Cliff McNish

tink

'The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.' – J.M. Barrie

I emerged from mother’s fairy womb straight to scorching sun held up, so I’d never doubt my inferiority. And that same night, furthermore, my eyes pinned open by my own ruthless sisters to mark me with moon’s pale lucence.

A week later they returned, crowding the lavender, spitting fulsomely at bees, hard jaws working rose petals like gum, finally pretending friendship. More and more siblings flitted into the shrub where I lay — parking their backsides down, farting inside the bells of foxgloves — while at the same time, with prissy insistence (for we fairies are all obsessed with our sparkling teeth) offering me my first grass seeds to floss.

It was a lonely time for me. No sister celebrated my new-born light those first weeks, knowing I outshone them. Insanely jealous, they took their combined inferior blush inside Dead Man’s Cave, tittering and glittering amongst themselves. Heaven, in truth, is our greatest fear: light upon light, bright upon bright, outshone for eternity.

I never discussed any of this with Pan, obviously. He had no interest in the internal affairs of fairies. He did, bless him, have some quaint notions about our origins. Generations ago some capricious fairy had whispered in his ear that when the first human baby laughed, the sound broke into a million pieces, all of which went skipping about, and thus we were born. Pan still trots out this line when — always holding the prettier girls’ hands — he brings visitors to Neverland. Also the old joke that fairies are created spontaneously whenever a human child is born. Only Peter is naïve enough to swallow that one.

Though, I suppose, deceitful by inclination, we Fae do make convincing storytellers. We tell hobgoblins that we are birthed in the upturned bowls of primordial buttercups. We tell them we have no fathers, we are pure, breasts squeezed from essence of blossom-light, that the wet glow you see on our faces as we fly past is not common sweat but nothing less than our shining mercy for the needs of all living things.

In truth, we are spectacularly ambitious, but only within our own warring family sisterhoods. Murder is rife, the sound of our stroking fingertips like sandpaper...and we are old. When sky met earth to divulge our shape, humankind did not yet exist. Only flowers, yearning for us.

These days I have taken my wings to the gloomier side of the island. I live with moribund butterflies, exiled goblins and broken-hearted ogres. Whenever gnomes are nearby, I relieve the tedium by making them dribble: wrapping leaves across my thighs without observable fastenings, then extending them by charm alone out onto my freckled arms with, deftly added — dabbed in certain places — moss.

I am not the only fairy here. Eventually we all come to die on this dank ebb of riverbank where the crocodile lives. Just over there, by the bullrushes, ancient Triss, my great-grandmother, has spent the past ten days dimming her light. She does so with slender palms outstretched, one slow finger at a time drawing down her radiance. It is the tradition in Neverland: a last extended goodbye to stream, forest, sky.

Trembling a little — I’m always cold now, the edges of my wings are beginning to fray — I study Triss covertly. Still immensely beautiful, she displays herself in various suggestive poses before all the motley Forest Folk — the dumbest of imps, the cloddiest hobgoblins, even putrid brownies. Every last creature is permitted to view her here at the end of days. All our lives we stay devoutly chaste, making decisions the fairy way: gratuitous, tenacious, venal. Finally, however, we give something back.

At dawn Triss’s dress slips off, to untold groans, invites them all to jump her bones.

I twist away, not wishing to watch. I am too close to the same end myself. What would Peter say about such a spectacle? The answer is nothing. Or rather, perhaps he would sniff in distaste — but then hurriedly dismiss the scene. Peter Pan: the boy who must at all costs forget whatever he inadvertently learns about the world in order to stay childlike. He works tirelessly at this endeavour. ‘Dreams do come true if only we wish hard enough,’ he whispers earnestly. ‘You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.’

And he does, he does. He pretends he still has his first teeth, as we do. He pretends he is boastful and careless, forgetful and self-centred, like any ordinary boy.

All the Fae wanted him desperately, of course. Male and female alike. How could we not? Pan was irresistible to us precisely because he refused to be touched. We whom everything wishes to touch. We whom every tree-spirit, sprite, ogre and virginal sweet-perfumed flower must love if we attend upon them even fleetingly.

Only the Forever Child resists us. Hence our obsession.

Peter Pan! The boy who wouldn’t grow up! What fatal arrogance made me think I could be the first fairy to make him care? Even as I was falling for him, I knew he’d forget about me the moment another fairy or human girl-child took his fancy. But I persisted because — for all his melodramatic antics, silly pouts and calculated innocence — Peter is not a child, not really. No one can live as long as Peter and not grow up a little. More than a little. The first time I met him I saw at once how much he liked me being inclined in the chest toward embonpoint. Wendy Darling cattily described me later to him as ‘an abandoned little creature’, and not inappropriately: even a child like her sensed I emanated a wantonness that Pan secretly enjoyed.

Wrapped in his skeleton leaves, he liked nothing more than the two of us fighting over him. I went along with this game. Played the part of the cross, jealous fairy, while prudish Wendy — in her blue bow, nightgown, and stiff black slippers — could never quite manage to turn herself into the convincing mother-figure Peter so desperately yearned for. Still, she was his latest female interest, so he always took her side during our squabbles. ‘You are quite a common fairy,’ he would say pompously, wagging his finger at me. ‘You are not very polite at all!’ Then, next moment, when we were alone: ‘Don’t you understand? You mean more to me than anything in this whole world.’

The shame of it: to fall headlong for such a shallow youth. A man in his prime would have been understandable, but a boy? And not even fully a boy. A half-boy. Half boy, half bird. Petty from birth, he fled his own parents as a baby simply because he could not bear playing second fiddle to the new child his parents dared to have.

His swordplay, nevertheless — yes, that was mesmerising. To see him fence against Hook took one’s breath away. That time facing death in the lagoon of Marooners' Rock, Peter was terrified, I saw that. He thought he was going to die, yet he still granted Hook only one single shudder. I fell in love with him that moment, and settled for accepting his simple, negligent attitude towards me, since it was all he could handle. Every now and again (this shames now) I encouraged Peter to cuff me — even to give me a good hiding — attempting to break through his studied naivety to the raw energy beneath. But no — such machinations, as countless fairies before me have discovered, never quite work on Pan.

‘Tink is not all bad,’ he told Wendy one time. ‘Or, rather, she is all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she is all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.’

Wendy drank all this nonsense up as only a child can, then sat primly waiting for Peter to lose interest in me. Which he soon did. Leaving me here by this river, entirely forgotten: just another of his disremembered fairies, soon to die.

It is sunset in Neverland. The time of the day that fairies like to rhyme.

Knowing that my time is near, my sisters arrive to comfort me, even in this dreary place. All pretend they are excited to see me. All dote on me. And although in the same breath they can’t help themselves reminding me that I will never again sparkle and twinkle the way Heaven’s stars sparkle and twinkle, I am glad that they are here. Glad, too, that none of them know in the small hours I visit the pirates’ huts: that from gloom of brink and worm-ridden grass I seek out guilt’s pungent sleep in Hook’s hairy arse. And thence to bathe not in morn’s dew-welcome sills, but rainwater drippage from mushroom gills; taking my turn in line with mucky gnomes and common sprites — my light no longer sufficient to make them turn aside, nor even make the shyest dryad hide. And betwixt times, while Pan moons for Wendy Darling — ‘Wait for me, Peter!’ always crying — my only companion the nemesis in the brine, which ticks and bides its time.

Note: Italicised speech in ‘Tink’ is quoted from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (Penguin, 2004)

Cliff McNish’s middle-grade fantasy novel The Doomspell was translated into 26 languages, and his ghost novel Breathe was voted in May 2013 by The Schools Network of British Librarians as one of the top adult and children’s novels of all time. Amongst other places, his adult stories have appeared in Nightjar Press, Dublin Creative Writers, Stand and Confingo. He has yet to find a fairy in his garden. Children's Website: cliffmcnish.com Twitter: @cliffmcnish

Cliff wrote the following about ‘Tink’:

In J. M. Barrie's ‘Peter Pan’, fairies burn brightly for about a year, then pffff...they die. Peter himself forgets about loyal Tinkerbell, who dotes on him so, the second she's out of his sight. I wondered what this Neverland society of fairies - in thrall to such a shallow, rather callous little boy -  might really be like, and what started as three separate and predominantly playful poems about fairies became the much darker ‘Tink’.