Metro Winds

  ‘Clever cat,’ hissed the raven.

  Rose was silent for a long moment, and her face was white, but at last she shook her head and said, ‘You must lead my father back and give Willow a message from me. She must know that I have never forgotten her and that I will always love her and think of her, and wish her happiness.’

  ‘You have made up your mind?’ asked the cat, coldly now.

  Rose wept, but her voice was steady. ‘I must stay. It is the right thing to do and I cannot do the wrong thing, not even for love, for how should love survive in the aftermath? Can’t you understand?’

  There was a long silence. Then the cat lost its rigidity. It sighed and came to wind about her, putting its small nose against hers. ‘Of course I understand. But I . . . I cannot be an animal, Rose.

  Not when neither of us knows how much time I would be a man and how much a beast.’

  ‘No,’ Rose said, brushing away her tears. ‘Of course you can’t stay like this. Oh, this is such a cruel ending. I waited so long for you.’

  ‘And I spent my life in reading books, dreaming of a world that was better than the one I inhabited. Sweeter and stronger and more pure. A world that wanted courage and daring and intelligence, a world of wonder. And here it is, but I never imagined that to remain in it I must become Puss in Boots.’

  She gave a weepy laugh and cuddled the cat to her. Then she rose with Silk in her arms and taking hold of her father’s arm she said, ‘We have to go, before the gate closes.’

  ‘A pity,’ said the raven and became Madame Torquemada, clad in gleaming black, her hair a blaze of red fire. ‘Well, at least he was kind in saying no. He did not blame her for her choice. He was truthful about his own reasons and this parting had sweetness enough in it to comfort them both in the days to come.’

  ‘She to be a queen without love, then?’ asked the policeman. ‘That is a sad ending.’

  The witch shrugged. ‘Sometimes endings are sad, though I do not think Rose will live without love. There is too much of it in her not to draw it to her, and this is a world full of princes and heroes. But the cat man was her first love and there is only one of those,’ said the queen. ‘And now, I must see about my own ending.’ She smiled at Godred, then she looked at me as if she had heard the questions surging in my mind. ‘Princess Rose made a queen’s choice when she decided to stay, for she understood that love cannot last if wrong is done in its name, that sometimes the cost of love is too great. But she cannot become Queen Rose until I am gone, for there can only be one queen here. Now let us make haste, for our lovers believe the gate will close at dusk and we must try to live up to their expectations. In truth, the gate will not close until I choose, but it will be best if your sister sees it close so that she will know the way is ever barred between her and her cat man. And all must be done before I abdicate and make your sister queen.’

  We travelled back across the green hills and up into the snowy peaks, then Madame Torquemada summoned up a sled drawn by a pair of reindeer with bright yellow eyes and twelve enormous golden tines each.

  ‘An ending should always have a flourish, I think,’ she said as she climbed into the seat.

  It was a thrilling ride that took us a different and much longer way than we had walked, and we saw many wonders. Once the queen indicated a distant spire and said this was the Palace of the Moon, where my sister would live. I realised, then, that this journey by sleigh was a gift from her to me, a way of showing me what my sister’s life would be.

  ‘This could have been yours to rule,’ said the policeman.

  ‘It is enchanting here, but I think that things have a way of working out as they were meant to. Rose will make a wonderful queen. I am only sorry that Silk did not choose to stay. I wonder if I would have had the courage to stay, too, if the man I loved had to go. Rose was always a better person than me.’

  The old queen gave me a flashing look. ‘I think you would have surprised yourself, though in truth, you are something more complicated than a princess and I suspect you will have an interesting life back there in that other world, for it is no less complex than this one, and no less magical, in its own way.’

  Time passed. We stopped to eat at an inn amidst trees with leaves of silver and gold and bronze, where jovial dwarves served us green wine and a badger sang a song, but I was wondering about time.

  ‘I have made the way long enough that Rose and her prince might have a little time to love before they part,’ said the queen, who had been growing gradually older as the long day unfolded.

  ‘Liar! Romantic!’ cackled Griselda who now seemed less servant than crotchety old aunt to the queen. ‘You hope he will change his mind!’

  The witch queen pretended not to hear.

  When we set off again, it was only a little while before we saw ahead of us the line of ghost trees that marked the border of the world where I had been born. And there was Rose, alone alongside one of the ghost trees, gazing across at our apartment. There was no sign of Silk or my stepfather, and I realised they must already have gone into the house. I saw her straighten her back slowly, and then she moved away through the trees. I watched until she was out of sight.

  ‘Do not fear for your sister. Her life will be full and good and she will be much loved and revered here. Your world would have had little use for one whose goodness was so pure. I wish her prince had stayed, but it is better that he went than stayed and blamed her for it. And he would blame her, for he proved at the last to be more a creature of thought than feeling. I should have guessed it from the cat he became, for there is always a bit of them that remains aloof.’

  ‘I don’t really understand how Silk came into it,’ I said, drying my eyes.

  ‘Young men are often a good deal more than they seem to princesses and even to queens,’ said the witch. ‘He loved the goodness and sweetness of your sister before she became a woman, and there was a yearning in him that the world did not satisfy. Not for adventure or power or even for a princess, but for wonder. Then your letter summoned him home.’ She smiled, and it was exactly the same smile that the velvet song walker had given to me, a smile of respect and familiarity. ‘You showed all your faerie blood in writing that letter, for no words could have pierced him more deeply.’

  ‘My words?’ I echoed.

  In answer she looked expectantly at me, and I remembered. I had written asking Silk to come home to stop his brother selling the apartment and putting my stepfather into an institution. I had told him that, although I knew it to be utterly irrational, I could not shake the idea that Rose might one day return, and should there not be someone who loved her waiting to greet her? ‘Was not the greatest proof of love fidelity, even against all rationality?’

  The witch laughed. ‘He had given up on finding Rose, even though his heart told him she was not dead. But your words brought him back in all haste, and he found your stepfather weeping over the letter you had left him. Silk was galvanised and he decided he must follow you. Your stepfather insisted on coming too, and for a time it was truly the blind leading the blind. Well, you know the rest and my weariness grows heavy. I must go and prepare myself. Griselda will help me and then I will lay my head in Godred’s lap, and sleep. Fare you well, Willow. Do not let your mind or your heart limit you.’

  She touched the lead reindeer and it and the other reindeer vanished along with the sleigh, leaving only the little trap and mule that Griselda had ridden in from the hut to the tower. The witch hobbled away arm in arm with Griselda, but the bear remained.

  ‘You were her prince, weren’t you?’ I asked him gently.

  He smiled. ‘I am her prince. Unlike your sister’s prince, I thought her worthy of any sacrifice. And in the end, it was no sacrifice at all.’

  ‘Did you never regret being a bear?’ I asked.

  He gave a rumbling laugh. ‘I am only a bear some of the time, and mostly by my own choosing, though there were times in my long life as consort to my queen when the beast in me caused the transfor
mation at a time I did not wish it. Once I was a bear for a hundred years. I could be a man now, but somehow, at the end of it all, it is comforting to take this form. She could be a beautiful young woman if she chose, but it comforts her to allow herself to be old and bent and wrinkled.’

  There was the sound of running footsteps and we turned to see Griselda returning, but transformed into a plump pretty girl with bouncing brown ringlets. I would not have known her save that she was bursting out of the dress she had worn before. Ignoring us, she ran to the soft grey mule that had pulled her trap, and when she stroked it, it became a stocky, beaming young man in rich clothes and golden boots. The pair embraced and ran off without a second look.

  The bear shook his head. ‘She always did like happy endings and it was a nice way to reward Griselda. After all this time, Prince Peter might have learned a little humility.’ He sighed. ‘I must go to her now, for we have a final journey to make together. And you had better go, unless you mean to stay, for the gateway will soon be closed.’

  He gave a bearish bow and lumbered off.

  I looked at the policeman, who said soberly, ‘If you stayed there is bound to be a prince for you.’

  ‘You heard the witch,’ I answered. ‘I am too complicated to be a proper princess.’ He offered me his arm, and as we walked towards the ghost trees, I found myself wondering what beast lay inside him. A lone wolf, perhaps, something grey and reserved and very clever.

  We stepped back into the real world where it was now a hot moonless night, and the policeman stopped and turned to look down at me. It was very dark but there was a faint luminescence from the ghost trees that let me see his expression. ‘I never loved any woman because I wanted mystery and I thought love must be the end of mystery. But now it seems to me that love is a land in which things might be very different from the way they had seemed at first sight, and full of the unexpected. Not so much mysteries as paradoxes within which all the mysteries and contradictions between a man and woman may be contained. The right man and the right complicated woman.’

  I opened my mouth to say that I was not a woman, and then I realised I was wrong. I smiled up at him, and said, ‘Inspector Grey, remember the part that Godred said was the best bit of the story?’

  He nodded, eyes glimmering. ‘My name is Alasdair,’ he said, and he kissed me for a long, lovely time.

  Then it began to rain very hard. I gasped and as we turned to run across to the house, I thought I saw someone running past me. I stopped, squinting and blinking, and turned in time to see a cat, leaping into the dissolving park.

  THE STRANGER

  What is it about airports? Case thought. There was something almost mythical about the level of boredom and stagnation he felt, trapped in these mazes of shining glass and plastic laid out over acres of bilious-looking carpet. Yet in movies airports were always represented as glamorous, slightly dangerous places, where pursuit scenes erupted violently in the midst of all that coming and going, the protagonist racing along moving walkways waving a gun, elbowing extras aside as he pursued the plot. Someday he would write a script that captured it all, from the dewy awe you felt at first, primed by all those movies to see airports as portals to worlds of sophistication and mystery, to the disenchantment of the jaded frequent flier who knew an airport was no more than a tatty waiting room for journeys to the same end.

  Yet despite all the travelling he had done, there were times when he still experienced a furtive stab of hope that this trip would take him somewhere he had never been before. That sly bit of hope was like the cat in a story he had once read that is always getting its master to open this door and that door during winter, but refusing to go out any of them to its master’s baffled irritation. Then one day the master realises the cat is looking for the door to summer, and he keeps opening doors into winter.

  He kept travelling, looking not for the door to summer, but for a gateway to somewhere or something that would stop him feeling like a stranger in his own life.

  He pictured the scene: a cat stalking from door to door, tail in the air as its master turns one doorknob and then another. It would be a nice opening device for a movie without a linear structure. He imagined trying to pitch his airport movie to the money men and grimaced. Why were they always money men? Was it that women did not invest in movies? Maybe that was why the movie world was so full of men as boys. Was he a man or a boy, he wondered? Sometimes he felt as if he was some other category altogether.

  Certainly he had not been man enough for his ex-wife, Stephanie. He sighed and looked at his watch without taking in the numbers. Then, as he habitually did, he thought about that as directions in a script.

  Man checks time.

  I am losing the plot, he thought.

  What plot is that? he enquired of himself drily.

  Man mutters to self, then smiles.

  If life were a movie, his would be one of those European movies where everything took too long and even the smallest event was invested with a mysterious meaning that never divulged itself. Most people in the New World did not ‘get’ European movies because they saw them as metaphor. They could not imagine a level of alienation from other people so profound that almost no words or interaction were necessary or indeed possible. The first time he travelled to Europe, he had discovered that a lot of the things he regarded as metaphor were no more than simple descriptions of an unfamiliar reality. Like the way people in Russian novels lived, several different generations crammed into a two-room apartment with bookshelves and thin dividers set up to create an illusion of privacy. He had thought that a metaphor for emotional oppression, only to find that it was just how it had been behind the Iron Curtain during communism, or communism disguised as socialism, or state capitalism disguised as socialism. Privacy and space had been as unreachable as freedom.

  His Czech friend Ivana had said languidly that in those times, entire sagas evolved around the attempt to get an apartment. People schemed and planned and paid bribes so they could leave home, where their grandparents, parents and siblings still lived together, sometimes even their in-laws. She herself had slept with the brother of a dead woman in order to get him to sublet his sister’s squalid bedsit. It had been illegal, of course, in a place where, for a long time, almost everything anyone could want had been illegal. Her occupation of the apartment had lasted a year before the man had evicted her for fear of being reported. And that had been in the aftermath of the fall of communism. After the aftermath.

  The thing was that people like Ivana had a reason for feeling disconnected from the people around them. But he had never been poor, or politically oppressed, or even in much physical discomfort. He had never experienced the extremes of fear or anger or sorrow. His childhood had been pleasant, and when his parents died he had felt sad rather than grief-stricken, before burying them and going on to live a pleasant, even rather lucky life. He had no excuse for feeling alienated.

  He glanced around the airport, feeling weary and slightly dehydrated. But not suicidal. Not over an apartment or an airport or because of being left by his wife. Not even because he was living a life in which he had taken hundreds of trips without ever feeling he had arrived. Once, years ago, he had told a guy at a party that he had never contemplated committing suicide. The guy had looked at him incredulously. How could anyone see the state of the world and not feel like killing themselves? he asked. Obviously the man thought him shallow, and Case had felt disturbed in some way he could not articulate, but when he told the story to Ivana, she laughed uproariously.

  ‘Petr is Hungarian! What can you expect? Hungarian is not a language in which to conduct normal conversations. It is a language only for suicide and poetry.’

  Case had been fascinated by the idea of a language so tortured it could express only suicidal or poetic thoughts. He saw it as a poetic notion, until he overheard someone at a rap party say that the suicide rate among Hungarians was the fifth-highest in the world. That was the thing he liked about parties. The way you hear
d or misheard intriguing scraps. The way certain words got stuck in your head; this piquant phrase or that evocative awkwardness. He loved conversation – not taking part in it but witnessing it. Parties were perfect for that, because everyone wanted to talk and no one listened. He could be a stranger among them, listening and taking mental notes, and no one cared. He saw himself as a natural and instinctive witness of the world, which was perhaps why he’d been so troubled by the comment that a person who truly saw the world would be suicidal. Because Case felt like he saw far more than people who were deeply engaged in life. It was only that he did not feel suicide to be the natural or necessary consequence of his observations.

  He thought of his ex-wife’s disgust at his passivity, and found himself looking at his watch. He did not want to know the time; it was a pose he often struck in an airport. It’s like I am performing for an unseen audience, he thought. He often had the feeling his life was some sort of performance. It even worked as a metaphor. You came out of the darkness of the womb into the limelight, and so began the performance that was life, which invariably ended with the curtain falling. Curtains. The only bit that really bothered him was the idea of coming to the end of the performance, without ever knowing what it was for. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble with endings in scripts. They felt contrived, because life did not come with full stops. Everything bled into everything else.

  His problem with endings was why he had never made it to the big time, despite all the young playwright prizes and grants and the preliminary excitement of studios. He was known for being a very good scriptwriter who had trouble ending his scripts, to the frustration of his agent. Studios that took him on these days knew they would have to wait and wait and maybe call in another writer to finish his script or rewrite the end. The fact that he did not object to someone putting the tail on his script was why he was still working. The truth was that he was content for someone else to finish his stories.