by Graham Joyce
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.
CHAPTER FIVE
It is strange and weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne; but then the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If I have drunk of the fairies’ drink it is but just I should drink by the fairies’ rules.
G. K. CHESTERTON
We’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,” s
aid 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.”
“Tara you never went traveling at all. At least not where you said you’d been. Mytilini isn’t even in Crete, for chrissakes.”
“I saw you were trying to trap me. I knew it.”
“So why not just tell the truth. The bloody truth?”
She turned and grabbed the sleeves of his coat, and almost shouted at him. “Because when I tell you the truth I will have to go away again. Really. I will have to go away. You won’t believe it, not a word of it, and you’ll hate me even more and there will be nothing for me to do but leave. That’s it. Now that I have you back for a short while I don’t want to bring it to an end. I love you, Peter, you’re my brother. I love Mum and Dad. But once I’ve told you the truth it will be all over between us. Is that what you want?”
“Of course it’s not what I want! What could you have done that was so bad? Did you kill someone?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Then it can’t be so bad that we would hate you!”
“Oh, you would. Simply because you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Then give us a bloody chance! Just tell it straight up. The plain and simple truth.”
Tara turned away from him. Her acorn-brown eyes dulled as she gazed across the bowl of the old spent volcano. It was as if she were seeing another time, or hearing other words inside her head.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”
CHAPTER SIX
The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Oh, yes, the bluebells were out in May. Do you remember how they were? Their perfume stole the sense right out of your head. It turned you over and shook the juice right out of you. You couldn’t walk between them that year, they were so dense; you had to swim in them. The madness of it! The scent was so subtle that it got all over you, in your nostrils, in your cavities, and on your fingers like the smell of a sweet sin. Didn’t it bind you in blue lace and carry you away?
We walked there together that year, didn’t we? There were tiny paths between the bluebells and I went off the path and you told me I’d be punished for going off the trail, for treading bluebells underfoot. You said there was a law against it. But you meant lore.
Yet there were so many of them, troops of them, so scented and ringing out and waving to me that I had to find my own trail between them. At the time I believed or was tricked into believing—that I hadn’t crushed a single flower or green blade or bulb underfoot, that they lifted me a few inches off the ground, bore me up and carried me over. I was wrong. It was a trespass. I know that now.
We all know it now.
Youth fears nothing because it knows nothing.
I lost myself in the bluebells. Heart, mind, and soul. I know there was a moment where I was of this world, and then there was an instant when I felt odd, dizzy, estranged. I think that was the moment that the doorway opened. Though I didn’t step through it. Not then. Not yet.
We were talking, you and I, and we arrived at that ancient rock covered in thick lichen the exact color of marmalade, that outcrop poking up like a fist with a finger pointing to heaven. That’s what we always said: a marmalade finger pointing to heaven. I was planning to tell you about the argument I’d had with Richie, about how it was all going wrong and what had happened that brought us to the brink of a big decision. I was pretty sure it was going to go only one way, but I hadn’t told him yet. I was planning to discuss it with you, to see if there was a way that I could tell him that wouldn’t hurt him. But something stopped me from telling you.
It was the rock. There was a cloud of little golden beetles flying around the rock, their sleek backs glittering in the May sunshine like flints striking a stone. And so the golden light fizzed and crackled with hundreds of tiny sparks of wing light. You were astonished, too. You who were never amazed. We both stood and stared. It was like a blessing, it was like a gift.
But I knew something was happening. And I forgot all about Richie, and I forgot all about telling you. I just watched the air fizz with tiny prickles of fire, knowing something was about to happen.
The next day I asked Richie to come with me, here, to the bluebell woods. I was determined to tell him. I don’t know why but I thought this was the right place to tell him it was over. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I would never do that again: take someone to a beautiful place to dump them! It’s not a good idea. I think if it ever happened again I would take them to some industrial scrap heap to let them down. It’s cruel to lay such things over a beautiful landscape. But anyway, I knew nothing in those days, and I thought it was poetic and the right thing to do.
He just wouldn’t have it. “This is not going to happen” is what Richie said to me that day. I told him, “You can say what you want.”
He was angry and hurt. He cried. I cried. Then I ran away from him, ran through the woods, and I hid. See that outcrop of amber rocks over there? I hid behind one of those rocks. He came shouting for me. Crying and shouting my name. I shrank behind the rock, and when he came round I circled back and sprinted toward the charcoal burners over there. He went off in the other direction calling my name. His voice became more distant and I ran back through the woods, up the slope, higher, crushing bluebells underfoot.
I had no thought at that time of how I would get home. Richie had driven me there in his old Volkswagen Beetle with all those Rock Against Racism stickers on it. He’d parked the car on the grass shoulder of Breakback Lane, so I was careful to avoid that side of the Outwoods. I found another hanging stone covered in marmalade lichen among the bluebells, and I sat there with my back to the stone for an hour or maybe two. When I returned to where Richie had parked the car, he’d gone. I was so relieved.
There was an elderly couple walking back to their own car. They’d been out for a stroll. I walked right up to them, looking tearful, and I lied and said my boyfriend had left me stranded there because we’d had an argument. They said what a shocking bad person he must be and that I should find myself a decent chap, one who wouldn’t abandon a young girl like that. “You don’t know who is around in a place like this,” the man said. “A pretty girl like you.” They offered to give me a lift home, which of course I accepted. They took me right to my door and made me promise that I’d have nothing more to do with the lout who had abandoned me in the Outwoods, and I promised.
But something had started. In my head, something had started. It was like the scent from the bluebells that day had ripped me open like a drug. That scent was always just at the edge of my senses, lodged somewhere in my throat, on my fingers, in my nostrils, until I tried to smell it or taste it again, and I couldn’t. It was there all the time; but when I tried to look for it, to trap it, it was gone.
But it was having
a strange effect on me. I felt all the time that I might just float off this planet. And my head was hot. Do you remember that poem:
I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head.
I’ve always loved that because that was how I felt so often, and when I did feel like that I would come to these woods until the fire burned out. But this was different. The back of my head felt hot. I knew something was going to happen.
I remember getting home that day and Mum asking me if I was all right. I said I was fine. Then Richie called but I’d already primed Mum to tell him I’d got back safely from the Outwoods but I wasn’t in right now.
“Have you two had words?” she asked me.
Words.
I dreamed of flying golden beetles. But they were like scarabs from an Egyptian tomb. And when they flew around me they would stop dead in the air and the frozen formation of them would spell out words in tiny sparks of fire and light. But I couldn’t read the words; they would always break up just before I could make them out.
When I woke in the morning there was a small scorch mark on the headboard of my bed, where my head had touched the pine panel. Do you remember? I showed you. I told you my head was hot and that it had left a burn on the headboard and you snorted and said that was impossible. But I know.
I know, and you don’t.
Richie persisted in telephoning. He called every hour. It was driving me crazy and my head was coming apart. Mum said she couldn’t keep lying and pretending that I wasn’t home, so I went out so that she could tell him the truth. I got my bicycle and I cycled up to the Outwoods. I hadn’t got a lock for my bike so I hid it behind a tree and covered it with branches, and then I went walking amid the bluebells. This time the scent came up on me in a rush, a cloud, and I was drawn deeper into the woods, following an old bridle path. There were few people around that afternoon, it being a working day. Someone trotted a pony along the bridle path, and that’s the only person who passed me.
The scent from the bluebells was overwhelming, but it was also giving me a kind of peace, a serenity. I stopped thinking about Richie. I stopped thinking about what was happening inside me. I walked among the bluebells again and I must have known that by treading them underfoot I was releasing more of that strange perfume into the air. After a while I found a rock covered in brilliant green moss and orange lichen. I sat among the bluebells and put my head back on the mossy pillow of the rock.