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Stevie cleared her throat and started to speak, low and controlled: ‘Give me the child. Through dangers untold and . . . hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle, the castle . . . beyond the Goblin City. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great. You have no power over me!’
‘Wahey!’ Susie applauded from her prone position on the sand.
‘Very cool.’
Stevie looked down at them both. ‘Come on, join in. We’ve got a much better shot at banishing the Goblin King if we do it together. Girl power! Hold hands,’ she ushered them with her fingertips. ‘Now repeat after me . . .’
They stood in a circle, clutching each other’s booze-clammy hands, squeezing tight and somehow keeping their balance as they started to walk around and around the fire. They soon fell into a sort of a chant, but Temperance’s voice drifted away as she let her mind wander back into the dress’s memories of its wedding day. In fact, she sought them out – so delicious and moreish were these snapshots of a happy life, suffused with bright and beautiful love.
A four-piece band playing Rat Pack classics in one corner of the hotel ballroom, a giant fruitcake impeccably iced in another. Temperance in the bride’s shoes, being twirled on the spot until she was dizzy. A small pageboy tries to cut in but a low voice says very firmly, ‘Not today, Tim. I’ll think you’ll find she’s all mine today.’ They are holding hands under the table as telegrams are read, they are standing hip to hip as they cut into the cake with a sword, of all things. Cheering, laughing. Happy tears.
Temperance felt the biting current of magic, starting in the very tips of her fingers and then travelling up into her shoulders and down her spine. She started to rearrange the memory in her head. To redesign it. It wasn’t something she’d ever done with a real memory before, but now, more than anything, she wanted this memory to be hers, as she would have it. As if the dream of her future had already come true. She squeezed her eyes and painted a scene in vibrant technicolour behind them.
It’s not a hotel ballroom – it’s the barn at the back of the Witch’s Nose. Gold and silver streamers everywhere. A DJ in the corner, playing ‘Get Lucky’. A huge tower of profiteroles and French Fancies. Because who actually likes fruit cake? Susie and I are dancing like crazy, the sequins from her mini dress almost blinding me. Until a hand finds my waist, snaking around, drawing me to him. He smells like something familiar, like being outdoors maybe. Shells and pine needles. ‘I can’t believe you’re mine,’ he says. We hold hands as funny speeches are made, we bump into each other as we jostle to smush a French Fancy into the other’s face first. We’re so happy, we could burst.
Temperance saw herself in all of those moments, embroidering her own hopes into the story of the dress, mingling with its echoes of eternal love. She blinked up at the starry sky, clearing the tears in her eyes, pulling herself back to reality. Where were they again? Oh yes, the Goblin King. Totally normal.
As she tuned back into Stevie’s chant, Temperance found herself making her own version of the words in her head, born of the sort of honest desperation only a midnight beach and too much Malibu can bring out in a person.
Give me The One. Through long lonely nights I have found myself here, at the beach holding all of nature’s wonder. For my will is as strong as yours, and my magic as great. Love can have all power over me, if it brings The One to me. I swear.
Chapter 5
Temperance had never been chucked out of a pub before. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to her, and she’d never dreamed it would happen because she smelled so bad.
‘You’re green around the gills, Temperance Molland, and you smell like pond water to boot. Clear off out of here and help outside,’ Margie, landlady at The Witch’s Nose, had told her this morning. Margie has been like an official granny to Temperance her whole life, but the kind of gran who told you when your skirt was too short as she fed you a massive Sunday roast. You didn’t mess with Margie.
So Temperance had given up stringing up FairyFest decorations over the bar, echoes of synthetic coconut coming back to her even though she’d scrubbed her tongue like she was removing barnacles from the bottom of a ship, and she stumbled outside to set up the kids’ treasure hunt.
Temperance itched at her scalp. She’d not fallen asleep on the beach since she was nineteen, maybe. She didn’t remember bringing so much of it back home with her in her hair or her knickers last time. That meringue of a wedding dress was like a tent in itself, though, and she’d slept so deeply next to Stevie and Susie by the firepit. Even those mad dreams didn’t shake her awake. Dreams like she’d never had before.
Thunderclouds so dark they were purple, rolling towards the village like a herd of wild horses, spooked and seething.
A hand trailing through knee-high wildflowers, but everywhere the fingers dance, the blooms turn instantly to fire. Burning like sparklers right down to their roots, leaving only ash on the wind.
The mottled glass of Try Again splintering and fracturing right through the middle as the door slams shut.
Temperance had sat in the sticky doom of a hangover before: the roll of her stomach, the sweaty sense of guilt that she’d said something to someone she shouldn’t, the painful thump of dehydration behind her eyeballs. But this doom was different. This doom went deeper, into the marrow of her bones, it pulled at the roots of her hair like it was making her stand to attention, as if her whole body was trying to say: danger is coming. Get ready.
She told herself for the seventeenth time this morning that it was just hangxiety talking and tomorrow this would all be a silly memory. There were no curses here. No horror-movie storms or wildfires on the cliff paths. The shop was perfectly intact. Not that she’d checked this morning but . . . it was all fine. Fine. The lead lining her stomach would melt away just as soon as the alcohol evaporated from her system. Totally fine.
The festival volunteers had put together some tiny organza bags filled with marshmallow mushrooms for the children’s toadstool hunt around the village green. Temperance had the task of hiding them in clever but accessible spots for children aged three and up, a job which at least involved lots of salty fresh air to help bring her back to life.
She sucked in a lungful as she stood looking out over the grass. It was 9am and the village was still mostly asleep. Dew sparkled on the ground and a swallow swooped low to snap up a tasty insect. Hugh and Praveen from the committee were the only other people around: timidly using a rubber-ended mallet to knock in a fairy circle of tent pegs with papier-mâché ‘stones’ glued on top in the middle of the green. Temperance suddenly marvelled at how much of her life had taken place on this green. She had learned to walk here, to ride a bike. Temperance could so clearly remember the exact moment she did a perfect cartwheel here aged twelve and then instantly knew it was a totally babyish thing to do, and so not cool. She used to share sandwiches with Abel in the bus shelter when she’d had enough of Susie and just wanted to vent to her best friend. They met there at least once a week. Until things between them changed, and felt altogether different. And then, the night after Temperance turned seventeen, when she was fizzing with a magical knowledge only she and her mum shared, she went to find Abel at the bus shelter with a slice of birthday cake especially for him. He was gone. Only a note on his hoodie waited for Temperance on the bowed wooden bench. The closest thing she got to a goodbye.
She felt her feet moving her towards the shelter now, scattering a few sweet bags in the potted plants and behind parking bollards. Still waiting for the heavy haze of doom to lift around her heart, Temperance went to sit down. But as her hand reached out for the well-worn wood, the doom only seemed to find an extra gravitational pull within her, pushing her heart down directly on top of her stomach.
The purple clouds.
Burning flowers.
Cracks in glass.
Why couldn’t she shake this dream? How badly fermented was that old bottle of Malibu?!
As much as her rational brain reminded Temperance that her body was out of whack after too much alcohol and a short night’s sleep out in the wild, another part of her kept whispering: danger, danger! The part of her that knew magic existed, that weird things were woven just underneath the fabric of the ‘real’ world, out of sight but still pulling the strings. That everything in this universe of beautiful chaos was linked by energy, recycled over and over again, and that one tiny push of a domino on one day could bring down a skyscraper the next.
She gripped the sleeve of her sky blue cardigan tightly. No new feelings there. Could the wedding dress have left a strange kind of nightmarish imprint on her, perhaps? It didn’t feel possible: that dress had only stirred up the very best, most glorious feelings. Temperance was sure it couldn’t cause one wince of pain to anyone.
