Some Kind of Fairy Tale (6 page)

“Tara you never went traveling at all. At least not where you said you’d been. Mytilini isn’t even in Crete, for chrissakes.”

“I saw you were trying to trap me. I knew it.”

“So why not just tell the truth. The bloody truth?”

She turned and grabbed the sleeves of his coat, and almost shouted at him. “Because when I tell you the truth I will have to go away again. Really. I will have to go away. You won’t believe it, not a word of it, and you’ll hate me even more and there will be nothing for me to do but leave. That’s it. Now that I have you back for a short while I don’t want to bring it to an end. I love you, Peter, you’re my brother. I love Mum and Dad. But once I’ve told you the truth it will be all over between us. Is that what you want?”

“Of course it’s not what I want! What could you have done that was so bad? Did you kill someone?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“Then it can’t be so bad that we would hate you!”

“Oh, you would. Simply because you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Then give us a bloody chance! Just tell it straight up. The plain and simple truth.”

Tara turned away from him. Her acorn-brown eyes dulled as she gazed across the bowl of the old spent volcano. It was as if she were seeing another time, or hearing other words inside her head.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

O
h, yes, the bluebells were out in May. Do you remember how they were? Their perfume stole the sense right out of your head. It turned you over and shook the juice right out of you. You couldn’t walk between them that year, they were so dense; you had to swim in them. The madness of it! The scent was so subtle that it got all over you, in your nostrils, in your cavities, and on your fingers like the smell of a sweet sin. Didn’t it bind you in blue lace and carry you away?

We walked there together that year, didn’t we? There were tiny paths between the bluebells and I went off the path and you told me I’d be punished for going off the trail, for treading bluebells underfoot. You said there was a law against it. But you meant lore.

Yet there were so many of them, troops of them, so scented and ringing out and waving to me that I had to find my own trail between them. At the time I believed or was tricked into believing—that I hadn’t crushed a single flower or green blade or bulb underfoot, that they lifted me a few inches off the ground, bore me up and carried me over. I was wrong. It was a trespass. I know that now.

We all know it now.

Youth fears nothing because it knows nothing.

I lost myself in the bluebells. Heart, mind, and soul. I know
there was a moment where I was of this world, and then there was an instant when I felt odd, dizzy, estranged. I think that was the moment that the doorway opened. Though I didn’t step through it. Not then. Not yet.

We were talking, you and I, and we arrived at that ancient rock covered in thick lichen the exact color of marmalade, that outcrop poking up like a fist with a finger pointing to heaven. That’s what we always said: a marmalade finger pointing to heaven. I was planning to tell you about the argument I’d had with Richie, about how it was all going wrong and what had happened that brought us to the brink of a big decision. I was pretty sure it was going to go only one way, but I hadn’t told him yet. I was planning to discuss it with you, to see if there was a way that I could tell him that wouldn’t hurt him. But something stopped me from telling you.

It was the rock. There was a cloud of little golden beetles flying around the rock, their sleek backs glittering in the May sunshine like flints striking a stone. And so the golden light fizzed and crackled with hundreds of tiny sparks of wing light. You were astonished, too. You who were never amazed. We both stood and stared. It was like a blessing, it was like a gift.

But I knew something was happening. And I forgot all about Richie, and I forgot all about telling you. I just watched the air fizz with tiny prickles of fire, knowing something was about to happen.

The next day I asked Richie to come with me, here, to the bluebell woods. I was determined to tell him. I don’t know why but I thought this was the right place to tell him it was over. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I would never do that again: take someone to a beautiful place to dump them! It’s not a good idea. I think if it ever happened again I would take them to some industrial scrap heap to let them down. It’s cruel to lay such things over a beautiful landscape. But anyway, I knew nothing in those days, and I thought it was poetic and the right thing to do.

He just wouldn’t have it. “This is not going to happen” is what Richie said to me that day. I told him, “You can say what you want.”

He was angry and hurt. He cried. I cried. Then I ran away from him, ran through the woods, and I hid. See that outcrop of amber rocks over there? I hid behind one of those rocks. He came
shouting for me. Crying and shouting my name. I shrank behind the rock, and when he came round I circled back and sprinted toward the charcoal burners over there. He went off in the other direction calling my name. His voice became more distant and I ran back through the woods, up the slope, higher, crushing bluebells underfoot.

I had no thought at that time of how I would get home. Richie had driven me there in his old Volkswagen Beetle with all those Rock Against Racism stickers on it. He’d parked the car on the grass shoulder of Breakback Lane, so I was careful to avoid that side of the Outwoods. I found another hanging stone covered in marmalade lichen among the bluebells, and I sat there with my back to the stone for an hour or maybe two. When I returned to where Richie had parked the car, he’d gone. I was so relieved.

There was an elderly couple walking back to their own car. They’d been out for a stroll. I walked right up to them, looking tearful, and I lied and said my boyfriend had left me stranded there because we’d had an argument. They said what a shocking bad person he must be and that I should find myself a decent chap, one who wouldn’t abandon a young girl like that. “You don’t know who is around in a place like this,” the man said. “A pretty girl like you.” They offered to give me a lift home, which of course I accepted. They took me right to my door and made me promise that I’d have nothing more to do with the lout who had abandoned me in the Outwoods, and I promised.

But something had started. In my head, something had started. It was like the scent from the bluebells that day had ripped me open like a drug. That scent was always just at the edge of my senses, lodged somewhere in my throat, on my fingers, in my nostrils, until I tried to smell it or taste it again, and I couldn’t. It was there all the time; but when I tried to look for it, to trap it, it was gone.

But it was having a strange effect on me. I felt all the time that I might just float off this planet. And my head was hot. Do you remember that poem:

I’ve always loved that because that was how I felt so often, and when I did feel like that I would come to these woods until the fire burned out. But this was different. The back of my head felt hot. I knew something was going to happen.

I remember getting home that day and Mum asking me if I was all right. I said I was fine. Then Richie called but I’d already primed Mum to tell him I’d got back safely from the Outwoods but I wasn’t in right now.

“Have you two had words?” she asked me.

Words.

I dreamed of flying golden beetles. But they were like scarabs from an Egyptian tomb. And when they flew around me they would stop dead in the air and the frozen formation of them would spell out words in tiny sparks of fire and light. But I couldn’t read the words; they would always break up just before I could make them out.

When I woke in the morning there was a small scorch mark on the headboard of my bed, where my head had touched the pine panel. Do you remember? I showed you. I told you my head was hot and that it had left a burn on the headboard and you snorted and said that was impossible. But I know.

I know, and you don’t.

Richie persisted in telephoning. He called every hour. It was driving me crazy and my head was coming apart. Mum said she couldn’t keep lying and pretending that I wasn’t home, so I went out so that she could tell him the truth. I got my bicycle and I cycled up to the Outwoods. I hadn’t got a lock for my bike so I hid it behind a tree and covered it with branches, and then I went walking amid the bluebells. This time the scent came up on me in a rush, a cloud, and I was drawn deeper into the woods, following an old bridle path. There were few people around that afternoon, it being a working day. Someone trotted a pony along the bridle path, and that’s the only person who passed me.

The scent from the bluebells was overwhelming, but it was also giving me a kind of peace, a serenity. I stopped thinking about Richie. I stopped thinking about what was happening inside me. I walked among the bluebells again and I must have known that
by treading them underfoot I was releasing more of that strange perfume into the air. After a while I found a rock covered in brilliant green moss and orange lichen. I sat among the bluebells and put my head back on the mossy pillow of the rock.

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me from falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on, and I know I went soaring.

I was wearing a ring that Richie had bought me the day after we first had sex together. My first time. It had been at this very place and at that moment in my life I felt that I wanted Richie to hold me forever. Now I wasn’t so certain. I took off his ring and let it go, and it fell, fell through the blue sky onto the emerald-and-amber cushion of moss and lichen that sat so soft on the table of ancient rock.

I felt unburdened. Lighter. I sat back with my head against the moss. The twittering of the birds died down and it seemed like all of the woods became silent. I might have fallen asleep. But even if I did, I woke up with a start when I heard someone coming through the woods toward me.

It was a man on a pretty white horse making his achingly slow way along the bridle path. Strung on either side of the horse was a large straw pannier, each side looking loaded. I thought the man was talking to himself, or to the horse, but anyway, he had the laziest seat in the saddle you ever saw, and this horse was hardly moving. The man had a crop and he was twitching it at the horse, but not so the creature would feel it. He’d allowed the reins to fall slack at the horse’s withers and I almost thought he was riding this white horse in his sleep.

I decided to keep quiet and lay with my head back on the mossy stone so that he wouldn’t see me and he would pass by, but then as he drew near I saw that his eye was fixed on me. He twitched at the horse and turned it off the bridle path and toward me, crushing bluebells under the hooves of the horse.

And they were large hooves. The horse was an elegant creature but its sturdy legs were more like those of a shire, with huge hairy fetlocks. It moved slowly toward me, nodding as it came. Then it stopped right before me. The man sat up a little, smiling down, an amused look in his eye.

I should have been a little afraid, but I wasn’t.

I said, “That’s the whitest horse I’ve ever seen.”

“It is,” he said. “It’s the whitest horse you’ve ever seen; and it’s the whitest horse you will ever see.” He had an unusual accent. I don’t know what it was, though I liked the sound of it well enough. “And that’s why he’s mine.”

He sat there for an uncomfortable moment or two as we eyed each other. “What’s its name?” I said, just to break the silence.

“Tssk,” he went, and he smirked at me like I was a bit simple. “You don’t give a horse a name. They don’t like to have names.”

“I’ve never heard that,” I said, defiant.

“I expect you haven’t heard a lot of things, you being a slip of a young girl.”

He was very quick with his answers, but he softened them with a smile on his moist red lips. He wasn’t so old himself. Maybe about thirty, so I thought. Too old for me, but not so old.

Then he said, “That looks like a very comfortable pillow you’ve found for yourself there. A very comfortable pillow.” And he swung down from his horse.

He dropped the reins of his white horse and I thought he was going to come toward me but he stepped away from me, to the far end of the mossy rock. “Would you mind if I shared your pillow? Only over here, which is safe, and not too close, because I know what you young girls are like.”

He certainly wasn’t close enough for me to be worried, so I said, “It’s a free country.”

“It is and it isn’t,” he said, and he slumped down and laid his head back on the stone and I do believe he immediately went to sleep.

Or maybe he was just pretending, but anyway, his eyes were closed and his breathing changed, and I could see the rise and fall of his chest. It was a hot afternoon, and his horse, untethered, plodded away to go and stand under a tree. I waited awhile, thinking
the man would speak to me at any moment, but he didn’t. He lay there amid the bluebells, his eyes closed and his mouth very slightly open.

I sat up and got a good look at him. At first I wondered if he was a gypsy. But he didn’t have the manner of a gypsy, and they are not so often seen alone. Then I took him for some kind of hippie, one of those crusty guys who get stuck in the fashion of their youth. His hair was down to his collar, a mass of dark curls behind which I saw the glint of a single gold earring, but you and Richie wore your hair longer than that. He wore a white shirt without a collar, and a black waistcoat, and then baggy black trousers gathered at the knee and stuffed into his riding boots.