John Lenahan - Prince of Hazel and Oak

‘So,’ Fallon said with a quizzical look on his face, ‘you saved the world?’

‘I had help.’

‘And when in all of this did you cut your uncle’s hand off?’

‘Just after Dad reattached his.’

‘I take it all back, Conor, you are insane after all.’

After listening to myself I wondered if he was right. It wasn’t the first time, since my return, that I had grappled with my sanity. The only thing that had kept me from going over the edge was the stuff I had brought back with me: my clothes, Fergal’s Banshee blade and Mom’s present. Many a night I sat and just touched them, wishing they could somehow transport me to The Land. But they weren’t with me now, and at that moment I wondered if I had imagined them, too.

I think I would have lost it right then and there if Fallon hadn’t unknowingly thrown me a lifeline. He reached into an evidence folder and placed in front of me a paperback book-sized sheet of gold in a wooden frame. ‘What is this?’ he asked.

I picked it up. ‘It’s called an emain slate,’ I said, feeling my throat tighten. ‘My mother gave it to me.’

‘It’s solid gold.’

‘I know.’

‘We found faint writing on it. What’s it for?’

‘Anything written on this slate appears on its twin.’ I picked up a pen from the table and clicked the ball point back into ked the baamber, with the blunt end I wrote the contents of my heart. I wrote, ‘HELP!’

‘And you are saying your mother has the other one in this land of yours.’

‘Yes.’

‘So how is she?’

My anger erupted. How dare he be so flippant about this! If I had had a banta stick I would have clocked him in the head for that. But anger gave way to understanding. Firstly, he was trying to get me mad and I wasn’t going to play his game, and secondly, he didn’t take this seriously, he didn’t understand how deep his quip cut.

After spending one day back in the Real World and waking from a dreamless sleep, I realised how much of a mistake returning had been. I had found a mother – my mother – something I had wished for with all of my heart, for all of my life, and as soon as I found her – I left her. How stupid is that? I wrote her every day for a month and spent countless hours wiping the tears out of my eyes just so I could see that the emain slate gave me no reply.

I looked Fallon in the eyes and admitted, ‘It doesn’t work here.’

‘Are you sure? Maybe your mother sent you little notes on this thing and told you to kill your father?’

‘No. I told you it doesn’t work!’

‘Look, Conor, I’m just trying to help you. The story about the Leprechauns didn’t convince me that you were insane, but getting letters from an imaginary mother just might save you from the chop.’

I thought about that. Maybe he was right, maybe he was my friend and this was good advice. I looked into his kind countenance and almost bought it, but then his eyes gave away the truth.

‘You’re not trying to help me,’ I said. ‘I know what you are doing. You are trying to get me to say I did it, so you can get a tick in your little score sheet and go home to your wife and kids and tell them that, “Daddy got a bad guy today”, but I am not going to oblige. I did not kill my father!’ I screamed. ‘I love him and I miss him and I… I hate myself…’ I broke down and wept.

‘Why do you hate yourself, Conor?’ Fallon said in a calm voice, like a psychiatrist getting to the crux of a problem. ‘You hate yourself because you loved him and you hurt him?’

I picked my head up off my damp arms and looked at him through the blur of my tears. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I hate myself for being so stupid. I hate myself – for leaving him.’

Fallon picked up his notepad and stood up. ‘Let’s take a break,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should just sit and think for a while.’ I could tell he was disappointed. I’m sure he thought I was about to confess. He unlocked the door, but before he went through he stopped and said, ‘Just one thing.’

I looked at him confused.

‘I don’t have kids. I just got one – a girl. And I promise I won’t tell her you’re a bad guy. You’re not a bad guy, Conor, you’re troubled and in trouble – but you’re not a bad guy.’

That was it. I had hit rock bottom. I dropped my head onto the emain slate and closed my eyes not caring if I slept or not. Sleeping brought me no relief; I couldn’t even escape into a dream.

I felt the message before I saw it. My cheek was resting on the emain slate and a tickling sensation stirred me enough to lift my head and take a look. There underneath my cry for help was a sentence, ‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Yes!’ I screamed. I don’t think I had ever been happier in my life. Like a bawling child lost in a shopping mall, I was found, and my mother was going to clutch me to her breast and wipe away my tears. I reached for the pen and realised that Fallon had taken it with him. I frantically searched around the room trying to find something I could etch a reply with but the only thing in the room was me, two chairs and a table. I tried to use my fingernails but I had bitten them down to nothing. I hammered on the door and shouted. After what seemed like ages it opened. Standing there was Detective Fallon and a uniformed cop holding a club.

‘Gimme your pen!’ I shouted as I jumped up and down.

‘Back off, Conor,’ he demanded.

‘OK, OK,’ I said, putting my hands up and doing as I was told, ‘just give me a pen.’

The two policemen cautiously entered the room. ‘Why do you want a pen?’ Fallon asked.

‘I just do! Give me your damn pen!’

‘I’m not going to give you my pen,’ the detective said in pacifying tones, ‘until you tell me what you want it for.’

‘OK, I did it. I want to confess. Give me your notepad and pen and I’ll write a confession.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What you said I did. Give me your pen and I’ll write it all down for you – everything.’

The two policemen looked at each other in amazement. Fallon gave me a sceptical look but he offered out his notepad and pen. I snatched the ballpoint, ran over to the table and turned the slate around to write on it. Fallon grabbed the pen back before I could etch a mark and tried to read the Gaelic sentence aloud. ‘Did you write this?’ he said.

‘Yes, yes I did. See I’m crazy. I’m writing letters to myself in made-up languages. Here I’ll show you.’ I reached for the slate but he pulled it out of my reach.

We stared at each other, his eyes narrowed with an effort to figure out what was going on. I gazed back wide-eyed and pleading. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Trust me, this is important.’

He handed me the slate and I wrote on it, ‘YES!!!’

I dropped the slate on the table and stared at it. So did Fallon. Just when I thought my eyes were going to burn a hole in the gold surface, letters appeared one by one. ‘I WILL BE RIGHT THERE,’ it said.

Fallon’s eyes shot up to look at me. They were a lot wider than before. ‘What just happened here?’

‘I got a magic email.’

amp;›‘What… what does it say?’

‘It says, “I will be right there.”’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘It means – my mom’s gonna bail me out.’

‘Conor,’ Detective Fallon said, ‘no one is going to bail you out.’

It was just the two of us again. I had finally calmed down enough for him to dismiss the guard. ‘You saw what was written on the slate.’

‘I did. How did you do that, some sort of conjuring trick?’

That made me laugh. ‘Not a conjuring trick, it’s a magic trick – real magic.’