Such Tales as Fairies Tell: Boella

Jordy wakes up the on the footpath.

He’s not surprised.

It’s not as if it’s the first time that’s ever happened, and not the first time his memory’s been a little bit fuzzy about the event.  He rolls over and searches out a wall he can lean against; his head doing flip-flops, or perhaps the backstreet he’s found himself on is doing them.  Either way it turns over and under, sideways, far then close. He has to close his eyes to keep a wave of dizziness from overwhelming him.

This again then.

Jordy rests his head against a sandpaper brick wall.  The east side of an old, iron-gated post office.  His eyes slink off down the slope of the road – slowly, as he opens them a millimetre at a time.  He tries to remember: bright lights and loud noises.  Well that’s a given.  A girl with about the same red hair, with glasses, in a fuzzy white jersey.  A few words exchanged, and then whisked away, laughing, forgetting.  And not the same anyway.  And… he thinks… he did, didn’t he?  He finally did it.  He went to the fairies.

One word: Boella.

#

He discovers his body again over the next half hour or so.  Familiar aches.  A head that has lost the capacity to register movement.  And his location: Durham Lane East, where the little bookshop sits between two second hand shops, a chemist, a little photo-print booth; and a bakery opposite.  The colour of the morning runs a tangerine-turmeric down the length of the street; the shadows are strangely autumnal as if sunrise and sunset have combined for a little while.

The tales fairies tell.

He hadn’t known the guy was even serious when he first heard him say it.  Jordy remembers laughing it off.  He remembers some joke about a brothel; walking in the door he’d still half imagined that that was what he’d find.  Instead: his memory dances away from him when he tries to pin it down.  What exactly?  A room that wasn’t a room, light and foliage and strange men and women.

One hundred dollars to hear a fairy tale!

He should be shaking his head right now.  Somehow, he isn’t.  And it hadn’t seemed that way at the time had it?  It’d seemed… transcendent…  Like waking up.

“Shame on you,” some stranger calls out walking past along the main street.

Yeah, yeah.  Jordy answers with one finger.  That seems sufficient.

#

“You’re an idiot,” says Will, his best friend.

“Takes one to know one.”

“You wanna keep crashing on my couch or not?”

“Yeah, fine.  Well, that’s what I did anyway.”

Will perches on the arm of one badly frayed chair, one shoe hanging half off his foot.  “Where did you get a hundred dollars, anyway?”

“That money Dad gave me.”

“To pay off your phone bill?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Only Will would.  That’s half the trouble.  He and Will, they’re in it together now, the Club for Those Who’ve Had a Broken Heart.  And it sucks.  But Will had Josie.  And Josie had been his world.  He’d been engaged, he’d been ecstatic, and then one day he’d been alone, with none of her explanations making any sense to him.

And Jordy.  “I know it sounds stupid.”  But the way it’d been with Theresa.  The way he’d felt.  Days of walking on air transformed into days of walking under lead.  It only frustrates him even more knowing that Will can understand, that his world did go from psychedelic to dark, washed-out greyscale overnight.

“Sounds?”

“It wasn’t… I felt something… what they had to say… and these fairies…”

“You know you can’t trust…”

“But I do.”  And that certainty builds in him.  He can only remember a skeleton of the story, more feelings than the events, and the name, and the image he has in his mind of this heroine, an image all shrouded in lights and shadow, the edges blurred, the angles ever-changing.  He says: “I think I have to find someone.”

#

It’s easier said than done.  To hunt down a character in a story he’d never heard before.  She’s not in any phone book (and she wouldn’t be even if he had a last name to go on), and all Google can give him is a research centre in Italy, and a hotel in Tarragona.  There’s no fairy princess, no beautiful warrior facing off against the forces of darkness.

It’s a fool’s errand.

And yet he can’t forget her.

He finds that wherever he goes there is a nagging feeling of something missing.  He finds himself half glancing over his shoulder, expecting somebody to be there.  When he glances in the mirror he almost catches a glimpse of a figure behind him. Her hair is swirling around her, and she’s draped in gold and silver, her eyes stare blackly, beautifully out at him, burning through everything.  But only for a handful of seconds.

The library knows nothing either.

Or the bemused professor at the university.

“Maybe you should put up a notice,” Will suggests.

“Bite me.”

“Missing: Boella something-or-other, no last known address.  Description: open to interpretation on account of how SHE DOESN’T EXIST.”

“Like I said…”

“I’m telling you this as a friend.  You’ve let them get into your head.”

“You weren’t there.”

“That’s because I have some sense.”

Jordy is stubborn.  He’s stubborn because he can feel something inside him.  There’s something altered, something killed or reborn.  It doesn’t matter if other people can’t make sense of it, because he can – not in a way that can be put into words, but in a way that bubbles just beneath his skin, that comes from maybe his soul.  “That story changed me,” he insists.

“Into a moron.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“They promise things, but it’s always twisted.  Didn’t your grandma ever tell you…?”

“No.  And no.  It’s not like that.”

“Well, are you healed?  Can you live without her?”

It took him a moment to realise: Theresa.

“You can’t make that shit go away with a quick fix.  Not a bottle of whiskey or some dumb story.  Trust me.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And stop sleeping on my couch.”

#

Well, he can hardly go back to sleeping at his old place.  Seeing as how it’s also hers.  Or his parents’ place, since they’ve made it clear by now that they’ve had enough of his shit.  Or the dive he skipped out on two years ago without paying the back rent or fixing that door.

Theresa.

He hasn’t forgotten.

And if he’d gone into that fairy enclave seeking a cure, then he hadn’t come out with one.  Theresa is always there somewhere in his thoughts, if she isn’t at the forefront she’s always somewhere nearby.  He can always picture her: quintessentially wholesome; perennially smiling; her red hair tied back with a white, knotted headband, that little sparkle she seems to have to her cheeks, her neat little white teeth.  The way she’d walk, a little ahead of him, looking back over her shoulder, gently teasing, offering up promises with her eyes that she perhaps didn’t know she was making.

That.  That’s still there.

He doesn’t know where this shadow named Boella fits into it all.  The two of them are different, unrelated

And his heart remains scalded. 

But he does know one thing: he can’t go on living like this forever.  Will’s his best friend, but if he isn’t now then he soon will be serious about his couch.  He’ll need a new place.

#

The building attracts him right away.  He’s not sure what he sees in it, because it’s an ordinary apartment building, really quite austere, no embellishments, no flourishes, a little bit run-down, noticeably dated.  Running through his head the thought: well, beggars can’t be choosers.  But he doesn’t rock on up here feeling like a beggar.  He feels like a king.  It’s stupid.

He reads the ad again – reads in his memory, because it’s inexplicably stuck there.  One bedroom flat.  Fourth floor.  Partly furnished.  Own kitchen.  Share laundry with other tenants.  Two hundred a week. 

Well, that’s his price limit.

Weird, the feeling that comes over him walking through this courtyard.  It feels almost like a chess board, with its big paving stones, dark and light, and it seems to Jordy as if he sees shapes, just faint shadows that are almost human, that blow away if he turns to try and look at them.  As if the whole area is moving subtly, all the parts and pieces changing shape or position.  Though he never catches them.

The big glass doors open automatically.

Jordy stands face to face with a giant mural.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.  It’s abstract, but it makes him think of the ocean, though its colours are all reds and oranges, with a black undercurrent.  It feels as if it should be a picture of hell.  It’s arresting.  It should be terrifying (should it?).  But it feels… thrilling.

Is there a face in there….?

He shakes himself out of it.  Just a mural.  Just a piece of bloody art.

He’s here about the flat.  He steps into the lift, pressing the 3 and waiting with his hands behind his back.  Does the old man standing next to him look suspicious?  Does he look a bit like a dragon, diminished into human form?  Is there something huge and golden in his crinkled-up eyes?

Or is Will right?  Is he out of his mind to have sought out the fairies?  These things they’re putting into his head when he should be trying to get his life back on track.  Enough of that, he tells himself, taking a deep breath.  Looking at a flat, that’s all.

He steps out of the lift and there she is.  Standing right in front of him.

Boella.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work