“Where’s the rest of the truck?” he asked.
“Up on the hill,” I said.
With your wanker boyfriend, I wanted to add.
Fergus frowned at me.
“I had to leave. Forgot I had them with me,” I said and felt like a coward.
Fergus shrugged and I turned to go.
“How are you getting on with your haunted house?”
I stopped.
I should have just left. I knew even then I should have just left. I was tired and already annoyed. I had better things to do, finding the old man for one. And Fergus had done nothing but tell lies and tall tales. Nothing he could say to me would do any good.
I turned around and considered him.
He was either pretending not to look at me or he was genuinely very interested in whatever items he was boxing up.
“I’m not falling for it,” I said.
“Falling for what?”
Either he truly believed he was innocent or he was a damn good actor.
“Another one of your stories.”
He put up a hand. “Only the truth this time.”
Fairy Mirror.
I sighed and stepped back up to the counter.
“What’s wrong with the house?”
He looked down at me, unblinking, and grinned. He reminded me of the Big Bad Wolf in an old collection of Fairy Tales I’d once had, smiling down at Red Riding Hood, mouth wide and charming and hungry. A bit like her smile.
“Do you really want to know?”
I didn’t break eye contact with him. After realising I wasn’t going to flinch, he huffed a little air out of his nose, as if laughing at some secret joke I wasn’t in on, then looked over his shoulder.
“Okay,” he said, leaning onto the counter, lowering his voice. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He hadn’t warned me. He had done the very opposite of warn me, but I didn’t care. I leant forward to hear him.
“I knew a kid at school here. He moved to the area for a brief time when I was about nine, ten? He was from one of the cities, too. Like yourself. He and his mum. I didn’t know the whole story about why they were here, but they arrived quick and didn’t stay long. Didn’t even last the whole year. My mum thought there’d been some trouble with debt collectors. Or maybe a fella. Like I said, I never got the whole story, and they kept themselves to themselves for the most part. I only ever saw him at school, and the only time I ever saw her was when she’d come to pick him up and drop him off. Quiet people. Not really looking to stand out. Except, he had this birthmark. A port wine stain, I think it’s called.”
He traced a finger over the right-hand side of his face.
“From the corner of his eye, across his cheek and over to his ear. Easy to recognise. Probably why they came out all this way rather than to another town or city. Couldn’t hide a birthmark like that for long. Anyway, after a few weeks he and I got to talking. Started with schoolwork, then TV, what our favourite show was: The Demon Headmaster not that you’re asking. And before you know it, we were pals. Well, as much as we could be within the hours of school. He wasn’t allowed out after class or even over the weekend. I had my mum ask his mum if he could come over one night. She was polite about it, but it was clear a sleepover was never happening. Every weekday she’d drop him off in the morning and be there to pick him up at the bell in the afternoon. It was a real shame, because I thought he’d be quite popular if he was allowed out a bit more. He had a dark sense of humour and nothing much seemed to scare him. Not the spiders in the supply cupboard. Not one of the farm dogs when it got into the school yard. Not even when Micky Campbell had a seizure in maths class. In fact, he was the one putting his jumper under Micky’s head and telling the teacher to call an ambulance. For a kid who was bundled away as much as he was, nothing much seemed to faze him.
“Except for one Monday, when I got into school after my paper round—I was always the first one in on Mondays—and there he was waiting at the school door, face pale, bags under his eyes and this thousand-yard stare. His uniform hadn’t been washed. He still had the grass stains on his knees from Friday’s football when he’d slide-tackled me off my feet. I called out to him, saying if I’d known he loved school so much I’d have set the two of them up weeks ago. Poor kid nearly leapt out of his skin. He saw it was me and then ran straight into my arms. Back then, my dad would have looked at me funny if he’d seen me hugging another boy, but I could tell something was wrong so I just rubbed his back like my mum would do and waited till he was ready to start talking.
“After a while, the school receptionist arrived and let us into our regi class to warm up. Once we were alone, he told me what happened. His mum had been a bit distracted lately. She wasn’t telling him why and he was worried that—”
He stopped suddenly. I looked behind me, wondering if another customer had come in or—God forbid—Rowan had returned already. But there was no one. Fergus continued.
