In The Shadows
By
Robin P Gilbert
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011, Robin P Gilbert
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
To connect with this author and learn more about his work,
please visit his official website: http://www.robinpgilbert.com
Dedicated to the wonderful people of South Wales.
eBooks by Robin P Gilbert
The Serendipity Trilogy
Nothing Neutral*
(* Forthcoming in 2012 )
In The Shadows
FREE eStories by Robin P Gilbert
Slipstream
Looking Back on the Summer of ‘87
The Speckledom Recitals
Tales from the Gateway Worlds
Prologue
“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me,
and from the words of my roaring?”
Psalms 22:1
*
From the summit of Marlas Hill can be seen the full extent of Collwyn Wood, at least those parts in which the children can safely play. What lies beneath those farther, older bows and amid those torn and tangled brambles they seldom think nor care, and even if they were told that in the darkest nook there began a magical footbridge all the way to the moon, still none would venture near. It is cold there, and dark. The river slows and the shadowy creatures within it seem to stop and stare at those who find themselves wandering through the gloom. Nettles with bitter stings litter the floor, fallen twigs seem intent on tripping up anyone who steps too near and brambles stretch long, sharp fingers across the path in the hope of snagging a jumper, or scaring a cheek, or scratching an eye.
In places, dark, secret places, cold ruins lay sleeping in beds of moss, earthy monuments to a time long gone; a time of lumber camps and coal mines and forgotten attempts to unearth other treasures buried deep beneath the old, Welsh soil. Shadows move in discordance with the sun like the ghosts of hardy men and women gone. And among all this, huge mounds of fallen leaves hide deep gullies no child can escape.
In the winter the wood is a writhing mass of black and twisted branches, tumbling up hill and down valley and out across the meandering, gurgling river. Springtime brings a pebbledash of greens and browns and the summer extra splashes of colour where the fruits shine through. In the autumn the entire valley looks full of gold.
But no season can touch the darkest reaches.
Stories have been told of mischievous fairies disguised as lost little boys who promise to play fun games and draw unsuspecting children deeper into the Wood, and then onward to who knows what or where. Blonde little children they are, the Fair Family. Called the Tylwyth Teg in the Old Tongue.
Mothers near and far know of the mysteries of Collwyn Wood and gladly fan the flames of the more frightening tales so that if a child should venture too far, perhaps follow a path that draws him or her, even unwittingly, into the heart of the Wood, they can stand proudly upon the crossing at Pyle, safely tucked beneath their black umbrellas in the rain, and confidently inform their neighbours that it was not their fault, that the children had been warned often enough and should have known better.
Yet some children still go there; the brave or the foolish or those too eager to impress their peers. Most return to tell of the twisting trees and the icy ruins and the hidden hollows, but not all of them.
No, not all of them.
Young Daffydd Ellis shuddered with anticipation, standing atop Marlas Hill. He sported an impressive mop of light brown hair darkened by infrequent slashes of black that would one day swamp his mane. His hazel eyes were dazzling and intense yet inundated with a selfless tenderness and beautifully poised above carmine lips more used to gladness than sorrow. His bronzed complexion told of his many long, outdoor adventures throughout that nearly ended summer. He watched his four friends rolling, fully stretched with arms pushed up and toes pointing down, giggling as they rolled down and down the huge grassy bank towards the Afon Cynffig, happily gurgling and glistening like a ribbon of diamonds far, far below.
Far below. Near the Wood.
He could delay himself no more and lay flat, pushed himself and off he went, screaming joyously in rapid descent, rolling down then somehow getting all sideways and sitting up and adjusting himself and pushing off again and rolling and twisting and tumbling down towards the tangled mass of friendly arms and legs and giggles that awaited him at the bottom of that glorious hill that was higher than all the Himalayas and come to rest far below among the tall grasses of some native North American Indian hunting ground.
The five best friends untangled themselves and danced and skipped towards the ruined mill, just a waterfall now. There were still a few unnaturally shaped stones too heavy even for a thousand young boys to lift, an old wall above a deep pool for the more daring among them and some wooden posts as thick as the mast on the Titanic whose once proud purpose nobody remembered. They leapt over these forgotten things, carefully passed the waterfalls and tiptoed across a strange narrow stone bridge over the old wheel housing and entered Collwyn Wood.
The safe part of the Wood.
The safe part of the Wood where the sun still reached the hard, mud floor, where the birds still chirruped and the bolder animals warmed themselves on the rocks at noon. But even here it grew suddenly quiet and despite the pervading mirth each child’s laugh became slightly forced, each smile tentative, each heart beat a little faster.
They knew where they were.
They knew how close they were to the unseen border between safety and something else and although it terrified them it excited them too. They delayed on that invisible precipice between one step along the path and the next and then... children being the strangeness they are, such worries soon dispersed.
Mischief was afoot.
There were games to be played, heroes to be made.
“Its got to be fox and hounds. Got to be!” Jono declared, idly fencing a bramble with a fallen stick. There was something gladiatorial about him in the proud, stately way he walked, the way he held himself so tall, so upright, shoulders back and nose uplifted. And in the way he looked; his short, curly brown hair hugged his brow and framed his pale chiselled face. His eyes were of the kindest brown, yet in some lights they glinted and turned decidedly devilish as if the devil within him sometimes wrestled for their control and won it from him.
“Nah! Kick the can. It’s always a good laugh!” Daff suggested
“But we haven’t got a can, have we?” said Simon, sitting upon a fallen log, staring at the ground. There seemed an air of perpetual sorrow about him, walking around as he did, head bowed as if in constant prayer. He was the fifth member of the gang in all regards; the last to join, the last in line, the least frequent attendee. He was too tall for his age and wore ill-fitting, unfashionable clothes that when combined with his pasty, spotty skin made him an easy target for bullies, of which there seemed a great abundance.
Mikey said, “Hide and seek!” and they played that. They always did what he said. He was the leader of the gang after all.
Louise, the only girl among them, had to go first. She wrinkled her nose, full of freckles that would fade in time, although whilst incumbent added a certain boyish charm to her otherwise gentile appearance. Her short, black hair and dark, slightly Oriental eyes blended neatly with her oddly shaped ears, making her appear almost elfish. She waved a thin, dismissive hand, resigning herself to the unfair penalty. If she put her mind to it she might easily insist that one of the boys go first and none would argue with her, for she could best them all in many games and sports, and none dared threaten her with fisticuffs. But she acceded and crouched and began to count and like the wind through the trees, the boys scattered.
Her counting increased in speed and volume as each boy selected their hiding place. Daff, the oldest by a good two months, which could easily become two decades in some scenarios and two seconds in others, hastened east, moving swiftly along the leafy path towards The General, a revered oak few boys could climb. Lou could climb it, but she kept that fact to herself for game times just as these. She did not keep this simple secret from any sense of false vanity; one so young does not appreciate such subtlety, but knowing she could climb it was satisfying enough for her. Daff might have been the eldest in years but Lou was much older than all of them, in her way.
Daff scrambled up onto the lower limbs, frantic and excited. Once firmly ensconced upon a limb perhaps half way up, high enough to avoid being seen by a passer-by and high enough to see over the tops of the other trees and along down the valley, but not so high that a fall might break any bones, Daff looked around.
It is said that on a fine day the rolling downs of Devonshire can be seen from the tip of It’s highest limbs, though few dare climb so high and those who do are usually too young to care much for the goings-on of their English neighbours. There were some boys in school who insisted those hazy Devonshire hills across the mighty River Severn were in fact the coast of darkest Africa and on a really clear day you could see giraffes and elephants and sometimes even lions roaming the green fields over there.
Daff was not sure. Even so, it added an excitement to his already buoyant mood entangled as he was with nature. He scanned the Wood, looking repeatedly and ever more frequently into the darker parts where his gaze landed upon a monstrous bush or a bestial shrub and he had to alternatively wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans to ensure his grip on the surrounding limbs remained secure. He knew that if he fell, and that if he survived the fall, he would roll uncontrollably along and down the leafy path and into that desperately eager undergrowth, never to return.
His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
Suddenly, beneath him, raced Mikey, fleet footed and giggling with excitement. Those among you who know of the Tylwyth Teg, or have perhaps met one, long ago, as a child; just a fading memory that you think may have been a dream; will be forgiven for thinking Mikey one of their ilk. His blonde, curly locks shone bright both night and day as if steeped in sunlight. His blue eyes were sharp, piercing, like the base of an arctic glacier. He frowned a lot, argued the merest whim, but was a fast runner and great fun and very funny. He was a joker, full of riddles and tales and lies and jests. His mood could change for no apparent reason and when situations arose he was not completely happy with he was quick to raise his little fists.
But he was the heart and soul of the gang. The leader. Everyone liked him. He was the apple of his mother’s eye, his father’s footballing friend, and when he put his mind to it, when it suited him, he was the teacher’s pet. There was no disguising his intellect. Many would say he was ahead of his time and they would be right. Many more would say he could, and would, do anything he put his mind to. They would be right too.
Perhaps that was what inspired his mischievousness, which in itself was so endearing, and perhaps that in turn was why everybody liked him.
His blonde locks bounced gaily east, moving much further along the path than Daff dared go by himself. He considered calling out, warning him, begging him to join him up the tree where it was safe, where together they could watch Louise wonder aimlessly through the Wood in search of them. But he was too slow to shout or Mikey too fast going by.
Then somebody else came crunching by.
Daff’s heart beat quickly at the fear of being spied, but it was not Louise who stepped from a thicket to the north onto the path beneath him. At least from this angle it did not look like her. It was so difficult to tell who that was.
Was it one of the Fair Family?
A man?
A ghost?
What on God’s good earth was it?
...ten
...long
...minutes
...later
...when Daff finally climbed down and returned on tingling feet from sitting so awkwardly high to the ruined mill with its roaring falls, Louise, Jonathon, and Simon all applauded his arrival last and for winning the game. They waited and waited and waited, even called his name as loudly as they could, but Mikey never returned.
Chapter One
“No!” he screamed, lurching up and thrashing madly at his long, black hair as if trying to dislodge something his nightmare told him writhed there, scratching, burrowing, egg laying. He violently fingered his ears, rubbed his nose on the cold, hard denim of his old jacket sleeve, sniffed and spat a disgusting glob at the dirty stone wall beside him. He gasped at the frigid air, swallowing it down desperately as if breathing for the first time, or as if he had not expected to wake and have another chance to inhale.
Which was true.
There was vomit on his sleeve, a puddle of it nearby. He had no recollection of being sick (cheap wine and cheap pain killers have that effect) but the tramp knew it had been him, knew that the sickly mass represented a body and soul desperate to cling onto life despite his conscious efforts to the contrary.
It was a while before he calmed himself enough to reach back to a tattered old backpack that doubled as a pillow and drag it towards him over the mud. With surgical precision he untied the cord, pulled it open and removed an old, red wide- lined notebook stuffed with faded newspaper cuttings, a ten pound note carefully wrapped in layers of yellowing cellophane, a blank envelope with a second class stamp affixed (a penny below the current rate) a small piece of card covered in names written in a careful tiny script and, most importantly of all, photographs. He stared at these so intently and for so long you would be forgiven for thinking he desired to be back there, in those warm and playful days when the pictures were taken.
Which was also true.
He sighed, not really surprised by his own survival, somewhat accustomed to it after so many failed attempts. He stowed his few simple possessions, worthless but vital, dislodged his cargo trousers from his shabby black and green rugby socks and stood and straightened them as best he could. It was a new day full of hope and horror but, for once, not full of uncertainty. He walked towards the large hole where barn doors had once hung and peered outside.
What little he could see was veiled in mist, ethereal in the early morning grey. A high, dry-stone wall to his left disappeared about a hundred feet away; the eastern boundary of a field into which he looked, lumpy with tussocks, full of thistle and bramble, unkempt and forgotten and gripped in winter’s tight fist. A path of flattened grass ran around its border suggesting it was not infrequently visited and that his presence may soon be discovered. Occasional eddies of wind lifted the mist as though some invisible giant was wafting his club whenever the mood took him. The field rolled away downwards toward an unseen stream that gurgled merrily on its journey towards the sea, and even though the roaring surf was two miles away the air was ripe with its smell.
He shivered, stamped his feet, stretched and rubbed at his stiff limbs and... there, emerging from the mist... a... a person... no, a boy, approaching, slowly, floating up the field towards him... a silvery boy with a golden aura and a face that was... that was so familiar, so full of wickedness.
“Fuck off! Just... just leave me alone.” With an anger that drew tears to his eyes and bubbled the spit in his mouth he grabbed a stone, threw it at the boy. He threw another, and another, and another.
The tramp blinked and the boy was gone.
He slumped to his knees. “Just... leave me alone. Please?” Crumpled up on the ground he sobbed, the tears rolling down his cold cheeks and spotting the brittle grass.
Time passed.
He stood and dismissed the boy with a sigh.
It was an all too familiar routine.
Like so many thousands of other homeless souls scattered like chaff across the country, he gathered himself and what little he had and left his makeshift abode. He could barely discern the untidy snake of twisted bramble that led to the rusty gate tied to a post with fraying string. He stopped stiff-legged atop it and looked back in the direction of the sea. Four seagulls emerged from the mist, drifting silently, dreamily inland. “Don’t fly too low,” he said gruffly, throat dry, “I’m hungry enough to eat you raw!”
The tramp set off down a meandering lane that had long ago laid claim to being the primary thoroughfare through the South Wales village of Llantwit Major.
A little bridge spanned the Afon Col Huw at right angles to Church Lane. On its eastern side another giant swirled the mist like spectres around the tombstones of Saint Illtyd’s. The tramp turned his back on the dead, sat on the low wall that marked the edge of the bridge and took from his backpack a small cup, its handle tied with string. He lowered this into the busy stream and lifted fresh water to his lips. He washed his face and neck as best he could and cleaned his teeth with a well worn brush before carefully stowing his things once again and continuing north along the lane.
Dense hedgerows in whose variety mice and birds would have delighted lined the way, hiding the birds but not their dawn chorus, providing the companionship the tramp so deeply needed yet so deeply feared and so fervently denied himself.
He strolled along the meandering lanes passed quiet houses with their low walled gardens and old iron gates, small front doors and paint chipped window frames, smoking chimneys atop wavy roofs, and on passed the luxuriousness of West House to the bramble covered ruins of a castle where he stopped a moment, as he so often did, wishing he had lived when the castle was alive and times were much simpler, when folk like himself were commonplace, travelling the country, working for food and shelter, but otherwise left alone, not ridiculed by individuals or government. Yet he felt so unworthy of even these lowly aspirations and so grew angry with himself for thinking this, again.
He turned off Castle Street into a narrow lane and came upon a seclusion of walled allotments. He slowed his pace, hoping... then, “Morning, Mikey!” A welcome old voice called. The tramp turned and smiled at the old man standing beside his kitchen door. “Hungry, my boy?”
“Always hungry, Mr W,” the tramp replied, walking briskly over and shaking the old man’s heavily calloused hand. “And not just for food...” he joked, drawing a deep chuckle from the gardener, his friend of a decade now.
“Come in, then, have some tea. A sandwich, or something.”
“I would love to, Mr W, but...” but I tried to kill myself again last night. I obviously and maybe deliberately failed and drinking tea with an old friend feels too surreal somehow, he thought. I have vomit on me. I smell like sick and shit. Yet here I am, hanging around like a lost puppy, wanting, wishing. Hoping.
Seventy two year old retired gardeners may not lay claim to the prize of possessing the greatest shrewdness among men, but there are some exceptions. It took only a pinch of Mr Williams perceptiveness to detect the tramp’s great reluctance, almost abhorrence at the thought of entering another man’s home in such a dishevelled state, despite his countless past forays into the warm little kitchen. “Tell you what, Mikey, you wait there...” The old gardener disappeared inside.
He returned shortly with a tray holding two steaming mugs of tea and two plates of warm bacon sandwiches awash with HP brown sauce.
The aroma made the tramp salivate, almost collapse with pleasure. He smiled, willed the tears return along their ducts and tentatively, as though a wary animal accepting food from an unknown hand, reached forward and took one half of the sandwich. He ate it quickly, as a life on the streets instils, before taking the second half and consuming it likewise.
All this was observed, as ever, by Mr Williams. “Ah,” he moaned, holding his midriff. “Got a dickey tummy this morning. Best you finish off my other half, Mikey.”
The tramp was rather shrewd himself, but hunger overwhelmed his ability to decline the kind offer. “What are you up to on the swede-ometer now, Mr W?”
“Nigh on our second thousand,” he replied half-heartedly, determining immediately the point of the tramp’s question. “Which is bloody great but if we keep saving at this rate, well, me and the misses will be receiving telegrams from the Queen before we so much as burn a single drop of diesel!”
“Well, at least you’ve got your health!”
“Indeed, lad!” Mr Williams chuckled. “Although I cant say for sure how long that’s going to last.”
“Only He knows that,” said the tramp, pointing at the grey sky above.
“That and a lot more besides I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Doesn’t make you feel any better though, does it?”
“No.” Mr Williams smiled, then screwed up his face as he looked into the mist.
“Well, I’d better make a move,” the tramp said. “I’ve got a long walk today.”
“Oh? Where to?”
“Porthcawl.”
“Christ!” Mr Williams rubbed his smooth chin. “Must be a special occasion, eh?”
“Yes,” the tramp said, smiling. “Something like that. Thanks for breakfast, Mr W. Again. What would I do without you?”
“Buggered if I know, young man. Cheerio!” The old gardener returned inside, calling out, “Mildred? Where are you, oh light of my life?”
The tramp swiftly decided upon the coastal path even though it would take him six hours instead of five along the roads. He loved the sea, the smell, the motion, the sheer vastness of it. He adjusted his old backpack, slipped his thumbs beneath the straps and strode off.
“Mikey!” Mr Williams called after him. “Mikey!”
He stopped, turned, waited as Mr Williams rushed over and thrust a brown paper bag upon him. “Not much, I know, but these carrots won me first prize this summer gone. Not these exact ones, you understand. Their brothers and sisters did. Make a nice snack, should you decide to stop along the way. Or eat them as you go, perhaps.”
“They’re... wonderful,” said the tramp, genuinely pleased, peeling open the bag and looking inside, more for Mr Williams benefit than to remind himself what carrots looked like. Their simple orangeness was a beacon of hope on this cold, grey day. “They’re perfect, Mr W, thank you very much.”
“Not at all, Mikey. Not at all.”
Mr Williams watched until the tramp was out of sight.
His long standing wife approached unheard to his side. “Why do you pander to him so much, father?” she asked, catching his hand in hers to assure him she thought well of the deed and meant no criticism. The name ‘father’ was a leftover from her Cornish parentage.
“He’s a good man, love, I know he is, and despite the road he followed to reach himself today, we should not judge him by his current standing. Judge all men alike, that’s what my old dad taught me.”
“I see a man, too, but that doesn’t send me running from my kitchen at dawn offering tea and bacon sandwiches and pleasant neighbourly chat. And I don’t go chasing down the street after him in my slippers giving him bags of carrots!”
Mr Williams smiled, said, “Nine, no, ten years ago, I was tending the cabbages down the far end when I saw him go passed. He’d wandered by a handful of times, I recall, and looked like he wanted to come over and say hello, but was afraid, perhaps. Afraid of how I might react. Well, it just so happened that Mrs Winterberry went by in that lovely old Rover of hers and got a puncture not ten feet from where he dawdled. He waited until she got out of the car before going over and offering to help. ‘I shant be able to pay you anything’, the miserable old bugger said; I can remember her shrill voice now. You know what the old bitch is like sometimes.”
“Father! Language.”
“Well. Anyway. He changed her tyre for her and got exactly what I thought he would, a reluctantly mumbled thank you and a cloud of exhaust fumes in the face as she pulled away. I remember watching him wave to her as she drove away. Chuckling to himself, he was. Well, I thought, one good turn deserves another. I didn’t see him for weeks, until that day I found him... you know, asleep. In the front garden.”
Mildred had heard that story before but knew how much her husband enjoyed recounting it. “You’re too soft, father, that’s your problem.”
“Maybe, love, but...”
“But what?”
“Well, there’s something about him. An aura, or something.” Mr Williams sighed. “He sometimes looks more at home in the mist, as if he’s not actually a part of this cold world of ours at all.”
His wife smiled, squeezed his hand. “Come on you old fool. Tea’s getting cold.”
The lanes meandered strangely through the fog, appearing in front, disappearing behind, as if only the tramp existed in this tiny fragment of world within a world. He knew the coastal path was hazardous, in places only feet from the soaring cliff edge, but that was a part of it, a part of who he was, on the edge of... something.
He reached a summer-only café at the foot of a western headland near the beach, cupped his hands around his gaunt cheeks and looked inside at the post apocalyptic air, the plastic tables, bolted down chairs, empty countertop, dusty posters on the discoloured wall. The clock had stopped at just before midday as if time itself was suspended until the café once again opened for lunch. He went around to the back where he found four large bins chained to a wall. He sifted meticulously through each, delighted in finding two plastic carrier bags, an old newspaper, an empty plastic bottle, and on the floor nearby an apple with only one bite taken from it. He neatly folded the newspaper and slipped it inside one of the carrier bags. The other bag he wrapped around his already well sealed and protected notebook. He cut away the bitten area of the apple with his sharp knife and put both in his threadbare coat pocket. He washed out the bottle in the river which ran alongside the café (the same one he had brushed his teeth in, farther upstream, earlier that morning), carefully filled it and pushed it into his backpack.
At the top of a long flight of stone steps he stopped to kiss a signpost that read Heritage Coastal Path. He had to kiss it. He had kissed hundreds all along the Welsh coast during the long, lonely years. He closed his eyes and whispered the prayer he always whispered... before walking briskly on, the sea roaring on his left, its spray dampening his face, its scent filling his lungs, eager now, to receive the life.
He was alone in the desolation. Alone yet happy, in a way.
At a shingle beach some distance on he stooped to collect some promisingly dry pieces of driftwood but as he straightened he saw, appearing and disappearing out of the mist inland an old manor house, cold and bricked and lost, standing grey and wet, irresolute in the damp air. It boded ill. Suddenly, irrationally overcome with terror, he dropped the sticks (fearing his theft might anger the ghostly monstrosities who dwelt within) and ran and ran until he reached the safety of some trees where he stopped, panting clouds of breath into the path ahead, where the drips from the leaves fell like pearls in the mist.
He thought about his old friends, his young, childhood friends from long ago and slowly calmed himself, drew comfort from his memories. Are they in for a surprise, he thought.
There! The blonde boy.
“What do you want?” the tramp shouted despairingly.
The apparition drifted closer... closer, closer, rushing towards him... then vanished, merging with the mist, leaving only the suspicion of laughter behind.
Twenty miles west of the tramp a young women was walking across the beautifully unmolested sand dunes around Kenfig Pool. Her Levi’s hung baggily from her narrow waist, falling and rarely touching her sinewy legs, the bottoms wrapped inside brown woollen socks that emerged from sturdy, well worn boots. Her heavy raincoat leant her upper body a girth it lacked. Her short, bleached-blonde hair was hidden beneath a Redskins cap. Her soft, unblemished skin was pale but she was rosy cheeked and looked so healthy. There was a faraway look in her dazzling blue eyes as mindlessly she walked...
She caught her toe on a stray root, tripped and tumbled down a slippery grass bank into a mixture of gorse and sand. Her golden Labrador dropped his log and rushed over to investigate with a forceful nose and wet tongue and a deep well meaning bark.
“Get off me you silly old bugger,” Louise giggled, wrestling playfully with her canine companion. “Oh Sam, Sam, Sam.” she sighed, sitting on the wet grass as the dog pushed himself as close to her as he could get without getting insider her raincoat. “Should I tell them? Do you think? Is this the year I reveal my secret?”
Somebody laughed.
She sat up, suddenly alert, afraid. “Hello? Hello?” She stood, approached the bushes from where the sound had apparently originated.
Sam barked, startling her. He snarled at the bush, hackles raised.
“Hello?” Lou inched closer, delicately pulling branches back to look inside. “Who is that?” It was the third time she had heard laughter recently. Laughter that seemed to emanate from thin air.
Sam rubbed his wet self against her leg.
She couldn’t see anybody beneath the bush, nor had she expected to. I mean who could it be? She shrugged nonchalantly but felt quite afraid. “Come on old fellow, lets head home.”
Hers was still the only car in the parking area. She opened the back door and helped Sam climb in. He deposited his log reverently on the towel and sat facing forward, chin high while Louise roughly dried him. She doffed her boots and coat and put them on the back seat, slid behind the wheel (sitting on a towel of her own), started the car, turned the heaters up to maximum and with wheels churning gravel, drove away. The BMW’s dashboard clock read 6:39am.
At home she parked on the road to avoid waking Pat by crunching over her gravel driveway, doubtless still asleep. Sam alighted unaided and with the log held proudly before him, trotted towards the front door.
“Around the back for you!” Louise intoned deeply.
Sam stayed where he was, wagged his tail. But it was not to be. Louise strode around the back, holding the side door open for him as he ambled reluctantly through. She washed him thoroughly in warm, soapy water. Sam gripped his log throughout as if for moral support, and after a second towelling, followed his mistress indoors.
Louise dropped her heavy boots and thick socks outside the kitchen door, tiptoed across the cold marble tiles, put down fresh food and water for Sam and stripped off the rest of her wet clothes.
“That’s not something you see everyday,” said a tired voice.
“I got soaked!” Lou declared unnecessarily. “I’m taking a shower.” She kissed Patricia as she passed and thumped swiftly upstairs.
“Want some coffee?” She called after her in a thick American drawl.
“No time!”
Louise stood beneath the hotly delicious outpouring for an age, lost once again in thought. It was not unusual, she felt, that the four of them had formed such a lasting bond after what had happened. It was amazing that they all (almost) always attended. It made her realise just how lucky she was to have such close friends. It also served as a sad reminder of how seldom she saw them all (except for Jonathon). Tonight would be different though. She was sure of it. Maybe it was her years of training in the black arts of software analysis, maybe it was feminine intuition, maybe it was something to do with the unusual, laughter-like sounds she had been mysteriously hearing lately. Whatever it was, it did little to assuage the trepidation she always felt on the last Friday before Christmas every year. And this year she would tell them. Her secret had been kept for long enough.
“You haven’t drowned in there, I hope,” Patricia called from the other world beyond the shower door.
Louise laughed, spluttered a negative.
“Got room for one more?” she asked, sliding the door open.
“Sorry. Full up.”
Patricia laughed, disrobed and joined Louise and beneath the hot shower they washed each other lovingly, intimately, stopping only when the alarm clock warned them 7:30am had arrived.
Louise skipped athletically out of the cubicle, dressed in what she referred to as her “falling down clothes” (blue jeans, chest hugging vest, grey Billabong sweatshirt, sturdy brown shoes) and sat on the edge of the bed, studying her bitten fingernails.
“Stop worrying! Everything will be dandy.” Patricia knew what was making Lou so distant. “Look! If you’re that bothered about it, don’t tell them. Don’t mention... our plans. I’ll... understand.” The last words spoken with mock sorrow.
Lou nodded, stood up, said, “Yes. I will. Got to dash. See you lunchtime?”
“You bet! I’ll grab a cab. Meet you there at noon?”
“Will that give you enough time?”
“Sure. My train doesn’t leave until 1:15pm. See you later, honey!” She kissed Lou, a long, lingering kiss and gave her the hug she thought she needed.
“The taxi number’s on the fridge,” Lou said as she left.
“Lou!” Patricia called after her, stopping Louise on the stairs. “Don’t let Mr Fucking McChipSet give you any shit today! Remember what I told you!”
Pat’s cruel misnaming of her colleague made her laugh. It was with a spring in her step that she reached her car and set off towards Daydream Studios, the strange laughter once again forgotten.
Mornings in the Stone household lacked finesse. Claire was hastily applying makeup using a two inch mirror balanced against a marmite tub on the kitchen table, huge pregnant belly making it very awkward. Alison was doing likewise in her black walled bedroom whilst simultaneously brushing her teeth and donning her school shoes. Jack was chasing a little rugby ball around the living room seemingly intent upon a course of maximum destruction and quite ignorant of the cessation orders emanating from the kitchen. Jonathon was wholly consumed by the task of finding a matching sock for the one firmly in place beneath his shoe. He was a shadow of his former self, yet the shadow he cast now, aged twenty nine, was double what it had been at nineteen. A paisley tie hung loosely around his white collared neck, he had shaved only minutes ago but already needed another, what little hair remained needed combing and what skin he had was pale and freckled and ill-fitting.
“You’re going to be late for work again!” his wife shouted from downstairs.
“Yes, thank you,” he mumbled. “Always stating the fucking obvious, some people. Where’s my sock?”
By degrees a certain disorganised readiness was achieved. The old house slowly emptied and the old car slowly filled up.
Jonathon drove too slowly and too carefully in his wife’s opinion through the narrow, wet streets and finally dropped her at the staff entrance to Tesco. “You should be at home with your feet up,” he said to her gently. “Do you have to go?”
“It’s my works party. Of course I have to go!” She smiled, although it failed to activate her other features. She carried her thirty eight week old baby, steadfastly encamped upon her bladder, through a raised roller-door and disappeared into the darkness beyond.
Jonathon dropped his son, all quiet and brooding, at the gates of the junior school and watched him saunter across the tarmac. The other kids were running about in groups, but he wandered in alone, looking sad and hopeless. A bigger boy came up to him and took his little satchel, obviously offering to carry it for him.
Jonathon pulled away, said, “You’ll be seeing your friends in school soon, why do you have to talk to them on the phone now?”
Alison ignored him then insisted on being dropped a hundred yards shy of the gates, which he did before driving all the way down to the end of East Avenue and into the school car park alone. He nestled the Ford alongside Miss Rimes’ trendy red mini and hastened inside.
It was picking to rain.
A few colleagues orbited the staff room kettle, others reclined leisurely, chatting. Jonathon poured himself a mug of coffee, tore open and emptied four sachets of artificial sweetener into it and took a sip.
The first bell rang.
It was not unusual for people to feel drawn to him. His boyish looks may have been a thing of the past but his mind was sharper than ever; the combination of the two endearing him to both sexes. Yet his early tendency toward heated relationships had rapidly diminished over the years, as had his love for Claire. He was a practising member of Mensa, which often became the butt of staff room jokes, always told on the back of reverence. He owned a neatly catalogued and quite enviable nineteenth century European stamp collection about which he knew more than most philatelic dealers. He was the department head of both physics and computer science and intellectually untouchable in both fields by anyone else in his or any of the neighbouring schools. He sometimes ran the PE class for year one boys, always bringing a rugby-centric outlook to proceedings they all revelled in. All this overachievement only enhanced his popularity, and even though he was fully aware of the attention he received, he seemed quite baffled by it.
He strode purposefully toward his classroom now, reminded of the day he had first done so. Back then he had stood outside room 4 with a pounding heart and sweaty palms, trying to compose himself, to convince himself his approach would work. He had taken a deep breath, whispered a short prayer, pushed open the door and walked silently to his desk. From his briefcase he took a clear bag full of sand and a pin, and with one in each hand, climbed upon his desk for all the twenty seven rowdy, expectant, excited eleven year olds to see. There he remained, until all eyes were upon him and a hush had descended.
“I have a question for you,” he said, scanning the rows and columns of expectant faces. “How many grains of sand are there in this bag?” then he punctured it with the pin, allowing a small trickle to cascade to the floor.
Hands were raised, guesses made, each acknowledged with a “warmer” or a “colder” as the guesses homed in on the answer. This proceeded until the bag ran dry.
“And so if we estimate there to be about one hundred thousand grains of sand in this bag.” He had a boy up the front write the number on the blackboard for all to see. He used a purple chalk, Jonathon remembered now, and all his noughts were different sizes and falling over towards the end. “Now!” he had gone on, “How many do you think you might find on the beach from which this bag was taken?”
Everyone guessed, a buzzillion, a guzzillion, a trillion million billion. He had other children add more noughts, then moved into powers of ten and talked about that. Once he felt they understood he said, “What about all the sand on all the beaches of Wales?” More guesses. “Or the entire coast of the British Isles?” More guesses of ludicrous and unspeakable quantities. Too many noughts, too many colours of chalk. “Then,” he added finally, “what about on all the beaches across the world?” This was greeted with laughs at the absurdity of the question. There were obviously no words big enough to describe such a number nor any blackboard large enough to hold that many noughts.
When the hullabaloo finally settled, Jonathon, still standing on his desk, made an observation to which all his previous questions and demonstrations had been building. “What if I told you,” he stated to his captive audience, “that there are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world?”
No laughter now, just awe inspired incredulity.
When the aeroplane landed the usual sighs of relief and nervous chatter passed through the cabin before the daring blatantly disobeyed the fasten seat belt sign and began extricating their overhead belongings, much to the frustration of the less adventurous. Some retribution befell those nonconformist souls when the taxiing ceased, the plane jerked and all those illegally standing stumbled embarrassingly forward.
Amongst those desperately hiding a reddened expression was a recently appointed vicar. To some this may seem surprising, to find a man of the cloth with such a blatant disregard for rules, but to those other globe trotters, he was just another dissident, dressed as he was without the dog collar.
The Reverend Simon Brestwick looked as though he had spent much of his life on a rack. Standing at six foot eight and weighing just eleven stones wet through he was a man who at first struck you as being domineering, but on closer inspection looked more like the missing leg from a giant’s kitchen table... and seemed to possess a similar amount of charisma. He was a thoughtful man, a thoughtless man, a man who knew his own mind but did not care much for what was buried there; cavernous as it was. A stint at Oxford, the promise of greatness and the widely accepted superior intellect to most who came to know him, which was a very short list was not obvious when beheld. He said very little unless the good Lord was up for discussion. He smiled infrequently. His thoughts he loved, his memories he despised. He stared at people when they were not looking at him and was seldom caught by the observed, and on those rare occasions when he was he had the perfectly rehearsed smile. He had a few glaring at him now, hunched over as he was in the aisle.
His thin, pale brown shirt lay flat against his stomach. His belt, drawn to a hole of his own making held aloft thin, creased and cream-coloured trousers. He wore sandals upon long, bony feet but carried socks in his carry-on bag, and wouldn’t think twice about inserting them beneath his footwear as soon as the chill of London enveloped him. Fashionable he was not.
As he stood there, quietly surveying his fellow passengers, he calmly removed both nicotine patches from his arm and placed them neatly on the arm of his seat as if the seat looked like it needed calming too.
The taxiing finished and the plane attached itself finally to the concourse like some limpet on a ship’s hull.
With his carry-on backpack on his bony shoulder he began the staccato shuffle towards the door. Much to his annoyance, an emotion he hid with consummate ease behind another well practised smile, he watched kind hearted souls up ahead call those remaining prostrate into the aisle before them, slowing his egression interminably.
But servant of God that he was, or perhaps just simply the classically repressed Britton, he said nothing, even smiling at those queue jumpers ahead of him when they happened to glance his way.
Suffice to say, when he finally extricated himself from the 747 he advanced as swiftly but unobtrusively as he could through the corridors of Heathrow weaving in and out of passengers as he made towards Immigration where European Union status favoured his rapid attendance. He joined a very short line that swiftly shrank.
He regarded himself as a reasonably seasoned traveller even though this was only his second overseas trip, the first having come during his second year at Oxford to CERN, where his amazing insights into the subatomic world had really blossomed. But so had something else. Even now, when he thought back to that day in the laboratory, analysing the chaotic paths left in cloud chambers after a near light speed particle collision, he was amazed to discover that he felt closer to God than at any other time in his life.
Except once. A long time ago now.
In the heart of the most advanced research facility in the world he truly saw the hand of God. He became so awestruck, so dumbfounded, so resigned to the fact that he could never really know, never truly understand everything, that his interest in the physical faded like a setting sun. He spent many weeks, full of anguish, full of conversations with peers and mentors alike, in a dazed limbo. One morning Simon Brestwick was born again. Those string theorists, he smiled to himself as he neared the front, were dancing to the wrong tune.
He showed his passport to the immigration officer but was simply waved through. He followed a convoluted path to a huge room full of carousels, strolled to the one labelled with his flight number, took up a position adjacent to the portal from which the bags emerged and waited.
Before long the carousel shuddered into life and the luggage began to inch painfully slowly passed his knees, the anticipation of viewing his own duffle bag a parody of impatience.
He was quite flabbergasted to see it emerge among the first of the bags. It seemed such an anticlimax. He grabbed it gleefully, dropped it on his trolley and with racing driver qualities, raced towards the customs area. He slowed as he approached and with a deep breath went down the green way. He passed behind a screen door... his heart beat a little faster... he looked for the regiment of rubber gloved security guards, but saw no-one... the room was empty. Nervously he walked, thinking perhaps he was being observed on closed circuit television cameras. Nobody stopped him. As he pushed his trolley into the arrivals area, he wished he had bought a fifth carton of two hundred cigarettes.
Without breaking stride he walked on, glancing at the garishly fresh yellow overhead signs, looking for something that would tell him how to get outside. A picture of a bus. Perfect.
When he emerged from the stale, processed atmosphere into the cold, London morning, he stopped dead. His exhalations formed a cloud that gently ascended like that of a homeward soul. With fascination he watched, exhaling, watching, exhaling, watching, for minutes outside Terminal 3. He had not seen his own breath for twelve months and did not realise just how much he had missed it. Only then did he light his long awaited cigarette and inhale and breath out and watch all over again.
An invasive coldness soon permeated his cotton shirt. A thin veil of rain clung to his short dark hair, his tanned skin, a colouring brought about more by accident than design. As though a stranger to inclemency, not a man merely driven by absentmindedness, he stood in the misty drizzle, more content than he could ever remember.
It was with great reluctance that he broke the spell, forcing himself towards the shuttle that would take him to Reading and a train bound for South Wales.
After the bright, colourful, clean lined buildings of Perth, the houses and shops he passed looked drab and worn, old and rundown. Shabby, when all down under had been so new and vibrant. Even the people seemed to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, moving along the pavements, heads bowed, oblivious to everything and everyone around them. London, a city of seven million people taken from all the world, looked an awfully lonely place. For a moment he considered getting off and joining them. Not to minister, or to cheer, but to blend in, to disappear. But he knew he could not do that. He was needed now, back home, in the parish he had grown up in with the people he knew and, yes, he admitted, the people he loved. The people he felt he owed so much.
He reached the station and found it a dreary place too, devoid of the excitement any romantic would normally associate with points of departure and arrival. It was not a place in which adventures began but a place that simply served the fundamental need to get from A to B. He took coffee in a little shop staffed by uninspiring youngsters who took his order and took his money but hardly made eye contact. Such a waste, he thought, here you have the perfect opportunity to watch people yet you seem more concerned with pre-packed tubs of butter and the arrangement of stale buns.
He sat in a too small chair at a too small table outside the café on an adjunct of the platform smoking endless cigarettes until his train arrived. When he finally climbed aboard, grabbing a seat by the window, the scents of Western Australia, Singapore and Abu Dhabi trailing in his wake, he felt as downtrodden and alone as everyone else.
But he was going home.
Home!
For any true traveller, the excitement of going home comes second only to leaving in the first place. The train pulled smoothly away and began its mollifying journey betwixt the dreary.
The conductor looked surprised to find anybody in first class. “Can I see your ticket, please sir?” he asked in a thick, London accent. This took Simon by surprise. Having seen the man’s turban and huge salt and pepper beard, he’d been expecting another voice.
He showed his ticket. “Can I smoke?”
“No, I’m afraid not, sir. This is a non smoking service.”
Simon nodded, settled back in his seat and stared out of the window. The greyness, the dirt, the neglect slowly sent his mind racing back to a rainy spring day nine years ago and to a place not all that far from where he now reclined.
He looked like a daddy long legs as he raced across the quadrangle. He slipped and went flying over some prized rose bushes and would have gone crashing into a low retaining wall and lost some teeth but for the outstretched arm of David Neet, a stocky front row forward from Gloucester. “You should be out on the wing with a turn of speed like that, Brestwick,” he said, placing him back upright upon the path as if he were a chess piece. The burly young man walked off whistling Mozart before Simon could thank him.
He straightened his clothes and ran a hand over his hair as he climbed the stairs three at a time; an act that hardly tested his hamstrings. When he reached the head of year’s antechamber he was as presentable as he could make himself. No sooner had he sat on a bench outside than the door opened and an old man with a wizened beard beckoned him inside with a podgy little hand, nodding and staring at him over the top of small, round spectacles balanced precariously on the end of his nose.
Simon glanced back down the corridor as he slipped passed this unusual and unexpected old man, feeling an enormous sense of trepidation and mystery. His mood was not helped when he saw the old man lock the door behind him.
The floor was wooden, the walls covered in books, as was half a large window that even fire men armed with axes would have been hard pushed to open. The ceiling was grey but had once been white as irregular patches carelessly told. Behind a great wooden desk to the left sat five men. The old man joined them, indicating a lonely chair in the middle of the room. For a moment, Simon considered smashing the window with it and making good his escape but realised he would never survive the fall, even if he could get the damn thing open. He gulped, approached the chair nervously and sat, back straight, hands in lap, just as his mother had taught him.
A wrinkled man on the left wearing robes and a dog collar leant forward, steepled his fingers beneath his chin and said, “You may or may not be aware of this, Mr Brestwick, but there are vicious rumours going about campus that you’re a very bright young man. Why do you want to join the church?”
“I wasn’t aware the two were mutually exclusive, sir,” he replied quickly, nervously, then immediately regretted his confrontational manner. Well, he thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Perhaps even somebody with my alleged intellect might be able to do God’s work?”
“And what work do you think that might be?”
“Spreading the word of Jesus Christ in accordance with the teachings of the Bible.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’ve memorised that from some pamphlet or other. Tell me what you think.”
Simon told them of his life as a child. Of feeling different, gladdened and fascinated by all he saw around him, all he thought this meant. He recounted his life changing experience in the laboratory at CERN and how this pushed him over the edge into the world he now found himself. When he finished the wrinkled old man turned to his left and a rotund gentleman next to him took up the questioning. None of them showed much emotion nor gave away their thoughts. They asked him about the Church of England, his sense of vocation to ministry, his convictions and how others may or may not have confirmed it. They talked of faith and love and friendship. Of honesty, loyalty and other moral and ethical ideologies. They spoke of spiritual and mental discipline, quizzed him on a more intellectual level concerning aspects of the bible and its many interpretations. The talked of his family too, during which time he thought only of what his mother would say. Not his father. Never his father. Finally it was the turn of the old man who had let him in. He sat there with his eyes closed for a long time, lost in thought, or perhaps asleep; it was difficult to tell.
“How tall are you, Simon?”
“Er...” What has this got to do with anything, he thought. “Six foot eight, sir.”
“My word, that’s rather tall, isn’t it?”
“Taller than average I suppose, sir, yes.”
“Do you like being so tall?”
“I haven’t really thought about it like that.”
“Come now. You’re wearing clothes.”
Simon glanced at himself. What a weirdo, he could not help thinking, looking quizzically at the old man who still sat there with his eyes still closed. What do you think you are, some kind of Jedi? he wanted to ask, wished he was brave enough to ask.
“Then I assume you must have had occasion in the past to enter a shop and purchase those items you’re wearing. Did you find a large selection from which you might chose?”
“Well, no, as a matter of fact I didn’t.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Honestly, I was a little annoyed.” Simon felt like a mouse a millimetre away from the cheese, bar poised to snap down any second and break his neck. “But I understand why. I mean, I am taller than most people and don’t expect to be as well catered for as Mr Average Height.”
“We are all the work of His hands, if I might paraphrase Job 34.” With that the old man opened his eyes and stood. He wobbled his way over to Simon and offered his hand, which Simon stood up and shook. “We shall consult with the bishop and be in touch with you before the end of this week.” Still holding his hand he stepped in closer, whispered, “Now, I can either unlock the door and let you out, or would you rather jump out of the window?”
Chapter Two
Lou drove through the thirty mile-an-hour speed limit town at a steady forty five until at its boundary she wound down the windows, turned up the stereo and weaved dangerously through the lanes, occasionally slowing to sixty on the sharper bends. The golf course and dunes swept by in a blur, Kenfig Pool a mere flash of blue on her left. She slowed down for the particularly nasty bend at the foot of a curving hill but took it with one hand on the steering wheel and the other in the glove box rummaging for her favourite CD. She crossed the motorway bridge, and in the second it took, realised just how quiet the roads were. She turned left at the crossroads whilst skipping the player forward tracks and roared towards the crest of the hill. The song was barely thirty seconds old when she dropped into second gear and pulled left into the car park. An avenue of close cropped box hedges guided her to her assigned parking spot. At the door she offered her proximity card to a wall mounted detector and pushed her way inside.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-26 show above.)