TROLLS’ NIGHT OUT

JENNY BLACKFORD

 

 

JENNY BLACKFORD’S university degree was in Classics (Greek and Latin), but an advertisement in the paper led to an unexpected twenty year career in large computer networks. Since she gave up her day job, Jenny has been writing fantasy, science fiction, and ghost stories. A story set in ancient Delphi appeared in the Hadley Rille anthology Ruins Terra in 2007, and various stories for children have been published in the NSW School Magazine and other markets. As well, a YA story has appeared in Paul Collins’ anthology Trust Me!

 

During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a principal in the small press publisher Ebony Books and a member of the Editorial Collective of Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series, an award-winning journal. She was fantasy reviewer for The Age in the early 1990s, and one of the judges for the Fantasy division of the Aurealis Awards in 1998 and 1999. In 2001, she co-edited (with Russell Blackford) Foundation 78, the special Australian issue.

 

She also writes and reviews for the Australian science magazine Cosmos, the ecological magazine 6, and the New York Review of Science Fiction.

 

In this sweet, stinging, and funny predatory tale, Blackford shows us what other, er, people do on their night out...

 

* * * *

 

 

There was a lot of shrieking and laughing going on at the table behind ours.

 

‘Girls’ night out,’ I said, and took a good swig of my glass of red.

 

David barked out, ‘What did you say, woman?’

 

I shouted this time, hoping to penetrate the restaurant sound barrier: ‘Girls’ night out.’

 

David snorted. With his impressive snout, that was something.

 

‘Trolls’ night out, more like it,’ he said. He bared his long white canines in a toothy grin.

 

The comment was typical of the David I’d known and hated, before I ran away to Scandinavia. Unfortunately, it’s not considered good form to scream at one’s ex in a good Melbourne restaurant. Instead, I cut off a piece of my salmon cutlet and stuck it in my mouth, fast. The aroma of David’s steak was tormenting me.

 

‘That’s not very nice,’ I said, at last, when I could speak without screaming at him. ‘Even for an old wolf like you.’

 

‘So what?’ he said. ‘I’m not a very nice person.’

 

I swallowed my list of pent-up grievances, and sighed. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you were going to become a warmer and nicer person.’

 

David sneered. His dark unibrow made the expression even nastier. ‘Maybe you agreed that I was going to be warmer and nicer. I don’t remember any such agreement. This would have been before you so heartlessly left me and went jaunting off to Sweden?’

 

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Heartlessly. Unaccountably. No good reason at all.’ Ha! After all the fights, he knew my reasons well enough. I drank half a glass of red wine in one gulp. At least it was a sturdy South Australian shiraz, not a watery pinot noir.

 

Without conscious warning, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted, and I could feel my cheek muscles trying to bare my teeth in a snarl.

 

David patted my hand and said, ‘Settle down, sweetie. It’s okay — it’s just two Samoyeds and an Alsatian on the footpath. Nothing to get agitated about. They haven’t been washed for a month, by the smell of them.’

 

He was handling his involuntary physical reactions far better than I was, the bastard. Showing no signs of stress, he said, ‘So, this agreement that I was going to become a warmer and nicer person. Was I listening at the time?’ Another fistful of chips disappeared into his maw. The coarse dark hair on the back of his arms poked irrepressibly out of the wrists of his dark grey shirt. Not so long ago, that sight could have made me feel all tender and squishy inside.

 

‘Well, you seemed to be listening,’ I said. ‘You were nodding now and then, saying “yes”, and occasionally “no”, making eye contact, all that. You mean you can do that and not listen?’ It had been during the last of our many rapprochements. I’d been feeling strangely emotional, sentimental, hopeful. Hormonal.

 

He grinned irritatingly. ‘Of course, my dear. It’s just a simple, autonomous subroutine. My mind could have been anywhere. Contemplating dinner, thinking about my tax bill, plotting my next play.’

 

‘You travesty of an ex-lover,’ I said. ‘So much for the meeting of minds.’ Clearly, our relationship had been more about the meeting of bodies.

 

‘Let that be a lesson to you of the perfidy of man,’ he said. He looked at me shrewdly as he cut a bleeding piece from the almost-raw centre of his enormous steak.

 

‘You want this, don’t you?’ he said, waving it under my nose.

 

I’d cheerfully have killed for it. ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m a vegetarian now. I told you that when I rang.’ I put a huge piece of salmon into my mouth and chewed like mad. It didn’t help much. Eventually, I swallowed. ‘A lot can happen in a year.’

 

He looked down his long snout at me. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Talia, but salmon don’t grow on trees.’

 

It was time to change the subject. ‘That girls’ night out behind me —’

 

‘Trolls’,’ he said firmly.

 

My blood was starting to boil, despite the cooling influence of the fish. ‘You really are such a bastard, David. You’re always so judgmental about people — especially women —’

 

He smirked. ‘Well, turn around and take a look at them.’

 

‘Don’t be rude. They’re just a pack of high-spirited young girls.’ But I’d seen them as they’d walked in past our table, in their ones and twos; they were more than just young girls. I was only arguing with him from long habit.

 

David snorted again. ‘Very muscular girls.’

 

‘Maybe they go to gym together.’

 

‘Look at that one, the girl in the red dress, the fluffy-haired blonde,’ David said, pointing with his fork at a girl — woman — at the end of the table behind us. ‘She could be a wrestler with those arms.’

 

I swivelled my neck to sneak another glance. Her red dress was a tiny sleeveless thing, and her triceps muscles rippled visibly. Her biceps were stunning. I wondered what it would be like to lick her arms. It would be a smoother, softer experience than it had been with David.

 

Two voluptuous girls with long, straight blonde hair sat on her left wearing ruffly pale violet confections that made the most of their amazing pecs and lats.

 

The girl next to them, with short spiky dark hair, was even more impressive. I couldn’t help myself: ‘How about the deltoids on the one in the sparkly top! Wow!’

 

He looked at her, then back at me, and gave his right shoulder a reassuring squeeze with the left hand, as if to check that the muscles were still there. ‘Well, my muscles are bigger.’

 

‘Not much, proportionally,’ I said.

 

He looked gratifyingly distressed. ‘But how has she done it? You know the weights I lift.’

 

I pretended to smile. ‘Yes.’

 

‘You should have been happy to have had a fella who didn’t let himself go. At least I’ve always taken care of myself.’ As I watched, he pulled in the stomach which had persistently evaded his best efforts towards perfection.

 

‘Yeah, right,’ I said. He’d driven me mad with his obsession with exercise, for seven long years. Up before dawn every day. Cycling one day, weights the next. Especially if a first night of a play was coming up. No slow mornings of coffee and the papers in bed for us ...

 

But it was not my problem any more. I had more important concerns, now. I wiggled my shoulders until the small knot that had developed between them came loose. No wonder I’d needed months of remedial massages in Sweden.

 

David turned back to his oozing steak, then peered at my plate. ‘What’s this nonsense with eating fish, anyway?’ he said, with a stern look. ‘It’s not right or proper for people like us. You’re not trying to deny your heritage, are you?’ He wiggled his one long eyebrow to underline the word ‘heritage’.

 

So, he’s back to that again, I thought. I sighed as deeply as I could manage, and tried to look put-upon.

 

‘Look, David, I don’t want to deny anything. But I don’t have to give in to it. I can fight it. And, when I called you, I told you, I’ve gone off red meat. That’s it. End of argument.’ For months now, I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of benefiting from the killing of my fellow mammals. Each of them was somebody’s furry, milk-drinking baby. But I hadn’t had to sit at a dinner table and watch anyone eat steak oozing delicious juices either.

 

‘You’re not going soft on me, are you?’ he said. ‘That’s not like the delightfully predacious Talia I remember.’ He gave a wolfish grin. ‘No, I know what it is. It’s just because you’ve put on weight, isn’t it? You’ve gone veggie to lose weight. Actresses do that all the time.’

 

As he sniggered, I considered punching his long, designer-stubbled jaw. The restaurant owner would understand, if I told her. As long as it was a her. ‘You insufferable —’

 

He interrupted me: ‘Not that it’s a bad thing.’ He winked theatrically. ‘Your tits look great, sweetie.’

 

I was briefly distracted from my building fury by the waiter walking past, taking another huge platter of food to the girls’-night-out table. It was piled with lady’s fingers, those long, thin Middle Eastern pastries stuffed with spicy minced lamb. The smell was torture.

 

‘But how did you manage to get so much of the added weight to go up top?’ David asked. ‘Surely you wouldn’t have had a breast op.’

 

He’d pushed me to my limit. I snapped. ‘You’re right, you know,’ I said. ‘They are trolls.’

 

His mouth hung open. It was not a pretty sight. Given that he was temporarily speechless — a rare and welcome event — I went on. ‘Well, not adult trolls yet, not quite. They’re troll nymphs, a few years from metamorphosis.’

 

‘Trollettes,’ he said, with an evil grin.

 

‘Troll nymphs,’ I said firmly, keeping the conversational upper hand as long as I could. ‘It’s dark outside, so they can leave home without getting turned into stone. But they won’t be able to come out to places like this much longer. Around the time they turn thirty, the metamorphosis starts. In a couple of years, most of them won’t even be able to get through the door. They’ll be huge, like sumo wrestlers only bigger, and the camouflage will kick in.’

 

He sniggered. ‘They’ll develop baggy green uniforms?’

 

‘Don’t be frivolous,’ I snapped. ‘This is serious. They’re evolved to blend into mountains. They’ll look like a heap of rocks, most of the time. If you saw the group of them moving, they’d look like a small landslide. In winter in Europe they’d be paler, like ermines, to blend into the snow.’ I hoped I was making an impression on David with this disgraceful breach of the secrecy agreement I’d signed.

 

‘What a heartbreaking story,’ he said. ‘Gloriously nubile muscular treats one minute, boulder-like monsters the next. Are you sure they’re really trolls? I was just indulging my well-known mordant wit.’ He put on the facial expression he used for photographs of himself as a semi-famous playwright: one side of the unibrow lifted, the other lowered. I tried not to laugh.

 

‘I’m absolutely sure, David.’ Deciding that I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, I carried on breaching secrecy. I’d feel bad about it in the morning, but right then I didn’t care. Anything to score another point.

 

‘They’re definitely troll nymphs,’ I said. ‘I worked with them in Scandinavia. There’s something subtle about the proportions of the arms and legs. Nothing crude; it’s not like their knees are on backwards or anything, but the bones aren’t quite human, either. Once you’ve studied them, it’s unmistakable. And the endocrine system is fascinating. Even the blood is incredible.’ I’ve seen a lot of blood in my life — mostly through a microscope — but I’d never seen blood quite like that before I went to the institute in Sweden.

 

‘I’m impressed. So, you actually did something useful after you deserted me.’ Surprisingly — even shockingly — he truly did look impressed.

 

‘Thanks, I think,’ I said. ‘And be careful around them, you old wolf. Gloriously nubile or not, they’re more dangerous than ever at this stage.’ I glanced back at their table. The huge platter of lady’s fingers was empty already. ‘They’re highly evolved predators, with an amazing sense of smell, and they have to eat enormous amounts to fuel the metamorphosis.’

 

‘They’ve certainly been tucking into the food tonight.’ This from the man who’d practically inhaled a huge steak and a mound of chips.

 

‘And you know their favourite food, don’t you, David?’ It was so nice, knowing more than Mister Know-It-All, about something other than the endocrine system.

 

‘Shock me,’ he said, with a devil-may-care man-of-the-world look.

 

‘They’re a protected species in Scandinavia, but it’s kept very quiet. They’re isolated in the mountains, in a secret spot, or they’d be exterminated in weeks. Vigilantes would hunt them down. The people have long memories, there.’

 

‘Cut to the chase,’ he said. He hated any conversation he didn’t dominate. ‘Their favourite food is ...?’

 

I didn’t want to lose the upper hand now. ‘Human flesh, David. The younger and sweeter the better. Babies, if they can catch them. Back in the old days, you didn’t let a child wander too near a heap of rocks — just in case it wasn’t really a heap of rocks.’ I ruined the effect by shuddering involuntarily; I simply wasn’t the woman I used to be.

 

For the first time in the evening, he looked genuinely excited. ‘Really? No wonder they starred in so many fairy tales. Kids love that stuff.’ He’d made most of his income, over the years, in plays for schools.

 

‘Yeah, human nature never changes. Kids have always loved disgusting, scary things.’ Things like you, I thought.

 

‘They’re revolting beasts,’ he said. He leaned across the table, his brown eyes gleaming. ‘Children, I mean, not trolls. I’m assuming that the trolls can’t help themselves. They’d be acting instinctively, at the mercy of their genetic coding. However much of a monster I might be, at least I don’t go in for human babies.’

 

Despite myself, I almost laughed. ‘You’re well-known to detest them, in fact.’ But that was enough talk of trolls and babies. The conversation could take far too many dangerous turns from here. More importantly, I felt the unmistakable tug of duty: I had to be home by 10 pm, alone.

 

The gods were with me. At that moment the waiter came to take our plates, and I distracted David with the help of the cakes on display in the big glass case at the back of the restaurant. But I knew that getting rid of him wouldn’t be easy. He’d want to come home with me for coffee: several cups of coffee in fact, a brandy or two, and, despite everything, he’d try to talk me into bed. Despite everything, I might even have been tempted, if I let it get that far.

 

I gulped my chocolate cake down in four or five huge, delicious mouthfuls. I suspect David wolfed his in one big bite; I couldn’t bear to look.

 

Cruelly, he asked, ‘What would you do if they discovered that the cocoa bean could feel pain? Would you give that up too?’

 

‘That’s a moral dilemma for another meal,’ I said, and placed notes on the table for more than my share of the meal. I wasn’t almost famous, like him, but at least I had a steady income. I stood up, and walked to the door, talking over my shoulder as I went: ‘Gotta go, sweetie, lovely catching up, must do it again soon, bye ...’

 

He just sat there staring; I was into my car in seconds, and off.

 

Once I was home, I sat in the old blue car for a moment, relieved to have escaped so simply. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tried to follow me, but there was no sign of that. I was in perfect time for the 10 pm feed.

 

Inside the house, I paid off my elderly baby-sitter and carried the sleeping babies from their big cot out to the glassed-in room at the back of the house. The light of the full moon streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The boys woke and started mewling with hunger; their vigorous little bodies knew it was time for food.

 

I lay back on the huge squashy sofa and stripped down for action, then I carefully attached a soft, sleepy, hungry baby to each nipple. Once they were suckling steadily, there in the moonlight, I allowed my body to relax at last into an animal languor. It was such a relief. The twins took no notice; they love me with four paws and eight teats just as much as they love the version with two legs and two breasts.

 

But then I heard the crunch of dead leaves outside. My senses have always been sharp, and they were amplified by motherhood, doubtless to help me protect the young. I looked out carefully: something was trying to conceal itself between the huge deep-green camellia bushes. It was a troll nymph, there in my backyard in the moonlight — the dark-haired girl in the sparkly top.

 

My lupine instincts took over. She was a danger to my young. The hair at the back of my neck bristled, and I made a guttural noise deep in my throat. It felt good. I went further: I stood on all four paws over my babies, and howled a loud warning to the predator. The twins lay under me, reaching upwards for a teat like the famous bronze babies in Rome. The fact that I was standing on the sofa may have undercut the iconic nature of the tableau somewhat, but that was not my problem.

 

From out in her hiding-place, the troll nymph saw that I’d spotted her. She looked up, startled.

 

‘Annafrid,’ I growled. My hearing is too sharp for me not to have caught her name over dinner.

 

‘Can I come in?’ she said. ‘Please? I’d like to talk.’ She looked at me a little guiltily, a child caught out doing something silly — not a predator caught in the act. I sniffed very carefully, checking the tiniest nuances of her smell. The air was deliciously full of fascinating pheromones: not-human and not-wolf.

 

With difficulty, I started to pull myself together. Transmuting from human form into wolf was all too easy, but it took a huge effort of will to melt back into the soft human form — especially in the moonlight. Growling gently, I worked through the whole painful process, and reflexively pulled a few clothes on. The twins started to whine with frustration.

 

‘All right, Annafrid,’ I said at last, ‘come in. The back door’s not locked.’ I’d known since adolescence that I could take care of myself, as long as I didn’t come across too many mad peasants with silver bullets, and no one had cause for revenge; I’ve never so much as tasted human meat. The whole idea had always made me nauseous, even before I’d got myself pregnant. Apart from any moral questions, it was so shockingly unhygienic. You never know where people have been.

 

The troll nymph walked in, looking tentative. Her deltoids shimmered prettily in the moonlight, and her top sparkled. So did her dark-lashed blue eyes.

 

‘May I hold one of them? Please?’ she asked, glancing at the twins.

 

The wolf in me wanted to growl, but I knew that Annafrid was taking her medication. I could smell it in her sweat.

 

I handed Remus to her. She held him clumsily, as if he might explode. ‘It’s so little,’ she said. ‘Hardly even a mouthful.’

 

The window over the sink shattered, and a greying middle-aged wolf leapt over the kitchen bench and straight at Annafrid. He pushed her to the ground, and stood over her throat. She managed to keep hold of the writhing, screaming baby; her muscles were mercifully useful as well as decorative. Romulus in my arms and Remus in hers both started to howl. Their lung capacity is excellent and their ancestry appropriate; the noise was indescribable.

 

‘David! Down, David!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t you dare hurt my baby!’

 

I dropped Romulus on the sofa, snatched Remus from Annafrid with my right arm, and pushed David’s snout away from her throat with my left. He snarled at me.

 

As I scrambled onto the sofa with my two babies safely in my arms, David threw back his head and howled. All the dogs in the neighbourhood, as well as my twins, joined in.

 

‘Stop the histrionics at once, you middle-aged thespian,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see she’s not resisting? Get off her this instant, and transform back.’

 

He snarled at her and me then, and growled a few times, but finally complied. His clothes must have been lying in a heap somewhere — wherever he’d changed — so I passed him the sofa throw. He knotted it around his thickened waist.

 

As soon as he was decent, and his vocal cords had settled in, he started shouting back at me.

 

‘What do you think you’re doing, woman? You should be thanking me for rescuing you, and those babies of ours that you’d so treacherously kept secret from me! How could you?’

 

‘Stop jumping to conclusions, you egocentric idiot!’ I shouted. ‘What makes you think they’re anything to do with you?’ He’d never wanted children; he wasn’t going to claim my gorgeous babies now.

 

He took no notice. ‘I knew something was up at the restaurant. You didn’t smell right. You’re lucky I followed you to find out what you were so eager to get back to, and caught her in the act. She’s a troll nymph! She’s just here to eat our babies! Why aren’t you doing anything about it?’

 

By this time, I’d reattached the twins to my leaking nipples, which had the great virtue of stopping the babies’ ear-splitting howling. ‘My babies,’ I said, ‘not ours,’ and glared at him. ‘And you’re wrong about Annafrid, too. Maybe you should have snooped around outside the window a bit longer before you leapt to conclusions about what she was doing.’ I nodded to Annafrid, hoping that she’d take the hint and explain herself.

 

‘Actually, I came here to thank you, Talia,’ she said. ‘You changed our lives. Those trials you were doing in Sweden ... the pills you were testing on my relatives are wonderful. They really work.’ She waved happily towards the twins, still sucking away. ‘Even the smell doesn’t tempt me. Your babies are perfectly safe from me!’ She beamed, clearly overcome with joy.

 

‘It wasn’t just me, it was the whole team,’ I said, blushing modestly. Then I looked David in the eye. ‘She’s talking about a new medication for troll nymphs, to suppress the desire for human flesh. That’s what I was working on when I was in Sweden: the clinical trials.’

 

David sat on the Turkish rug, exuding disbelief — but speechless for the moment.

 

‘I’m so pleased the medication really works,’ I said to Annafrid, with perfect sincerity. ‘I’d have hated to have been forced to kill you.’ Actually, I wasn’t sure who would have won in a serious match between Wolf Woman and Troll Nymph, but I wasn’t going to let on.

 

Annafrid gushed on: ‘I was so proud, just being in the same restaurant. My group — we all had a wonderful night.’

 

I felt all warm and runny inside. David just rolled his eyes.

 

‘That wasn’t a coincidence, was it?’ I said to Annafrid. ‘A group of wild trolls, in inner Melbourne?’

 

She shook her head and gave a rueful half-smile. ‘No. Most of us live up in the Dandenongs. Elfrida and Birgit flew down from Sydney; there’s a lesbian colony up in the Blue Mountains.’ Troll males are almost always solitary and brutish, though enormous. Heterosexuality should never be assumed among female trolls.

 

‘Elfrida and Brigit — they were the pair in the matching satin frills?’ I asked.

 

She nodded, and said, ‘We’ve been monitoring your emails since you got back to Australia. Sorry about that ...’ She scuffed her feet uncomfortably, while I tried to look impassive. Soon, she went on: ‘Um, well, our relatives in Sweden had told us about you, and we all wanted to see you. All of us who could pass for human.’

 

‘Oh?’ I said.

 

Annafrid looked serious. ‘It’s very important to me. I lost my mother that way. She snatched a human toddler, when I was just a baby. They came for her with machine guns and hand grenades. Afterwards, my older sister smuggled me out here to Australia. She’s changed now, poor Agnetha. She can hardly talk any more.’ Tears were glistening in her huge blue eyes. Trolls were formidable after the metamorphosis, but they lost easy use of many of their higher functions.

 

David finally spoke up. ‘And you all just happened to choose the night Talia deigned to see me, after a whole year. After she’d left me when she was pregnant with our sons. Without even having the courtesy to tell me she was pregnant. Great timing, both of you.’

 

‘My babies,’ I said again. ‘Not your babies, or our babies, you horrid man. You don’t even like babies, remember? Just for once, this isn’t about you.’

 

‘I think it is, actually,’ he said, with a smug almost-smile. ‘Whose babies could they be, if they’re not mine? I’m sure they’ve got my eyes. They’re exceptionally handsome little creatures, for babies.’

 

Everything was always about him. ‘I’ve told you already, they’re mine. They’re only eight weeks old. Do the maths, David.’

 

His long, single eyebrow tilted. ‘So you got pregnant in Europe, a few weeks after you left me. You said there wasn’t anyone else. Would you care to explain just how this happened? Artificial insemination? Immaculate conception?’

 

David had quite graciously helped me pack up and leave him, after seven years of squabbling interrupted only by more serious fights. I’d diagnosed mildly dented pride, rather than heartbreak.

 

‘It’s absolutely none of your business,’ I said. ‘I think it’s time you went home, now. I’ve got to put the twins to bed.’ I wanted to mention the bill for mending the smashed window, but he’d have stayed all night arguing that it was merely a by-product of his heroism, and that I ought to welcome him back to my bed in heartfelt gratitude.

 

‘And I bet you’ve called them Romulus and Remus,’ he said, with a sly smile. ‘Male twins of uncertain parentage, right? Possibly semi-divine, and suckled by a wolf.’

 

He knew me far too well.

 

I prevaricated. ‘Why would you think that?’

 

‘Well, what else would you call them? Tom and Jerry? Not my inventive Talia.’

 

Now, more than ever, I knew that I had to change their names to something plainer and more child-friendly before they got to kindergarten, or they would be social pariahs.

 

After much nagging, David loped off into the night alone, leaving me and Annafrid with the twins. I handed Romulus to Annafrid, and we walked upstairs together and tucked the two boys into their big cot.

 

When David was out of earshot — which took quite a long time, with a wily old wolf like him — Annafrid asked, ‘They are his, aren’t they?’

 

‘Yeah. You can smell it?’

 

She nodded. Troll senses are even better than wolf senses. Their natural environment is harsher.

 

I said, ‘They’re five months old, really, not eight weeks, but he wouldn’t know the difference. I only found out I was pregnant when I was working in the institute with your relatives. He’ll work it out eventually. He’s not stupid, and they really have got his eyes.’ I hoped, quietly, that they wouldn’t get his dark unibrow.

 

She looked baffled. ‘But why don’t you want to tell him now?’ she said. ‘Human males bond strongly with their young, don’t they?’

 

‘Yeah, mostly, but David would be a terrible father. He’d probably run away to Europe, if I told him they were really his. On the other hand, he’ll make a fantastic Uncle David for little boys: all care and no responsibility. Hunting lessons in the backyard — chasing grasshoppers and beetles — they’ll all have a ball.’

 

While I was trying hard to be casual, Annafrid was looking at her feet sheepishly.

 

‘What’s up?’ I said.

 

She looked up at me through her long, feathery eyelashes. ‘Hey, would you mind if, I mean can I, um, is it all right if I sleep on your sofa tonight? Talia? I missed my lift back to the hills, coming here.’

 

I almost asked her to share my bed. My tongue itched to lick those rippling deltoids. But it had been a stressful evening, and I needed a few hours’ sleep before the 4 am feed, and the 7 am alarm clock.

 

‘Sure.’ I led her to the linen cupboard for sheets and blankets. She stood very close to me; her fascinating inhuman smell surrounded me. I breathed deeply, and smiled.

 

But there was no hurry. Annafrid and I could have a few good years together before she started to change into an adult troll. I could smell it in her endocrine mix. And there was something that none of the researchers had wanted to tell the trolls until we were absolutely sure: the medication we’d been testing didn’t just take away the desire for human flesh. It actually seemed to delay the metamorphosis. Annafrid would have a choice; she didn’t have to turn into an aphasic pile of rocks. With luck, she could stay gloriously nubile for as long as she wanted.

 

As she kissed me goodnight, sweetly and gently, I passed my right hand lightly over her shoulder. Her deltoids felt as good as they looked.

 

A few minutes later, in bed — alone — I set my mind to work towards a happy future for us all. What could I rename the twins? Castor and Pollux, no; that would be even worse. Tom and Jerry, no. Ben and Jerry, no. Bing and Bob, no ...

 

* * * *

 

AFTERWORD

 

Some years back, Russell Blackford and I ate at a noisy Melbourne restaurant near a large group of young women who seemed to be having a wonderful time. I said, ‘Girls’ night out,’ and our sardonic dining companion replied, ‘Trolls’ night out.’ It became a family catchphrase, and eventually turned into this story. 

 

— Jenny Blackford