Some Kind of Fairy Tale (33 page)

Knowing that Richie was waiting for her in the hospital parking lot, Tara lay still as the radiographer stepped out of the room to trigger the scanner. She was deeply worried about Richie. On the way to the hospital he’d had to stop the car, so severe was his latest migraine attack. He had parked, closed his eyes, and held his fingertips to his temples while she sat helpless in the passenger seat. After about ten minutes the attack had subsided and he carried on driving her to the hospital. Tara had wanted him to come inside, into the waiting room, but Richie said he preferred to tip back his seat so he could try to rest quietly in his car. Plus, of course, you couldn’t smoke in the hospital.

As the X-ray flickered over her, reset, and flickered again, she had three things on her mind. One was Richie, one was Mrs. Larwood, and one was the
charnas
flower made up by bugs.

Tara’s visit to the elderly lady living across the street from The Old Forge had been a strange one. Jack had somehow managed to communicate, or her parents had, after relaying Jack’s message, that the old lady’s request to see her was somehow urgent. But when it came to it Mrs. Larwood wasn’t offering anything more pressing than tea and biscuits. Tara concluded that the old woman was simply being nosy. Perhaps she had been around the neighborhood when Tara had disappeared and now just wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

But all the time she’d been in her house, Tara had felt the old lady was circling her, gazing with her cataracted eyes, probing, looking for confirmation of something unexpressed. When Tara came to the conclusion that her visit had no real purpose she had excused herself, but the old lady had gotten up and escorted her across the street back to The Old Forge. Only the appearance of Jack throwing bags over the gate and behaving in a furtive manner had given her the opportunity to get free.

Tara knew perfectly well that she herself was the peculiar one, the one with the outrageous story, the one seeing a shrink, but she
often thought that everyone around her had a very breakable shell, too. Meanwhile, the effort of maintaining a singular belief in the face of overwhelming opposition was exhausting. Tara could see how easy it would be simply to give way, to accept that she was deluded, to let the memory become a ghost and to then let the ghost fade.

The most extraordinary thing about it all was how simple it was just to carry on. There were meals to be prepared and eaten; dishes to be washed; clothes to be laundered, ironed, and put on and taken off; beds to be slept in and made and unmade. The prosaic needs of day-to-day living blunted all impact of the miraculous; it demanded that the glorious be relegated. And she knew that even if she were able to convince everyone involved that she had witnessed something remarkable, had undergone a transcendental and miraculous experience, reached and returned from another world, it almost seemed like it would not ever, and could not ever, truly matter.

As she lay inside the doughnut of the CT scanner, with the photoflash triggering, resetting, and triggering again, she thought of the
charnas
flower. She saw it all over again and she knew she was one bug in the group flower. Scattered by the wind of what happened, however astonishing it was, she really hadn’t traveled that far from the community to which she belonged. As the X-ray machine whirred and made another photograph of her brain she knew she had to take her place in the assembly of the flower. There was no other place to be.

O
UT IN THE HOSPITAL
parking lot Richie felt that his migraine had subsided. He was experiencing colored lights flickering behind his retina, tiny iridescent worms of radiance, but the pain had gone away. The attacks were irregular and unpredictable but they were getting worse. He thought maybe he was going to have to go in for a lifestyle change. No alcohol. No smoke. No sense of humor. Life unplugged.

If that was going to be the case, he decided, he might as well smoke while he still could. He opened his car door, stepped out, flicked his lighter, and torched up a cigarette. As he inhaled the
tobacco he thought he saw a small shadow flit at the periphery of his vision, like that of a mouse running beneath a fridge. He peered hard between the cars parked in rows but saw nothing. His driver’s-side door was still open a fraction. He opened it wide and leaned back against the sill of his car, luxuriating in his smoking.

He was scheduled to see a specialist the following day to get the results of his own CT scan. He’d spent the morning reassuring Tara that it was nothing, routine; and so it was nothing. That is, the scan itself was nothing. The seeded anxiety about what might be found was, however, not nothing.

Being with Tara again had made him review his life. The last twenty years had gone in a flicker. It compressed in the memory. Much of it had been lost to drinking or to being stoned, both of which were experiences that largely produced at best only smoky reminiscences. If the experiences had been good at the time—and he supposed they were—it would be nice to have strong recollection. But that didn’t seem to be the way it worked.

The music—the making of music and the performing of music—produced memories, many good, some bad, some difficult. But he knew for sure that he’d spent too much of that time living not in the present moment of creating or playing music but in the expectation or hope of some reward, some success. He had always been waiting for his life to start when that happened, when the recognition came. It had taken him twenty years to realize how utterly wrongheaded that was.

It was as if the twenty years didn’t amount to much, that he hadn’t actually been
present
for so much of his life. He wondered if he might be able to fix that now that Tara had come back. She had the gift of bringing him back to the present. He had played his guitar for her the previous evening and she had sat erect on his sofa and had been so focused on him, he knew that she was the audience he had wanted all along. Plus, he had a huge repertoire of songs—other people’s songs and his own songs—that he could play for her, and play well.

And then while he was playing she had taken his breath away when she showed him how to retune his guitar a different way.

“That won’t work,” he’d said.

“It will. Now play your normal chords, but one step up.”

He was astonished. She had been right. There were new sounds in the world. Sounds that, crusty old muso that he was, he’d never heard before.

“Where did you learn that?”

He shouldn’t have asked. He knew the answer.

“I told you. I learned lots of things.”

Richie smoked his cigarette, thinking about some songs he wanted to rearrange in this extraordinary new style when he heard the rush of footsteps. But even though he was distracted by thoughts of Tara and of musical chords, he was ready.

He’d been ready from the moment he’d been discharged from the hospital after the first assault, because he knew in his bones that a second attack was always imminent. Even though he now preferred the quiet life, Richie was a street fighter. Both his instincts and his experience informed him that a second assault would follow, as sure as counting for the thunder that follows lightning, and that it would happen in an open space at a time when he was alone. And he was ready.

The sound he heard behind him was a light-footed skitter on the tarmac. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped out and away from his car. There was a rush of a shadow and an astonishing high kick that whistled an inch past his jaw, but Richie grabbed his attacker, and, instead of blocking, he pulled the man farther into the line of his own attack, so that his assailant went crashing into the gap left by the open car door. Richie moved quickly, stepping around to slam the car door into the figure crumpled against the driver’s-side wheel. He slammed the door again, and again.

The dazed attacker tried to shield his head with a raised forearm, but Richie slammed the door a fourth time, catching the raised arm between the door and the roof of the car in a sickening crunch. There was a howl of agony from the shadowy figure trapped by the car door.

Richie knew now for sure that his attacker was the same man who had eyeballed him while he was onstage that night. He opened the door again and the man slumped to the floor. Richie put the boot in, hard.

“Who the fuck are you?” Richie roared. He could smell the
man, smell his pain and his hurting breath and body odor mingled. “Who the fuck are you?”

The man squatted, leaning against the bottom sill of the car, nursing his injured arm, a rich stream of blood leaking from his nose. He was still trapped between the car and Richie, who was ready with the door, threatening to slam it on him again.

The man spoke in an eerie whisper. “She’s not for you.”

“What the fuck are you TALKING about?” Richie roared back.

But he got no answer. From his squat position the man made a sudden spring, an impossible upright leap that took him over the open car door to land nimbly on the tarmac behind. Still nursing his injured arm, he ran.

“That’s right, run, you fucker! Run!”

The man stopped and turned to call to Richie. “Give her up. She’s not for you. She’s not for any of you.” And then he trotted away, disappearing behind a row of parked vehicles.

Richie was suddenly calm. He was pumped with adrenaline but now it changed and flowed through him like a sedative. He felt his body spasm. He lit another cigarette and stared at the space where the man had disappeared, wondering how the man had leapt over the car door like that.

After a while Tara emerged, smiling broadly at him. Then her expression changed. “What happened?”

T
HEY WENT TO
T
HE
Phantom Coach to get a drink. Richie had a pint and a scotch chaser. Tara had asked for snakebite, and he shuddered. Richie told her everything about the attack. Tara took her dark glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose. She sighed and told Richie all she knew about Hiero, about how he had followed her everywhere, how he was still stalking her.

“That means,” Richie said evenly, “that I’ve just had a fight with a fucking fairy.”

“They’re dangerous,” she said.

“Think I don’t know that?”

“And you shouldn’t call them that. They don’t like it. Are you starting to believe me?”

“No,” said Richie. “Yes. Not really. Partly.”

“Are you okay?”

Richie was wincing. “It’s these migraines I get. They’re like attacks of colored light, but they burn like acid.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Another scotch and another beer. Throw medicine at it. I’ll be all right.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“Tara, I’m all right. You’ve come back to me. That’s all I need. That’s all the medicine and the dope I need.”

“Richie!”

“Let me tell you something. You’ve been away for twenty years. But I have, too. I went into hibernation when you left me. All I’ve done in twenty years is write songs about you. I haven’t really grown up, have I? Look at Peter and Genevieve. They’ve grown up but I’ve been stuck where I was when you left me.”

“Oh my God, Richie.”

“But that’s changed. Time started again. A new clock started ticking. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, Tara?”

“Yes, Richie.”

“You have come back, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Richie.”

J
ack managed to scoop up the bag with the cat’s corpse and to step around Tara and Mrs. Larwood without much conversation. Mrs. Larwood seemed to want him to stay while she heaped praise upon his shoulders, telling Tara how he had helped her with her computer and what a fine boy he was. Jack had muttered some remark about being in a bit of a hurry, whereupon Tara had said something teasing. Both she and Mrs. Larwood had giggled at him.

But as he walked away he felt both pairs of eyes boring into his back. He wondered if the plastic bag was transparent enough for them to be able to determine the shape of a cat’s corpse. He was tempted to look down at the bag to gauge the opacity of the plastic; but he was certain that one downward glance would draw attention to what was inside it and almost certainly betray him, so he kept his eyes directed ahead of him and marched on with agonizing and robotic purpose.

After walking for half a mile in this mode he came across a builder’s Dumpster in the road, outside a house in the process of renovation. The Dumpster had been filled with discarded bricks and old plaster and lath, plus bathroom fittings torn from the old
house. Jack checked that no one was watching, and dumped the cat corpse in the bin, hiding it under some broken lath for good measure.

From there he took a bus into town and went directly to Cat-line, the rescue center he had researched on the Internet. He had identified a specific cat from a gallery of photographs; it looked exactly like Mrs. Larwood’s cat, down to the detail. At least, he thought guiltily, it looked like Mrs. Larwood’s cat before it had been shot, buried, had decomposed, and was dug up again. The favored cat had the piss-poor name of Frosty, but that hadn’t seemed an insurmountable problem, because cats, as far as he knew, were not like dogs in answering to their names. There was little prospect of someone randomly shouting its name and the cat responding. All it needed was Mrs. Larwood’s distinctive collar—or, rather, Mrs. Larwood’s cat’s distinctive collar. Jack felt he had a good chance of pulling this off.

At the reception desk he blushed when he told a heavily pregnant woman behind the reception desk that he’d had some e-mail exchanges with a lady called Joanna.
Why the fuck am I blushing?
he thought angrily.
There’s no need to blush
. While he fought back the pink, the woman said Joanna was being summoned from the bowels of the cattery.

Joanna had dark hair that tumbled over her eyes and she wore tight-fitting but dirty blue jeans. She had lazy eyelids, and Jack thought she was hot for such an old chick, though he guessed she was well over twenty-one, and therefore well past it. But when she eyed him from behind her fringe of dark hair he found he was fighting another blush. Even from where he stood she smelled of what he suspected was cat fur. Or something like that. It set him on edge.