A Fae of low rank, and full of spite with it, arrived one day in his chamber and wordlessly beckoned to him. He was practising for a banquet and so he kept hold of his violin and his bow as he followed the creature through the court. In the years that followed, he has frequently been moved almost to tears to think of what might have become of him had he not had his violin clutched in his hands that day. A coincidence like the one that saw him taken as a child, a circumstance that has coloured everything since.
The Fae led him out of the filigreed gates and across the buttercup meadows to the border of the woods. He’d tried to ask where they were going but the courtier had ignored him. She led him through the beeches until they came to a ramshackle cottage. He remembers that he was nervous. He remembers that he thought he might be sick if it was the Queen in there. He remembers that he was holding his violin so tightly the strings were cutting into his palm.
She shoved the door open.You’re going in there, she’d hissed, baring her pointed teeth, whiter and sharper than mistletoe in the oak.Do you know why you have to go? Because the Queen’s had it with humans and she’s most specially had it with you. Ugly, stinking oaf you’ve become, she loves you no longer.
She pushed him through the door and he arrived backin the human world, dressed in ugly, drab human clothes. It was precisely the same spot they’d taken him from – though it took him years to work that out – except the trees had long gone and in their place was a car park and four huge buildings like luminescent temples arranged at its northern end.HOMEBASE, read one.HOBBYCRAFTsaid another.KWIKSAVEandDFS. He blinked in the unnatural glare and coughed from the fumes. By the time he thought to look, the portal was gone and all he had were the human clothes he stood up in, his violin and his bow.
Even now, all these years later, the memory squeezes at his chest. He rubs his thumb over the wood of his violin to calm himself, closes his aching eyes. He starts to hum the Pearl waltz, one of his favourite parts of the score. Like wrapping a warm, heavy blanket around himself and sinking into darkness.
That’s what he’d done that first day, hummed and sang to stop himself from screaming. He’d wandered the edges of that car park until dusk, watching the steel carriages come and go, bewildered by their speed and noises and lights. He slept on its edges that night, bedding down among the thorny branches of the box trees with his violin tucked between his knees, broken glass stuck in the tread of his trainers and the stink of foxes acrid in his nose. It was May 2, 1998. He saw it on a newspaper.
By the time the winter set in, he’d got himself in hand. He’d made his way to the city where he spent his days busking outside train stations for pennies, and his nightscollecting banknotes in hotel rooms and saunas. He had enough changes of clothes to fit into any social situation, a bed to sleep in each night, a case for his violin and a rough understanding of how the new world worked. It turned out there wasn’t much difference between the mortal world and the Fae court: that first delighted, then depressed him. You needed to be beautiful, and you needed to be able to wander about the world without a care, unattached, tethered by nothing more troublesome than gravity. Those with power expected to be able to look and touch as they pleased, and if you were smart you’d let them, and pocket their favours while you could.
There’s a loud knock at the green room door and without waiting for a response, Derek the follow spot strides in, power drill in one hand.
‘Mackie sent me to have a look at a loose shelf,’ he announces and gives the drill a little blast. Sandra hurriedly opens her book and pretends to read. Michael ignores him. Henry shrugs. You have to pretend he doesn’t get to you, Henry’s found, this Uriah Heep with the manners of Mr Collins. You have to hold your face blank and your nerves steady until he goes away and torments someone else.
‘Go ahead.’
Derek puts his drill to the shelf bracket above the mirror and aggressively drills a screw into the wall. ‘Sorry!’ he shouts. ‘I’ll only be a minute!’ Henry stares at his score, thoroughly jangled and trying not to show it.
‘All done.’ Derek giggles, an unpleasantly high-pitchednoise that doesn’t match the paunch, the wisps of straw-like hair over his bald scalp or the steel toe-cap boots. He gives a silly little shudder. ‘Sorry, I had to have my coffee black this morning. Milk was off.’
And with an aggravating smirk, Derek saunters out, letting the door shut softly behind him.
Henry’s stomach swoops. How long before everyone starts to put two and two together about soured milk and a changeling aboard the Grub? How long will Belinda – who must know – shelter him? Will the Crow sling him out on a day off, or will Derek move first? What exactly would be the consequences of everyone finding out? A stoning, the silent treatment, a public repudiation back into the human world? But that would be breaking his pledge, so what would the Crow do about that?
As usual, he feels like mad Bertha in the attic after an encounter with Derek, so he flips back through the score until he comes to the wedding scene, a lilting 6/8 that is almost the exact tune as the song he used to play each year on Queenday and plays the first few bars to comfort himself. A new problem to worry about. As if his life hasn’t been hard enough. How the fuck did Derek guess? Who or what is he?
Five months here and still Henry understands so little and yes, it makes him respect the Crow, if only grudgingly. The magic tricks are perfect, the illusions seamless. Why, for example, doesn’t anyone notice the Grub when they stop in ordinary train stations? Does anyone ever tell the people they know on the outside the truth of this show?
Why did he take so long to find out about it? More than twenty years he’s spent poring over human-written books of what they call folklore, long pages of mostly nonsense about the fairy world and not a word about this show. Ever since the internet became widespread he’s been searching, scouring squillions of terabytes of bollocks, wading through endless message boards of people emoting at strangers about their problems, trying to find one, just one, like him.
All these years alone with himself and his violin. All these years wandering through the greyness of the human world, never even catching a glimpse of magic from the corner of his eye. The only person who’d ever come close to knowing the truth of his life was Nora.
He met her on a carnival when he was maybe seventeen. He was still stumbling around the human world, confused by light switches and bewildered in a supermarket; she was a teenage runaway with a shaved head and burn marks all along her thighs. Six months they spent together, getting stoned behind the haunted house, telling each other their dreams, carefully talking around the holes in their childhoods. She was the closest human to a Fae he had encountered out in the world; capricious, carefree and cursed – perhaps – with a clairvoyance that saw her stuffing her bra with twenties on a Saturday night after a few hours in a tent dressed up as Esmerelda. He modelled his speech on hers, copied her inflection until all traces of a bygone time were gone from his tongue.Jesus Christ, Henry, you know life has moved on from those chonky books about dead people you loveso much?He did know that, but he didn’t much care. He’d learned everything about humans from long afternoons in a library, the only place he’d been able to get warm. He swapped Fae masters for human ones as he worked through the shelves: Austen, Brontë, Carroll, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Thackery, Tolstoy, Zola.
Nora disappeared with a tattooed dodgem operator and Henry had taken it as a sign to wise up, forget about having friends and get on in the world he’d found himself in. Then, last year, on a warm Monday evening in July, he had a night off fromTurandotat the Coliseum. Restless in city smog that only trapped him in his gasping, sweating body, he did what he used to do when he was a kid and had nowhere else to go – he got on the Tube and rode until the end of the line in any direction, until the city petered into scrub. He would wander into scrawny, forgotten copses littered with fridges and mattresses and he’d stand with his eyes shut, breathing in the green, trying to hear the pulse of Fae beneath suburban drone.
Down the escalator at Notting Hill, into the clay-bound bowels of the city on the Central line, thundering east. He got off at Loughton and wandered until the lights of a fairground lured him off the road and onto the common.
He went to the fortune teller for the memory of his old friend. And there, in the corner of the booth, was Nora herself, conjured like a spirit. Her tears drew black streaks of eyeliner down her face as she watched him walk towards her and sit down at the velvet-covered table.
He was not a man given to sadness or pity, but when he saw the track marks up her arm as she reached lazily for his hand he felt something squeeze in his stomach. She traced one blackened fingertip from his thumb joint to his little finger and she folded his fingers into his palm.
They don’t love you back, you know.
His breath hitched.
But there’re ways in again, if you can find them.
Do you know how?
She leaned back, her eyes fluttering closed. He could see her pulse flickering at her throat as her breath slowed and her body sank into the chair.You’ve spent your life on the fringes of this world because you think that’s where you’ll find them. Carnie folk, deadbeats and junkies like me. But they don’t think as much of us as you do. You need to try going somewhere else that’s neither here nor there.
How?
The Apple and the Pearl.
