by Heide Goody
“Myra?”
“As we grow up,” said Myra wearily. “We start to see things as they really are.”
Ella could find nothing to say for a time.
Maybe I should go and seek out my Granny sometime,” she said eventually. “Where is this Rushy Glen exactly?”
Myra creased her thickly made-up brow, a move that almost made Ella shriek with horror.
“Do you know, I’m not at all sure,” she said. “I was never any good at geography.”
Petunia and Lily wove across the dance floor.
“We are here!” declared Petunia.
Myra waved impatiently for her drink.
“Here, Sex with a Tucson Barman. It’s great.”
“Better than being taken in a back alley?” said Myra with a wry smile.
“We got you a Pink Lady, Ella.”
Ella nodded in thanks. “Think I need to freshen up a bit before I plunge into more drinks.”
“We’re going to get a fishbowl next.”
“God help me.” Ella propelled herself upwards and over to the toilets.
She wasn’t impressed with the loos, given the lateness of the hour and the inebriation of nearly everyone in the club, but at least they were dwarf-free. However, as she washed her hands, she heard a tiny noise that sounded exactly like a small body slipping under a cubicle partition. She ducked down rapidly and spotted a small booted foot clambering up onto the toilet seat. She lunged for it and hauled the attached dwarf back where she could see him.
“Another one!” she said. “What are you doing accosting women into public toilets?”
“Accosting? I was hiding until you tugged me off and got my purple hat all moist.”
“Ugh.” She let him go in disgust.
“You’ve got a strong grip,” said the dwarf, massaging life back into his little leg. “I like a girl with a strong grip.”
“Enough.”
“S’true. I’ve not got anything against chicks with a bit of muscle — not as often as I’d like.”
“Okay, now that’s just inappropriate.”
The dwarf bowed low. “At your service,” he said.
“So there’s five of you.”
“I don’t suppose anyone’s in the slightest bit interested,” came a voice from the ceiling, “but there is another dwarf you know.”
Ella raised her eyebrows and looked at Inappropriate. “Don’t tell me. This one’s called Passive Aggressive?”
Inappropriate nodded.
“Talking about me behind my back?” called the voice from the ceiling.
“I’m just telling her that you’re a twat,” said Inappropriate.
A black-capped and beady-eyed dwarf dropped from the ceiling, planted its hands on its hips and stared at a point halfway up the wall, avoiding anyone’s direct gaze.
“Oh well, fine. Try to make me look bad,” he sniffed.
“Are the others here too?” Ella looked around at the cubicles.
“That’s right,” said Passive Aggressive, “because we’re not the important ones. All too used to being overlooked, I am, so just carry on.”
“So, are they here or not?”
“I mean, it’s not as if I add anything, do I? It’s not as if I’m the one working silently away in the background while certain other dwarfs take all the glory? Ooh, no. Unk!”
Passive Aggressive slumped to the floor as Psycho leapt down from the ceiling and coldcocked him with the haft of his little dwarfish axe.
“Whinging little shite,” said Psycho and then addressed Ella. “Told you before, bab. You’re in a lot of trouble. Well it’s all about to kick off in there. That old bag’s been talking to some blokes she’s organised. It’s their job to drug you and take you away in a van.”
“No, no way,” laughed Ella. “You’re mistaken. Those men? The one’s Myra’s been dancing with who are young enough to be her sons? She loves that sort of attention.”
Psycho huffed in exasperation while Passive Aggressive murmured and stirred.
“I grabbed something out of the tall one’s bag,” said Windy. “Does it smell like chloroform?” he asked with a questioning parp.
Windy offered up a small white jar, and OCD took a tentative sniff. He keeled over backwards without a word, landing on the grumbling Passive Aggressive.
“Right you lot, that settles it,” said Psycho. “Get that silly sod back up to the ceiling to sleep it off and let’s get Ella out of here before the same happens to her.”
“I’m quite capable of getting myself out of here,” said Ella, “even if I am a little bit tipsy.”
“A little bit tipsy?” Inappropriate huffed. “I thought women drivers were bad enough. You can’t even walk. I saw you fall over a line on the floor on your way in here.”
“S’nothing.” Shitfaced staggered forward. “I can fall over the line on the floor before it’s even there.”
“I’m sober enough to see there’s only six of you,” said Ella. “Shouldn’t there be seven?”
“Yeah, well he’s busy.” Psycho turned to his companions. “Shitfaced, with OCD out of it, you’ll have to help with her legs.”
“What about my legs?” Ella tried to focus on them.
“Inappropriate, Passive Aggressive, you take her top half. Windy, I think it’s best you take her feet.”
“No one’s taking my feet anywhere!” said Ella.
“Can it, Cinders.”
“Meanwhile,” said Psycho, “I will supervise and clear a path for our exit.”
“Ooh, who died and made you King of the Dwarfs?” said Passive Aggressive.
Psycho slapped him. “Shut it, whinger!”
“Or what?”
“Or they won’t find your bones till Christmas.”
“Wait. Wait,” said Ella. “How’s this supposed to w—”
Psycho ran at her and head-butted her in the stomach. She toppled back and was instantly lifted by small, strong arms that carried her away at a fast pace. Ella was too alarmed to react as she was transported across the room and out through the door.
“Windy!” shouted Inappropriate. “Keep your end up! It’s drooping!”
When Ella realised that she was being carried out of an open window and tipped head first over the edge, she managed to gather enough breath to protest, but her scream was lost in the wind as the dwarfs leapt from ledge to gutter to drainpipe as they made their way toward the ground. In her panic, she thought she saw two bluebirds, flying just overhead and pointing directions with their wings.
The last but one thought Ella had before she passed out from a mixture of alcohol and dwarf-induced travel sickness was that birds, (real, non-cartoon birds anyway) did not point with their wings. The very last thought she had was that she hoped Lily and Petunia wouldn’t hurt themselves, as she heard them shrieking from the bathroom window that Ella had invented a fun new Hen Night game, and that they wanted a go too.
Chapter Three
Ella rolled deeper into her lumpy bed and clutched the bedsheets to her neck. She wasn’t yet sure if her hangover was just going to come on stage, perform a little nauseating dry-mouthed pirouette and depart, or if it was going to treat her to an all-day brain-pounding revue with technicolour special effects. She decided not to ask herself. The fact that she felt she was rocking like a ship at sea did not bode well.
At a distance — was it her radio? — she heard voices. Male voices. All of them were familiar but she couldn’t quite place them.
“I know it’s not our usual bastard play but I say we go for the Glass Slipper Gambit.”
“Are you sure? I mean you need lions and flying monkeys and a tornado.”
“I can do one of those.” A third voice, with a little grunt, unleashed a whining parp like a runaway party balloon.
“Oh, really impressive,” snarked a fourth.
An appalling smell began an assault on Ella’s nostrils.
“Glass Slipper Gambit, you big twat,” said the first voice.
/> “Actually,” said a new voice, “that’s a mistranslation from the original. It was originally a fur slipper. And, frankly, a glass slipper is a health and safety nightmare.”
“But much less messy if you’re going to drink out of it.”
“Why would you drink out of a woman’s shoe?”
“I’ve drunk out of a shoe,” said a drunken voice. “Actually it was a barrel.”
“So, not a shoe then?”
“Someone was standing in it,” argued the drunkard.
“But the Glass Slipper Gambit isn’t our speciality.”
“But all the bloody pieces are in place. We’ve got a ball in ten days. Our brother Disco is working his way through the royals. We’ve got a PC lined up.”
“Who?”
“That inbred fucking toff with the shotgun and too many teeth.”
“Really? He’s hardly charming.”
“But it’s okay because our princess is, to use the correct scientific terminology, ‘on the shelf’ and will probably fall into the arms of any man who’ll have her.”
Ella groaned as it all came back to her. She opened her eyes. It hurt.
It was morning, not much past dawn by the quality of the light, and she could see the reason her world was rocking. She was on a train, specifically a slightly shabby commuter carriage with hard plastic and foam seats and an above average level of graffiti. Her ‘bedsheet’ was a red paramedic blanket stamped with the words ‘West Midlands Ambulance Service’.
She sat up.
The dwarfs were huddled in argument at the far end of the otherwise empty carriage. None were looking her way. Ella was a practical soul with little time for nonsense and make believe and other fancies. A day job among hammers and nails and load-bearing walls had left her with a firm grasp of what was real and what was important. Nonetheless, Ella found herself facing up to the fact that these dwarfs were real; she doubted her delusional psychoses were organised enough to buy train tickets and rustle up blankets.
“Can’t we just deal with her our way?” said Windy, with a plaintive pump. “You know, the old Glass Coffin routine.”
“I do prefer routine,” said OCD.
“Yeah, let’s drag her back to our digs and get her cracking on the housework,” said Inappropriate. “Women like that. Chores are their heroin.”
“Like you know what chores are,” said Passive Aggressive.
The train was slowing for the next station. Ella recognised nothing of the landscape outside. Farmland, pylons, scattered woodland; it could have been any piece of rural England, ten miles from home or two hundred. Wherever it was, she wanted out.
The train decelerated further. The station sign for Little Wangford came into view.
Little Wangford! Mrs Jubert with the dodgy rendering! Ella wasn’t one for dropping in on clients unannounced but any port in a storm…
“She can help me with my drinking problem,” said Shitfaced.
There was a sudden silence among the dwarfs.
“I can’t get the lids off sometimes,” explained Shitfaced.
“No, you turd-brained cocknuggets!” yelled Psycho. “We’re not taking her home! We’re not going to wait for the evil witch to come after her with a poisoned apple. And the glass coffin’s already being used, isn’t it.”
The dwarfs were still engrossed in their conversation. Ella waited for the open door light to come on and then slipped from her seat, blanket still wrapped around her, and pressed the open door button.
“We’re doing the Glass Slipper Gambit,” said Psycho. “We just need some mice and lizards and a pumpkin and then get old Bossy-boots to pay a visit. Hey!”
He leapt up onto his seat and pointed as Ella slipped out the door.
“This isn’t our stop!” said Shitfaced.
“Get her, you knobs!” yelled Psycho.
Windy gave a war-like bugle parp and they charged. However, in their hurry, half the dwarfs tripped over the other half and before any of them came within five feet of the door, it closed.
Ella stood and watched Psycho’s incandescent face as it yelled muffled insults at her through the window. Inappropriate provided some helpful interpretive hand gestures.
She hugged the blanket tighter as the train pulled out of Little Wangford. It might be June and the sun bright but the air was cold and sparkling dew clung to the grass at the platform edge. It was a rural station with metal railings between the platform and the tiny car park, but no sign of any other people. Ella’s hangover headache was still just a dim thing at the edges of her mind which either meant she still drunk from the night before and it was going to hit her with a vengeance soon enough or it wasn’t going to amount to much and a good walk would blast it away.
Ella tied two corners of the blanket around her neck to make a cloak of it and walked along the platform, past the unmanned ticket office and onto the hedge-lined single track road that led down to the village.
As she walked she considered her resources. She did not have her purse, so no money, no cards. However, she did have her mobile phone; a phone that had accumulated two dozen text messages in the night, mostly from Petunia and Myra wondering where the hell she was. There was one from her dad, letting her know that he had arrived safely at Thornbeard House once more and would probably be staying with Mr Dainty for two or three days at most. There was also one from Roy, asking if she had time in her busy schedule to join him for a day at the Cornbury Park Game Fair on the thirteenth. There was also a text from Tilly Chapel, the supplier of the ecologically-sourced exterior render, replying to Ella’s query from yesterday.
Ella tried to make a call to her dad but there was no signal to be found. A call to Myra proved equally fruitless.
Instead, she wrote a single text to each person: to Myra and Petunia that she was fine and apologised for fleeing the festivities; to her dad that she was in Little Wangford and going to visit Mrs Jubert; to Roy that the thirteenth, two days’ time, was short notice, and weren’t game fairs for the Barbour jacket / wellies / shotgun and golden retriever types she generally disapproved of?; to Tilly Chapel the broad details of Mrs Jubert’s complaint which she was going to investigate this morning. She left her phone to its own devices to send them when it found a signal.
Ella almost missed the turning for Mrs Jubert’s cottage. She recalled that Mrs Jubert lived down Spinney Lane which ran off from the main road not far from the tiny village green. What she did not recall was that Spinney Lane was little more than a dirt path, overshadowed by low, shady trees and threatened by bramble on all sides. Even the sign for Spinney Lane was overgrown with bindweed and encrusted with lichen which rendered it all but unreadable. She had driven this way only a fortnight before and couldn’t picture her car making its way up such a narrow track.
But, she told herself, “There can’t be two Spinney Lanes,” and began to walk up it.
The canopy of broad, dark leaves instantly cut out the sunlight. Shafts of morning light shot through here and there, picking up this tree trunk, that patch of pebbly path.
Ella rehearsed her pitch.
“Morning, Mrs Jubert. Yes, it is early but when I heard that you were less than happy with our work on your cottage, I jumped on the first train here to inspect the… ooh, yes, I can see what you mean. We’ve never had that happen before.” Ella ducked to avoid a particularly low-hanging branch. “Now… My goodness, do you know what I’ve just done, Mrs Jubert? I left my purse on the train; cash, train tickets, the lot. I am a fool. Could I possibly use your phone to call a taxi? You’re driving over to Solihull this afternoon? Well, as long as I’m not imposing. A cup of tea while I wait would be absolutely de—”
Ella stopped.
“—lightful,” she said and looked round.
The narrow track was now definitely nothing more than a path. The route ahead, hardened earth intermittently crossed with questing tree roots, was still clearly visible but there was no way a car could make it up here. It wasn’t even wide enough for t
wo people to walk side by side.
She looked back. There had been no turnings. Odd.
Had it become overgrown in the time since she had since been here? Midsummer was fast approaching. England was a riot of greenery. The landscape did transform rapidly. She considered it for less than a second. No, of course this hadn’t all sprung up in the past two weeks.
“Bloody odd,” she said softly.
Bloody odd, like dwarf-odd, like bluebirds-with-messages-odd. She scanned the trees for weird birds bearing cautionary messages. As she turned, something cracked under her foot. It felt like a seed or a nut. It wasn’t a nut, not quite.
Ella picked up the yellow peanut M&M. There was another one, green, six feet ahead. There was a red one a little further on.
A notion stirred in Ella’s foggy mind and it didn’t involve careless hikers or bags of sweets with holes in the bottom.
“Breadcrumbs,” she said.
There was a noise of agreement from the undergrowth to one side. Ella looked and where she was quite sure there hadn’t been a wolf before there was a wolf now. Her mind skated over the notion that it might be a dog without even touching it. This thing, grey-furred, long-snouted, orange-eyed and taller than any hound she had ever met, was a wolf.
Ella froze.
“Hello, little girl,” the wolf said.
The wolf had petrified Ella but the talking wolf had tipped her over into frantic terror. She punched the wolf straight on the nose.
“Ow, goddamn son of a bitch!” the wolf yelled, recoiling. “What d’you do that for?”
Ella tore a near-dead branch from the nearest tree and hefted it like a baseball bat.
The wolf rapidly blinked away tears of pain. “Right on the hooter,” he said unhappily.
“You surprised me,” said Ella, shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“I surprised you?” said the wolf. “I said hello. You hit me.”
“You called me little girl.”
“You are little.”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“But you are a girl.”
“I’m thirty-five! And, just so you know, ‘Hello, little girl’ is pretty much the creepiest thing you can say. Even to little girls.”