This is Not a Fairy Tale Read online



  This

  is

  Not

  a

  Fairytale

  Nina-Gai Till

  Copyright © 2010 Nina-Gai Till

  Edition 2/2017

  www.ninagaitill.com

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by BC and NGT © 2010

  978-0-557-39769-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people either living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  To my own angels,

  Jillian, Lily-Mae and Cara Grace.

 

  1

  Unlikely angels

  This is not a fairy tale. It’s the truth, my truth, and you’re lucky I’m going to share it with you, because it’s not the kind of topic I would normally get into with just anyone.

  In fact, if it were up to me, I’d just be kicking back poolside, reading a trashy novel and smoking illicit cigarettes while my children weren’t looking. But, to my great consternation, I have recently learned that it’s not up to me at all. Not a scenario that fills me with joy, let me tell you. I mean, would you like to be obliged to share your deepest darkest secrets with the world at large? Honestly, if I’d known that things were going to end up so, well, so public, I wouldn’t have gone to the tattoo parlor in the first place.

  Of course, it’s all the fault of my ex-husband. Things are generally the fault of ex-husbands; all of my divorced friends say the same thing. The car broke down on the way to work? His fault because a) had he still been around, he would have understood when the mechanic charged for an overhaul that turned out to be replacing old spark plugs with older ones, and b) he would have been on the way to work, not you. Ditto for every other household, mechanical, garden and electronic problem. Not to mention the psychologically disturbed kids, the over-stressed dog and the under-paid electricity bill. All his fault.

  And needless to say, I wouldn’t have found myself in a tattoo parlor at the age of 41, lining up to get my kids’ initials inked about four inches above my coccyx if he hadn’t run off with a teenage gym instructor, leaving behind only a pile of debts, two upset daughters and some snide comments about stretch marks.

  I can hear you already, sighing and getting ready to put the book down, wishing you’d picked up yet another Grisham because even if you knew how the book was going to end, at least the storyline was going to be original. Not another whining treatise by a bitter ex-wife.

  Did you know there’s a club of second wives, on the Internet, dedicated to bitching about us first wives? Seriously. I wonder if they realize that one day, they will probably be bitter ex-wives themselves. It’s not like the guys they married are paragons of loyalty, after all. If this were the case, why would my ex-husband make such a huge deal of leaving me for a “fresh, young body, unmarked by the passage of life”? His words, not mine. When he called to cancel yet another weekend with our daughters, knowing full well that it was my forty-first birthday and that I couldn’t afford both a babysitter and the luxury of going out, I was angry enough to remind him that he was an arsehole, but when he uttered that fateful phrase about my body, the body that had worked like a lunatic for him in our - now his – landscaping business for twenty years and borne his two beautiful if big-boned daughters, well, something in me just snapped.

  Fast-forward to the tattoo place. I’ve walked past it every day for thirteen months now. Nestled in between a bank with a squirrel on the front and a white goods store run by a large sweating man in a beret, it’s the third shop I pass when I walk out of the front door to my apartment building.

  At first I took it as a personal insult that, due to someone else’s sexual proclivities, my real estate quality of life had been downgraded from a nice house in a good suburb to a crappy apartment in an even crappier suburb. You wouldn’t have found a tattoo parlor in my old street, hell, the neighborhood watch probably didn’t even let people with tattoos onto the block. But all of that changed when the father of my children decided to get a move on with his mid-life crisis and now I live within spitting distance of a place that marks people for life. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere but I’m in no mood to search for it.

  And so it was that fateful night when I walked in and demanded a tattoo, right then, right now, for God’s sake, and watched a couple of hairy bikers fall off their stools in hysterics. Perhaps it was my nice Burberry raincoat – that outward symbol of prosperity worn by all school mummies with something shameful to hide. Or the fact that I had mascara streaks down my cheeks from crying like a banshee as soon as I’d bribed the grandmotherly woman next door to watch my kids for an hour while I ran an errand, which at that point was either getting drunk or committing suicide (I didn’t have time for both).

  Just as the bikers were stumbling to their feet, still laughing and pointing at me as if I was some kind of freak, the big black door at the back of the shop groaned as it opened and a flash of light illuminated the shop and its customers, just like in those tacky stairway-to-heaven-on-velvet pictures they used to sell in the seventies.

  I held up my hand to shade my eyes as the bikers fell silent. As my sight began to adjust to the light, I saw an elderly man standing in the doorway. He raised his arm and pointed to the door, and the bikers moved to leave as if in a trance. I desperately wanted to follow them but my feet were stuck solidly to the floor. I wasn’t afraid, although I was terrified. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind the last biker that the man spoke.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  His voice was calm and posed, with the trace of an accent lingering behind in the air, giving a certain weight to his words.

  I looked at him curiously and cleared my throat to speak.

  “Why would you be waiting for me? I don’t even know you.”

  I didn’t think he was a serial killer but then again, I’d once trusted a man who stood in front of two hundred people and God and promised to love and honor me, so I wasn’t going to let this stranger off so lightly.

  He turned away from me and walked back through the doorway to another room. I stood for a minute, thinking I should just leave, but then I followed him into the light, feeling somehow reassured that at least he knew where we were going. And thus begins my story.

  Now I’m certain that at this point, you are seriously regretting the Grisham. You don’t do mystical books or crystals or any other of that new age crap, so why the hell should you consider continuing this book? And you’re probably so annoyed with yourself for buying this book – a book whose title specifically states that it is not a fairy tale – that you won’t believe me when I tell you that there are few people in the world more pragmatic than I.

  Honestly. I’ve never had my fortune read. I am proudly agnostic, totally pro-science. I don’t follow my horoscope, read the runes or believe that everything is pre-ordained. Especially that last part, because if it were true, and everything that had gone wrong in my life was destiny, I would have had some serious words with the one responsible for all the planning. I mean, what kind of a sadist would set people up like that?

  So when I tell you that I followed the pale little gent into the backroom, and that in doing so, I felt like I was taking the first steps on an incredibly and profoundly important journey, you’ll just have to set aside your sniggers for a moment and read on. I’m not going to say “trust me”, because I’m not selling used cars, or indeed, anything else. But at least read on a little way, because things are about to get interesting.

  2


  Talking unicorns and

  mystical televisions