I got a chameleon spell.
A witch from East Grinstead made it for me. She was very friendly; her name is Tabby. She lives in this bungalow off the A22, with furniture for all different sizes: little chairs for imps and big ones for me, which I thought was really nice of her. She said, “How can I help you today?” and I said, “I don’t want people to see me,” and she tutted and said, “Invisibility isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’ll be lonely if you’re invisible, and that’s the longest way to a death that I know. How about more like a fashion rethink?” So she made me this chameleon spell, and now people see me, but not the real me. And that’s lonely sometimes. But lots of times it’s the best thing that ever happened.
I used to work at the Dartford Crossing–my whole clan; we try to keep the traditions alive, living under bridges and stuff. There’s lots of different clans of troll; mine is the big kind. I got paid twelve pounds a night to scare the bad drivers–the ones who cut up the others or pushed in at the queues, because there’s always queues at the Dartford Crossing. We’d hide under the bridge and then when they came along, the men in white vans and the speeding guys in little red sports cars, we’d leap out and we’d go “RAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!” and I think it was a public service we were doing. It was a living, at least.
But then, when there was really bad congestion, all the traffic would stop and we’d hide in the service tunnels–because there’s the bridge at Dartford, and there’s the tunnel. And I liked the bridge, but you know how it is, people get worried by trolls leaping out of the toll booths and that–but sometimes the traffic would get so bad that all the cars would turn off their engines and just sit there, windows open because it was hot. And there were these families, with kids in the back shouting. The mums would give their kids food to make them stop talking, and the smell was… It was…
My clan said it wasn’t right to be interested in food, that a baked rat served on tyre rubber was all a sensible troll needed for good living. But I’ve got this good sense of smell. And the kids, they were eating… chocolate and crisps and apples and jam sandwiches, and jam-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, and sometimes there’d be salsa with the crisps, and Scotch eggs and pork pies, and hummus! Hummus with oil and hummus with chickpeas or onion, lemon and coriander, cumin on top, and these smells… There came a time when I couldn’t eat rat any more. I just wanted… I wanted something more.
My clan said that getting the chameleon spell, trying to find a way to live with humans, learn how they lived, that was selling out. Betraying who I was, giving up my family, my traditions, my identity and everything. That I was becoming something else–something not wanted by anyone or anything, stuck in the middle.
They were wrong.
I was becoming me.