Midnight Diner 3

by Edoardo Albert

  But Lily suddenly stopped. "Don’t you want to see my layout?" she asked, her bell-like voice fractured with anxiety.

  Caught, as I was, in the politeness trap, I managed to reassure her with only a hint of hesitation in my reply. But before Lily could say anything further, a voice drawled out from near the neatly clipped box hedge that marked the turning for her street.

  "Yo, Lily, my friend, where you takin’ these dudes?"

  Out, apparently from the hedge, stepped a hooded figure. Usually, at least in films, hooded figures are mysterious and dangerous, the hoods the attic extensions of elegant floor-sweeping robes. In this case, the hood was polyester and terminated at the waist, where there was a large underwear-revealing gap before the actual trousers began. Throw in expensive white trainers, pale, sun-starved skin and features bearing the imprint of an unfortunate attempt at creating a rodent/human hybrid and, yes, we were facing chavdom incarnate.

  Lily dropped her head, assuming her characteristic floor-gazing posture, but carried on, forcing us to follow. It appeared she was going to try to ignore the fellow.

  But he was not so easily ignored. Moving with an incongruous liquid grace he slid alongside

  Lily.

  "What’s the matter, darling? Cat got your tongue?" Lily hunched her shoulders.

  Theo tugged my hand. "Is that man bothering Lily?" he asked in a voice that was all too carrying. The man’s gaze flickered back to take us in, and then as swiftly dismissed us. "Do something, Dad."

  Look, I’m no sort of hero. My job is wrestling figures, not thugs. If we all had a go at yobs the place would be crawling with Charles Bronson wannabes. Besides, my taxes provide the police with a very good living—let them sort it out. In fact, the last time I fought anyone I was still relying on the tooth fairy to balance my accounts.

  "Excuse me, Lily, is this chap bothering you?"

  All right, so it wasn’t exactly Errol Flynn but from the response it might as well have been. The chav hissed at me. My first thought was that I was glad Theo was behind me; he would have missed that. Then I saw him beside me, his face shocked.

  A hiss. It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? At least it wasn’t a stream of profanity. But it becomes more disconcerting when the face producing the hiss turns into a snake’s head while doing so, complete with flickering tongue. The hood stayed in place though. Hooray.

  "They’re with me."

  As quickly as it had come, the snake’s head disappeared as the chav turned back to Lily. "Where you goin’ wiv ’em?"

  Lily shook her head.

  "You have no power here."

  The chav stood back, leaning in apparent nonchalance against a fence as we, a somewhat uneasy convoy, sailed in line astern past him. I meant to ignore the young man, but traitor eyes flicked to his grinning face while Theo stared in unabashed curiosity, then pulled my hand to announce, "He’s not a very nice man, Daddy."

  The pronouncement drew a snort of laughter from behind, which I ignored, and a look back from Lily.

  "No," she said. "He’s not a man."

  It was only after we had walked half way down the road that I realized there was a word missing in what she had said. Surely she had meant to say that he was not a nice man? Or did she mean that he wasn’t a "man" in the proper, grown-up, John Wayne sort of way of being a man. But before I had the chance to ask, we arrived.

  Lily led us up a tiled path, through a neat front garden, to the green door of a typical late

  Edwardian family home. She fumbled in her bag for the key, then turned and smiled shyly at us. "I don’t have many visitors," she said. "Welcome."

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I saw was a perfectly normal hall, complete with original tiled floor, coving and wooden paneling. My wife would have loved it.

  "This way," said Lily, indicating the back room. The entire space was given over to a model railway—and when I say entire space, I’m not exaggerating; model mountains loomed high, with train tracks exploding out of tunnels like engineering exclamations. There was a little town, complete with tram and harbor, short rural branch lines and intercity main lines. Like all the best layouts, it was a world in miniature.

  "Do you like it?" asked Lily.

  Theo was alternately bouncing up and down like a self-propelled rubber ball, or putting his eyeline on the same level as the layout and staring with passionate intensity at some aspect of the design.

  "Does that answer your question?" I asked.

  Lily smiled. It would be nice to say how a smile transformed her face into one of beauty, or at least some measure of attractiveness. Sadly, no. But it did show off some very impressive canines. I still congratulate myself on stifling any obvious reaction.

  Lily turned to the controls, set some trains running and then turned back to me. " Tea?"

  "Oh, yes, please. I’d love a cup." "And for Theo?"

  "Have you got any orange juice?"

  Lily nodded and scurried off to the kitchen. While she prepared the tea I cursorily inspected the layout—good, but nothing to set it apart from the hundreds of others I had seen over the last few years—then went to look out at the garden. Now, how quickly could we politely leave? A cup of tea, some laudatory comments about the layout, and then off, I decided.

  That was strange. "Dad, this is strange."

  The garden was big, much bigger than any suburban London garden had any right to be. "Dad, they’re moving."

  Beyond the boundaries, fields spread out to distant, tree flecked hills. There was no sign of

  Chingford anywhere. Although maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing... . "Dad, they’re definitely moving."

  "Aren’t they supposed to move?" I said, unwilling to move from the window. "It’s the people who are moving, Dad."

  Reluctantly, I backed towards the layout, keeping one eye on the scene outside.

  "There," said Theo, pointing. I looked down to see the passengers of a Mallard-type steam engine disembarking at Coombe Halt station. And not just disembarking, but milling around in the station, disappearing into the café and toilets, even setting off down the roads, knapsack on back.

  "Gosh. But look here, Theo, and tell me what you see." "Fields, hills, trees, elephants…"

  "Huh?"

  "Hairy elephants."

  Trundling along at the bottom of the garden was a small herd of… "Mammoths."

  Lily put the tea tray down. "Milk?"

  "Er, yes. Please."

  "Sugar?"

  "No thanks. Um, Lily, aren’t mammoths extinct?"

  "Dad, one of them’s doing a huge poo," said Theo delightedly.

  I sipped, little finger suitably extended, from the fine bone china cup. "Nice view."

  Lily didn’t say anything. She was staring out of the window. It was the first time I’d seen her face in profile: heavy brow, flat nose, big chin, mammoths…

  "You’re a Neanderthal!"

  Lily glanced at me then looked away, blushing. She stared out of the window. The mammoths had disappeared.

  This was all getting too strange.

  "Thank you for the tea. Theo, it’s time we were going."

  "No, please, you can’t go, you mustn’t." Lily was looking me full in the face for the first time since we had met and, yes, her eyebrows really did meet in the middle.

  "Theo, come on, time to go."

  "But you haven’t seen everything yet."

  "I’m sure, but we really have to go. Theo." Crossly, this time.

  "Dad, there’s been a terrible disaster." He looked up solemnly from the layout. Before him a green steam train lay scattered on its side, a broken-backed snake, with a car wedged under the engine. The level crossing lights were still flashing forlornly further down the track.

  "Did you do that?"

  "No!" Theo’s look of shocked horror was sufficient to confirm his denial. "They tried to drive across the level crossing even though the lights were flashing and the train was coming, Dad."

  "Who did?"<
br />
  "They did. The little people." Theo pointed and for the first time I realized that, yes, there really were little people walking, running, sitting and driving around on the layout. That is, people as in moving, breathing, talking, er, people, and not just animated figures. At the moment, a crowd of them was gathering to look at the crash, while the victims of the accident, none of whom seemed the worse for wear, were climbing out of carriage doors and car windows, and joining the onlookers in what seemed something of a party.

  I looked up at Lily. She gave a little smile and giggled—something I found oddly disconcerting coming from a Neanderthal.

  "They are great at running the layout, but they do like to play tricks." "Who do?"

  "The little people."

  I looked back at the layout. The small figures capering around the accident scene did seem to be wearing suspicious amounts of green.

  "I didn’t know they were so, er, little." Theo shook his head.

  "Little people, Dad. D’oh!" "But they’re tiny, not little."

  " To you maybe," said Lily, " but they’re little to a dwarf."

  "You’ll be telling me there’s a dwarf wants to meet us next," I said.

  "Oh, not a dwarf," Lily laughed, rather nervously I thought. "But there is a fairy…"

  "No, no, no," I said. "Extinct species, all right; little capering folk, maybe; but fairies are a definite no. Definitely. Er…" Some quick thinking here. Was this homophobic? "Unless you’re talking about a queen."

  "No, he’s a king."

  I began to answer then stopped to look more closely at Lily. She really meant it. "Come on, Theo, it’s time we were leaving."

  "Oh, Dad." Theo crouched down lower, more on eye level with the layout. But before I could remonstrate further with the boy, Lily did something totally unexpected. She touched me. In fact, she grabbed my arm. But surprise quickly gave way under the pressure: I could feel my arm bones grinding together.

  "Please, I only need you to stay for a short time. I have to show that I’ve made some contacts, otherwise he’ll close the door." Lily let go of my now throbbing arm. "I have to pretend that I have some friends."

  While trying to massage some blood back in to my arm, I shook my head. But before I could reply further, Theo shoved me.

  "She’s crying."

  You’ve probably never seen a Neanderthal cry. It doesn’t help their appearance.

  I handed over a handkerchief—from a strategic distance—and waited for her to stop.

  "Let me get this straight. You’ve come from wherever you’ve come from"—here I waved towards the window—"to make friends and influence people?"

  Lily nodded. "In part."

  "Great, we’ve walked into a Neanderthal self-help manual."

  "The other reason is that the king said he’d put out the sun if we couldn’t make contact with some humans."

  I’d been finishing off my tea at this point. It nearly finished me off instead, in a fit of choking that had both Neanderthal and son—a pair not always easily distinguished—patting my back.

  "Put out the sun," I eventually croaked. "What do you mean?" "Have you heard of the white world?"

  "You mean the Ice Age?"

  "That was the king’s doing. He put out the sun to allow my people time to cross over to his land, for we had sought shelter there."

  "What land?" I asked. "America? Atlantis?"

  "It has no name here, for it lies under hill and below lake, through cave and copse, but the ways have been closed for centuries. Only now, these last few years, did the king give word for some of the doors to be unsealed and for some of my people to return to your world."

  "Like it?"

  "No." Lily sighed. "I fear my looks are against me. All my kin gave up, driven away by laughter or fleeing before silent stares. This is the only door that remains open."

  "How come you haven’t gone back?"

  "I found a...passion." Lily gestured at the layout. "And people who truly did not care what I look like, but only that I shared their enthusiasm. And as you can see ..." The little people were busy running the railroad again. "Others came to share my love."

  "Why didn’t you get one of your train chums to come here then?" Lily shook her head. "I need someone more ordinary."

  I began an answer, then stopped. Was that a compliment or an insult? "It really is time to go, Theo."

  "But, Dad, we can’t leave now. The king’s almost here." He pointed. I turned and looked out of the window. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe a carriage, or a flying horse, something like that, but in fact the fairy king was arriving by train.

  Quite a feat as, when I’d looked out of the window before, there had been no track. But now a railway line had been laid across the grass plains by a team of sweating, gesticulating dwarves, who were taking up the track behind the engine as fast as they were laying it in front, while, through clouds of steam and smoke, the engine approached. The track laying, I noted, was made easier by the line and sleepers not having to actually rest on the ground. The whole thing, engine, tender, carriages and track, appeared to take no notice of topology whatsoever, cutting through ridges and floating over dips with no regard for the actual lie of the land.

  The locomotive halted, hissing, about where the shed was.

  "It’s the City of Truro," Theo whispered, his eyes wide with wonder.

  I shook my head. "Look, whatever that thing is, it’s definitely not a town in Somerset." "The engine, Dad. That’s the City of Truro."

  "The last occasion the king visited, he came in the Sir Nigel Gresley," said Lily. "Wow," said Theo.

  I tuned out the train talk and looked at what was going on. The dwarves, their work done for the moment, stood in a grumbling group at the front of the train. Meanwhile, the carriage doors swung open and, er, people stepped down. I use the term "people" approximately, in the same way that the word "writer" applies to both Dan Brown and Martin Amis. In the same way, these people made everyone I’d ever seen before into caricatures of humanity. I glanced at Lily. How must she feel before this mirror of perfection? Maybe it was not so surprising that she’d volunteered to come into our world.

  The fairies, for thus I assumed them to be, milled around for a while in the way characteristic of groups of beautiful people, before forming themselves into a rough sort of line.

  "Which is the king?" I whispered to Lily. "He’s still on the train," she said.

  The fireman jumped from the locomotive, a crooked, misshapen creature obviously related to the dwarves in some way, and I turned my attention to the engine. Maybe the king of the fairies had decided to take a turn driving the train.

  My attention elsewhere, it took me a little while to realize that the line of fairies had reformed itself into a retinue. Lily opened the sliding patio doors (I caught myself wondering if the double glazing installers had looked out on the same vista) and went to wait on the patio. Theo slipped out beside her. Despite my better judgment, I made it three.

  The hunchbacked creature that I’d thought a dwarfish fireman limped closer, running a thick finger across his forehead and flicking the sweat of his labors away. And where the sweat landed, flowers sprang from the turf, daisies and buttercups and others I had no name for.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lily begin to kneel, but the creature roared at her, "Get up with you, Lily. I’ll not be having you kneel to me."

  He limped to a stop in front of us, squinted through misaligned eyes that lingered for an uncomfortably long time on me, then said, "This one, though, would best be groveling on the ground if he ever wants to see home again."

  I confess at this point my mind froze as completely as my body locked up. I don’t know what

  I would have done if Theo hadn’t shouted, "Hey, you can’t talk to my dad like that."

  "And why not?" The cripple turned slowly towards my son, while behind him I could see the entourage variously gasp, blanch and smile expectantly at Theo’s words.

  "I am t
he king," he said. "I can do what I want." Theo ran in front of me.

  "No you can’t," he said.

  The king paused. His eyes never left Theo’s face. The courtiers leaned forward and Lily held her hands to her face, peeking through protecting fingers at the scene in front of her. Me, I managed to put my hands on Theo’s shoulders.

  "Can."

  "Can’t."

  "Can."

  "Can’t."

  "Can."

  "Can’t."

  "Can."

  "Can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t."

  "Can, can, can."

  "Can not." Theo wagged his finger at the fairy king. "It’s naughty," he said.

  The king laughed, and his laughter was like the blowing of bellows. His merriment was accompanied so quickly by the laughter of his court as to almost make you think their joy was genuine. There was something about the laughter that didn’t sound right, or at least didn’t sound human: it was too tinkling, too scintillating, too much like a windy day in a wind chime factory.

  The king stepped up and ruffled Theo’s hair—something he hates. Then he looked at me. He had the most magnetic face I have ever seen and I hope never again to be as close to him.

  "Your son is a brave boy," he said. "Live up to him."

  Then he turned to Lily and skipped around her like a jester.

  "Found some friends, eh, gorgeous?" He stopped cavorting and stood behind her, a bent creature. Lily stared straight ahead.

  "All right, you can keep your door."

  Lily glanced back at him, then fixed her eyes in front again. "And the sun stays on?"

  "The sun stays on; for the moment." The fairy king limped around in front of Lily. They were the same height, so Lily had no choice but to look him in the face.

  "Oh, Lily, Lily, my pure flower, you can’t refuse me forever." Lily blushed.

  "I can give you trains, all the engines you want." He gestured towards the hissing locomotive and it flickered through all the generations of rail: steam, diesel, diesel-electric, maglev, and back to steam.

  Lily shook her head. The king smiled.

  "Ah, Lily, don’t you know: sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."