Martin Millar - The Good Fairies of New York.html (2 page)

She finally made it and looked down on East 4th Street. She gasped. To a Scottish thistle fairy, used only to hills, glens and the quiet village of Cruickshank, it was an amazing sight. Cars and people everywhere, children, dogs, noise, and at least ten shops within twenty yards. In Cruickshank there was only one shop, and very few cars.

'What is this place? Where are we?'

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Morag joined her. Her first sober sight of their new environment made her forget the argument and she clutched Heather's hand.

'I think it must be a city.'

'What's a city?'

'Like a big town. Like lots of villages put together. I think we must be in Glasgow.'

'But we were in Cornwall,' protested Morag. 'Cornwall isn't close to Glasgow, is it?'

Heather shook her head. She did not think so, but her geography was as shaky as Morag's. Since leaving Scotland neither of them had had much idea of where they were most of the time.

They peered down at the street where a ragged man with a shopping bag tramped forcefully along the sidewalk,

spilling small children out of the way.

This ragged man was Joshua. He was in pursuit of Magenta who had made off with his recipe for Fitzroy cocktail, a drink consisting of shoe polish, methylated spirits, fruit juice and a secret concoction of herbs.

After pursuing her down First Avenue he had lost sight of her when she dodged down the subway. She was a

cunning adversary but he would never give up the hunt for his recipe, the most precious thing he had ever had in his possession.

'What happened to our friends? Where are Brannoc and Maeve and Padraig and Petal and Tulip?'

It was impossible to say. They could be anywhere in this city. Neither of them could remember much except

waking up in a huge bumpy machine and being tossed into the street in a beer crate. Their friends had presumably been carried off by the machine. They started to argue again about whose fault it was.

'Right, you two,' said Dinnie, stomping back into the room. 'Get out of here immediately and don't come back.'

'What is the matter with you?' demanded Heather, shaking her golden hair. 'Humans are supposed to be pleased, delighted and honoured when they meet a fairy. They jump about going "A fairy, a fairy!" and laugh with pleasure. They don't demand they get out of their room immediately and don't come back.'

'Well, welcome to New York,' snarled Dinnie. 'Now beat it.'

'Fine,' said Heather. 'We'll go. But don't come crying to us if your lineage is cursed to the seventh generation.'

'Or even the thirteenth.'

They stared at each other. A cockroach peered out from behind the cooker, then went about its business.

Morag, generally the more rational of the two fairies, tried to calm the situation.

'Allow me to introduce myself. I am Morag MacPherson, thistle fairy, from Scotland.'

'And I am Heather MacKintosh, thistle fairy. And greatest fiddler in Scotland.'

'What?' protested Morag. 'I am the greatest fiddler in Scotland.'

Heather fell about laughing.

'How dare you laugh at my fiddle playing. I am Morag MacPherson, champion of champions,' continued the dark-

haired fairy.

'Well I'm Dinnie MacKintosh and you two can just beat it.'

Now Morag burst out laughing.

'What's so funny?'

'He's a MacKintosh,' chortled Morag. 'No wonder his fiddle-playing is so bad. The MacKintoshes never could

carry a tune.'

Heather looked uncomfortable.

'He's only a beginner,' she said, but Morag continued to laugh uncontrollably. She was greatly amused at this turn of events. In her eyes she had won the argument.

'How dare you laugh at a fellow MacKintosh,' raged Heather, who could not bear to see her clan belittled in any way. 'Even a human MacKintosh is worth more than a lying, cheating MacPherson.'

'How dare you call the MacPhersons lying and cheating,' screamed Morag.

The fairies' green eyes blazed.

'Look— ' said Dinnie, but he was ignored.

'You are lying and cheating. Lying, cheating, thieving, no good— '

'Heather MacKintosh, I hope I never see you again ! ' shouted Morag, and hopped out the window.

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There was a silence.

Heather looked glum. Shouts drifted up from the footballers on the corner below.

'Phone 970 C-L-I-T for the hottest phone sex in New York,' whispered a naked woman on the television screen.

'I'm lost in a strange city and now my friend's gone away and it's all the fault of your stupid violin playing,' said Heather, and began to cry.

'Yes,' admitted Kerry, tucking a pair of gloves underneath her waistcoat. 'I do shoplift compulsively.'

'Why is this?' enquired Morag. 'Is it kleptomania, which I once read about in a human newspaper?'

'No, it just burns me up the way there are nice things everywhere and I can't afford to buy them.'

'Are you poor?'

Kerry was.

'And often depressed. But I have been much more cheerful since you appeared.' Outside in the street, Kerry tried on her new gloves with satisfaction.

The fairy, after arguing with Heather, had flown across the street and there had the good fortune to meet Kerry, one of the very few human beings in New York who could see fairies.

Anyone who knew Kerry, with her long silvery blue hair, her hippy clothing, her flower alphabet and her quixotic quest to play New York Dolls guitar solos, would not have been surprised to learn that she could see fairies. They would only have been surprised that she had never seen one before.

She had made friends with Morag immediately and now they regularly went shoplifting together. Kerry fed Morag, found her whisky, and listened to her fiddle-playing and her stories. She also explained the intricacies of her flower alphabet and the reasons why she loved the New York Dolls and why she was determined to be revenged

on Cal, a faithless and treacherous lead guitarist who rehearsed with his band across the street in the old theatre.

'My revenge on Cal will be terrible and complete,' she told the fairy. 'He will bitterly regret ever promising to teach me all the guitar solos on the first New York Dolls album, then letting me down so disgracefully.

Particularly as I fucked some dreadful, boring roadie merely so he would give me a guitar.'

'Excellent,' agreed Morag. 'Give him hell.'

Kerry had several methods of revenge in mind, but mainly she planned to defeat his entry for the East 4th Street Community Arts Association Prize.

'They are producing a version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
at the theatre,' she explained. 'Cal is directing it.

They imagine that they will win this year's prize. But they won't. I will. My radical new version of the ancient Celtic flower alphabet, assembled afresh for the first time in centuries, will win the prize. And this is good, because I am very fond of flowers. I used to take flowers to bed with me when I was little.'

'So did I,' said Morag.

On 4th Street a beggar asked for money.

'I'm sorry, I don't have any,' said Kerry. 'But have this instead.'

'What was that?' asked Morag.

'A postcard of Botticelli's
Venus and Mars,''
Kerry told her. 'A most beautiful picture.'

Morag was unclear as to how this would help a starving beggar, but Kerry said it would do him the world of good.

'If more people had nice pictures by Botticelli there would be much less trouble everywhere. I base the flower arrangements in my hair on
Primavera,
the world's greatest painting.'

'Now let me get this straight,' said Spiro, chief squirrel of Central Park who, alerted by reports from his

subordinates, was paying the strange new creatures a visit.

'You call yourselves fairies. You are invisible to almost all

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13humans. You come from a place called Cornwall. You lived, happily there until some technically minded fairy called Magris invented the steam engine and precipitated an industrial revolution in your fairy society.

Consequently Tala, your king, started moving previously well-contented fairies out of the fields and gardens and into workhouses, thereby producing a miserable and oppressed fairy kingdom almost overnight, complete with

security police and travel permits. Am I right so far?'

Brannoc and the other fairies nodded.

'Whereupon you, being mainly concerned with playing music and eating mushrooms and having no interest in

working twelve hours a day in a factory, decamped for Ireland, aided by two Irish fairies. On the way you met two Scottish fairies who claimed first to have been run out of their home town for playing Ramones songs on their fiddles, and second to have been run out of Scotland for some other offence they would not admit, and then you found a field of magic mushrooms and ate them all. Instead of carrying on fleeing.'

'We were tired.'

'Right. Subsequently you drank more whisky and beer than you can remember, then you got bundled on to a truck somehow and next thing you knew you were being driven up Fifth Avenue, after presumably being loaded on to

some sort of cargo-carrying airplane. Is that it?'

The fairies nodded miserably. Central Park was better than the furious streets beyond, but it was not like home.

'Well, cheer up,' said Spiro. 'It's not too bad. At least you ended up in America. You speak the language, more or less. You can rest here a while, and what's to stop you sneaking out to JFK and boarding a plane home?'

'We can't go back. Tala the King wants us dead.'

'Looks like you're stuck here then. But what's so bad about that? New York is a good place, you'll like it.'

Somewhere around City Hall Magenta halted for lunch, unwrapping a half-eaten pizza she had picked up on a

bench along the way. She ate it warily.

She was sure that Tissaphernes was in the area. Tissaphernes was head of the Persian cavalry. Magenta's force consisted mainly of Hoplites and Pelasts, so she had to be careful not to be outmanoeuvred. She rose and carried on up Broadway.

Outside, the sun shone. Inside, Kerry and Morag got drunk. This was not good for Kerry as her wasting disease left her short of energy, but it made her mind feel better.

'Two in two days,' she mused, referring to another tramp who had lain down and died on the sidewalk outside.

Kerry and Morag placed some flowers around the corpse and called an ambulance. Tired now, she lay down to rest and asked Morag the reason for her continuing argument with Heather.

'It is partly because I am a MacPherson and she is a MacKintosh,' explained Morag. 'And there is a very ancient and bitter feud between the MacPhersons and the MacKin-toshes. I will tell you all about this later. But even apart from that, Heather showed herself to be of dubious character right from the start.

'It was way back when we were children, or bairns as we might say in Scotland. Both our mothers had taken us, along with our clans, to a great fairy piping and fiddling contest. The gathering was held near Tomnahurich Hill, which is close to a town called Inverness.

'My mother told me that the gathering used to be held on the hill itself back in the old days, when the Fairy Queen lived right inside it, but now humans have built a cemetery there. Thomas the Rhymer is buried there. He was a famous Scottish prophet and fairy friend, some time in the tenth century. Or eleventh or twelfth. Or some time, I forget. Anyway, with a cemetery there we couldn't use the hill any more. There are many places we can't go any more because of humans. But we still like the area.

It is beautiful, and convenient for all the fairy clans to come and play.

'I remember on the way there we passed by Culloden. There are many stories about Culloden but they are all very painful for the Scots, so I will not tell them just now. Anyway, the festival was a wonderful event. All the great pipers and fiddlers were there, and singers and jugglers and acrobats and storytellers and horse-racers and

everything you could imagine, everyone bright and happy and colourful.'

Morag smiled at the memory.

'I was very excited because my mother had entered me for the junior fiddle competition. It was the first time I would ever have played in front of anyone else but my own clan. I had been practising all year. I was going to file:///Users/lisa/Downloads/Martin%20Millar%20-%20The%20Good%20Fairies%20of%20New%20York.html

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play "Tullochgorum". That is the tune I was playing outside your window a while ago. I don't wish to be immodest, but these days I am famous throughout Scottish fairydom for my playing of "Tullochgorum". It is a famous strathspey, which is a kind of Scottish reel, but it is very difficult to play well. A Scottish fiddler can build a reputation just by the way she performs it. Rabbie Burns, who is the most famous poet in the world, called it the Queen of Songs.'

She laughed.

'My mother wanted me to play something less difficult but I was a very determined bairn, if rather quiet. And in fact, though all the great fiddlers were there, playing in competitions during the day and for fun all night, and I heard the tune played by some of them, I did not really think that any of them did it better than me.

'Well, come the day of the junior contest, I was a bundle of nerves. My mother, who despite many faults did

understand the fiddle, poured a dram of whisky down my throat and told me to get on with it. The whisky calmed me down and when I heard the other young competitors I realised that I was a better fiddler than any of them. It was my turn next and I was just starting to feel confident when a pale, sickly-looking little fairy with unusual golden hair got up and played. She played "Tullochgorum" and it was the best version anyone had heard at that festival. The audience went wild. Naturally I was furious.'