Sitting at a long driftwood table on an equally long driftwood bench were St. Nicholas, the Magi, Don Alonso, Flaccus Intrepidus Nauta and Fergus MacLob O’Toora. They looked very festive. St. Nick was wearing his red suit and cap, the kings their colourful robes and jeweled crowns. Fergus had a bow tie made of holly round his neck and a circlet of holly round his top hat. Nauta also wore a chaplet of holly and Don Alonso had golden stars in his hair that Mrs. Parry had put there unhooking them from her necklace. And they also sounded festive, for they were singing Christmas carols at the top of their manly voices.
“Look at the fishies drinking, drinking up the river! Look at the fishies drinking to toast the Lord that’s born!”
And they, too, were toasting and drinking like the fishies, but from punch mugs, not a river.
I let them finish the traditional Spanish carol they were singing before going up to the table and pausing before Mr. O’Toora.
“What will you have?” he asked me, looking straight into my chestnut eyes with his own fiery ones, and I felt as if he would roast them.
Before I could say it was a word with him that I would have, Alpin snapped his fingers and began to shout, “Where’s my bubbly? Waiter, champagne! I want pub grub! I want shepherd’s pies and mashed potatoes and ploughman’s lunch sandwiches! And I want it all quick! I’m starving! I haven’t had a bite to eat in ages!”
“That’s not true, you little fibber!” snapped Mrs. Parry. “I myself fed you enough Welsh rarebit to sate fifty shepherds! Yes, indeed! On your way out of my Henny’s shop! You said you’d never make it home if I didn’t and you’re here, so that proves you ate!”
“This isn’t my home,” retorted Alpin. “I said I wouldn’t make it there and I haven’t!”
While they were settling this dispute, Thistle came determinedly up to the singers’ table and over Alpin and Mrs. Parry’s bickering voices began to tell Mr. Fergus about my allergy.
“So he is living in a mortal’s automobile because he has an allergy to pollen, isn’t that it, cailín? And he feels that he might sneeze even in his ideal garden at his ideal fairyland home. But when it gets really bad is when he moves among the mortals. And that’s because of the pollution in their cities. And when he’s at Apple Island it’s not as bad. Why can’t he just stay home for a while if he’s not sure his allergy exists there?”
“He has awful nightmares when he sleeps in Apple Island.”
“Oh. I see. That won’t do at all. Not in Apple Island. What are they about, these horrible nightmares?”
I explained that I had been born under a certain mulberry tree that Shakespeare himself had planted. A human, who had made himself owner of the land it grew on, cut it down because too many people were invading his garden to see it and he hated trespassers. So I lost the place I felt most at home in.
My mother tried to console me giving me the keys to an ideal home she had built for me in the fairy world. It had a garden with the ghost of my mulberry tree in it. But I took to thinking that if the humans had driven us from one place, there was no reason why they couldn’t drive us from another. Although I tried not to worry about this when awake, it got much worse when I tried to sleep. There was no way I could sleep at home without having nightmares that had to do with humans invading our world and taking it over. I said I also had terrible ones about just the opposite. In these, fairies were frightfully mean to humans I liked.
“I see. Now what might the opposite of a nightmare be?”
“The Impossible Dream,” coughed Don Quijote.
“True. That’s the most beautiful of all dreams. The only way not to have nightmares is to have brilliant dreams, Arley. You’ve got to see the bright, sunny side of life and think that after a storm there is always a rainbow. You’ve got to have a fixation with rainbows. Stare at them fixedly, until you’ve hypnotized yourself into believing that all will turn out right in the end. Gentlemen, there is not one of us sitting here at this table who is not of the stuff of which dreams are made. Let us now sing dream and rainbow songs for Arley!”
They sang and sang many, many beautiful, beautiful songs. I loved all of them and I really appreciated the effort these determined dreamers were making to help me. But when I left the pub, I knew that despite all these lullabies I would have a nightmare if I went to sleep at home that night. A nightmare about recurring storms that followed rainbows. And shattered them in pieces, like glass that can cut.
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