Faerie Wings- Tam: Aged Eight

Entry #1

Faerie Wings- Tam: Aged Eight [Picture: 18, Prompt: 35]

In the west, the sun is setting over the trees. Mam told her to be in by dark.

Tam pretends not to remember. She’s close by, and if Mam’s voice rings out she can duck around the corner and be at the caravan they call home in half a second.

She’s enjoying her new present. Her big sister Helen went all the way to Galway earlier that day to the clothes bank and found her some things. Tam doesn’t much like dressing up, but she let Mam make her “pretty” this time. A new stripy pinafore and barely worn red tights. Tam likes the colour. She even let Mam comb her hair into pigtails. She wants to cut her hair; she doesn’t like it long, it gets in her eyes. But when she suggested cutting it, Mam said, “The lads don’t like girls with short hair, not one bit, Tam Dooley, so don’t you go and cut it, d’you hear?” Tam wondered why it mattered. She wasn’t at all interested in boys.

But letting Mam fuss over her was worth it, for the best bit of all. Because Helen brought back- in the backseat of her banger that Tam loves so much- a pair of faerie wings.

Mam used to tell her terrible stories about the faeries. “And you mayn’t ever have a mirror in your room, else they’ll come and get you!” She would spring on Tam at that point, and she would curl up deep under the covers and sleep so that she wouldn’t see any faeries.

But it’s still light, and now she’s teasing the faeries by pretending to be one, sneaking around the caravans in the hope of finding a child to steal. There are a lot of things that she sometimes covets but would never steal around. The old rusty bicycle leaning against the corrugated iron of the Connor’s caravan, the blue stripy beach towel hanging out of Helen’s window. She stands admiring it for a moment. Helen always finds pretty things for herself and her sister.

She’s brought out of her daydream by a shout of “Tam Dooley, where are you?” With a gasp, she stops being a faerie and bounds round to where Mam’s standing at the door of their caravan. It’s a pretty normal thing, with chipped white paint barely covering the metal below and a huge rusty contraption of some sort for it to be pulled by a car. But it’s been in this field for a very long time, and the only car they have is Helen’s which couldn’t pull anything -it’s very old.

“Where’ve you been?” Mam asks. She’s got Tam’s baby sister, Gina, in her arms.

“I’ve been pretending I’m a faerie,” Tam says proudly.

Her mam gives her a gentle slap up the head. “Away in with you. You’ve got mud all over that new dress that Helen got you. What in the name of the Lord have you been up to?”

“I climbed the big tree round the back and I could see the whole world, Mam. It was just like flying,” Tam says. It’s true. She loves climbing. She nearly got a hole in one of her wings, but she managed to avoid it. She could see all the caravans in the field as well as the road beyond and the houses. There was one yellow house she looked at for a long time. She doesn’t mind living in the caravan -it’s home- but in the tree she wondered what it would be like to live in the big yellow house. She thought it looked close enough to touch, if she could just jump and her wings would take her there…

“Here now, don’t be getting silly ideas into your head, else your da will have to beat them back out, d’you hear?” Mam brings her back to the present.

Tam nods, and shivers. She remembers not to tell her da this. He doesn’t like her pretending. He doesn’t like anything much.

“Anyway, Mam,” she says, and sticks out her fist.

“Ah, thanks Tam,” Mam says, taking the present. “I’ll put them in the glass on the window sill.”

They have one tall glass where Tam’s gifts go whenever she brings them back. This time, they’re long lilac flowers from the ditch, but Tam doesn’t know the name of them.

“Now go and get washed up,” her mam says.

Tam goes round the back where they have a tap in a tent. She washes her face and hair, then takes off the pinafore and carefully lays the faerie wings down. She runs in her t-shirt and tights to her window, and climbs up the cinder blocks left outside it until she sticks her hand through and picks up some clean clothes. She pulls them on. Mam likes to have things clean, and so does she.

She frowns as she runs her fingers through her hair, and wishes that they had a mirror somewhere, so that she could see better what she looks like.

She looks up to the west, where the sun’s vanished behind the trees, and thinks that tomorrow, she’ll find the faeries and ask if the reason they’ve never stolen her is because she’s ugly.

I know that the end needs work. Anyway, I'm not putting the link to this until it's edited. What do you think? Do I need to develop Tam more as a child? Four more entries follow her through childhood and teenager-hood. Anyway, I appreciate all your comments!

Oh, and for the record, she's a Traveller. I don't know if it's necessary for me to make that clearer or not. Tell me!