• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I couldn’t stop her now.

“What do you want?”

I knew. But there.

She was at the fridge by then, cooling herself with sticking her head, tortoiselike, forward in among the salad.

“Well now, look at this, they keep winter in a box. That’s clever,” she congratulated me. Then she shut the fridge door and turned and looked at me with her blue-saffron eyes. “Ah, cailín,” she said. She, too, knew I knew what she was there for.

“Calling me ‘colleen’ isn’t enough,” I said. I added, “Your High-ness—”It’s as well to be courteous. “I’ve never been over the sea to the Isle. Colum made a bargain, or you did. It isn’t mine.”

“Yes,” she said.“How else did you get your talent? Oh, it was there in him, but he wouldn’t work for it. He preferred the desk behind the leather shop and then the boss’s desk at the factory in Dublin. Oh, the shame and waste of it, when he might have made his way through his voice, and by learning a bit of piano in his grandlady’s parlor.He kept his music for talk, to woo the women.Well and good. He was not the one. But it’s owed,my girl, for that night.”

I hovered in the kitchenette. I said, “And when he was on the savage hill, and they came running, where were you?”

“Where should I be and all? Up in his fine skull, waiting for him to hear me inspire him.”

“There’s the gin,” I said.“Have a drink.”

I went and ran a bath. I knew she would never come in to plague me there, nor did she. She was from a forthright yet modest age. But when I was out and anywhere else in the flat, there she was.

She sat, like my own geas, across from me at supper, eating apples. She sat by me on the couch as I watched TV, drinking gin. She lay down at my side—somehow, for the bed was narrow—when I tried to go to sleep. And all night long as I stretched rigid like a mar ble figure on a tomb, she chattered and chanted on and on to me, telling me things that filled my head so full, I myself couldn’t move about there. Near dawn after all I slept, hoping to find my great-grandfather again and have a word. But if I dreamed, I didn’t recall.

The next night I was to go to sing and play at a pub in Kentish Town.Waking up, my throat was as sore and hoarse as if she, the old hag, had been strangling me in my sleep. Yet no sooner had I croaked into the phone and canceled my gig, than my throat was well, as if from the strongest antibiotic known to man.

“I won’t,” I said.

But she only opened the fridge door again, and spoke to the winter within, of ice and snows and berries and belling stags, and low sun and the lawless winds of the Cailleach Bheare, the winter goddess from the blue hills.

I must pay her no heed. There was nothing to fear. Ignored, in the end she would leave me alone.

ALL FRIDAY, all Saturday, there we were, we twain.

Saturday afternoon I went out to the shops, and she went with me, hooking her loathsome, withered, iron-tough arm in mine. A tourist herself from another time, another country, another dimension, oh such pleasure she had among the market stalls, and in the supermarket. No one else either saw or heard her, but once or twice, when I forgot and spoke to her, as when I told her to leave the cabbages alone, then I got the funny looks the crazed receive.

Perhaps that was it. Had I gone crazy?

“Hoosh,” said she, “that is not your fate,my soul.”

When we were coming back from the shopping, she dragging on my arm like a bundle of whisky-damp laundry, the next thing happened. In fact, it had happened before, and I knew it had and that it must, if not quite yet what it was.

“Who are they?”

“Who do you think,my soul?” said she.

“The Faerie Folk?”

“Hush, never call the Gentry that, keep a wise tongue in your head, so you must. But no, nor they are.”

At which I must know, for what and who else was left then that they could be?

They darted through the crowds, the three of them, silken-lithe and gorgeous. I recollected I had seen them before on the escalator, and today in the market, and taken them, as you would, for three Goth girls