Some Kind of Fairy Tale (28 page)

“Right.”

“You would never mess with them. Not if you knew. Never.”

“Right.”

“You say ‘right’ one more time and I will kill you. What’s that cut on the side of your head?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want anything to eat?”

Richie told her to get something from the bread bin. She set about toasting the bread and poaching eggs, and she put the kettle on again to make more tea. She gave a sudden start. “Richie, you’ve got mice in your kitchen.”

“I know that. They have a nest behind the fridge.”

“This place is a wreck. It’s unhygienic.”

“What do you care?”

“I want to move in with you.”

Richie shook his head quickly. It wasn’t a negative response. It was an involuntary twitch, the kind of response he might have made if a gnat had flown into his ear. Now it was his turn to take off his spectacles. He polished them on the hem of his T-shirt, replaced them on the bridge of his nose, and stared hard back at Tara.

“You’re not against the idea, then?”

“What’s brought this on?”

“I can’t stay at Mum and Dad’s much longer. It’s driving me crazy. They watch everything I do with bated breath. They watch me brush my teeth. They watch me brush my hair. They watch me eat. I suspect they even come into my room at night and watch me sleep. They don’t say much. They just watch. I feel like a bomb is going to go off. Plus Pete is going to call you.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s going to tell you stories about me being out on the town.”

Richie’s mobile phone chirruped at that exact moment. Richie picked it up. The screen told him that it was Pete calling. “You’re psychic, you are.”

“Don’t tell him I’m here.”

Richie clicked to answer and put the phone to his ear. He turned around and looked out of the window. “All right, Pete? Yeh? She’s here right now. Yeh.”

Richie listened. He interjected occasionally with a few grunts. Then he clicked off and put his phone in his pocket. He looked at Tara.

“I went down to The White Horse.”

“Right. Teenyboppers pub. Sounds like you had a good time.”

“I just wanted to be with people of my own age, Richie.”

“Your own age?”

“Yes!”

“So why do you want to move in with me? I’m an old fuck.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am! I don’t want to go down to The White Horse drinking snakebite till I vomit! I don’t wanna dance in the mosh pit with my nose trapped in someone’s funky armpit. Do you know what? I don’t want to be young. I actually fuckin’ like getting older. I do! I’d rather stick my dick in a high-speed kitchen blender than go back to being a teenager. If that’s what you wanna do, Tara, if you want to get off your face down at The White Horse, you got the wrong guy coming back ’ere. I got my whisky, I got my bit o’ puff, I got my mug for my tea, and I got my carpet slippers. End of story.”

“I have to get out of that house, Richie.”

“It ain’t gonna work, darlin’.”

Richie collapsed onto the sofa and lit another cigarette. They sat in silence for a while.

“You said I used to roll sweet joints for you.”

“You’ll find even that’s changed if you haven’t already. Most of the smoke you get nowadays is called skunk. It’s rubbish, and it’s so
strong all you can do is sit with your mouth open, drooling at the world, like you’ve had a lobotomy.”

“I still do a good back rub.”

Richie sighed. “You’d have to take me as you find me.”

“I’ll clean up the place.”

“That’s up to you. Don’t expect me to weigh in.”

“The mice would have to go.”

“I’ll set some traps.”

“You don’t have to do that!” Tara was on her feet. The argument had been settled. She was moving in with Richie and they both knew it. “What time is it? Okay. You got any incense?”

“Incense?”

“Joss sticks.”

“Maybe in that drawer over there.”

Tara rummaged through the drawer he’d indicated. She found some old broken sticks of sandalwood and busied herself arranging them in the kitchen in a half-circle, poking them into any available crevice. Richie stood in the doorway, watching, bemused.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Shhh. We need to wait till the stroke of midday. When I start, don’t say anything. Open the front door and the back door and leave them open. And you’ll need your guitar.”

“What? I ain’t singing to no mice.”

“Acoustic. I need an E note when I ask you for one.”

“You’re fucked up.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “We know that already. Get your guitar.”

“I’ve got ten fucking guitars.”

“Ten? Who needs ten? Get an acoustic with a nice deep E note.”

Richie went away muttering, but did as he was told. He came back with his Taylor 914Ce, wanting to show it off to Tara, something he could never have afforded when they were together. He tried to make his face suggest that he was only playing along with this nonsense; in truth, he was intrigued. By the time he’d returned, Tara was lighting sticks of incense and some of them were already streaming smoke.

She told him again to open the front and back door and then briefed him to settle on the sofa and shut his mouth. She said that on her signal she wanted him to sound a lower E note, and to pluck it once every four beats.

“That’s not gonna sell, is it?”

“Shut up and do it.”

Tara watched the clock and on the stroke of twelve she pointed at him and he plucked the low E string. Tara squatted, putting her mouth near the foot of the fridge, and started to chant. It was a low, barely discernible chant, repeating phrases he couldn’t make out; but he nevertheless did as instructed and kept time and plucked the string.

After a few minutes Tara got up and, swaying in time to her own chanting, walked slowly around the kitchen. She made a motion that Richie should pluck harder, and he did.

A slight breeze blew through the house, stirring the streams of incense. Tara walked toward the back door, beckoning to Richie that he should follow and that he should continue to pluck his string. He did as he was told and followed Tara out of the house. She led him to the front of the house, still chanting. Richie did a quick take to see if any of the neighbors could see them. He hoped he’d got away with it, and when Tara led him back into the house through the back door he followed. She closed the door behind him and motioned for him to return to the sofa. She continued to chant, swaying into the kitchen, occasionally squatting and putting her mouth near the foot of the fridge. After fifteen minutes her chanting became softer and softer until he couldn’t hear her anymore.

She straightened her back and smiled at him. “That’s it. You can stop. They won’t come back.”

Richie looked at her quizzically. Then he laughed and his laughter completely seized him. “Haha! That’s what I loved about you! You were always doing things like that. You were always full of shit like that!”

She wasn’t smiling. “Say what you want. They won’t come back.”

“Right.”

“You don’t know everything, Richie.”

“I dare say I don’t.”

“You haven’t been everywhere. I’ve learned things you don’t know about.”

“Right.”

“Have it your way. We’ll see.”

“Right,” Richie said. “We’ll see.”

Y
ou have no idea. You can’t begin to see. You have eyes and yet you walk in the shadows. You have ears and they are stuffed with noise. You can’t take a caress without flinching. You have food and spices from all continents and nothing surprises your palate anymore. Your lips don’t even know how to speak. You shout, you mumble, you strangle your words. Right, you say to me. Right.

I am sixteen years old and in only six months I have lived more than people five times my age. If you stay at home and plug your mouth with booze and your eyes with TV have you seen anything? Stay at home. Drink. Eat fat and sugar. Mow the lawn. What do I care?

You don’t know everything. I’ve learned things while I was away. See that trick with the mice? It’s called charming. Anyone can do it. A fool. All you have to do is make the mice unwelcome and they go. You don’t have to mince them in traps or bait them with poison.

Those people, you know they don’t hate us. They pity us. They say we are clumsy, brutal, and dominating. I learned a new way to ride a horse while I was away. You don’t need a saddle, or a sharp bit. You don’t have to shred its sensitive mouth to get a horse to take you where you want to go.

As for playing with time, Richie, not even in your dreams have you been where I’ve been. And believe me, if you go there, if you have your eyes burned open, only love can bring you back, and I came back for you.

Here are some things I learned. (Look at your eyes! I know you don’t believe any of this. But it doesn’t matter.) I can levitate, if only for a few seconds. I’ll prove it when I’m ready and not before. I can make myself almost invisible. I can find great strength, the strength of an elephant. There are other things I didn’t have time to learn. I saw some of those people pass through walls. It’s true! Other things I did learn, frivolous things: I can bring a man to the point of orgasm just by looking at him if I want. Remember the woman on the kitchen table I told you about? Sex woman? Her name was Ekko. She showed me how to do that. It’s easy. Ridiculously easy.

But there are far more significant things. How to see for the first time. There are forces, Richie. You can train yourself to see them. There are sounds just beyond the range of normal hearing, and you can train yourself to hear them. But here you blunt all your capacities with greed and booze and dope.

No, it won’t stop. And once you begin to hear and see you can’t stop it. That’s what I was doing at The White Horse, if you want to know. I was doing what we used to do when we went there together. I wanted to blast myself with drink and noise to see if I could stop it. But that only works for a little while. You wake up. You blink. It’s all still there.

Sometimes I think we are asleep, that we are only a dream, that this is the dream. When we sleep we get a chance to see what life is really like. That’s it. In our daily lives we don’t know what it means to be fully conscious. And I don’t say I like it.

Hiero couldn’t be with me always. He had work to do. They grow their own food. They are fruitarians. They eat only fruit, nuts, and seeds, and won’t have anything to do with cooked food. And when Hiero was away, Silkie, the handsome man from the lake, came creeping around.

He was quite sweet. In fact, it was him who taught me the mouse-charming trick. But I just kept him at arm’s length. At first Hiero didn’t seem bothered about Silkie hanging round: Hiero said
if I wanted to do anything with Silkie, then that was my decision, no one else’s. He assured me that neither Silkie nor anyone there would force themselves on me. That wasn’t their way with women.

But then one day Ekko, the woman who was fucking on the kitchen table, sex woman, came to me and said that Silkie was pining for me and becoming ill. She asked me to fuck him, as a favor to her.

“Please,” she said. “It’s beginning to get on everyone’s nerves.”

“What?” I told her. “You want me to have sex with him just because he’s got a long face?”

She was quite put out. “Look at how thin he is! You can see it’s making him unwell! He hardly eats, pining for you. Just lie down on the sand with him for half an hour, what on earth is the problem with your kind?”

I told her that my kind were not in the habit of lying down on the sand with every Tom, Dick, and Silkie who wants it. I told her that my kind had a habit of saving it for people we care about a great deal.

“I’ve heard of that,” she snapped back at me, “and it’s just preposterous. Preposterous and ridiculous. It’s completely against nature and it’s not surprising to see what a desperate mess your kind have made of everything.” Then she started shouting at me. “It affects us, too, you know! We have to share this place! It isn’t yours to do what you want with!”

I told her I didn’t care what she said, I wasn’t going to make a slut of myself just because it suited her. She stormed off, and I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.

I tried to keep to myself when Hiero wasn’t around. There were wonderful things to discover. I would walk in the woods or by the lake, marveling over some of the plant life I had never seen before. There were colored fungi growing amid the roots of trees—I mean blue toadstools and red mushrooms—and there were other miraculous plants.

There was a flower of stunning beauty, large, the size of a football, and it was pink and yellow, made of tiny flower heads, and it seemed to be illuminated from within. I sat gazing at it. I was so absorbed I never heard anyone coming up behind me. Then I realized that Silkie had quietly settled down beside me.

“You like this one?” he asked me.

“Oh, yes.”

“We call it
charnas
, something like
‘group mind’
in your language. Watch.”

He leaned across to the flower and gently pushed his finger into it. Immediately I realized that it wasn’t a flower at all but a thousand bugs that flew up, disturbed. Each bug was like a tiny glittering fleck of pink or yellow light. They flew up in a cloud. I gasped.

“Watch,” he said.

After a few moments of frantic fluttering the cloud of bugs started to resettle together in the same place. Within a few minutes they had composed exactly the same flower, all over again.

“They are communing with each other,” Silkie said. “They draw strength from the hive mind.”

“But are they bugs or are they a flower?”

“They are both!”

“It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yes. It’s what we do when we all have group sex. It’s the same thing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I shouted at him. I stood up. “How to kill a wonderful moment!” He looked hurt, regarding me with confusion etched into his handsome features. I marched away, angry, not even looking back to see if he was following me.