Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

  “Is having,” I say. “Is having. How do you know that?”

  “Her pregnancy was confirmed by her GP.”

  “Thought that was confidential,” I say to my lawyer. “Wasn’t it?”

  “How old was Tara?” says the fat one. He can’t say his R’s. He says Tawa.

  “Have you found her?” I ask.

  “Can I have a word?” my lawyer says to the policemen.

  DAVE, FRIENDLY DAVE, DEAD-STRAIGHT Dave, sad Dave, my mate Dave, steps outside with my lawyer, leaving me with the uniformed bobbie and the incredible hulk still fingering his collar. Only now he’s looking at me with dead-fish eyes. He sniffs. Then he does it again. Sniffs. Like he’s telling me he can smell something.

  After a moment they come back in. Sit down again.

  Dave says, “Richie, you must have known that Tara was under the age of sexual consent, which is sixteen in this country. But for the moment, for the moment, I’m quite prepared to let that go. I want to make things easy on you and I can guess how hard things have been for you.”

  “What things?”

  “Were you the father, Richie?”

  “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to reveal confidential information,” I say.

  “In situations like this, it’s different.”

  “What is this situation?”

  “For God’s sake!” says the fat one with his squeaky voice. Then he actually wipes his own spittle off his own black trousers.

  “Richie, we know you had a lot of very angry rows with Tara. We also know that you have a pretty hot temper.”

  “Violent temper,” says the fat one.

  “No.”

  “We’ve got information about your violent temper. We found some records about a case in which you badly beat up a young man in a disco pub.”

  I turn to my lawyer. She’s busy scribbling. She’s not behaving like the lawyers you see on TV. “Why are you here?” I shout. “You’re saying nothing!”

  The lines crease even further around the copper’s face. He looks incredibly depressed. “Richie, I’m going to say something now in front of these other people and it shames me to have to say it. Things happen. Some years back, Richie, I used to take a drink. Not anymore, but I did then. One night I went home drunk. I’d been married for twelve years and I had three lovely children. My wife and I got into an argument.”

  My lawyer stops scribbling, and she looks up at him.

  “That’s all I remember, I swear to you,” says Dave. His blue eyes are burning into me. “Then in the morning I woke up and I found my wife sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was a terrible mess, Richie. Puffed and swollen. Split lip. Two black eyes. I don’t remember anything about it, Richie, I swear to you now as God is my judge.”

  I look at him. He’s leaning forward and gazing deep into my eyes, like he wants to look right into my soul and back again. His eyebrows are raised. I look at my lawyer. I glance at the fat cop, and at the uniformed cop. They are all looking at me, and their eyes, all of them, are like water swirling down a drain.

  And for the first time I think: Did I do it? Did I?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

  BRUNO BETTELHEIM

  Is there something wrong with our aunt Tara?” said Amber.

  “What do you mean by ‘wrong’?” said Genevieve.

  Genevieve, Amber, and Josie were baking a chocolate cake in the kitchen of The Old Forge. Zoe was out with her white rapper. Jack had got bored shooting rats and was now trying, from a distance of twenty yards, to ignite matches suspended by string on an outhouse door.

  “She squints and pulls faces.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “And her skin hangs off her like there’s too much of it. And she wears dark glasses indoors.”

  “She’s certainly very slim. Wish I was.”

  “And Zoe says she only looks fifteen and there must be something wrong with her.”

  “You’re spilling that. Pay attention.”

  “And she does this,” Josie said, half closing her eyes and moving her head from side to side while affecting a smile.

  “Stop being mean, you two. I thought she was very kind and sweet to all of you.”

  “And she smells funny,” said Amber.

  “Oh, that’s patchouli oil. I used to wear that. Now, stir.”

  OUTSIDE, JACK WAS STILL trying and failing to ignite matches from a distance. When he inspected the damage he found that the pellets were embedding themselves in the soft old wood of the outhouse door. It all looked a bit of a mess. He thought he might have to reckon with his father about that. Then he thought he could maybe get his penknife and dig the pellets out of the wood before his dad got back from walking in the Outwoods.

  Jack was no great fan of hiking. His parents had taken him walking in Charnwood Forest many times over the years, dragging him up Beacon Hill or pushing him through Bradgate deer park, mostly in freezing weather. Before Jack could walk, Peter or Genevieve would carry him in a papoose-style backpack. He could never understand the appeal of walking without having a place to get to. He’d once argued with his dad that it was a bit like jumping with no fence or obstacle in front of you, or running when there was no pressing need to get anywhere fast.

  What’s more, the strange unresolved landscape of Charnwood Forest spread too many shadows. He had an early memory, or, rather, the memory was so early he wasn’t sure if it was only an infant dream. Or a memory of a dream. Anyway, in the memory or the dream, he was strapped in the papoose, facing backward as Genevieve strode through the woods. The rocks around were formed of gleaming dark blue slate, sliced and cracked into fine layers, so he assumed the scene was Swithland Woods, a place he’d been force-marched through many times later in his life.

  His father had been slightly ahead, carrying sister Zoe. There were creatures looking at him from behind the blue slate rocks; they pointed their fingers and smiled cruel smiles. He felt safe in his mother’s papoose but was still afraid of the creatures. He was only just old enough to talk. He’d tried to make a sound but he was almost mesmerized by the creatures stirring in the wake of the family’s passage. He knew intuitively that if he had been able to alert his mother or his father, the creatures would be able to disappear.

  He’d recounted this experience to his mother many years later. It was Genevieve who had put the idea in his head that it must have been a dream. She’d suggested that no one could remember something that had happened when they were only two years old. But Jack knew that if it was a dream, it was a full-color dream. And it had stayed with him: an uneasiness, a low breathing that seemed to exude from the soil and the volcanic rock of Charnwood.

  He didn’t hate the place, but he never felt at ease there, either.

  Jack decided to take a few more potshots at the matchsticks before giving up for the day. Anything was preferable to staying in a house full of sisters. He took up a position closer to the door and sighted the rifle. He knew that to ignite the match he had to graze it, not hit it center-punch. Not that his shot was good enough to accomplish the latter. But he sighted the air rifle on the match and tried to hold it perfectly still before squeezing the trigger.

  Before he fired, something moved at the periphery of his vision. It was a blur of red rust at the bottom of the garden, a furry thing, half hidden behind a shrub. He knew instantly it was a fox. Foxes visited the garden every evening, eyeing the chicken coop. Sometimes you could see a fox calmly scrutinizing the coop and its occupants like it was a mathematical problem that could be solved by patient application and attention to detail.

  The thing moved again, creeping through the bushes. Jack swung his rifle, quickly sighting it, and fired.

  The tiny slug hit its target. There w
as a brief flurry of earth and fur as the thing made a leap. There was a moment of writhing, and then stillness. His dad had told him that his 1.77 slugs weren’t big enough to kill a fox, but Jack slipped down from the garage roof and ran after his target in hope.

  At first he couldn’t find anything. Then he spotted his kill. A dilapidated wooden fence surrounded the property, and he saw a ball of ginger fur brushed up against the base of the fence. It wore a little red collar.

  “Bugger bugger bugger fuck.”

  He squatted beside his kill. It was a pretty ginger cat. Its eyes were wide open and it lay still. Jack tried to poke it.

  “Fuck bugger fuck bugger.”

  It was a neighbor’s cat that he’d seen in the yard once or twice, a sweet thing owned by the elderly lady who lived a few doors away across the street. Jack felt his stomach squeeze. He could see where the pellet had gone in the head. There was also a tiny clot of blood in the cat’s ear. Why did he have to suddenly be such a good shot?

  He stared back at the house. He didn’t think anyone could have seen what had happened. He held his head in his hands, trying to ward off a deep thrill of shame. Then he recovered, got up, and walked back to the outhouse to open the pellet-studded door. Inside he found a garden spade.

  Returning to his kill, he dug a hole in the earth as deep as he could, but after just a couple of feet he hit clay that made the spade ring, as if it was iron. He put the cat in the shallow grave. He thought about taking off its red collar but decided against. Then he covered the dead cat with loose soil. He scattered a pile of dead leaves over the grave to disguise his handiwork.

  He returned to the outhouse, put the spade away, and went back inside the house.

  GENEVIEVE WATCHED THE BOY kick off his boots at the door and hang his jacket on the banister post of the stairs.

  “You okay, Jack?” she shouted, still busy with the girls and the cake.

  “Yep,” he said, swinging upstairs.

  She hadn’t meant Are you okay? She had meant: Gosh I’ve hardly seen you for three days. But his answer had told her that he wasn’t okay. She gazed at the spot on the stairs where he’d been, as if his imprint or a ghost of him was still there.

  “Are you sure it is Aunt Tara?” Amber said.

  “Why on earth do you say that?”

  “Well, I heard you saying to Daddy that she should be nearly your age. And she’s not. So it can’t be her, can it? She’s not old enough, is she?”

  “Don’t be so silly. Of course it’s your Aunt Tara.”

  And Genevieve picked up the cake in its baking tin and put it in the oven, which had been warming.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  W. B. YEATS

  He also had a great way of listening. It was as if everything I said to him was important. Counted for something. And it was like that with everything he said, too. Nothing lost, or loose. We rested there amid the bluebells with our heads leaning against the moss-covered stone and with the lark twittering in the infinite sky, and it was as if time didn’t shift.

  No one came or went. Usually on a lovely day such as that there would be several people strolling in the Outwoods, but today none passed by. I didn’t even think it strange.

  “A lovely girl like you,” he said, “you must surely have a boyfriend.”

  “I do. But he doesn’t make me happy.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He thinks more of his music than he does of me.”

  “But I love music and music makers. You could have a worse fellow than that, you know: one who makes music.”

  “I don’t know about that. I think they just like to have the girls look at them. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “It is for me. I want to be somebody’s special person. I don’t want to be with a man who looks at other women.”

  “You’ll have your work cut out for you to find a chap like that,” he said.

  That sort of remark would normally make me prickle. He was mocking me for being naïve but he had a way of softening it with a smile and with these lovely wrinkles around his eyes, so that I didn’t take the least offense. Plus, his experience was an attractive thing. He was so relaxed in his manner with me. Richie was always so intense, so full-on. Richie, or any younger man, for that matter, would be so focused on getting his hand down your pants that he would drain all the fun out of things. Whereas even though I knew this man had a fancy for me he was so enjoying the moment, and making me enjoy the moment, that he seemed to have no care or interest in what might happen next.

  “What about you?” I said.

  “What about me?” He knew exactly what I meant, and that I was trying to discover if he was married or had a girlfriend of his own somewhere. But he was teasing me.

  “Are you spoken for?”

  “Spoken for. What a lovely turn of phrase you do have.”

  “It’s what we say around here.”

  “And I’m not from around here.”

  “Where are you from, then?”

  “Well if I’m not from around here I must be from around there.”

  I pulled up a straw of grass and threw it at him. “Cagey, ain’t ya?”

  “I am.”

  “So are you married?”

  “Hahaha!”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Never found the right one. Been looking. I’ll know her when I find her.”

  “Do you believe in love at first sight, then?”

  “No, I don’t. You have to have a bit of agitation first.”

  “Agitation?”

  And then he started banging on about physics, which I must say is not the most romantic thing to set a girl’s heart racing. It’s not a subject that much interested me before. I mean, I did do some physics at school but it didn’t exactly stir my blood. He started talking about molecules colliding and how only certain collisions have the energy to connect effectively and this is because only some of the molecules have enough energy at the moment of impact to break any existing bonds and form new ones. And then he looked at my face and he must have seen me with my mouth open because he laughed out loud and rolled around in the bluebells, laughing his head off and hugging his ribs as if they were cracking.

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he said, and then he laughed some more.

  I folded my hands in my lap and looked at the sky until his laughter burned itself out.

  “Dear dear dear,” he said, recovering his breath. “Oh, dear! What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You’re already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you’re changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes.”

  “I am, am I?”

  “Yes. Through meeting me.”

  “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

  “Maybe I do. But you know it’s true.”

  And he looked into my eyes, and I looked back into his, and I knew what he was saying was true, and I thought, I want to know more about you.

  “It was called courtship once upon a time.” I thought he sounded a bit melancholy. “Nowadays, sad to say, there’s none of that. You’re supposed to meet on the dance floor, rub up naked against each other for five minutes, and then on to the next person. Now, that’s just a knock; whereas what I’m after is an almighty collision.”

  “So where is it you live?” I asked again.

  He pointed vaguely to the west and told me he lived exactly on the county border, and I assumed he meant on the county border between Leicestershire and Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire. He said where he lived there was a stream and you could stand astride the stream with one foot in one land and one foot in the other. He told me he had a house by a pool and that it had no electricity or television
because he didn’t like those things. He said he preferred to live by the sun and the moon and by the light on the water.

  “That’s beautiful,” I said. “Like poetry.”

  “Perhaps one day you’ll come and see my house, Tara,” he said, smiling.

  “I never told you my name,” I said.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He got up and walked away from me. I thought he was perhaps offended, but he’d gone to fetch his white horse. After a moment he led the animal back through the bluebells toward me. There he stood holding the reins, just looking at me.

  “Well, do you or don’t you?” he said.

  “Do I or don’t I what?”

  “Do you or don’t you want to see the light on the water?”

  I was able to answer in a beat. “I do.”

  I know I should have refused his offer. Then things would have been different. Then there would have been no trouble. But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don’t take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.

  “Then up you get,” he said.

  There was no saddle on the horse. There was just a dusty red blanket. He blinked at me, and smiled, and I got up and went over to the horse and he dropped the reins and locked his fingers together for me to step into the palms of his hands. Then I was up on the horse’s back, the big straw panniers swinging at either knee.

  He led the horse through the bluebells and onto the bridle track. There he walked me through the woods without a word. After a while the track became a bit wider, and there he stopped the horse and leapt up behind me. He reached for the reins and I could smell his manly smell again, and the smell of the horse.

  He reached a hand in front and placed it on my belly and I felt a terrible excitement.