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 moved with my family—I was married by now, with a toddler—into an old house that had once, many years before, been a railway station. The tracks had been dug up, and the old couple who lived opposite us used it to grow vegetables.
I was getting older. One day I found a gray hair; on another, I heard a recording of myself talking, and I realized I sounded just like my father.
I was working in London, doing A&R for one of the major record companies. I was commuting into London by train most days, coming back some evenings.
I had to keep a small flat in London; it’s hard to commute when the bands you’re checking out don’t even stagger onto the stage until midnight. It also meant that it was fairly easy to get laid, if I wanted to, which I did.
I thought that Eleanora—that was my wife’s name; I should have mentioned that before, I suppose—didn’t know about the other women; but I got back from a two-week jaunt to New York one winter’s day, and when I arrived at the house it was empty and cold.
She had left a letter, not a note. Fifteen pages, neatly typed, and every word of it was true. Including the PS, which read: You really don’t love me. And you never did.
I put on a heavy coat, and I left the house and just walked, stunned and slightly numb.
There was no snow on the ground, but there was a hard frost, and the leaves crunched under my feet as I walked. The trees were skeletal black against the harsh gray winter sky.
I walked down the side of the road. Cars passed me, traveling to and from London. Once I tripped on a branch, half-hidden in a heap of brown leaves, ripping my trousers, cutting my leg.
I reached the next village. There was a river at right angles to the road, and a path I’d never seen before beside it, and I walked down the path, and stared at the partly frozen river. It gurgled and plashed and sang.
The path led off through fields; it was straight and grassy.
I found a rock, half-buried, on one side of the path. I picked it up, brushed off the mud. It was a melted lump of purplish stuff, with a strange rainbow sheen to it. I put it into the pocket of my coat and held it in my hand as I walked, its presence warm and reassuring.
The river meandered away across the fields, and I walked on in silence.
I had walked for an hour before I saw
