“Before we begin,” said a voice, “I totally have a question?”
All eyes turned to the speaker. If he’d had the vascular capability, he might have blushed. Peroxide-blond hair on a bone-white face, skinny blue jeans, leather shoes and a tight-fitting white T-shirt all proclaimed the owner, a man of probably no more than twenty-five years old, to be comfortable with his sexuality, even if the rest of the world wasn’t. “So yeah, hi there. I’m just wondering, with this meeting–are we going to change the hours for daylight saving? Only my complexion really takes some looking after and I can’t be having too much sun, if you know what I mean.”
Silence in the hall.
Eyes turned inexorably to Sharon. She rose to her feet. This moment was something she’d been preparing for.
She said, “Uh…”
And stopped. Somehow, in all those hours spent in front of the mirror practising being open-minded and understanding, with help from books carrying titles like Everything I Ever Needed to Know Was Inside Me Already, the rallying cry of “Uh” hadn’t been mentioned.
“… these are issues,” she added hastily, because you couldn’t go wrong with a good “issue” or maybe even a “challenge”, “which we can all address. If anyone has any concerns about the set-up of this group then of course please do say so, and we’ll try to, like, address that.”
It had been going so well.
“Excuse me?” The voice wasn’t loud or aggressive or even particularly projected but there was something in it, an indefinable thickness of sound, that cut through every conversation. The speaker was hard to focus on. There was a sensation of bulk, aided by the fact that the speaker’s chair seemed to be warping under pressure. But as Sharon looked and tried to gain an exact sense of weight or height or skin, or even gender, such information seemed to slip just out of her grasp, like wet soap in a hot bath.
“Excuse me,” he, or maybe she, or perhaps–yes and without wanting to be judgemental–perhaps it said, “May I have another biscuit?”
Several gazes flickered back to Sharon. “What? I mean of course. The biscuits are here for everyone to enjoy. Please, help yourself.”
“Thank you,” he/she/it replied, rising with the majesty of a sunken submarine from beneath raging depths. All eyes watched it go to the bar. All eyes watched it pick up a biscuit with a grace and care that surely came from having fingertips larger than a lion’s paw, and all eyes watched it return to its chair, which groaned under the imposition. It ate and, for a moment, there was an impression of teeth in that not-quite-face, teeth indeed that no wishful thinking could deny.
“Well, I think that’s just the kind of thing we should talk about,” said a voice at last, and Sharon nearly shuddered with relief as she turned to the new speaker. This was a man, mid-fifties, with demarcated strands of mouse-grey hair combed across his spotted, massy skull. He wore a navy-blue suit and a red club tie, complemented by a thick leather belt done up several notches too tight. But his face… Somewhere the gods of grease and the gods of time had drawn up their battle lines, and as their wars had raged the mercenaries of wart and spot had joined the foray, fighting to a standstill entrenched in the bags beneath his eyes, under his wattled chin and all around the remnants of his frayed hairline. At the gaze of the others, he bristled, and with petulant pride he declared, “You don’t see me coming here in a chameleon spell, and a cheap one at that, do you? I may see the appeal of an occasional glamour, the odd protective enchantment, when in more refined social circles. But here, surely, we must by definition wear our true colours!”
“There won’t be nudity?” queried someone. This was a question which Sharon had been hoping to posit herself, and so dismiss before the evening could get out of hand.
“I don’t think we should rush into things…”
“How does this work then?” asked a third.
This time Sharon was ready. She coughed, pushed her chair back, stood up with arms folded in front of her, and said, “Uh, yes, so I guess, uh, I should explain.” She took a deep breath and launched, far too fast, into her prepared speech. “Thank you all for coming to this very first meeting of Magicals Anonymous. I’m pleased to see what a good response we got from the Facebook campaign and on Twitter and I’m sure as the weeks go by we can come to help each other and… and stuff. Here we aim to support and assist each other with all our… our…” the eyes of everyone in the room, so carefully avoided, were beginning to burn into her “… our issues and things, and as this is the first time we’ve met I guess we should say a bit about ourselves and why we’re here. So, yeah. My name’s Sharon…”
“Hello, Sharon,” sang out a cheerful voice, into a silence. “What?” asked the speaker. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?”
“… and I can walk through walls.”