by Graham Joyce
Not after what I’ve just seen on the kitchen table. I need a shower.
There isn’t a shower. We wash in the lake. I’ll come with you.
No, it’s okay.
I needed some time to myself. I was already planning to leave, but I wasn’t about to announce it. It wasn’t even that I thought Hiero would prevent me from leaving, but I just wanted to slip away quietly. I had an idea that I would take the horse and just retrace our steps.
But I had to go through the kitchen to get out. The couple who had been fucking on the table had stopped and were lying in each other’s arms, sleepy in the afterglow, their sweat shimmering in the sunlight on their hips. I slipped past them, went outside, and walked down to the lake.
It was a beautiful morning, but the sun was lancing off the water and it hurt my eyes, by which I mean my eyes felt grazed by the intensity of the light. I had to use my hand as a visor. It was as if there was a grittiness in the particles of light, a grittiness that left my eyes feeling sore. And yet everything I looked at seemed to be rinsed clean, or somehow new, in the way that everything appears new when you are a child.
At the lake’s edge I stopped and threw some water on my face. It was crystal and cold and it took my breath away. The droplets of water on my hand, beaded with spectral light, looked both more simple and more complicated than they had at home. I squatted there for a while, gazing at the water on my hands—I don’t know whether like a simpleton or a philosopher.
The stable where the white horse was kept was just twenty or thirty yards from the house. I guessed Hiero might be watching me from indoors so I squatted there on the sand, wondering whether to go right away to get the horse or to wait for a better moment when no one was around.
Then I heard a whisper in the sand and heard someone’s gentle footsteps coming up behind me. I thought it was Hiero but I turned and saw the woman from the kitchen moving toward me.
She was still naked, and in that spectacular, iris-grazing light she was stunning. Her dark eyes were on me. She was tall and lithe, somehow like a racehorse, her skin tawny, very lightly freckled. Her cheekbones were so high you could have cut yourself on them. Her long many-colored hair hung lower than the amber nipples of her breasts. I had to fight to stop myself from looking at her pussy and her long, slender legs. She was easily the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and though I have always thought of myself as pretty I felt by contrast a wizened little frump.
She said nothing as she walked by me and into the water, but she trailed a hand through the air toward me, either as a gesture of recognition or dismissal, I couldn’t tell. She stopped, turned, and sluiced water over her shoulders, all the time keeping her eyes on me, and the water effervesced on her skin, foaming with milky light.
Beautiful this morning, she said. She spoke with a trace of an accent I couldn’t place. Take off your clothes and come in.
Thanks. We like to keep our clothes on where I come from.
Don’t be sullen. Come in. I know you want to lick my pussy.
Jesus Christ! What is this place? A camp for perverts?
I was disgusted. I turned and walked back up the beach toward the house.
My mistake, I’m sure! Her shout bounced off me. But there was mockery, not apology, in her voice.
As I approached the house I heard talk and laughter. I saw through the door that it was Hiero, sharing a joke with the other twisted pervert from the kitchen table. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking loudly.
I turned on my heels and made straight for the stable. There the white mare snorted at me when I opened the stable door. I took the ancient blanket from its pole and flung it over the mare’s back. Apart from a crop the only tack on offer was the worn leather bridle. I looped it over the horse’s head and trotted the animal out of the stable.
There was a track running through the trees behind the house. I decided to walk the horse out that way, because I would be seen if I crossed the beach, not least by the twisted goddess washing all the sweaty fuck off herself in the lake—and I calculated that I could make my way through the trees to the far end of the lake. It wasn’t difficult, though the path ascended through the woods before I found a trail back down again, and I soon joined up with the path by which we had arrived, marked by an avenue of trees. When I knew I was clear I mounted the horse and I set off at a trot.
The mare was beautiful. She responded well to me. She picked up my intentions almost without any aid from me. If I thought trot, she made it happen. If I thought canter, she took off. I rode for two hours without stopping: cantering, trotting, or walking. I was confident of my path because I have a keen sense of direction and I recognized distinctive features—rock formations, glades, a hollow, a stream, a tree twisted and bent by the wind—all from the previous night. Plus I knew we had come roughly west and I could get my compass bearings from where the sun was still rising ahead of me in the sky.
Two hours later I stopped and let the mare drink from another stream. I got down and let her take some rest, while the sun stood still and boiling at its zenith.
After the mare was rested I got back on the horse and followed what I thought was a bridle path. All the time I was looking for the grassy incline—we’d cantered up it after galloping across that lush green field, so I was searching the landscape for a slope running down to the same field.
But I couldn’t find it.
I wasn’t afraid because I knew that all I had to do now was to keep the sun at my back and that eventually I would wind up at some farm or village or small town, and from there I could telephone Mum and Dad. They would be as angry as ferrets in a sack but they would come and fetch me in the car. But I trotted and walked the mare on for another hour or two without seeing a single sign of a dwelling house.
I turned the mare off the bridle path and took her up the side of a hill, and from its crest I was able to look all around me. All the time I was scanning the landscape for the glitter of the Trent or the Soar, or for anything that might show me through Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire or Leicestershire and back into Charnwood Forest, where all would be well. The countryside looked beautiful but unfamiliar, enchanted but foreboding. I was lost.
No, you’re not lost, because I’ve found you. It was Hiero. He was speaking from behind me, standing on a crag in his white shirtsleeves.
You’ve been following me.
I couldn’t abandon you, now, could I?
I want to go home.
And so you shall. But you can’t just yet.
Stop lying to me! Just point me the way and I’ll go! Just put me on the path: that’s all you have to do, put me on the path.
Your life has taken a different path now, Tara.
I jumped down off my horse and ran to him and lashed at him with my riding crop. He flinched as it caught his jaw and the side of his neck, but he made no defense and no retaliation. I saw a weal appear immediately and a streak of blood on his neck where the crop had landed.
I deserve it for bringing you here, he said. I know I do.
I started crying, because I didn’t know what to do and I was frightened.
He pulled me toward him and held me. Don’t, Tara, don’t; because yours are the tears of heaven.
Just put me on the path! Please! Just put me on the path! I want to go home.
He held me for a while. I could put you on the path, but it would still take you six months to get there. I’m going to take you back to the house again, and I’m going to tell you how it is with us folk here.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nimmy Nimmy Not,
Your name is Tom Tit Tot.
ENGLISH VERSION OF Rumpelstiltskin
You don’t see many doctors smoking. In their offices.” It was the first thing that Genevieve had said since Tara had begun her story. Underwood was at his desk typing up notes directly onto a PC. Tara was taking a toilet break and Genevieve had to speak to him right across the room, a distance of a dozen paces.
He did
n’t look up. “Quite motherly, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
He made a few more keystrokes. “Do you know why she wanted you here? Against my wishes?”
“She trusts me?”
“Nothing to do with trust. It’s to do with finding people to populate her Peter Pan world. You’re her Wendy.”
“I am?”
“Oh, yes. Wendy has to keep everyone safe. Keep everyone in order. Look after all. Be mother to the lost boys and girls.”
“Tara already has a mother.”
“One she ran away from, yes. But she needs a safe one. A surrogate mother. You’re the perfect candidate.”
“Should I be worried?”
“I don’t see much to worry about. You are Wendy because you’ve been trusted with the verbatim report. You’re an acceptable conduit back to the family. You’re an in-law, aren’t you? That means you’re inside and outside at the same time. She’s clever, that Tara.”
“So what is your diagnosis?”
“I don’t discuss my cases other than with immediate family. Sorry.”
“Am I being scolded about something here?”
“Only for banging on about my smoking habit, I’d say.”
“You know what? You’re plain rude.”
Underwood glanced up from his keyboard. He looked pleased. “Look at those framed certificates on the wall. I worked hard for the right to be rude. I’m a licensed fool.” He puffed happily on his cigar. “Do you want one of these? They make a lovely stink.”
“GOD, HE’S WEIRD,” GENEVIEVE said to Peter, back at The Old Forge. They were enjoying a glass of wine and a few rare moments together, with all the children either in bed or upstairs and abducted by the Internet.
“I quite like him,” Peter said. “Did you tell him you have a master’s degree in psychology?”
“Christ, no. Anyway, psychiatrists are suspicious of psychologists. I’d rather let him stereotype me and see what he has to say. Fucking Wendy. He was trying to provoke me. For some reason.”
“So what will he say? Bottom line.”
“He’s refreshingly jargon-free, but I’d guess he’ll tell us Tara is a pathological narcissist, and that her story is an elaborate compensation for an inability to face up to adult chores and functions. He’ll suggest that the explosive shock of discovering herself to be pregnant at age fifteen and the hasty abortion coupled with the fear of family disapproval caused a crisis and a state of arrested development. Rather than face up to it all, she ran away.
“He’ll tell us that typically these people—pathological narcissists, not shrinks—have no steady job, never get married, raise no family, put down no roots, have no real friendships or long-term relationships. She’s been bumming around for twenty years, basically.
“He might even go so far as to say that she is suffering from a form of psychosocial short stature, which is what some chronically abused kids suffer from, and their growth gets stunted. She might have partially switched off the aging hormones, and that could account for why she looks so young.”
“Jesus. I’m glad I only bend horseshoes for a living.”
“She’s not the only bent person in the world, Peter.”
“I know that. It just sounds so very fucked up.”
“Come on. Everyone is fucked up.”
“Why do you think she’s chosen to come back now?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. See how sweet she is with our kids? I think she wants kids of her own and time is running out. So she’s regrouping by coming back. You have to go where the wagons are circled. I admit not all women seem to want to pump out kids like I do; but even women who hate the idea of having kids have unconscious drives.”
“I feel so sad for her,” Peter said.
“I know you do. Come here. Have a hug. Speaking of sad teenagers, do you think Jack is okay?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He’s looking a bit shifty lately.”
“Oh, he’s pissed off with me because I told him to help out Mrs. Larwood across the road. Jack’s okay. By the way, you know what you were saying about narcissistic whatsits?”
“Yes?”
“No steady job, never got married, raised no family, put down no roots, no real friendships. Reminds me of someone else.”
RICHIE CONCLUDED HIS GUITAR set at The Phantom Coach with a big barnstorming blues finish, milking the applause. He hosted a weekly music night in the large function room at the back of the Coach, and it always attracted a good crowd. The event was called indie night. Richie always said he hadn’t a clue what indie meant as a category, since he couldn’t see how anything anyone did was independent of everything else, but it always attracted a much bigger audience than if he labeled the evening folk, rock, world, blues, or pickled pig music. The plain fact was that Richie was highly accomplished in all of these genres—even the last one—and could, if he wanted, blow any of the guest artists or bands right off the stage.
But he was modest and he never stole the light. He was always expected to offer a guitar spot, either solo or accompanied by a couple of grizzled and fossilized old hippie musos he’d known for years; and even though his playing was way superior to most of the guests, he always made sure a visiting act concluded the evening’s performance. Unless they were awful, and that night the guest band, three kids called The Dogs, were atrocious. Richie salvaged the evening first by appearing to approve of the boys by joining them onstage, and then rounding off with a glittering smoky blues-and-folk medley in which he found himself showboating.
Showboating because his headaches were getting worse and he thought that if he could lose himself in his music, then the pain might recede. Meanwhile, he was self-medicating with chasers of beer and whisky. It didn’t matter: stone-cold sober or in his cups, he could always put an audience in a spell.
These live performances somehow never quite carried over into his recordings. And there had been recordings over the years. He’d knocked out three vinyl albums with major record labels. The first two albums had bombed, despite healthy reviews in the national press, so his third album was “fly or die.” It died. He came back a few years later, by which time almost all recorded music had migrated from vinyl discs to CDs, with a couple of releases on a smaller but respectable label. He mixed genres. His stuff was a moody and eclectic blend of blues and rock that he’d translated into the synth-rock world but with growly vocals. He was always missing the wave.
Between all this he was often in demand for sessional studio-work, and more than once he added memorable licks or riffs to some pop diva’s limited ideas. He spent a lot of time doing what he called “polishing turds,” only to see the polished turd rocket into the stratosphere, trailing silver, gold, and celebrity stardust. His only acknowledgment might have been a modest kill fee. Session artists didn’t get royalties.
One time he polished a turd so lovingly it spent twenty weeks at the top of the singles charts. He’d added a catchy intro and a complete bridge to a lame three-chord trick brought dead-on-arrival into the studio by a well-known egomaniac with an orange tan and huge floppy bangs. The song got picked up by a major movie and sold in the millions all over the world. Richie got none of it.
He’d had enough. He got the support of the Musicians’ Union and gathered together enough money to mount a court case to claim some royalties from all this success. The floppy fringe lied shamelessly in court and so did the record label. Richie lost, and even though everyone knew that the real work was his, the failed action left Richie busted and broke.
Thereafter, a decline of ambition set in. You can be an aging rock star, but you can’t be an aging wannabe rock star. All that was left for him to do was focus on being a damn good musician.
APART FROM THE FLASHES of migraine, the evening had gone well after The Dogs had been ignored off the stage. Richie and his accomplished fossils had pulled the audience back into line with a sparkling and versatile set mixing standards and classics and some of
Richie’s own compositions on a theme of lost love, all of which, though none but Richie knew, were about Tara and the losing of Tara.
There was just a single fly thrashing in the ointment. All night, one member of the audience had been giving him the evil eye.
When he was a young musician Richie had learned to blank out the audience, or at least to see it as a homogenous creature, a multiple-eyed many-tentacled lumbering beast there to be tamed and charmed. But now, with his musicianship being so expert and so relaxed that it seemed effortless, he had plenty of time to look around, to note nuances in the audience response, and to check out individuals. It became an interesting hobby: watching people watch him.
And there was this one scruffy weather-beaten dude who had spent the entire evening squinting with malevolence at him from the side of the hall. The man sat alone at a table, nursing a single pint of ale for the duration, exuding disdain. Richie knew professional cool when he saw it: A&R men from record companies who refused to be impressed by anything, watching sullen and unsmiling and unmoved. This was not professional cool on display. This was something else.
The man was expressionless but somehow hostile. He wasn’t interested in the music. He wasn’t attracted there by the drink, or by the company of the audience. He just seemed to fix his neutral but chilling gaze on Richie.
Even for the pro that Richie was, it was unnerving.
When Richie concluded his shimmering big blues finish at the end of the evening he earned rapturous applause from the hundred and fifty people in the hall; but from this sullen, staring man, nothing. Not a flicker of interest. Just a baleful gaze.
Richie set his guitar down on its stand and stepped offstage. Behind the stage was a shabby hallway that passed for a backstage green room. It did no more than give the performers a place to appear from and retreat to, and the audience the illusion of a dressing room area.
There Richie found a towel and the glum consortium of The Dogs, three lads with stubbled chins and tousled hair. It seemed to Richie that the dress code of the kids was exactly the same as it had been when he was starting out.