Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Free

brow.
    “Yes,” Peter said. “Exactly.”
    “Who is Tara?” said Zoe, their fifteen-year-old daughter.
    “That’s impossible,” Genevieve said. “Isn’t it?”
    “Who is Tara?” asked Amber, the middle daughter.
    “I’ve got to go over there.”
    “Should we all come?”
    “There’s no point in us all going.”
    “Who the heck is Tara?” Amber asked again.
    “Your dad’s sister.”
    “Dad has a sister? I never knew Dad has a sister.”
    “No, we don’t talk about her,” said Peter.
    “Why don’t we talk about her?” asked Josie, the youngest. “I talk about my sisters. All the time.”
    “I have to go,” Peter said. “Is there gas in the car?”
    “Is Dad leaving us on Christmas Day?” Amber said.
    Genevieve got up off the sofa and winced as she stepped barefoot on a Lego brick. “He won’t be gone long.” She followed Peter out into the hallway and waited while he put on his shoes and his coat. “Will you?”
    “No.”
    “Do you want a hug?”
    “Yes. No,” said Peter. “Not right now.”
    There was another slap as an air-gun pellet hit the wall outside.

CHAPTER TWO
    Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear
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    M ARINA W ARNER
    P eter drove to Anstey via Breakback Lane. It wasn’t the direct route. He had an idea that he should call on Richie Franklin and tell him the news, but he knew he wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Couldn’t. It didn’t stop him driving that way.
    The roads were almost deserted, it being Christmas Day. Picked out like lonely ships on an ocean, one or two isolated vehicles passed him along the way, tires hissing on the wet roads. The sky was laden with snow but it fell only in brief flurries, not settling, instantly melting on impact with his windshield, barely enough for him to activate his wipers.
    At the Outwoods he slowed down and turned into the parking area. It was empty and lonely. He had some cigarettes hidden in the glove compartment. This was what passed for contraband in his life now: he’d given up because the girls had been counseled that smoking kills and they cried whenever they saw him spark up a ciggie. But he kept a stale packet hidden for moments like these. He got out of the car and surveyed the bare winter trees grouped around the clearing of the parking area. The trees were golden and gray and somehow asleep, off guard. It was bitterly cold. He tasted a flake of dry tobacco on his tongue and his first drag on the cigarettemade him cough. The cigarette smoke hung like a gray rag in the cold air, and so did the sound of his cough.
    The Outwoods was one of the last remaining pockets of ancient forest from which Charnwood took its name. It nestled at the spot where the three counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire touched, and seemed neither to belong to nor take its character from any of them. It was an eerie place, swinging between sunlight and damp, flaring light and shadow; a venue of twisted trees, its volcanic slopes of ash and granite ruptured by mysterious outcropping crags of the very oldest rocks in Britain.
    He didn’t like it.
    The last time he’d seen Tara was here in the Outwoods. It had been May of that year and they had walked through the woods, and the bluebells at that time had been astonishing. They had sat on the golden lichen-stained rocks and talked about the future.
    Peter flicked his cigarette to the ground half smoked and stamped it into the earth. Then he climbed back in his car.
    Sometime later he parked right outside Richie’s house but left the engine running. It was almost a challenge, inviting someone to come out and ask him what he was doing; but no one came. No one even so much as glanced out the window. Richie’s house was a council property in what might once have been a row of houses tied to a local land owner. Squat, badly built, and grimy little