Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2 page)

O
N THE OTHER SIDE
of Charnwood Forest at a ramshackle cottage on the road to Quorn, Peter Martin was stacking the dishwasher. Christmas dinner had been trashed a couple of hours ago and he was still wearing an acid-red paper crown from a Christmas cracker but he’d forgotten it was there. His wife, Genevieve, had her bare feet up on the sofa, exhausted by the responsibility of coordinating the domestic crisis of Christmas in a house with a dreamy husband, four kids, two dogs, a mare in the paddock, a rabbit, and a guinea pig, plus sundry invading mice and rats that kept finding inventive routes into their kitchen. In many ways it was a house weathering a permanent state of siege.

Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship’s mast cut from a single timber. He felt bad that they’d had Christmas dinner without having his mother and father over. Dell and Mary had been invited, of course, but there had been a ridiculous dispute about what time dinner should be served. Genevieve wanted to sit down on the stroke of one so that they could all get their coats on in the afternoon and drive up to Bradgate Park or Beacon Hill for a healthy blast of wind. Mary and Dell liked to eat later, and at leisure, and certainly not before three; they’d done all the walking and blasting they cared for. There wasn’t actually a row. What followed was more of an impasse and a sulk, followed by a default decision no party was happy with, that this year they would sit down to separate dinners.

Peter and Genevieve anyway had a daughter who was fifteen, a
boy thirteen, and two more girls of seven and five. Whenever they went over to Mary and Dell’s they garrisoned the place, moving in like a brutal occupying army. It was always easier and more relaxed to stay put in the cottage, and this year that’s what they did.

Meanwhile Peter had bought thirteen-year-old Jack an air rifle for Christmas, and Jack was sitting in the yard hoping for mice or rats to turn up. He lounged on an old exploded sofa his dad hadn’t gotten around to taking to the dump. Like a grizzled old-timer from a shotgun cabin he held the butt of the gun on his thigh and pointing skyward.

Peter put his head outside the back kitchen door. “Don’t wave that fucking thing around. If you catch anyone I’ll rip your head off for sure,” Peter said.

“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m not gonna shoot my fuckin’ sisters.”

“And don’t swear. Right?”

“Right.”

“And don’t wave it around.”

Peter went back inside to stack the dishwasher. He went through to the trashed dining room and was dithering what to do with the carcass of the turkey when the phone rang. It was Dell.

“All right, Dad? I was just going to call you. When I get the kids lined up to say happy Christmas and all that.”

“Never mind that, Pete. You’d better get over here.”

“What? I’ve had a few drinks. We’re about to go for a walk.”

“Come over anyway. Your sister’s here.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I said your sister’s here.”

“What?”

Peter felt dizzy. The room swam. “Dad, what are you saying?”

“She just showed up.”

“She can’t have.”

“Come over, Pete. Your mother’s had a bad turn.”

“Dad, what the hell is going on?”

“Please come over, son. Please come over.”

There was a note in his father’s voice he’d never heard before. Dell was clearly very close to tears. “Can you just tell me what’s happened?”

“I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know anything. Your mother fainted. She fell badly.”

“Okay. I’m coming.”

Peter put the receiver back on its cradle with a gentle click and crashed down onto a hard chair that lived beside the phone. He stared at the debris of Christmas dinner still littering the table. Pulled Christmas poppers and plastic toys and paper crowns were strewn across the room. He suddenly remembered he was still wearing his paper crown. He took it off and held it in his hand, between his knees.

He got up and moved through to the living room, swaying slightly as he went. The television was broadcasting softly while the three girls were sprawled on the carpeted floor playing with Lego bricks and dolls by the lopsided Christmas tree. A cozy coal fire burned in the grate and two staghound lurchers lay on their backs before the fire, their legs in the air and their teeth bared in grins of pure canine pleasure. Genevieve snoozed on the sofa.

Pete went back into the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. He stood watching it boil, and contrary to received wisdom it boiled pretty damn quick. He made a cup of tea for Genevieve and one for himself, gazing at the tea diffusing from a teabag. At last he was roused by the snap of an air-rifle pellet as it struck the outside wall.

Carrying the tea through to the living room, he kneeled before the sofa, then leaned across Genevieve and woke her with a kiss. She blinked at him. Her cheeks were red.

“You’re a sweetheart,” she said sleepily, accepting the tea. “Did I hear the phone?”

“You did hear the phone.”

“Who was it? ”

“Dad.”

“Are they still speaking to us?”

“Yes. I have to go over there.”

“You do? Anything wrong?”

Peter exhaled a puff of air. “Tara came back.”

Genevieve looked at Peter for a moment as though she didn’t know who Tara was. She’d never met Tara, but she’d heard plenty about her. She shook her head quizzically, knitted her brow.

“Yes,” Peter said. “Exactly.”

“Who is Tara?” said Zoe, their fifteen-year-old daughter.

“That’s impossible,” Genevieve said. “Isn’t it?”

“Who is Tara?” asked Amber, the middle daughter.

“I’ve got to go over there.”

“Should we all come?”

“There’s no point in us all going.”

“Who the heck is Tara?” Amber asked again.

“Your dad’s sister.”

“Dad has a sister? I never knew Dad has a sister.”

“No, we don’t talk about her,” said Peter.

“Why don’t we talk about her?” asked Josie, the youngest. “I talk about my sisters. All the time.”

“I have to go,” Peter said. “Is there gas in the car?”

“Is Dad leaving us on Christmas Day?” Amber said.

Genevieve got up off the sofa and winced as she stepped barefoot on a Lego brick. “He won’t be gone long.” She followed Peter out into the hallway and waited while he put on his shoes and his coat. “Will you?”

“No.”

“Do you want a hug?”

“Yes. No,” said Peter. “Not right now.”

There was another slap as an air-gun pellet hit the wall outside.

P
eter drove to Anstey via Breakback Lane. It wasn’t the direct route. He had an idea that he should call on Richie Franklin and tell him the news, but he knew he wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Couldn’t. It didn’t stop him driving that way.

The roads were almost deserted, it being Christmas Day. Picked out like lonely ships on an ocean, one or two isolated vehicles passed him along the way, tires hissing on the wet roads. The sky was laden with snow but it fell only in brief flurries, not settling, instantly melting on impact with his windshield, barely enough for him to activate his wipers.

At the Outwoods he slowed down and turned into the parking area. It was empty and lonely. He had some cigarettes hidden in the glove compartment. This was what passed for contraband in his life now: he’d given up because the girls had been counseled that smoking kills and they cried whenever they saw him spark up a ciggie. But he kept a stale packet hidden for moments like these. He got out of the car and surveyed the bare winter trees grouped around the clearing of the parking area. The trees were golden and gray and somehow asleep, off guard. It was bitterly cold. He tasted a flake of dry tobacco on his tongue and his first drag on the cigarette
made him cough. The cigarette smoke hung like a gray rag in the cold air, and so did the sound of his cough.

The Outwoods was one of the last remaining pockets of ancient forest from which Charnwood took its name. It nestled at the spot where the three counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire touched, and seemed neither to belong to nor take its character from any of them. It was an eerie place, swinging between sunlight and damp, flaring light and shadow; a venue of twisted trees, its volcanic slopes of ash and granite ruptured by mysterious outcropping crags of the very oldest rocks in Britain.

He didn’t like it.

The last time he’d seen Tara was here in the Outwoods. It had been May of that year and they had walked through the woods, and the bluebells at that time had been astonishing. They had sat on the golden lichen-stained rocks and talked about the future.

Peter flicked his cigarette to the ground half smoked and stamped it into the earth. Then he climbed back in his car.

Sometime later he parked right outside Richie’s house but left the engine running. It was almost a challenge, inviting someone to come out and ask him what he was doing; but no one came. No one even so much as glanced out the window. Richie’s house was a council property in what might once have been a row of houses tied to a local land owner. Squat, badly built, and grimy little peasant hutches. Peter knew them well because he’d been raised in an identical house five doors away. Richie, having inherited the property from his mother, still lived there.

There was a light on in Richie’s house, but deep, low, and at the back. There was a single living room that ran the depth of the house. The dim light only made the house look cold and uninviting. Just go up to the door, Peter told himself, and when he answers the door just say
Tara’s back
, that’s all you have to do.
Tara’s back
.

But he couldn’t. He and Richie hadn’t spoken in a long, long time, and two words might as well have been two hundred thousand words. He couldn’t do it. He cursed under his breath and drove away.

“C
OME IN, LAD
.” D
ELL
spoke in a strange kind of whisper.

“Where is she?”

“Are you going to take your coat off? And your shoes? We’ve got the new carpet.”

Peter took off his coat and handed it to his father before untying his shoelaces. He felt a wave of frustration with his father, that at a time like this he was concerned with clean carpets, but said nothing. He made to move down the hall but he felt the flat of his father’s hand on his breastbone.

“Don’t go upsetting anyone. Your mum’s had a fall.”

“I’m not here to upset anyone!” Peter tried to keep the keening note out of his voice. “Is she through here?”

“Come on.”

Peter took a step into the living room and stopped just inside the doorway. His mother lay on the couch. She was sipping tea and had an ice pack on the knee she’d cracked when she’d slumped to the floor. But Peter was more interested in the woman nursing Mary from the armchair next to the sofa. Even though she wore dark glasses, it was his sister, Tara: of that there was no doubt.

Tara stood up. She seemed an inch or two taller than he remembered. Her soft nut-brown hair was maybe a darker shade, and still fell around her face in a tangle of curls. Behind the shades and around her eyes there might have been one or two lines but she hardly seemed to have aged. She just looked pretty grubby, like she’d been living rough.

“When did you cut your hair?” she said.

“Oh. That would be about fifteen years ago.”

“You had such lovely long hair!”

“Everybody did then. Do I get a hug?”

“Of course you do.”

Peter stepped forward and he held his sister in his arms. She held him tight. He inhaled the smell of her. She didn’t smell like he remembered. Now she smelled of something belonging to the outdoors he couldn’t identify. Rain, maybe. Leaf. Mushroom. May blossom. The wind.

It was a long time before she broke the clench. Peter looked over at his mother stretched out with her ice pack and her leg up
on the couch. She gave him a pained smile and dabbed at her eye with a tissue.

“So where you been, Tara? Where you been?”

“She’s been traveling,” Dell said.

“Traveling? Twenty years is a lot of travel.”

“Yes, it is,” Mary said from the couch. “And now she’s come back home. Our little girl has come back home.”

W
ITH TEA BEING THE
drug of choice in the Martin household, Dell concocted more of it, thick and brown and sweet. After all, they’d had a bit of a shock; and whenever they had a shock or experienced a disturbance of any kind they had poured tea on it for as long as any of them could remember. The fact is they poured tea on it even when they hadn’t had a shock, usually six or seven times a day. But these were extra-special circumstances and Peter knew he had to wait until the tea had arrived before he could begin any line of questioning. Even when the tea did arrive, the questioning didn’t go well.