Free Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

you’re that age, isn’t it? You have to stand up for your girl. Another time a bloke was getting a bit friendly with her and I stomped him. Pete had to get between us and I caught Pete one on his jaw. The bloke was taken off to hospital by paramedics and his parents wanted to press charges, but nothing came of it. Only Tara said if I didn’t stop she’d leave me and I knew she meant it, so I had to sit on my jealousy, which was probably no bad thing.
    We started getting gigs and she used to watch me when I was up on stage. She’d stand at the front with her arms folded, looking up at me. She was telling the other girls I was hers. I loved that.
    Anyway, she fell pregnant, and that was what the problem was all about. Whether to keep it.
    Oh, I knew what I wanted. There was no doubt in my mind, none at all. I wanted for us to keep it, to get married, to have half a dozen sprogs all looking just like her. Six little girls if I had my way. The future was all settled in my mind. House, wife, kids, garden, dogs. What else?
    That wasn’t how Tara saw it. Pete was on the verge of buggering off to university. He was going to complete his studies, and he’d been offered a place at the University of Warwick. That wasn’t for me; I’d staked a future on my guitar, but Tara had an idea she might follow him down the college road. She was smart, and she found studies easy. She said she wanted to do what Pete was planning.
    “And what then?” I asked her. “There’s two years to go before that, and three years there is five. What then after that?”
    “Who knows?” she said. “I don’t like to plan that far ahead.”
    “But how you gonna do all that? You’ve a kid growing inside you. How you going to do that when we’ve got a kid?”
    “That’s just it,” she said. “That’s just it.”
    She never came right out and said so but she wanted to get rid of it. She didn’t want to be tied down at the age of sixteen. I calledher a killer and a butcher and all sorts. Stupid, ignorant, ugly things I wish I’d never said to her. But I was stupid and ignorant and ugly. Remember, I was only a kid myself. I wasn’t thinking with my head, even though it seemed like I was at the time.
    She cried. We had fierce rows about it.
    Then I drove her up to the Outwoods one day in my old banger. We often went up there to be alone together. The bluebells were flowering and I thought if we strolled 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.
    S O 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