Reluctantly Charmed (25 page)

We see a time of great unrest,

a time of strife and all these things,

We see a time when torment spreads,

and all else is out of mind,

A time of being shook by pain,

which makes you weep and makes you blind.

So in these doubtful waiting hours,

our lessons to you we teach,

We ask you to stop the time,

put ticks and tocks away from reach,

And know that we are old and young,

and this is how it’s meant to be,

Not confined by clocks and tocks,

but living in peace as us and we.

The fifth Step had a tsunami effect. Videos appeared online of people holding hammers over watches and smashing them triumphantly. Bloggers left instructions about how to disconnect the clock on computer screens. The Anoraks lit a small fire in a metal bin and burned some calendars. A man was arrested on O’Connell Street for throwing stones at Clerys clock. (The Gardaí said he was “vandalizing a national monument.” He said he was “doing the fairies’ will.” I wasn’t sure how his defense would stand up in court.) Of all the Steps, number five resonated the most. Or maybe it was the cumulative effect—five is better than four.

I hadn’t left my flat during the weekend before I posted the Step on the Tuesday, but I was told by reliable sources—my parents and Matthew—that out there in the real world there was a serious sense of anticipation, excitement, and energy on the streets. Seven Step parties were held for the big reveal, and groups on Facebook had organized events. Schools had held art competitions and posted the results online—brightly colored pictures full of leprechauns jiving and fairies sprinkling fairy dust on the streets of Dublin. Fiona had been approached to sell her story on “the real Kate McDaid.” She said it was the best laugh she’d had all week.

People were wearing green T-shirts with
SEVEN STEPS
scrawled on the front. There was a YouTube video of a guy getting a tattoo of the words “Seven Steps” across his chest. What would his
mother say? Ann Daly, the newsreader on the telly, made a reference to the fairies in an interview with Colin Powell. They’d been talking about religion. By all accounts, Mr. Powell remained stony-faced; thankfully, the fairies hadn’t hit the political press. Every radio station played “The Seven Steps” constantly. Someone had bought the rights to use it for a coffee ad, so it was everywhere. So was Jim: while I ducked and dived he posed and strutted. The remaining members of Red Horizon faded into a smoky background as he strode into the spotlight.

I’d received requests for interviews from journalists promising to tell my side of the story and TV crews wanting to follow me. (I laughed at that one, where would they follow me to? The bathroom? The kitchen? I couldn’t even go to the shops anymore.) The bloggers, the Anoraks—they all wanted me to speak. I was referred to as “elusive,” “mysterious,” “enigmatic.” I said nothing because I didn’t know what to say.

For the record, I don’t own a watch, never have. I’ve been given watches in the past but always seemed to lose them. It’s as if they just slide off my wrist. There were no clocks in my flat, and even the time setting on my mobile phone was wrong. There were clocks at work, obviously, and on my computer, but I didn’t actually own a timepiece, so I didn’t have anything to destroy, even if I wanted to. I knew Maura would say that my not owning a watch was no coincidence. Lily and the others would have probably exchanged “aha” glances about it, too. But I was hardly the only person in Dublin who didn’t have any clocks. This was hardly proof positive of my special relationship with the fairies. That said, the coincidences were becoming impossible to ignore. And if someone like Maura—who was definitely a bit eccentric but also educated and intelligent—believed in it all, could that count for something? In all honesty, there was a part of me that
couldn’t deny the “coolness” factor. How fantastic would it be if there was a parallel world running alongside ours, with fairies and magic and all those fabulous things I’d believed in as a child?

But then the Anoraks would do something so ridiculous all ideas of coolness flew out the window. On the day I published the fifth Step, they held hands and, singing a song by Drake Chandler in homage to the fairies, they skipped around a bush in my front garden that I recognized to be a giant weed. These were grown men—albeit grown men in anoraks. These were the people who believed in fairies. They were seriously deluded, and I really didn’t want to be part or, God forbid, the president, of that club. No, common sense would prevail. I was a logical, sane individual who worked in advertising, read diet books, and had unfortunate one-night stands with guys in bands. I was a modern city girl, and I had no time in my life or room in my handbag for little people.

By Wednesday, I was fully ensconced in captivity. Colin had thankfully given me leave to work from home; I think my presence in the office was becoming too disruptive. I kept the doors of my flat locked, and in between checking work e-mails, I summoned the spirit of Howard Hughes and obsessively cleaned all day long. I picked dust off the skirting boards with a safety pin and polished the walls in the kitchen. I even washed the sofa covers. I had chapped, flaking fingertips and raw nostrils from all the bleach. I was cleaning as a distraction.

Lily called. She was having problems with Mr. Goatee. He was in love with her, but while love should never normally be a problem, his love was verging on obsessive and she was getting freaked out. He was calling in to walk her to work every morning. He’d turn up with coffee; he’d text her and phone her. I argued that these were all nice gestures for a blossoming romance, until Lily
filled in the details. Mr. Goatee had started waiting outside her flat an hour before she got up in the morning just in case her alarm clock didn’t go off. He’d bring her four different types of coffee so she could choose what she wanted during the walk to work. He sent “I love you” texts seventy-four times a day. He called her,
and
he called her family to talk about her. He was, to put it mildly, acting like a man under a spell. Either that or he was an obsessive lunatic who, in the manner of a Lifetime movie, would at some point make figurines of Lily out of egg cartons and bottles of washing-up liquid before imprisoning her in his wardrobe because he loved her too much to share her with daylight. I suspected that the cookie recipe—could I call it a spell?—had done something to him.

By late afternoon I was starving. My spotless fridge had suffered a mass evacuation—it was dismal and empty. All that remained on the top shelf was a jar of marmalade, which was opened only when Mam called over for breakfast. I looked enviously at the cat food and Mister Snoop Doggy Dogg’s overflowing kitty dish. After eight hours of hard-core cleaning, I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to ring Matthew.

I did, telling him I was hungry and agoraphobic. He laughed and promised to be over in a jiffy.
Brilliant
, I thought. I couldn’t wait to see him, to relax, to laugh, to see his big smiling face and watch him rub his nose and tell bad jokes.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I was pale and hungry-looking. I pulled my hair off my face, brushed some bronzer on my cheeks, and changed out of my cleaning pajamas and into a pair of boyfriend jeans and a T-shirt.

I heard a commotion outside and knew he was nearby. I could hear shouts, panicked pleas, and high-pitched girlish shrieks coming from the mouths of middle-aged men with large cameras. I
peeked through the curtains. A hooded and sunglassed Matthew was racing down the garden path in a flurry. I feared he might run straight into the ground. He had a heavy backpack on, and it looked as if the paparazzi were trying to grab hold of its straps. He shook them off like a wild horse and galloped right into the front door with a thud.

I leaped down the stairs to let him in.

Once inside, he pressed up against the closed door. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “Have you seen what’s outside?” He bent over to catch his breath. “Bloody hell!”

I’d never heard him curse so much. I gazed down at his bent-over back, amused.

“There’s so many of them.”

I shrugged, feeling like an old pro.

“So many,” he repeated to himself, talking directly to his shoes.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Of course I’d come.” He straightened up and pulled his hood back, running his hands through his tousled hair. “Wait until you see what I’ve brought.” He kissed his fingers, the way he often did in AlJo’s, imitating a stereotypical Italian waiter. “
Magnifico!
”

“Do you want a hand?” I gestured toward his backpack and the steep stairs, but he shrugged me off.

In the living room he shed his jacket to reveal his zipped-up Adidas tracksuit. He looked down apologetically. “Clothes keep shrinking,” he explained.

I nodded, deliberately averting my eyes from his Starshoot midriff.

“This place is so clean! This isn’t like you. Is that bleach I smell?”

With a proud sweep of my arms, I told him I’d done it all myself and had the bleach scars to prove it.

“Well, you’ve clearly done enough for today. So now, you sit down, Princess Lo Lo Ki Ki,” he said with a sly grin. “I’m taking control of dinner.” He guided me over to my own sofa and plonked me down. Within seconds, I had a glass of wine in my hand and the Killers were thumping out some dance beats in the background. From what I could gather, Matthew was thrashing the kitchen, beating up the counter with a variety of pots and pans. Now and again he’d shout out, looking for a masher or a sieve, and even once for a pestle and mortar. He was making a curry, a delicious-smelling curry that was making my eyes sting and my mouth water.

“We could have just got a takeaway, you know,” I shouted to him.

“Not the same. It’s tastier if you make it from scratch,” he hollered back.

“I never knew you cooked.”

“There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He was standing in front of me, looking right into my stinging eyes with a giant bowl of curry in his hands.

“I’ll just chuck it here, yeah?” He put the curry bowl on the coffee table before running back into the kitchen. With a whack, bang, wallop, he produced more plates and dishes. The coffee table was on the verge of collapse, breathing a heavy sigh under the weight of Indian dishes.

We tucked in greedily. With every happy mouthful I complimented the chef. He bashfully accepted. And for the first time in a long time I completely relaxed.

After I’d finished, the food coma set in, so I snuggled up on the couch into a cushion. We started to chat about work and the upcoming shoot with the Hoff.

Matthew laughed. “I think the Little Prince will keel over
with a heart attack when he meets the Hoff. It’s going to be hilarious to watch.”

“I bet the Hoff is cool. I’ll definitely get my photo taken with him for Facebook.”

“I got hold of a really old
Baywatch
poster. He has big hair in it—it’s brilliant. I’m going to get him to sign it.”

“Brilliant.” I smiled. “It’ll be fun. Work, but fun work.”

Matthew nodded enthusiastically. He paused. “So what do you make of it all? Honestly,” he asked cautiously. He snapped a papadum in two.

I looked at him in disbelief: I couldn’t believe he was still eating. I knew he wasn’t talking about the Hoff anymore. And, to be fair, Matthew had been there at the beginning, when Dudley delivered the letter. He felt as much a part of this journey as I did.

“Well, I’ve been humming and hawing a bit about it all. Could there be something in it? Could fairies exist, or have they existed? Today I decided that it’s just not possible. There is no earthly way that fairies can exist.”

“You think that? Even now?”

“What do you mean ‘even now’?”

“It’s just that the Steps, they’re good, you know? There’s no bad messages in them. What’s the harm, really?”

“Matthew, you just ran up my garden path for fear of being attacked by paparazzi. I’m under house arrest, watches all over the place are being smashed up, and people are calling me a witch.”

“Oh yeah,” he laughed, playfully throwing a crumpled napkin at me. “Aside from all that stuff.”

“I can’t believe in them. Do you not understand?”

“No.”

“If I believe in them . . .” I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, I was finally going to say what had been chipping away at me.
“If I believe in them, in the fairies and that my great-great-great-grand-aunt was a witch, then . . .” My mouth dried up. I swallowed hard. “Then
I’m
in it. I’m part of it. I’m a witch.”

Matthew turned his face to me and sympathetically smiled. “Then you’re a witch.”

“You see? It’s just too ridiculous.” And we both laughed.

“What if . . . Okay, hear me out.” He pulled on his nose. “What if you are? I mean, she saved all this for when you turned twenty-six. What if this is something that just comes on you?”

“Like puberty?”

“Well, hopefully not as bad as puberty,” he joked.

“But it hasn’t, and it won’t,” I said, trying to convince myself.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m just being stupid. None of it can be true. I mean, if it were true, you’d be riding around on a broomstick.”

“And I’d be making spells to get food in—not having to make phone calls to you.”

And then maybe I could add that spell to the list of other spells I seemed to be able to concoct. My mind turned to Mr. Goatee, which reminded me that Matthew was supposed to have had his first online date the night before. “Oh my God! How could I forget the date? Wasn’t it last night? How did it go? What did you do? What happened?”