Free Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman Page A

Saw the lights inside, and stood in the driveway, and talked about the band I was starting. We didn’t go in.
    Then it was decided that I’d walk her home. So we walked back to her house.
    She told me about the battles she was having with her younger sister, who was stealing her makeup and perfume. Louise suspected that her sister was having sex with boys. Louise was a virgin. We both were.
    We stood in the road outside her house, under the sodium yellow streetlight, and we stared at each other’s black lips and pale yellow faces.
    We grinned at each other.
    Then we just walked, picking quiet roads and empty paths. In one of the new housing estates, a path led us into the woodland, and we followed it.
    The path was straight and dark, but the lights of distant houses shone like stars on the ground, and the moon gave us enough light to see. Once we were scared, when something snuffled and snorted in front of us. We pressed close, saw it was a badger, laughed and hugged and kept on walking.
    We talked quiet nonsense about what we dreamed and wanted and thought.
    And all the time I wanted to kiss her and feel her breasts, and maybe put my hand between her legs.
    Finally I saw my chance. There was an old brick bridge over the path, and we stopped beneath it. I pressed up against her. Her mouth opened against mine.
    Then she went cold and stiff, and stopped moving.
    “Hello,” said the troll.
    I let go of Louise. It was dark beneath the bridge, but the shape of the troll filled the darkness.
    “I froze her,” said the troll, “so we can talk. Now: I’m going to eat your life.”
    My heart pounded, and I could feel myself trembling.
    “No.”
    “You said you’d come back to me. And you have. Did you learn to whistle?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s good. I never could whistle.” It sniffed, and nodded.“I am pleased. You have grown in life and experience. More to eat. More for me.”
    I grabbed Louise, a taut zombie, and pushed her forward.“Don’t take me. I don’t want to die. Take her. I bet she’s much tastier than me. And she’s two months older than I am. Why don’t you take her?” The troll was silent.
    It sniffed Louise from toe to head, snuffling at her feet and crotch and breasts and hair.
    Then it looked at me.
    “She’s an innocent,” it said. “You’re not. I don’t want her. I want you.”
    I walked to the opening of the bridge and stared up at the stars in the night.
    “But there’s so much I’ve never done,” I said, partly to myself.“I mean, I’ve never. Well, I’ve never had sex. And I’ve never been to America. I haven’t . . .” I paused. “I haven’t done anything. Not yet.” The troll said nothing.
    “I could come back to you. When I’m older.” The troll said nothing.
    “I will come back. Honest I will.”
    “Come back to me?” said Louise. “Why? Where are you going?”
    I turned around. The troll had gone, and the girl I had thought I loved was standing in the shadows beneath the bridge.
    “We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”
    We walked back and never said anything.
    She went out with the drummer in the punk band I started, and, much later, married someone else. We met once, on a train, after she was married, and she asked me if I remembered that night.
    I said I did.
    “I really liked you, that night, Jack,” she told me. “I thought you were going to kiss me. I thought you were going to ask me out. I would have said yes. If you had.”
    “But I didn’t.”
    “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” Her hair was cut very short. It didn’t suit her.
    I never saw her again. The trim woman with the taut smile was not the girl I had loved, and talking to her made me feel uncomfortable.
    I moved to London, and then, some years later, I moved back again, but the town I returned to was not the town I remembered: there were no fields, no farms, no little flint lanes; and I moved away as soon as I could, to a tiny village ten miles down the road.
    I