Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

  Tara was very smart, pretty, and intriguing, and she left a lot of people her own age and older way behind. She had a cool look about her: an unsettling calm, and nut-brown eyes that blinked with intense appraisal. She had her own effortless style and she was genuinely interested in other people at an age when most teenagers were passionately devoted only to themselves. Boys and girls were drawn to her, but she didn’t need them. She was a natural leader, but one who didn’t want any followers. Tara came across as someone with an agenda lodged elsewhere: a private agenda, mysterious and esoteric.

  It had been Peter who had introduced her to Richie Franklin, her boyfriend at the time of her disappearance. Peter and Richie had put together a rock-and-roll band, of sorts. Pete kept strict time on drums while Richie, with front-man ambitions on guitar, marshaled various hapless and mostly useless teenagers in and out of the band. Richie was someone who could forgive anyone for playing a wrong note, but not three.

  They allowed Tara to come with them to watch their band play in pubs, or to see other bands in clubs, to camp with them at rock festivals, to smoke a joint with them, to let her pretty face and shy smile help them gate-crash parties. She never cramped their style; on the contrary, without even knowing it her simple presence loaned them a radical and chic appeal that neither of the boys had naturally. She plugged them into something. If only she had a voice to go with it, Richie had said more than once.

  All of which made the loss of this fey but exciting creature doubly hard to bear at the time. After she’d gone from their lives many people repeated clichés about her being too beautiful for this world. It was said too often and by too many. She was nearly sixteen when she’d been spirited away. Or rather, as it now seemed, spirited herself away.

  At last there came the sound of a car horn, a double toot, Dell’s little signature of arrival, something he always did when he came visiting. And this time he would have with him not just Mary but also Tara, the now semi-legendary Tara, not, after all, a corpse rotting in some shallow woodland grave but living and breathing, and not, after all, too beautiful for this world but, in the blink of a lizard’s eye, a mere twenty years older without looking it.

  Peter sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

  “Come on,” Genevieve said. “Pull yourself together. Answer the door.”

  With a great heaviness like that of clanking chains, Peter pushed back his chair and hauled his large frame upright. He took a deep breath and made purposeful strides to the door, seizing the door handle at the same moment that a finger pressed the doorbell outside. The door stuck in the frame and he had to wrench it open, and there was Mary with bags stuffed full of Christmas gifts for the grandchildren she spoiled, and she was in, kissing his cheek, pushing past him. And there was Tara, again with that shy half-smile and her burgundy lips slightly puckered, that shy kink, an incomplete curlicue at the corner of her mouth; he’d seen it before many times but never noted it, and now it had him mesmerized. But his momentary trance was broken when they were propelled forward by Dell, bringing up the rear, going chuff chuff chuff.

  “Lovely cottage,” Tara said, kissing Peter.

  “It’s falling down. Come in and meet everyone.”

  “Is that door sticking again?” Dell said.

  And then they were all crowded in the tiny hallway, Dell and Mary taking off their coats, the kids all bug-eyed at the mysterious Tara, the dogs trying to leap up at Mary and Dell.

  “Tara,” said Peter, “this is Genevieve.”

  Tara stepped forward. She cupped a hand on either side of Genevieve’s face and gazed into her eyes. “I knew it,” she said. “Beautiful. I knew he would find someone absolutely beautiful.”

  Genevieve blushed. Away from Tara, Zoe looked at Jack and pointed a finger down her own throat. Genevieve was still trapped by Tara’s fingers resting lightly on her face. At last Tara dropped her hands and leaned in to press her lips to Genevieve’s cheek.

  “Let me take your coat,” Genevieve said.

  “So this is Zoe,” Peter said. “And here is Jack, and Amber and Josie.”

  “Hi, Zoe. Hi, Jack. Hi, Amber. Hi, Josie. I’m Tara.”

  “We already know that,” Josie said haughtily.

  Tara turned her smile on Josie, who instantly retreated behind the living room door.

  “Why do you wear dark glasses?” Amber said, reasonably.

  “I have something wrong with my eyes,” Tara said, and Amber seemed satisfied with that.

  Genevieve ushered Tara through to the living room and waved Mary and Dell through after her.

  “She’s tiny!” Gen whispered to Peter. “And so young-looking!”

  The next hour was taken up with the unwrapping of Mary and Dell’s gifts and the merciful small talk that went with it. Tara helped Josie get her package open and congratulated Jack on his ratting, since, she said, she hated rats. She complimented Zoe on her taste in clothes, and when Amber struggled to button up the new dressing gown her grandmother had brought for her she got down on her knees and buttoned it.

  Though the kids all seemed to regard Tara as something akin to a unicorn, she easily charmed them. Peter noted how naturally she did that. It was always thus, he remembered. Though no one else but himself and his parents—plus Richie occasionally—saw the moods that sometimes stood in counterpoint to that effortless ability. Yes, but there’s a shadow, he wanted to tell everyone.

  She’d scrubbed up well, too. He didn’t know how long she’d spent in the bath but she’d come up looking pink as a peeled prawn. All the grime had been washed away. Her hair had recovered its waves, and its chestnut sheen was there for all to admire as she tossed her head like a pony. The dirt had been scraped from under her fingernails. She used no cosmetics at all and her complexion was flawless.

  She looked very good, and healthy enough, though a little tired. It was just that Peter knew that only someone barking mad would leave home without a word and then wash up at the door two decades later.

  “I made a cake,” Genevieve said, jumping out of her chair.

  “I’ll help you,” Tara said.

  Peter saw an opportunity to talk. “I’ll come through, too.”

  Tara gently pushed him back into his seat. “Stay there, big brother. I want to bring you cake.”

  He didn’t know whether to resist. A glance from Genevieve told him to stay put.

  “HE HATES ME NOW,” Tara said, as Genevieve drew a big knife through her chocolate cake.

  “He’s confused, hurt, angry, puzzled, baffled, and above all he’s been told he can’t ask you any questions. But I know he still loves you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Genevieve sucked a sliver of cake from her thumb. “If he didn’t love you, he wouldn’t give a damn about any of it.”

  “Not only did I know he’d find someone beautiful, I knew he’d find someone very smart.”

  Genevieve took a step toward Tara. “You seem very nice to me. I think it’s a time for honesty, not charm.”

  “That’s fair. Very fair. I will talk and I will be honest. Right now I’m just trying to find a way to explain what happened. It’s not as easy as you think. For one thing, when I tell him the truth he won’t believe me and he will hate me even more than he does now. He’ll despise me.”

  “I know him, and I know he won’t despise you, whatever it is.”

  “Oh, yes he will. And you will, too. Though you may turn out to be my best hope. It’s certainly not something I can tell Mum and Dad. In fact, I wouldn’t even bother telling anyone, not a soul, except that certain people deserve to hear the truth, whether they believe it or not.”

  “Tara, I haven’t the faintest idea of what you are talking about.”

  “Do you know his friend Richie?”

  “I’ve never met him. He told me they had a falling-out before we met. They haven’t spoken in all these years.”

  Tara put her hands to her face. “That would be my fault that they fell out. Th
ey were great friends. Before—”

  “What happened, Tara? Why don’t you just say in simple words what happened?”

  The door opened. It was Mary. “Are you girls baking that cake, or what?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Are you a witch

  Are you a fairy?

  Are you the wife

  Of Michael Cleary?

  CHILDREN’S RHYME

  FROM SOUTHERN TIPPERARY, IRELAND

  New Year’s Day. Tara promised to tell Peter everything on New Year’s Day. Why? Peter had asked. Why couldn’t she tell him there and then? She said because after she’d told him, he wouldn’t want to speak to her again, and that she’d wanted to get through Christmas for the sake of Dell and Mary. But, she promised, she would tell him all of it. Everything.

  She asked if they could go for a walk together on New Year’s Day through the Outwoods. He could bring Gen and the kids and the dogs. She pointed out that it used to be a great tradition in the Martin household. Dell, Mary, Peter, and Tara would always walk in the Outwoods, a couple of times with Richie, too, and always with Peter’s terrier Nix.

  “Where is Nix, by the way?” Tara had asked Peter.

  “Hell, Tara, Nix died about fifteen years ago. Dad buried her in the garden in the rose bed.”

  “Oh, of course.” Then Tara had cried bitterly.

  “We had lovely roses come where we buried him.”

  “Don’t.”

  The walks through the Outwoods had stopped after Tara had disappeared. It didn’t seem right. There were more walks, but they went instead to Bradgate Park, where the spirit of Lady Jane Grey sighed in the ruins of her Elizabethan mansion, or up on Beacon Hill, with its Iron Age earthworks and its weird crags. The Outwoods forever carried the stamp of Tara’s ghost. Peter had been sure for twenty years that she had haunted the place, and for some reason the sudden unpicking of that belief terrified him more than had Tara’s ghost. Now that she was alive he quickly had to review his ideas about hauntings. Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.

  “She wants us all to go for a walk with her,” he told Genevieve. “All of us.”

  “What, she thinks we can drag this lot out walking? Doesn’t know much about teenagers, does she?”

  “Says she’s going to tell me everything.”

  “You should go alone.”

  “You want to come?”

  “I’d like to. I’d like to hear what it is she has to say. But I’ve got a feeling it ought to be just you and her.”

  “I think I need you to be there. To stop me from punching her.”

  Genevieve blinked at that. Peter, a strong and powerfully built man, had never talked that way and had never raised his fists to anyone in all the time she’d known him. “We could leave Zoe in charge. I’ll come if you want me to. Think it over.”

  Think it over. The problem was that was all he could do: think about it. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He considered that maybe he should go back to work early, take his mind off Tara.

  Peter was a farrier. He had his own business, mostly shoeing horses but occasionally turning his hand to other bits of ironwork. He hadn’t always been a farrier. After completing a degree in social psychology he had looked around for a job related to his studies. A recession-hit Britain didn’t seem to have too many vacancies, so he took a sales job in confectionary, thrashing up and down the motorway, selling bars of chocolate.

  He was an affable man and found strangers easy to talk to. He got the orders and didn’t find the job too stressful. But it was a kind of sleep to him. You descended into work mode and hardly noticed that a day of your life had passed. After a few years he became a regional manager; he was efficient, well liked, and he reached his quotas. Then the company he worked for was bought out by a larger corporation and he was made redundant.

  With two very young children it wasn’t a great moment to be out of work. At the time no one could find a plumber. When he calculated out what plumbers were earning he wondered why the hell he’d bothered studying for a degree in social psychology to become a chocolate salesman; and so he decided to look into retraining as a plumber. Dell and Mary were mortified. Peter had hauled himself out of the working class only to parachute right back in among it.

  But then Peter heard that no one could find a farrier, either, and that there was a living to be made shoeing the horses and ponies of leisure riders for anyone who had a strong back. What’s more, a local, ancient, and crusty farrier had died and his cottage was up for sale, complete with an old forge. That’s what the cottage was called: The Old Forge. So Peter, with his redundancy check in hand, put in an offer.

  “Christ,” Genevieve had said. She had Jack gamely hanging off one tit at the time and Zoe had only just finished breast-feeding.

  “I’ll retrain.”

  “Christ.”

  “Are you up for it?”

  Genevieve shifted a tumbling curl out of her eye and hitched baby Jack higher on her nipple. “Do I get to look at the place?”

  The property was ramshackle. It needed heating installed and fixing up and decorating from top to bottom. The forge itself was antiquated and hardly in working order, but Peter pointed out that it didn’t need to be: most farrier work these days was mobile and done from the back of a van.

  Genevieve was not, like her husband, of working-class origin. In fact, she was very minor aristocracy. Her cousin was thirty-ninth in line for the throne of England. Or something. Her own family was broke, but luckily she was high enough in the social order not to give a damn about social appearances. Had she been a little less upper-class she might have insisted on a showroom home with a touch of Regency-style furniture. But she wasn’t. She’d married so far beneath her in the social order that it couldn’t be interpreted as anything but an escape and a relief.

  Peter knew that the decision, ultimately, was hers to make. “Are we taking it?”

  “Christ. Yes.”

  So, twelve years on and just two days after Christmas, he found himself in his workshop, sorting horseshoes that didn’t need sorting, just so that he wouldn’t have to feel angry about Tara.

  Genevieve had appeared at the workshop door. “Leave the sodding things, Peter. You promised yourself a week off. Come and play with the kids.”

  “Right. Coming.” He clattered some shoes into a wooden box, where they rang like tuning forks.

  TWO DAYS LATER HE was sitting in his car outside Richie’s house again. This time he had taken the step of switching off his engine. It was raining. The windshield and the side windows of the car had steamed up and he had to wipe the glass to see out. Not that there was a lot to see.

  Peter sat there for maybe fifteen minutes. A light burned in Richie’s house—the same dim table lamp he’d seen before, deep at the back of the house. No one seemed to move in front of it, anyway, and no one went into or out of the house.

  The condensation on the windshield glass matched Peter’s state of mind. He was misted, paralyzed between the act of getting up and knocking on the door and sinking farther into his seat. He and Richie had been childhood friends up to and until shortly after Tara’s disappearance. They shared a lot of history: childish things, stupid things.

  One time, when he was eleven, Peter had been foolish enough to walk across a frozen pond. In the middle of the pond he’d dropped straight through the ice. His weight had cut a perfect and circular hole. As he struggled to haul himself back onto the ice it splintered in his hands and gave way again and again, each time sending Peter plunging back down into the freezing water. Richie did everything you are instructed not to do in such a situation: he walked calmly across the ice, reached down an arm, and pulled Peter out of the water.

  “Stupid,” Peter spat, shivering as they walked home together, he soaked and freezing. “You could have gone through the ice, too.”

  “Yeh.”

  “You pulled me out.”

  “Yeh.”

  “W
e both could have died.”

  “Yeh.”

  “Stupid.”

  “Yeh.”

  Two years after that Peter repaid him. One beautiful summer evening, with the air smelling of sweet, new-mown grass, they were playing cricket on the playground along with some younger kids. Two older boys appeared, strangers, their faces creased with mischief. One of them had a stick with a rope noose at the end of it. Just for fun, just for meanness, the boy with the stick strolled right up to Richie and hooked the noose tight round Richie’s neck. Richie was brought to his knees, his face puce, struggling to breathe.

  Peter was holding the cricket bat. Without hesitation he stepped up to the mean youth as casually as if he were moving to the wicket and going to bat. He swung the bat hard and struck the boy across the ear. The boy’s head made exactly the same pleasing sound as a cricket ball on a bat, leather on willow. The boy went down as if he’d been shot.

  The second aggressor turned pale. “You’re fuckin’ mad,” he said. “You coulda killed ’im!”

  “You want some?” said Peter.

  Richie, still purple in the face, tore the noose from around his neck and used the attached stick to thrash at his tormentor, who lay on the ground, guarding his head. The second boy chose to say no more.

  “It’s enough. Leave it,” said Peter.

  The cricket game was over. They walked home without a word, leaving the assailant lying on the ground.

  They shared a lot of history and a lot of hurt.

  Peter was startled from his reveries when his passenger door was suddenly snatched open by a man in a gray hoodie. The man had serious need of a shave. He looked at Peter with unblinking bloodshot eyes.

  “How long you gonna sit here without coming in?”

  “DO YOU WANT BEER or whisky?” Richie said.

  “I’ll have a beer.”