Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

  “Is it her house?”

  “No. We don’t own things. Around here, everything belongs to everyone.”

  “So if I take the horse again tomorrow,” I snapped back at him, “no one is going to stop me?”

  “No one is going to stop you.”

  “So you’re like communists or something?”

  He had to suppress a smile because he knew it would enrage me for him to look amused. “Not exactly.”

  “Is it a commune?” I’d heard of a place near Quorn, not far from the Outwoods, where the people ate only macrobiotic food and slept freely with one another and smoked dope until they pissed their pants.

  “Of a kind.”

  I looked across the lake. Everything was so vivid that it still seemed to graze my eyes, as if something was gently scraping my retinas. It occurred to me that the lake had changed color since the day before. Where it had been a blue black it was now much more of an aquamarine, as if the light itself had changed. But it also seemed to me that the shape of the lake had changed, and that where I had previously looked at an elliptical body of water it was now like a long cylinder. There was something unsettled and unsettling about the earth and the landscape in that place. As if it were remolding itself all the time.

  But I had other things to think about.

  I was still demanding to know why I couldn’t go home and all he would say was that there was no road, no way, no possibility. The crossing opened again in six months, and even then you could slip by only at the precise hinge. When I complained that I didn’t understand anything he was saying he told me there were four hinges to the day: dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight. These, he said, opened up the crossing, but only at certain times of the calendar. “Tara, the world is more complicated and beautiful than you people have ever understood,” he said.

  “You people?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking my hand. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that. But you can’t fight it. The thing to do is to make the best of it while you’re here. Learn things. See things with different eyes. I’ll make sure that you come to no harm and that no one touches you.”

  I didn’t much like the sound of that.

  He looked into my eyes. “My dearest hope,” he said to me, “is that you get to like it here, and I’m sure you will if you can only stop pining for your old life. Things are different here. But if after six months you’re not happy then I’ll make sure you go back safe and sound. That’s a promise.”

  But I still couldn’t accept any of it, and then while we were talking I felt a slight tremor in the earth. Hiero’s eyes bulged.

  “Did you feel that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He leapt to his feet. “Quick, into the water,” he said. I watched him as he stripped off his clothes. “Get naked,” he said.

  I didn’t see why I should. I sensed some kind of emergency but I didn’t see how taking off my clothes would help. Then sex woman and her lover both came running pell-mell from the house, and they were both shrieking. They were trying to tear off their clothes as they ran, stumbling, running, still screaming.

  The pair were joined by others who emerged from houses and cottages further along the bank of the lake. Strange-looking creatures all of them, lithe figures running in a state of half undress, trying to rid themselves of their clothes as they ran toward us.

  “Into the water, Tara!” Hiero shouted. “Into the water!”

  I felt frightened. By now we had been joined by maybe fifteen or twenty other people, all of whom were either stripping off their clothes on the sand or splashing into the water as they did so. They shrieked and screamed and I could hardly hear Hiero above the noise.

  He was still shouting and beckoning me on and I felt a wave of terror, until I saw that he was smiling, and though all these other folk were shrieking they were also laughing. Bewildered but still in my clothes, I waded out to him and he grabbed my hand, and just as our hands touched I felt the water fizz and foam and crackle, and a current pass through the water to our bodies, and then there came an almighty thump that flung us over in the water.

  Unable to resist the shock wave, everyone went over together, and I felt the foam of the water pass through me, tingling and vibrating, and it seemed to pass inside my veins, making my blood buzz and vibrate. The shock of deep pleasure made me laugh out loud, and for a minute I was helpless with laughter, involuntary laughter, just like all the other people who had been turned over by the shock wave.

  They were all laughing like hyenas or chattering monkeys, and I was, too.

  I got to my feet and now everyone was holding hands. Somebody grabbed my hand—not Hiero, for I’d lost him in the water. Another hand enclosed my free hand on the other side and everyone stretched out in a long, linked line just before a second shock wave tipped us over. This time the pulse was stronger and I felt the communion of all those bodies as the power surged through the line. The laughter reached a scary pitch, a hysteria moderated only by a feeling of health and well-being, as if my blood had been emptied out and replaced by a transfusion of silk. I looked at the water and it had become an iridescent pool, sparkling and roiling with color. The light overwhelmed me and made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

  Hiero, laughing his bloody head off, came staggering toward me through the water.

  “What’s happening?” I shouted, as he grabbed my hand.

  “Hahaha tee hee hee nanana it’s an ejaculation is what it is, Tara! Hahaha hahhheee—”

  “A what?”

  “Tee heee hee ejaculation!”

  And then another throb of energy struck us and we were thumped sideways. I felt both the benign energy of the water and the shock of power from Hiero’s hand flutter through me, and I knew in that moment how he loved and adored me, and the detection of unselfish love passing from him to me transmitted in a wave to the stranger holding my hand on the other side. And I was laughing again even though there were tears of sadness running down my face, a mixed-up folly of mirth and sorrow.

  I think the jolts—the ejaculations—came seven or eight more times, and then stopped suddenly, and at last the laughter and shrieking died down, though everyone remained hand in hand in a long line for a good while afterward, catching their breath, hoping for another jolt, not knowing if the earth would deliver more.

  But it was over and the moment had passed and eventually the folk moved out of the water, returning to wherever they had come from. Only a few diehards remained in the water, desperately hoping for another shock wave.

  We lay on the sand, Hiero and I, recovering from the hysteria, I in my soaking clothes, because I was the only person who hadn’t taken them off, and for which modesty I now felt a bit foolish. I asked Hiero what had triggered these seismic movements and he looked at me blankly.

  “It’s the gift of the lake,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s what lakes do.”

  “Not where I’m from they don’t. I’ve never seen that.”

  “Oh, yes, you have. But your people don’t know how to notice it. It’s what the lake does when it’s pleased.”

  “Oh, come off it,” I said, laughing at him.

  He looked at me seriously. “Really.”

  “I mean,” I said, “it’s not like the lake is a living thing.”

  This was perhaps the worst thing I could have said. He looked suddenly alarmed. He put a hand, sticky as it was with gray sand, over my mouth. “Hush, darlin’ girl! Hush! The lake hears your every word and knows your every thought.”

  I made to answer this nonsense, but I saw further alarm in his eyes and he pushed his hand further onto my mouth, forcing grit onto my lips. Only when he felt I wouldn’t say any more on the subject did he take his hand from my mouth.

  “The lake listens,” he said quietly. “The lake watches. The lake knows everything.”

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I had no chance to reply because one of the diehards who h
ad been standing in the water long after most of the others had gone came striding out of the shallows, his muscles running with glistening droplets of water and light, and he spotted me.

  “Yum yum!” He was strong and handsome, with very tanned skin and hunter’s eyes, gray and green. He had his long hair tied at the side and the water was still dripping off his hair and sluicing down his body. He smiled at me, showing a row of strong white teeth, with one missing at the corner of his mouth.

  He leaned down quickly and through my wet blouse he gently squeezed a nipple between a thumb and forefinger. Hiero grabbed his wrist and twisted it away. “Not for you, Silkie,” he said firmly. “This one’s not for you.”

  The man called Silkie stepped back. “Possessiveness? I would have thought that decision was up to her.”

  “It is up to me,” I snarled, “and I don’t want you touching me again.”

  The man looked nonplussed, as if no one had ever spoken to him like that before. “You’ve brought a ghost into the camp, Hiero.” Then he looked at me. “Your loss,” he said. He turned and walked back up the beach toward the farther houses.

  “A what into the camp?”

  Hiero grunted. “You might find that the men here aren’t used to being rejected. And the women never so.”

  “He was a creep.”

  “It takes some getting used to.”

  “I don’t plan to get used to that, thanks.”

  “No. You don’t have to.”

  Something I was soon to discover about the commune was its rampant sexual permissiveness. The people who lived there fucked openly, frequently, and—it seemed to me—indiscriminately. The boys fucked the girls and the girls fucked the boys and the girls were the most persistent initiators. Plus, the girls fucked the girls and the boys fucked the boys, and often they all did it to one another in a daisy chain.

  Maybe you find that erotic. I didn’t. I don’t. In fact, quite the opposite happened, and I soon realized that I was the only person there who wasn’t sexually active, with the exception of one person. That was Hiero. He was saving himself, it appeared, for me, if ever I decided I wanted him. Most of the women in that place expressed astonishment. They regarded him with concern and pity, in the same way you might have sympathy for someone with a broken leg. They brought him fruit and made conscious efforts to cheer him up when he protested he didn’t need cheering up.

  It was all the fault of the ghost he had brought into the community. A ghost, I later discovered, was to these people someone who had died a virgin.

  I didn’t try to tell anyone that I wasn’t a virgin. Meanwhile, there was no shortage of offers from those who wanted to relieve me of the burden of virginity.

  And that, in the end, was what led to Hiero being killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know.

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  She talks of making a crossing. We can be sure there is no crossing, at least not in the material world. There is no border, no gateway nor checkpoint. There is not even a river to ford. The crossing she has made is from the safe place of what she feels is her domestic incarceration to a place of open possibility. Her psyche has opened up like a flower to her own unconscious longings. She has crossed from the restricted, rationalized world of the local, the world of her safe childhood, to the open, creative, and chaotic world of the universal, to the more dangerous realm of the adult.

  Yes, she has met someone. But still we don’t know who or what he is, and we don’t know anything about her intentions.

  What can we say of the place at which she arrives? We are told there is a sandy beach, though it appears to be more lake than sea. We can safely say that it is a version of the land of Tir Na Nog or some other fabled land beyond the reaches of any map, a place that can only be reached either by arduous voyage or through an invitation by one of its fairy residents. It exists, in a very precise way in a plane of the mind, and although this is true for TM’s story, we can be sure that this place has some kind of parallel in the material world, and it is here we get some insight into where she went, at least initially.

  There are descriptions of what appears to be a commune of some kind. Certainly it is a gathering of folk with what might be called antiestablishment values. The house she describes as cobwebbed and rather filthy by the bourgeois standards to which she is accustomed at the Martin household. But there appears to be high value placed on the arts and on music, because we hear details of musical instruments and descriptions of books and beautiful illustrated charts. Scholarship, at least, seems to be prized in this commune to which she has been brought.

  The house is shared, we know that. There is no electricity and there are no phones available. The electricity may have been turned off because no one has paid the bills, but the rejection of telephone communications seems radical and indicates an ideologically based group of people perhaps living an experimental lifestyle, possibly anarchistic in character. There appears to be no property ownership, no rigid social structure, and no obvious leadership or hierarchy, and this might point to an early eco-group or green-living project; alternatively, we might be looking at a religious troop or fringe spiritual cult, though TM’s report offers no clues in the way of religious dogma. Even though these events happened twenty years ago it might be possible to make inquiries to see if there were any such communes either in the immediate locality or, say, within a thirty-mile radius.

  Yet even though there are no telephones available to her, we can assume that there was nothing stopping her from simply walking out and finding her way home. There is nothing at all to suggest that she was being held against her will, and we are surely not to take seriously the idea that she couldn’t find her way back. Again, we must reassert that TM was perfectly happy to be there until some process of disillusion had set in, by which time she might have felt that she had disgraced herself to her family and couldn’t face returning. And I think we have the answer to why that might have been.

  TM makes much of a ritual drink she takes with her seducer. The drink comes in a ridiculously tiny glass, and two things are happening here. Once again, TM is falling back on traditional fairy lore. The food and drink of the fairy folk is dangerous. Tradition has it that their hospitality should be resisted, because those who do partake of the offered food and drink can never leave this enchanted place. And so with TM. The drink, along with her oath, traps her in this place, at least in her own head. But there is a more mundane level to all of this. After the drink TM reports that she feels calm and finds the night velvety. She is drunk and is trying to excuse her behavior by minimalizing the quantity of the drink. How many people lie about how much alcohol they have consumed and claim to be surprised by how they came to be in such a state? This is a young girl’s post-debauch lament that she had no idea how much she was drinking or that someone put something in her drink.

  And although it is not reported, this debauch probably led to sex. This conclusion is guaranteed not by any admission, but by the force of her outrage against the sexual act itself. She is in an overly energetic state of denial.

  Her revulsion of the open sexuality she describes is a projected revulsion of her own behavior around the time of her disappearance. She has sublimated her distaste for what happened to her and blamed it on the other, which in this case is the community in which she had been living. The sex she sees happening openly in the commune is always described in orgiastic rather than sensual terms; the sex is mechanical rather than loving. TM expends a great deal of energy distancing herself from these sexual activities. Rather too much energy.

  A word or two here about the family context, such as it is, though the patient has been distanced from her own parents for some twenty years. The patient’s brother has stepped into the father’s role in bringing her here and arranging for her well-being. I’ve also been
able to meet the brother’s wife, a psychologist by academic training. I put it to her that we have here a complete Darling family, with TM as one of the lost children seduced away by Peter Pan. She was less than amused, though confirmed her own role in that she continues to want to take hold of the story by advancing a few theories through her affable husband, who raised the question of pathological narcissism, a phrase his wife had surely equipped him with. These people really do have an almost superstitious belief in the power of words, as if by naming Rumpelstiltskin they suddenly have power over him. Similarly, they desperately want to name the condition. This is the academic way, and I have to say that it’s less than helpful.

  TM’s account does have the pervasive pattern of grandiosity that is an indicator of narcissistic personality disorder, but the trait’s two other most common indicators, the need to be admired and the lack of empathy, are absent. In every single case of NPD that has come before me the patient has gone to great lengths to seek my express approval (and why wouldn’t they want the approval of someone who is, on the face of things, fascinated by them?), whereas TM couldn’t care less whether I like her or not. On the other hand, she never exhibits irritation, boredom, or distraction and her cooperation with my line of questioning is fully empathetic to my own needs. I am happy to dismiss the narcissistic diagnosis or any variant forms of NPD.

  I do, however, suspect an inability to face up to adult functions. The nature of TM’s revulsion of sex may confirm this. The question remains as to whether this was caused by trauma resulting in amnesia or by chronic fear of family disapproval. In her mind, of course, she has just experienced an abortion and she may be carrying over a squeamishness permanently associated with sexuality.

  The most puzzling thing muddying any potential diagnosis is the complication of TM’s extraordinarily juvenile appearance. I have encountered examples of psychosocial short stature in which growth hormones freeze, but TM’s physiognomy doesn’t correspond at all. In most cases of psychosocial short stature we see a thickening of limb growth, whereas TM’s appearance corresponds more roughly with anorexia nervosa.