Martin Millar - The Good Fairies of New York.html (10 page)

Unfortunately in New York it didn't. She got a fright and jumped backwards into the street.'

Morag frowned.

'It takes a terrible long time for an ambulance to arrive in this city.'

Kerry sympathised, and said at least she had meant well, but Morag could not be easily consoled. She had caused a serious accident which was bad enough, but she was convinced something terrible would happen to her in return.

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According to Morag, fairy karma was notoriously powerful.

Still, there was nothing to do but press on with today's programme, which was to track down the young bag lady in possession of the triple-bloomed Welsh poppy.

The afternoon was uncomfortably hot. Magenta sat down to rest at the corner of Avenue C and 4th. Today, by her reckoning, she had marched forty parsangs under continued harassment from Tissaphernes. This lieutenant of

Antaxerxes was a crafty opponent, content at this stage to harry her troops while avoiding a direct frontal attack.

This was just as well for both sides really, as Xenophon's Greek Hoplites were immeasurably more disciplined that the Persians' and would inflict dreadful casualties if attacked, but this deep inside enemy territory the Persians'

greater numbers would tell in the end.

A fire truck wailed by. Magenta ignored it and scanned the rooftops for hidden archers. Finding none, she took a swig of her drink and allowed herself a short sleep outside a little hall with a banner over the door.

Kerry busied herself with the bag at her side. There is no known cause for Crohn's disease, and no known cure, so when Morag asked Kerry if she would one day get better, Kerry could only reply that she might.

'I might heal up inside and then the doctors could give me a reversal operation and I wouldn't have to have a colostomy bag any more. Or I might stay just the same for a long time, which would still not be well enough to be fixed. Or I might have more attacks and have to get more of my intestines removed and then L would never be

able to have the reversal operation.'

This was always enough to bring a tear to Kerry's eye and Morag would generally have to change the subject.

Kerry hunted among the bundles on the floor for all her brightest garments — her long ragged yellow skirt, her sweatshirt dyed red, blue, pink and purple, her green Indian waistcoat covered with embroidery and mirror

fragments, her beads and headband, round sunglasses tinted blue, fringed suede bag with more embroidery,

baseball boots splashed with the entire contents of a junior painting kit, and a carnation to pin in her hair.

'Would the rose be better?'

'I still can't make up my mind,' said Morag. 'Have you considered daisies?'

'Let's go.'

Outside, Kerry, who was regularly whistled and shouted at by men in the street, suffered a prolonged stream of unpleasant cat-calls when she passed by a gang of construction workers. She did not like this but did not answer back.

'I'd like to get between the cheeks of your tight ass!'

'How depressing,' said Morag, on her shoulder. 'Perhaps this is the start of my bad karma.'

Kerry assured her that it was not, as it happened to her all the time.

In the hot sun pedestrians toiled along unhappily and the traffic was everywhere tangled and congested. It did not feel like a good day.

As Kerry and Morag reached Avenue B, scene of Morag's sighting of Magenta, a cab made a violent manoeuvre

on to the sidewalk in an attempt to break free of a traffic jam and Kerry was forced to leap for her life. Morag tumbled into a doorway and landed heavily.

'My karma.' she wailed.

'I'm sure it is just a coincidence,' said Kerry, and brushed the dirt off the fairy's kilt. Morag was not convinced, and when on the next corner two crazed skateboarders forced Kerry to leap briskly for cover, sending Morag once

more plummeting groundwards, the fairy declared that she would be doing well if she was still alive at the end of the day.

'Change, any change?'

Kerry brought out some change, gave it to the beggar, apologised for not having any Botticelli postcards on her, and scanned the horizon. A flowerpot tumbled from somewhere above and missed her by inches.

Kerry was shaken.

'Can't you do anything about this, Morag?'

'There is only one possibility. I shall have to perform some immense good deed and work off the bad karma.'

They looked around for some good deed to do but none was in view.

'I'll just have to wait it out,' whispered Morag, 'and hope I get the chance before some more terrible occurrence file:///Users/lisa/Downloads/Martin%20Millar%20-%20The%20Good%20Fairies%20of%20New%20York.html

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overwhelms me.'

Dinnie and Heather met Cal as they left the theatre. Cal's arms were full of flowers. He nodded to Dinnie

pleasantly.

'Coming to see
A Midsummer Night's Dream?'

'Damned fairy rubbish,' replied Dinnie, pointedly. 'And how about not making so much noise when you rehearse.'

'Who was that?' asked Heather, following Dinnie on his mission to buy beer.

'Cal. Big mouth big shot of the community theatre downstairs. He's got some stupid idea to put on a show and

play all the music on his guitar. The whole thing will be a disaster. He only wants to meet young actresses and fuck them.'

Magenta woke, sensing danger.

'There she is,' cried Morag.

Magenta bolted into the hall behind her.

Kerry and Morag hurried after her, but inside what turned out to be a small gallery there were so many people it was difficult to move and their quarry was nowhere in sight.

This was a fund-raising event with many local artists exhibiting their work and local poets doing readings. It was meant to be fun, but as today was intolerably hot it seemed more like an ordeal for everyone.

Trapped in the crowd, Magenta nowhere in sight, Kerry and Morag could only stand and strain their necks to see what was going on.

A young red-haired woman mounted the stage.

'I know her,' whispered Kerry.

It was Gail, a friend of hers, about to read her poems.

Unfortunately by this time no one was paying attention to anything any more, except sweating and wondering

whether to leave.

'Oh, dear,' muttered Kerry. 'Everyone is fed up with the heat and the crush and will not listen to Gail, even though she is a great poet.'

As Kerry had predicted, few people paid attention. It was just too uncomfortable to listen to poetry, or anything.

Morag saw her chance to undo her bad karma. She unwrapped her fiddle and played, just on the threshold of

human hearing. The effect was immediate. The audience were hypnotised by Gail's words and the fairy music.

They quietened down and listened, transfixed.

When Gail read a poem of sadness Morag played a lament and it was as much as anyone could do to stop from

crying. Gail read a fierce poem about property developers moving into the area and chasing out the poor and

Morag played a stirring strathspey. When this was over the audience was on the point of storming the property developers' offices and running them out of town. Gail finished with a love poem and Morag played 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose', and the entire crowd felt that they were definitely in love with someone, and it was going to work out well.

As she finished there was wild uncontrollable applause. Gail smiled. She had been a huge success. Morag smiled as well. This successful good deed would surely have worked off her bad karma.

'There she is,' cried Kerry, sighting Magenta in the distance, and hurried off. Morag made to follow but the man next to her, clapping his hands furiously, knocked the fiddle on to the floor. It was invisible to him and he stamped on it.

Kerry found Magenta as she was about to make her getaway and retrieved her flower with a determined frontal

assault. Later she placed the bloom back in its place as pride of her collection. She was happy now, but Morag was inconsolable.

They looked at the shattered violin.

'This is the worst day of my life,' said Morag.

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Spiro the squirrel ceased chewing a nut to peer at Maeve.

'Why are you sad?'

'I miss Ireland,' she replied, and Padraig nodded agreement. They regretted the day they had ever hopped on the ferry to England just to find out what it was like.

'And why are you sad, Petal and Tulip?'

'We are scared that our father the King will find us even here and make us go back,' they said.

'Does he know how to get on a jumbo jet?' 'Magris knows everything,' said Brannoc, and thought about killing him.

In the distance some joggers panted their way through a long circuit of the park.

'Play us some music,' said Spiro. 'The whole park has seemed more peaceful since you've been here. Play some

music and I will show you where to find the largest mushrooms this side of the Atlantic'

So the fairies played in Central Park and the animals and humans stopped to listen. Radios were turned down and children stopped screaming. The joggers, cyclists and baseball players took a rest. Everyone who heard went home happy and stayed happy for the whole day. No one fought or argued and no crimes were ever committed while the park fairies played. Cornwall was less happy.

'I cannot have my son and daughter escaping the country,' said Tala the King. 'It will give encouragement to the resistance groups.'

Magris shrugged. He was more interested in inventing new and efficient machines for producing goods.

'I could try opening up a moonbow between here and New York. But generating enough power to send a full host

will take time.'

Tala was impatient with this. He wanted his children back now.

'Do you have enough power to send over a smaller force?'

Magris nodded.

'Very well. Assemble some mercenaries.'

Tala had a gold crown of the finest workmanship. He also had twelve powerful barons controlling his Cornish

fairy population. This meant that his crown was not quite as powerful as it used to be. However, with his mind concentrated on the greatly increased production which Magris's reorganisation of their society had brought, he did not yet realise this.

Due now at a meeting with the barons, he walked through a corridor of small trees but was halted on the way by a messenger with the shocking news that Aelric and his band of resistance fighters had set fire to the royal granary, thereby destroying the King's food store and that of his court. This grain would have to be replaced by one of the barons, which would cause hardship in his territory.

Magris held a propaganda leaflet, distributed by Aelric. It urged Cornish fairies everywhere to throw off their chains and support the beloved Petal and Tulip as new rulers of the kingdom.

'The rebels tried to distribute them,' Magris told the King. 'Fortunately our troops prevented it.'

'This Aelric must be caught,' raged the King, and he gave instructions that the strongest flyers among his army must be sent to guard his installations from the air, so that the harmful propaganda leaflets could not be dropped.

'I must have some whisky,' said Padraig, laying down his fiddle, and no one disagreed with him. It was a long time since any of the Central Park fairies had had a drink. The squirrels, friendly though they were, could not be persuaded to bring them any. They said it was too dangerous an endeavour. This particularly disgusted Maeve.

'Back in Ireland,' she told the others, 'a squirrel would go out of its way to bring a fairy some poteen. Although normally the problem would not arise as the humans there are good, friendly folk and generally leave it lying around for us.'

There was nothing for it but to mount an expedition to the streets beyond the park.

'We'll hit the first bar we see.'

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The loss of the triple-bloomed Welsh poppy, so soon after its dramatic recovery, was a shattering blow to Kerry.

She stared furiously at the ransom note from the Chinese fairies.

'How dare they hold my flower hostage ! '

Kerry saw her ambitions crumbling into nothing. Without the Welsh poppy she could not win the East 4th Street Community Arts Prize and without Morag's fiddle she could not learn any Johnny Thunders guitar solos.

'I have made up my mind,' said Johnny Thunders. 'I can never be satisfied, even here in Heaven, until I know what happened to my 1958 Gibson Tiger Top. I just laid it down on a barstool for a minute in CBGB's and when I

looked round it was gone. And there never was another guitar like it.'

Billy Murcia nodded sympathetically.

'And I sure could do with my best guitar right now,' added Johnny. 'Because as far as I can find out, there is an acute shortage of good rock bands around here. Plenty hippies and plenty gospel choirs, but nothing gritty. So when these Chinese spirits head on out for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, I'm going with them.'

The fairies from Central Park ventured warily into the streets.

'That looks like a bar,' hissed Brannoc after a while, although they found it difficult to tell. The buildings were all so different from the small Cornish and Irish dwellings they were used to. Because of this uncertainty they had travelled further into Harlem than they intended and were now well out of sight of the park.

People were everywhere on these streets and traffic belched fumes that made the fairies' eyes sting. They were all nervous, though both Brannoc and Maeve refused to show it. Pausing to let four small children with a huge radio scurry past, they made ready to invade the bar.