Some Kind of Fairy Tale (39 page)

Peter blinked himself awake. “What kind of problem?”

Richie sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “Well. It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeh, it’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

“The thing. Tumor.”

Peter thought he might still be sleeping. He rubbed a broad hand across his face. “What do you mean,
it’s gone
?”

“I can’t explain it. Neither can
they
. They want to do me all over again.”

“Do you again?”

“Scan.”

Peter stood up. “Talk sense, Richie. Please.”

The senior consultant came out, an intense man with a close-cropped beard and a haircut almost like a monk’s tonsure. “Are you ready?” he asked Richie.

“What’s going on?” Peter asked.

“Can he come?” Richie asked the consultant. “It’s a bit hard to take in.”

The consultant turned the full beam of his gaze on to Peter. He stroked his short beard. “I don’t see why not.”

There was an office adjacent to the radiography studio. The consultant led them to a computer monitor. He had two images on the screen. He pointed to the image on the right. “There’s your friend’s scan from a few days ago. Here’s the tumor: size of a bloody grape.” Then he pointed at the left-hand image. “Here’s today’s image. No tumor.”

“A mistake,” Peter said.

“Exactly what I thought,” said the consultant. “We don’t normally collate the images at once but we do check to make sure the equipment has been running properly and the radiographer picked it up at once before calling me. At first I thought—as she did—that the images must be from two different people. But look here, and here, and here. There is no possibility that these scans aren’t taken from the same brain.”

“Well, where’s it gone?” Peter said. “Where’s the tumor gone?”

The consultant bunched a hand in front of his mouth and looked hard at Peter. He didn’t have an answer.

“It can’t just go!” Peter said.

“I want to check it all again,” said the consultant.

“It can’t just disappear!”

“I’ve never seen it in all my career,” said the consultant, “but sometimes it happens and it’s called spontaneous remission.” He turned to Richie. “Do you believe in God?”

“Nope,” Richie said flatly. “And I ain’t about to start.”

“Me neither,” said the consultant. “Thing is, if you don’t believe in miracles, you’re left only with the beautiful and unsolvable mystery.”

“I’ll take that,” Richie said, “if it means the tumor might have gone.”

The consultant appeared to smile and frown at the same time. “Shall we get on with repeating the scan?”

“I’m ready,” Richie said. “You all right waiting for me, Peter?”

“I’m right outside the door, brother,” Peter said. “I’m right outside.”

A
couple of weeks or so after Tara’s second disappearance the family took a winter afternoon’s walk in the Outwoods. Peter and Genevieve were there with Amber and Josie. Jack was there, too, even though Peter had said no, don’t be so bloody silly, you can’t take your air rifle. Richie was there, having become a regular face at The Old Forge. He carried Josie on his shoulders through the woods. Perhaps more extraordinary was that Zoe wanted to be there, too, and she’d dragged her dreadlocked boyfriend along. Dreadlocked boyfriend was very happy to be there because he thought Richie was cool. He’d seen Richie play a set at The White Horse.

Word had got around among those in the know that the
old muso
had come back to life and was playing fresh material for the first time in a decade. It was standing room only at The Phantom Coach. Everyone in the local music world nodded sagely and said,
Richie, yeh, that Richie, he knows his way around a guitar; yeh, that Richie, that’s a class act
. For some reason everyone claimed to be familiar with his music of old; and for some reason everyone wanted to know him.

As for Richie himself, he was still hurting badly over Tara,
but he was working on a song to express the sentiment that the second hurt never wounded like the first. There were lines about a scar covering up an old scar. The song wasn’t ready yet, but he was working on it. More miraculous than songs, however, was the disappearance of his tumor, and with it the headaches. The awful blinding migraines that had arrived with Tara had vanished along with her. There was an extraordinary coincidence to it all, and one that Richie didn’t like to spend too long thinking about, but for some reason it was a thought that wouldn’t leave him alone.

His subsequent brain scans had revealed nothing. It all seemed like a bad dream. There was no evidence to show that there ever had been a tumor of any kind. The sum total of medical science, expert opinion, and extensive doctoral experience had nothing to say about what had happened other than “Be thankful.”

He was thankful, as thankful as it was possible to be without actually being on his knees. Beyond his emotional hurt he saw the world with rinsed eyes. A new light poured into his life and it made time slow. What’s more, Richie had found himself a complete family, and he’d been adopted into it. He’d supped at The Old Forge frequently since Tara had left, and he liked being around. When the incessant chatter and knockabout behavior and bickering got too much for him, he just left without a word, only to appear another evening after Peter had finished work.

“Has Richie gone?” Genevieve might say.

Someone in the house might answer.

No one seemed to mind or to find his intermittent presence an intrusion on the family. Genevieve cooked a little more food or packaged up leftovers for him to take home, an arrangement he was very happy with. She was on a mission to fatten him up and get him to eat healthily. If she found him skulking outside smoking a cigarette she took the ciggie out of his mouth and crushed it under her foot.

“No smoking anywhere on the property,” she said.

“Fuck! It’s like a prison regime round here.”

“No, it’s not. You can smoke in prison. Are you hungry? Let me get you something.”

Peter was very happy to have him around. He was fun. He tried to teach the kids how to charm rats and mice away from
the property. He said Tara had taught him and since the day Tara had exercised her powers in his kitchen, he’d never seen a mouse. Everyone was skeptical.

But he and Peter had twenty years of conversation and experiences to catch up on, and Peter had as many years of guilt to exorcise. He’d already committed himself to becoming Richie’s gig driver: after all, Richie had a drunk-driving charge coming up and was about to lose his driver’s license for a while. Peter also hired Richie to give regular guitar lessons to Zoe. They had an argument about it.

“I ain’t taking your money. If I’d asked for cash for guitar lessons twenty years ago you’d never let me hear the end of it.”

“It isn’t twenty years ago.”

“You’d have called me a capitalist hyena or somethin’ o’ that order.”

“Well, you better take it and look happy.”

“A running dog of the merchant classes. A lackey.”

“We’ll pay you a proper hourly rate.”

“You can fuck off with that. If I want to teach Zoe it’s up to me. An imperialist dog.”

“I’m not having that. If you’re not paid then you can always make an excuse and slink off, can’t you? Not doing it this week, sorry. Bit busy. Got something on. I know what you’re like.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do. I want her to have proper structured lessons, paid for and accounted for.”

“What do you mean, accounted for? I’ve never done accounts in my life and I’m not starting now.”

It took Genevieve to shame them into stopping. “Are you two still arguing about that? For God’s sake!” In truth, they weren’t arguing about the teaching of music at all; and she knew it.

They walked through the Outwoods that winter afternoon, Josie still perched on Richie’s shoulders, the two hounds bounding and crisscrossing the tracks ahead of them. There were no bluebells; only the rust-colored ghosts of dried bracken and brambles, plus a primal odor of wet leaves and mud underfoot. They arrived at the ancient protruding crags of green and gray rock, speckled with lichen turned the color of marmalade by the winter temperatures.

“That’s where she said she sat,” Peter said, and they all stopped and looked at the small and mysterious outcrop of stones.

There was a moment of communal silence, as if they half expected the stones to begin to hum, or to pulsate, or to advertise their presence in some way. But there was only the penetrating stillness of the damp woods, until it was disturbed by the shrill call of a crow.

Genevieve shivered. She looked around her. “Where’s Jack?” she said.

He was missing from the pack. Everyone looked around for Jack. He wasn’t there.

“Jack!” Genevieve called.

The woods breathed a hollowness back at them.

Genevieve felt a thrill of alarm. “Did anyone see him?”

“No,” said Amber.

“No,” said Josie.

“I think he drifted off that way,” Zoe’s boyfriend said. “He followed the dogs.”

Peter looked nervously at Richie. Genevieve was already striding in the direction indicated. She called again. “Jack!”

There he was, standing on a slight rise, partially obscured by a second outcrop of rock. He was gazing out across the woods, where the trees and the bushes grew thickest. The trees were mostly bare but the dense bramble offered plenty of cover. The two dogs were alert, too, and motionless, gazing at the same spot, as if waiting for some tiny movement there that would release them into the thicket.

His mother ran to him and hugged him from behind.

“What?” Jack said. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” his mother said, feeling both foolish and relieved. “Stupid. I thought I’d lost you for a moment.”

“I’m thirteen!” Jack protested.

“Yes.” His mother was embarrassed now. “What were you looking at?”

“Don’t know. I thought I saw someone looking at me. From the tree. Over there.”

Genevieve looked across into the tangle of dead bracken and dripping bushes. She could see nothing.

“I thought someone was watching us,” Jack said.

Genevieve kissed him. “Come on. Let’s join the others.”

They walked back to the family group, who were gathered around the stones waiting for them. The Outwoods, that in an instant could seem so singular and menacing, became familiar and comforting again.

Jack had indeed spotted something in the woods, as had the dogs. Someone had been watching him. But to reveal who had been watching him would be to reveal who has been telling you this story all along. And, as you were advised earlier, everything depends on that detail.

Tara went away, and this time she went away for good. She didn’t leave any further information. She had already tried to tell them everything she understood about what had happened to her, but they had either not wanted to hear or had found her report too unsettling, too risky, and therefore impossible. Perhaps she was speaking in a kind of code; or perhaps she was speaking the literal truth of what happened to her.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance, and for Tara it was just too hard. That much I can say with certainty. And so she made her escape for a second time, in a canter through the woods, over crystal streams and across the broad fields, to a bohemian land of light and fire, to a place where the sun and the moon meet on the hill.

M
ay Day, four months after Tara’s second disappearance. It was spectacular bluebell time all over again. The weather was sunny and bright and the sky cloudless. The blossom around The Old Forge was high, the ornamental cherry at the front of the house was in full flush, the apple raced along abreast of the cherry, and the lilac and the sweet chestnut at the rear of the house were aching to follow. Spring was roaring in, and the air was heavy with pollen.

Peter had loaded up his truck to go out on a shoeing job. He’d ducked back into his workshop to pick up a laminitis treatment and another rack of shoes. As he emerged from his dark workshop, blinking into the sunlight, he spotted Zoe talking to someone at the front gate.

The giant ornamental cherry tree formed a spectacular gorgeous shell-pink canopy at the gateway to the front drive, and she was standing beneath it. She wore a pretty, short floral dress and flip-flops, exposing her coltish bare legs to the warm spring sunshine. She ran a hand through her long silky hair, and as she did so the sunlight shimmered along its dark waves like a quiet flame. She lifted her hair behind her ears and the light in it flared and then quieted again.

Peter looked at the man she was talking to, sizing him up. He
was a handsome figure, rather older than Zoe. His complexion was weather-beaten, that of someone who lived or worked out of doors, and within a head of dark hair there was the glint of a gold ring at his ear. He was smiling and teasing, his white teeth flashing, and he was pointing at the upper branches of the cherry tree.

Peter decided to go and see what it was all about. Still clutching a box of steel horseshoes under his arm, he made his way up the yard. But the man looked up, and when he saw Peter coming, the expression on his face changed. He held up a hand in farewell to Zoe, and, rather too quickly, he walked away.

By the time Peter drew abreast of Zoe the man had made it several yards down the street and was already climbing into a white van. Peter and Zoe watched him drive away.

“Who was that?” Peter asked.