Geek Fantasy Novel (6 page)

Beatrice looked closely enough to see these things on Ralph’s face, and so did Gideon, who told his wife what he saw later that night as they prepared
for bed. Not in the words I’ve set out, of course, but more like “not really our sort, is he?”

Gert, however … Ralph withered beneath her solicitousness. She “couldn’t be more fascinated” by Ralph’s two little cats at home. She was “amazed” that he had been president of the Technology Awareness Club in high school. She found it “so very charming” that Ralph had never before left the United States, and that he loved his middle-class schoolteacher parents. (“It’s
charming
of you, it just is, you darling!”) He was suddenly lost, though, when in one breath she went from being “totally delighted” that Ralph liked his new quarters to crossly demanding that “all you children ignore that gunshot from a few minutes ago.”

The children, as will do any children addressed in the plural, stared back balefully.

“Really, honey,” Gert continued, “those kinds of things aren’t nice to think about. Say something pleasant, Beatrice. Pleasant is pretty.”

“My mum just got buried, Gertrude.”

“Yes, of course, so she did. Let’s get on with dinner. Where
is
dinner?”

After the meal, the Battersby children convened on the patio to strategize. Ralph and Cecil paced the floor while Beatrice reclined in a splendid pose on a chaise and Daphne worked out her nerves by swinging from an eave.

“Okay, Daph, that’s enough,” Cecil said, holding up his arms until Daphne dropped into them.

“So have you guys figured it all out?” Daphne asked, for a moment only white tights and crinoline underskirt as she struggled to the ground.

“We’re pretty sure it was a gunshot,” Beatrice reported.

“It’s not even hunting season, is it?” Cecil asked.

“It’s always hunting season,” Beatrice said.
“Something’s
sure to be getting killed.”

“Why don’t we ask Mummy and Daddy about it again, now that they’re not all fussy because servants are around?” Daphne asked.

“No chance,” Cecil said.

“Thousands of years of cultivated civilization, and ignorance is still the best way we British have come up with for dealing with problems,” Beatrice said to Ralph, a trifle affectedly. She squinted. “But you know, that’s probably not exclusively British at all, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Ralph said. “Haven’t really thought about it.”

“Tell us more about
America,
Mr. Ralph,” Beatrice said, throwing her pitch ridiculously low.

“Bea! Someone’s probably been
shot,
and you’re making boring talk!” Daphne squealed.

Cecil clapped his hands on Daphne’s shoulders. “I’m sure no one’s been shot, Daph. A bird, somewhere.” He winked over her shoulder. “But it’s certainly worth investigating, to make sure.”

“I’ll take that way, and you take that way!” Daphne said, pointing in random directions.

“Sure, whatever. You coming?” Cecil asked Ralph.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ralph said, eyeing the chaise next to Beatrice.

“You should go with them,” Beatrice said. “This is the only adventure you’re going to get all summer.”

“Don’t you think,” Ralph said, “that if a firearm has been set off, it’s not wise for us to wander off into the countryside?”

“Ralph,” Beatrice said, “what are you so uncomfortable about? We’re in the country — there’s always a grouse to be shot somewhere around here. If
there was anyone dangerous around, those guards would have stopped them. Don’t be so wimpy.”

And so he went. Soon enough, he was enjoying his search of the twilit grounds. When he returned to Beatrice twenty minutes later, he found Cecil and Daphne already back and lazing about the patio. None of them had turned up anything, not a single clue.

“A hunter’s bullet,” Beatrice concluded. “Death of the usual variety, nothing to worry about.”

Indeed, Ralph wouldn’t turn up a single clue about that night, about the gunshot or the Battersby parents’ reluctance to discuss it or the guards or even the funeral, for a little over a week. In the meantime he spent a large part of his days on the phone with British Telecom, or waiting for their servicemen, or holding wires in either hand in hopes that their currents would stop interfering. During his non-working hours he read with Beatrice on the roof, played squash (poorly) with Cecil, and taught Daphne how to shoot videos on her phone. One day he and Beatrice went into town to see a movie (an American blockbuster, which brought on an unexpected rush of pride related to frame rates and number of effects shots), after which Ralph hung out with Cecil in the stockroom at the clothing store and bought Daphne a clearance headband with two monstrous felt eyes wired to dangle over her bangs. It would be a great prop for the short films that Daphne the telephone filmmaker had taken to composing.

Every night Ralph double-checked the locks, morbidly certain that he was bound to have an intruder — it wasn’t difficult to imagine someone breaking into his shadowy, isolated gatehouse. To keep his mind off the possibility until he fell asleep, he had taken to sitting up in bed, typing game
ideas into his laptop, or composing the long apology email he would send to his parents once he got the internet working. Glancing about the spare stone walls lit only by the feeble glow of his laptop screen, listening to the scratches of his pen against heavy paper and seeing the reflected shadows of the giant tree’s leaves pace the windows, he often wondered what he would do if someone knocked on his door. There was no peephole or door chain, no back escape and no one to hear if he shouted for help. His only defense would be to not answer the door at all, and that sounded feeble as far as defenses go.

His invader wound up not giving Ralph the option, materializing as she did at the foot of his bed, seated so her royal posterior rested in the space between his legs. Until her appearance, Ralph had been in a deep sleep, and it took him a few moments to click the light on and realize that there was, indeed, a famous duchess in the room.

Ralph’s first impression of Chessie was a flurry of details: massive strawberry curls piled on a narrow head and held in place by strips of velvet, low-cut black evening gown interrupted by swatches of mesh and linen lattice, lips as wet and red as fresh-cut ruby grapefruit. Slowly the details formed together into what could only be his aunt Chessie.

“I was not expecting you to be here,” she intoned, locking a cigarette into her curved mouth.

Ralph sat up, pulled his sheets about his bare waist, and stared at Chessie’s lips.

“In fact,” she continued, “I don’t believe that was an error on my part. I do believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that even your parents probably don’t expect you to be here.”

“What are you doing in my room?”

“The way you say that makes me think you’ve already realized who I am. Otherwise, that would be the next logical question, no?” She pulled her cigarette away from her lips and examined it idly.

Ralph nodded. Just a few days before he had seen her ad in a newspaper flyer, mugging as she sipped a protein shake.

“I assume that the kids must have told you all about me. So now you inform me, if you will be so kind, how it is that you come to be alive.”

And so Ralph stammered for a moment about how, to the best of his knowledge, he had never died, and could therefore only conclude that he was still, at least as of that moment, alive.

Chessie took a long drag of her cigarette and offered it to Ralph. He declined. “Those wily Stevenses,” Chessie said. “They sent me a Christmas card a few years back saying you were quite dead.”

“I bet they had a good reason,” Ralph said quietly.

“Wishes, wishes, wishes,” Chessie said, jumping to her feet and pacing the gatehouse. “All this fuss over
wishes.”

“What kinds of wishes?” Ralph asked, reaching for a discarded T-shirt and pulling it on.

Chessie pressed her hands against her cheeks, pulling her skin taut. “What do you see when you look at me?” she asked.

“Chessie of Cheshire. You’re famous.”

“For the wrong reasons. Do you know how it feels, Ralph, to be well-regarded, but not the way you want to be?”

Ralph nodded. He was seen as an adept geek, when he wanted to be fun, instead. He opened his mouth to tell Chessie so.

“I don’t want to have to be a corporate pitchwoman,” Chessie continued, barreling over his first syllable. “But unless I wanted to be a boring dignitary,
a path that was never open to me for various reasons, I could find no other way to have a life that … means something. And all I want is a life that means something. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Ralph nodded, no longer even attempting speech.

“Tell me: I am the godmother to three immature children. Centuries ago, what would that have meant?”

“I’m very sorry, but I’m not sure.”

“I would have been a fairy godmother! I would have granted wishes!”

Surprisingly enough, he had already considered that conclusion, but was afraid it would sound ridiculous if spoken aloud.

“Come,” Chessie said, holding her hands out to Ralph, who stared at them. “Who says I can’t cast a spell or two? Who says being a duchess can’t come along with anything cool anymore? Look at my sister, Gert. Is she all you expect from aristocracy? Dry obligations and chilled heart? I’m of the old variety. I don’t want to be elegant and unobtrusive. I want to have an
effect.
I want everyone to be at least a trifle scared to meet me, like I’ve got a poison apple secreted away in my purse. You’re not scared of me, are you, dear heart?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Gert and Mary would have hated what I just said. They have an aversion to strongly worded statements, particularly those that don’t originate from them. ‘You know very well why we no longer partake in spells,’ Gert would say, ‘It’s so
nouveau royale.
Five hundred years ago, fine. But not now.’ We’re so
polite
now. And while my other sister, your mother, wouldn’t be as rude as Gert, she still doesn’t have the nobility of soul to understand what I’m trying to do.”

Ralph wasn’t sure how to take this last bit. He had often called his mother strict, or annoying, but “nobility of soul"! The concept was beyond him, and certainly nothing he would consider attaching to his parents.

“But you get me in a way she never will, don’t you?” Chessie continued. “Young Americans are always hankering for some fairy tale pizzazz.”

Ralph remembered another of Chessie’s ads, this one a photo of her hyping a treadmill while wearing a bathing suit of uncommon brevity. He didn’t think of her as a storybook godmother. But, as he always tried to give the right answer when an adult asked a question, he said, “I guess we always do attach some magic to royalty. We don’t have any of our own.”

“You’re a magician of your own sort, aren’t you, dear?”

“No, I don’t think so. Well. Depends on what you mean, I guess,” Ralph said, secretly hoping Chessie was about to unveil a prophecy that would tell him what to do with his life.

“You and your game designing. Your mythmaking.”

“How do you know about that? A few seconds ago you thought I was dead.”

“I’m a
fairy godmother,
Ralph. I thought we went over this.”

“Sorry. Please continue.”

“Well, there’s not much more to say. Just that we’re after the same thing. We’ve got that American grit. You’re a lot more like me than Gert’s children are. I can see that much right away. Even back in the States, though … no one’s ever really gotten you, have they?”

Ralph shook his head, suddenly chilled.

“We’re magicians. Or at least, we both want to be. But your path hasn’t been going too well, has it?”

“I don’t know about that,” Ralph said, hugging his knees to his chest.

“Dear, it’s okay. I can help.”

“How?”

“Really? Keep up! I
grant wishes.”

“Are you offering me a wish?”

Chessie nodded.

“Okay,” Ralph said, spontaneously deciding to ignore years of his parents’ warnings. “I wish —”

“No, no, not yet. It all has to be in the right sequence. I can’t grant a wish to you before the Battersby children.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Ralph, mere minutes ago you were fibbing and telling me you were dead. Wishes take preparation. I can’t spring one out like a parlor trick.”

“Well, when do I get my wish?”

“You must work on this selfish streak.”

“Look! You can’t show up in my bedroom, offer a wish, and then take it back!”

Chessie looked at him appraisingly. “Well! Plenty of ambition, after all. Surprising. You’ll work hard for this, won’t you?”

“Tell me what you want, and I’ll make sure it happens.”

“What I want is easy,” Chessie said. “I need access to the Battersby children, even if only for a split second.”

“I’ll have to talk to Gert first.”

“You haven’t been following what I’ve really been saying, have you? No deal,” Chessie said, and vanished, leaving behind one extinguished cigarette, its filter rimmed in red lipstick.

When Chessie didn’t reappear even once over the following week, Ralph feared he would never see her again. His anxiety became all-consuming — he would glance at the foot of his bed between each paragraph of his late-night reading, sit on the patio for hours and scan for a fairy carriage coming down the walk. But there was never a single magic duchess. To occupy himself he became involved in the lives of his cousins. Before long he was as close to them as he had been to any of his friends in New Jersey (which is, to be honest, not terribly close). With Beatrice he discussed his parents’ wish ban. He told Cecil about his failure with girls, for which the suggested remedy was to ask out Cecil’s assistant manager, who was folding socks. (“You’re sweet” was her unpromising response.) And he had Daphne play simple games he had designed, for which she always managed to find the perfect sequence of keystrokes to crash the program. But Beatrice’s indifference, Cecil’s ill-conceived advice, and Daphne’s game wrecking, though each a minor failure, hid within them a sort of familial tolerance, an unthinking acceptance of the crazy American cousin. Ralph interpreted this as affection. He found that, despite their essential ambivalence about his existence, the Battersby family was very pleasant company for a summer.