by Shane Dunphy
This world has changed considerably since then. The forests that tend to be the setting for fairy-tales are all but gone. They have been replaced by terrain of a different kind, dangerous in a less obvious way. But the stories continue to remind us of the witch in her cottage, of sweets and cake, of the demonic Rumpelstiltskin, with his twisted desire to have a child, of the troll that hides beneath the bridge, waiting for the unwary to cross … and these reminders make us uncomfortable. So we change the stories, contriving to make them more palatable for our arrogant, modern sensibilities. Yet the shadow in the fairy-tale abides. You can dress up the witch or the wolf any way you wish, but their essence remains. They are predators.
I closed the book and, creakily getting to my feet, took the couple of steps to the shelf of children’s books. I ran my finger along the titles: Lewis Carroll; Roald Dahl … there it was! A long spine, bound in brown leather, with the entwined letters B and G. The Brothers Grimm. I opened it, feeling a slightly childish thrill. Here there were dragons and much, much more.
It was a beautiful book. Each page of text was accompanied opposite by a beautiful plate, painted by the artist Fritz Kedel, depicting a scene from the story. This edition contained a scholarly introduction to the tales, and was published in 1931. But the stories were all here, in their initial, untainted form. I turned to the account of Hansel and Gretel, with which I intended to begin the sessions with Larry. The first plate showed the children, seated on the ground by a dying fire, their arms around each other, alone in the forest. The painter had rendered their faces in loving detail, and their fear, loneliness and sadness were very clear. In the corner of the picture, so small you would barely see it unless you looked very closely, was the silhouette of a wolf’s head, its great tongue lolling out. About, all was darkness, the trees looming threateningly around the children. The picture might as well have depicted Larry and Francey. It summed up perfectly what they were like when I had first met them. I read a couple of lines:
Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once, when great scarcity fell on the land, he could no longer procure daily bread …
The language was a bit archaic, but then, so was Larry and Francey’s. I didn’t think it would be a problem. I closed the book and looked at my watch. I had been in the library for two hours, and it was lunchtime.
I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair in my office, called to Jerome, who was the only other staff-member in that day, that I was heading out, and went into the bright sunlight. There was a sandwich stand two roads over, and I made for it, whistling as I walked, my head now on frivolous things. Somebody touched me on the shoulder and I turned, almost falling over in surprise. I was staring into a blank, reflective visage, a bit like Darth Vader’s mask. I stumbled back a step, raising a hand to ward off the spectre, when realization dawned.
‘You have to tell me what you wants with Mina!’ it said.
My shadow from the morning had decided to make his move. I almost laughed. He was still wearing the helmet, which had one of those hi-tech, mirrored visors, so I could not see his face. Under it was the imaginatively coloured T-shirt, which fought valiantly to contain a pot-belly.
‘Hey …’ I said, regaining my composure, ‘we haven’t been introduced yet.’
‘You been axin’ about my Mina, and I wants to know what you has to do with her! You have to tell me now!’
I stared dumbly, unsure how to proceed.
‘Why don’t you take the helmet off and tell me your name?’
‘Oh, no!’ The figure’s voice was muffled under the protective headgear. ‘You don’t know what I look like, and you won’t find out neither!’
‘You were watching me at the workshop the last time I was there. You were in the café this morning, and you followed me here on a Honda 50. You’ve got curly light-brown hair.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now, take off the helmet. You must be sweating in there. Have you had it on all morning?’
The head nodded, a bit cowed, having learned that all the subterfuge had come to nothing. I felt a little guilty. I probably should have played along a bit more.
‘Why did you keep it on even when I was inside?’
‘My mammy says that it’ll get robbed if I leave it down.’
The chubby face was rolling with sweat when the helmet finally came off, the curls plastered to his scalp. I guessed he was in his late teens, maybe as old as twenty, but no more than that.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I’m Jacob Benedict and I am very pleased to meet you.’ His hand was thrust out to me, the introduction rattled off as if learned by rote, which it probably was.
I shook the proffered hand, smiling at him.
‘Well, Jacob Benedict, I’m very pleased to meet you, too. Any friend of Mina’s is a friend of mine.’
‘You can call me Jake, if you like. Are you Mina’s friend?’
‘Yes, I am. I’m Shane.’
‘Like the western.’
‘You know the western?’
‘Yeah! Alan Ladd and Jack Palance! My daddy says that Shane dies at the end, but I don’t think so. You don’t see him die. I think he gets better.’
‘You know, that’s always what I thought, too. It’s a better ending, isn’t it?’
He nodded vigorously.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said, biting his lower lip, nervously. ‘I’ve been out since early and I didn’t have enough money for anything except a cup of tea.’
‘I was just off to get a sandwich. Want one?’
‘I ain’t got no money.’
‘I’ll get you this one. Why don’t we leave that helmet in my office. It’ll be safe, I promise.’
He looked uncertain.
‘My mammy’d kill me if it got stoled.’
‘I tell you what. We’ll get Mrs Munro to watch it. She’s kind of scary, but she’s nice really, and when you meet her, you’ll see that there isn’t anyone who’ll steal your helmet if she’s watching it.’
Mrs Munro was the stern secretary of the Trust. She was actually, once you got to know her, a gentle and kind woman, but it took some time and no little effort to see that.
‘It’s a pretty cool helmet,’ I commented as we walked back.
‘Yeah! It makes you go faster.’
‘Does it?’
‘Daddy says so.’
‘Well, it must be true then.’
Mrs Munro took Jacob’s helmet gravely, and told him that she would guard it with her life. He beamed from ear to ear, and left to get his sandwich with a much lighter step.
‘Ain’t nobody goin’ to get it off of her!’
‘Told you.’
Chatting about nothing in particular, we walked to the sandwich stand.
‘What would you like, Jake?’
‘I would like a ham sandwich and a Coke and a packet of crisps and a Mars Bar.’
‘Hungry, huh?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, wide-eyed, carefully watching his sandwich being constructed.
I got tuna salad on brown and an iced tea for myself, and we made our way back to the duck pond and sat on a bench in the midday sun.
‘So why’ve you been following me?’
He couldn’t answer me for a few minutes. He had shovelled one half of the sandwich right into his mouth, along with a fistful of crisps.
‘Hey, slow down, there. You’ll give yourself a pain.’
‘You was axin’ about my Mina,’ he finally managed. ‘Then she stopped comin’ into work. Why she stop? What’ve you done with her?’
‘I haven’t done anything with her, Jake. Her mother and father decided they wanted to keep her at home for a bit. I’m afraid I can’t tell you why. It’s a family thing. Private, y’know?’
He popped the Coke can and gulped most of the contents in great slurps, then belched resonantly.
‘Me ’n�
� Mina is goin’ steady.’
I looked at the young man beside me. I never would have put the two of them together. Mina, despite her disability, was prim, proper and well spoken. Jacob was scruffy, overweight, ill-mannered and not too articulate. Yet there was also a sweetness and decency about him that was undeniable. He and Mina were on slightly different levels, but then, aren’t we all? And he was obviously crazy about her. He had taken it upon himself to find out where I lived and worked and, despite discomfort, had stuck with me until hunger had smoked him out. It was quite impressive, really.
‘How long have you been going steady, Jake?’
‘Long time.’
‘Since, say, before last Christmas?’
He stopped chewing for a moment and screwed up his eyes, concentrating. Time can be a particularly difficult concept for people with certain intellectual disabilities.
‘Last Christmas I got my bike and my helmet,’ he muttered. ‘And I showed it to Mina when we went back to work after the holidays! So yeah, she was my girlfriend then.’
‘What makes her your girlfriend?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what’s different about you and Mina from, say, you and one of the other girls you work with who isn’t your girlfriend?’
‘I loves Mina and she loves me.’
‘Has she told you that she loves you?’
‘Oh yeah. Oh yeah, she tells me every day when we’re at work.’
‘That’s nice. Anything else different?’
‘We kisses sometimes,’ he whispered. ‘When no one’s watchin’ us.’
I nodded.
‘Do the staff know? Ellen and them?’
‘No. We’re not let be boyfriend and girlfriend at work. They get mad if they catches you. They don’t mind so much at the club. I mean, we only hold hands there. You shouldn’t kiss and stuff when people are watchin’ you. It’s rude.’
‘That’s true. And what do your mum and dad think of you having a girlfriend?’
‘My mammy and daddy don’t mind. Mina’s won’t let her, though.’
‘She told you that?’
He nodded, peeling the paper off the Mars Bar and nibbling at the chocolate outer layer. It was strange after watching the decimation of the rest of the food to see him approach the confection so delicately.
‘And why won’t they let her?’
‘I dunno,’ he shrugged. The Mars had most of the chocolate off it by now, the nougat and caramel a two-tone block, with a small section at the end still chocolate-coated so he could hold it. He started to lick the caramel.
‘What does Mina think?’
‘She says that’ – he bunched up his face again, straining to recall the memory – ‘she says that her parents think she is a child, even though she is an adult, and they want to keep her tied to her mother’s apron strings for as long as possible.’
‘I see.’ I crumpled my sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the bin opposite us. I took out a cigarette and was about to light it.
‘I don’t like smoking,’ Jacob said, his eyes still on the duck pond. ‘It smells nasty and makes my eyes sting and … and it makes me cough.’
I put the cigarette back in the packet, not even bothering to suppress a smile. There were depths to Jacob.
‘Does Mina tell you why she sometimes runs away?’ I ventured, flicking open and closed the lid of my Zippo for want of anything else to do with my hands.
Jacob looked at me from the corner of his eye.
‘She tells me everything,’ he said matter-of-factly, and began to bite small, even pieces off the remaining nougat.
‘Would you like to tell me about that?’
‘No.’
‘I want to help her, Jake. She’s not happy now, and it’s all mixed up with her running away.’
‘She told me not to tell no one.’
‘You know, there are good secrets and bad secrets.’
‘We talked all about secrets when I was at school,’ he said, bristling. ‘I know all about that. I’m not a kid! “Yes feelings” and “No feelings”! What’s that got to do with all this stuff?’
‘I’m sorry, Jacob. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘You people always think I’m stupid. I’m not, you know. I’m a little bit slow, sometimes, but I’m not thick in my head. I understand a lot of things.’
‘I’m really sorry. I know you’re not stupid, Jacob. I can see that. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’
He sniffed and stuck the last bit of chocolate into his mouth. ‘Okay then. We’ll say no more about it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
We sat quietly for a few minutes. I wanted to broach Mina’s running away again, but didn’t know how to without upsetting Jacob. He had a finely tuned sense of dignity, honed over years of being patronized and ridiculed by a society that has little patience and tolerance for people who are different.
‘Are you really Mina’s friend?’ he asked when he’d swallowed his mouthful.
‘Yes. I really am. I want to make things right for her, if I can.’
‘How do you know her? I’ve never seen you at the club or anything.’
‘That’s a bit hard to explain.’
‘Are you a social worker?’
‘No. But I suppose I’m a little bit like one.’
‘How can you help?’
‘I don’t know, because I still don’t really know what the problem is.’
‘We want to be able to be together.’
He turned around, and looked me right in the eye. At that moment, all differences were stripped away. We were two men talking, equal to equal.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘And I will talk to Mina’s parents about you and see if I can’t maybe get them to reconsider. But how does that have anything to do with Mina running away?’
‘She runs away because she is upset in herself.’
‘Go on.’
‘She wants to be like everyone else. It’s hard for Mina, harder than for me, ’cause, see, she looks differenter than other peoples.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘She runs away and goes to places where they don’t know her, and she ’tends to herself that she doesn’t look retarded. She knows she still does, but peoples don’t seem to notice. She says they treat her as if she’s just like any other girl. She says it’s great.’
I gathered that Mina had not shared the full extent of her activities with Jacob, and decided not to enlighten him. It would only cause him pain.
‘I’m not sure that it’s as great as she’s letting on, Jake.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m just tellin’ you what she says. Why would she lie?’
‘I don’t think she’s lying, really. It’s just that, sometimes, when you want something to be true badly enough, you actually start to think that it is.’
He stared at the ducks on the water, chewing his lower lip as he thought that over.
‘I ain’t never goin’ to be like everyone else. I know that. I used to want to be, but since I started to get big, I ain’t so sure I want to be no more. In the workshop and in the club, peoples is nice. Out in the world, they’s mean most of the time, far as I can see. But Mina, she don’t see that. She still wishes she was the same as everyone else.’
I said nothing as he made this remarkable statement. What was there to say?
‘I told her that I wouldn’t like her to be normal,’ he said after a while.
‘Why not?’ I asked, knowing the answer before he said it.
‘ ’Cause if she was normal,’ he said, his voice catching with emotion, ‘she wouldn’t love me, would she?’
That night I put my mandocello, tenor banjo and harmonicas into their respective cases and got a taxi to The Minstrel Boy. I arrived at ten thirty, and there was already a good selection of musicians in place, covering a gamut of instrumental families: several fiddles, a couple of accordions, some guitars, a man with a box full of p
ercussion instruments and a guy with a bag of tin whistles in different keys. Ben was seated in the corner, his old Spanish guitar across his knees and a pint of ale on the table before him. A twelve-bar blues improv was in full swing, and I put my gear down with the empty cases by the door, went to the bar and ordered a pint of stout. It is part of the etiquette of sessions that you wait to be invited to join in, so I watched my drink settle and listened to the group play. When they finished, Ben waved me over, and introduced me. A space was cleared and I tuned up and got comfortable. A set of reels followed, led by the whistle player. Ben has a nice, percussive finger-style, and he drove the other guitars forward. I fell in on the banjo, playing a kind of rag-time rhythm. The musicians had a mix of styles and it made for an interesting sound.
The night drifted on, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It had been a while since I’d played with other people, but I found the fluidity returning to my fingers. Songs and tunes were all greeted with applause and whoops of encouragement from the people in the bar.
After an hour or so, Ben called for hush, and asked me to sing. I nodded assent, and picked up the mandocello. A mandocello is a member of the mandolin family. It has eight strings, a large, tear-shaped body and a neck similar to that of a guitar. Its tone is much deeper than a bouzouki, to which it is closely related. My mandocello is built along the design of the early English lute, with a diamond-shaped sound-hole and a tapered head. I like it because it has a nice kick to it on faster songs and tunes, but it can be a really melodic, delicate instrument for slower, more intricate, emotive pieces.
I put the appropriate harmonica into its harness, adjusted my capo and told the group that I’d be playing in the key of F.
I’d been thinking, after meeting with Jacob, about the whole idea of love, and how tenuous it can be. I’d also been pondering, from my work on stories that morning, the concept of archetypes. The song that came to me then, as the shadows in the old pub grew longer, and the night reached that point where magic seems to hang in the air, combined both those ideas. It dates back to the time of the Famine in Ireland, and tells the story of a man who has married for money, and accidentally comes across a girl that he once loved, but abandoned because she had no prospects. The melody is painfully beautiful, and once I had plucked the first few chords on the strings and then played the introduction on the harmonica, the others fell in like they’d been playing it all their lives.