Some Kind of Fairy Tale Page 9

  “When do we reach the crossing?” I asked at last.

  “The crossing? Oh, we’ve done that.”

  “We did? When? When did we do the crossing?”

  “Back there a ways.”

  I didn’t recall any crossing. I asked him about it again.

  “Good God, woman, you do ask a lot of questions!”

  It was only when we were coming out of the woods, with the sun completely gone and the moon coming up, that I realized I wasn’t going to be home that night. It’s not that I wanted to turn around, but I suddenly felt uneasy about Mum and Dad and how they would be worried about me. I needed to get a message to them. I thought, as soon as we pass a house in this remote place I’ll knock on the door and give them the number and ask if they would please phone and tell them that I’m fine.

  The moon went behind some clouds and we emerged from the wood to find not houses but a shadowy, sandy beach. The quartz in the sand twinkled in the half-light with an electrical intensity. I was astonished. I couldn’t believe we had come so far east or west, but when I made some comment he said no, it wasn’t the sea, but a lake. I peered across the water, trying to discern the farther side. In the morning, he said, in the morning I would be able to see all around the lake. And it was true: I could see tiny lights burning here and there out on the water, which I took to be the reflections of dwellings on the far side of the lake.

  The water was deep calm, like a layer of oil, but with a sweet, honest odor of mud and weeds. We trailed along the edge of the lake for perhaps half a mile, and soon we came to a large ramshackle house all in darkness.

  “Look, I share this place with others, but there shouldn’t be anyone here just now.”

  The horse came to a stop. He jumped off and then he helped me down. Everything he did for me was like a little display of chivalry. At first I thought it was a performance, to charm the pants off me, but it was no act; it was his way. He smiled at me briefly and then led the mare into a small stable at the side of the house. I followed. Once inside, he whisked the blanket off the horse and threw it over a bar. Then he picked up a dandy brush.

  “Let me,” I said, taking the brush from him, and I began to brush down the horse.

  He watched me carefully. “You know about horses.”

  “Yes.”

  “A woman who knows about horses. Can I marry you?”

  I laughed but when I looked back he wasn’t smiling. I finished brushing and then I ran my hand down the mare’s leg, squeezing the fetlock a little, and the animal easily showed me her hoof. “But she’s not shod,” I said.

  “I don’t ride on the road,” he said dismissively. “And those farriers that you see around, well, they’re like thieves. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  Well, it was a bit of a mess.

  There was no electricity. “Wouldn’t have it in the house. Makes people go crackers,” he said.

  Sometimes I didn’t know whether or not he was joking. “It might make you crackers or it might not,” I countered, “but you can see your way.”

  “We have light.”

  An old-fashioned brass oil lamp stood on the kitchen table. He lit the wick and rolled a brass wheel to bring up the flame, then lit a second, which he took through to the living room; I thought it was a living room, but there were a couple of mattresses with coverlets dumped alongside the walls and with long, thin pillows so they could be used as beds. The walls were covered with paintings and wood carvings and musical instruments: unusual musical instruments, as if they’d been collected from exotic countries. I instantly thought about Richie, but just as quickly I let go of the thought.

  But the cobwebs! Even in the shadows I could see the cobwebs stretching between some of the wall-mounted paintings and instruments. Anyway, I thought, there hasn’t been a woman’s hand turned here for a good while.

  I looked round for the telephone. I had a cock-and-bull story in my head that I was going to tell Mum and Dad, about running into an old girlfriend whose parents had a caravan by the sea. I was going to tell them we’d gone there on the spur of the moment. I could carry it off, I was certain.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “Phone?”

  “I’ve got to call my parents. They’ll worry about me if I don’t.”

  “There is no phone.”

  My heart stuttered. “No phone! Who the hell doesn’t have a phone?”

  “I’m sorry. We rejected all that sort of stuff.”

  “But isn’t there one in the village? There has to be a phone!”

  “Village? We’re nowhere near a village. Look, is it important?”

  “Of course! I have to let them know I’m fine.”

  “Tara, how old are you, darling?”

  “Fifteen, nearly sixteen.”

  His face crashed. “Fifteen! Fifteen! Yes, now I see the problem. Now I see it. Well. Oh, dear, oh, dear.” Suddenly this man who looked so vital and youthful in the bluebell wood looked fatigued and careworn. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. It was a mistake. I was spirited away.”

  Spirited away. Did he mean by me? But I was thinking practically. “Isn’t there a phone in one of the other houses? What about those across the lake?”

  “No. None of them. I told you we reject all that.”

  “But how do you pass messages? Across distances, I mean.”

  “Letters. Word of mouth.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “I’m going to have to take you back, aren’t I?” he said sadly.

  I thought about it. Riding back through the dark—if that were possible—and turning up at maybe four o’clock in the morning; or staying over and returning to face the music in the daylight. Either way, it was going to be rough when I got home. “Can you ride in the dark?” I asked.

  “That’s possible. Why do you ask?”

  “Because maybe we should go back at once.”

  “At once,” he cried. “We can’t go at once. We can’t make the crossing tonight!”

  “Well, when can we?”

  He sighed and blinked at me as if he was only now seeing me for the first time. He shook his head sadly, then grabbed the oil lamp, carrying it across to a cupboard. The cupboard was crammed with old books and rolled charts, antique charts of the kind you might expect to find in the captain’s cabin aboard a great sailing ship. He took one of these down and brought it to the table. I could see it was made not of paper but of a kind of beautiful creamy vellum. He unrolled it and placed the oil lamp on one side to hold it down. Securing the other end with his hand, he pored over the map.

  All I could see were beautiful hand-drawn pictures of the phases of the moon. There were also exquisite half-tinted sketches at each corner of the chart, cherubic depictions of the four winds, their cheeks puffed, blowing gales. The chart itself looked complicated, with busy numerical columns inked in black. He ran his finger across a line of numbers. “Here,” said. “That’s the earliest time we will be able to make the crossing.”

  “When is that?” I asked.

  “Six months’ time,” he said.

  So I stayed there with him until the six months were up. And at the first opportunity I came back. That was just before Christmas. And I found that for the rest of you, twenty years had gone by.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was during the eighteenth century that William Shakespeare was reconceived as a child-like genius, an idiot savant, partly because he broke the rules of Tragedy, but also because he wrote his plays prior to any cultural consensus that informative obedience to ascertainable reality ultimately told us more about our human experience of the world we inhabited than any myth or fairy tale or fabulation could possibly do.

  JOHN CLUTE

  From the dining room Amber could see her father’s battered pickup truck turning in to the front yard. “Dad’s back,” she called.

  “Has he got Tara with him?” Genevieve wanted to know.

  “No. Wa
it. He looks pretty cross.”

  “Really?” Genevieve hurried through to the dining room and peered out the window. She’d spent half the day cooking and baking. Tara had been invited to have tea with them. It was supposed to have been a family evening when everyone could get to know Tara without Dell and Mary refereeing, commenting on, or gatekeeping every remark and every response to every remark. Meanwhile, the expression on Peter’s face was as easy to read as the headline on a tabloid newspaper. “Oh.”

  She opened the door for him. He raised an eyebrow at her and squeezed into the hall.

  “Did you see Aunt Tara?” said Amber.

  “You bet I did.” Peter shucked off his coat. Then he kicked off his shoes and tried to embed them in the overflowing shoe basket, but they fell to the floor. He sighed, tried again, failed.

  “I like Aunty Tara,” Josie said, “even if she does smell funny.”

  “Good,” said Peter. “And it’s patchouli oil. Now, could you kids all go into the living room while I have a chat with Mummy?”

  “I want to hear,” said Josie.

  “No, you don’t. It’s boring.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she shouted back. “It’s interesting. Isn’t it Amber? Isn’t it interesting?”

  “Go!”

  Peter didn’t say go very often, so when he did the kids knew it was time to go. He went into the kitchen and reached up for a bottle of cognac from the cupboard, spinning the cap. He poured himself a careful measure. “Want one?”

  “No,” said Genevieve, closing the kitchen door and leaning her back against it. “Where is she?”

  “I whipped her back to Mum and Dad’s.”

  “Whipped her?”

  Peter sat at the kitchen table and took a slug of his cognac. Then he put down his glass. “Fuck and a half.”

  “Like that, eh?”

  “I dragged her back to Mum and Dad’s and I told Dad to ask her to repeat the same story she’d told me. Then I told Dad that if he wanted to strangle her, I’d cheerfully dig the shallow grave.”

  “Whoooo!”

  “You bet it’s fucking whooo.”

  Genevieve opened the door to check that no one was listening on the other side. Then she closed the door again and joined Peter at the table. “It was always going to be whooo, wasn’t it?”

  “Not this much whooo.”

  Genevieve didn’t ask him to expand. She propped an elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand, patiently waiting until he was ready to tell her.

  “The fairies took her.”

  She blinked. It was a long blink. He nodded.

  “The fairies.”

  “Well, she took a couple of hours to tell me, but it was as simple as that in the end.”

  “And you said …?”

  “I said: ‘Oh, if that’s all it was, don’t worry, you’re back now, safe and sound, and this evening we’re having lasagna.’ That’s what I said.”

  “I think I will have a drink. To celebrate the existence of the little people.”

  “Oh, they are not little.”

  “Really?”

  “No. And they don’t have wings. And you can mistake them for ordinary people. Apparently.”

  “Do you know, I’m seriously worried about the gene pool I married into. How did you leave things?”

  “At a certain point in the story I marched her back to the car, bundled her in, and drove back to Mum and Dad’s place. All the way in silence. That was some journey.”

  The door burst open and Josie ran in. She had a wet finger in her mouth. “I’ve got a wobbly tooth!” she shouted, fingering a little canine near the front of her mouth.

  “Come here and let me see,” Genevieve said. “When it comes out we’ll put it under the pillow.”

  “Oh, yes,” Peter said. “We’ll tell your aunt Tara to alert her friends.”

  Josie put her mouth very close to Peter’s face and wobbled her tooth. He poured himself another glass of cognac and ran a hand through his daughter’s hair.

  RICHIE ANSWERED THE DOOR to Peter in a long threadbare dressing gown. “Second visit in a couple o’ days. The neighbors will be talking.”

  There was a bottle of milk on the doorstep. Peter picked it up and brought it inside. Richie closed the door after him.

  “You look like shit,” Peter said. “Make some coffee, will you?”

  “You do it. I don’t feel too good.”

  Richie slumped on his sofa and sparked up a cigarette. Peter put the milk in the fridge and noticed it was empty except for a jar of jam and another half-empty milk bottle. He filled the kettle, lit the gas stove, and made a quick survey of the state of the kitchen. It all reminded him of the houses he used to share with other young men when he was at university. Richie didn’t seem to have moved on in all that time.

  “Sugar? ”

  “Lots,” Richie said. “Three, at least.”

  Peter waited until the kettle boiled. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something dart under the fridge. He made two cups of instant coffee and winced at each spoonful of Richie’s sugar. Then he took it through to the living room, where Richie sprawled, displaying the cracked toenails of his bare feet by resting them on the arm of the leather sofa.

  “Been on a bender?”

  “No.”

  “Really? You look like you’ve got a wicked hangover.” He moved a guitar aside so he could lower himself into an armchair.

  “I’ve been getting these terrible headaches. Can’t sleep a wink.”

  “Seen the doctor?”

  “No. It’s only just come on these past couple of weeks.” He slurped the hot coffee and made a face.

  “You’re going to want to see Tara at some point. And even if you don’t want to see her, she’s threatening to come and see you. I thought I’d warn you about the state she’s in. She’s like a bag lady. I mean, her head is all over the place.”

  “It always was.”

  “Not like this.” Peter gave him the story in shorthand. He suggested that Richie get the details from Tara herself.

  Richie held his cigarette to his lips, thinking about it. “How does she look?”

  “You know, in a certain light she doesn’t look any different. And I mean no different at all. Then when you look at her in another light she looks kind of … cobwebby. Like her brain is full of cobwebs. Hey, are you okay?”

  Richie was wincing. “I think this coffee is making my headache worse.”

  Peter told Richie that Tara, not knowing Richie was still at his parents’ old house, had asked him for Richie’s address but that he’d withheld it. He’d wanted to check that Richie was prepared to see her. Though he felt it was only a matter of time before she found out, and that if she was anything like the Tara of old nothing would have stopped her from coming to say her piece.

  They talked for a while about Richie’s music. His checkered career. He dug out a CD. Peter could tell from the printed paper inside the jewel case that it was pretty much a homemade project, and he wondered where all that talent had burned away. Though Peter had played, too, he always knew he never had the flair that would lift him up into the stratosphere. Richie had it. It just never happened for him. Peter had maintained a hobby interest, but sometimes a whole year might pass without him picking up his drumsticks. Zoe strummed her guitar more often than he rattled his skins. His playing belonged to his teenage years; he had put all his ambitions away, as if they were a childish thing.

  But Richie was different. Back then, Richie was burning with it. Angry, headstrong, in-your-face, like a lot of people, but all that rage resolved in clean composition and strong, simple lyrics. It should have worked out for him; he should have made it. But something happened that just deflected him a single degree or so from the trajectory or flight that nature had intended. His was a talent that had burned in the darkness and had gone out in the darkness.

  Session work for the studios was good for several years, but that had dried up when Richie had failed to sh
ow up for a couple of bookings. It was okay for millionaire pop stars to be belligerent assholes and to fall over drunk, but for working musicians—real musicians—rock and roll had very little to do with it. You put in the hours and you played for pay, and you had to count your coin at the end of the job like any office or factory jack. Richie admitted he was broke but, he pointed out, he was still writing songs after twenty years, and that counted for something.

  “I am so fucking sorry we doubted you, Richie. So sorry.”

  Richie waved a hand through the air, but there was a tremble in its flight. “It’s an old hurt. I was angry, I admit.”

  “It’s unforgivable. What we did.”

  “Look, anyone at that time would have suspected me. It was the only sensible explanation. There was even a time back then, you know, when the police were questioning me, when I had to ask myself if I really had killed her. They had me pretty close to a confession, you know. Did you know that?”

  Peter just nodded. He was feeling deeply ashamed. His lack of faith had lost him a great friend in life and he knew this was a noisy, angry clock that could neither be put back nor muted.

  “I will see Tara at some point,” Richie said. “I will. And there’s another thing maybe you can help me with. I’d like to see your mum and dad. Just to look them in the eye, Pete. Not to say anything, not to be saying cruel words. I’m past that. But just to look them in the eye as if to say: See, I told you I was telling the truth.”

  “We abandoned you,” Peter said. “We just abandoned you.”

  “It was hard, I don’t mind saying. Your mum and dad were closer to me and kinder to me than my own parents ever were. You know that. It was hard.”