Excerpt: Away with the Faeries

He'd begun at the A's of the A to Z of World Fairies when a flood of light fell across his table. The street door flung itself back, smacked into the wall outside. Plaster crunched and the panes of glass set into the door gave out a thin protesting creak. "Oh, sorry! Sorry all. Don't know my own strength!" The woman who burst through in the wake of that thunder stood blinking in the pub's comparative darkness, smiling vaguely at every nook where something moved.

Her hat wasn't the only thing that reminded Ben of Crocodile Dundee, but it was the first. The big floppy leather hat, with its band of twisted leather, seemed to have been attacked by exotic insects. Trembling blue wings, the orange bodies, striped thoraxes, black heads, nightmare fringed legs, and a glint of metal from the fish hooks to which they were attached. More of them swarmed out of the many pockets of her sleeveless khaki jacket, and joined the scale-work of badges that decorated one of her shoulderbags. Baggy khaki shorts over stick thin legs. Grey knitted socks drawn up to her prominent knees and secured there with garters, the ends of which dangled out of the turned over inch of sock top. A pedometer on one skinny wrist and some other kind of meter on the other.

She hitched her bags more firmly onto her shoulder. The massive camera case bulged, other cases dangling from rings and straps all over it, like a big black spider carrying its young on its carapace. Binoculars around her neck, map in a see through plastic map case with a compartment for a compass.

Ben pulled his book closer to himself, raising it up like a shield. All around the room a fluttering of newspapers indicated other people doing the same. A universal shifting on the bar stools turned drinker's shoulders towards the door.

Crazy woman alert, Ben thought, just as she pulled up a chair at his table and dumped her many bags on it. He closed his eyes, pretending not to be there, as she gave an appreciative groan and stretch. She had the long, lined arms—all sinew and sag—of an elderly woman, and the voice of a duchess. "I think you must be Mr. Chowdry. How d'you do? I'm Phyllis. Phyllis Mountjoy, don't you know. With—"

"Don't tell me," he got up to take the offered handshake. It was like holding on to steel pistons inside a thin chamois leather bag. "You're with Matlock Paranormal. I'm beginning to recognise the signs."

The hat landed on the table, obscuring his book and overlapping his plate. He blinked—he had somehow not imagined the impeccably cut silver bob of hair, or that she had paused to put on baby pink lipstick before going out for a hard day's ramble. "Is that rudeness, young man? I believe it is." Periwinkle blue eyes—a colour that romance novelists might call 'violet'—ringed with faded white. Her twinkle had something hard edged about it.

"I was being rude," he said, thinking it out loud, "but it's true nevertheless. You all have an air about you. An air of—"

"Not having time to waste on fools?"