Reluctantly Charmed (21 page)

He wrapped his arm around me, enveloping me in aftershave, and told the paparazzi to take a photo. “I’ll hang it here,” he said, pointing to the spot over the Marlboro Lights that had once been blank but now hosted a collage of images of me, underneath a giant sign that said, “Kate McDaid, Best Customer.”

“Ahhh, Kumar.” I looked at him, exasperated.

He grinned, squinting his eyes. “Very good for business.”

“Can I just get some orange juice?” I muscled my way down the aisle, conscious that two other shoppers, clutching their frozen pizzas, were staring at me. Cameras were clicking, whirring, flashing. I quickly grabbed a liter of something that had an orange on the front, threw some money at Kumar, raced out of the shop, and ran, something I haven’t done since school hockey classes. I ran all the way back to my flat, propelled forward by wheezing paparazzi and asthmatic Anoraks. With lightning speed, I put the key in the door, slid through, and slammed it with gigantic force. I stayed fixed on the spot, waiting for my breathing to level out. My hands were shaking and there was a tremor in my legs, but I wasn’t sure if it was just from having exercised.
This is madness
, I thought,
absolute madness
.

I decided I had to replace my bike—I knew I could outride these guys. I got onto eBay and searched for secondhand bikes in Dublin. Much to my surprise, up popped my trusty old steed. I hadn’t known bike thieves were so Internet-savvy. Then I saw that the starting bid was 300 euros, and I practically fell off the
sofa. I’d bought that bike three years earlier for forty euros from a guy in a tracksuit with
HOUSE OF PAIN
tattooed on his neck. He’d treated the whole thing like a drug deal, looking over his shoulder, sniffing suspiciously, in spite of the fact we were in his bike shop. I doubted that he’d given me the deal of the century and that somehow my bike was worth a lot more than I’d paid for it.

Then I saw the item description: “Kate McDaid’s bike. A modern-day witch’s broomstick. Get it now.” They’d also included a photo of me on the bike that looked like me on a bike and not a witch on a broomstick. Two hundred and forty-seven people had bid.

I reached for my phone. “Can I speak to Garda Fitzgerald, please?”

“One moment, please.”

“Hello.” It was Garda Fitzgerald’s voice.

“Hi. This is Kate McDaid. You’re investigating my bike that was nicked from outside Kumar’s corner shop on Camden Street.”

“What? Sorry.”

“My bike was stolen.”

“No, it doesn’t ring a bell.”

I sighed heavily. “I’m Kate McDaid, the spiritual guru.”

There was silence on the line. “Is this about my problem? Do you know something?” Garda Fitzgerald whispered at last.

“No. It’s about
my
problem. My bike.”

“I can’t talk to you about this here.”

“Do you want me to come into the station? I have information.”

“No! God, no. I’ll come to you. I’ll be there within the hour.” And he hung up hastily.

I wondered to myself what the Anoraks and the paparazzi would make of a guard turning up on my doorstep. It might put
them off or cause them to scatter.
This could all work out very well
, I thought, smugly.

Garda Fitzgerald arrived twenty minutes later. His feet were polar opposites as he duck-walked up the path past the Anoraks and the paparazzi with an air of importance and busyness. The buttons on his uniform caught the light and reflected the flashlights of the paparazzi, who were pelting him with photographs and questions.

He blushed from ear to ear as they asked him what he was doing. “Police business,” he shouted at the top of his lungs, so that even Mr. O’Brien four doors down wouldn’t question his presence.

He wanted five sugars in his tea. Red-faced, he sank into my sofa and undid the top two buttons of his jacket. Beads of sweat popped onto his forehead.

“Will this be painful?”

The cup wobbled in my hand, splashing some milky, sugary tea onto the carpet. “What?”

“The healing.”

“What?”

“The healing for my problem, you know, down there.” He looked at his crotch.

I handed him the mug, shaking my head. “I want to talk about my bike.”

“And then will you heal me?” He pursed his lips in concentration.

“Okay,” I said, deadpan, realizing that it was probably the only way to get his attention.

He sighed with relief.

I showed him the bike on eBay and the bids.

He looked stern, nodded, and took many notes.

“So what’ll we do?”

His nodding turned into a shake. “I’ll pass it on to the Internet fraud squad. It’s out of my hands.”

“But it’s there, look. It’s in your hands.” I pointed at the screen.

“No, no, it’s on the Internet. Nothing to do with me. I’ll make sure somebody looks at it.” He flipped his notebook shut. “You can trust me.”

I put my head in my hands, feeling exhausted. “I just want my bike back.”

“Right.” He stood up. “Should I take my pants off?”

“Excuse me?” I straightened up.

“For the healing? On or off?”

“On, for the love of God!”

“Right.”

There were a few seconds’ silence as I raced through my brain for options. “How can Garda Fitzgerald relieve his itchiness?” I said to no one in particular. And there it was again. It came to me in a heartbeat and I knew it would cure him. “Eh, combine the skin of an apple, a warm egg, four teaspoons of nutmeg, and some boiling water. Plant a tree for regrowth, symbolizing a new beginning to your life. Drink the mixture for three days, and on the third day you will be healed.”

“I will?”

“Yeah,” I said, shocked. Where was all the hocus-pocus stuff coming from? I was getting good under pressure at making things up.

“That’s amazing.”

“Mmm.”

“And it will definitely cure the . . . ?” He shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

“Mmm.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

Garda Fitzgerald skipped down the path. The new jolly policeman even stopped to chat to the Anoraks.

“Don’t forget about my bike!” I screamed after him through the open window.

He waved back, instantly forgetting.

I put on a tracksuit and threw myself onto the couch. This had taken a turn for the worse. Now, I felt under house arrest.

16

Step Four

Your mansions are her fields, your shelter is her trees,

Her music is the wind playing harp strings on the seas,

She gives to you her light, her green and her earth,

Nature is the one thing of true lasting worth.

You shatter blue skies with fire and smoke,

And do more wrongs to her than seasons evoke,

Devil’s Bit is cluttered with your long roads that bend,

Trees torn from the earth—you take beauty that she lends.

Be careful, work together, don’t choke her fair land,

Feed from her, plant for her—you must understand,

Watch where you tread, your footprints don’t fade,

Through the years man will weep

for mistakes that you’ve made.

We ask you to make us a home in your lair,

With flora and fauna, where nature is there,

For those Celtic souls who don’t listen, who refuse,

Come sneezes, wet eyes and tongues they can’t use.

I was about to post the fourth Step and I was a complete and utter nervous wreck. It had been only four weeks since I’d first heard of the Seven Steps, but things were escalating fast. I felt torn. Part of me wanted to pull the plug, to put an end to the freaks outside my door. But another part, my parents’ daughter’s part, wanted to see how this was going to play out.

Still, the attention was really getting to me. Initially, I’d laughed it off, but now it felt—I don’t know—more sinister. People seemed to believe in fairies. Really believe. They believed these Steps were from another world, and if that was the case, which it seemed to be, they believed that I had a message for them, that I was different from everyone else, that I was some type of a key to unlocking this other place. And while it’s nice to be told that you’re special by someone other than your parents, it didn’t ring true for me. I was sure that I was not the person everyone wanted me to be.

Journalists, TV producers, and marketing consultants were ringing me with questions. What were my thoughts on global warming? If I was an animal, what animal would I be and why? Did I see dead people? How big are fairies? Was I interested in endorsing a face cream?

I stopped asking how they got my number. Nothing felt private anymore, nothing belonged to me. I was becoming public property, or rather an image of me was, the one in newspapers. That person was suddenly in the public eye. But that person, the witch, the one they really wanted to see, was not Kate McDaid, junior advertising copywriter and biking enthusiast.

I had no control. If I tried to answer their questions, if I said “I don’t drink coffee,” they’d twist it into “Kate McDaid refuses to allow toxins to enter her body. She lives a life as pure as the fairies.” I stopped talking to all of them as soon as I read the headline “Is Kate an Alien?” in
The Mail
. There was a photo of me looking up to the sky. I couldn’t win.

Drake Chandler’s suicide note hadn’t helped. That sounds a bit callous of me, doesn’t it? But I couldn’t help but think if he hadn’t died, if he hadn’t sung those tormented songs, if he hadn’t taken truckloads of drugs and written about the fairies in his suicide note, there wouldn’t be nearly as much interest in me and the ramblings of the Red Hag. Maybe Simon Battersby and the Anoraks would have appeared—they loved a good conspiracy—but the other stuff, the bigger stuff, the papers, the paparazzi, the celebrity, would it really have happened if Drake Chandler hadn’t mentioned fairies? And no matter which way I reread that first Step, I really felt that it was too much of a leap to read his suicide into it. As far as I was concerned, the Red Hag had not predicted his death. His death was not caused by people not recognizing the fairies. It was caused by drugs, it was very sad, and it was suicide.

I also felt sure that the cold-sore epidemic was a natural occurrence. That type of thing happened all the time. One person got a cold sore—everyone got a cold sore. It was a coincidence that the people around me who were inflicted were nonbelievers.

There hadn’t been a storm, as predicted in the third Step, not one that I could see, anyway. Yes, there’d been an economic crisis, and yes, houses were being repossessed. But I didn’t know whether that could be classified as an actual
storm.

The Friday after I’d posted the fourth Step, during
The Nightline
on RTÉ, Patrick Molloy had stuttered and stumbled
through the first hour of the show before being overcome with what could only be described as a seizure of sneezes. Live on air he found himself unable to speak, his eyes red and runny, his body convulsing in spasms. For the first time in the history of RTÉ, the show was stopped halfway through, and a film,
Weekend at Bernie’s
, was broadcast instead. Obviously Patrick had had a cold coming on—first a cold sore, then a fit . . .

It was the same with the ninth floor at work. Half of them were off sick, overcome with what they described as hay fever. Kumar at the corner shop told me proudly that he’d run out of tissues. Even his four-box supply in the storeroom had sold. Could it be hay fever? Was it yet another coincidence?

Since I’d been publishing the Steps, I had definitely been appreciating nature more and I regularly gave Mister Snoop Doggy Dogg an extra tickle under his chin, and I loved having Setanta snuggled at my feet at work. I also occasionally found myself looking out for the elusive Hugh Delaney, but sightings in the office had been scarce in recent days. My heart had felt full, if that made any sense, since I’d sat on that rock and felt joyful. So I was convinced that there was no harm in the Steps themselves. It was just the furor they were causing that bothered me.

Then I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the European Convention of Witches. The invite told me that “I was not alone.” I have to admit, I was almost tempted to go. Curious maybe more than tempted. What could possibly go on at a witches’ convention? Would it be like a cookery class, where they swap spells and potions? Did they wear black hats, paint their skin green, and put warts on their noses? Would it be like a Halloween party? I had to remind myself that these were grown-ups, and then I just felt weird, and politely refused their invite.