“I don’t know what to think,” he said, standing up. “Look, Mori, you kind of like me, right?”
“Right,” I said, cautiously, staying where I was. He was way up above me, but I didn’t want to be struggling to my feet.
“I kind of like you too,” he said.
For an instant, I felt wonderfully happy, and then I remembered about the karass magic. I’d cheated. I’d made it happen. He didn’t really like me, well, maybe he did, but he liked me because the magic had made him like me. That didn’t mean he didn’t really think he liked me now, of course, but it made it much more complicated.
“Come on,” I said, and struggled to my feet, putting my coat on. Wim put on a scruffy brown duffle coat and went out. I followed him out onto the pavement.
There was an Indian woman with a baby in a pushchair just coming out of the bookshop as we came out. She was wearing a headscarf, which made me think of Nasreen and wonder how she was getting on. We waited for her to pass us and then crossed the road to the pond, where the mallards were chasing each other.
“You don’t want to talk about it?” Wim asked.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him about the karass magic, and I couldn’t think what was ethical, if I’d sort of accidentally bewitched him. It was a little bit exhilarating and a little bit terrifying, and it felt as if gravity wasn’t quite as strong as normally, or as if someone had decreased the oxygen or something.
“I’ve never seen you at a loss for words,” he said.
“Very few people have,” I said.
He laughed, and followed me into the trees. “This magic thing, you’re not making it up?”
“Why would I?” I didn’t get it. “It’s just that I really have sworn an oath not to do magic except to prevent harm, because it’s so difficult to understand the consequences. Anyway, magic is difficult to show, because it’s so deniable. You can say it would have happened anyway. And with the, um, the elves”—I didn’t want to say fairies, it sounded too babyish—“not everybody can see them, not all the time. You need to believe they’re there first, before you can.”
“Can’t you give me a charm so I can see them? Or teach me their names? I’m not like stupid Thomas Covenant, you know.”
“A charm is a good idea,” I said. I handed him my pocket rock and he rubbed it thoughtfully in his fingers. “This should help.” It wouldn’t exactly help him see the fairies, as all there was on it was general protection and specific protection against my mother, but if he thought it would, it might. “I haven’t read the Covenant books. I saw them, but it compared them to Tolkien on the cover so I didn’t want to read them.”
“It isn’t the author’s fault what the publishers put on the cover,” he said. “Thomas Covenant is a leper who mopes his way around a fantasy world most of us would give our right arms to be in, refusing to believe anything is real.”
“If it’s from the point of view of a depressed leper who doesn’t believe in it, I’m glad I haven’t read them!”
He laughed. “There are some great giants. And it is a fantasy world, unless he’s mad, which he thinks he is and you can’t tell.”
We were quite deep in among the trees now. It was muddy, as Harriet had said it would be. There were a few fairies in the trees. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to see, but hold tight to that rock and try looking there,” I said, pointing with my chin.
Wim turned his head very slowly. The fairy vanished. “I thought I saw something for a second,” he said, very quietly. “Did I scare it off?”
“The ones around here are very easily scared. They won’t talk to me. In South Wales where I come from there are some I know quite well.”
“What’s the best place to find them? Do they live in the trees, like in Lorien?” His eyes were darting about all over, but not seeing the fairies that were peeping back.
“They like places that used to be human and have been abandoned,” I said. “Ruins with green things growing in them. Is there anything like that?”
“Follow me,” Wim said, and I followed him downhill through a lot of mud and old leaves. The sun was out, but it was still cold and damp and the wind was freezing.
There was a stone wall about shoulder high, with ivy growing over it, and as we followed it along we came to an angle of wall, as if there had been a house once, and inside the angle where it was sheltered, snowdrops were pushing through the leaf mould. There was also a big puddle, which we stepped around. There was a half-height wall there, which we sat on, side by side. There was also a fairy, the one I had seen before on Janine’s lawn, like a dog with gossamer wings. I waited for a moment, quietly. Wim didn’t say anything either. Some more fairies came up—it really was just the kind of place they like. One of them was slim and beautiful and feminine, another was gnarled and squat.
“Hold the stone, and look at the flowers, and at the reflection of the flowers in the water,” I said to Wim, quietly, not that it made much difference how loudly I spoke. “Now look at me.” When he looked at me I put my hands on the sides of his face. I was trying to give him confidence. He wanted so much to believe, to see one. His skin was warm and just slightly rough where he needed to shave. Touching him made me feel more breathless than ever.
“He wants to see you,” I said to the fairies, in Welsh. “He won’t do any harm.”
They didn’t reply, but they didn’t vanish either.
“Now look to your left,” I said to Wim, letting go.
He turned his head slowly, and he saw her, I could tell he did. He jumped. She regarded him curiously for a moment. I wondered for a second if she’d enchant him and lead him away into wherever it is they go when they vanish, like Tam Lin. He put out his hand towards her, and she vanished, they all did, like lights going out.
“That was an elf?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“If you hadn’t said so, I’d have thought it was a ghost.” He sounded shaken. I’d have liked to have touched him again.
“They’re not all that human-looking,” I said, which was an understatement. “Most of them are kind of gnarly.”
“Gnomes?” he asked.
“Well, sort of. The thing is you read things, and you see things, and they’re not the same. To read about it, it all makes so much more sense, with Seelie and Unseelie courts, with gnomes and elves, but it’s not like that. I’ve been seeing them all my life, and they’re all the same whatever they are and whatever they look like. I don’t really know what they are. They talk, well, the ones I know do, but they say odd things, and only in Welsh. Usually. I met one who spoke English at Christmas. He gave me this stick.” I tapped it in the mud. “They don’t call themselves elves, or anything. They don’t have names. They don’t use nouns very much.” It was such a relief to have someone to talk to about this! “I call them fairies because that’s what I’ve always called them, but I don’t really know what they are.”
“So you don’t know what they are, not really?”
“No. It’s not the sort of thing. What I think is that people have told a lot of stories about them and some of them are true and some of them are made up from other stories and some of them are muddled. They don’t tell stories themselves.”
“But if you don’t know, then they could be ghosts?”
“The dead are different,” I said.
“You know? You’ve seen them?” His eyes were very wide.
So I told him about Halloween and the oak leaves and the dead going under the hill, which meant I had to tell him about Mor. I was getting cold by this time. “So how did she die?” he asked.