The Various
Authors: Steve Augarde
Contents
About the Book
There have been stories of the ‘little people’ – piskies, fairies, call them what you will – ever since the world began. Whispered rumours are all they amount to, until a twelve-year-old child discovers the truth, hidden away among briars and brambles. The truth is strange and wild – and sometimes deadly.
A compelling tale of the extraordinary tribes who struggle for survival in the land of human giants – you may even be tempted to seek them out for yourself . . .
WINNER OF THE SMARTIES BRONZE AWARD
Dedicated to all those who live precariously,
yet remain hopeful.
(
And this includes my family, of course – Gina, Camille and Marcelle
).
You have been granted three wishes, And
The Various
is but the first. Coming soon, the second wish:
Celandine.
An Introduction
The Various were not as Midge had imagined they would be. They were much taller for a start – well above knee-height – and rather grubby-looking. They gazed up at her in wary silence, their dark eyes full of suspicion, never blinking. Midge felt dizzy, overwhelmed by the sudden reality of it all. She stared back at them, a ragged little group, dressed in black and white for the most part, their weatherbeaten skin and broad features made yet more strange by the mottled sunlight at the edge of the clearing. Spears and arrows they had – not pointing at her directly, but obviously at the ready – and it occurred to her that she might actually be in some danger. She had forgotten what was expected of her. Shouldn’t she kneel, or curtsey or something?
Their Queen, she couldn’t help thinking, wasn’t a bit beautiful. She was dumpy, and her eyebrows met in a deep scowl. Her grey hair was tied back in an untidy bun. She was obviously quite old – and this was more shocking than anything, somehow. Midge had never expected that the little people might grow old, as we
do
. The Queen sat, carefully posed, and looking ridiculously pompous, in a sort of wickerwork sedan chair – a rickety affair with carrying handles at either end. Her off-white dress had a purplish stain down the front of it (blackberry?) and she held a tatty black fan, half-raised and motionless, as though she were poised to issue a command. Her lips were painted, but badly smudged, and she wore long grey gloves, that looked as though they had been mended a few times. Midge pictured her trying to fly, this tubby little creature in her faded finery, and she began to bite the inside of her cheeks to stop herself from giggling. The silence had become a strain.
Then a tiny spinning movement caught her attention, as a stray sycamore seed – a relic of the previous autumn – twirled gently down from the trees and landed abruptly on the Queen’s head, where it remained, a homely decoration, perched just so on her grey bun. And that did it. Midge started to laugh. Her snorts and splutters rang through the sunlit clearing, startling the pigeons in the trees, as the strange assembly stared up at her, outraged.
Chapter One
A WEEK AGO
she had been bored, bored, bored. The prospect of spending most of the summer holiday in the West Country with her cousins wasn’t so bad – although she could barely remember them, not having seen them for years – but for the first fortnight they would still be away with their mother somewhere, and so that meant staying on her own with Uncle Brian until they arrived.
Uncle Brian was her mother’s elder brother. He was OK, as far as she could recall, but he was unlikely to be much fun. And anyway, she felt weird about living in some big old half-derelict farmhouse with just Uncle Brian for company.
‘Do I
have
to go?’ she asked her mum. ‘Can’t I wait until Katie and George get back? Couldn’t I stay here till then?’
‘Darling, you know you can’t stay here all by yourself,’ her mum had said. ‘We’ve been through all this. Please don’t make me feel any worse than I do already. You’ll be fine, and anyway, Brian’s easy enough to get along with. You’ll remember him when you see him.’
Well, it was easy for
her
to say, thought Midge. Swanning around with the Philharmonic and having all the fun (‘actually it’s
not
much fun, darling, it’s really quite hard work,’) while she, Midge, had to kick about a deserted old farm waiting for her cousins to arrive.
‘I still can’t see why you don’t take me with you,’ she grumbled – although this was an old tack, and she knew it would get her nowhere. Worth a last try, though.
She remembered something else. ‘Mr Powers takes
his
children.’ Mr Powers was second oboe, and lived quite close by. They occasionally bumped into him in Safeway.
‘Mr Powers does
not
take his children, Margaret. Mr Powers
sometimes
takes his
wife
and his children. There’s a difference. And only then if it’s just a weekend concert and not too far away. This is a four week tour, darling. Four weeks! Living in hotels, up late every night, flying around here there and everywhere. It’s no life for a twelve-year-old.’
‘Yeah, it sounds like hell,’ said Midge, and knew even as she said it that she’d crossed one of those invisible lines that her mother drew around their conversations.
‘Listen, Margaret. This is my job. It’s what I do, and believe me it’s not easy. I’m a single parent and a professional musician. The two don’t always go together very well. Now Brian has
very
kindly said that he’ll look after you for a few weeks, and I think we should both be extremely grateful. I know I am.’
Midge came within an inch of saying, ‘Yeah, I bet,’ but managed to bite back the words. She felt, as she had always felt, that the ‘job’ came first as far as her mother was concerned, and that her daughter was often an inconvenience, something to be organized, palmed off, dealt with. And lately things had become worse. Her mum seemed to be perpetually distracted and on edge – hardly there, somehow. The best times were when the orchestra was resting and there was time off from the otherwise constant round of rehearsal and performance. Then they got along pretty well. But as soon as a new tour was scheduled, Midge felt that she was just a nuisance, no longer deserving of much attention.
‘Left playing second fiddle,’ she often thought, wryly. Second fiddle was what her mother actually
did
play – although she didn’t call it a fiddle of course.
And so she arrived at Taunton bus station after a two-and-a-half hour coach journey, collected her bags and magazines together, and tried to look through the dusty windows to see if her Uncle Brian had arrived to meet her. Midge recognized him almost straight away, although he looked a bit older now than when she had last seen him. He was peering up at the windows in the way that people do when they’re meeting someone from a coach or train – smiling already, even though they can’t yet see the person they’re smiling for. He wore a very red jumper and those awful yellow corduroy trousers you only ever seem to see on people who live in the country. (Midge thought of herself as
a
‘townie’, and a rather sophisticated one at that.) His hair – which Midge had remembered as being black – had gone much greyer, and he had a very definite bald patch, which she could clearly see from her high position in the coach.
‘Hallo Midge! You look cheerful!’ Uncle Brian stretched his arms out towards her as she got off the coach, and Midge wondered for a moment if he was going to kiss her, or shake her hand, or something embarrassing like that. But he was only reaching for her hold-all and carrier bags. ‘Here, let me take those things. Had a good journey?’
‘Not bad, thanks. How are you, Uncle Brian?’
‘I’m
extremely
well, my dear. Can’t grumble at all. Now then, let’s see if we can’t get you back home before the soup’s ruined. Car’s parked just round the corner, right opposite the Winchester.’
Midge remembered hearing about the way in which Uncle Brian’s sense of geography always seemed to involve the name of a pub, or hotel. Her mum sometimes said that Uncle Brian would probably describe the Pyramids of Egypt as being ‘just down the road from the Dog and Sphinx.’
Mum didn’t seem to have much time for Uncle Brian – not that it stopped her from using him as a babysitter now that it suited her. ‘He’s a “nearly” man,’ she would say. ‘Good at everything – but not quite good
enough
at anything.’ She had never forgiven him for inheriting Mill Farm, that was the trouble. Mum and Brian had grown up there as children. Mum had left home, gone to university and music college, then
had
become a professional musician and something of a success. Her brother Brian had stayed at Mill Farm, got married, fathered two children, separated, looked after his mother, Midge’s granny, until she died, and then the farm had been left all to him.
‘I got
nothing
,’ Midge’s mum would say bitterly. ‘What a slap in the face that was. Nothing at all. It should have been shared between us. And what does Brian know about farming? Lived there all his life and
still
wouldn’t know one end of a hay-rake from the other! Or rather he’d know how to
fix
it, without knowing when to use it. Tried pig-farming. Didn’t work. Tried cider-making – planted acres of trees and used up God knows how much capital. Didn’t work. Agricultural machinery auctions, bed and breakfast, go-karts – you name it, he’s messed it up. He’s messed up his life, the farm and his marriage. Brian’s a fool. Or rather he’s not, and that’s the trouble. He’s a nearly-man. Nearly good enough. But not quite.’