Page 34 of The Start of the Story
I rounded the top of the wall, close to where there was a large gap, where fishponds and wetlands had once prevented entry to York, and stared out over the city. Down the alleyway lay the headquarters of Elliot’s workplace, the big salvage yardwhere materials were brought from all over the country when ancient buildings were demolished. I could almost see the roof of his office from here; that higgledy-piggledy mix of corridor and corner that had been my second home for such a long time, that had smelled of soup and microwave meals, where laughter had echoed at odd angles and Elliot had held chair races with his workmates on quiet days.
A place I no longer had a tie to. Elliot was gone. If I’d turned up there now, they would have been polite, pleased to see me in a baffled kind of way – they’d have fed me coffee and made enquiries into how the cottage was getting on, and how I was doing. All very concerned, but notinvolved. Then they would have turned away and got on with their work and I would have wandered back out into the chilly day, and Elliot still wouldn’t be here.
It was just me. And that meant only me to remember the importance of things. Those witch marks that people had carved into wooden beams to keep the house protected from evil, they’d mean nothing more than random graffiti if people like me didn’t list them, date them, keep the story alive. Shoes up chimneys, cats in walls, they’d all meant safetyto the people that had put them there, and what right had we, as twenty-first-century people, to call them stupid superstitions? They’d made their own security back then, in a time of uncertainty, as Elliot and I had made ours. Those people were gone just as he was, and I was holding the memories of all of them, the fairy believers and my husband, to stop them from being lost.
I stared out over the city, where the brittle sunlight lay smoothly over ancient buildings, and shadows piled in corners. Memory. All this came down to memory. Those things that were gone still existed, as long as someone remembered them. The folk tales, the myths, the fairies, they all lived on somewhere for as long as their stories were told. Elliot still lived on in mymemory, in all those things in the cottage that he’d rebuilt. None of it was completely over, because I remembered. The quiet acknowledgement of the importance of never allowing anything to vanish completely ticked away in my head.
It was my job to remember.
I took a deep breath and carefully descended the steep and slippery steps that took me down to street level, then went in search of mince pies to keep Chess happy.
16
1910
Memmie climbed up out of the ditch cussing under her breath. ‘Mazed Memmie’, they called her, ‘Mindless Memmie’, but she knew. She knew a thing or two, more than those daft little girls who’d gone to school with her and now helped their mams in the kitchens and bakehouses; she knew about the fairy folk for a start. Her own mam had told her – you don’t go out when the travelling folk comes through, you stays away, you turns your face to the wall and you doesn’t listen to them calling you over.
She wasn’tquitesure that they were fairies, but they came and went in the summer, with their vans and their fires and their songs, and all the children were told to keep away and not take anything they offered, so Memmie reasoned that theymustbe fairies, else what was they doing?
That hot summer night she’d leaned out of the window and heard the music and it had sounded so sweet. She’d heard the voices raised in song, and she’d climbed out and gone to them. Spent the night dancing and singing with them, drinking the harsh apple juice they gave her, but not eating, no, never eating, you don’t eat fairy food else they’d take you away. That was what Mam said.
There had been the men, and she wasn’tentirelysure what they’d done, mostly cos of the apple juice, which had made her head all fuddled. And now it was winter, and here she was in this ditch with her apron all ruined and this thing that they’d given her.
Memmie looked down at it. She didn’t want it. She wasn’t sure what to do with it now, and Mam would give her a belting if she took it home. Then Da would join in for good measure, and they’d know that she’d been out with the fairy folk.
There was only one thing to do. Memmie folded her apron around the thing and crept her way out of the village. Send it back. That was what she had to do, send the thing back to the folk it belonged to. Up, up onto the high moor, following the distant secret path that nobody was supposed to know, but that she’d seen the men walk only last week. Yes, the path was still here, still clearly marked by the tread of their boots. Out across the hill to the Fairy Stane.
Memmie felt her heart beat faster with the fear as much as the walking. Suppose the fairies was there? How did she tell them that she didn’t want what they’d given her? How could she return the gift if they was there? But the stone lay, stretched and silent, alone in the dark, and Memmie relaxed. Nobody was here.
She crouched next to the stone and scooped great handfuls of wet, loose soil away from underneath it, digging until her nails were all dirt and her hands were sore, until she found the little bundle that the men had brought up here last week. They hadn’t dug all the way down to fairyland, then. Just far enough to make sure everything was covered. Memmie nodded to herself. They wouldn’t want to disturb the fairies down there, have ’em coming up around the village again. Once a year was all anyone could stand.
She rocked back on her heels and pushed the apron-wrapped gift into the new hole, on top of last week’s offering, then used her forearms to push the excavated earth back in on top. There. Now it was back where it belonged and Memmie could forget about it and not get belted by Mam and Da.
It was the fairies’ problem now.
Now
The lights were all on in the cottage. I could see them blazing out into the misty evening as I crested the rise of hills and began the swoop down towards the river, and I cursed Saoirse and Connor under my breath as I went. They could have made sure all the lights were off before they went! But I supposed they’d been hurrying, dashing out towards their wonderful new life, not worrying about my electricity bill.
The back door wasn’t locked either and I cursed more loudly as I barged my way through, hoping that the place wasn’t full of burglars or murderers, crouching behind my tiny loveseat or hiding under the beds. It would be vanishingly unlikely, of course, but it had been that kind of day.
‘Bloody hell,’ I announced to the kitchen, loudly, to give all the burglars time to get out of the upstairs windows, ‘they really didn’t care, did they? He could have locked the door and posted the key through the letter box.’
I dropped my work bag noisily on the floor. There was a reassuring lack of windows opening and black-clad figures jumping to the riverbanks, so the house probably wasn’t being ransacked. I went over to fill the kettle to make tea while I gotout of my coat and boots, and jumped. The kettle was half full and hot.
And then Connor walked in from the living room.
‘Ah, you’re back,’ he said, as though last night hadn’t happened and we were still existing in our landlady and tenant situation. ‘I’ll get some food on.’
‘Connor?’ I didn’t know why I asked. It was obviously him, wearing an Aran knit jumper and his usual black jeans, looking as though he’d come from an evening of lecturing rebellious students.‘Connor?’
‘Who were you expecting? I hear Idris Elba is married, y’know, you’ll have a long wait.’
‘But you…’ I gathered up my disobedient jaw, which wanted to gape. ‘Is Saoirse upstairs?’ I finished lamely.
He turned his back, fiddling with mugs and teabags and opening and closing the fridge. ‘She’s in a little B&B in Pickering,’ he said, and it sounded as though the words came sieved through the sweater. ‘She’s not here.’
‘So why are you?’ I slumped into a kitchen chair. I’d so thoroughly convinced myself that he’d gone, that the cottage was back to being my place of solitude, that finding him here in the kitchen was nearly as hard to get my head around as it would have been should Idris Elba have turned up.
