Widdershins (5 page)

Okay, so she was a seer and not a queen, but that didn’t change a thing except that I have to laugh as I use those words. All my life I’ve avoided the weirder side of life that my brother embraces, this idea that side by side with our world lies a secret, hidden world of fairies and goblins, ghosts, and other improbabilities. But the past two years have changed that. I’ve seen and experienced far too much that can’t be rationally explained away, culminating in my showing up here at the Woodforest Plaza Mall a couple of nights a week to provide music for a fairy court’s revels. I mean, once you’re part of a pickup band made up of little stick people and a troll playing a stand-up bass, it’s pretty much impossible to keep laying the “I don’t believe in this crap” card down on the table.

So now I’m a believer, but I’m not all evangelical about it like my brother Christy, or the Professor and Jilly, wanting everybody else to see what I see. I’ve just adjusted these long-held, if erroneous, beliefs and carry on with my life.

I wish I could say the same about some of the other personality quirks that seem to be hardwired into my psyche. Well, not my feelings about music. I don’t ever want to buy into the idea that recordings are anything more than a snapshot of a moment—especially not now, when they’ve got the software to tweak a bad performance so that every single element of a recording comes out sounding note perfect.

Music needs to live and breathe; it’s only pure when it’s performed live with nothing hidden—neither its virtuosity nor the inevitable mistakes that come when you try to push it into some new, as yet unexplored place. It’s improvisational jazz. It’s the jam, the session. The best music is played on street corners and pubs, in kitchens and on porches, in the backrooms of concert halls and in the corner of a field, behind the stage, at a music festival. It’s played for the joy and the sadness and the connection it makes between listeners and players.

When it’s played for money, it’s a job. When it’s played for itself, it’s magic. And I guess that sums up why I’ll always be living hand-to-mouth instead of making the decent living everybody thinks I should be making with it, because if a gig doesn’t seem honest to me, I’ll turn it down.

I’ve done the other kind. I’ve written for soundtracks. I’ve been a session musician on more recordings than I can count. I’ve played concerts. But I’m happiest sitting in a corner of the pub, playing tunes with a couple of friends, nothing planned, just seeing what happens as one tune reminds us of the next and then leads us into another.

I don’t think that’ll ever change. I wouldn’t want it to. But I sure wish I could figure out a way to stop putting women on a pedestal—or rather, stop obsessing about the unattainable women that I’ve put on a pedestal. I know it cuts me off from meaningful relationships I could have, and even if I do get into a relationship with one of these pedestal women, it never works out. Partly because no one can match up to an ideal anyway, and partly because what I’m bringing to the relationship is an unhealthy devotion. I get way more concerned about everything to do with them, which makes my own life just an echo of living instead of the real thing.

But knowing all of this doesn’t make me stop.

That said, Galfreya was a perfect candidate of someone for me to obsess over, but there were things about her that I just couldn’t get around. For one thing, being a fairy made her somewhat promiscuous—at least by human standards. I’m old-fashioned and expect a monogamous relationship. For another, she looks like she’s in her twenties, half my age, which feels strange enough. What feels stranger is knowing she’s . . . well, I don’t know exactly. Fairy-kind are basically immortal. For all I know, she could have been around since the beginning, when Raven first made the world. So it’s weird that it looks like I’m robbing the cradle, going out with someone who could be my own daughter, but she’s actually old enough to be some distant ancestor.

Then there’s the fact that I can only see her on her terms. I come to her at the mall, play my fiddle at her fairy revels, stay the night sometimes in her private quarters that aren’t quite in this world, aren’t quite in fairyland, but some place in between the two. She doesn’t come to a gig with me. To an art opening. To a movie unless it’s at the mall’s Cineplex. Out for dinner, except for ditto, and the mall eateries are never going to make it into the city’s best culinary guidebook any time soon.

So she’s not exactly an ideal life companion. She’s not someone I might expect to make a life with, to grow old with.

I know, how incurably romantic of me, looking for everlasting love in a world of five-second sound bytes, where most people find it more interesting to watch the so-called reality of other people’s lives in scripted television shows than to actually live one of their own.

But I do want that long-term stability. I don’t really expect to ever find it, but that doesn’t stop me from yearning for it all the same. That said, I also have to admit that I’m probably more scared of getting into a serious relationship than I am of living the rest of my life on my own. It’s not that I’m a commitment phobe. It’s just that whenever I do, sooner or later, I get left behind.

My last serious relationship really brought it all home to me—how this was something that was never going to work in my life. Because we were perfect for each other; what problems we had, we were both willing to talk about and work on, compromising where necessary—you know, all the things you’re supposed to do in a relationship, though that’s nothing I learned from my own parents. Tanya and I, we did everything right, but one day, there I was all the same, alone in our L.A. apartment, packing my bags to come back to Newford.

So in a way, these occasional liaisons with Galfreya—no strings attached, be together when it felt right, no hard feelings when it didn’t—should have been perfect. But I, at least, am human and we’re never satisfied, are we? What I had with Galfreya wasn’t true love. It had no future. It had only the here and the now, and while that’s obviously enough for fairy, who seem to live the whole of their lives ever in the moment, it wasn’t enough for me.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay,” Galfreya said, then leaned close to kiss me. “Say hello to Christy for me,” she added.

“I will.”

I was halfway to the car when I heard the door close behind her. I reached the car, then paused, cocking my head. If I listened hard I could hear a fiddle playing—low and lonesome, coming from some far distance. I almost recognized the tune, but then the sound was gone.

I looked around, but I was alone in the parking lot with my brother’s car. Or so I thought.

I opened the back door and laid my fiddlecase on the seat. As I was straightening up, my gaze became level with that of one of the small twig and leaf fairies that were regulars at the mall revels. She was lying on the roof of the car, pixie-featured and grinning, head propped on her elbows, her vine-like hair pulled back into a thick Rasta ponytail. She wasn’t really made of twigs and leaves and vines—or at least I didn’t think so—but her skin was the mottled colour of a forest, all greens and browns.

“Hello, Hazel,” I said.

“Hello, your own self.” She got up, tucking her ankles under her knees so that she was sitting cross-legged. “Can I get a lift into town?”

“Sure. What’re you up to?”

She shrugged. “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”

“In other words, some kind of mischief.”

She made her features go very serious and said, “I don’t think so,” but she couldn’t hold it. Laughing, she fell back onto the roof and then kicked her feet in the air.

“Well, come on,” I said.

She jumped to the ground when I shut the back door. Standing, she came up to about my waist, a skinny little gamine in baggy cropped blue jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt, and a yellow bandana tied loosely at her neck. Her feet were bare on the pavement.

“You’re not cold?” I asked.

She shook her head. “But I could pretend to be, if you like.”

I laughed and opened the driver’s door, standing aside so that she could climb in and scramble to the passenger’s side of the bench seat.

“Buckle up,” I told her after I got in.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You won’t get a ticket. I won’t let the policemen see me.”

Handy thing, being a fairy and only being seen when you wanted to be. Unless you had the gift of the Sight, or had it given to you as I had by Galfreya, so that none of the more impish fairies could play tricks on me.

“That won’t help if I have to brake suddenly,” I said, “and you go flying up against the windshield.”

Hazel sighed theatrically, but she already knew that I wouldn’t start driving until she did as I’d asked. It was an old argument, but that didn’t stop her from trying every time I gave her a lift.

“How did you get so boring?” she asked. “Did you have to practice?”

“I was just born that way.”

“Boring.”

I laughed. “Yes, sad isn’t it?”

Once Hazel was buckled in, I started the car and pulled out of my parking spot. With the lot empty, I ignored the designated lanes and drove straight for the exit. There was already traffic as we pulled out onto the highway—commuters driving in from rural communities. They came in early to beat the rush, and subsequently were able to leave early as well, but all it really did was spread the traffic congestion over a longer space of time. Rush hour in the city was now three to four hours long, depending on the weather.

“How come you didn’t stay with herself?” Hazel asked.

I shrugged. “I’m just tired. I’ve been up all night. I had a gig before tonight’s revel, remember, and I don’t exactly have a fairy’s stamina. I don’t think you people ever need to sleep.”

“Of course we do. If we didn’t sleep, how could we dream?”

I didn’t see the logic of that—there were many other, and I’d say far more pressing, reasons to get one’s sleep, starting with how exhausted and stupid you end up feeling when you don’t get enough—but there was no point in arguing logic with fairies.

“She really does like you, you know,” Hazel said.

“I know.”

“It’s just she—”

“I know,” I repeated.

“Grouch.”

“Moxie.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.

“It means you’re annoyingly full of verve and pep.”

She smiled. “Oh, well, that’s true.”

We had to slow down for a light that had turned green ahead of us, but the line of cars was just getting back up to speed.

“Oh, look,” Hazel said. “Damn pluikers. Don’t they just make you sick?”

I had time to note a line of three or four fairies sitting on a fence watching the traffic go by. They looked and dressed like Native Americans—jeans and buckskin, checkered shirts—but I could see hare ears and antlers, which is how I knew they were fairies. And naturally, they were invisible to everyone except for me and Hazel.

She raised her middle finger and waved it at them, sticking out her tongue.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

She gave me a look that asked how did you ever get to be so dim.

“Because they’re green-brees,” she said. “Duh.”

“But what does that
mean
?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what we call them. I think it means stagnant water—or the slime you find in stagnant water.”

“So why don’t you like them?”

I could still see the line of little figures in my rearview mirror. They seemed perfectly normal—in fairy terms, I mean.

“Why should we?” Hazel said. “They don’t like us.”

“They just looked like fairies to me.”

“Well, they’re not. They didn’t have to come across the water to get here. They were already here when we arrived.”

“So they’re native fairies.”

“They’re not fairies. We’re fairies. They’re just pluikers.”

“And what does
that
mean?”

Hazel grinned at me. “That they’re great big fat pimples on the arse of the world.”

“You’re beginning to sound like a racist.”

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t like them. They keep us in the cities—right from the start they have, back when the cities were no more than a few shacks at the edge of the water. We rode those high seas for long, long weeks and looked to replenish ourselves from the green and the wild, but they kept it all for themselves and they still do.”

“Well, it was their land.”

Hazel sniffed. “There’s so much. Did they need it
all?”

“How would you feel if someone took something that was yours, and you didn’t want to give it up?”

“I suppose. Except on the one hand they say that the wild and the green belongs to no one, it just is. Then on the other, they keep us out of what they claim are their territories. So what’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“Maybe they don’t want what you call the wild and the green to be spoiled the way the cities already are.”

Hazel shot me a frown.

“This is a boring conversation,” she told me.

She reached over and turned on the radio, stopping at a station that was playing a 50 Cent song. We listened to rap and hip-hop for the rest of the drive in, all the way to where she had me let her off downtown.

Our conversation was still bothering me after I’d dropped the car off at the garage Christy rented for it and got back to Jilly’s loft. I don’t know why I still called it that. After her accident, Jilly moved into the Professor’s house and I took over her loft, but it’s been a couple of years now. And it wasn’t just me—everybody still referred to it as Jilly’s place. I guess it was because we didn’t want to give up the hope that one day she’d be able to manage the steep stairs of the building and move back in.

When I got upstairs, I laid my fiddlecase on the kitchen table, shed my clothes, and got into the Murphy bed that I almost never bothered to fold back into the wall. It wasn’t like I ever had anybody over.

I lay there, tired, trying to figure out this enmity between the local fairies and those that had started to come over when the first Europeans landed on these shores. I didn’t actually want to be thinking about this, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.