Free Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

through the woods holding hands it would all work itself out. But it all flared up again and I must have bellowed bad things at her, and she cried and ran off into the woods.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find her. I thought she’d come out again: I mean, how was she going to get home? I scoured the place until dusk and then I started to get worried, so I drove to a phone box and called her home. Her mum answered and said she’d been home a couple of hours and that she’d gone out again. I guessed she was sitting there right next to the phone.
    I called the next day. I called lots of times but Tara was never in. I went round there myself but her dad said she was out and he’d tell her to call me. I knew she was just refusing to see me, because Peter told me so.
    The next thing I knew was that she’d returned to the Outwoods, and she’d disappeared.
    SO THE POLICE COME and ask me what I know. And I tell them what I know, and they go away. Then I go round to Peter’s house. His mum and dad have always been like second parents to me—they’re worried sick, as am I. They want to know what the arguments have been about. I can’t tell them the truth about the pregnancy—Tara hasn’t told them that. What’s more, she’s not yet sixteen and Dell would probably want to skin me alive, anyway, when he finds out. So I say it was about another boy she’s been seeing.
    Peter looks at me. He don’t believe that for a second.
    So I say okay not someone she’s been seeing but someone who has been making eyes at her, and Peter buys that, knowing how jealous I get.
    Then after a couple of days a search party is organized by the police, and we go up there to be part of it. Dell is shocking pale and Mary is shaking visibly and Peter is tight-lipped and we all go up there. And the police are out like blackberries in September and they’ve drafted in dozens more from neighboring forces: dog handlers, the lot; and there are friends and neighbors up there, too, with sticks to beat the ground and rake the bushes, and I feel this huge weight of a boulder in my guts. And I can tell everyone is looking at me and talking behind their hands, you know, he’s the boyfriend, he’s her chap. Christ, everyone is there, complete strangers come to help now that her picture has been in the local paper and on the local evening television news. Hundreds of people and we all move forward in a steady line, spread out across the Outwoods, marching between the trees and tramping the dying bluebells.
    They find her bike.
    I hear a copper telling another copper that it looks like someone has tried to hide her bicycle in the scrub, in some undergrowth, and he looks up and he glances over at me and he wipes his finger under his nose and walks away. And I know; I know at that minute exactly where they’re going to take this.
    We walk in slow formation through the Outwoods. Every inch, every bush, every depression in the earth, behind every rock. We keep going until the twilight comes and then the police stand us down. They say they’ll carry on searching with torches, but they want us to go home. Dell drives. He gives me a lift home. Mary in the front seat, me and Peter in the back. In silence all the way.
    I don’t sleep a wink that night. I keep snapping awake. My dad is snoring in the next room. There’s no one else to talk to. My mother died when I was nine. I sit up all night trying to work out where she might have gone, but it’s the same question Dell and Mary keep hitting me with: where might she have gone?
    I don’t have a single answer.
    Next morning I’m sleeping on the sofa when there’s a hammering on the door. Dad has gone to work and there’s only me to answer. I go to the door in my boxers. Police again. Would I come down to the station?
    I get dressed and they drive me to the station. I’m under eighteen so they can’t ask me anything, they say, until I have a lawyer with me. Lawyer, I say, I don’t need no