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'Naturally,' agreed Kerry. 'It was a mean trick.'

'It certainly was. And I might have been put off except I could see from the blonde fairy's kilt that she was a MacKintosh and I certainly was not going to let a MacKintosh fairy get the better of me. I had the pride of my clan to think of. Also, my mother would have been mad as hell.

'So I stepped up, closed my eyes and played. And was I good?'

'Were you?'

'I was sensational. The best version of "Tullochgorum" heard this century, according to independent witnesses.'

'So did you win?'

'No, it was a draw between me and Heather. She got the sympathy vote because she was such a sickly-looking

child. Also it was rumoured that the MacKintoshes had bribed the jury. But I wouldn't have minded being first equal except — and I know you will find this hard to believe — Heather and her mother started complaining that Heather's rendition had obviously been superior and suggesting the MacPhersons had bribed the jury on my

behalf! Can you imagine?'

'So what happened?'

'I attacked Heather and tried to kill her. Unfortunately she was tougher than she looked and we had a terrible fight.

We both had cuts and bruises and missing teeth before we were pulled apart. And then after that we made friends.'

'Just like that?'

'Yes. After all, we were the best two fiddlers there. And when the wise fairy woman was bandaging us up, we

started to like each other better. That's how me and Heather met: And also how we got our excellent fiddles. They were our prizes. But she will never admit that my version of "Tullochgorum" was better than hers.'

'And this underlying tension makes you argue?'

Morag was not sure what 'underlying tension' meant, but agreed that that was probably it.

'Also, she claims it was her idea to form a radical Celtic band, but it was mine. I heard the Ramones first. The blacksmith's son had their first three records.'

Morag mused.

'And now I have ended up in New York, where they come from. This is obviously fate, as one reason Heather and I left Cruickshank in the first place was because all the other fairies ganged up on us for playing garage-punk versions of Scottish reels and wearing ripped kilts. They didn't like us dyeing our hair either.'

She picked up her fiddle, played a majestically traditional version of 'Tullochgorum', then got down to the business of working out the notes of the guitar solo on the New York Dolls' 'Bad Girl'. Once she had it worked out she could try to show Kerry how to play it, although as Morag was not a guitarist and Kerry had little musical

knowledge, this was proving to be an arduous business.

'That miserable motherfucker Cal could play this solo,' grumbled Kerry, eyes shining with hatred.

Across the street Dinnie looked out of his window.

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'That's funny,' he muttered. 'I'm sure I heard someone playing the violin over there.'

'Ignore it,' said Heather. 'It was just some cat in heat. Now, are you sure you don't have a wee drop of whisky anywhere?'

FIVE

After Morag's departure, Heather stayed with Dinnie. Dinnie was enormously unenthusiastic about this.

'Go live somewhere else,' he told her.

Heather replied that she could not desert a fellow Mac-Kintosh in trouble.

'I'm not in trouble.'

'Yes you are.'

In reality, Heather had nowhere else to go. But as it seemed like an obvious stroke of fate that the first person she had met in this vast metropolis was a fellow MacKintosh, she was content to stay. With her ability to make herself invisible, Dinnie was powerless to chase her out, much as he would have liked to.

She sat now eating his cookies and working his TV remote control. Only dimly familiar with the small choice of programmes available back in Britain, she was fascinated by the fifty channels that beamed and cabled their way to Dinnie's TV.

Dinnie was out, trying to earn some money. He had snarled at Heather that he was behind with his rent and was in danger of being evicted.

'Fine, fine,' said Heather, unaware of what this meant.

He had spent a miserable morning hanging around the courier office waiting for work. As a cycle courier, Dinnie was a disaster. Too fat to ride quickly enough and too argumentative to accept less than good work, he was lucky to earn anything at all, and served mainly as a figure of fun for the other riders.

Today, like all other days, had proved unrewarding and Dinnie rode home in a foul temper, wondering where he

was to find money for his rent.

Turning on to East 4th he cycled past Kerry. Dinnie frowned his deepest frown. He saw Kerry often, and he

detested her.

'You cheap tart,' he would mutter to himself as she waltzed by.

'You faggot guitarist,' he would hiss quietly after whatever lithe and attractive young man was trooping along beside her.

'You slut,' he would mumble, when peering out of his window at four one lonely morning to see Kerry being

offloaded by a cab driver and helped, drunk and giggling, up the steps and into her apartment.

Dinnie was deeply attracted to Kerry.

Heather greeted him brightly as he appeared.

'Don't speak to me,' he grunted. 'I've decided not to believe in you in the hope you'll disappear.'

'Why are you so rude to me?'

'Because I am a sensible human being and I have no time for nasty little fairies.'

Dinnie opened a tin of corned-beef hash, heated it in a frying pan, ate it and piled the dishes in the sink. He was fastidiously untidy. In his two large rooms there was nothing clean or in its proper place. He had an unusually large living space for the rent he paid, as the rooms he occupied above the theatre were not meant to be lived in.

He rented them illegally from the caretaker. Because of this he lived in constant fear of eviction, even when he was not behind with his rent.

'I saw an incredible programme,' said Heather, 'about a big family who own oil wells in Texas. Would you believe that one of them had a car crash and couldn't breathe because of his injuries, so his secretary, who had trained as a medical student, jabbed a knife into his throat, stuck a pen into his windpipe and blew into it until an ambulance arrived, thus saving his life? An emergency tracheotomy, I think they called it. When he held her hand in the file:///Users/lisa/Downloads/Martin%20Millar%20-%20The%20Good%20Fairies%20of%20New%20York.html

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ambulance and told her he loved her I was moved to tears.'

Ignoring her, Dinnie picked up his violin and left, bicycling determinedly up Second Avenue.

'Where are we going?' said a disembodied voice from the handlebars.

Dinnie wailed and fell off the bike.

'I'm not surprised you don't make any money as a courier,' said Heather, brushing the dirt off her kilt. 'You keep crashing.'

Dinnie coughed and spluttered.

'Do you need a tracheotomy?' asked Heather hopefully, unsheathing her tiny sword.

'What the hell are you doing here?'

'I wanted an outing.'

Dinnie was going busking, something he did only in times of dire need.

He chained his bike at St Mark's Place. Three separate ragged and homeless young men begged dimes from him,

but he ignored them and began to play.

Heather shook her head in disbelief. Dinnie's playing was bad beyond description. Passers-by crossed the street to avoid him, and shouted insults. The small-time coke dealer on the corner left for his lunch break. The ragged homeless people, who had suffered too much to be driven away by a violin, just turned the other way.

After half an hour of painful wailing Dinnie had earned nothing whatsoever. He sadly unchained his bike and

made to leave.

Heather was appalled to see a MacKintosh musician so defeated.

'Don't go,' she whispered.

'What's the point of staying?'

'Play again,' instructed Heather, and she leapt on to Dinnie's violin, deadening the strings. Unseen by the rest of the world, she played her fiddle while Dinnie mimed. She played her way through some thrilling Scottish reels — 'The Salamanca', 'Miss Campbell of Monzie', 'Torry Burn' and various others, each linked with some of her favourite Ramones riffs — before plunging into a stirring version of 'Tullochgorum'.

The crowd burst into loud applause. Coins rained into Dinnie's fiddle case. Dinnie scooped them up and made a triumphant exit. He was so pleased with the money and the applause that he was moved to say thank you to

Heather, and all in all it would have been a memorable occasion had he not found that his bike had been stolen.

'You stupid fairy,' he raged. 'Why did you make me play after I'd unchained my bike?'

'Well I didn't know it would be stolen,' protested Heather. 'Bikes don't get stolen in Cruickshank.'

'Damn Cruickshank!' shouted Dinnie, and stormed off.

Magenta cycled serenely down First Avenue. Joshua, some way behind, shook his fist in frustration. He had almost caught her when Magenta, showing great tactical skill, had leapt on an unchained bicycle and made off.

Unable to run far, Joshua soon abandoned the chase and flopped down on the sidewalk.

He started to shake. Without regular doses of his Fitzroy cocktail he got withdrawal symptoms, but his mind was so addled by it he could not remember the recipe without the piece of paper Magenta had stolen.

A homeless acquaintance of his ambled by and offered him a drink of wine, which helped, though only a little.

'Damn that Magenta,' snarled Joshua. 'And her stupid classical fantasies.'

'I always knew it was à mistake to take her drinking in the library,' said his friend. 'Who does she think she is now?'

'Some ancient Greek general,' grumbled Joshua.

'It is not my fault if you live in a city populated by thieves and criminals,' said Heather, fluttering after Dinnie. 'I earned money for you, didn't I?'

'Twenty-three dollars. Where am I going to get a bike for twenty-three dollars?'

'At a bike shop?' suggested Heather, but this seemed to enrage Dinnie even more.

When an old woman with three worn and filthy coats hanging round her shoulders asked him for some change he

swore at her quite violently.

Back at the theatre he stepped over a body at the foot of the stairs without so much as a glance. Heather did stop to look. It was another dead tramp. Too far gone for a tracheotomy.

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It is just awful the way these people die on the street here, she thought. Why is there no one to look after them?

Downstairs at the theatre, rehearsals for Cal's production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
were under way. When Dinnie heard the actors' booming voices, he would scream abuse through the floorboards. He was not a fan of

Shakespeare.

'Never speak to me again,' said Dinnie to Heather, who thought he was being most ungrateful.

She was used to ingratitude, however. After she and Morag had spent countless hours in Scotland developing their new fiddle techniques, dyeing their hair and experimenting with inhaling the vapours of fairy glue, neither of their clans had been very pleased. Both their mothers had in fact threatened them with expulsion from their clans if they did not stop trying to subvert the youth of the Scottish fairydom. When they later enquired politely of Callum MacHardie, famous fairy instrument maker, whether he could make them an electric amplifier, he had actually

reported them to their Clan Chiefs, thereby subjecting them to long lectures on what was and was not suitable behaviour for fairies.

'Tripping around in meadows is fine,' their chiefs had told them. 'And helping lost human children home again.

Also, increasing the milk supply of friendly farmers' cows. But a large-scale youth rebellion is quite out of the question. So go home and behave yourselves.'

Right after this Heather and Morag had fluttered around the valley wearing hand-painted T-shirts saying 'First Mohican Fairy on the Block', but as no one else knew what a block was, the joke fell flat.

Morag stole what small pieces of food she could carry, loose cookies and bagels, and fed them to the homeless.

She had not appreciated it before in her village, but here she could see that being human could involve some very unpleasant things. Despite this, she was still marvelling at the wonders of New York.

Kerry was twenty-five and had lived in New York since she was fifteen, so she did not marvel any more, but she liked it.

They sat in a bar in Houston Street, drinking beer from a bottle. The fairy enthused about some South American musicians they had seen busking in Broadway.

'What good players they were. And lovely rhythms.'

'Mmmm,' replied Kerry.

'And all the young people walking up and down the pavement right next to them just to show off their new clothes.

What a pleasant occupation.'

'Mmmm,' replied Kerry.

'And weren't those two boys romantic, sitting kissing on the fire escape?'

Morag was keen on the fire escapes that snaked down the fronts of buildings and she frequently hopped up and

down them, looking in the windows.

'Mmmm,' said Kerry.

'I am sure I am having a better time with you than Heather is with that lump of a MacKintosh. I can tell that he is much too mean to give Botticelli postcards to beggars, or flowers.'

Kerry was silent.

A cheerful young barman gathered up the bottles from their table, giving Kerry a hopeful grin. Kerry stared into space.

'It is nice the way people smile at you all the time, Kerry.'

A tear trickled down Kerry's face.

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