Chapter 1
Out then spak the Queen o Fairies, And an angry woman was she, “Shame betide her ill-far’d face, And an ill death may she die,
For she’s taen awa the bonniest knight In a’ my companie.
“But had I kend, Tam Lin,” said she, “What now this night I see,
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een, And put in twa een o tree.”
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,
1882-1898 by Francis James Child
Once upon a time there was a girl named Janet, who went to Carterhaugh and plucked a rose. In Carterhaugh she met a man named Tam Lin, and although she was warned about his maiden- taking habits, things unfolded in such a way that she found herself pregnant soon after returning home.
Because there were few shames greater than bearing a child out of wedlock, she returned to Carterhaugh one night, to seek herbs that would rid her of her burden. There she encountered Tam Lin again, and there they talked, and there she learned that he was held captive by the Queen of Fairies. Because she loved him, and because he feared he’d soon be given as tribute to Hell, they hatched a plan to break the Queen’s hold over him.
At nightfall, the fairy troupe rode by, and Janet brought Tam Lin down from his steed. She held fast, knowing that his freedom depended on her holding him true while he turned into all manner of beasts. She held fast, knowing that he was the father of her child and that her heart belonged to no other. But then the man in her arms turned into a great big snake, and Janet learned that although her love for him was strong, and her fear of single motherhood stronger still, neither was mightier than her phobia of all things slithery.
She let go, crying bitter tears, and the Queen of Fairies turned her head and spoke a word.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Janet, and she was lying on a short wooden pier, stoned out of her mind. She felt woozy, but not unhappy, as she allowed her glazed eyes to wander over the stars. Her mood was a pensive kind of mood, brought on by too much drink and too many joints gone straight to her head. It was a mood that lent itself to quick and rash decisions, so it was but a matter of time until one broke through the fog in her brain and made itself shine brighter than the others.
“I’m thinking about going to Carterhaugh,” she mumbled. Three heads — one ginger, one brown, one black with purple streaks — rose beside her, tilting and blinking abnormally relaxed eyes at her. Greer, Shona and Bree, respectively her cousin, best friend and best friend’s best friend, sat up. Janet focused her stare on the white face of the moon and continued, slurring: “If things keep going the way they’re going. ’S not as if pa does anything with it, he’s only gone there thrice in his life. I can spend Saturday cleaning up the place and ask Ian to cart my stuff over in his truck, and then I’ll camp there and install some wireless.”
“But Carterhaugh’s a dump!” Bree said, in a mellow-yet-scandalised tone. “It’s been abandoned for years. ’S got no ’lectricity or running water or heating, and you don’t know who hangs out ’round there.”
“Vagrants,” Shona helpfully supplied. “Those woods are filled with vagrants. Vagrants and rapists.”
“And fairies,” Greer added. Three heads spun in her direction, but she held steady, or at least didn’t start swaying more than she was already. Greer was a big believer in the supernatural. Some of her obsession she’d come by honestly — her mother was highly superstitious, the sort of person who left saucers with milk outside the door after dark — but most of it was the pre- packaged sort of mysticism that people contracted when they spent too much time watching obscure TV shows and listening to Enya. Greer did plenty of both. “My mum says fairy magic is strong there.”
“Vagrant rapist fairies,” Shona declared, refusing to be outdone. She gave Janet a look. “Don’t go. Seriously.”
“Gotta,” Janet garbled back. She liked the idea more and more now that she’d had time to turn it over in her head. True, the last time she’d gone to Carterhaugh she’d been a small girl, and the woods had terrified her, and the lonely building lost amidst the trees hadn’t struck her as homely. Not exactly a dump, like Bree said, but she knew she’d need to put in work to make it comfortable. Still, it beat her current living situation. “I can get to the money Auntie Fiona left me now that I’m eighteen. I’ll use it to fix up the place. ’Sides, it beats staying with da, ’specially now that he’s drinking again.”
The other girls made sympathetic noises. They knew the situation. Her father’s vices weren’t the same as theirs. Theirs consisted of a few bottles a week, shared amongst the four of them, plus weed if they could get it. Just a young group of friends, having fun. Her father’s were the kind that consumed him whole, and left him useless for days. He’d been that way since Janet’s mother had walked out on them, and although she loved him, she could sense that he was reaching his breaking point. Which meant she needed to get out of the house before he broke her.
“I always thought your mum had something fae in her herself,” Greer offered, after a patch of silence. “She’s got incredible skin for her age, and she always looked like she took care of herself. So pardon me for saying, but small wonder she left him for someone else. I mean, your
dad, I guess he might have been good looking when they married, but he’s really let himself go since then. And he isn’t exactly rich, either,” she added, with the fickle pragmatism that could only be achieved by people who were very much in contact with their chakras.
“She didn’t leave for someone else,” Janet replied quietly. “Not that we know of, anyway. She just up and left.”
Greer was right, though. Her mother was very much like a fairy. She was at least as treacherous.
****************************
It was Saturday.
Janet struck blindly at her alarm clock, casting it off the bedside table, and wrapped a blanket around her head. She came close to falling asleep again, but then an errant thought made its way to her brain, and she remembered. Saturday. She was supposed to get up early, or early for a weekend, to get to Carterhaugh before midday. The plan might have wormed its way into her mind while it was altered, but sobriety hadn’t made it seem any sillier, and Janet was the type of person who stuck to her resolutions.
Yawning, she dragged herself out of bed, and stumbled through the hallway until she arrived at the shower. The water kept her from nodding off, and minutes later she was as awake as anyone could be at that ungodly hour. There was no need to pretty herself up, as she would spend the day cutting bramble and shovelling dirt, so she threw on some old clothes, used a green ribbon to tie her hair in a practical knot, and headed downstairs.
The first thing to hit her was, as always, the smell. It seemed to never go away, no matter how long or how often she opened the windows. Even the incense sticks Greer had lent her failed to overpower it. It was the smell of a body that had gone unwashed for days, and humidity and mould and rot, and the wine that her father had spilled on the carpet last week, and other things that Janet didn’t bother to identify. Breathing through her mouth, she padded into the living room.
She saw the bulky form of her father strewn over the couch. A line of dried spittle ran from the corner of his mouth, and the floor around him was littered with broken glass. Janet heaved a sigh.
“Da,” she called softly. When he didn’t react she called again, louder, and shook him. A deep rumble came from his belly, and his chest rose and sank like a mountain shaken by an earthquake. Janet took a step back, wary and ashamed of it. The tension that took hold of her whenever she was near him felt like proof that the world was working wrong. He was her father. She shouldn’t fear him — and she didn’t, really. She just feared what the drink did to his head. “You broke another bottle, and I’m not cleaning up after you this time.”
His rheumy eyes opened and focused on her face. His mouth formed a rare smile.
“Mabel?”
Janet swallowed. Her greatest fear, that he would wake and be in one of his darker moods, seemed small and unimportant all of a sudden. He sounded so much like a hopeful child that it was hard to summon the will to correct him. Her eyes went, unwillingly, away from him and to the mantelpiece. It was stacked with empty bottles, but also framed pictures. Pictures of a dead world, a happier world. A world where the only alcohol her father ever touched was a pint on New Year’s Eve, where he and Ian still spoke to each other, where her mother wasn’t gone.
She looked away and took a deep, laboured breath.
“No, it’s Janie. Mum’s not here.” A familiar resentment filled her as she said it, and heartache followed suit. Of course her mother wasn’t there. Her mother wasn’t anywhere that anyone knew of. Janet had attempted to track her down throughout the past year, fruitlessly. Mabel Reed had no family, and her friends were as much at a loss as everyone else. Her Facebook profile hadn’t been updated since January. She might have been a collective hallucination, for all the tracks she had left behind. “She’s gone, you know that. Now get up, you need to shower. It reeks in here.”
Her father kept staring at her, his mind lost in some other realm. It was difficult to tell whether he had understood a word. Janet shook her head to herself, grabbed his slippers and pulled them over his feet, so that he wouldn’t cut himself on the shards on the floor. Then, with great effort, she lifted him into a sitting position and coaxed him into walking. She stayed a step behind him as he hobbled upstairs, prepared to catch him if he lost his balance, and pushed him under the shower fully clothed. What he had on could do with a wash, too.
“I’m leaving clean clothes over here. Don’t come down, I’ll be right back!” she warned, and closed the door on him. Against her better judgement, she swept up the glass in the living room after all, and threw it out along with the bottles — the empty ones and the full ones. He would throw a fit about that, as he had the last time she’d done it, the time that had made her decide that she needed to get out of the house as soon as she was able. Janet didn’t care, though. Until she left, she’d keep doing her part to keep temptation out of his way.
Until she left. Now that the prospect loomed, all rational and tangible and affordable, she felt guilt eat at her. Everyone else was gone already. Her mother. Ian — handsome, regal Ian, who took after their mother the same way she took after their father, who had a great sense of duty but an even greater dislike for weakness. He hadn’t been able to stand the sight of what their father had let himself become. They’d had an argument, and after that he had called her, and told her that the old fool could drive himself to his meetings from then on. As far as Janet knew, the two men hadn’t spoken to each other ever since. She had tried to talk to her brother, convince him to bury the hatchet, but she’d always had a hard time speaking to him. Ian intimidated her, especially when she was telling him off.
If she left too, what would happen to her father? He’d go on drinking and he’d go on withering, and with nobody around to prod him away from the couch and the telly, he’d fall apart. The
house itself had already started to do the same over the past year. Realistically, Janet knew that the reason was that no one had done any fixing up or repainting in all that time, but in her soul she felt it was just another symptom of her mother’s absence. Things hadn’t been perfect when she was there, but they had been good, and bright, and optimistic. Her departure had shattered that illusion.
She threw bread in the toaster and waited for it to spring out, still feeling troubled. She’d have to tell her father that she was going, wouldn’t she? Although come to think about it, he might not even notice. He barely seemed to know who she was thirty percent of the time, and confused her with her mother another fifty. But still, it would be better if she did give him some kind of warning. It would be up to him whether he understood or accepted it.
She was startled by the noise of footsteps thundering down the stairs. Her father hadn’t heeded her warning to not come down; she stood paralyzed for a second, fearing that he’d fall and break his neck, but as luck would have it, he came into the kitchen a moment later, unhurt, dry and dressed. In a bathrobe, true, but she would still call it an achievement. Janet bit her tongue and pulled out a chair for him. He sat, heavily, and she placed a buttered slice of toast in front of his nose. He stared at it as if he had never seen one in his life.
She figured it was as good a time as any to break the news.
“I’m going to Carterhaugh,” she said. “And after I clean it up, I’m staying there.”
“There’s bad sorts there,” he mumbled, without taking his eyes off the toast. She was caught off- guard by the topical answer, almost as much she was by his lack of reaction. Perhaps the part where she was moving out hadn’t sunk in yet, though. She passed him a pot of jam and waited to see if he’d say anything else, but he didn’t. He just began staring at the jam instead.
“I’ll come by every weekend to see how you are doing, and bring groceries and things,” she added. He swallowed, and looked at her directly at last. His lips moved, soundlessly, but then came the whisper:
“I love you, Janie.”
“And I love you, da. Always will.” But there was loving someone, and then there was being someone’s maid, caretaker and sanity-minder, every hour of every day of every week. Janet had been shouldering that burden, because she refused to pull an Ian and wash her hands of the situation as if it had nothing to do with her. She had been able to handle it, too, while it looked like her father was improving. Lately, however, he’d taken a sharp turn for the worse, towards anger and violence. Much as it pained her, he wasn’t safe to be around anymore. Not when she didn’t know how far his downward spiral would take him.
“’m sorry.” His eyes were wet now, and her heart broke, bit by bit. “Sorry I made her leave.”
“You didn’t make her leave.” She reached for his hands and held them, intensely enough to mask that her own were shaking. They’d gone over that hill so many times, and yet they kept coming back to it, and he would never believe her even though she was right. “Mum left because she’s a selfish cow. If you’d done anything, she’d at least have kept talking to Ian and me, but no. Nothing. She didn’t even say goodbye! A note on the table ain’t a goodbye! So it beats me why you think you were the problem.”
His shoulders shook with grief, and suddenly Janet thought she might know how Ian had felt when he still visited, why he’d kept his head turned most of the time. It wasn’t her father’s weakness that was hard to look at. It was his pain, made a hundred times more uncomfortable by the fact that she had no way of easing it. Just the look on his face was enough to compel her to run out of the room and to the end of the lane, before the cloud of depression that hung around him at all times found some way to swallow her too.
“I think I’m going,” she said. “I’ll still be back, but late, so don’t wait up. And eat your toast.”
She left him staring mournfully at the table, collected a shovel and pruning scissors from the tool shed outside, and set off, with a heavy heart and a troubled mind, towards Carterhaugh.
