Great Aunt Sue was very tall, had shoulder length curls of mist, and her wrinkles were invisibly sewn into her withered skin.   She always wore the same straight style cardigan, pleated skirt, and skin coloured thick tights with doll carpet shoes.  She looked like a very dull and unwelcoming elderly woman.
The first time my eyes set sight on her my hands were shaking with fear.  I was sitting on a chair with my hands in my lap fiddling with a toy car that I had stolen from my younger brother Samuel.  My attention was so engaged at the time with making the wheels turn on the little red car and running it along my thighs that I only noticed her presence when a shadow appeared before me.  I dropped the car and gripped my hands together to hide the shaking and gulped hard.  Looking up to see her gloomy figure crowding over me, I shrank back into my chair. 
“Hello Daisy,” She said softly.  
“Hello.” I replied in almost a whisper as she had the affect that if you pronounced one syllable incorrectly or that you made one false move she would somehow punish you in no way imaginable.  She was disturbing in that way.
“You have simply golden hair, and aren’t you tall!” She exclaimed stroking my hair but more ruffling it so I looked like a new born chick.  I wasn’t exactly tall and how would she know since I was sitting down?  
“Thank you,” I smiled anxiously.  
“Would you like a present?” She asked sitting down beside me in the vacant seat.  A present?  I wasn’t going to pass on that.  I always liked presents.  Presents were always wrapped nicely in shiny decorative paper, and inside there would be a necklace or a watch or a teddy bear which afterwards you’d always carry everywhere with you.  I remember getting this cream bear, soft as silk, with a red and green striped scarf for my sixth birthday. Yet it was not my birthday, or Christmas so I wondered what wonderful occasion my present was for.  I was not going to refuse, of course, because that would be rude.
“Yes please,” I grinned, her presence not so alarming since she offered the present.  She handed me a small box wrapped in shiny pale yellow and an orange ribbon tied in a bow.  I took the box and placed it in my lap.  I undid the ribbon carefully as to not spoil it and tenderly took the lid of the box off.  There was yellow tissue paper inside and scattered small silver balls the size of half a pea.  Once I had cautiously removed the tissue paper so as not to tear it, the present was revealed to me.  Inside this small box underneath the yellow tissue paper was what looked like a scarecrow.  I peered at it tilting my head with a quizzical expression.  I picked it up with the utmost care and inspected my present.  I brought it very close to my face as if examining it with a magnifying glass.  When I looked closely I could see it wasn’t a scarecrow but a doll.  A doll made out of dried out straw.  The doll’s hair was from fragile thin twigs; its eyes gravel stones, and its main body straw.  I was so scared I was going to crush it that I placed it gently back into its box, leaving the box off so that it looked like I admired it.  I was about to tie the ribbon from the box round the doll but Great Aunt Sue stole the ribbon from my hands weaving it out of my fingers.  
“Do you like her?” She asked me blankly.  If she was referring to the doll as ‘she’ then I wasn’t sure.  I didn’t feel anything when the straw doll was in my hands, when I touched its hair.  It was just a present.  A meaningless thing.  Just some bits and bobs sewn together.
“Yes, I do.  Thank you again,” I lied.  I had to lie.  I wasn’t going to say I did not like it.  It was kind of my Great Aunt Sue to give me something, even if it wasn’t what presents should be.  I smiled at her again, with my fingers vibrating on the box hoping for my Great Aunt to disappear and torture someone else.  Eventually, she did.
I stared at the thing in the box trying to see if there was any beauty.  I could not find any trace of beauty.  It stared at me with those stone eyes, making me feel uncomfortable.  I looked away, and tried to study some of the guests.  I could see my mum in her pale pink frock laughing with a glass of red wine in her hand with an elderly man who, with an astonishingly long scruffy grey beard, I did not recognise. Swivelling my eyes across, I saw my brother crouched under the table with a pile of fairy cakes, dismantling the strawberry and lemon flavoured icing, and shoving it in his mouth.  All the time I was studying the room, I could sense the eyes belonging to the thing in the box on my lap watching me.  I felt like it was ghost, a spirit of some sort, who had invaded me and somehow we were bonded.
When I got home that evening I climbed on my wooden chair and pushed the box with the thing in it to the very back of the top shelf in my wardrobe.  I didn’t throw it away in case Great Aunt Sue would want to look at it.  I soon forgot about the doll.  It was just a present I had discarded.
That was when I got into this whole mess.  That’s how it began.  If only I hadn’t reluctantly accepted the present.