Some Kind of Fairy Tale (18 page)

She somehow sensed my presence. Without breaking rhythm she turned and looked back at me across her shoulder. She didn’t appear cross at being caught in this act, but she didn’t look pleased, either. She kept a steady gaze on me. Who are you?

I said nothing. The smell of their sex was like smoke in the room. The man lifted his head from the table and looked at me from around her hip, and then he beckoned me to come nearer.

You wait your turn, the woman said to me, sharply, and then she twisted away, thrusting harder at the man.

I slammed the kitchen door, hard, and skipped back to where Hiero was sleeping. The banging of the door roused him. He lifted his head and blinked happily at me.

Do you know there are two people
fucking
, I said,
fucking
on your kitchen table?

Oh.

In the next room! A man and a woman!

Well. Who is it?

Who is it? Who is it? I’ve no idea who it is!

It’s probably Laila. Or one of the other women. Just leave them to it and they’ll soon be gone.

I stared at him. They’ll soon be gone? What sort of place is this?

Well, he said, scratching his head. I did warn you I shared the place with others. He was casual about the whole thing. Do you want breakfast?

Not after what I’ve just seen on the kitchen table. I need a shower.

There isn’t a shower. We wash in the lake. I’ll come with you.

No, it’s okay.

I needed some time to myself. I was already planning to leave, but I wasn’t about to announce it. It wasn’t even that I thought Hiero would prevent me from leaving, but I just wanted to slip away quietly. I had an idea that I would take the horse and just retrace our steps.

But I had to go through the kitchen to get out. The couple who had been fucking on the table had stopped and were lying in each other’s arms, sleepy in the afterglow, their sweat shimmering in the sunlight on their hips. I slipped past them, went outside, and walked down to the lake.

It was a beautiful morning, but the sun was lancing off the water and it hurt my eyes, by which I mean my eyes felt grazed by the intensity of the light. I had to use my hand as a visor. It was as if there was a grittiness in the particles of light, a grittiness that left my eyes feeling sore. And yet everything I looked at seemed to be rinsed clean, or somehow new, in the way that everything appears new when you are a child.

At the lake’s edge I stopped and threw some water on my face. It was crystal and cold and it took my breath away. The droplets of water on my hand, beaded with spectral light, looked both more simple and more complicated than they had at home. I squatted there for a while, gazing at the water on my hands—I don’t know whether like a simpleton or a philosopher.

The stable where the white horse was kept was just twenty or thirty yards from the house. I guessed Hiero might be watching me from indoors so I squatted there on the sand, wondering whether to go right away to get the horse or to wait for a better moment when no one was around.

Then I heard a whisper in the sand and heard someone’s gentle footsteps coming up behind me. I thought it was Hiero but I turned and saw the woman from the kitchen moving toward me.

She was still naked, and in that spectacular, iris-grazing light she was stunning. Her dark eyes were on me. She was tall and lithe,
somehow like a racehorse, her skin tawny, very lightly freckled. Her cheekbones were so high you could have cut yourself on them. Her long many-colored hair hung lower than the amber nipples of her breasts. I had to fight to stop myself from looking at her pussy and her long, slender legs. She was easily the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and though I have always thought of myself as pretty I felt by contrast a wizened little frump.

She said nothing as she walked by me and into the water, but she trailed a hand through the air toward me, either as a gesture of recognition or dismissal, I couldn’t tell. She stopped, turned, and sluiced water over her shoulders, all the time keeping her eyes on me, and the water effervesced on her skin, foaming with milky light.

Beautiful this morning, she said. She spoke with a trace of an accent I couldn’t place. Take off your clothes and come in.

Thanks. We like to keep our clothes on where I come from.

Don’t be sullen. Come in. I know you want to lick my pussy.

Jesus Christ! What is this place? A camp for perverts?

I was disgusted. I turned and walked back up the beach toward the house.

My mistake, I’m sure! Her shout bounced off me. But there was mockery, not apology, in her voice.

As I approached the house I heard talk and laughter. I saw through the door that it was Hiero, sharing a joke with the other twisted pervert from the kitchen table. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking loudly.

I turned on my heels and made straight for the stable. There the white mare snorted at me when I opened the stable door. I took the ancient blanket from its pole and flung it over the mare’s back. Apart from a crop the only tack on offer was the worn leather bridle. I looped it over the horse’s head and trotted the animal out of the stable.

There was a track running through the trees behind the house. I decided to walk the horse out that way, because I would be seen if I crossed the beach, not least by the twisted goddess washing all the sweaty fuck off herself in the lake—and I calculated that I could make my way through the trees to the far end of the lake. It wasn’t
difficult, though the path ascended through the woods before I found a trail back down again, and I soon joined up with the path by which we had arrived, marked by an avenue of trees. When I knew I was clear I mounted the horse and I set off at a trot.

The mare was beautiful. She responded well to me. She picked up my intentions almost without any aid from me. If I thought trot, she made it happen. If I thought canter, she took off. I rode for two hours without stopping: cantering, trotting, or walking. I was confident of my path because I have a keen sense of direction and I recognized distinctive features—rock formations, glades, a hollow, a stream, a tree twisted and bent by the wind—all from the previous night. Plus I knew we had come roughly west and I could get my compass bearings from where the sun was still rising ahead of me in the sky.

Two hours later I stopped and let the mare drink from another stream. I got down and let her take some rest, while the sun stood still and boiling at its zenith.

After the mare was rested I got back on the horse and followed what I thought was a bridle path. All the time I was looking for the grassy incline—we’d cantered up it after galloping across that lush green field, so I was searching the landscape for a slope running down to the same field.

But I couldn’t find it.

I wasn’t afraid because I knew that all I had to do now was to keep the sun at my back and that eventually I would wind up at some farm or village or small town, and from there I could telephone Mum and Dad. They would be as angry as ferrets in a sack but they would come and fetch me in the car. But I trotted and walked the mare on for another hour or two without seeing a single sign of a dwelling house.

I turned the mare off the bridle path and took her up the side of a hill, and from its crest I was able to look all around me. All the time I was scanning the landscape for the glitter of the Trent or the Soar, or for anything that might show me through Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire or Leicestershire and back into Charnwood Forest, where all would be well. The countryside looked beautiful but unfamiliar, enchanted but foreboding. I was lost.

No, you’re not lost, because I’ve found you. It was Hiero. He was speaking from behind me, standing on a crag in his white shirtsleeves.

You’ve been following me.

I couldn’t abandon you, now, could I?

I want to go home.

And so you shall. But you can’t just yet.

Stop lying to me! Just point me the way and I’ll go! Just put me on the path: that’s all you have to do, put me on the path.

Your life has taken a different path now, Tara.

I jumped down off my horse and ran to him and lashed at him with my riding crop. He flinched as it caught his jaw and the side of his neck, but he made no defense and no retaliation. I saw a weal appear immediately and a streak of blood on his neck where the crop had landed.

I deserve it for bringing you here, he said. I know I do.

I started crying, because I didn’t know what to do and I was frightened.

He pulled me toward him and held me. Don’t, Tara, don’t; because yours are the tears of heaven.

Just put me on the path! Please! Just put me on the path! I want to go home.

He held me for a while. I could put you on the path, but it would still take you six months to get there. I’m going to take you back to the house again, and I’m going to tell you how it is with us folk here.

Y
ou don’t see many doctors smoking. In their offices.” It was the first thing that Genevieve had said since Tara had begun her story. Underwood was at his desk typing up notes directly onto a PC. Tara was taking a toilet break and Genevieve had to speak to him right across the room, a distance of a dozen paces.

He didn’t look up. “Quite motherly, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

He made a few more keystrokes. “Do you know why she wanted you here? Against my wishes?”

“She trusts me?”

“Nothing to do with trust. It’s to do with finding people to populate her Peter Pan world. You’re her Wendy.”

“I am?”

“Oh, yes. Wendy has to keep everyone safe. Keep everyone in order. Look after all. Be mother to the lost boys and girls.”

“Tara already has a mother.”

“One she ran away from, yes. But she needs a safe one. A surrogate mother. You’re the perfect candidate.”

“Should I be worried?”

“I don’t see much to worry about. You are Wendy because you’ve been trusted with the verbatim report. You’re an acceptable conduit back to the family. You’re an in-law, aren’t you? That
means you’re inside and outside at the same time. She’s clever, that Tara.”

“So what is your diagnosis?”

“I don’t discuss my cases other than with immediate family. Sorry.”

“Am I being scolded about something here?”

“Only for banging on about my smoking habit, I’d say.”

“You know what? You’re plain rude.”

Underwood glanced up from his keyboard. He looked pleased. “Look at those framed certificates on the wall. I worked hard for the right to be rude. I’m a licensed fool.” He puffed happily on his cigar. “Do you want one of these? They make a lovely stink.”

“G
OD, HE’S WEIRD
,” G
ENEVIEVE
said to Peter, back at The Old Forge. They were enjoying a glass of wine and a few rare moments together, with all the children either in bed or upstairs and abducted by the Internet.

“I quite like him,” Peter said. “Did you tell him you have a master’s degree in psychology?”

“Christ, no. Anyway, psychiatrists are suspicious of psychologists. I’d rather let him stereotype me and see what he has to say. Fucking Wendy. He was trying to provoke me. For some reason.”

“So what will he say? Bottom line.”

“He’s refreshingly jargon-free, but I’d guess he’ll tell us Tara is a pathological narcissist, and that her story is an elaborate compensation for an inability to face up to adult chores and functions. He’ll suggest that the explosive shock of discovering herself to be pregnant at age fifteen and the hasty abortion coupled with the fear of family disapproval caused a crisis and a state of arrested development. Rather than face up to it all, she ran away.

“He’ll tell us that typically these people—pathological narcissists, not shrinks—have no steady job, never get married, raise no family, put down no roots, have no real friendships or long-term relationships. She’s been bumming around for twenty years, basically.

“He might even go so far as to say that she is suffering from a
form of psychosocial short stature, which is what some chronically abused kids suffer from, and their growth gets stunted. She might have partially switched off the aging hormones, and that could account for why she looks so young.”

“Jesus. I’m glad I only bend horseshoes for a living.”

“She’s not the only bent person in the world, Peter.”

“I know that. It just sounds so very fucked up.”

“Come on. Everyone is fucked up.”

“Why do you think she’s chosen to come back now?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. See how sweet she is with our kids? I think she wants kids of her own and time is running out. So she’s regrouping by coming back. You have to go where the wagons are circled. I admit not all women seem to want to pump out kids like I do; but even women who hate the idea of having kids have unconscious drives.”

“I feel so sad for her,” Peter said.

“I know you do. Come here. Have a hug. Speaking of sad teenagers, do you think Jack is okay?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s looking a bit shifty lately.”

“Oh, he’s pissed off with me because I told him to help out Mrs. Larwood across the road. Jack’s okay. By the way, you know what you were saying about narcissistic whatsits?”

“Yes?”

“No steady job, never got married, raised no family, put down no roots, no real friendships. Reminds me of someone else.”

R
ICHIE CONCLUDED HIS GUITAR
set at The Phantom Coach with a big barnstorming blues finish, milking the applause. He hosted a weekly music night in the large function room at the back of the Coach, and it always attracted a good crowd. The event was called
indie
night. Richie always said he hadn’t a clue what
indie
meant as a category, since he couldn’t see how anything anyone did was independent of everything else, but it always attracted a much bigger audience than if he labeled the evening folk, rock, world, blues, or pickled pig music. The plain fact was that Richie was
highly accomplished in all of these genres—even the last one—and could, if he wanted, blow any of the guest artists or bands right off the stage.