Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

  “That won’t work,” he’d said.

  “It will. Now play your normal chords, but one step up.”

  He was astonished. She had been right. There were new sounds in the world. Sounds that, crusty old muso that he was, he’d never heard before.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  He shouldn’t have asked. He knew the answer.

  “I told you. I learned lots of things.”

  Richie smoked his cigarette, thinking about some songs he wanted to rearrange in this extraordinary new style when he heard the rush of footsteps. But even though he was distracted by thoughts of Tara and of musical chords, he was ready.

  He’d been ready from the moment he’d been discharged from the hospital after the first assault, because he knew in his bones that a second attack was always imminent. Even though he now preferred the quiet life, Richie was a street fighter. Both his instincts and his experience informed him that a second assault would follow, as sure as counting for the thunder that follows lightning, and that it would happen in an open space at a time when he was alone. And he was ready.

  The sound he heard behind him was a light-footed skitter on the tarmac. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped out and away from his car. There was a rush of a shadow and an astonishing high kick that whistled an inch past his jaw, but Richie grabbed his attacker, and, instead of blocking, he pulled the man farther into the line of his own attack, so that his assailant went crashing into the gap left by the open car door. Richie moved quickly, stepping around to slam the car door into the figure crumpled against the driver’s-side wheel. He slammed the door again, and again.

  The dazed attacker tried to shield his head with a raised forearm, but Richie slammed the door a fourth time, catching the raised arm between the door and the roof of the car in a sickening crunch. There was a howl of agony from the shadowy figure trapped by the car door.

  Richie knew now for sure that his attacker was the same man who had eyeballed him while he was onstage that night. He opened the door again and the man slumped to the floor. Richie put the boot in, hard.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Richie roared. He could smell the man, smell his pain and his hurting breath and body odor mingled. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man squatted, leaning against the bottom sill of the car, nursing his injured arm, a rich stream of blood leaking from his nose. He was still trapped between the car and Richie, who was ready with the door, threatening to slam it on him again.

  The man spoke in an eerie whisper. “She’s not for you.”

  “What the fuck are you TALKING about?” Richie roared back.

  But he got no answer. From his squat position the man made a sudden spring, an impossible upright leap that took him over the open car door to land nimbly on the tarmac behind. Still nursing his injured arm, he ran.

  “That’s right, run, you fucker! Run!”

  The man stopped and turned to call to Richie. “Give her up. She’s not for you. She’s not for any of you.” And then he trotted away, disappearing behind a row of parked vehicles.

  Richie was suddenly calm. He was pumped with adrenaline but now it changed and flowed through him like a sedative. He felt his body spasm. He lit another cigarette and stared at the space where the man had disappeared, wondering how the man had leapt over the car door like that.

  After a while Tara emerged, smiling broadly at him. Then her expression changed. “What happened?”

  THEY WENT TO THE Phantom Coach to get a drink. Richie had a pint and a scotch chaser. Tara had asked for snakebite, and he shuddered. Richie told her everything about the attack. Tara took her dark glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose. She sighed and told Richie all she knew about Hiero, about how he had followed her everywhere, how he was still stalking her.

  “That means,” Richie said evenly, “that I’ve just had a fight with a fucking fairy.”

  “They’re dangerous,” she said.

  “Think I don’t know that?”

  “And you shouldn’t call them that. They don’t like it. Are you starting to believe me?”

  “No,” said Richie. “Yes. Not really. Partly.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Richie was wincing. “It’s these migraines I get. They’re like attacks of colored light, but they burn like acid.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Another scotch and another beer. Throw medicine at it. I’ll be all right.”

  “You don’t look all right.”

  “Tara, I’m all right. You’ve come back to me. That’s all I need. That’s all the medicine and the dope I need.”

  “Richie!”

  “Let me tell you something. You’ve been away for twenty years. But I have, too. I went into hibernation when you left me. All I’ve done in twenty years is write songs about you. I haven’t really grown up, have I? Look at Peter and Genevieve. They’ve grown up but I’ve been stuck where I was when you left me.”

  “Oh my God, Richie.”

  “But that’s changed. Time started again. A new clock started ticking. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, Tara?”

  “Yes, Richie.”

  “You have come back, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Richie.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.

  MARINA WARNER

  Jack managed to scoop up the bag with the cat’s corpse and to step around Tara and Mrs. Larwood without much conversation. Mrs. Larwood seemed to want him to stay while she heaped praise upon his shoulders, telling Tara how he had helped her with her computer and what a fine boy he was. Jack had muttered some remark about being in a bit of a hurry, whereupon Tara had said something teasing. Both she and Mrs. Larwood had giggled at him.

  But as he walked away he felt both pairs of eyes boring into his back. He wondered if the plastic bag was transparent enough for them to be able to determine the shape of a cat’s corpse. He was tempted to look down at the bag to gauge the opacity of the plastic; but he was certain that one downward glance would draw attention to what was inside it and almost certainly betray him, so he kept his eyes directed ahead of him and marched on with agonizing and robotic purpose.

  After walking for half a mile in this mode he came across a builder’s Dumpster in the road, outside a house in the process of renovation. The Dumpster had been filled with discarded bricks and old plaster and lath, plus bathroom fittings torn from the old house. Jack checked that no one was watching, and dumped the cat corpse in the bin, hiding it under some broken lath for good measure.

  From there he took a bus into town and went directly to Cat-line, the rescue center he had researched on the Internet. He had identified a specific cat from a gallery of photographs; it looked exactly like Mrs. Larwood’s cat, down to the detail. At least, he thought guiltily, it looked like Mrs. Larwood’s cat before it had been shot, buried, had decomposed, and was dug up again. The favored cat had the piss-poor name of Frosty, but that hadn’t seemed an insurmountable problem, because cats, as far as he knew, were not like dogs in answering to their names. There was little prospect of someone randomly shouting its name and the cat responding. All it needed was Mrs. Larwood’s distinctive collar—or, rather, Mrs. Larwood’s cat’s distinctive collar. Jack felt he had a good chance of pulling this off.

  At the reception desk he blushed when he told a heavily pregnant woman behind the reception desk that he’d had some e-mail exchanges with a lady called Joanna. Why the fuck am I blushing? he thought angrily. There’s no need to blush. While he fought back the pink, the woman said Joanna was being summoned from the bowels of the cattery.

  Joanna had dark hair that tumbled over her eyes and she wore tight-fitting but dirty blue jeans. She had lazy eyelids, and Jack thought she was hot for such an old chick, though he guessed she
was well over twenty-one, and therefore well past it. But when she eyed him from behind her fringe of dark hair he found he was fighting another blush. Even from where he stood she smelled of what he suspected was cat fur. Or something like that. It set him on edge.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize I was e-mailing such a good-looking young man,” she said airily.

  The blush broke like a tsunami. That is, all his blood drained from his face for a second, leaving him pale, but it was only gathering strength to come back in force. The blush discharged from deep in his scalp and from low across the back of his neck, swelling like a foaming red tide across his cheeks, and crashing like a breaker around his ears. His ears were the worst. They flamed. He knew his ears would be flamingo pink and he hated himself with a vicious passion. Right at that moment he hated his own guts for blushing so profoundly.

  Joanne waited for him to speak. He couldn’t. His tongue froze in his mouth.

  She cocked her head to one side. Then she cocked her head to the other side, in an exaggerated and mocking gesture, waiting patiently for him to speak. Finally, she pressed her fingertips together, making a steeple that she held under her chin. Her eyes laughed at him.

  “Frosty,” Jack managed.

  “Just a bit.”

  “Cat.”

  “This is a cattery. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Joanna shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and Jack found himself with the biggest and most unwanted erection he’d ever experienced in his young life. Now the woman behind the reception was looking at him oddly, too. Jack thought that both women could tell he had a huge erection. He hated his erection and he hated his blushing and he hated the young woman Joanna and her mocking eyes. What right had she got to give him an erection? He didn’t even like the way she smelled.

  Joanna glanced at the woman behind the desk. “You want to come and have a look at him?”

  It was with some relief that Jack realized Joanna was addressing him, not inviting the woman behind the desk to study his no doubt observable erection. He nodded. She beckoned him to follow her to the cattery, which he did. He’d been holding his breath and was relieved to find that he could ultimately take in air again. The young woman’s buttocks swung in front of him and he had to quickly avert his eyes. He made the mistake of blowing out noisily—a completely involuntary act—and she glanced back over her shoulder at him.

  Someone from the winding depths of the cattery called to Joanna and she abandoned him for a moment to speak with her colleague, for which release he was mightily grateful. When she returned he found he had almost recovered the faculty of speech.

  “I e-mailed you,” he said.

  “You did.”

  “Saying what I was looking for.”

  “You did.”

  “And you said Frosty.”

  “I did. And here he is.”

  She had led him to a wire cage on a shelf, just one in a row of identical cages. The cat behind the wire was perfect. Jack had in his possession a picture of Mrs. Larwood’s cat—printed on a leaflet—but he didn’t even need to get the picture out of his pocket to know that Frosty was a precise match. It was uncanny, so close was it in its markings to that dead cat. It was even white-mitted on all four feet.

  “You want to hold him?”

  Jack didn’t. He wasn’t at all attracted to cats. He didn’t want to pet the thing, coo at the thing, or talk to the thing. In fact, he despised the way people would adopt a falsetto voice or any other kind of voice in order to address a cat. He just wanted to stow the creature in a box, get that red collar round its neck, and drop it off at Mrs. Larwood’s place at the double, job done. But it occurred to him he’d better look like he was thrilled to see the creature so he made some poor efforts at emulating cat-lover noises.

  She swung open the cage, made a gentle grab for Frosty, and handed him over to Jack. Luckily for him, Frosty seemed happy enough, purring and nestling into the crook of his arm, blinking up at him.

  Everything was going pretty well between them until Joanna mentioned a home visit.

  “Home visit?”

  “We don’t just dump them on anyone.”

  “Oh?”

  “We check out that you’re all suitable for the cat and the cat is suitable for you.”

  “Right. Is that really necessary?”

  “You wouldn’t believe what we see in people’s homes. One family had a huge pet snake. Imagine.”

  “Right. That must have been … Right.”

  Joanna puckered the corner of her lips and blew her dark fringe out of her eye. “When do you want us to come?”

  “I’ll need to get back to you on that,” Jack said.

  “Need to check your busy schedule, do you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “See if you can find us a window in your calendar?”

  Jack blew out his cheeks again. “Yep.”

  “No rush. Take your time. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I mean, you’ll probably want my parents to be there, won’t you?”

  She nodded slowly. She seemed way overfocused on him. “Plus, there’s the donation to think about.”

  “We’re okay with the donation,” Jack said, rather too quickly.

  “That’s great.”

  “How much is the donation?”

  “Well, we cover all bases: vets fees, microchipping, inoculations, tick and worm treatment. It actually comes to around a hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “What?”

  “But we suggest a minimum donation of fifty.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “That going to be a problem?”

  “No. No. I’ll go now.”

  “In a hurry, now, are we?” She put her hands on her hips. Those fractionally swinging hips, in her tight, dirty blue denim jeans. Her long forefingers slipped into the belt loops at the waistband of her jeans. And as she locked her gaze on his she swung those hips to the side, rocking slightly.

  Jack turned and he knew he was coloring again. He felt the rush. He retraced his steps, knowing that Joanna was watching him leave. He crossed the reception, and the pregnant lady at the desk bid him good-bye.

  “Yes,” Jack said, by way of reply.

  He walked to the end of the street, turned the corner, and found a brick wall; and he gave that brick wall a bloody good kicking.

  JACK HAD A STROKE of luck that afternoon when his mother asked him if he might stay in the next day and take care of Amber. Zoe would be out with her boyfriend and Genevieve wanted to take Josie to the optician to find out if she needed spectacles. It would be a big help to her, Genevieve said, if Jack would hold the fort. Jack quickly calculated that his dad would be working and that he had a useful window of opportunity in which he could invite the visit from the cattery. He could make out that his parents had been called out unexpectedly. The visitors would check out the house, see that it was fine, and release the cat.

  “Sure.”

  Genevieve was slightly taken aback. “What, no protest? No demand for financial reward? No moaning?”

  “Do you want me to do it or not?”

  With that settled, Jack stepped outside with his phone and called the cattery to schedule a home visit for four p.m. the following day. When he came back he found Amber in the sitting room. “If you’re good tomorrow,” he told her, “I might let you play on my computer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. If you’re good.”

  “Jack, I love you!”

  “Shut up with that or I won’t let you.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, WITH Jack in full command of the house, the doorbell rang at about ten minutes before four. “They’re early,” Jack said out loud, though he hadn’t intended to.

  “Who?” Amber wanted to know.

  “Go and play on my computer,” Jack said.

  “Who is at the door?”

  “Now! You have to go now! You go and play on my computer now, right now, or you don’t get
to play on it at all, and you know what that means?”

  “What does it mean?” Amber asked reasonably.

  “Get on my computer this minute!”

  But Amber instead ran to the dining room at the front of the house and looked out of the window. Jack chased after her. “It’s Richie,” she said casually.

  Jack’s hopes crashed. He answered the door, holding it open just a crack.

  Richie had a guitar-shaped carrying case in his hand. “Jack,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “Dad in?”

  “No.”

  “Mum in?”

  “No.”

  “You in?”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  “I’ve brought this guitar for your sister. It’s a damn sight better than that thing she’s got.”

  “Right.”

  “Jack, you’re gonna have to open the door just a tiny bit wider.”

  “Why?”

  “See this guitar I’ve brought over for your sister? I’ll never get this guitar through that little crack without damaging it. If I’m to bring it in at all, that is.”

  Jack opened the door and extended an arm, generously offering to relieve Richie of the burden of the guitar. Richie didn’t tender the guitar, however. He looked as though he planned on keeping it for a while longer. Instead he asked where Genevieve was, and Jack told him. Jack shot a glance at the clock in the hall. It was now eight minutes before the scheduled visit.

  “Everything all right, Jack?”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “Tell you what, let me in and I’ll leave a note for your sister about the guitar.”

  Jack hovered in the doorway, hearing his spinning plates crashing around him. He looked up the street. He looked down the street. There was no sign of the cat people. Then he stepped aside and let Richie in.

  Richie swaggered through to the kitchen as if he owned the place. There he leaned the guitar, in its case, gently against the wall. “It needs careful handling, that one. Keep it away from radiators, tell her. And out of the direct sunlight. Right?”

  “Radiators. Sunlight. Check.”

  “You been suckin’ a lemon, Jack?”