Some Kind of Fairy Tale (5 page)

“Christ,” Genevieve had said. She had Jack gamely hanging off one tit at the time and Zoe had only just finished breast-feeding.

“I’ll retrain.”

“Christ.”

“Are you up for it?”

Genevieve shifted a tumbling curl out of her eye and hitched baby Jack higher on her nipple. “Do I get to look at the place?”

The property was ramshackle. It needed heating installed and fixing up and decorating from top to bottom. The forge itself was antiquated and hardly in working order, but Peter pointed out that it didn’t need to be: most farrier work these days was mobile and done from the back of a van.

Genevieve was not, like her husband, of working-class origin. In fact, she was very minor aristocracy. Her cousin was thirty-ninth in line for the throne of England. Or something. Her own family was broke, but luckily she was high enough in the social order not to give a damn about social appearances. Had she been a little less upper-class she might have insisted on a showroom home with a
touch of Regency-style furniture. But she wasn’t. She’d married so far beneath her in the social order that it couldn’t be interpreted as anything but an escape and a relief.

Peter knew that the decision, ultimately, was hers to make. “Are we taking it?”

“Christ. Yes.”

So, twelve years on and just two days after Christmas, he found himself in his workshop, sorting horseshoes that didn’t need sorting, just so that he wouldn’t have to feel angry about Tara.

Genevieve had appeared at the workshop door. “Leave the sodding things, Peter. You promised yourself a week off. Come and play with the kids.”

“Right. Coming.” He clattered some shoes into a wooden box, where they rang like tuning forks.

T
WO DAYS LATER HE
was sitting in his car outside Richie’s house again. This time he had taken the step of switching off his engine. It was raining. The windshield and the side windows of the car had steamed up and he had to wipe the glass to see out. Not that there was a lot to see.

Peter sat there for maybe fifteen minutes. A light burned in Richie’s house—the same dim table lamp he’d seen before, deep at the back of the house. No one seemed to move in front of it, anyway, and no one went into or out of the house.

The condensation on the windshield glass matched Peter’s state of mind. He was misted, paralyzed between the act of getting up and knocking on the door and sinking farther into his seat. He and Richie had been childhood friends up to and until shortly after Tara’s disappearance. They shared a lot of history: childish things, stupid things.

One time, when he was eleven, Peter had been foolish enough to walk across a frozen pond. In the middle of the pond he’d dropped straight through the ice. His weight had cut a perfect and circular hole. As he struggled to haul himself back onto the ice it splintered in his hands and gave way again and again, each time sending Peter plunging back down into the freezing water. Richie did everything you are instructed not to do in such a situation: he
walked calmly across the ice, reached down an arm, and pulled Peter out of the water.

“Stupid,” Peter spat, shivering as they walked home together, he soaked and freezing. “You could have gone through the ice, too.”

“Yeh.”

“You pulled me out.”

“Yeh.”

“We both could have died.”

“Yeh.”

“Stupid.”

“Yeh.”

Two years after that Peter repaid him. One beautiful summer evening, with the air smelling of sweet, new-mown grass, they were playing cricket on the playground along with some younger kids. Two older boys appeared, strangers, their faces creased with mischief. One of them had a stick with a rope noose at the end of it. Just for fun, just for meanness, the boy with the stick strolled right up to Richie and hooked the noose tight round Richie’s neck. Richie was brought to his knees, his face puce, struggling to breathe.

Peter was holding the cricket bat. Without hesitation he stepped up to the mean youth as casually as if he were moving to the wicket and going to bat. He swung the bat hard and struck the boy across the ear. The boy’s head made exactly the same pleasing sound as a cricket ball on a bat, leather on willow. The boy went down as if he’d been shot.

The second aggressor turned pale. “You’re fuckin’ mad,” he said. “You coulda killed ’im!”

“You want some?” said Peter.

Richie, still purple in the face, tore the noose from around his neck and used the attached stick to thrash at his tormentor, who lay on the ground, guarding his head. The second boy chose to say no more.

“It’s enough. Leave it,” said Peter.

The cricket game was over. They walked home without a word, leaving the assailant lying on the ground.

They shared a lot of history and a lot of hurt.

Peter was startled from his reveries when his passenger door was suddenly snatched open by a man in a gray hoodie. The man had serious need of a shave. He looked at Peter with unblinking bloodshot eyes.

“How long you gonna sit here without coming in?”

“D
O YOU WANT BEER
or whisky?” Richie said.

“I’ll have a beer.”

Richie seemed not to hear Peter, because he splashed two measures of whisky into glass tumblers and handed one to Peter. “Quite a surprise. You showing up.”

Peter took a slurp of the whisky. Supermarket special. He settled back on the leather sofa and glanced round the room. There were three electric guitars lying around, and a couple of small amps. One expensive-looking jumbo acoustic guitar. The place was tidy but dusty. No sign of a woman’s touch. Peter had heard over the years that Richie was living with this or that woman, was supposed to have fathered a child by one of them, but there was no sign of children or family.

“Fag?” Richie sparked up a cigarette.

“No. Gave up. No one smokes indoors anymore, anyway.”

“They do in this house.” He blew a plume of smoke to advertise the point.

Richie wore his hair very close cropped. He once had beautiful long hair, and girls fell in love with its soft waves; some did, anyway, and Tara once said that it was his hair that made her fall in love with him. If the severe crop was to disguise the salt-and-pepper color the years had given over, it only drew attention to the bony shape of his head. His pale skin seemed stretched and taut over the skull it covered. The veins on his forehead were a little too prominent and a little too blue.

These days Richie wore round John Lennon old-style glasses. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose. “I hear you’re a blacksmith now.”

“Farrier.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Horses. Horseshoes.”

Richie wrinkled his nose and took another sip of whisky. “Never have been on the back of a horse.”

“Sensible. Flighty creatures. You’ve got to watch they don’t kick you in the head.” Peter pointed at the guitars. “I see you’ve kept the faith.”

Richie grunted.

“Does it make you a living?” As far as Peter knew, Richie did the pubs circuit, was in and out of bands, did session work whenever he could get it.

“A living? Half a living. You’re out at The Old Forge, ain’t ya? Wife and kids. Four kids.”

“Yeh.”

“You were here on Christmas Day. I saw you. Sat outside. Too scared to come in.”

“Yeh.”

Richie drained his glass and gave himself a refill. Almost as an afterthought he got up and carried the bottle over to Peter, splashing another measure into Peter’s glass. He put his cropped, bony gray head dangerously close to Peter and jabbed an angry finger. “You’re a fucker! A fucker! You hear that? A fucker, not speaking to me in all this time. Fucker.” He went back to his own seat, crashing back into the leather upholstery.

Peter wanted to say that it takes two to make a silence work. Instead he said, “You feel better now?”

Richie offered him a carnivorous smile. “Yeh, I do, actually. I feel much better. I’m quite relaxed now.”

“Well, that’s good, ’cos I have something to tell you.”

Richie blinked.

“Tara came back.”

Richie stared hard at his former friend. He said nothing. After a moment he took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his shirt, put them back on again, and looked at Peter some more.

The two men sat in silence, sipping whisky.

W
e’ve never been back here since you went away.”

“No,” said Tara. “Mum and Dad said you stopped coming. But I still love this place.”

Peter shook his head. “It was too painful to come here.”

The Outwoods is a hundred acres of oak, rowan, and birch, of holly and yew, trembling on the lip of an ancient volcanic crater and peering out over the Soar Valley, a timeless pocket of English woodland inside the boundaries of Charnwood Forest. Its rock formations contain the oldest of fossils. In its mineral soil rare plants flourish. The inspirational red-and-white-spotted fly agaric mushrooms spore and fatten around the gleaming silver birches, sucking sugars from the roots and feeding back minerals and water. The trees conduct and transfer energy around the woods. The land is a mysterious freak, where the air is charged with an eerie electrical quality, alternately disturbing and relaxing. The earth echoes underfoot.

It is a place to go, Tara would always say, when there is a fire in your head.

Or all of this is just fanciful talk and the Outwoods is just an
ordinary stretch of ancient woodland. But even the most unimaginative visitor would have to be overwhelmed at one particular season of the year, because thrilling are the bluebell woods in May.

“Did you never come back to see the bluebells?”

“No,” said Peter.

They were walking with the two hounds, just Tara and Peter. Genevieve had decided for Peter that she wouldn’t join them but would instead spend New Year’s Day at the cottage with the children.

Tara wore a long woolen coat that Peter thought familiar, and a ridiculously long multicolored scarf that he had never forgotten. He was right: it turned out that Mary had kept all Tara’s clothes, wrapped in polyethylene, in the attic. Untouched, all these years. A polyethylene shrine in a dark and silent place. Peter would have burned them all.

The Peruvian hat with its earflaps and tassels, though, was new. “Do anything special,” she asked him, “for New Year’s Eve?”

“Stayed at home.”

“Really?”

“Quiet night in. Opened the doors at midnight. Brought the coal and a penny inside. Job done.”

“Not like you. Last year you were out whooping it up. You didn’t come home for three days. Three days!”

He stopped. “Last year?”

She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth opened and then she quickly looked away. “I meant last time.” She picked up a stick and flung it for the dogs to chase. It went spinning through the air and cracked into a birch tree.

“Well,” he said, “when you have four kids and a menagerie to think about, it changes things.”

“Yes.”

Peter watched her carefully, trying not to make it obvious. He pretended to look away when she glanced at him, noting that she wasn’t making a lot of eye contact from behind her dark glasses. She was carrying some guilty secret, he knew it.

But the extraordinary thing about Tara was how her looks seemed to change under different light. Genevieve had remarked how young she looked; and it was true. Under soft lights she could
almost pass for his daughter’s age, or someone in her late teens. Then again the direct sunlight might reveal care lines about the mouth, laughter lines around the eyes. Her complexion seemed unnaturally young, and her delicate and graceful hands seemed never to have done a day’s work. At least not when compared to the ruined, scarred hands of a working farrier.

Something in Tara’s frame, something in her delicacy, had always made Peter want to protect her. More than once he’d wondered if they had different fathers. He had a large, lumbering physique, a gentle giant, slow-witted, according to his own assessment; she, by contrast, was mercurial, slender-boned, and sharp-tongued. He was earthly; she was aerial. He was made of clay and iron; she was made of fire and dreaming.

Richie had fallen for her big-time. Peter saw it happening from far off, the way you might see a weather front moving in: you might not want it, but you couldn’t do anything about it. It was Richie in particular who encouraged her along on their jaunts, when Peter might have felt encumbered by having a sister monitoring his moves. But one day Peter saw Richie and Tara laughing together in a certain way. He should have known then and there that they were destined or doomed to become lovers. Peter had a momentary vision of Richie up there in the clouds with her, and on fire. He was more worried for Richie than he was about his sister.

“You’re going to have to go and see Richie,” said Peter, “at some point.”

She said nothing, threw the stick again for the dogs.

“Tara, I went to his house. Day before yesterday.”

“Oh, God.”

“You know we had an argument after you left? I let myself be persuaded that he was somehow behind it. Behind your leaving, I mean.”

“That was stupid. Richie wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“He went odd after you disappeared. It all seemed to add up.”

“Everything seems to add up until you subtract.”

“What?”

“How is he?”

“Old. Like me.”

“Old is a state of mind.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“You sure about that?”

“I have a weak back, bad knees, fading eyesight, and there’s a bit of gray in my hair.”

“Shoeing horses gave you the weak back, not your age. Anyway, I know where there is a fountain of youth. God, do you remember when this wood was full of bluebells?”

“That year you left us. They were …”

“They were inspirational. They swamped the entire woods. It was like the woods were underwater.”