Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

  As he walked through the frost, under that brilliant moon, he was flooded by memories of making that same walk after escorting Tara home so many times before. The landscape had hardly changed. Maybe a farmer’s fence here or there might have been different, but nothing else. As he reached the crest of the hill bordered by the woods, he had a frightening thought. He wondered—just for a second—if the last twenty years had been a strange hallucination, and that really he was still in his late teens with his entire life before him. Maybe one of the psychedelic drugs they used to take back in those days could do that. Maybe he would wake up in the morning to find that the years had rolled back.

  It could have been a comforting thought, but it wasn’t. It made his stomach squeeze.

  He stopped alongside the woods to light a cigarette. He flicked his lighter, inhaled, and turned to look back down the valley, toward Tara’s house. Then a figure came rushing out of the woods to smash a brick into the side of his face, and Richie blacked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tush, tush. Their walking spirits are mere imaginary fables.

  TOURNEUR, The Atheist’s Tragedy IV, III

  TM made a big fuss about bluebells at the start of her account. I’m not sure of the significance, though I do think it represents permission. In the same way that alcohol or drugs offer permission or partially excuses a determination to violate some social code or other. It’s as if she wants to blame the bluebells themselves for her transgressions.

  Of course, the use of alcohol or drugs represents a willful determination to keep an appointment with some persuasive force or need in the unconscious mind. Rationally speaking, blaming one’s behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.

  She describes the bluebells as intoxicating and she also describes her path through the pool of bluebells as transgressive. She wants to be drugged by the bluebells, so that she can have access to her alternative world. Her life has already been turned upside down before her seducer comes along. The sky is in the earth, she says, and the earth is in the sky. There is, incidentally, a certain kind of logic in her thinking. Bluebells are associated with the spirits of the earth—I am consciously avoiding the word fairies, since I take the principles of animism and genius loci rather more seriously. Further, all parts of the flower—bulb, leaf, and sap—do secrete a poison: they contain glycosides similar to digitalis and so are as dangerous as foxgloves.

  This all may be an indication that she was intoxicated by drink or drugs at the time of her disappearance or abduction, or that she was in a state of mind parallel to inebriation. Either way, we may assume that TM finds relief in the standard excuse of intoxication by the fragrance of the flower.

  The site of her seduction is highly significant. There is a rock, the location where she says she lost her virginity to her boyfriend, Richie. She removes the ring he gave her and places it on the rock. I take this to be highly significant. The rock is a kind of island in the sea of bluebells, a place of stability, rationality. When she takes off her ring and places it there she has already cast herself adrift. There seems to be no going back from this point.

  It is here that fable and well-known narrative takes over the account. A mysterious male appears on a white horse. If we seem to know him, that is because his archetype is well established in literature, and it is at this point that TM’s personal story confabulates with that of literary convention. The antecedents are manifold, and presumably TM has heard all of these stories right from the cradle. She even signals to us that she was going into a certain kind of storytelling mode when she describes placing the ring on an emerald cushion of moss.

  Her story from this point seems to be drawn from books, a confection of half-grasped tales. There is, of course, a well-known literary tradition of famous abductees. Thomas the Rhymer kissed or slept with the Queen of Elfland and rode with her to her kingdom. When he returned, seven years had passed. Similarly, there is the ballad of a fellow by the name of Tam Lin, half fairy and half mortal, who collected the virginity of any maiden who passed through the forest of Carterhaugh. Tam Lin, it should be noted, rode a white horse. And on it goes: stories of abduction by fairies or by elves (the species interchangeable, one from the Latin root, one from the Teutonic root) are as numerous as the stars, and even though these two famous fellows are male abductees, the more common form of the story is that of women abducted. These are the clearly identifiable sources of TM’s outlandish tale.

  She hasn’t exactly copied the stories, but what she has copied is the poetic conceit, that is to say a poetic summation of her experiences. She has enclosed the kingdom of her twenty years inside an acorn cup. She’s made it her own life. To understand it all, we have to approach her tale in the same way that we would approach a dream, looking for clues that add up to a pattern that will inform us about the present state of her wounded psyche.

  The dreamlike quality of the world she has moved into is intimated when she tells us she might have fallen asleep. Whether she did or not is immaterial. The next thing that happens is the appearance of her suitor, if that’s what he is, or, in a darker sense, her abductor and possibly her attacker.

  He appears on a white horse. I have already alluded to the traditions regarding such an animal, but it has more significance. The horse stands in for many unconscious passions, and the apparition of a black horse may be associated with war and death but commonly the female libido. In the case of white horses, however, the symbol is universally positive, often an emblem of the irresistible life force, and is linked to the Celtic goddess Rhiannon and her Roman incarnation Epona, a goddess of fertility. To declare it a sexual image would be to understate the case, because travel by a white horse moreover often indicates a spiritual journey of some kind, perhaps to the underworld, perhaps to a supernatural place. The arrival of the seducer on his horse is complicated. In this case the maiden wants to be seduced and transported to a new level of consciousness. She lets her hair down from the tower of her longing.

  What follows is a fairly prosaic account of ritual teasing, a preliminary to cozying up that might be experienced by any boy or girl. They lie with their heads together against a moss-covered stone. That moss-covered stone may be an altar at a wedding ceremony, or it may prove to be a tombstone. But what is important is that bluebells scent the air like incense and there is the irresistible excitement of courtship ritual. She is very willing.

  She was very willing. And that is why she took off her ring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Some time afterwards she was lifted out of the bed by the men, and carried to the kitchen fire by John Dunne, Patrick, William, and James Kennedy. Simpson saw red marks on her forehead, and someone present said they had to use the red poker on her to make her take the medicine. The four men named held poor Bridget Cleary, in her night-dress, over the fire; and Simpson could see her body resting on the bars of the grate where the fire was burning. Fire, particularly applied to iron, is a traditional method of warding off a fairy, or frightening a changeling into leaving so that the real person can return. The certain liquid was urine, traditionally believed to force the changeling to flee; Bridget was repeatedly doused with human urine.

  SUMMARY OF TRIAL TRANSCRIPT (1895)

  Where are you?” Peter was just finishing up shoeing a mare that wouldn’t stand still, a nervous gray with a walleye that had tried to bite him and then kick him. He’d insisted its owner, the wife of an estate agent, take the reins and hold the creature while he did the job, and it had bitten her on the back of the hand instead of him.

  Being kicked, bitten, and burned came with the farrier’s job, like having a strained back. But when the horses bit or kicked their owners he couldn’t help feeling an unnecessary fizz of satisfaction.

  “I’m at the hospital. I called your house and Gen gave me your mobile number.”

  Peter looked at his watch. “I’ve
got another appointment over that way. I’ll pick you up and you’ll have to sit in the car while I do the job, or I’ll be late.”

  “Appreciate it, Peter. There was no one else I could ask.”

  Peter put away his mobile phone. “Friend of mine,” he explained to the estate agent’s wife as she nursed her bitten hand. “He got mugged on the way home from the pub last night.”

  He ran his hand down the leg of the mare so that he could gently lift its hoof, and the creature tried to kick him again.

  RICHIE WAS WAITING AT the hospital with a black eye and a bandaged head. He climbed into the cab of the truck and Peter drove off. Richie told Peter that he’d woken up freezing on the Badger Track. He’d staggered to the road and tried to hail passing cars but, seeing his bloodied condition, no one wanted to help. Then a minibus full of nuns had stopped and had driven him the hospital.

  “Nuns?”

  “Yeh, nuns. Six of ’em.”

  “Really, nuns?”

  “Yeh, nuns. No one else would stop.”

  Peter wanted to know what Richie had been doing up on the Badger Track at that time of night, and Richie told him he’d walked Tara home from the pub. Peter had blinked at that but kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t even know Tara had been out. They talked about the assailant. It hadn’t been a mugger, Richie explained, because when he came to check his pockets he still had his wallet with his credit cards and cash, and his mobile phone.

  When Peter asked him if he’d got any enemies, Richie laughed and said only the Martin family, who for twenty years thought that he’d done Tara in. Peter bit his lip. Then Richie said no, he didn’t have any enemies, even in the music biz, where hatred and loathing of other artists was compulsory. Then he remembered the man who had been staring at him all night in The Phantom Coach.

  “You’ve no idea who that was?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “You say he looked like a gypsy?”

  “Not exactly. Not a gypsy, anyhow. More like a roadie who fell out of a tour van. Staring me down in the pub.”

  “Did you get a look at guy who attacked you?”

  Richie had already been through this with the police. They had interviewed him at the hospital about the attack. Richie told Peter with some amazement that the police officer who interviewed him was the same local PC who had been in the station when he was being grilled after Tara’s disappearance. He hadn’t recognized Richie, but because the man was still in his uniform, Richie recognized him instantly, even though the elderly policeman had lost most of his hair and had put on a few stone in weight. Asked by Richie if he remembered the case, the policeman said he did; he also said that he’d heard that the girl had turned up again after all this time. When Richie asked him if he remembered the CID man beating the crap out of him the officer said he didn’t remember that, but he followed his answer with a knowing look.

  “Funny,” Richie said to Peter, “I had my jaw near broken just after Tara left, and then the same again just after she came back. Funny.”

  Peter turned the truck into a stable yard where he was scheduled to shoe three more horses. “You can help me,” he said. “But stay out of sight, because with your face like that you’ll frighten the horses.”

  RICHIE PROVED TO BE useful and wasn’t above lugging Peter’s portable furnace around, or holding a bridle while nails were hammered into horseshoes. In return Peter bought him lunch at a pub. Peter had a pint of beer; Richie had a pint and a whisky chaser. Then they had another round and this time Peter had a chaser, too. Richie wanted to go a third but Peter pointed out that he was driving and he had an errand to run.

  “In fact, I can take you straight home or I can show you something interesting,” Peter said.

  “I’ve got nothing at home,” Richie said.

  So Peter drove him to see Tara’s shrink. Underwood had asked Peter to drop by at a time when Tara wouldn’t be present. Why, exactly, Peter didn’t know, but Underwood had suggested that he kept mid-afternoons free if possible, and that if Peter was out that way he should call in.

  “You’ve got to see this bloke,” Peter said. “Never mind Tara, he looks like he’s the one who’s been living with the fairies.”

  So they went in and were greeted solemnly by the ancient Mrs. Hargreaves, who whispered that Vivian was having his afternoon nap, but it was never longer than fifteen minutes, if they wouldn’t mind waiting. She looked pointedly at the bandage looped around the crown of Richie’s head. Then she led them upstairs to the landing and the waiting room before shuffling away.

  “Vivian,” said Richie, after she’d gone.

  They both had a look in the museum cases at the silk shoes and then they sat down next to each other on hard chairs in the waiting room. Peter folded his arms, and Richie did, too. “It’s quiet,” Richie said.

  “Mmm,” Peter replied.

  Richie crossed his ankles in front of him. He unfolded his arms and then folded them again. Then he snorted briefly. Peter looked at him to see what he was laughing at. “Vivian,” Richie said. Then Peter made a kind of grunt. The grunt seemed to pass back to Richie, because he snorted louder. Peter tried not to get pulled in but in bracing himself somehow a tiny pellet of snot shot down his nose and landed on his knee. Richie’s snort turned into an asthmatic wheeze. In less than a second the two men sat upright on their hard chairs, their bodies quaking and shuddering mercilessly, like two schoolboys convulsing with the giggles in morning assembly. They both squeezed their ribs, gripped by panic and hysteria. Holding back their hilarity was like trying to nail down the lid on a barrel of eels. Richie gulped in some air. Tiny little high-pitched squeals, like trapped gas from a balloon, pushed out from between Peter’s clamped cheeks.

  It was too much for Richie. He had to get up and make a dash for it. In the process he shouldered aside the white-haired man who had arrived at the door of the waiting room. Vivian Underwood was attired, as before, in a brocade smoking jacket and leather slippers.

  The psychiatrist turned to watch Richie, who was now howling his head off, dash past him and make his way down the stairs.

  Underwood said nothing about the spectacle of a man in a prominent head bandage roaring down the staircase, and instead invited Peter into his consulting room. Struggling to contain himself, Peter followed Underwood into the study, where he was offered a choice of chairs. The mood of the room sobered him a little. Peter opted for one of the chairs drawn up by the fireplace.

  “Thank you for coming in,” Underwood said. “It would help me enormously to hear your views on one or two things.”

  “Sure.”

  “We could start, quite simply, by you telling me—in your view—what you think is going on with your sister.”

  “Okay. My view is not very deep, I’m afraid. I think she got pregnant, had an abortion, and ran away because she couldn’t face us. Why she’s come back now with this cock-and-bull story is beyond me.”

  “Nothing more complicated, in your view, to be found?”

  “That’s why I’m paying you.”

  “Fair enough. When she ‘ran away,’ as you put it, do you think she felt in physical danger?”

  “Oh, no. My dad had never lifted a hand to her. There would have been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth but no one would have hurt her. Physically.”

  “Physically, as you say. But that’s as far as your own guesswork goes?”

  “I told you it was simple. I could say that maybe she’s a pathological narcissist, and that her story is an elaborate compensation for an inability to face up to adult chores and functions. But I don’t know what that all means.”

  The doctor did a theatrical double take. “Who the hell have you been talking to? Is this your wife speaking?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “Relax. We can smell it on each other. Anyway, I’m not one for labels: they change every couple of years like the hemlines on women’s skirts. And in any event I’d disagree. The narcissistic personality
is characterized by self-importance and lack of empathy. That’s not your sister.

  “The problem I have with your sister is that while her story is outrageous, she exhibits none of the usual indicators of disorder associated with delusions. Your wife may be right in that there is a grandiosity in her tale, but I’d expect certain things to come with that. As a pathology, delusion is different from what we might call dogma or plain stupidity. Her belief in her story isn’t any different to the belief in certain faiths. If she’s mentally ill, then so is half the population. We have to leave that and look elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?”

  “It’s not the six months she’s telling us about that I’m concerned with. It’s the nineteen and a half years she’s holding back. Somewhere in there I think we’ll find a trauma, and that trauma will have started the clock ticking on this fantasy she is so vividly reporting. The reason I’ve got you here is so that you and Tara’s parents can listen out for tiny fragments of that near twenty years of existence. Anything to build on. And by the way, I really don’t think she is consciously lying or hiding information from you: I believe there is a huge gap in her memory. You’re going to have to get used to that.”

  “She seems willing to cooperate, at least,” Peter said. “I wondered if there were any tests we could do, so that we could present her with evidence of her age. At least confront her with the science of it. Do you know of any tests that prove conclusively how old a person is?”

  “Oh, there is one. But the person has to be dead.”

  “That’s going a bit far.”

  “Indeed. It’s not as easy as you would think. You could remove a tooth from her mouth and have that analyzed, but that also seems rather extreme. On the other hand, X-rays of her teeth would conclusively reveal her age plus or minus a couple of years. Do you happen to know a sympathetic dentist?”