The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Page 20
This view was quite different from the one from the bedroom window. There was no point in trying to find patterns in the waves of the sort for which the boy who’d made the drawings must have been searching. Here, the bumps in the green carpet where the crowd of the trees pushed up against the bindweed stood out purely by virtue of their height, not their distance from one another. Nor were the movements of their leaves blurred by distance; from here, it was obvious that the wind was stirring the foliage, and that each individual bump was quivering. It was equally obvious that the regions in between weren’t being depressed by the passage of invisible bodies. It was easy to see the hawthorn branches and brambles that protruded through the bindweed in hundreds of different places, so it was obvious that the greenery wasn’t a single oceanic mass at all, but a confusion of different things.
Angie looked hard. The bumps on the apparent surface were squat and rounded, impossible to imagine as people or animals, but it was possible to imagine creatures hiding behind them or moving beneath them—except that they only seemed to move when she wasn’t looking directly at them. Angie knew that it was an illusion. She knew that the movements glimpsed from the corners of her eyes were just branches of different kinds shifted in different ways by the wind. The reason she could imagine animate creatures making those movements was that the information transmitted to her brain by her eye was incomplete, allowing her brain to make things up. She was an engineer’s daughter, after all. Her father was always enthusiastic to explain those sorts of things.
That wasn’t the point, though. She wanted to know what kind of creatures she wasn’t really seeing. She wanted to know what it was that Mrs. Lamb had avoided saying. So she tried very hard to see exactly what wasn’t there. She tried to work out exactly what her brain might want to invent, if it were given a license to do so.
Then she guessed, and giggled.
“There are fairies at the bottom of the garden,” she quoted. That was what Mrs. Lamb had been too embarrassed to mention. It wasn’t ghosts that lurked in impenetrable thickets, in the old lady’s mind, but mischievous fairy folk.
Angie was eleven years old, and she knew better than to think of fairies as tiny people with butterfly wings. It wasn’t the kind of fairies that featured in children’s fairy tales and their illustrations that Mrs. Lamb had been thinking about. She had been imagining tricky things that moved in the borderlands of existence as well as the borderlands of sight: things that teased belief as well as sight.
“Well, if that’s all they are,” Angie said, “there really isn’t any need to be afraid, is there?”
“What’s that, treasure?” her mother’s voice put in. Her mother had opened the back door of the cottage, perhaps to look for Angie and perhaps to let in some fresh air.
“Nothing,” Angie said. “I’m just going upstairs to my room.”
That was, indeed, what she had decided to do. She wanted to take another look at the dead orchard from her bedroom window, to see if she could make any more sense out of the designs drawn beside it, now that she had made her new guess as to what it all might mean.
She ran up the stairs, and went into her grey-walled room, which now seemed to be waiting to be rescued from its own unfinished state. It deserved to be made into a thoroughly human habitation again, by the careful repair of its crumbling plaster and the application of two layers of cheerfully-colored paint, and it expected to be given what it deserved.
“All in good time,” Angie told the walls.
She took her drawings from the drawer of her bedside table and took them to the window. She looked out intently, staring as hard as she could, and then looked at one of the drawings. She repeated the procedure with another, and then another.
The artist never got it quite right, she reminded herself. Not while he was drawing on the wall, any rate. None of these is exactly accurate—hut there’s a wonky spiral in there somewhere, if only I can figure out how to see it and draw. It’s difficult because it’s a fairy thing—a tricky thing. Maybe it is a kind of trap. Maybe there is someone in there, after all, who can’t go on to wherever he’s supposed to go, because he’s trapped in the fairy ring. Even though he knows that, in theory, all he has to do to get out is to keep on going, he can’t actually do it because the fairies keep tricking him, the way fairies do.
It occurred to her, after she’d finished formulating the thought, that she now had it firmly fixed in her mind that the unknown artist was a boy. What Cathy had said about him being a human sacrifice whose blood had been used to fertilize a witch’s garden was nonsense, because there was no witches’ garden, but he had been trapped there nevertheless. The orchard hadn’t failed because the apple trees had been planted in poisoned ground; it had failed because it had been planted on a fairy ring—which was actually a fairy spiral.
That was nonsense too, of course—but it was a different kind of nonsense. It couldn’t make the kind of sense that an engineer’s thinking could recognize, but it might make a kind of sense that the artist standing by the window, looking out through the old lattice with its ill-matched fragments of distorted glass, had recognized quite naturally. Even her father had conceded that what he called mandalas might reflect something basic in the unconscious mind— something that hovered on the brink of perception and believability, teasingly.
Angie put the completed drawings back in the drawer and took out her pad and a soft pencil. She took them back to the window, and looked out. At first she looked through the cluster of new diamonds, but then she moved her head sideways, to look out through the older glass, which blurred the image of the green waves just a little bit more.
She began to sketch, trying to find the right eccentric spiral, the right mandala. She wanted to see the trap as it really was. She wasn’t in the least afraid, because she thought that if she could only succeed in making an accurate map, she would know exactly how to get out of the trap should she ever find herself in it.
Her first attempt was a dismal failure, worse than the examples scribbled in the yielding plaster. Her second was no better—but she could feel that the practice was doing her good. She was getting a feel for the work now. She was beginning to see what was really there, and beginning to guide her hand in such a way as to reproduce what she saw on paper.
She carried on drawing, relentlessly.
* * * *
6.
When Angie’s mother finally called her down to dinner, she took her best effort yet downstairs to show her parents.
“It’s not quite right,” she told them, “but it’s very nearly right. I don’t think the light’s quite right at this time of day. I’ll try again later, when the sun’s gone down.”
Her mother looked at the drawing, and then passed it on to Mr. Martindale. Angie could see that they were gathering themselves to be complimentary, although they wouldn’t really mean it. They couldn’t see what it was that she had almost drawn. To them, it was just a glorified doodle.
“It’s a load of crap,” was Cathy’s verdict. “If you’re going to be an artist, you might as well try to be a real artist first, before you settle for passing off scribbles as abstracts.”
“Not these days,” her father observed. “These days, you might as well skip the drawing entirely and go straight to pickled sharks, unmade beds and video loops.”
“You were wrong about the ghost, by the way,” Angie said to Cathy. “He wasn’t killed. He just got lost. He knows that he’s in a spiral rather than a maze, but he still can’t get out because he doesn’t have an accurate map. It’s not just a matter of going on walking, you see—you have to be able to see through the tricks.”
“What are you talking about?” Cathy demanded.
“I’m not at all sure that he’s a ghost at all,” Angie said, blithely. “At any rate, he’s not the sort of ghost they hunt for in those TV shows. The TV people are looking for the wrong things, so they never get to see anything clearly.”
“You’re off your head,” Cathy said dismissively.
Angie hesitated, knowing that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try talking to her father about fairies.
“I don’t think they’ve got a name,” she said. “In fact, I think that’s what they are: the kind of thing you can’t put a name to. Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t, when I talked to her this afternoon. She believes in spirits that get trapped here, and she believes in something else, but she couldn’t say exactly what it was, because it doesn’t have a name. Something you can’t see unless you look really hard, and might wish you hadn’t seen if you did.”
“Stark raving bonkers,” Cathy observed.
“No,” said Mr. Martindale, making an obvious effort. “I think I understand what Angie’s getting at. From what your mother tells me, Mrs. Lamb’s a country person, born and bred. She hasn’t always lived and worked in the same place, but she’s always lived in the same area. She taught village children in a village school. She’s never lived in a town, let alone a city. She’s an intelligent and sensible woman, no doubt, but she’s never entirely got away from the folklore she grew up with. She doesn’t believe it, exactly, but she doesn’t reject it either. People of that sort don’t put names to such things, because that would compel them to think about them more clearly, and come to a firmer decision about whether to take them seriously or not. But we’re not like that, are we? So what are we talking about, Angie? Fairies?”
Angie was surprised to hear her father make that guess, even though she knew how smart he was.
“You might call them that, I suppose,” she said, serenely. “Not the silly kind, though. Not the kind those two little girls cut out of soap ads so that they could fake photographs.”
“What little girls?” her mother asked.
“She means the girls who faked the Cottingley photographs that fooled Conan Doyle,” her father supplied, helpfully. “Are we talking about sinister fairies, love—sly things that steal the milk and knock things over in the kitchen while everyone’s asleep?”
“No,” said Angie, defensively.
“No?” her father echoed. Then, like the intelligent man he was, he looked at her drawing again, and studied it more carefully. “Ah!” he said. “I’m getting it now—the right folklore, that is. Tales of traps where people are becalmed in time—tales of wanderers who stray over some invisible barrier, into a world where time stands still, then return home to find that years have passed, or centuries.”
“Kids’ stuff,” Cathy said, scornfully.
“Not at all,” Mr. Martindale replied. “It’s a kind of story found all over the British isles, and very old. There was a time, you see, when fairyland and the land of the dead were the same thing. That’s why time doesn’t move in fairyland: because the dead are outside time, and unaffected by it. In that way of thinking, fairyland’s inhabitants are ghosts, of a sort—and Angie might be right when she says that it isn’t appropriate to name them, to see and know them for what they really are. Ignorance, you see, is what sometimes allows the living who stray into fairyland by mistake—especially children—to get back again unscathed. If they ever realize where they are, they get stuck, perhaps because they die themselves but perhaps because they just get stuck.”
“What’s the drawing got to do with it?” Angie’s mother asked.
“It’s a mandala,” Mr. Martindale said. “A map of time and life as a kind of maze—a maze that you can’t really get lost in, as you proceed from birth to death, by way of the eternal sequence of days and years, but in which you always seem to be lost, because you never know where you’re headed, and always seem to be going around in circles.”
“I don’t get it,” Mrs. Martindale said, flatly.
Angie was still looking at her father, and he was looking at her. “The thing you have to remember,” her father said softly, “is that you can always get out, even if you think you’re stuck. You understand that, don’t you, treasure?”
Angie knew that her father wasn’t talking about what was in the back garden, or about ghosts, or about fairyland. He meant that it was okay for her to let her imagination run wild occasionally, as long as she knew the way back and didn’t ever accept that she was stuck.
“Sure,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
She honestly thought that she did. As soon as she’d finished dinner, without even glancing in the direction of the TV set, she went back upstairs to see if the grey twilight would allow her to see what she hadn’t quite been able to grasp in the sunlight.
She drew one pattern, and then another—and then, finally, she got it right. She managed to capture the exact pattern of the fairy ring.
She didn’t take it downstairs to show her parents and sister. She knew that it would just be one more meaningless doodle to her mother and Cathy, and one more arbitrary mandala to her father. None of them would be able to see it properly, and recognize it for what it was.
Among the various things her father had bought in the supermarket to help with the decorating was some masking tape, which he was going to put around the edges of the windows while he painted the frames, so he wouldn’t get paint on the glass Angie went down to the kitchen and used the kitchen scissors to cut a few inches off the roll.
She took the piece of masking tape back to her bedroom, and stuck her drawing on to the wall beside the window, on top of two of the sketches that had been made directly on the wall. Then she spent a few minutes looking back and forth from the drawing to the window, checking that it really was right.
After that, she went downstairs and watched TV with Cathy. She didn’t mention ghosts or fairies between then and bedtime, and was quite happy to listen while Cathy talked about her friends, and all the things they planned to do once she was back in Kingston, having returned to civilization from the desolate of wilderness of Sussex.
Angie and Cathy stayed up late, because it was Saturday, and because the work that had to be done the following day was not work with which they could be expected or asked to help. Scraping wallpaper was something the entire family could do, but plastering wasn’t. Plastering was specialist work—the difficult sort that an engineer had to do on his own.
“Mind you don’t have bad dreams,” Cathy said, when they finally went up to their rooms, probably hoping that that was exactly what Angie would have.
“I’ll be fine,” Angie assured her.
She was confident that she would be fine. Indeed, she was so confident that she would be fine that she wasn’t in the least afraid when she woke up with a start to see that the starlight streaming through her window was falling at an angle upon the face of a boy who was studying her drawing raptly.
After a minute or so, he turned to face her. “You’ve got it right,” he said. “I never could.” He pointed at Angie’s drawing using his left forefinger.
Although he wasn’t very tall and was wearing knee-length trousers, Angie judged that the boy was at least as old as Cathy—plus an extra hundred years or so that didn’t show.
The most peculiar thing about the boy was that his clothes seemed brand new, as if he’d only just put them on for the first time. His trousers and socks were clean, without a thread out of place. His white shirt looked freshly-washed, and the black waistcoat he wore over it was equally unstained. His face had been scrubbed and his hair newly-combed.
All of that seemed much stranger than the fact that there was something slightly odd about the way he spoke, or seemed to speak. It was almost as if Angie weren’t hearing his actual voice, but some kind of substitute, like the voice-overs they sometimes used on the TV news to translate what foreign speakers were saying into English.
“You’re not a ghost, are you?” Angie said.
“No,” he replied.
“But you don’t belong here.”
“Oh yes I do,” the boy said, with a sigh. “That’s the trouble.”
“I mean that you don’t belong in t
his time.”
“Why not?” he said, innocently. “What time is it?”
“Two thousand and six,” she said. “What year was it when you got lost?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it was Whitsun—I remember that.”
“Might you be able to find your way out,” Angie asked, “now that you have the right map? You can borrow it if you like.”
“Is that why you drew it?” the boy asked. “I thought you were trying to find a way in. I tried to warn you twice, when you were looking at the bushes, but you couldn’t see me then.”
“Could you see me?” Angie asked, interestedly.
“I can see everything, after a fashion,” the boy told her. “Not well enough, though. I’ve never been able to see well enough.” He didn’t sound happy about it. Angie figured that he had been born into an era when there were no regular eye tests, and maybe no opticians at all, but she suspected that he wasn’t just talking about being short-sighted.