Mrs. Batterberry looked embarrassed, but relieved. “I’m sure you’ll be able to help.”
Meran had no such assurances, but Lesli’s mother was already on her feet and heading for the door, forestalling any attempt Meran might have mustered to back out of the situation. Mrs. Batterberry paused in the doorway and looked back.
“Thank you so much,” she said, and then she was gone.
Meran stared sourly at the space Mrs. Batterberry had occupied.
“Well, isn’t this just wonderful,” she said.
* * *
From Lesli’s diary, entry dated October 12th:
I saw another one today! It wasn’t at all the same as the one I spied on the Common last week. That one was more like a wizened little monkey, dressed up like an Arthur Rackham leprechaun. If I’d told anybody about him, they’d say that it was just a dressed-up monkey, but we know better, don’t we?
This is just so wonderful. I’ve always known they were there, of course. All around. But they were just hints, things I’d see out of the corner of my eye, snatches of music or conversation that I’d hear in a park or the backyard when no one else was around. But ever since Midsummer’s Eve, I’ve actually been able to see them.
I feel like a birder, noting each new separate species I spot down here on your pages, but was there ever a birdwatcher that could claim to have seen the marvels I have? It’s like, all of a sudden, I’ve finally learned how to see.
This one was at the Old Firehall of all places. I was having my weekly lesson with Meran—I get two this week because she was out of town last week. Anyway, we were playing my new tune—the one with the arpeggio bit in the second part that I’m supposed to be practicing, but can’t quite get the hang of. It’s easy when Meran’s playing along with me, but when I try to do it on my own, my fingers get all fumbly and I keep muddling up the middle D.
I seem to have gotten sidetracked. Where was I? Oh yes. We were playing “Touch Me If You Dare” and it really sounded nice with both of us playing. Meran just seemed to pull my playing along with hers until it got lost in her music and you couldn’t tell which instrument was which, or even how many there were playing.
It was one of those perfect moments. I felt like I was in a trance or something. I had my eyes closed, but then I felt the air getting all thick. There was this weird sort of pressure on my skin, as though gravity had just doubled or something. I kept on playing, but I opened my eyes and that’s when I saw her—hovering up behind Meran’s shoulders.
She was the neatest thing I’ve ever seen— just the tiniest little faerie, ever so pretty, with gossamer wings that moved so quickly to keep her aloft that they were just a blur. They moved like a hummingbird’s wings. She looked just like the faeries on a pair of earrings I got a few years ago at a stall in the Market—sort of a Mucha design and all delicate and airy. But she wasn’t two-dimensional or just one colour.
Her wings were like a rainbow blaze. Her hair was like honey, her skin a soft-burnished gold. She was wearing—now don’t blush, diary—nothing at all on top and just a gauzy skirt that seemed to be made of little leaves that kept changing colour, now sort of pink, now mauve, now bluish.
I was so surprised that I almost dropped my flute. I didn’t—wouldn’t that give Mom something to yell at me for if I broke it!—but I did muddle the tune. As soon as the music faltered—just like that, as though the only thing that was keeping her in this world was that tune—she disappeared.
I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what Meran was saying for the rest of the lesson, but I don’t think she noticed. I couldn’t get the faerie out of my mind. I still can’t. I wish Mom had been there to see her, or stupid old Mr. Allen. They couldn’t say it was just my imagination then!
Of course they probably wouldn’t have been able to see her anyway. That’s the thing with magic. You’ve got to know it’s still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
After my lesson, Mom went in to talk to Meran and made me wait in the car. She wouldn’t say what they’d talked about, but she seemed to be in a way better mood than usual when she got back. God, I wish she wouldn’t get so uptight.
* * *
“So,” Cerin said finally, setting aside his book. Meran had been moping about the house for the whole of the hour since she’d gotten home from the Firehall. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“You’ll just say I told you so.”
“Told you so how?”
Meran sighed. “Oh, you know. How did you put it? ‘The problem with teaching children is that you have to put up with their parents.’ It was something like that.”
Cerin joined her in the window seat where she’d been staring out at the garden. He looked out at the giant old oaks that surrounded the house and said nothing for a long moment. In the fading afternoon light, he could see little brown men scurrying about in the leaves like so many monkeys.
“But the kids are worth it,” he said finally.
“I don’t see you teaching children.”
“There’s just not many parents that can afford a harp for their prodigies.”
“But still…”
“Still,” he agreed. “You’re perfectly right. I don’t like dealing with their parents; never did. When I see children put into little boxes, their enthusiasms stifled… Everything gets regimented into what’s proper and what’s not, into recitals and passing examinations instead of just playing—” he began to mimic a hoity-toity voice “—I don’t care if you want to play in a rock band, you’ll learn what I tell you to learn…”
His voice trailed off. In the back of his eyes, a dark light gleamed—not quite anger, more frustration.
“It makes you want to give them a good whack,” Meran said.
“Exactly. So did you?”
Meran shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, but it was almost as bad. No, maybe it was worse.”
She told her husband about what Lesli’s mother had asked of her, handing over the English essay when she was done so that he could read it for himself.
“This is quite good, isn’t it?” he said when he reached the end.
Meran nodded. “But how can I tell Lesli that none of it’s true when I know it is?”
“You can’t.”
Cerin laid the essay down on the windowsill and looked out at the oaks again. The twilight had crept up on the garden while they were talking. All the trees wore thick mantles of shadow now—poor recompense for the glorious cloaks of leaves that the season had stolen from them over the past few weeks. At the base of one fat trunk, the little monkey men were roasting skewers of mushrooms and acorns over a small, almost smokeless fire.
“What about Anna Batterberry herself?” he asked. “Does she remember anything?”
Meran shook her head. “I don’t think she even realizes that we’ve met before, that she changed, but we never did. She’s like most people; if it doesn’t make sense, she’d rather convince herself that it simply never happened.”
Cerin turned from the window to regard his wife.
“Perhaps the solution would be to remind her, then,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. It’d probably do more harm than good. She’s just not the right sort of person….”
Meran sighed again.
“But she could have been,” Cerin said.
“Oh, yes,” Meran said, remembering. “She could have been. But it’s too late for her now.”
Cerin shook his head. “It’s never too late.”
* * *
From Lesli’s diary, addendum to the entry dated October 12th:
I hate living in this house! I just hate it! How could she do this to me? It’s bad enough that she never lets me so much as breathe without standing there behind me to determine that I’m not making a vulgar display of myself in the process, but this really isn’t fair.
I suppose you’re wondering what I’m talking about. Well, remember that essay I did on ethnic
minorities for Mr. Allen? Mom got her hands on it and it’s convinced her that I’ve turned into a Satan-worshipping drug fiend. The worst thing is that she gave it to Meran and now Meran’s supposed to “have a talk with me to set me straight” on Thursday.
I just hate this. She had no right to do that. And how am I supposed to go to my lesson now? It’s so embarrassing. Not to mention disappointing. I thought Meran would understand. I never thought she’d take Mom’s side—not on something like this.
Meran’s always seemed so special. It’s not just that she wears all those funky clothes and doesn’t talk down to me and looks just like one of those Pre-Raphaelite women, except that she’s got those really neat green streaks in her hair. She’s just a great person. She makes playing music seem so effortlessly magical and she’s got all these really great stories about the origins of the tunes. When she talks about things like where “The Gold Ring” came from, it’s like she really believes it was the faeries that gave that piper the tune in exchange for the lost ring he returned to them. The way she tells it, it’s like she was there when it happened.
I feel like I’ve always known her. From the first time I saw her, I felt like I was meeting an old friend. Sometimes I think that she’s magic herself—a kind of oak-tree faerie princess who’s just spending a few years living in the Fields We Know before she goes back home to the magic place where she really lives.
Why would someone like that involve herself in my mother’s crusade against Faerie?
I guess I was just being naive. She’s probably no different from Mom or Mr. Allen and everybody else who doesn’t believe. Well, I’m not going to any more stupid flute lessons, that’s for sure.
I hate living here. Anything’d be better.
Oh, why couldn’t I just have been stolen by the faeries when I was a baby? Then I’d be there and there’d just be some changeling living here in my place. Mom could turn it into a good little robot instead. Because that’s all she wants. She doesn’t want a daughter who can think on her own, but a boring, closed-minded junior model of herself. She should have gotten a dog instead of having a kid. Dogs are easy to train and they like being led around on a leash.
I wish Granny Nell were still alive. She would never, ever have tried to tell me that I had to grow up and stop imagining things. Everything seemed magic when she was around. It was like she was magic—just like Meran. Sometimes when Meran’s playing her flute, I almost feel as though Granny Nell’s sitting there with us, just listening to the music with that sad wise smile of hers.
I know I was only five when she died, but lots of the time she seems more real to me that any of my relatives that are still alive.
If she were still alive, I could be living with her right now and everything’d be really great.
Jeez, I miss her.
* * *
Anna Batterberry was in an anxious state when she pulled up in front of the Kelledy house on McKennitt Street. She checked the street number that hung beside the wrought-iron gate where the walkway met the sidewalk, and compared it against the address she’d hurriedly scribbled down on a scrap of paper before leaving home. When she was sure that they were the same, she slipped out of the car and approached the gate.
Walking up to the house, the sound of her heels was loud on the walkway’s flagstones. She frowned at the thick carpet of fallen oak leaves that covered the lawn. The Kelledys had better hurry to clean them up, she thought. The city work crews would only be collecting leaves for one more week and they had to be neatly bagged and sitting at the curb for them to do so. It was a shame that such a pretty estate wasn’t treated better.
When she reached the porch, she spent a disorienting moment trying to find a doorbell, then realized that there was only the small brass door knocker in the middle of the door. It was shaped like a Cornish piskie.
The sight of it gave her a queer feeling. Where had she seen that before? In one of Lesli’s books, she supposed.
Lesli.
At the thought of her daughter, she quickly reached for the knocker, but the door swung open before she could use it. Lesli’s flute teacher stood in the open doorway and regarded her with a puzzled look.
“Mrs. Batterberry,” Meran said, her voice betraying her surprise. “Whatever are you—”
“It’s Lesli,” Anna said, interrupting. “She’s…she…”
Her voice trailed off as what she could see of the house’s interior behind Meran registered. A strange dissonance built up in her mind at the sight of the long hallway paneled in dark wood, the thick Oriental carpet on the hardwood floor, the old photographs and prints that hung from the walls. It was when she focused on the burnished metal umbrella stand, which was, itself, in the shape of a partially-opened umbrella, and the side table on which stood a cast-iron, grinning gargoyle bereft of its roof gutter home, that the curious sense of familiarity she felt delved deep into the secret recesses of her mind and connected with a swell of long-forgotten memories.
She put out a hand against the doorjamb to steady herself as the flood rose up inside her. She saw her mother-in-law standing in that hallway with a kind of glow around her head. She was older than she’d been when Anna had married Peter, years older, her body wreathed in a golden Botticelli nimbus, that beatific smile on her lips, Meran Kelledy standing beside her, the two of them sharing some private joke, and all around them…presences seemed to slip and slide across one’s vision.
No, she told herself. None of that was real. Not the golden glow, nor the flickering twig-thin figures that teased the mind from the corner of the eye.
But she’d thought she’d seen them. Once. More than once. Many times. Whenever she was with Helen Batterberry….
Walking in her mother-in-law’s garden and hearing music, turning the corner of the house to see a trio of what she first took to be children, then realized were midgets, playing fiddle and flute and drum, the figures slipping away as they approached, winking out of existence, the music fading, but its echoes lingering on. In the mind. In memory. In dreams.
“Faerie,” her mother-in-law explained to her, matter-of-factly.
Lesli as a toddler, playing with her invisible friends that could actually be seen when Helen Batterberry was in the room.
No. None of that was possible.
That was when she and Peter were going through a rough period in their marriage. Those sights, those strange ethereal beings, music played on absent instruments, they were all part and parcel of what she later realized had been a nervous breakdown. Her analyst had agreed.
But they’d seemed so real.
In the hospital room where her mother-in-law lay dying, her bed a clutter of strange creatures, tiny wizened men, small perfect women, all of them flickering in and out of sight, the wonder of their presences, the music of their voices, Lesli sitting wide-eyed by the bed as the courts of Faerie came to bid farewell to an old friend.
“Say you’re going to live forever,” Lesli had said to her grandmother.
“I will,” the old woman replied. “But you have to remember me. You have to promise never to close your awareness to the Otherworld around you. If you can do that, I’ll never be far.”
All nonsense.
But there in the hospital room with the scratchy sound of the IVAC pump, the clean white walls, the incessant beep of the heart monitor, the antiseptic sting in the air, Anna could only shake her head.
“None…none of this is real,” she said.
Her mother-in-law turned her head to look at her, an infinite sadness in her dark eyes.
“Maybe not for you,” she said sadly, “but for those who will see, it will always be there.”
And later, with Lesli at home, when just she and Peter were there, she remembered Meran coming into that hospital room, Meran and her husband, neither of them having aged since the first time Anna had seen them at her mother-in-law’s house, years, oh now years ago. The four of them were there when Helen Batterberry died. She and Peter had bent their heads o
ver the body at the moment of death, but the other two, the unaging musicians who claimed Faerie more silently, but as surely and subtly as ever Helen Batterberry had, stood at the window and watched the twilight grow across the hospital lawn as though they could see the old woman’s spirit walking off into the night.
They didn’t come to the funeral.
They—
She tried to push the memories aside, just as she had when the events had first occurred, but the flood was too strong. And worse, she knew they were true memories. Not the clouded rantings of a stressful mind suffering a mild breakdown.
Meran was speaking to her, but Anna couldn’t hear what she was saying. She heard a vague, disturbing music that seemed to come from the ground underfoot. Small figures seemed to caper and dance in the corner of her eye, humming and buzzing like summer bees. Vertigo gripped her and she could feel herself falling. She realized that Meran was stepping forward to catch her, but by then the darkness had grown too seductive and she simply let herself fall into its welcoming depths.
* * *
From Lesli’s diary, entry dated October 13th:
I’ve well and truly done it. I got up this morning and instead of my school books, I packed my flute and some clothes and you, of course, in my knapsack; and then I just left. I couldn’t live there anymore. I just couldn’t.
Nobody’s going to miss me. Daddy’s never home anyway and Mom won’t be looking for me—she’ll be looking for her idea of me and that person doesn’t exist. The city’s so big that they’ll never find me.
I was kind of worried about where I was going to stay tonight, especially with the sky getting more and more overcast all day long, but I met this really neat girl in Fitzhenry Park this morning. Her name’s Susan and even though she’s just a year older than me, she lives with this guy in an apartment in Chinatown. She’s gone to ask him if I can stay with them for a couple of days. His name’s Paul. Susan says he’s in his late twenties, but he doesn’t act at all like an old guy. He’s really neat and treats her like she’s an adult, not a kid. She’s his girlfriend!
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