by Graham Joyce
Tara was more than a little surprised by the frail figure before her. “But,” she said, “why us? Why so few people? Why do you think it was us?”
“I’ve never figured that out, but I do think I was marked from the beginning,” Mrs. Larwood said. “The man who led me away from the Outwoods: I’d seen him before.”
“How? ”
“It was the spring of 1951. The war was over and we were still on austerity measures in this country. Everyone was still on rations, you know, butter, meat, all that. You couldn’t even get the cloth to make a pretty dress. But it was a lovely spring that year and the blossom came early. We had a vigorous cherry blossom tree that made a canopy over our gate, in the front yard. It was the year of the Festival of Britain, but somehow I always thought that the Festival of Britain was in the tree with all its sparkling flowers.
“While my parents were out one afternoon a man came to the door. He was handsome but he looked like he’d spent too long in the sun, and also like he could do with a good wash, but he twinkled his eyes at me. Could he, he asked me, cut some of the blossom from our tree? I saw that he had a horse-drawn cart waiting in the road. There were panniers on the cart, baskets, lots of them. Well, the tree was so laden with blossom I didn’t see what harm it could be, so I said yes and before I knew it he was scrambling up in the tree, lithe and agile as anything, snipping off branches of the blossom and dropping them into one of the panniers from the back of his cart.
“I couldn’t think what he wanted it for. I mean, it doesn’t last, does it? You can’t sell it. But there he was, in the tree, busying himself, snip, snip, snip. I watched him from the bedroom of our house, and I remember feeling a little alarmed that he was taking too much of the blossom.
“Then my father returned unexpectedly. I watched my father stroll halfway up the path and do a double take on this man in the tree. He stopped dead and asked him what he was doing up there. I couldn’t hear exactly what was said, but a fierce argument broke out. The air was smoked blue for a while and in the end the man got on his cart and he trotted his horse away.
“Daddy came in. ‘Helen, did you tell that man he could take our blossom?’ he wanted to know. I told him that I’d given the man permission to take a few posies. But my father seemed to think he’d been cutting down half the tree. Anyway, that was that, and I thought it was the end of the matter.
“But then a couple of weeks later I went walking up at the Outwoods. I’d gone on a picnic with some girlfriends. We often went up there together, especially at bluebell time, when the bluebells make you want to faint with pleasure. Anyway, I got tired of all the silly chatter of my friends and I felt a kind of storm brewing in my head, so I walked a little way off. I sat down by a rock, and there he was, smiling at me, a straw in his mouth. And though we never discussed the argument he had had with my father I knew it was the very same man: the same man who had been in our tree, the blossom thief.”
“And you went with him,” Tara said.
“And I went with him.”
“And the light.”
“And the light.”
“I admit it was hard to adjust when I came back. Seven years had passed. Things had hardly changed.”
“Only seven? You were lucky.”
“I didn’t think I was lucky when I was locked up and given electric shocks. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’d been in a kind of heaven. But the year in the asylum was hell. And one year there was like seven elsewhere. So you see, it was balanced out. I had to pay in the end. There is always a terrible and peculiar kind of accounting. I want you to be warned of that.”
“I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist. So far he hasn’t given me any electric shocks. I think he’d like to. He’s annoyed that I keep cooperating with him.”
“If I were you, I’d invent a lover and say that you ran away with him and you’re very sorry and that you won’t do it again. Then they’ll leave you alone.”
“I would do that. But it’s more complicated. You see, the man who led me away? He followed me back here.”
Mrs. Larwood blinked at her. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. He’s stalking me all the time.”
“My God! You’ve got to get him to go back!”
“I’ve tried. He’s sick. He’s pining and ill. I look out of my bedroom at night and he’s in the garden, skulking in the shadows. If I go anywhere, he follows me.”
“Oh, dear. That’s very bad news. We’re going to have to do something about that,” said Mrs. Larwood.
“It’s worse. He attacked one of my friends.”
Mrs. Larwood looked shocked. “Now, and for your friend’s sake,” she said, “you have to be very careful indeed.”
Mrs. Larwood said that on returning to find that seven years had gone by, she had met a man who had stuck by her even while she was in the asylum receiving electric-shock therapy. He was, she said, the only man who didn’t try to persuade her that she was insane, even though he found it impossible to believe what she was saying. He had accepted her. They married. But he in turn soon developed a debilitating wasting illness. The doctors were unable to diagnose his problem. He couldn’t eat. He never became well again. He wasted and died.
Mrs. Larwood said she knew how it was done. She, too, had been followed home. She said they had used the technique of blasting.
“Don’t say that,” Tara said.
“I see you know something of this.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“I’m sorry. But what I wanted to tell you was that I think I made a mistake, all those years ago, in coming back. I don’t think I should have. There is no place for us here, and our presence can become a harm to those we love.”
Mrs. Larwood’s new cat came rubbing up against Tara’s legs, and so she went on to tell Tara about Jack and his antics with the cat. “I wasn’t going to tell you these things until Jack tried to fool me with this cat. Yes, I had ruined my own life, but I thought it wasn’t my place to interfere in yours. Then, when Jack did this, I knew I should talk to you, tell you what I know, and then at least you can make up your own mind. You see, I ruined my life by pretending I was the same person when I came home. But I wasn’t. We can’t be. I was no more the same person than was this cat my old cat. It took a thirteen-year-old boy to make me certain of that. Tara, you are not the girl who left here.”
“No,” Tara said. “I’m not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I understand. Thank you for talking to me. It was brave of you.”
“Brave? I don’t know. I’m so afraid of hurting people just by speaking up. You know when my young husband was dying I was still receiving treatment as an outpatient, and a psychiatrist managed to put it into my head that somehow I was the one who was killing him. There you are. On one side you are blasted by curses and on the other side they blast you with drugs and electric shocks. One is a knave and one is a fool. One wants to steal the blossom; one wants to steal the light. Where are we left, you and I?”
Tara shook her head. “The one I’m seeing seems mad as a hatter to me. Smokes like a chimney.”
“Smokes like a chimney? His name isn’t Underwood, is it?”
“Vivian Underwood. You don’t know him, do you?”
“Do I know him? Oh, yes. As a very young doctor he was once a great proponent of electric-shock therapy. I’ll say I know Vivian Underwood.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.
CHARLES DE LINT
The client has commissioned me to do no more than make an early report, about whether TM might need medication or counseling or both, and whether she is actually a danger to herself or to others. My report will suggest doing nothing, at least for the present. Deluded though TM is, I see no indication that she is likely to harm herself or those around her. She has a good support network; she is not using drugs, as far as I can determine; she drinks only moderately; an
d her conversation when she’s not referring to this wild episode is rational and coherent.
She has lost a huge chunk of her memory. But the scan I arranged for her showed no sign of trauma to the head, or any kind of aberration whatsoever. I suspect she hasn’t lost her memory at all. Rather, she doesn’t yet want to find it. But many things about TM’s story are leaving me confident that she is busy—at least on an unconscious level—working out the solution to her problem.
I suspect something unpleasant probably happened twenty years ago, in the Outwoods, or around the time she was either abducted or led astray. Some deep sense of shame made it impossible for her to go back to the family hearth: a loving, protective family that she felt she’d disgraced. Her repair time will, inevitably, be slow. But she is the principal engine of her own reintegration, not me or some other counselor, not drugs.
It will take time but the confabulation is already beginning to shed its layers. In one layer we are in the timeless world of Tir Na Nog, a place of eternal youth. Significantly, there are no children mentioned in TM’s account. Not one. If this were a real piece of geography one would suspect that all this casual coitus would normally produce one or two babies. The reason for this is clear: TM is the only child in this world. Hence her distaste for the sexuality that probably led to her abduction, or possibly—and this is a guess—the experience of being raped all those years ago. Her confabulation is the willful act of someone determined to remain a child, presexual and almost prelapsarian.
Traditionally, the fairies stand in for some violation of the sexual mores of a society. They are the wild force that whispers to us. It’s not just the abducted individual who buys into this: as recently as a hundred years ago, there was even a legal case in Ireland in which a woman was murdered by her husband, who believed she’d been taken by the fairies. She returned, in disgrace, of course. Neither she nor her husband could face up to what had happened. The family, and perhaps the community, found it easier to lay the moral blame on the unseen folk rather than face up to the shame and dishonor of what is all too human. In this case there was no need for supernatural agency, but the husband and his family preferred the fiction, or at least tried to hide behind the fiction.
Yet the detail that makes me most happy is the apparently insignificant portrait of the bug, or rather the bugs, that settle in the forest to make an individual flower. The forest, with its winding pathways, is the subconscious mind trying to make itself conscious. The image of the bug flower is what Jung called a mandala, a circular motif of perfect integration. The bugs breaking up are an emblem of her fractured psyche; the action of the bugs reconfiguring themselves into a perfect flower or mandala is TM’s wish fulfillment, a forward projection of her deep desire for the full integration of her disturbed psyche. Her family, and the reintegration inside the bosom of the family, is an expression of the very same compulsion to repair, but on a physical level. The bug flower is a picture of her mind.
Amnesiacs and elective amnesiacs are, according to Freud, always unconsciously trying to repeat the cause of their amnesia. It is quite possible that she succeeded. From that moment the process of repair and reconstruction would have begun. The most significant act was for her to come back home. She reported to me that the first thing she wanted to do when she was reunited with her family was to walk in the Outwoods with her brother. She was ready to revisit the scene of the crime, as it were. This was a huge step on the path to full recovery.
TM thinks that I don’t take her story seriously. On the contrary, I take it very seriously indeed. I approach her story rather like a dream she might have had; only it’s a constructed dream, made of smoke and mirrors she can hide behind so that she doesn’t have to face up to her personal history. This fairyland is a place she goes to hide from herself. I think she will recover the information of where she’s been these twenty years when she’s good and ready. We could use psychiatric methods to tempt it back but it’s like pulling on a dried rosebud to try to make it into a rose. I prefer the method of interpreting her dream in a way that she can use to rebuild a new narrative of what has happened to her. Her story, to be sure, but with my ending.
I have one last meeting with TM. I’m not confident that she will tell me anything that will yield up more information about where she has been. But I can insert into her story information and signposts about where she is going. I intend to try something that will at least prepare the soil for me to build in a competing end to the narrative under construction.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Michael Cleary her husband; Patrick Boland the deceased’s father; three Kennedy cousins and an aunt, and four local men including sanachie (Irish storyteller) John Dunne, were all charged with wilful murder. During the murder trials conducted in the Clonmel courthouse, all charges of murder were reduced to manslaughter. Three defendants were discharged without penalty. Patrick Boland received six months imprisonment, as did Michael Kennedy but with hard labour. James Kennedy got a year and a half imprisonment, while his brother Patrick Kennedy got five years for his part in the burial. Michael Cleary was sentenced to twenty years penal servitude for manslaughter. After only fifteen years in jail he was released from Maryborough Prison on the 28 April 1910, with a gratuity of £17. 13s. 4d. He emigrated to Montreal, Canada, there to live out the rest of his life. Throughout his time in prison, Michael Cleary steadfastly maintained he had not killed his wife, he still believed right up to the end, that the fairies had taken her and left in her place a changeling.
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
OF REGINA V. MICHAEL CLEARY (1895)
When Tara breezed into his study for what was to be their final session, Vivian Underwood was interested to notice a change in her manner of dress. Gone were the black jeans and the loose T-shirt, and the high-top boots, and the sparkling arm’s length of bangles; gone too were the dark glasses. Tara wore a dark pencil skirt, flat shoes, and opaque black tights. Her tight burgundy sweater plunged at the front in a V-neck, and the wild tumbling curls of her hair, which she had restrained in a neat ponytail for the previous sessions, spilled around her shoulders, lustrous and brown. Her fingernails were painted scarlet red. There was a marked sheen in her eye. She wore a little makeup, and her lips were painted with a delicate shade of pink and a provocative smile.
She was celebrating her release from counseling, Underwood noted with grim pleasure. But he was pleased to see this change in her attire. He knew that it signaled an advance. Attire, Underwood knew well enough, chattered when the personality remained silent; clothes spoke freely of secrets, hidden desires, and wounded feelings when the subject wearing them was struck dumb. He also knew that sometimes they were just clothes.
“This is your last session with me, Tara,” said Underwood. “We’ve had some fascinating conversations, you and I, but we have arrived at the end of the usefulness of those talks.”
“I’ve learned a lot from just talking to you,” Tara said, plucking a speck of lint from her sweater. “I feel like it’s my last day at school.”
“Quite. And just as before, you get to choose where we sit.”
“Let me see: writing desk with armchair opposite, that would indicate a businesslike defensiveness; the sofa, looking for intimacy, perhaps; the armchairs by the fire, an interest in pretending we’re all equals … no, let’s stick with those chairs drawn up by the window, open to the light, ready for new ideas.”
“Not bad,” Underwood said. This hostility is new, he thought.
“I’ve been watching you watching me.” Tara squinted at him, perhaps in parody of his scrutiny.
“And what did you see me seeing?”
“Oh, you’ve got it all mapped out. You know that everything I say means something else. I’m sure it all fits into some big picture in your mind.”
Underwood nodded at the seat and she took her place by the window. He lit a cigarette and fetched himself a heavy glass ashtray before sitting down. There was a small octagonal table next to one of the chairs,
and on this he placed the ashtray. “You’ve been talking to your brother. Or to his wife, the lovely domestic-goddess-psychologist.”
“Not at all. Pete has refused to discuss anything you’ve said about me. I admit I badgered him about it. But he kept it buttoned. And as for Genevieve, she’s the smartest one, and smart enough to know she doesn’t know much. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter, Tara?”
“Because you’ve got your theory, no doubt. You don’t believe a single word I’ve told you. And your word is more important than mine, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“Oh, yes. Look at all these impressive certificates on the wall. Neatly framed. You are old and wise and clever, and you know everything, whereas, well, me”—here Tara made a steeple of her hands and laid her cheek upon them—“I’m just a young girl.” She fluttered her eyelashes for him.
“You’re angry today.”
“A bit.”
“But you’re not a young girl, are you, Tara? Not sixteen, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I’m much older than that. I don’t know what happened. I was away for six months, but I gathered twenty years of experience in that time. My body didn’t age, but my mind did. It matured, anyway. Maybe I gathered more than twenty years of experience in that six months. The difficulty is that some of the people I left behind didn’t grow at all. And sometimes I find them infuriatingly simple. Like my mum and dad. Oh, I love them. Would die for them. But they watch junk television and read junk newspapers and repeat the phrases they got from their junk television and junk newspapers. Do you realize what a nightmare that is to witness?”
“I think I do.”
“I hoped to find them at home,” Tara said bitterly. “But all that I found were shells of what they were. Husks. They’d allowed age to diminish them instead of mature them. And then there’s my brother. Peter. He was like a beautiful animal when he was young. He burned with a flame. Now he’s just a tired dad, hammering horseshoes every day, bent over an anvil. Where did he go, my brother? And his lovely wife, up to her elbows in cooking and cleaning for her family.”
