Seventeen

I walked strong and staunch as I could and soon I was directly opposite the Fairy Girl, and the old man stood up and seemed to unfold to his full height and as if by magic he looked younger.

The river was narrower there and shallow, running fast over flat golden-brown river stones all polished smooth and worn looking, but the water was not even knee deep by the looks of it. We were only ten paces separate and I loosened my jacket as the man called me over. He had a pot boiling over a wood fire in a natural pit with damp logs round it and I could smell wood smoke and coffee and the last hints of sweet moist tobacco. The Fairy Girl just glided from behind him and tiptoed into the water, going stone to stone to halfway then outreached her hand and long slender arm. Her arm just seemed to reach right across the water and she smiled at me. ‘Stay on the stones, the water’s deeper than it looks,’ she said. Her voice was soft and perfect and the water didn’t seem to go round her ankles but through them as if by magic.

I took her hand and an electric charge ran through her to me and she guided me to the other bank, stepping around me and then behind me lightly, and putting her hand on my arm she guided me to the man and I hadn’t seen whiteness like her skin except on statues. Her skin was so perfectly delicate and her eyes so lighted I could hardly breathe and couldn’t look away and couldn’t look straight at her either.

‘You’re lost.’ The man offered me an old enamelled mug of black coffee and I took it even though coffee wasn’t my drink and he knew I was lost because he was a wizard and he had that wild and weathered look wizards have. His hair was straggly and grey and long and his nose thin. Maybe he wasn’t so old but time hadn’t written kindly on his features and his lines were deep, but he had a big smile.

‘I’ve been slaying boar.’ I tried to sound like it was no big deal and something I did every day but knew I sounded stupid as soon as I heard the words leave my mouth and the fairy girl laughed gently as she stroked the man’s grey curly hair and I could see it was black once. He looked past me and all around. ‘Really? Did you leave him on the hill?’ and the girl smiled kindly and nudged him to be silent and spare me.

She whispered at me ‘You’re the hunter …’ She looked happy enough in her face but there was a sadness over her and I could see it in her eyes and wanted to look deeper but I had to look away because it isn’t polite to stare and not safe because she was a being from another world and staring at her might strike me down.

‘Slaying boar …’ the man repeated back at me in a similar voice I had used and he laughed like she laughed, gently and not like they were mocking me, so I wasn’t offended and I nodded.

The girl danced a pirouette like a kid more than a ballerina, ‘And now … you’re lost?’

I nodded. ‘And now I’m lost.’ All I could do was sigh it off and be honest and I was looking dumb as a post and the girl was lovely as mist over a meadow in the morning.

She said, ‘But now you are found! And we will keep you … safe.’

The Wizard stepped closer to me and helped me out of my jacket, saying it would dry better on the rocks, and with a stick he rolled some more wood on the fire so its flames licked up smoky despite the dampness of the timber. All around the fire, hemming it on every side, were more small logs, which is a woodsman’s trick to dry out damp wood before you feed it to the fire. In the wilderness fire is life, the Woodsman’s Bible tells you so.

The flames were too hot to get real close to and my jacket was steaming off its dampness in seconds but I got as close as I could and could feel the heat getting into my knees and ankles and chasing out the gripping cold. That kind of cold gets you really deep and makes you feel old, but fire is a miracle of healing.

‘Sit …’ said the Fairy Girl and I sat straight away on a rock by the fire where her long finger pointed and it was like a spell was upon me and she knelt and undid my boots and soon I had no jacket and no boots or socks on and she had half stripped me and I had let her and the spell meant I couldn’t resist her and she was graceful and beautiful and as lithe as a sliver of moonlight. I saw she wasn’t wearing a bra and tried to catch a glimpse of her boobs and not to at the same time because the Book of Cool tells us you should never be caught trying to see a woman’s boobs, and she saw me and smiled, turning her head away and her big watery eyes down and didn’t cover herself and I didn’t turn to stone or fall down dead, which could have happened had she not been so merciful.

The Wizard smiled kindly. ‘Have you panned before?’ He picked up a battered silver metal bowl, which from a distance had gleamed like silver dollars but close up was dulled and dented and bruised, and went to the waters edge with it and crouched. I wasn’t sure what he meant at first but understood he had changed the subject to save the girl from my clumsy perving and I was ashamed as he scooped up sand and gravel from the river bed and swirled it with water in the pan. He knelt and studied it then swirled again in smooth practised circles so the water and the lighter sand and stones slopped gently over its lip, and the fairy girl tiptoed around the flat stones. ‘For gold … Panned for gold? Marvellous stuff, so pretty,’ The Wizard said.

He had my interest. ‘Do you find much?’

He looked at the girl then back to me. ‘No. None! Never! Not a bloody spec! But it’s an optimistic way to spend a day out by the river.’

‘Why don’t you fish? That’s an optimistic way to spend a day by the river too,’ I said.

‘True. Perhaps. Do you fish?’

‘Sometimes.’

The girl spun towards me. ‘Are you as good at fishing as you are at slaying boar?’

‘Don’t tease him … come and see,’ he said, and I went with him along the river bank to a shaded bend and with his hand and silent gestures he slowed me and told me to go slow and quiet, then he pulled me by the arm into a crouch beside him and pointed into the water where it was running faster and clear and green right under overhanging bushes whose roots were poking out of the bank where the river was eroding the earth. At first I saw just water burbling and noisy and pure and cold but then I saw in the reeds under the bank a beautiful fish, long and stripy like a tiger, and muscular and thick so it looked like a single long muscle, all power, all primal and earthy and ready as a coiled spring and so still in the fast waters.

‘You see Mr Trout?’ he whispered and I nodded and hardly breathed and I had never seen a fish like this fish and he seemed to be made of water and diamonds and rubies and pearls, and the Wizard edged forward slowly and entered the water downstream of the fish without seeming to move or disturb the surface so it didn’t even ripple as much as it would if a single raindrop fell onto it, and he crept into the stream and reached down, slow, moving with the soft current and his eyes unblinking, and came to the trout from the rear. The great fish was pointing upstream into the current and holding in one spot with barely a pulse of its tail and had no idea the wizard was behind him because all its attention and focus was forward and all its hopes and optimism was forward – and whoosh! Quick as a cat the wizard stood up holding a fish that was longer and thicker than his forearm and all its world was changed and never in a million years did it see coming or imagine this event, and that’s how death comes more often than not.

He came to me with it like it was precious and fragile. ‘Rainbow trout.’ He smiled and carried the fish with me towards the girl, who swooned over it.

The great freshwater fish was beyond beautiful. It shimmered with all the colours I could name and some I can’t describe and it was perfect. Every scale was carved from pearls and pure paua and shimmered electric and neon and rainbow upon rainbow. It gaped and looked shocked and I could hear it calling out in panic and I wanted to put it back in the water.

I had never fished, in truth and it wasn’t something I got to do in the city but never could admit it and I had never seen a fish look as beautiful and alive and perfect.

The Wizard smiled, holding him towards my eyes. ‘Perfect.’

I nodded.

‘She is,’ the girl whispered. ‘Praise the perfect lady fish!’

Then the Wizard crouched and lay the fish on a flat river stone and killed it with a single sharp blow with a stick and I was shocked by the power and precision of that blow so I stepped back a pace. Maybe I jumped a little and I don’t know if the girl gasped or I did but for sure one of us gasped and maybe it was both of us and I felt something inside me jump with horror and recoil and protest, for it was a terrible deed and so unexpected that I was shocked and hurt and grabbed the fairy’s hand in mine or maybe she grabbed me.

The Wizard held the fish before my eyes again and I saw its colour going away and its electricity fade until it was no more than a shadow of dirty muddy brown. The day darkened.

I had seen death in the Hanged Man and in Sun the Korean and seen its shadow move in the streets and follow me but I never seen life end so deliberately before me and never saw all its hope and potential and energy fade so fast.

The Wizard said, ‘We will eat him for lunch … but you see pup, when you pan you hope for gold and wealth and new clothes for the ball, but when you fish, if you are lucky and favoured, it ends in death … and there is no good death. I hope, I really really hope, you are hungry.’

But he knew I wasn’t hungry enough to warrant the killing and then I was ashamed.

‘It will feel worse when you slay the boar, I hope,’ the man said. ‘It should. The boar will run, it will fight, it will be afraid and then angry, and eventually when it’s exhausted and worn down it will scream and make its stand, and it will be overwhelmed and torn and then it will be spiked, screaming, panting, slayed, but not bowed. It will not be a quick or kind or honourable end. There won’t be glory. So, yes boy, if you’re a good person you will feel worse.’

‘Feel much worse, my dear. Much worse,’ the Fairy Girl echoed.

I already felt worse.

The fish tasted better than any fish I ever ate and I could actually taste its life on my tongue and although we ate only small it seemed to fill me up because maybe its life set my senses alive. The fish meat tasted like summer and honey and pure and clean and lean and we ate without words, but I reckon we all thought the same thing and felt guilty because of it. We ate the all of it, everything, every scrap, and sucked and licked our fingers then the tiny bits left over and the skin and bones were thrown into the river and flowed away into vanishing like the fish had never even existed and it was too quickly gone and I said to myself, A life, any life, should leave more of a mark. I also knew life should be remembered, so I promised the fish I would remember him and I do.

The Fairy Girl washed her hands in the river and rinsed her mouth, then kissed the Wizard on the mouth and me on the cheek and I was sure with the touch of her lips that if I never saw another girl I had seen the perfect woman and felt her perfect lips on my imperfect skin.

Her hair flowed long and copper red and blonde depending on how the light caught it and her eyes were blue and green and sparkled like the river stones on the bottom of the stream. She wasn’t so much older than me I reckoned. Old enough to be a woman but not so past me in years I couldn’t catch her up one day and make her my own. I watched her move and I was looking at a magical and mystical being and I swear her feet didn’t even touch the ground when she walked and there was something serene about her that made me feel content and peaceful and safe.

The Wizard smiled and his hand went onto my back in a fatherly way like I hadn’t felt in a long time and he passed me my jacket as rain started to fall and the mist of the forest crept down over the river.

I followed them back from the river and along a path that rose to higher ground and into a shallow cave where we sat and watched the mistifying of the day. He said the rain would pass soon and he would get me back to a path that would take me home. He didn’t ask me about myself and he didn’t say much about anything else, but I seem to recall that I said a lot about everything and most of it was just blabber and when you’re in love you do that kind of thing and I was very in love and I wanted to ask the Fairy Girl her name but it didn’t seem right and I didn’t want to be too forward like some kind of Romeo. The Book of Cool says be patient.

With the rain and mist the air temperature fell quick but the Wizard had brought logs and embers and the Fairy Girl brought kindling from the river fire and in seconds we had another fire to sit by right in the mouth of the cave. The smell of pure fresh woodsmoke mingled with the damp earth smells and I could smell everything perfectly and like I was smelling it for the first time as it interwove with the perfect scent of the girl’s skin and hair. There is something primitive and satisfying and ancient about sitting sheltered and watching rain fall, especially when it falls on a river and you can see how cold the world is but you have a warm fire. Fire and water and rain and mist and smoke are the ancient perfect things that take your mind from anything else and just hypnotise you and keep you locked right there in the very moment of their constant new creation and I knew it before I knew it. I sat there with a wise old wizard and a beautiful young fairy woman and the fire and the shelter and couldn’t figure why people had ever stopped living in caves.

I had two cigarettes stashed in a plastic bag wrapped up in a rubber band and we shared them both in the best smoke anyone ever had. We told funny stories and laughed as we picked our way through a box of raisins I found in another pocket and we were like kings and queens.

And then I saw my first wild, living, breathing wild pig.

It passed through the trees just across from our shelter and it was magical like everything else there that day. He was huge and powerful, so much more than I expected, but low to the ground and with compacted muscle and tusks with yellow eyes and thick black hair. The girl held her finger to her lips as I caught my breath and she whispered in my ear like a serpent, ‘Seeeee him! Seeeee what you have come to kill, boarssssslayer … The thrill of the hunt is the chase not the kill. The chase is life and all the exccccitement of life and all the fun and energy of life. The kill is the end of life, sadness, colourless, the end of the heartbeat. The heartbeat is the most beautiful sound in all the world, the sound of the world itself. A heartbeat …’ And the pig was gone back into the mist and trees, beautiful and primal and masculine and dumb and simple and I wouldn’t want to see it killed and wouldn’t kill it and wouldn’t eat it neither and I swore a solemn oath. It was too real and alive and too important and ancient and pure.

When the rain stopped we headed up a path I would never have seen if I was alone and the Wizard and the Fairy Girl both put on long thick woollen jumpers and she tied her hair up and walked ahead stroking the bushes as she went. Her jumper reached the hem of her dress midway down her thighs so it looked like she wore no dress at all. Her thighs were strong and perfectly shaped and her calves were like teardrops and she wore army-style combat boots only half laced up.

I was expecting a long and hard journey like the one that had got me to the river, but we were back on the path real quick because I had walked circles and figure eights in my confusion and lost isn’t about distance and you can be lost in your favourite armchair in your own front room and I learned that later and lost isn’t about place but time and mind and I learned that later too.

We came around a tight bend and jammed into the trees was Leon’s truck and close off we heard voices and dogs and I said this is my friend’s truck and I offered them a ride home but the Wizard said no and he shook my hand and left me there. I sat on the tailgate of the truck like a half-drowned Buddha and before she vanished into the trees the Fairy Girl turned and smiled and she blew me a kiss and the Wizard laughed and walked ahead.

When no one could see I reached up and caught that kiss and she turned again and caught me in the act and her features were perfect and hair red and waves of bronze and her legs bare and her dress pressed down under the woolly sweater and her boots all muddy and she looked cold and red-cheeked and knock-kneed and perfectly pure and she smiled, saying, ‘My name’s Melody … Melody Grace, by the way …’ And I shivered at the perfection of it. Melody Grace. Melody Grace happens to be my favourite perfect lady’s name and it was spring rain and summer sun and winter snow and everything perfect and right and magical in the whole wide universe and all the bells of all the world chimed her name and she was gone like mist into the forest and then I breathed.

*

Leon and Johnny were back shortly after with the dogs yapping and a big boar roped on Johnny’s back with its mouth held open with a stick and its head up over Johnny’s like an ancient war helmet. Johnny was sweating and bent under its weight and it was one hell of a pig but only half the size of the beast I had seen. Its throat was a torn wide slash of flesh and blood and its tusks white and mottled yellow and its eyes stared black and red and its face was messed-up raw.

Leon had Johnny’s backpack worn on his chest and he dumped it before helping unload the boar, then straight away he locked up his short-barrelled rifle in the truck and they looked me over and in that way experienced woodsmen know. They knew straight off I had got lost and started talking about me like I was invisible and they mocked people for getting lost and they were mocking townies as if being from a town was a crime, and even the dogs ignored me.

The hunters dried down the dogs with old beach towels and checked them two or three times for wounds but they were all good and they put the dogs in their cages, then they loaded the pig on top of the dog cages and lashed it down and got back in the truck and still they never spoke to me and I just slid in beside Johnny.

Leon tapped a magic tune on the steering wheel which he always did to ensure a first-time start and turned the key in the ignition one click, waited for the coil light to go out and tapped the tune again then turned it another click and the truck rumbled into life as the rain started to drift down again and the boys started laughing but I said nothing. We lit cigarettes before we bounced back down the track. I was wet and cold and starting to feel the tiredness and hunger so I leaned into Johnny and wedged myself between him and the door and footwell.

It was less than a mile when we passed the Wizard and Melody Grace and I strained to see her and my heart leapt when she came into view so I actually felt it in my chest and I wasn’t expecting that and had never had it before. They stepped aside to let the truck pass and Johnny looked to the couple who looked away.

‘They were at the river,’ I said and wished I hadn’t straight away.

‘What river?’ Johnny studied me hard. ‘There’s no river for about twenty miles, no way you could’ve walked to the river and back today!’

That sealed it for me. Magic had happened. ‘There was a river.’

‘Ain’t a river … So, they your friends?’ Johnny grinned at me. ‘Buddies?’

I shrugged. ‘Just people.’

Johnny laughed. ‘You keeping secrets?’

‘No …’

‘That’s Dirty Dick Dave and Twenty,’ Leon said and he had slowed down as we approached so we kept pace with them a while. When she realised we were looking Melody Grace dropped her head even more and I knew the couple were uncomfortable being shadowed by the truck and I would have been too.

‘What kind of names are they?’ Johnny asked.

‘Dirty Dick Dave and the Twenty Dollar Whore,’ Leon whispered like they might hear him and waved grudgingly as we crept past, but neither the Wizard nor Melody Grace waved back.

‘So … what kind of names are they?’ Johnny asked again.

‘Accurate adjectives buddy … Dirty Dick Dave will put his dick in anything and fuck anything with a pulse however filthy, so his dick is a miracle of fucking science just by staying attached to his scrawny body, and Twenty will do anything with anyone for twenty bucks. She’s a boat’s girl mate. Do the whole crew in a night. She is pure oxygen to lonely desperate and pitifully impoverished men.… Especially fishermen. Twenty bucks and you can spit roast her.’

I was sick. He was a liar and it turned me mad.

Johnny said, ‘Have we got twenty bucks?’

I could feel Leon’s words distorting the air and I wanted to kill him right there and then and I was a bomb about to blow and was sick right in my stomach, not because she might be that thing he said but because someone was saying it who couldn’t see she was a fairy girl and I was trying to get my knife and stab him right in the neck and filthy mouth but I couldn’t get it because I was too jammed tight between the door and Johnny, so I just wriggled and squirmed.

Leon said, ‘I’m hungry and tired and I’m not fucking nothing that cheap and neither are you two! Your cock’ll fall off! I know it … Mine will. We’re not Dirty Dick and our dicks will not survive. Heard it happened to a fella a few years ago after a trip to Thailand. His name was Phil, now they call him Phillis. Silly-Phillis …’

I couldn’t find words and couldn’t get my knife but there were tears running down my face and they were for rage and sadness that someone could say such things and even if she was the Twenty Dollar Whore I didn’t care and I didn’t care one bit and I would kill anyone for her and even myself.

I choked like something was in my throat, so Johnny looked at me and studied me a bit and seeing something was wrong he frowned and brought his face close. Sensing my trembles and seeing my eyes and cheeks wet with crying he wiped my face without speaking and then I got my hand on my knife and straight away his arm went across mine and he turned to Leon. ‘Just fucking drive,’ he said. ‘And shut up.’

Leon didn’t know nothing about what was happening beside him but he drove on faster, revving the truck and blasting the horn.

Johnny didn’t let me go for a good while, he just whispered in my ear to be ‘shhh now, shhh …’ like I was a horse and he wiped my face more.

In my soul or my gut something was deeply wounded and I loved Melody Grace even more than before like she was an injured bird and my dad always fixed up injured birds and made them well and sent them back to fly again and I didn’t understand how Leon could be so wrong and mean and there was a knot inside me and I didn’t even want to look at him or breathe the same air as him and I sat with my forehead against the window waiting to get home.

A couple of times Leon spoke to me but Johnny always took the question like I was a mute and eventually he told him I was asleep and I closed my eyes to help the deception and Johnny kept his hand on me and I didn’t make no sounds.

Halfway back home we pulled into a forest layby to skin and butcher the pig and there were big steel bins in the layby just for that purpose because it was a hunters’ route and it’s no good burying guts because Johnny said nothing ever gets buried and stays buried. Johnny said the bits we didn’t want would go in the bins and get collected and even the skin would be minced and fed to cage-reared pigs, the sort people buy as bacon. I didn’t like the idea of cannibalistic pigs and my face must have given up my doubts but Johnny was certain and swore it and said the heart and brains and liver and kidney would go to the dogs and we would eat the rest.

As the boar was prepared and reduced to steaks and joints and ruined into parcels of meat I kept looking up the road in case Melody Grace came walking past, and Johnny whispered to me that she would be walking a good hour unless they had a car hidden up there.

He put his arm around my shoulder like a big brother would if I had one and he sighed and whispered, ‘You like her eh? So she’s a whore, so what? She’s still human, still a woman, still got a heart beating in her chest. If you like her you like her. It ain’t no perfect world. I once liked a chick who was a vegetarian. How fucking sick is that?’ He held up the blooded skinning knife. ‘And don’t be so sore with Leon. He was only talking shit. He liked a girl once and she didn’t like him back so he says shit and sometimes he doesn’t like the fairer sex. Makes him feel better to say mean shit. Like he ain’t missing nothing.’ And he took my knife from its sheath as he spoke as easy as taking a lollipop off a toddler and slipped it in his belt. ‘Don’t blame him for it.’

But I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t like her, like was too weak a word, I was in love, proper love, and it was a curse for sure and all the alarm bells were sounding in all my body because woman love is a dangerous thing and not something anyone wants because it brings pain you can’t control and it’s a one-way ticket to an unknown country full of earthquakes and volcanoes and woe and you walk that Romeo walk all alone right into the mouth of grief and hell and destitution and loss itself, and I heard grown men say so. Leon had already forgotten Melody Grace and he and Johnny were talking about cooking up the pig for dinner and how best to sear in the taste and I was properly glad of that diversion and we drove home slow.

The temperature was dropping even lower and smelled of snow and Leon reckoned there would be a drop after dark and it would be the last snowfall before spring woke up properly and when he said that stuff he was usually right.

I was dead tired and my gut was twisted tight, so that night I kept my oath not to eat of the pig and I was in bed while boys were eating and talking round the firepit on the front quad. I could smell the pig fat even inside the house and the boys were making a big hoo-ha about the pork and filling their bellies in the dark, which would usually lull me off good but I couldn’t stop thinking of Melody Grace, and I wanted to run into town just in case I might catch a glimpse of her but it was dark and freezing and flurries of snow were starting to build up and look in from the window frames so I lay still and kept warm and planned our wedding and named our children.