Read Online Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce - Free Book Online Page A

lust and fancy was older girls and women, even if they were unobtainable. Girls our own age and younger were treated with disdain.
    Except my feelings about Tara were different. One day I was waiting for Peter to get ready and I saw this school photo of her, with the waves of her brown hair all combed and her eyes full of sparkle. I stole the photo there and then. I kept it in the bottom of my sock drawer and took it out from time to time. It wasn’t the only photo of her I lifted from their house. They must have known where all those photos were going. Must have known.
    Like I say, I kept it all secret. But I looked forward to going to school every day because I knew I would see her. School, which before all this was a pile of dung, had become a place of golden light. I was too clever to let on. Of course. I wasn’t about to have Peter or anyone having a laugh at my expense.
    There were plenty of opportunities to be near her. I watched her blossom every day. No one knew. I don’t think she knew. I never let her see me watching.
    One day in the schoolyard she asked me to look after her shoulder bag while she went off and did something. When she’d gone I nipped behind the bike-sheds and had a rummage through the bag. I found a comb with a couple of strands of her hair in it. I kept it. A pencil. Kept it. One or two objects like that. I wrote things with that pencil. I wrote I love you, just to see how the words would flow out of her pencil. I kept it, that pencil, in a box with a lock on it, like it was the finger bone of a medieval saint.
    I was learning the guitar back then. I wrote some shit songs about Tara. Really shit songs. You wouldn’t want them to see the light of day. No.
    I noticed that Tara didn’t seem to have close friends. Not like most girls of that age. It wasn’t that she was unpopular—just the opposite. She held people off. Didn’t seem to need them.
    But she did want to come with us, wherever we were going. Peter resisted at first, but I talked him round. Peter was always easy to run. I told him that if Tara came along, we’d have more chance with the girls.
    “ ’Owz that work?” he’d say.
    I told him that if girls see you with another girl they feel less threatened. At the time we had a project to try and get into any girl’s pants who came along. But I knew we were coming on too desperate.
    “ ’Owd’ya mean?” he’d ask.
    It was like he hadn’t thought through any of these things. I told him it made us look less like we were on the prowl and they would drop their guard. Plus she might talk to them and that way we would have an in. “Christ you’re slow, Pete,” I told him. “So bloody slow.”
    Anyway, he bought it. Tara started to tag along. I was still playing it cool, and the cooler I was with her, the more she got interested in me. But I couldn’t stand it. I was dying in love. Dying. I had dreams about marrying her and the two of us flying over the motorway at night. Bright-colored dreams. It was making me ill. After over a year of this I told Peter.
    Well, he hit the roof.
    “I want to go out wi’ your sister.”
    “Eh? ’Owd’ya mean?”
    “Tara. I want to ask her out.”
    “ ’Owz that work?”
    “Your sister. I want to ask her. Out. On a date.”
    “Hahaha!”
    “I’m serious, Peter. I want to go out with Tara. I think about her all the time.”
    His face reddened. “Fuck off.”
    “I’m serious, mate.”
    “Fuck off! You ain’t going out with my fucking sister, no way!”
    “Why not?”
    “ ’Cos I know what you want to do with her, that’s why fucking not!”
    He wouldn’t speak to me for three days. Then I went round there and reasoned with him. “If your best mate, who you trust, can’t go out with Tara, then who can? And someone will, I said, ’cos she’s gorgeous, and it’s only a matter of time before some skanky, sleazy townie with jelly oil on his hair and a sporty set of wheels comes waving his top gear dick