Tam is convinced he saw a nymph today. I saw her too, and nymph isn’t that far off the mark as a comparison, but Tam’s got it in his head that she’s a nymph maybe in the folkloric sense as well. What is definite—what we can both agree on—is that neither of us has ever seen anyone like her before. Neither of us ever thought we would. We never thought people could turn out like that outside of a painting. What amazes me more than her fantastical appearance is the fact that she’s survived into adulthood. I would have thought the vicious hurdy-gurdy everyday world would have flattened someone like her. She doesn’t look like she’s made of anything more substantial than a whim.
We encountered her on the Green, which, according to Tam—half-jokingly—buttresses his little fairy theories about her ethereal nature. He muses she slipped out of a treetrunk for the day, yenning to mix with forbidden mortals. He was so goddamn winsome this afternoon. You wouldn’t have thought he would be—we’d just left a repertoire showing of Le cercle rouge and were feeling pretty hardened.
It was sleeting on our heads as we walked back from the movie. Those iced-up loogies made it all the way through our hair to slap at our scalps. I checked my coat pocket, but I’d left my wool cap at home. We were turtled into our collars and scarves, hiking at a trot along the edge of the park, heading for home. The fast hike was only partly motivated by the weather—Tam felt guilty leaving the twins to tend shop in the middle of a weekday. I could feel the restlessness wafting off his shoulders and the top of his head the moment we left the theater.
I egged him about that as we hurried home. Why’d he insist on coming out for a matinee in the first place if he didn’t think he could take it? He said something about hating that he never makes the time to accompany me on my daytime forays into cinema-land—that the twins tag along often enough but he lets me down whenever I ask. Like I have to be supported, or something, in my hobbies. I could have reminded him I’m happy going to screenings on my own—I really am—but I figured he needed time away from the shop anyway. We’ve had kind of a stressful quarter. Besides, the twins had already seen the flick and I guess once was enough for them. When Tam shrugged out a suggestion that he wouldn’t mind going instead, If you’re looking for a date, I was happy to oblige. I was sort of eager to introduce him to Melville anyway—the other one.
All of this prefacing to point out that, things as they usually are, Tam never would have been strolling along the southeast side of St. Stephen’s Green at three o’clock on an icy Thursday if I hadn’t rattled him loose from the shop. I would have gone to the theater alone—I’d only ever seen the film on bootleg confounded by zero subtitles and a shit transfer—but I might have taken a different path home. I wouldn’t have headed for the shop. I probably would have gone for a decent Guatemalan coffee at the nook across from the theater and read my book while I waited for the sleet to die away. Then I might have headed sort of westerly in the direction of my favorite music store and checked out new arrivals under headphones for an hour or so. I’ve been craving new tunes for a while—I know my consumer cycles. Anyway, chances are good I would have taken another route home, or taken it hours after the nymph had been kicked off the Green by the cops. Chances are pretty good that, solo—without Tam—I would have missed her entirely.
Weather-wise, as I indicated, it was no day for busking because (1) there weren’t enough people strolling through the park to make it worthwhile and (2) you were apt to freeze off extremities. The sky straddled the rooftops—in a city lacking skyscrapers—with the kinds of clouds that absorb light and sound. The wind formed whirling dervishes out of the sleet—we counted four on the way home—and the wet poured down mild then fierce then mild again, indecisive. It was more than a little cold for mid-April and I was glad I’d worn gloves. It sucked being outside.
That alone made her stand out sore. We met first with just the distant sight of a busker and the distant sound of a cello. At first I barely paid attention—buskers are practically underfoot in these parts—but then it occurred to me that it was maybe a tad too shitty out. It occurred to me how skilled the music was. I turned away from Tam and spotted the figure: brown tarp-like coat over billowing wine skirt, all of it topped off with butter.
She was two hundred feet off and only the skirt made her sex distinct from where we stood. She sat on a bench half-turned away from us, sawing on her cello. She’d found a place to sit that was sheltered by a thick twist of trees, which spared her from the brunt of the sleet. She was able to leave her cello case open to catch donations, but there were no donations to be had. Pedestrians skirted the Green in the main, too hurried for parks in that weather. The only person in the cellist’s space was an elderly dogwalker who didn’t look inclined to pay the musician much heed. Beyond the bench and the trees I spotted a garda approaching the cellist from the north end of the park, looking smart and annoyed under a black umbrella.
I nudged Tam. He stopped complaining about the sleet, the bad run of business, the funny smell wafting from beneath his bathroom sink that he can’t for the life of him identify or efface, the couple next to us in the theater who wouldn’t stop whispering, the hangnail on his big toe that apparently kept catching on his sock as we hiked. He followed the jut of my chin in the direction of the cellist who was about to get served by the law. We’d gotten closer to the musician and now I could clearly see that she was young and not too hard on the eyes. She was also, most definitely, pitiful enough trying to pick up a few pence on a blustery day on the Green.
“That’s hunger,” Tam observed.
I nudged him again to get him to follow me onto the Green proper, digging for my wallet. “She’s really good,” I argued when I sensed him stalling behind me. We were closer to the cellist than the cop and I figured I had a chance to put a few quid in her case before we were intercepted.
The cellist didn’t appear to have noticed approaching law-and-order or the fact that two soaked pedestrians had turned in her direction. My knowledge of classical music is haphazard and I couldn’t identify the tune, but whatever it was sure had the girl. When we were twenty feet away, I noticed her eyes were closed as she played and, weather aside, she didn’t seem too bothered by the elements that bit at her bare fingers and exposed ears.
Beside me, tugging a few bills from his own pocket, Tam—who on the other hand does know his fair share about classical music—muttered “Chopin”. That was the last sane thing he said all day.
We were finally close enough to make out her face, having rounded the bench and the cello case on the ground. Instantly I forgot about the weather because instantly, I calculated, I couldn’t be in the real goddamn world anymore anyway. Swathed in the oversized brown tarp-coat and swelling wine skirt was the fairest person I’d ever seen. Fair pale and blond. Fair beautiful. Fair—as implied Eurocentrically in Grimm, Andersen and Lang—rare and delicate and virtuous and young. Tam may have thought, in that instant, nymph, but I’ve spent way too much time in fantasy fiction and comic book land, so my first thought was elf.
The girl looked to be made of porcelain and silver silk threads. She looked as if the rain might shatter her if she moved out from under the bower of trees—I imagined sleet-drops crashing through her brow and cheeks the way pebbles crash through windowpanes in glassy bursts that make a lot of shards. Her skin was an even flawless white—and I mean it. I’m living among pasty northerners, but this girl was literally snow-white. Which, when you really think about it, ought to be a little unsettling, but it wasn’t on her. She made it live. She turned it beautiful—warm, even, though neither of us dared interfere in her space enough to verify our suspicions.
Her face was a geometric oval and her lips were the kinds of lips the Pre-Raphaelites liked to paint and versify about: bowed with an appearance of never having been touched by anything but—hang on, I barely believe I’m writing this—syrup and honey. Her eyebrows were moth-wings. They were drawn together in that elfin kind of twist that indulgent illustrators are always crafting—a soft delicate pained furrow of bittersweet contemplation. Her hair was the color of butter, like I said, coiled into a thick braid that disappeared under her collar. Long loose wisps danced around her head on the breeze, tickling her cheeks as if the weather was desperate to get her attention. It failed. She was deep in her music, which was vital and practiced—unlikely to come off so strong under her little gossamer hands.
I never expected to be so fascinated by a busker or go on at length describing a stranger with my figurative pen. Just about when the impact of the girl settled on me, it settled on Tam as well. He made a confused sound in his throat and a fiver fluttered from his hand and landed on the ground beyond the cello case. The girl didn’t notice. I squatted and placed his and my own bills in the case, moving them under a magazine she’d wisely offered as paperweight—Gourmet, puffy from the damp and as frayed as her tarp-coat and Bohemian skirt.
“Here, now, lass,” called the garda, moving in.
The girl started and lifted her bow from the strings. Her eyes opened for us and gave out inconceivable navy blue. Tam made another confused sound. Her gaze—proverbial fairytale saucers of innocence—found his legs then my face, which was closer to her level thanks to my squat. These sights didn’t register. Her antennae were out for the law and she turned to find the cop closing the last ten feet of distance.
This sight made her cringe. In one motion she leaned forward, laid her cello in its flannel bed and closed the case shut. She was on her feet with case in one hand and bow in the other before the garda arrived on our spot.
Tam and I simultaneously backed up a few steps, instinctively giving her a berth we knew she’d insist on. She wasn’t a short woman—I give her 5’8”—but she looked too slender to be bearing up under the tarp-coat, never mind the cello case. We couldn’t see anything of her shape beneath the oversized clothes she wore—not even her ankles—but we sensed air.
“Your permit?” the garda asked the girl.
“Leave her,” Tam rumbled down at him.
This was new. Tam’s big on permits, ordinances and all manner of civic regulations that tend to make his life as a shopkeeper smooth—or at least protect the shop. He’s generally fairly optimistic about the law. From his privileged position as a middle-class, straight-as-an-arrow male Irisher, the law’s just about tailored to benefit him this way to Friday.
The cop glanced up at Tam, at me, then focused on the girl again. It was hard not to. She stood prised between bench, law and strangers. She seemed to flutter under her oversized clothes, which only reinforced Tam’s romantic notions about her origins and makeup. Her eyes avoided our faces—I could tell she wanted to bolt. I stepped backwards a little more, trying to give her an opening, but it wasn’t far enough. She couldn’t bring herself to head in my direction.
“You’ve had your share of warnings,” the cop told the girl.
“Another won’t hurt then, will it?” Tam said. He was intent on butting in. I touched his arm—he didn’t seem conscious of me. “We should all be grateful to hear such playing on a day this inclement. Was that one of Chopin’s etudes?” he asked the girl, who was beginning to consider the opening I’d given her—I could tell this by her body language. “Never heard it played on cello before.”
Tam was making conversation. I could have told him it was fruitless. She wasn’t going to speak to anyone. She held her instrument like a shield between her body and the three men surrounding her. I backed up a bit more. Tam didn’t move—I don’t think a tsunami could have moved him at that moment, because the girl’s gaze finally lifted and touched his face. His indefatigable mouth shut down. We watched the navy eyes focus on Tam’s overgrown lips, then dare a peek at Tam’s gray gaze. The moth-wing eyebrows knit together and the Rossetti lips parted.
An instant later she blurred past me. A foot-long tendril of buttery blond hair silked across my jaw, caught in an updraft as she rushed by at a run. The garda didn’t move to follow her. He didn’t have it in him to harass her any more than we did, it turns out. I sensed Tam was keen to bolt after her, but I stayed him with a hand until he found his head again. We watched the cellist disappear into the rain. She didn’t shatter.
The garda checked my and Tam’s faces, touched his cap and turned out of our circle. I was grateful he hadn’t taken too much offense at Tam’s contrarian antics. I wasn’t surprised—Tam gets away with a lot, and not just because of his size—but I was thankful. It was pissing rain and I was cold. I was also worried I might have an old roach rolling around in my coat pocket from a show I’d enjoyed two weeks back with the twins. Things might have turned hairy if there’d been any sniffer mutts around. The cop hadn’t been a tool, but I was glad to see his back.
“Wet enough?” I asked Tam. I had to nudge him again to get him to pay attention to me and the weather. His gaze was fixed on the hedge around which the girl had vanished. “Come on.” I was gentle. My pal apparently needed some TLC. I wasn’t obtuse. I could tell he was smitten.
“Was she real and actual?” he asked me on a bewildered laugh.
“Uh-huh. But maybe we should mind our own business.”
Business, I knew, was a word that might kickstart Tam Doyle out of a trance. It worked to a point. It got him moving towards the shop again.
The Myriad of Simon Hansen 