The Changeling

by Helen Falconer

  He peered over his wife’s shoulder, trying anxiously to see into the darkness beyond the garden. Nothing there but the black shapes of trees, rustling and dripping. ‘I can’t see anything . . .’ Then his heart missed a beat. Through the light patter of rain he could hear the heavy sigh of a horse and the rattle and creak of leather and wood, like the sound of the old farm cart on which he had once hitched a ride as a boy to school. And as he stared, the moon came out like a bruise against the clouds, and rising over the top of the blackberry hedge was the roof of a black carriage, of the type travellers use as a hearse for funerals.

  Maeve shrank back into the hallway. ‘James?’

  His throat felt dry as sandpaper. He said hoarsely to the woman, ‘Who is that?’

  Again, the woman urged the child forward into the yellow light of the porch. ‘You know well who it is, and who I am, or you are not a Mayo man at all. Give me your daughter and she will be cured. And you will mind this child as your own in her place.’

  Maeve slammed the door and punched 999.

  The Clonbarra guard turned up two hours later with the elasticated waist of his pyjamas visible over the belt of his trousers. He refused a cup of tea, and asked to see the little girl that the traveller woman had threatened to steal. He wasn’t too impressed when they explained that he wasn’t allowed to go near their daughter in case he might be infectious with something. He took one quick look around the garden, shone his torch on the fresh marks of a traveller’s caravan wheels in the muddy lane, and violently yawned his way back to the squad car.

  Eva remained in her deep drugged sleep on the couch in the back room, with Hector under her chin. She couldn’t be left in case she woke and needed extra pain relief. James took first watch while Maeve went up to bed for a few hours. He sat for a while, hunched in the armchair, brooding on what he’d seen. Then he closed the old wooden shutters on the window, and secured them with their iron latch. Then he took down a chocolate-box-style painting of a thatched cottage from over the couch and, using a piece of fencing wire, hung up the iron fire tongs in its place.

  Maeve was from Dublin, which is why James had moved there when they married – that and all the carpentry work, with the new houses being built and old ones renovated. Yet while you can take the man out of Mayo, you can’t take Mayo out of the man. James knew that fairies hated iron. His grandmother had insisted on these same tongs being hung over his own cradle when he was a baby, to stop the fairies stealing him and leaving a changeling, a child of their own, in his place. She hadn’t liked his parents buying this house, because it was built on a fairy road – a road, invisible to the human eye, that ran straight across the fields towards the bog. But James’s parents were hard up and took the risk; they bought the old place cheap. And now a fairy woman was at his door wanting him to raise her child, and to bring his own daughter to the Land of the Young, that paradise beneath the earth where she would be cured and live for ever.

  Or rather, in the real world, the world his wife believed in, a mad woman had been pestering him to buy some useless folk remedy, using the sight of her own child to soften him up, while her traveller husband waited for her in the lane, idly flicking the reins of their horse-drawn caravan.

  At five in the morning, exhausted, James checked that the black coach in the lane had not returned, then shook his wife awake to take over from him.

  At eight in the morning he woke to Maeve screaming his name.

  Hurling himself down the stairs, he knew for certain she’d woken and found their daughter dead. But he was wrong. Their daughter wasn’t dead. She was just gone. And sitting cross-legged in her place on the couch was the little red-haired child from the night before.

  Maeve was running around clutching her hair, screaming at the top of her voice: ‘She’s been stolen! Stolen!’ The iron tongs were back on the hearth. (He would discover later that his wife had removed them from the hook last night, afraid they would fall.)

  James grabbed hold of the tiny girl by her shoulders. ‘Where is she?’ But the urchin just burst into tears. ‘God help us, she must be here somewhere . . .’ He rushed through every room, searched every cupboard, then burst out into the garden – checking the turf shed; the coop where once there were chickens; the dark stinking space under the coop. In the boreen, tractor tyres had crushed all signs of other wheels; he searched the banks and ditches, under brambles and nettles and elderflower bushes. He ran back to the house.

  Maeve was screaming down the phone to the guard: ‘No, she hasn’t just wandered off, she’s sick, too sick to move! No, she’s not hiding! Why won’t you listen to me! Our daughter has been stolen!’

  James shouted to her: ‘I’m going to ask the kid again – she has to know something . . .’ and threw open the door to the back room. For a moment he thought the child was gone, but then he saw her squatting by the bookcase, on all fours with her knees bent up like a little frog and breathing in the same panting, rippling fashion. She seemed to have hurt herself – she was bleeding from a long cut on the palm of her hand – strange, sparkling, luminous blood. He moved very slowly towards her, his arms held out, not wanting to scare her as he had before. The child shrank back. He whispered, ‘I’m not going to hurt you . . .’ Then burst out loudly, ‘Oh, good God!’

  Because as he reached to pick up the little girl, she had sprung out of his way and run up the bookcase like a squirrel, and was now crouched on top of it, staring down at him with blue-green eyes.

  Maeve came in. ‘The guard is coming. Where’s the—? How did she get up there?’

  ‘I don’t— Jesus Christ!’ Because the child had flown through the air – literally flown – hurling herself with a bang at the nearest set of shutters, where she clung, screeching, not touching the iron catch but trying to force her small fingers into the gap. James rushed to stop her escaping. ‘Maeve, help me! We have to mind her!’ He caught hold of the tiny girl but she scratched his face and burst from his arms, leaping and flying around the room, smashing his mother’s porcelain figurines, even breaking the light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

  ‘What’s happening?’ shrieked Maeve. ‘What is it?’

  ‘She’s a changeling! We’ve to mind her, and that way Eva will be cured and live for ever!’ Because he knew it was true. He’d known it deep in his Mayo heart as soon as he saw the carriage in the lane. It was what his grandmother had warned his parents of, and why she had hung the fire tongs over his cradle. The fairies had taken his beautiful little girl for themselves, and in return had left him this fierce changeling child.

  It was a long hard battle to catch the changeling and calm her down, but slowly the fight went out of her. At last she sat on the couch with her little face buried in her knees and her red hair hanging down, and her arms wrapped around her thin brown legs, and just wept and wept. Maeve also wept, as James begged her over and over to say nothing to the guards – because they couldn’t afford to lose this fairy child: she had to be minded if Eva was to be cured and live for ever with the fairies in the Land of the Young.

  When the Clonbarra guard turned up an hour later, with boiled egg on his stubble, they showed him the changeling (now sleeping) and said she was their own daughter, who’d been hiding in the wardrobe. He was heavily unsurprised. ‘Sure wasn’t that the way with the O’Sullivan child: his mother had him drowned for sure, and him in the barn all along, with the new puppies. Don’t cry, Mrs O’Connor – she’s found now, and what else did I have to be doing on a Sunday morning?’ And away he went.

  It was five in the morning, and dawn was rising. The bedroom was full of clean clear early light.

  Aoife stared at her father in bewilderment. He sat on the bed among the photos, his head in his hands. The story he had told . . . Did he really imagine it was true? Had his fascination with old folk tales come to this – that he believed in the fairies, like his grandmother had done? Like mad John McCarthy? Maeve had her arm around him and her cheek pressed to his shoulder, eyes closed, as if she were l
ost in the mythical world of his strange tale.

  Aoife slid off the windowsill where she’d been sitting, quietly crossed the room and touched her mother on the shoulder. ‘Mam?’

  Maeve opened her eyes and caught Aoife’s hand, pressing it. ‘Always remember we love you. You’re our beautiful, clever, amazing daughter and we both love you very much.’

  ‘I don’t understand what Dad is saying . . .’

  ‘Darling. He’s saying the fairies stole our daughter.’

  ‘I know, I heard him! But, Mam, I’m your daughter, aren’t I? I’m Aoife – I’m me!’ She caught up her baby album from the bed. ‘Look, see – me, Eva!’

  Maeve took the album from Aoife’s hands and hugged it to her chest, saying nothing.

  Aoife cried, trembling, ‘I’m Eva Sarah O’Connor! That’s the name on my birth certificate!’

  ‘We love you, darling.’

  ‘Dad? Look at me! I’m Eva!’

  Her father raised his head and gazed straight at her, his eyes full of tears. He said, ‘I’m so sorry. You are the fairy child.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  She rushed for the window; the curtains blew open wide and the casement swung back in a blast of wind. She sprang onto the windowsill. The sun was rising over the mountains, and there was a pale green streak up Declan Sweeney’s field.

  ‘Aoife, stop, you’ll fall!’

  She leaped and clung to the outer branches of the ash tree. The slender twigs gave way beneath her, the leaves tearing off in her hands, and she was tumbling headlong through the air . . .

  ‘Aoife!’

  In mid-fall, she leaped again, and for a moment it was as if she had purchase on the wind, and somehow she was gliding across the garden and over the wall, and had landed in Declan Sweeney’s field. The rage drained out of her and she was filled with a joy and energy so bright, it was as if she had been flooded by the rising light of dawn. If her parents weren’t mad – this made sense of everything . . .

  ‘Aoife! Come back!’

  She fled on up the stony field in her bare feet, following the fairy road as she had as a child, but this time she wasn’t going to stop . . . She could run so fast, she could leap any obstacle . . . The bank was as high as her head. She sprang over it easily and hit the next field still running. A crowd of young bullocks came thundering towards her out of the dawn mist, silver spools of saliva swinging from their great mouths; Aoife darted straight as an arrow through the middle of the herd, scattering them in noisy panic, and vaulted over a metal five-barred gate, one hand on the top, without breaking stride.

  It was true, it was true! She was not made of dull human flesh and bone, but sun and wind! Exhilaration lifted her, like wings. A stream flowed across the next field; she raced across its misty surface, the water fizzing up between her toes. I can walk on water. I am the fairy child. Three more fields of long grass and kingcups, leaping the high hedges in between, and then it was the Clonbarra road that crossed her path – and there, panting, Aoife was forced to stop. The joy ebbed slightly from her veins.

  On the far side of the road was a small white modern bungalow, its porch supported by plastic Greek-style columns, fir trees densely planted around the border of its garden. This was Lois Munnelly’s house and, like Aoife’s own, it had clearly been built on the fairy road, and it was blocking her way. She could hardly knock on the door at this time of the morning and demand to walk straight through and out the back. Yet if she changed direction around it, she felt she might lose her way . . . Extraordinary thought – could she go over it? Up the drainpipe and over the roof? Could she? Why not? Imagine Lois waking up to see Aoife gliding down from the roof, past her bedroom window, the way she had glided down from the ash tree . . .

  Lois would probably decide it was just more attention-seeking.

  Oh, this whole thing was crazy.

  Aoife had to talk to someone down to earth, or her head would explode. Carla. Carla would know how to explain this. She checked her phone. Just gone six thirty. She tried calling anyway, but the other end rang out. Sometimes Dianne Heffernan took her daughter’s phone away at bedtime, to make sure she went to sleep. Aoife would have to throw stones at the bedroom window. She turned away from the fairy road and took the ordinary human road towards Kilduff, towards her friend.

  Passing the turning to her own house, she glimpsed the roof of her father’s car making its way up the winding boreen between the hedges. She scrambled over a gate and crouched down behind brambles. She wasn’t ready to face her parents yet, not while she was still trying to figure things out. A few seconds later, the car turned out of the lane towards Kilduff. Aoife stayed low, peering through the brambles, until they were gone. Her parents had clearly guessed exactly where she would be headed – towards Carla’s.

  A hundred metres further on, the garage was already open for early business. Dave Ferguson was walking around inside his little shop, phone to his ear, gesticulating furiously with his spare hand. Bent low so as not to be seen, Aoife hurried past the shop and shed, into the yard behind.

  The cream BMW’s FOR SALE sign had been removed. She opened the driver’s door and slipped in behind the wheel. She would hide here for a while, just till her parents had given up driving around looking for her, and until Carla woke up and saw the missed call, and phoned her back. The soft red leather seat embraced her; she leaned back in it and tiredness swept over her. She’d had no sleep at all. She closed her eyes.

  And opened them. The clock in the walnut dashboard said just after seven. She’d been asleep for only twenty minutes, but felt wide awake and refreshed. The key was in the ignition. She touched it lightly, and the car started. Alarmed, she tried to turn it off again, but couldn’t. What if Dave Ferguson heard the engine running and came storming out of his office? Yet she wasn’t doing anything wrong – it was her own car and she wasn’t driving it anywhere, she was just sitting in it, here in the yard.

  The BMW slid forward across the tarmac.

  Panicking, she slammed her foot on what she thought was the brake, but it clearly wasn’t, because the car turned and glided luxuriously up the slope by the side of the workshop. Sweating with fright, Aoife grabbed the steering wheel and stamped on the other pedal. The BMW carried straight on past the pumps and out onto the Clonbarra road, in the direction of Kilduff. Now she was afraid to touch anything, in case the car went even faster. As she entered the square, a Gardaí car passed her coming the other way. She shook the steering wheel frantically. ‘Stop, you stupid lump of—!’

  The car pulled in by the church and parked. Aoife got out as fast as she could, and stood there, half laughing, half shaking. Had she really driven this beautiful car? Although it felt more like it had driven her – she was just so relieved it had stopped when she had shouted at it. Is this what it was like to be a fairy? Able to make things happen – but not really being in control? Fun but incredibly scary?

  Across the square, the shop was already open, a bread van parked outside. The sight of the huge loaf painted on the side of the van made Aoife realize that she was hungry again – she’d had eaten nothing since last night’s dinner. While she was here . . . She felt in the pocket of her trackies. Plenty of money left from yesterday. She headed into the shop, grabbing a basket. Bananas, apples, a big bag of mixed nuts, a coffee cake, a litre of milk and some just-baked white rolls. At the counter, she held a twenty out to the man checking her purchases through the till. It was mad John McCarthy from the graveyard, the uncle of the man who owned the shop.

  When he looked up to take the money, the old man did a double-take, as if the sight of her shocked him. ‘Aoife O’Connor!’

  She was suddenly very conscious that she had no shoes on, and that her clothes were in bits from crashing over hedges. She said as nonchalantly as possible, ‘Yep, that’s me.’

  ‘Aoife O’Connor, who came in here yesterday with the hundred-euro note?’

  ‘Yes why?’

  John McCarthy eyed the money in her palm, but
didn’t take it. ‘Would that be the change we gave you from that note or is it the same sort of money you came in with yesterday?’

  Aoife began to feel uncomfortable, like she was being accused of something. Did he think she’d stolen the hundred? ‘It’s the change from yesterday. Sorry, is there a problem?’

  ‘Not at all. That’s grand, so.’ He smiled with very few teeth, took the note and counted out the change into her palm. ‘I’d say this twenty-euro note will stay as the good Lord made it, then, it not being fairy gold.’

  She stared blankly at him. ‘Sorry – what?’

  He rolled his marble-blue eyes to heaven, and pointed to a large dead oak leaf lying on top of the till. ‘And what do you think that yoke is that I found in the drawer only this morning?’

  ‘A dead leaf. But what—?’

  ‘See, your type of gold’s not much use to us poor mortals. Sure, I had that Sinead Ferguson in here yesterday evening trying to buy sweets with another leaf the very brother of this one. Fair flittered, the poor girl was, when she couldn’t find the fifty she says you gave her—’

  ‘What’s that about my daughter?’ Thomas Ferguson had just come into the shop, his glasses askew on his bald head and his shirt buttoned wrong. ‘Morning, Aoife.’

  ‘Morning.’ Aoife was stacking her purchases into a cardboard box as quickly as she could, in a hurry to get away.

  John McCarthy said, ‘I was just saying how the fifty Aoife here gave to poor Sinead turned out to be fairy gold and melted away.’

  Thomas laughed, although rather sourly. ‘Maybe that would explain what happened to the thousand my brother says was robbed out of his own till last night. He just got me out of bed to bring down a couple of coffees and a sandwich for the guard, because apparently they can’t catch criminals on an empty stomach.’

  ‘And would the drawer have been left stuffed with leaves like this one here?’

  Thomas Ferguson looked startled at the oak leaf in John’s hand. ‘How did you—?’