Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Free Page B

exactly has all this traveling taken you, Tara?”
    “Goodness! All over.”
    “Really? All over?”
    She nodded solemnly. “Pretty much, yes.”
    “Tara already told us some of it, Peter,” said Dell. “Rome. Athens. Jerusalem. Tokyo. What was that place in South America?”
    “Lima. In Peru.”
    “Really? Traveling all this time? Constant traveling?”
    “Pretty much, yes.”
    “Always moving?”
    “Well,” Tara said. “I might have settled here or there for a few months, but always with a view to moving on.”
    Peter nodded, but he was only pretending to understand. He scrutinized his sister’s clothes. She wore threadbare jeans with hugebell-bottoms, of a kind that had strayed way out of fashion when he was a young man and had probably come back in again. She wore a grubby dress over the top of them and long strings of beads. A woolen cardigan was a couple of sizes too big for her, the arms of which reached to the tips of her fingers but failed to hide her dirty fingernails.
    Peter couldn’t help himself. “You look like you could do with a bath.”
    “Steady on,” said Dell.
    “But Tara,” Peter said. “No word? Not even a postcard? No good-bye, no announcement, no—”
    “I know,” said Tara. “It’s unforgivable.”
    “Do you know what you put these two through? What you put us all through?”
    “Before you came, I said to Mum and Dad that I will understand it if you hate me.”
    “We don’t hate you,” Dell said. “No one hates you.”
    “But—” Peter tried.
    Dell cut him short. “Peter. I know there’s a lot to get into. But I won’t have you say anything to scare her away again. Okay? I won’t have it.”
    “I’m not going away again,” Tara said.
    Peter ran his hands through his close-cropped hair.
    “What about you?” Tara said. “Tell me about your life.”
    “My life?” Peter said. “My life?”
    “Mum says you have children.”
    “Get the photos, Dell. Get them,” said Mary, too quickly.
    “Tell me yourself,” said Tara. “I want to hear everything.”
    Peter sighed. “I married a lovely girl I met at university. Genevieve. We’ve got three girls and a boy.”
    “Tell me their names!”
    “Well, my eldest is fifteen going on twenty and her name is Zoe and—”
    “That’s a lovely name.”
    “And then came Jack, he’s thirteen. Running wild. Then a bit of a gap because we weren’t … well, we did, and we had Amber, who is seven, and Josie, who is five.”
    “Amber has webbed fingers,” Mary said.
    “Mum, please.”
    “Small thing,” Tara said, smiling. “A very small thing.” Then her smile dropped for the first time. “I’m sorry I missed it all. I really am.” Suddenly Tara vented a huge sob. She squeezed her eyes shut and her lip trembled. She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve and sniffed. “I’m sorry I missed it all. They sound so wonderful. Are they like you?”
    “God help them if they are.”
    “The boy is the spit,” Dell said helpfully. “The girls take more after their mother.”
    There was a silence. Dell had a photograph album that he handed to Tara. “These are all old. It’s all digital now, isn’t it? Things change so fast.”
    Tara studied the photographs. “But they do look like you!”
    Dell turned to Tara. “Zoe even looks a bit like you.”
    “She’s almost the same age as you were when you left,” Peter said. He looked at Mary. She shook her head at him in fierce warning.
    “Will I get to meet them?” Tara said.
    “Of course. If you want to.”
    She held up the photo album. “Where was this photo taken?”
    “Oh, that one’s in Greece. Before we had the kids. You said you were in Athens, didn’t you?”
    “Not for long. Couldn’t get out quick enough.”
    “So where were you in Greece?”
    “Crete. Some of the islands.”
    “Really? Genevieve and I lived for a whole year in Crete. Were you ever in Mytilini while you were on Crete?”
    “Yes, one or two nights I think. But I just