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Sport 26: Autumn 2001
The Tale of Leeta Lapeeta
The Tale of Leeta Lapeeta
Thousands of years ago, while the pale races were rooting themselves to the ground with stone monuments, a dark people began building boats, launching themselves at the horizon, and making the ocean's islands their own.
On one of these islands a woman gave birth to a baby girl. page 38 This girl grew up and gave birth to another girl, who gave birth to another girl, and so on, through centuries of famines, fights, and journeys, until a girl was born on the winged sandal island, and for reasons that remain obscure, was bundled up in a scarlet blanket and abandoned.
A man was walking through the park on the heel of the winged sandal when, glowing through the fog, he saw a spot of red and heard tiny, rasping cries. He ran towards the artificial lake, and there bobbing against the jetty was a large toy boat, with a swaddled baby inside.
Her racial origins were strangely unclear. She could have been a native of the winged sandal island, but she could equally well have belonged to a race from one of the other nearby isles.
The police at the station named her Leeta, and gave her the surname Lapeeta after the original people from whom all the island races were descended.
No one came forward to claim tiny Leeta, so she went to live with a foster family. And then another, and another.
As she grew older, her features became increasingly unique and guessing at her ancestry only grew harder. Leeta herself was proud that she had as many possible pasts as futures.
When she was eighteen, she moved to the big city on the wingtip and took a job as a stripper. She was good at it and became highly paid. She used the money she made to play the sharemarket, and soon demonstrated a considerable talent for finance. After four years, she bought her own strip club, then turned it into a chain. After four more years, she sold the chain and became a major property owner, buying, renovating, renting and reselling shrewdly.
It wasn't long before she was the wealthiest woman on the island, writing columns, appearing on television and receiving constant invitations to open festivals. By then her life story had become a tabloid legend.
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