Such Tales as Fairies Tell: Anita

Right there in front of him.  Her hair isn’t swirling around her like eels, her eyes don’t glow, and she’s not draped from head to toe in silver and gold.  Her dark hair is neatly pinned back, her face is warm, shaded, encasing dark eyes and red lips; a neat, freckled nose.  She’s dressed in an ordinary blue skirt, a creamy, lacy blouse. 

And still.  Her presence just shocks the word out of him: “Boella.”

The girl – this stranger – leans in at him.  “Huh?”

His mouth jerks around without his permission, and it’s caught in a loop  “Boella.”

She shakes her head.  “Sorry.  I only speak English.”

From somewhere, Jordy finds his brain and pushes it back into gear.  “Hi.  I’m Jordy.  Sorry…” and where’s he going to go from here exactly?

“Anita.”  She holds out her hand.

“I’m here about the flat.”

“Number 34?”

He has the details imprinted in his mind.  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

After a pause: “Oh, I’m not the landlord. I was just heading out.  He’ll probably be in there.”  She hesitates a moment.  “Do you suppose I could come with you?”

“Into the flat?”

“Yeah. I live on the other side.  Everyone says this side’s better.”

“You mean you want to check it out?”

“Yeah.  So, can I?”

He doesn’t know what to make of this.  She’s everything his image of Boella isn’t and yet she’s still – and he’s sure of it – Boella.  This mild, fidgety girl who looks like a secretary or a sales clerk is the same warrior princess who wielded a kingdom’s finest weapons and stood between that kingdom and unspeakable kinds of darkness.  Still her.  Somehow.  There’s nothing else to say.  He says: “Of course.”

#

“And she’s Boella?”

“Yup.”

“The same Boella?”  Will doesn’t sound convinced.

“Her name’s Anita.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m telling you.”

There’s a serious look that comes over Will’s face now.  He positions himself so he can look Jordy fully in the eye.  “You gotta stop this, dude.”

“Stop what?”

“All this fairy shit.”

“It’s not-”

“Yes, it is.  They’ve gotten into your mind and they’re pulling strings.  They’re making you dance.  You’ve read the warnings, right?  You’ve heard what people say.”

“Your old gran?”

“Everybody’s old gran.  You’re being played, Jordy.  Seriously.”

Some of this should be sinking in.  He feels dimly aware of that.  But a certainty overrides it.  It’s more than stubbornness – and his mother always said he had that in spades – it’s something that he would describe, if he were pushed to describe it, as maybe belief, maybe faith.  He feels sorry for Will: “You should have come with me that night.”

“You should have gone to Ludigro’s with me instead.  This girl-”

“Anita.”

“She’s not a fairy princess.  She’s not… she’s just a girl.  Ask her.  Ask her out – you’ll see she goes shopping on Fridays and likes crochet, and she collects stamps or something.  She’ll be so bloody ordinary.”

We’ll find out.  He feels a constant itching in the back of his mind.  This ever-awareness of the memory of her.  The fantasy image.  The real one.  It leads somewhere.  “Well, anyway, I’m moving out.  You get your couch back.”

The flat is great.  Once again, he can’t quite get his head around why it’s great.  But he’d felt an immediate warmth when he’d stepped in there.  A feeling of belonging.  The carpet might have a few seventies hues, and the wallpaper may be flowery in the bedroom, but the views are nice, the heatpump works, there’s an oven and a half-decent shower, the cupboards in the kitchen all have functional doors.  He’s already signed the lease.

Anita had walked through there with him, pretending to be his girl, making little comments about the details, even slipping her arm through his and resting her cheek sometimes against his shoulder. The middle-aged landlord hadn’t batted an eyelid, hadn’t seemed to recognise her as an existing tenant.  She’d mime-mimicked him talking a couple of times and Jordy had had to fight the urge to laugh.

She’s fun, he wanted to say to Will, but the description seemed to diminish her.  Beneath her shell, she was something far more than fun.

“You gonna want help moving?” Will remains in the present.

“Yeah.  Actually, yes.”  Although he’s got next to nothing in the way of stuff.  “This weekend?”

“If it gets you off of my couch, right?”

“Love you too.”

“And I’ll get to meet her.  And maybe steal her off you.  Sure, I’m in.”

#

She isn’t a girlfriend though.  Maybe that’s the part Will can’t understand.  This isn’t a sexual attraction.  It’s something more basic than that, more simple and at the same time way more complicated.  Anita/Boella is a presence.  She’s the missing piece in a puzzle he’d never known existed.

And yet, if she is Boella, she gives no sign of it. She continues to live and breath in this guise of an ordinary woman.  She shows up when he moves in, wearing faded jeans and a loose t-shirt. She has a six-pack with her, and a bowl of almond muffins.  She chatters as she helps them carry things in and helps arrange what little he has to furnish the place.  She looks around it all with a critical eye.  “This needs some things.”

Jordy spreads his hands: “I’m a guy.  This is as good as the home decorating gets.”

“Hm,” she chews her lip, considering.

“Can we break open those beers?”

She nods.  “Go ahead,” gesturing absently behind her.  “Hey, if you come over to the window… there you go, you can see the police station from here. Right there, that’s where they bring the bad guys in and haul them through that door to jail.”

“For real?”

“Yeah.  Throw me one of those.”

Will tosses her a beer.

He says later to Jordy: “She’s cute.”

“Hands off.”

“Why?  You haven’t made a move.”

“It’s not a move thing.”

“Oh, right.”

“What?”

“Cluck.  Just saying.”

“What?”

“Just saying: someone here is chicken.”

Will knows nothing.  Jordy could almost laugh at how little.  He sits on his newly rented carpet and watches the sun set through his new big window.  In the sunset he can see the scene unfolding: creatures of cloud and fire, twisting in and out of monstrous shapes, an army that bounds through the sky.  Unstoppable.  Irresistible.  Until she’s there, in shining armour, with her hair tied back in a loose, fraying braid, a long, barbed spear in hand.  Stopping it all in its tracks.  Drinking, half watching this scene play out on his new horizon.  “What do you think of the building?”

He can see Will shrug from the corner of his eye.

“Does it seem… strange to you?”

“Strange?”

“Yeah.  Like animated.  As if the walls kind of shimmer a bit, or the shape of it doesn’t quite hold or something.”  He doesn’t have the words for what he’s trying to express.  It’s not that building’s alive exactly, but then it’s not that it isn’t.  It’s more as if it’s just a little bit more real than the rest of reality.  A little bit deeper in its colour, more tactile in its textures.  There’s a presence of background noises that are not quite loud enough to name.

“Like haunted?”  Will asks him.

“Not… not that.”

“Like a fairy castle with the perfect disguise?  That’s where you’re going with this?”

“I don’t know…”

“Good grief.” 

“Hey, what did you think of the mural downstairs. The sort of fiery, abstract one.”

Will only shrugs.  “Huh.  Didn’t really notice it.”

#

Jordy notices.  Maybe just because it seems like such a weird thing to have painted in the foyer of residential building.  Who and why go to all the trouble?  And the way the fire-waves really do almost seem to move.  As if a story lurks under the paint.  He doesn’t see the face again – the one he almost saw at first glance – but he sees something… an object or an image that’s seems deliberately buried there.

Anita comes over a few days after he’s moved in, and she’s got some new muffins: these are ginger and chocolate chip.  She seems proud to let him know that she’s baked them herself.  And they are, as it happens, pretty good.  She also has a couple of tasselled blankets that she calls ‘throws’ that are going to give his new place some ‘sparkle’; she has a scrunched, patterned sheet that is threaded into a hollow wooden pole, which she says is a wall-hanging.  It’s been embroidered in thick, course thread, has wool and pom-poms all mixed up in it, and she hangs it on a nail in the centre of his main wall.  She throws a couple of sheepskins down on the floor and tosses a couple of cushions onto the cheap, bean-bag couch.

“There,” she says.

Jordy, a little lost, acknowledges: “Thank you.”

“It just needed a little spicing up.”

“What about you,” he says, “Who are you really?”

They sit in a patch of sun sharing beers and muffins.  She says: “Wow, just jump right in there.”

“Seriously.”

“Nothing’s to tell.”

“I doubt that.”

“Poor boy.  Listen: what you see is what you get.  I’m nothing special, me.  I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman with nothing much to show for her life.  I earn enough money doing spreadsheets and filing stuff for accountants to get by.  I hardly see my mum; Dad, he’s less than a memory – I don’t think she even knows his name.  And my brother’s lived with his dad since he was ten.  Throw in a few bad choices in regards to men, and here we are.  Now, what about you?”

But it’s her he wants to know about.  There’s a surface he needs to break through to find something deeper and sweeter.  Even in this setting, with her hair tied up and knotted, a stained shirt, bare feet, he still sees the image of Boella, it shines from directly beneath her skin, and his eyes just can’t shut it off.

#

“Well, maybe she doesn’t know she’s Boella.” Will seems prepared for the moment to play along.

“Like amnesia.”

“Something like that. Or a dissociative personality disorder.”

“A what?”

“Multiple personalities.”

“Oh.  Maybe.”

“Can you hear yourself?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Why would she be?  Why would this girl, unconnected, somehow end up being the heroine of some fairy story?  Why should it be her?  Why should it be at all?”

Because.  Because.

“You could just ask her.”

He has though.  In a way.  He’s mentioned the fairies, and asked her if she knows about that place where you can find them, that used to be a nightclub and still masquerades as one.  He asks if she’s ever been there, about her past, her childhood, her bloodline.

“Genealogy buff?”

He can only mumble, “Sort of,” and he’s not quite sure if his reluctance to say any more is born out of fear, embarrassment, or an unwillingness to feel the disappointment that might follow her answers to a more direct line of questioning.  Or maybe a fear of sounding just a little bit too crazy, so that she’d stop visiting and he’d lose her.

#

Because there’s something happening between them.  He’s sure of that too.  There’s a bond that’s developing, like a sapling growing in the space between.  A delicate thing that’ll need patience and sunshine and careful tending before it grows into anything real, into anything resilient and meaningful.  But it is there.

It means that he can drop by her house when he’s out of food and she’ll cook him dinner; they can lounge around in front of the TV; they can go out along the street to get curry together and eat it in one of their two flats. 

On a wet night they risk the trip out to the takeaways, and have to make a run for it as the rain suddenly comes down on them in full force.  They run; her with her coat over her head, him with nothing to shield his hair or his face, but wrapping his body over the curries to at least keep them safe.  And so, he’s dripping when they stand in the hallway, when she’s trying to dry him off with her sweatshirt that’s already pretty damp.  Her cheeks are pink from exertion and there’s a fire about her, her eyes especially bright.  It happens in an instant, just leaning over without a thought and giving her a gentle, barely-touching kiss on her lips.

She almost freezes but doesn’t, she returns the kiss, and then pulls away.

“Sorry,” he says reflexively.

“No.  No sorry.  That… that was coming.  It’s been coming.  It’s just…”

“It’s okay.”  In this moment anything can be okay.  Anything at all can be worked around if this moment, if the essence of it, can just be kept alive.

“It’s not.  You see: there’s someone.  There’s a kind of a boyfriend.”

And in the next moment her door swings open, and he’s standing there, taking up the whole frame.  Recognisable, somehow. 

The stag.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work