Some Kind of Fairy Tale (32 page)

“We cantered a little way, and I knew we had made it over the crossing because the light changed. I had slowly become used to the brilliance of the light where I had been, but now everything had a jagged, smudged quality. And where the light had grazed my eyes, now it seemed to rake and sting. And it was cold! The wind hacked at me like a knife. But the landscape became familiar, and I knew I was in Charnwood again, dear Charnwood, close to where the three rivers meet, and rising in the distance I could see the Outwoods.

“The season had changed. Winter had come. I asked him to let me get down but he insisted that he would set me down where he found me, and even though I didn’t want to be in the Outwoods and wanted to be at home, he wouldn’t listen to me. He barely spoke. I was shivering, and as we trotted on, small flakes of snow began to fall.

“It was up in the Outwoods that he delivered me, at that very rock where the bluebells had been growing in such thick, perfumed colonies. But now there were no bluebells and no songbirds. The bracken was dead, the trees were bare, and the track was muddy. I got down from the horse and turned to speak to him, but he steered the mare away from me.

“Why? I said to him. You have to answer one thing! Why did you choose me?

“He shook his head as if he didn’t believe that I didn’t know the answer to my question.
Tara, because you were the Queen of the May
. And with that he kicked at the mare’s flanks to canter her away. I was left alone, exactly as I was found.

“My first instinct was to run, and I did, I ran. I pelted down to the road, stumbling, slithering in the black leaf mold, running to get home.

“In the short time I’d been away someone had built a parking lot, with public toilets and bulletin boards offering information about the place. I resented these things. They gave me a bad feeling in my stomach. There were two cars parked there, and I didn’t like the shape of them. They didn’t seem to be quite right. Sculptured wooden figures near the entrance made me feel queasy. All the time I was squinting into the jagged light, and my senses were tingling and I knew things had changed, but it was too soon for me to see how much. I mean, even the cars were different. The designs of the cars. I knew something had happened.

“The snow was falling and I was shivering. I spotted a man with a dog walking back to his car. I stepped out of the trees and asked him if he would give me a lift. He flat-out ignored me and got into his car and drove away. I actually wondered if he even saw me. It was like I was a ghost trying to communicate with people on another plane. I was shocked by his rudeness. I felt cold and weary and overwhelmed, and I know I started crying.

“After a while a married couple came by. They looked like they’d been hiking. She had a patch over one eye, like a pirate’s patch. She paused and asked me if I was all right. I said no, I’d been dumped there and I needed to get back home. The couple exchanged looks, and then the woman offered me a ride. I saw myself reflected in the passenger window and suddenly appreciated what I must have looked like. I wasn’t very clean and my clothes hadn’t been laundered in the six months I’d been away.

“Once I was in the car the woman tried to break the tension by talking to me. She asked me if I was all ready for Christmas. I said that I was, but I couldn’t work out how it might have been Christmas, since I’d been away exactly six months and that would make it October. When she asked me where I wanted to go I
gave her my home address. But when we passed through Anstey I knew everything was out of joint. The cars were all different, the buses were different. There were electronic signs that I’d never seen before. The roads had changed. The shops had changed and some old decorative storefronts had been replaced by plate-glass windows. Even the public telephones had changed—where were the old red phone boxes, so comforting and reassuring? It was all detail, just fine detail, but important detail to me on this homecoming day and it all felt wrong.

“I was beginning to panic. I think I was hyperventilating. The lady in the passenger seat turned her head to look at me with her one good eye. She asked me if I was all right. Even this seemed sinister to me, as if she were in on some joke.

“When the car approached the end of my street I got them to let me out of the car before we reached my house. I was nervous about going in. For one thing I anticipated a dreadful reception; but quite apart from that I couldn’t process all the changes that had taken place. A gas station had closed down and only its broken canopy remained, defaced by graffiti, a sheet of newspaper blowing across its forecourt. A newsstand had become a tattoo parlor. A housing development had sprung up like mushrooms after a night of rain, and a video camera, like a surveillance device, was angled down at street level.

“Even the door to our house had changed. Someone had added a white glass storm door to mask off our old blue door. And as I looked, an elderly man came out of the new door. He was a bald-headed man, with a tuft of white hair behind each of his ears. He looked beaten down by life as he opened his car door and climbed inside. And I realized it was Dad. It was my dad, and he was old.

“I know that I cried out. I bit into my knuckles. I couldn’t help it.

“As he backed the car out of the driveway—a new car I didn’t recognize, I turned and ran. I ran blindly, feeling like I should hide, hide my face. I had tears in my eyes and nowhere to go. I ran until I came to the crossroads, where the pub that used to be known as The Old Bell Inn had a new sign and had been rechristened The
Snooty Fox. But I had no money to go inside, so I walked on and I came to the public library and I went inside just to get warm and to gather my thoughts.

“But even that place had changed. It had automatic doors! Inside, there were rows of TV screens and people were hunched over the screens. I had no idea what this all meant. I thought the people must all be watching television. The age of the Internet had arrived while I had been away.

“And then I laughed, because I knew what was happening. I was in a dream. I was still dreaming that I was on the back of a giant bee. All I had to do was wake up, but in order to wake up I first had to fall asleep, and then this strange dream would all be over, and I would wake up at home, a foolish schoolgirl who after falling asleep among the bluebells had had the strangest dream. I was exhausted enough to fall asleep there and then. There was a lounge area in the library with newspapers and magazines, and I sat there, holding on to a newspaper and pretending to read it while I dozed.

“And I did doze. But when I woke it was not to find myself at home. A librarian, a kindly lady with soft brown eyes, was shaking me awake. She apologized to me and smiled and said that I couldn’t sleep there and that they were closing the library for the Christmas holidays. She gave me a leaflet stating when the library would be open after the break. It had the dates and it had the year, all clearly printed for me to read.

“Of course I didn’t believe it. I had to ask the librarian what year it was. She didn’t answer me. Instead she asked me if I had somewhere to go. When I repeated my question she went away and came back with a piece of paper. It had an address written on it, the address of a hostel, she said, where people could get food and shelter over Christmas. She smiled at me again. It’s going to be a cold Christmas, she said.

“She thought I was homeless! But I wasn’t homeless; I had a home to go to, a family, loving parents, and a boyfriend. I walked back home again and I decided that whatever the consequences and whatever the circumstances at home, I had to declare myself. I didn’t have a key to the house but we always kept a spare key under a small boulder near the front door. I decided I would let myself in.

“But the boulder was gone. There was no key, and even if there was a boulder and a key the door had been changed, and with it the lock! I rang the bell and I knocked at the door, and no one was home. I decided to wait in the garage next to the house, to keep warm. Even the garage was piled high with unfamiliar junk, but I waited, and eventually my father returned in his car. I watched from the garage, spying on my father as he got out, and as an elderly woman struggled to climb out of the passenger seat. The elderly woman was my mother. Her hair had turned silver. Can you imagine how I felt when I saw my poor mum and dad, turned almost overnight into frail, silver-haired old people?

“I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to run to them, hug them, but I couldn’t. I was too overwhelmed by the change, the hideous aging that had taken place in them. Instead I waited, hiding in the garage as they shuffled inside. I couldn’t face the idea of presenting myself to them. I didn’t want them to look in my eyes or see my expression twisted with horror at the lines engraved on their faces and their snowy heads, so I skulked in the garage, paralyzed, bewildered.

“Darkness fell and I crept away. I walked the five miles into Leicester, in a kind of blindness, tears stinging my eyes. I found the address, given to me by the librarian, of the hostel. They took me in without asking questions. Most of the inmates were in a wretched condition—bag ladies and drug addicts or feebleminded women with their senses battered out of them by life. It was a grim place to be. I shared a stinking room with three other women. One of them talked constantly about a dead child; another curled in the corner, calling out in her sleep; a third ranted about how they wouldn’t allow any drink in the place. But it was warm. You could get a hot shower and something to eat. Eventually I slept.

“The next day was Christmas Eve. We were told to leave the hostel between eleven a.m. and three p.m. No one there seemed to have any idea of what they were supposed to do in those hours. I was given an old coat. I spent the time walking around the town, trying to take in all the incredible but minute changes. I went to the central library to get warm and someone there showed me how to read back through newspapers on a screen, and this I did, trying to get a sense of all the things that had happened since I’d been away.

“Twenty years. I’d lost twenty years. In my head I could no longer deny what had happened, but in my heart I was never able to accept it. I still can’t.

“And I knew that Hiero was following me. As I walked through the town I could sense him behind me. Sometimes he made an effort to remain unseen, and at other times he didn’t even care if I spotted him or not. He wanted me to know he was there. In the central library he sat up in the balcony, gazing at me through a gap between the shelves.

“After a while he approached me. You see? he said. You see how it is? You see how you can’t come back here?

“I shut out his words and I focused on the newspaper archives, as if by an effort of will I could make him unreal, as if I could make all of this unreal. Eventually a male librarian came along and said, Is this man bothering you? Hiero sneered at the man but left without fuss.

“You see, I was in a state of shock. I had to process what had happened to me, and I couldn’t. I went out into the streets again and drifted by all the shops, all the plate glass imported into the High Street, all decorated for Christmas and boasting unfamiliar glittering merchandise.

“I went back to the hostel, not because I felt comfortable there but because I couldn’t face the truth, and I couldn’t face my parents. I ate a meal there and in the evening a choir came, a local choir from a school, made up of adults and children. They sang carols for us, and they sang so beautifully and with such feeling that I cried and cried and cried until no more tears would come, just hot salt stinging the backs of my eyes.

“I lay awake that night trying to work out what to do. When I did fall asleep I had bad dreams, and I was woken up when the woman with the drinking problem tried to get into bed with me. I screamed so loudly at her that someone came and led her away to another room.

“In the morning, Christmas morning, I decided that I would have to go home, whatever the cost, whatever the agony. I told one of the volunteers that I had a family after all, and that I should be with them. He was very kind. He drove me back to my house and
waited while I knocked on the door. It had started to snow again, tiny flakes of snow, and I remembered how my dad would always bet on a White Christmas, and I wondered if he still did.

“When Dad answered the door, he didn’t recognize me. Then Mum came to the door, and, on seeing me, she fainted.”

T
ara registered at the general hospital to undergo a CT scan, paid for privately this time, and yet without knowing it she found herself lying on the very same public health service flatbed and passing through the same doughnut-shaped scanner that Richie had stretched out on some days earlier; her scan was also supervised by the same radiographer who had photographed Richie. Tara was there at Underwood’s insistence. He wanted to see if there were any signs of trauma to the brain—recent or old—that might explain an amnesia spanning twenty years. Underwood conceded that even if a trauma were exposed by the scan, it would be difficult to explain why her memory before her departure and
since her return seemed to be in perfect working order; but then, he said, the workings of the human brain were often unfathomable, particularly in the process of the recovery.

The brain, he said, could hide twenty years of experience, but that didn’t mean those experiences weren’t there.