Reluctantly Charmed (17 page)

“The hottest,” the table echoed in unison.

I finished off my glass. Speech over. “I don’t know anything. Don’t look for something that isn’t there.”

We fell into an uncomfortable silence.

“Yeah, I suppose,” Fiona said reluctantly. She smiled. “But, for the record, you do have a nice wardrobe.”

We laughed. The moment had passed, but I felt uneasy. If my best friends were asking these kinds of questions, what else was out there? Was this what people were thinking? Should I be thinking this? Was there something there?

“Oh, you don’t know how lucky you are,” Anne-Marie piped up. “Worrying about being a witch and about your wardrobe. My one-year-old has cried nonstop for twenty-four days. He can’t stop crying. And now I’m going to start crying because I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept; he hasn’t slept. I’ve done everything. I’ve
brought him to the doctor; I’ve bought every rocking machine you can think of. Short of drugging him, I don’t know what to do.” She threw her hands over her face and heavily rested her elbows on the table.

Fiona slowly moved the bottle of wine away from her and we all nodded sympathetically as a few small sobs escaped.

“Did you put a bit of whiskey in his bottle?” Lily offered, followed by an explanation. “Mam said it worked a treat for us.”

The sobbing mother nodded. “Tried it. It gave him the hiccups. He just cried more.”

“What about baby yoga? I’ve heard that’s a great relaxer,” Lily said earnestly.

“Tried it. Yoga, Pilates, massage, swimming classes.”

“TV?” Fiona piped up.

“His best friend is Thomas the Tank Engine. I’ve tried.”

We all studied the table, clueless in the ways of motherhood.

I moved some steak around my plate and sighed.
What can Anne-Marie do to get her baby to sleep through the night?
And then it came to me, a eureka moment. I sat up tall and smiled from ear to ear. “I’ve got it. Problem solved. Did you ever get some fresh lavender and rub it on his sheets, and then take a spoonful of chamomile and sugar, and put it in some warm milk, and then let a few feathers, preferably white ones, hang over his bed to catch the bad dreams? And air out his pajamas in a southwesterly gale. That’ll work. He’ll sleep divinely for you.”

The table got whiplash as all heads spun toward me in a perfect silence. I continued to tuck into my steak.

“Excuse me? Lavender? Southwesterly gale? Feathers?” Lily spat the words at me.

I shrugged. “Yeah,” I said with my mouth half full. “I think Mam told me about it. That stuff really works. He’ll be grand.” I
quickly buried my head in my glass, realizing what I’d just said. Feathers? Southwesterly gale? These words just flew out of me. Where were they coming from? How did I know these things? Even I had to admit I sounded crazy and not just a little bit witchy.

“It’s probably the milk and sugar that does it. I think Mam threw the other things in for good measure.” I tried to sound nonchalant and not mildly freaked out.

“Are you sure you didn’t read it in a magazine article, next to a love spell?” Lily looked nervous and anxiously clawed at her neck.

“No. I’m pretty sure it was Mam.”

I hung my head. How did I know these things? What was going on? And what else did I know? I’d have to watch what I said from here on in.

13

Step Three

We are the laughter left in rooms,

the echoes of your sound,

We are a web of drifting mist

that works its way around,

We are the flowers’ mingled scents

and wind beneath birds’ wings.

We are all that is light and floating

with the calm air as she sings.

Yours is a borrowed world,

an island in our own,

We pull the strings that make you rise

and point you the way home,

We send you thoughts throughout the day,

instinct that guides all that you shall do,

We whisper ideas into your head,

and watch them work on you.

Listen for your fairy name,

you have known it all along,

We know your true path from birth,

and have battled to sing your song,

Do our wishes and take heed, if not,

your money’s lost and your houses they fall,

Remember her red-golden sunset

costs nothing at all.

Her green hills are endless with rainbows that bend,

Tears of joy you should shed for the beauty she lends.

Third week, third Step and, if I’m honest, I found this one creepy. Let’s say I had bought into everything up to this point. I really didn’t mind greeting nature, sitting on rocks, asking for my heart’s desire. But this Step felt like a shift. The poor old Red Hag must have been really losing her marbles when, pretending to be the fairies, she wrote this one. The implication was that, somehow, fairies were pulling the strings in our lives. That we were merely playing out a game they were controlling. That the ideas in our heads were theirs, that they nudged our instincts. (I wished they’d nudged mine better when I went to Kevin McLear’s birthday party the previous December and wore a pink off-the-shoulder dress that clashed with my purple eye shadow and green shoes. The pictures still haunted me on Facebook.) That they had a plan mapped out for our lives to be a part of nature, to benefit us, them and the earth.

My office phone rang, distracting me from staring at the third Step on my computer screen. Mam. “Darling, you’re not going to believe it. This fairy name thing, I swear you had one when you were a little girl.”

“Mam, are you looking at the Internet? That went up only two seconds ago! Anyway, it’s Tuesday afternoon. Don’t you have yoga?”

“I skipped it today. Your father and I need to be constantly updated, in case the media hit us up for another interview.”

“Of course.”

“But Kate, you did have a fairy name. Well, I didn’t think it was a fairy name back then, but you said that your imaginary friend, the one you had when you were around five or six, whose name I can’t remember, had given you a name. Do you remember it? I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. But you asked us to call you it.”

“No, Mam, I don’t even remember having an imaginary friend.”

“You did, for a long time. Hang on, I’ll ask your father.” I heard her shouting into the kitchen.

“Princess Fi Fi or Frou Frou. Your dad says it was definitely princess something or other. Does it ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Well, think about it, you never know. I swear, the more I read these Steps, the more I’m enjoying it. I’m going out to the back garden now to ask the fairies what my name is. I hope it’s something exotic. Will you come around for dinner tonight?”

“Great. Love to. Talk to you later.” I hung up.

A fairy name? I’d had a fairy name? Of course I hadn’t! My parents were just excitable. And while an imaginary friend did seem the type of thing an only child would conjure up, I had no recollection of having had one.

“Smutty Farlane is my porn name. I wonder what my fairy name is?” Matthew was wearing a zipped-up navy Adidas tracksuit. It wasn’t like him to be so casually dressed at work, and I could see his briefcase peeping out from behind his desk.
Unusual fashion statement
, I thought. Chewing on a Starshoot, he walked over to me with a big smile on his face. He stopped to pat Setanta, who was eagerly sniffing the ground for some Starshoot crumbs.

“Don’t let him eat chocolate,” I said firmly to Matthew.

“I know, I know. He’s watching his figure.”

And I don’t want his infuriating owner giving out to me
, I thought, wondering where Hugh was and why I hadn’t seen him around for a while.

Online, comments were slowly trickling in about the third Step. Matthew and I watched as bloggers’ names that were now very familiar to me popped up each time I hit the refresh button.

GR8tim: I’ve always felt a connection to the name fiachra—I wonder if that’s my fairy name

Seocha: listen quietly and they’ll tell you

DDdddrink: I knew I should always listen to my instinct

Banananas: that’s your gut talking

Matthew sighed. “These people are so strange.”

“What I don’t understand is how they don’t question this. Why aren’t they on there saying it’s a load of crap?”

“Because they’re weirdos,” Matthew said, looking at the screen in confusion as more and more posts filled the page. He took another bite of his Starshoot and chuckled to himself. “You know that baby thing, or birth, there?” He pointed at the line
We know your true path from birth
on the screen. “I remember hearing something about that. That when a baby is born there’s a race between fairies as to who gets to be the baby’s guardian.” He exploded laughing. “You should see your face! You think I’m one of those weirdos. I’m not. I’m just telling you that I remember hearing something about it. Google it.”

“I can’t be bothered.” Bored, I clicked into my e-mail.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Subject: Music

Kate

What do you think of our new song?

Click here to hear it.

I’ll give you a shout this afternoon.

J

I clicked through the link, halfheartedly put in my earphones, and pressed Play. Deep beats trembled, and Jim’s voice echoed softly around strumming guitar. The song had a haunting melody, and Jim’s voice rose and fell. “I knew when I read the letter, and learned the Seven Steps,” he sang.

I hid a smile behind my hand. What was he playing at?

“What’s up?” Matthew budged down to my level. I removed my earphones and handed them to him. He put them in his ears and listened. His eyes widened and the smile slipped from his face.

He popped the earphones out. “I don’t know, Kate. What’s he up to?”

“What do you mean? It’s funny. It’s sweet, and it’s a good song.” I hoped I sounded annoyed because I felt annoyed. What did Matthew mean by “What’s he up to”? I angrily strummed the tops of my fingers on my keyboard.
Click, click.

“Okay,” Matthew said carefully. He opened his mouth to say something else but then changed his mind. Pulling over a chair, he sat in beside me. I was still tapping on my keyboard, breathing sharply.

“I know what he’s like, Kate,” he said softly into his chest.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I spat the words out.

“Nothing.” He stared ahead of him. “The music, that’s his life. He’ll do anything for it.”

“Hmmphh.”

We sat in silence. Well, he sat in silence. I sat in a huff. Matthew was raining all over my parade. It was bad form. Of all people, he should understand. He should be happy for me. I had a gorgeous rock star looking for my attention. This kind of thing never happened to me.

“Hmmmphhhh.” I pursed my mouth and glared at Matthew.

Colin wobbled past and gave us both two thumbs-up. “Any word on our
Baywatch
friend?” he shouted.

“Getting right on it,” Matthew shouted back before dropping the remainder of the Starshoot into his mouth. “Do you want to get back to it?”

I nodded reluctantly, and we slipped into the black hole of work. David Hasselhoff was proving difficult to pin down. For me, celebrities lived in magazines or on
Entertainment Tonight
. If they were real people, which I doubted, they were the closest things to fairy-tale characters we’d ever know. If David Hasselhoff did exist and wasn’t just a computer-generated lifeguard, then surely he was like Rapunzel, imprisoned in a high tower away from mere greasy-fingered mortals, people who might cast a shadow across his blue eyes. Cushioned on mountains of gold, massaging his chest hair, the Hoff could not possibly be contactable.

Which he wasn’t. I’d already tried several times. Now I tried again, and started calling some new numbers I’d got off the Internet, numbers in L.A. Even saying “L.A.” gave me goose bumps. It made me feel like I was closer to
them
, the Hans Christian Andersen creations.

“No, but thanks for calling,” the receptionists would twang down the line from sunny L.A.

“Could you give me a contact number for his people?” When talking to foreigners, I always felt like my accent was overpronounced, that I sounded like an Irish cliché with a bowl of potatoes and a pint of Guinness in front of me. In fact, that day, I was looking very city chic and sophisticated, more like espresso coffee and paninis, I felt. I was wearing a flowery skirt (since my bike had been nicked I was wearing a lot of skirts) and a nice black wraparound top. I was looking officey, not
Riverdance
-y, but my speech was a lilt of slurring
t
’s and colloquialisms like “sure, not to worry,” “that’ll be grand,” and “hope the day is good for you.”