Some Kind of Fairy Tale (20 page)

“Some bloke giving me the dead eye.”

“Who?”

“No idea, but if he doesn’t fuck off I’m going to slam my fist in his face.”

She smiled, but it was a painful smile. “You haven’t changed in that regard.”

She reached out to touch him again, and this time he let her stroke the back of his hand. He shook his head. “How are you getting home tonight?”

“I’ll walk.”

“It’s nearly two miles.”

“We used to think nothing of walking two miles. Or ten. We’d walk ten miles back from some concert with a crap band.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“No, thanks. I watched what you put away on stage all night. Sink a battleship.”

“Then I’ll walk you home.”

“No need.”

“Yes, I will. You never know who’s out there.”

“All right.”

“Drink up. Let’s go.”

“It’s not eleven o’clock. The landlord hasn’t called last orders yet.”

“That’s all changed. They don’t do that anymore,” he said. “That’s all gone.”

R
ICHIE COLLECTED HIS GUITAR
and amplifier and the rest of his gear and dumped it in the trunk of his estate car in the pub car park. He planned to walk Tara home and then walk the farther mile to his own house; he would collect his car in the morning.

Before locking his car he handed Tara one of his CDs. “Here. Might as well have one o’ these,” he said.

“CD, right?”

“Duh.”

“I’ve never actually played one. I remember how you used to go on about vinyl records giving way to tapes. And now tapes have given way to CDs.”

“Are you pulling my leg?”

“No. I saw some at Mum and Dad’s house. It’s just a disc, right?”

“Know what an MP3 is? Don’t answer. Come on, let’s get walking.”

They set off along the footpath and after a few hundred meters they came to a wooden stile offering steps into a field. “Go the Badger Track?”

“Of course.”

A track ran across a field and then alongside a thin woods; and from there lay a climb up a country lane to the top of a hill before a minor road snaked its way to the Martins’ house. They had walked it in the darkness or under moonlight many times together, years ago, sometimes with Peter; more often hand in hand. No one else called it the Badger Track. They did because one night on their way back from the Coach they’d encountered a huge black-and-white striped creature in the middle of the path; it had stopped dead and looked at them almost in astonishment before scuttling away.

More than one spring evening before Tara disappeared they had lain down in the grass after a night at The Phantom Coach and had sex; and that was where Tara had fallen pregnant.

“Can I tell you about a dream I had last night?” Tara asked him as they took the track across the field. There was still a dusting of snow caught in the grass. A waxing moon shone down on the snow, and the earth underfoot was crusty and hard. “I keep hoping that my dreams will unlock what’s going on. I wanted to tell it to the shrink but he wasn’t interested. I always thought shrinks were supposed to be interested in dreams.”

“Tell it to me.”

“I was walking up here and I was looking for you. At first it
was a trick, you know, a joke, and you were supposed to be hiding. I got anxious. I looked all round here. Then I found a big pile of leaves and I scraped a few off the top and there you were, sleeping. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ You woke up and yawned and you said, ‘Hibernating.’ Then I woke up. What do you think that means?”

You’re the one, he said, you’re the one who has been hibernating, if that’s what it was. Not in my dream, Richie; in my dream it was you. That don’t change anything. Yes, it does, I don’t know how it does but it does, and aren’t you cold? A bit, I was expecting to drive home. You’re pissed so why would you drive, and anyway, do you want to take my arm?

That’s a good ’un. Twenty years not a peep and now you want to snuggle up. Pardon me if I don’t go along with that one.

You don’t want to take my arm but you do want to walk me home through the snow in that thin shirt. I’m having a smoke. Want one? Is it true you can’t smoke in pubs anymore? Stop screwing with me. I’m not, I really am not … Hey, there’s a fox.

With Richie about to light the cigarette in his mouth, they watched a fox slink through the slender birch trees, its russet coat and tail painted silver by the moonlight. It stepped into moon shadow and was gone.

Do you remember the badger? Course I remember the badger. Do you remember what you said to me that night? To hell with all that, where you been, Tara, where you been?

She took off her dark glasses and looked at him straight. Her pupils were hugely dilated, spinning with moonlight, like someone who had been taking drugs. She looked right into him and for a moment he felt dizzy and scared.

Think back on that promise. If I left you it doesn’t cancel it out. You’re my one hope, Richie. My one horse in the race. Mum and Dad are just too shocked and bewildered by my coming home; Pete is in a rage with me; his wife looks at me like I’m a specimen of piss in jar; and then there’s the shrink who just stares at me like he wants to pull my pants down and spank me. And then there’s you, Richie. You, the man I’ve hurt most but the only one who can give me half a chance to work all this out.

Give us a break, Tara.

See that spot over there? We made love over there, didn’t we? Well, as true as that is true, what I’m telling you is all true. All I ask is that for one second you open up your mind, for one second, and allow the possibility for that one second that I might be telling you that something extraordinary happened. Really happened. Then after that one second you can go back to thinking I’m a liar or I’m insane or whatever you want. But I demand it, I demand one second.

Nope, can’t do that.

You have no idea, Richie. None of you. There is a veil to this world, thin as smoke, and it draws back occasionally and when it does we can see incredible things. Incredible things, Richie.

What things?

Don’t make me prove it, because I can put things in your mind if I want to. Really, I could.

You’ve already put some murderous thoughts in my mind, Tara. Are you doped? Are you damaged? Are you just playing?

One second. One second in which you entertain the idea that the world is not exactly as you think it is, that everything unusual can’t be reasoned away.

No.

Just one second. The time it takes to say your name. Because if I get that from you then I have a fissure in the wall and I can make the fissure into a crevice and I can scratch the crevice into a hole and then the wind will blow through and the wall will start to disappear.

What are you on, crack cocaine?

Don’t need it where I’ve been.

Come on, that’s your house down there with the light on: haven’t been in a long time.

One second, Richie: give me one second of your life.

“Y
OU WANT TO COME
in?” Tara asked him, with Richie hesitating at the gate. “Mum and Dad need to see you.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Really? They feel the need to … you know … put things right.”

“Another time, eh?”

“Okay. If you think so.”

“I do.”

“Well. Good night, then.”

“Good night Tara.”

They waited at the gate, looking at each other.

“Thanks for walking me home.”

“I enjoyed it. I think.”

“Oh, do you want me to get you a coat? Dad could easily lend you one of his.”

“No. I’d have to come in, and all that.”

“And all that.”

“Well, good night. Again.”

“Okay.”

Richie swung away and retraced his steps. He glanced over his shoulder to see Tara stepping into the house. A security light had switched on above her head. He turned up his shirt collar. The pavement was gleaming with a rime of frost, and the bright moon lit his way. At least his headache had passed.

One second, she had asked for. One second, whereas if she only knew it she’d had twenty years. He’d deny it if she asked, but of course he had entertained the idea that she might be telling the truth, or at least the truth as far as she understood it. The thing that had made him fall in love with Tara all those years ago was her integrity. She was so scrupulously honest as a teenager that she often put the adults around her to shame. Neither was it the kind of honesty that doesn’t care about trampling on another person’s feelings. She had empathy in spades. She just wouldn’t compromise what she said to advantage herself or take the easy way out of a situation. It was an unusual trait in anyone.

Richie decided that Tara believed what she said. That, of course, was not the same thing as it being true.

What shocked Richie more than Tara’s clinging to her story was how he felt about her. Nothing had changed. A lot of waters had flowed through him since the day she disappeared. Drink. Drugs. Women. But he felt as passionate about her as he had all those years ago. The intervening time might not have happened.

As he walked through the frost, under that brilliant moon, he
was flooded by memories of making that same walk after escorting Tara home so many times before. The landscape had hardly changed. Maybe a farmer’s fence here or there might have been different, but nothing else. As he reached the crest of the hill bordered by the woods, he had a frightening thought. He wondered—just for a second—if the last twenty years had been a strange hallucination, and that really he was still in his late teens with his entire life before him. Maybe one of the psychedelic drugs they used to take back in those days could do that. Maybe he would wake up in the morning to find that the years had rolled back.

It could have been a comforting thought, but it wasn’t. It made his stomach squeeze.

He stopped alongside the woods to light a cigarette. He flicked his lighter, inhaled, and turned to look back down the valley, toward Tara’s house. Then a figure came rushing out of the woods to smash a brick into the side of his face, and Richie blacked out.

T
M made a big fuss about bluebells at the start of her account. I’m not sure of the significance, though I do think it represents permission. In the same way that alcohol or drugs offer permission or partially excuses a determination to violate some social code or other. It’s as if she wants to blame the bluebells themselves for her transgressions.

Of course, the use of alcohol or drugs represents a willful determination to keep an appointment with some persuasive force or need in the unconscious mind. Rationally speaking, blaming one’s behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.

She describes the bluebells as intoxicating and she also describes her path through the pool of bluebells as transgressive. She wants to be drugged by the bluebells, so that she can have access to her alternative world. Her life has already been turned upside down before her seducer comes along. The sky is in the earth, she says, and the earth is in the sky. There is, incidentally, a certain kind of logic in her thinking. Bluebells are associated with the spirits of the earth—I am consciously avoiding the word
fairies
, since I take the principles of animism and genius loci rather more seriously. Further, all parts of the flower—bulb, leaf, and sap—do secrete
a poison: they contain glycosides similar to digitalis and so are as dangerous as foxgloves.

This all may be an indication that she was intoxicated by drink or drugs at the time of her disappearance or abduction, or that she was in a state of mind parallel to inebriation. Either way, we may assume that TM finds relief in the standard excuse of intoxication by the fragrance of the flower.

The site of her seduction is highly significant. There is a rock, the location where she says she lost her virginity to her boyfriend, Richie. She removes the ring he gave her and places it on the rock. I take this to be highly significant. The rock is a kind of island in the sea of bluebells, a place of stability, rationality. When she takes off her ring and places it there she has already cast herself adrift. There seems to be no going back from this point.

It is here that fable and well-known narrative takes over the account. A mysterious male appears on a white horse. If we seem to know him, that is because his archetype is well established in literature, and it is at this point that TM’s personal story confabulates with that of literary convention. The antecedents are manifold, and presumably TM has heard all of these stories right from the cradle. She even signals to us that she was going into a certain kind of storytelling mode when she describes placing the ring on an emerald cushion of moss.

Her story from this point seems to be drawn from books, a confection of half-grasped tales. There is, of course, a well-known literary tradition of famous abductees. Thomas the Rhymer kissed or slept with the Queen of Elfland and rode with her to her kingdom. When he returned, seven years had passed. Similarly, there is the ballad of a fellow by the name of Tam Lin, half fairy and half mortal, who collected the virginity of any maiden who passed through the forest of Carterhaugh. Tam Lin, it should be noted, rode a white horse. And on it goes: stories of abduction by fairies or by elves (the species interchangeable, one from the Latin root, one from the Teutonic root) are as numerous as the stars, and even though these two famous fellows are male abductees, the more common form of the story is that of women abducted. These are the clearly identifiable sources of TM’s outlandish tale.

She hasn’t exactly copied the stories, but what she has copied is
the poetic conceit, that is to say a poetic summation of her experiences. She has enclosed the kingdom of her twenty years inside an acorn cup. She’s made it her own life. To understand it all, we have to approach her tale in the same way that we would approach a dream, looking for clues that add up to a pattern that will inform us about the present state of her wounded psyche.