“Gnomes?” he asked.
“Well, sort of. The thing is you read things, and you see things, and they’re not the same. To read about it, it all makes so much more sense, with Seelie and Unseelie courts, with gnomes and elves, but it’s not like that. I’ve been seeing them all my life, and they’re all the same whatever they are and whatever they look like. I don’t really know what they are. They talk, well, the ones I know do, but they say odd things, and only in Welsh. Usually. I met one who spoke English at Christmas. He gave me this stick.” I tapped it in the mud. “They don’t call themselves elves, or anything. They don’t have names. They don’t use nouns very much.” It was such a relief to have someone to talk to about this! “I call them fairies because that’s what I’ve always called them, but I don’t really know what they are.”
“So you don’t know what they are, not really?”
“No. It’s not the sort of thing. What I think is that people have told a lot of stories about them and some of them are true and some of them are made up from other stories and some of them are muddled. They don’t tell stories themselves.”
“But if you don’t know, then they could be ghosts?”
“The dead are different,” I said.
“You know? You’ve seen them?” His eyes were very wide.
So I told him about Halloween and the oak leaves and the dead going under the hill, which meant I had to tell him about Mor. I was getting cold by this time. “So how did she die?” he asked.
“I’m freezing,” I said. “Can we go back to town and maybe get a hot drink?”
“I won’t see any more elves or whatever today?”
I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see them now. “Look carefully by the puddle,” I said.
He turned his head slowly again and saw, I think, one of the gnarled gnome-like ugly fairies that isn’t human at all except for the eyes. He blinked.
“Did you see it?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. “I saw its reflection. If it’s there and you can see it, why can’t I see it? I believe you, I really do. I saw the other one.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s ever such a lot I don’t know about them. I can’t see them if they don’t want me to.”
The fairy was smiling in an unpleasant way, as if it could understand. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’m getting chilled through.”
It was hard to stand up from the wall, and hard to walk for the first few steps. Sitting on walls is better for my leg than standing up, but not very good for it all the same. Wim offered to help, but there’s nothing that helps, really. He put his hand on my arm, my other arm, my left arm. “Can I at least take your bag?” he asked.
“If you have a bag, you could take the books,” I said. “But I have to keep the bag.”
“Are you telling me your bag is magic?” he asked.
We both looked at my bag, bulging with library books. You couldn’t find anything less magic looking if you tried. “It’s sort of part of me,” I said, feebly.
He didn’t have a bag, but he took some of the library books anyway and carried them under his arm. “Now,” he said, as we came out of the woods. “Some real coffee, not that Nescafe swill.”
“What do you mean, real coffee?” I asked.
“In Marios, they have real filter coffee. They make it from coffee beans. You can smell them grinding it and roasting it.”
“The smell of coffee is great. The taste, however, isn’t,” I said.
“You’ve never had real coffee,” he said, confidently and correctly. “Wait and see.”
Marios was one of the brightly lit neon cafes in the high street where the girls from school hang out with their local boyfriends. The tables were full of them. We went to sit at the back where there was a small table free. Wim ordered two filter coffees. There was a juke box playing “Oliver’s Army,” very loudly. It was horrible, but at least it was warm. He put my library books on the table, and I put them back into my bag.
“How did she die?” he asked again, when we were sitting down.
“This isn’t the place,” I said.
“The wood wasn’t the place and this isn’t the place?” Wim asked. He put his hand on my hand, where it was lying on top of the table. I gasped. “Tell me about it.”
“It was a car accident. But really it was my mother,” I said. “My mother was trying to do something, some huge magic, to get power, to take over the world I think. The fairies knew and they told us what to do to stop it. She tried to stop us, and one of the things she did was to try to use things that weren’t real, things coming at us. We just had to keep on. I thought we’d both die, but it would have been worth it, to stop her. That’s what the fairies said, and that’s what we were prepared for, both of us. There were all those things that were magic, that were illusion. I thought it was like that, when I saw the lights, but it was a real car.”