Why I Let My Hair Grow Out (11 page)

“She'll be sharing my bangers and mash; thanks for the grandmotherly concern, Pat.” Colin picked up a fork from the bar and gestured with it. “Ye can bring our food any time this year or next, by the by—no rush, mate!” Pat rolled his eyes but the mob at the far end of the bar was clamoring for his attention, so he left us.

“It's twenty minutes already,” said Colin, not sounding perturbed at all. “How long does it take to grill some bloody bangers?”

“What's ‘bangers'?” I said.

“Ye'll see. Try the Beamish first, though, while your taste buds are still pristine.” Before my eyes, the mug of foam was gradually transforming itself into a creamy, cocoa-brown liquid.

“Is it beer?” I asked, lifting the heavy glass to my lips.

“It's stout, Mor,” Colin said, with reverence. “Drink of the gods.”

I was planning an experimental sip, but the Beamish was so good I took a nice long chug instead. Smooth, not as bitter as the Guinness, toasty and almost sweet and practically chocolatey, like the bartender had said. Yum. I took another drink.

As I did, the bartender slid a plate of what looked like fat, grilled human fingers in front of Colin.

Colin clapped me on the back. “Good girl! That Beamish'll put hair on your chest, if not your head. Now munch on some bangers; it'll build your strength.”

I stared at the plate of greasy digits in front of me. They were truly horrifying. It looked like you might find a wedding ring on one of them. Or a fingernail.

“Relax, luv! It's just sausage and mashed potatoes.” Colin stabbed one with his fork and took a hearty bite.

I used my fork to coax some mashed potatoes out from underneath the sausages, but they were all covered with banger grease. I concentrated on the Beamish instead. It tasted so rich it was more like food than a drink, anyway.

“Bloody fantastic game!” Stuart shouted. He seemed to have acquired an accent in the minutes since we'd seen him last: a little Irish, a little Beatles, a little Monty Python. “It's brutal!”

“It's rugby, mate,” Colin agreed. “Not some pussy game like your American ‘football.' ”

“Eeee-
lectrifying
. I love it!” Stuart leaned against the bar for support.

Patty and Heidi strode up to the bar. Heidi was nearly a foot taller than Patty and agewise they were probably fifteen years apart, but the evening's revelries seemed to have forged some deep bond of sisterhood between them. The other thing between them was Carrie Pippin, looking greenish and very loose. Her arms waved about randomly, like she was treading water.

“Do they use animal products at any point in the brewing process?” she was asking, with difficulty.

“It's whiskey, lady! Not beef gravy!” Patty signaled the bartender with three fingers in the air. He seemed to know just what she meant.

“Yes, but sometimes it's hidden—there's rennet in cheese and horse hooves in Jell-O. Not everybody knows that. I know that, but not everybody does. Well,
you
do, because I just told you—”

“Here's some Jell-O for ye,” said Pat, amiably, as he poured three shots. “They call this flavor Black Bush.”

“Like black cherry?” Carrie giggled. “That was my favoritest, favorite Jell-O flavor, when I was little—”

“Drink!” ordered Heidi.
“Eins! Zwei! Drei!”

And Patty, Heidi and Carrie threw back three simultaneous shots.

“She'll be flying high in a minute,” said Colin, elbowing me and looking over at Carrie. “P'raps she and Stewie-boy here will forget they know each other. They can meet and fall in love all over again, even better than before. Eat up, Mor. The rest is yours.”

He pushed the dish of food in front of me, but I was more interested in the fresh mug of Beamish Pat provided, as Stuart signed off on a new round of drinks for the three of us.

“Tell me more about rugby,” Stuart slurred to Colin. I tried nibbling the end of one of the bangers. It wasn't horrible, just a strong pork sausage taste and kind of chewy. They were cold now, which didn't help. I washed the taste out of my mouth with more Beamish.

“Rugby!” answered Colin, pounding the bar with delight. “The ultimate sport. A little rough sometimes. When the boys are in a fightin' mood the game gets bloody as Cúchulainn's wedding.”

“Kahoolin? What team does he play for?” said Stuart, giving me a wink.

Cúchulainn? I could have sworn that's what he said, but wasn't that the name from my crazy dream? My head-bonked hallucination?

I speak now of Cúchulainn, greatest of the heroes of Ulster. . . .
There was Fergus's voice, whispering in my ear like he was some guy in the bar.

Maybe it was the beer, stout, whatever, but the room was starting to spin. I grabbed Colin's arm.

“How did you know about Cúchulainn?” I said.

“It's bloody Ireland, Mor; everybody knows about Cúchulainn!” He looked at me like I was unhinged. “He's like—who's that bloke you have in America? Davy Crocker!”

“Betty Crocker!” Stuart was getting sloppy. He'd already offered to get Pat bit parts in movies. Pat, admirably, declined, claiming he was only interested in playing romantic leads or action heroes or, preferably, both.

“You mean Crockett. Davy Crockett,” I said, impatiently. “What does this have to do with—”

“Crockett, right,” said Colin, keeping one eye on the TV. “Is he the one with the apples?”

“No, she wrote cookbooks!” crowed Stuart, helpfully.

“No!” I said, trying to turn my back to Stuart. “That's Johnny Appleseed. But what about Cúch—”

“My
point
is,” Colin said, cutting me off, “in Ireland, Cúchulainn is like Davy Crocker or Johnny Appleseed. Part of the national bullshit, you know.” He started to laugh. “Except your Johnny skipped about the flowery fields scattering bits of fruit across the land, but Cúchulainn—he bloody chopped off heads and whacked off limbs till the ground was soaked with gore and guts and—GO! Go go go go!”

All the guys in the bar started screaming at the television.

“Fekkin' brilliant!” moaned Stuart in ecstasy, when the play was done. “Has anyone ever done a rugby movie, I wonder?”

My head was pounding from all the screaming.

“Well sure, there's that one about the cannibals,” said Colin.

“Did I say cannibals?” Stuart giggled. “Damn, I must be drunk! No, I mean a
rugby
movie. Has anyone ever done a
rugby
movie—”

“It's cannibals
and
rugby,” explained Colin, not entirely sober himself. “See, a whole rugby team goes down in a plane crash in the high snowy mountains. And half of them get killed in the crash but the other half live.”

I wasn't listening. I knew—
I knew
—I had never heard of Cúchulainn before. Before my head bonk on the faery road, that is.

So—my dream, hallucination,
whatever
—what
was
that?

“Dude, I thought you said it was about cannibals?”

“It's rugby
and
cannibals, that's what I'm telling ye! The survivors were trapped in the snowy wilderness for months. They had to eat bits and pieces of their dead mates until they got rescued.”

Something was strange, very strange indeed.

“Raw or cooked?”

“Raw, I'm certain of it. How could they bloody cook anything in the snowy wilderness? It's not like they had a microwave.”

I was staring at the bangers. The bangers were staring back at me. I was starting to not feel so well.

The conversation around me started to recede, as a kind of rushing noise filled my ears, almost drowning out Stuart's voice.

“Rugby! Plane crash! Cannibals! Now
that
would make an incredible film!

“It already
did
, mate. That's what I'm telling ye! And you know what else? It's a bloody true story!”

The room went wild. Even Patty and Heidi and a red-faced Carrie were screaming at the TV now.

That's when I raced off to the bathroom to puke.

eleven

“go! go go go go go!”

I drained the mead with a slurp. A deafening cheer shook the air around me.

“Drink hearty, Morganne! We drink to your health and the health of the king!

Me, puking and passing out on the bathroom floor of a bar, excuse me, pub, an ocean away from home?

Nope. It equals me, with long wavy locks of reddish-gold hair tumbling down my back, in a flowy cream-colored dress straight out of the Disney Princess fashion show. I was standing on a great wooden table with one foot on top of a barrel and what looked like two hundred extras from
Braveheart
egging me on as I chugged a goblet of mead.

I don't even know how I knew it was mead, but I did. Sweet, honey-flavored wine. It was a forty-ounce goblet at least, but I showed no signs of queasiness. In fact I felt quite confident that I could drink anyone in the room under the table and beat them in a footrace too.

I wiped my lips and looked around at my adoring fans. Fergus was at my feet, a cute little mead-mustache on his upper lip.

This was not a dream.
Oh
fek
.

“Fergus,” I said, scrambling down off the table and into his arms. “We need to talk.
Now
.”

 
On the way out of the crowded banquet hall i'd been invited to compete in several wrestling matches and an archery contest, but I managed to evade all my challengers and sneak out through the scullery door with Fergus. The noise of the feast carried through the night air, rising and falling but never stopping, like the roar of the surf.

We were at the castle. King Conor's castle, to be precise. It had been two days since Fergus had woken up in the grazing meadow alone, the animal skin still warm from where I'd fallen asleep next to him.

“But it was only this afternoon I had the bike accident!” I shrieked. Okay, I confess. I was freaking out. Who wouldn't? Beamish turning into mead, days randomly inserted in the calendar, unplanned outfit changes, hair going from short to long like one of those Rapunzel Barbies Tammy loved to play with, the kind where you spin the little plastic arm around and the hair gets longer and longer—

“Morganne!” Fergus said, sharply, interrupting my freak out. “This Barbie you speak of sounds like a terrible sorceress indeed! But you are safe now, in King Conor's realm. No harm will come to you, I swear it.”

Fergus is real,
I thought. He's a long-ago warrior-dude and somehow I have slipped into his world, myself and yet not-quite myself. Myself, with a different 'do and a bit more sporty and able to hold my liquor better.

“I swear it, on my sword and my honor,” he said again, firmly taking me by the shoulders. I looked up at his handsome, young-yet-weathered face, his striking blue eyes. Possibly the most trustworthy sight I'd ever seen.

“I'd better tell you who I really am,” I said.

 
by the time We'd found a Quiet place to sit, near the royal barn, I had explained to Fergus who I was. Or who I thought I was. Or who I used to be. Or who I would be, someday. It was all pretty confusing to me, but he didn't seem terribly surprised.

“It's just as it was foretold in the Druid's prophecies,” he said. “That ye'd come and go, and your time with us would be as fleeting in your mind as the petals of a cut rose. That we would hold your memories for ye, as a mother remembers her infant's face at the breast forevermore, though the child grows and forgets. That ye'd walk among us brief as the sunrise, but the shadow of your presence would remain—”

“I get it,” I said. It was rude to interrupt, but these prophecies got annoying fast. “So where am I? Is this the past? Is it a myth?” I looked around at the starlit meadows, the low wooden fences, the stone walls and grazing animals. Beautiful long-ago Ireland, a page from Mother Goose—who could tell them apart? “At first I thought it was a dream—”

Fergus sighed. “Perhaps it is a dream, but of your brain's making or mine or some other creature's altogether we can never be sure. Where did you say you'd come from, Morganne?”

“Right before this I was in Durty Nellie's.” I was chewing my nails, but then I stopped because it didn't seem like something the long-haired Morganne version of me would do. “We were watching rugby on television and I'd had too much to drink.”

“The last part I understand,” he said, nodding. “Too much mead can weaken the arm of the finest swordsman.”

“I guess,” I said. “Before that I was in Connecticut. It's—very far from here. Across the ocean.”

Fergus looked at me like I'd just started to smell bad. “You've come from England, then?” His hand went to the hilt of his sword.

“No, I mean across the
ocean,
” I said quickly. “It's in the other direction.”

His sword hand relaxed. “You mean the Great Water! But that's the end of the world!”

I shook my head. “Actually there's a continent on the other side. Nobody here knows about it yet except for some Vikings, I think. Or wait—maybe the Viking thing hasn't happened yet. Sorry, I'm just not a hundred percent sure when we are, right now.” This was the first time in my whole life I'd needed any knowledge of geography or history outside of a test. Clearly my grasp of both subjects was pathetic.