. It was also a hollow victory, as most of the audience were already seeing purple anyway.

The problem was that she couldn’t do it physically. Nor could she make it permanent. She couldn’t get rid of one colour and replace it with another. This was especially the case with purple, as it depended entirely on the colour blue for its own existence. So she had shifted her focus to something within her realm of influence. She decided to change her surname.

She thought this was doable. It was what had made her dislike the colour blue so excessively in the first place. She really wanted to be Anaïs Purple. She secretly hoped that if she started with her name then perhaps everything else would fall into place.

There was one problem, of which she was unaware. She was soon to find out: witches have a special relationship with their names. Put simply, it’s complicated.

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