‘You need Band-Aid,’ one of them said instead.
‘More . . . more than a Band-Aid,’ I managed.
‘We carry you to Gaela,’ said the other banshee. ‘She make you better.’
I tried to warn them that Titania might have more revenge to wreak. Nor could even a selkie heal the damage from my torn-off wings. But they lifted me in their furry, foggy arms, surprisingly warm for creatures of the night.
I had been cast from Fairyland forever. I had lost my wings. I might even lose my life. But the banshees were right. Gaela was all that I needed.
The world jolted around me as the banshees carried me along the pier. The waves crashed onto the sand. Sunrise was a small bright ripple on the horizon. Would I ever see another?
Far, far off, as if in a dream, I heard a fairy chant. Oberon’s voice:
‘Through the house give glimmering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire.
Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from briar.
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippingly.’
Now Titania sang the traditional fairy ending for Midsummer’s Eve, as brightly and happily as if a fairy called Peaseblossom had never rudely interrupted her revels.
‘First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note.
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.’
Oberon’s baritone joined her for the last verse. I imagined all the fairies gathered there, about to carry out the final duties of Midsummer’s Eve. But I would never join them again.
‘Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be.’
The King and Queen were commanding the children of Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, Moth and Flossie to be happy. And what Their Majesties commanded must be done. I was the only fairy who had ever stood against them.
‘With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait.
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.’
Oberon’s deep voice completed the chant:
‘Trip away; make no stay;
Meet me all by break of day.’
The Midsummer’s Eve revels were ended. It has all ended, I thought. But at least I was ending where I belonged . . .
I heard a door open. The scent of pizza crust, of melted cheese and tomato sauce — a slightly different tomato sauce — greeted me. And the scent of seaweed.
‘Pete!’ whispered Gaela.
‘He need bed,’ said one of the banshees.
‘No, I’ll bleed all over it,’ I murmured, trying to focus to see Gaela’s face.
Then I felt her hands, her strong pizza-maker’s fingers, somehow still with a hint of seal fur.
‘In here,’ she told the banshees.
And I felt sheets, a pillow. I wondered why, for surely selkies slept in the waves. But I could see nothing, only mist.
Then even the mist was gone.
CHAPTER 17
I woke alone. No, not alone. The delicious smells of baking pizza were all around me, and the song of the waves splashing in and pulling out below the wooden planks of the pier.
An orange and white cat rose from the end of the bed, stared at me expressionlessly, stretched, then jumped down and padded out the door.
Three seconds later Gaela appeared.
She looked . . . different. No more sack-like dress. No more hair pulled back in a businesslike ponytail. She wore blue silk trousers that billowed around her legs and were patterned with shells and fish, and her shirt was coral pink, the pattern almost too faint to see. Her glorious hair swung loose about her, as if still washed by ocean tides. One hand held a plate of pizza, the other a potion bottle. It looked familiar.
‘Time for your next dose,’ she said.
I looked at the flask suspiciously. ‘Did an elderly fairy in a blue doublet with gravy stains bring that?’
She nodded. ‘He brought a note too. It says to give you a sip of potion every hour and to rub a little on your back.’
‘And I’ve been sipping it?’
She nodded. ‘Even when you were asleep.’
What trick was Puck playing now? Was this enchantment to draw me back to Fairyland?
Then I realised the pain in my back was just a mutter, not a scream. I wriggled my fingers, then my toes, wrinkled my nose, then felt around to make sure other vital bits of me were still there. They were.
I was whole. And probably not quite human. But I was no longer a fairy either.
‘Thank you, Great-Grandpa,’ I muttered, and thought I heard a fairy chuckle. The old man had come through for me in the end.
I sat up cautiously, then leaned back on the pillows. They smelled of seaweed and sunlight with the faintest sweetest scent of perfect pizza dough.
Gaela sat on the bed next to me and watched as I sipped the potion, then bit into the pizza.
‘Mushroom and three cheeses,’ she said, then grinned. ‘No anchovies.’
‘Actually, I might get to like anchovies after we’re married,’ I said. ‘You . . . you will marry me, won’t you?’ I added anxiously.
Because of course I had never said . . . and she had never told me . . .
‘Of course I’ll marry you, idiot,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ I said.
‘Took you long enough to say it.’
‘You should have tied me up with seaweed out in the ocean till I did.’
‘Are we going to argue like this all our lives?’ she asked, smiling.
‘Probably. Are you going to keep trying to make me eat anchovies?’
‘At least once a year, on our anniversary,’ she promised.
We sat there grinning at each other for a while, till the room filled with the smoke of burning pizza and she dashed out to the oven. The cats were going to get lucky.
I’d eaten all the pizza and was lying down again by the time she came back.
‘No great loss,’ she said. ‘Just a trial of apricot and cream cheese pizza. I’ll experiment again when I have time to concentrate. But not today.’
‘Not today,’ I repeated, reaching up to kiss her.
My world had cracked apart today, but her smile could steady the universe. Yes, I thought vaguely, I really could get to love the taste of anchovies . . .
After a while I asked, ‘Where are we?’
‘An island off Australia. They’ve never had a pizza shop here before. They make excellent local cheeses, and the sea serpent still brings me anchovies. The tomatoes they grow here are good too.’
‘The sauce smells different.’
‘Garlic,’ said Gaela smugly. ‘Lots and lots of garlic. The island grows that too. Purple garlic, white garlic, red garlic, fermented black garlic. They even have a garlic festival each year. There isn’t a vampire around here for a thousand miles.’
Plus an island would have lots of beach, and maybe even a few shipwrecked sailors to rescue if she felt like a holiday. I should study CPR so I could help her.
‘What’s the new shop called?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t been able to think of a name. Guyye suggested the last one.’
‘How about Pizza Amore?’
‘Perfect,’ she said, and kissed me again.
The universe grew better still.
CHAPTER 18
Hippolyta died only ten years after her and Theseus’s wedding, fighting side by side with her husband, defending Athens from another invasion. She loved Theseus till her last breath, and l
eft him a son, Hippolytus. Theseus was driven mad with grief by her death. When his son died too, as a young man, Theseus threw himself off a rock, into the sea. Puck had been right. Theseus and Hippolyta had loved each other all their lives, though that love meant their lives were shorter than they might have been. Yet if I hadn’t used the love potion on them, one of them would have died there on the plain of Athens, or even both. At least they had a few years of deep happiness together.
I expect Polchis knew love too. You’ll find him in the history books: his father made him king of his own sub-nation. The books don’t say if Polchis married, but a powerful werowance like him might have had several wives. I can’t go back in time these days, so I have no way of telling for sure, but I suspect Polchis had a rich and fulfilled life, even if his people would soon face defeat and anguish. We have what we have, and must delight in every second of our joy while it lasts.
Nor do I know what happened to Demetrius and Helena. I’d like to think that Helena made Demetrius take the garbage out, do the washing, take the kids to the park each Sunday afternoon and rub her feet each evening. But they’d have had slaves to do all that, of course. I am sure Hermia and Lysander were happy. I hope they moved to live near Lysander’s aunt, and Hermia never had to look at her father’s sour face again. I bet she made Lysander honeyed baklava every Saturday, and even when they were ninety-four he still picked the first daphne flowers for her each year and told her she was more beautiful than their scent, and believed it.
A man called Shakespeare wrote a play about them all four or five thousand years later. One of our kids brought it home from school. It’s not bad. I don’t know how Shakespeare knew about Puck, but he features in it too. Puck gets around; maybe he and Shakespeare shared an ale or two at the Black Bear. Or maybe Puck led Shakespeare astray in the wood one night and whispered him a story in the dark.
Shakespeare even put me in his play, though I only had a few lines, and there was nothing about Gaela, the Fairy Floss, the banshees or pizza. But he mostly got it right.
We’re still here, me and Gaela, at Pizza Amore. Gaela still enchants everyone who meets her. I’m used to it now.
Most of her old customers from the Leaning Tower of Pizza found us again. They come to the island for holidays each year, and enjoy the sand and surf and large amounts of pizza and ice cream.
The banshees make the ice cream, though they employ humans to serve the customers. There are no traditional banshee jobs any more. No one hears a banshee’s song because everyone has the TV on, or they’re distracted by their mobiles, and their windows are shut for the air-conditioning. ‘Banshee Delight’ is great ice cream, almost as good as my ‘Passionfruit Supreme’. The table in the corner of Pizza Amore is permanently booked for four each Sunday night, because the banshees have two kids now. They’re cute in a black fuzzy way, and they all love anchovies.
Our pizzas are still the best in the universe, and each one is rich with garlic. Gaela sautés the garlic cloves in olive oil till the harshness vanishes and there’s only a subtle sweetness, but it’s still enough to stop any vampire coming near Pizza Amore — or even getting too close to any of our customers for a long time afterwards.
It turns out that four hundred years of mixing potions is a great preparation for learning to cook. Apple pizza is still on the menu, but you should try my caramelised oranges with passionfruit ice cream (the secret ingredient is the orange blossom), or double chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. As for the hazelnut pavlova with cherries and choc fudge drizzle, Puck says it’s the best dessert in ten millennia. He always has two helpings.
Puck visits every few years. It’s good to see him, though I suspect he doesn’t tell anyone in Fairyland where he’s going. No point attracting attention. He trades gossip for pavlova and an artichoke and potato pizza, hold the cheese.
It feels right now, being Pete. We’re even franchised.
No longer having wings means I can’t circle the earth in forty milliseconds any more. I miss hovering on moonlight, but I’m still fast enough to deliver a pizza before the second note of ‘Love Me Tender’. I’m still (sort of) immortal too, at least till the sun swallows our solar system.
Our eldest daughter, Bianca, was born with fairy wings, but we’ve cautioned her to keep them hidden till she’s eighteen and has a better idea of what she wants from life. If she has a hankering for the Fairy Court, I’m sure Puck will take her under his wings, but just now she wants to be an astronaut.
The twins, Remi and Jade, are selkie, at least at night when we go swimming as a family, Gaela holding me by the hand, and the twins leading Bianca. They’ve rescued sixteen sailors already, plus a kid who fell off the rocks while fishing. The island’s Emergency Services gave them medals for each rescue. We’ve pinned the medals up on the café wall, along with Bianca’s school prizes for her portraits of her Great-Great-Grandpa Puck.
We chose our lives, Gaela and I, chose to be together, but it hasn’t all been easy. Real life never is.
Gaela still hopes that maybe one day her parents, her brother or her sister, or some old selkie friend might call in to the island, even just to see our kids. But it hasn’t happened yet.
The ripped flesh on my back may have healed, but the scars ache in cold weather. Sometimes I dream that I’m flying in and out of misty clouds, or hovering through time, and wake up smelling chocolate. Other times I wish I could drop in at Fairyland for a Dew Brew with Cobweb, or to see how Mustardseed is going; or I wonder what Moth is messing up, and how.
There are hassles when the flour isn’t delivered, or the cheese goes mouldy; and days so cold the frost eats at your bones, or so sultry that you wish your too-solid flesh would melt. There’s global warming, earthquakes, bushfires, traffic jams and wars: Gaela and I are part of it all now.
I could fix most of those problems just by squeezing some flower juice into the eyes of the politicians, so they decide to save a forest or a coral reef, or an island that’s gradually vanishing under water, taking away its people’s home. But I don’t.
‘Use it or lose it,’ Puck used to tell me when I first learned to fly. He was talking about my wings, but it applies to freedom too. Most humans are free to choose how to live, and where and why, but how many of them really do?
If you don’t fight for your freedoms, you may never have them; or notice that they’re gone till it’s too late.
But I don’t go on about all this to our customers. They’re here for pizza, not a lecture on free will. And I’m just a pizza-maker now, with flour under his fingernails.
Great-Grandpa Puck says it best, really:
‘If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
Give me your hands, and we’ll be friends,
True love shall restore amends.’
AUTHOR’S NOTES
I never used to like Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It made me uneasy. I only recently realised why. Only royalty has free will in that play. Hermia must die or become a nun; Demetrius believes he’s entitled to a bride who doesn’t want him; the human boy in Fairyland has no name; and no one wonders how Bottom feels after his night with a mysteriously enchanting woman. It is a play about those with power abusing it and using it for the most trivial ends.
But at last I realised that may indeed be exactly what Shakespeare intended. He wrote his plays under two absolute rulers: Queen Elizabeth I, who was wise as well as capricious; and James I, who was only sometimes wise, and also extremely superstitious and mostly mad. Criticising either of them was a way to end up with your head on a pike.
In Elizabethan times, your religion was prescribed by the Crown, as were the colour and fabrics you were allowed to wear according to your rank in life. Even what you ate had rules: meat only on certain days, fish on others, no eggs or dairy during Lent, and many other rules. Or, rather, laws, for if you broke th
em you faced major fines, imprisonment or death.
Was A Midsummer Night’s Dream the only way Shakespeare could criticise the capriciousness of his country’s rulers; and a world in which a glover’s son, like him, was supposed to become a glover, not a playwright or a gentleman? A world that made him suffer when he succeeded at last in going his own way?
This book, too, is about free will. Freedom can be given, or it can be taken. But once you have it, use it and defend it, or you may find it vanishes like a fairy overnight.
Gaela’s Poem
The poem Gaela quotes is ‘The Forsaken Merman’ by Matthew Arnold. It was one of my three favourites as a child, along with Tennyson’s poems ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Break, Break, Break’.
I recited ‘Break, Break, Break’ in my first year at school to a slightly astonished teacher instead of a nursery rhyme. Never underestimate a child’s love of words, or the song of poetry or story.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Unless an idea bites my neck at 2 am and won’t let go — which does happen — this is the last book in the Shakespeare series that began with I am Juliet, then Ophelia: Queen of Denmark and Third Witch, with a detour to The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman, where I offered reasonable evidence that Shakespeare faked his death.
I’m vaguely tempted by The Tempest from Caliban’s point of view, but not enough to glue myself to my computer. Portia is tempting, but argues her own case far better than I could. I am intrigued by Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, but Shakespeare departs so far from history that if I write about their times, I’d rather do it free from the need to stick to Shakespeare’s text.
My love affair with Shakespeare’s work began with the sonnets as a child, then Romeo and Juliet in adolescence, and even survived the close textual study of Hamlet and Henry V in high school, mostly because of a brilliant English teacher, Mrs Gillian Pauli, who swept us into a love of the words rather than boredom. Macbeth captured me when I played Third Witch in a semi-professional production — the director and main players were paid. We witches were not, but I learned far more than lines from that production, including how heavy a broadsword is, and quite how much a play’s meaning may be changed by an actor’s or director’s interpretation of a role.
My Name is Not Peaseblossom Page 13
