by K. C. Finn
Good afternoon, he had said. If I had collapsed on Christmas Eve, then that could mean only one thing.
“I’ve ruined their Christmas,” I said, my voice tiny and weak. It was too exhausting to be sad; the words came out flat and dry.
“No, they’re fine,” Bickerstaff said in his proper tone, “They’re all downstairs around the wireless waiting for the King’s Christmas message. You’ve only ruined my Christmas, and I daresay you’ll feel a lot less guilty about that.”
“Sorry,” I whispered. He was right, but I did feel a little bad for him in spite of everything.
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t much of one to ruin.”
There was no invitation to press the topic any further, but of course I knew that he lived alone without him having to tell me. Bickerstaff put the back of his hand across my forehead and I could feel my damp skin sticking to him.
“Do you feel hot or cold right now?” he asked.
“Cold,” I replied, “What’s happened to me?”
“Fevers and rashes are not uncommon symptoms for people with your condition,” he replied clinically. There was no trace of empathy in his face whatsoever.
“I used to get fevers when I first got sick,” I replied. He just nodded. I didn’t feel feverish now, just sticky and horrid.
The door to the bedroom opened and Ness Fach ambled in wearing what looked like a new dress. Doctor Bickerstaff turned in his chair to see her. She watched him carefully for a moment, sucking on the hand of her Dolly.
“Hello little one,” he said in what he must have thought was a warmer tone. It didn’t sound much different to his usual one.
Ness ran away without a word. Bickerstaff’s mouth twitched awkwardly a little, and he was about to speak to me again when yet another visitor appeared in the wide doorway.
“Oh she’s awake then,” Blod said, her look was not relieved in the least, “Mam sent me to see if you wanted another cuppa.”
Doctor Bickerstaff stood up and brushed off his jumper, forgetting the book on his lap which dropped to the floor with a thud. His mouth twitched again as he looked at Blod.
“No, no,” he stammered. Was he nervous of something? “I daresay Kit’ll be up and about by this evening. Her fever’s broken, so I’ll be going once I’ve spoken to your mother.”
Blod eyed him with the kind of contempt she usually reserved for me, which was a nice change, I’ll admit.
“All right then,” she said, quickly turning on her perfect heels to sweep away.
Bickerstaff looked at the space where she’d been standing for a moment before he turned back to me. I knew I was giving him what must have been a rather rude, quizzical look, but he chose not to challenge it.
“I’m curious as to what brought this fever on, Kit,” he said, his face falling back into its relaxed emotionless template, “Your physical progress isn’t good enough to suggest overexertion. Have you strained yourself in any other way?”
“Peeling a potato is a strain in my world, doctor,” I answered, “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Well what about mental strain?” he pressed, a glimmer of annoyance hanging on his lip. He wanted to sneer, I was sure of it, but for some reason he was holding it back. “Have you been reading a lot or doing something else that uses your concentration?”
“I have been reading a lot,” I lied quickly, “There’s not much else to do here.” Of course I knew the real answer to his question.
“Well that could be bringing it on,” he explained, “A relaxed mind does wonders for one’s health, see that you remember that.”
I would, if it meant stopping him from invading Ty Gwyn ever again. I watched him pick up his things and go, already formulating a new way to balance my mental training and keep my brain strain-free the rest of the time. The fever had been awful, but now that it was over there was a lesson to be learned and more practice to be done. But first, I remembered, there were a few hours left of my first Welsh Christmas to enjoy.
***
The New Year brought plenty of nasty shocks with it, including the introduction of rationing, which sat about as well with Mam as the idea of birth control did with the Pope. Mam said that she was terribly grateful that Clive and the boys had been home at the right time before the government had taken control of how much food each household could have, but she couldn’t imagine what she would feed them the next time they came for a visit. I felt sad that I had only spent a few hours with them before their scheduled return on Boxing Day, but she assured me they would come again when they could. Leighton was hit almost as hard as Mam by the news that he could no longer have a snack at every hour of the day and night.
“But this is farm isn’t it?” he protested, “What you grow and make here should belong to you, not the Prime Minister!”
Idrys fielded the question until Leighton understood the problem of feeding all the soldiers defending us whilst also compensating for the supply chains that had been cut off from some parts of Europe. “This is how we do our part for the war!” he explained proudly, and Leighton seemed happy with that, even if his stomach disagreed.
In the time it took for winter to change into spring I had once again honed my mind-hopping skills to overcome the new obstacles in my path. By staying away from Mum and the painful connection to London I had reduced my raging fevers to nothing but mild sweats, which kept Doctor Bickerstaff away from the house right up until the start of April, when he turned up out of the blue and spent a very long time talking to Mam in the kitchen. I resisted the urge to step into his head and listen to what he was telling her, and I was sincerely glad I had when Mam told me later that I wasn’t making enough physical progress and the doctor asked ‘could I please try a bit harder when I had the time’. I was certain Doctor Bickerstaff hadn’t been that kind in the phrasing of his request.
I could have been annoyed, but the doctor didn’t matter to me that day; I had bigger fish to fry. Leighton was at school and the family were going out shopping for a new dress for Blodwyn’s birthday. The house was mine for three solid hours uninterrupted. And I was going to try to reach the German soldier at last.
I had been very nervous of trying to reach Germany in my head in case it brought on a fever, but April the 9th had a feeling about it, like the time was right. I felt unusually healthy as I settled myself in the sitting room, pushing the door shut behind me. I could wheel myself much better than what I had shown the doctor, or anyone else, so I put my chair in the centre of the room and turned away from the bright afternoon light in the windows to prepare for the usual routine.
Palms up. Eyes shut. In and out and in and out.
I tried to remember the German’s great hairy hands, the billows of smoke from his cigar, the nerves he felt when his commanding officer pointed to the map. Pointed to that jagged coast, that little red dot marked Oslo.
It was a grey day, wherever I was. Great silver clouds hung low in the sky as I looked out into a city through someone else’s eyes. It wasn’t England; I knew that by the grand old buildings in red brick or cream coloured stone. They were not the slate grey spires of London; there was something much more traditional to their style. The eyes I was looking through belonged to someone standing at a second floor window looking down into a wide boulevard lined with huge green trees.
I had a feeling I had not found the hairy handed German I was in search of, the emotions running through this body were far easier for me to interpret than his had been. The body was quivering against the cold air streaming in from the half-open window, a steady but quickened pulse racing in its veins. One look down revealed a pair of hands wringing together nervously. They were smooth and a little tanned with the lightest dusting of brown hair starting at the wrists, climbing up to two strong arms. A male, for certain, and quite young judging by the lack of blemishes on his skin.
The fearful young man gazed out into the grey street again where I noticed there were very few people out and about. One small clump of
pedestrians gathered under the leafy trees, looking expectantly out into the road, which was totally devoid of traffic. They were waiting for something. Somebody spoke in the room I was in and the boy turned his head to glance at the speaker. The room looked like a store room for fabrics and such; it contained a crowd of some two-dozen people who were all craning to see out of the window into the silent street. They muttered nervously in a guttural sounding tongue that I didn’t understand. Not German, I decided; my attempt to focus on the specific target had failed.
But I wanted to stay all the same; I had to know what this foreign mass was waiting for. What did they expect to come down their beautiful boulevard? And why did they await it behind bricks and glass? The boy I inhabited grew more nervous by the minute; I could feel him rubbing his palms together, his keen eyes expanding as he spotted a disturbance at the far end of the street. He pointed, shouting something foreign in a rich, smooth voice. Everyone crowded closer to the tall glass windows for a better view.
A procession of vehicles was traveling slowly down the boulevard from the far left of my field of vision. The first few cars were beautiful creations in glinting silver, open-topped to display a series of military personnel in their full regalia. I recognised the grey-green shade of their dress and the flashes of red on some of their collars. My boy’s mind grew suddenly angry. He clenched his fists.
The grand vehicles came to a halt right in the centre of the road almost directly below the building we were in. The remainder of the convoy was made up of covered canvas trucks in varying shades of green that spread out into different positions, including some on the wrong side of the road. Someone in the crowded store room said something that sounded an awful lot like the word ‘Nazi’. Other people muttered their anxious replies. My boy nodded his head silently as the canvas trucks began to open one by one.
I saw their shiny black boots first as the soldiers hit the empty pavement pair by pair. They all wore spherical helmets obscuring their heads, making them look like one never-ending line of identical toy soldiers during the disembarkation. They formed precise, tight ranks at once as their commanding officers came to appraise them; they had alighted from their more stylish transports. Where minutes before the grand boulevard had been almost empty, now at least a hundred soldiers convened on its empty roads. The grey-green mass saluted without a word, followed almost instantly by the clicking of a hundred pairs of polished black boot heels. The sound was eerie on the deadly silent street.
Then out of nowhere bursts of colour exploded through the grey. In the middle of every neatly-ordered pack of soldiers came a flash of red fabric, revealed moments later as the standard of the leader under which they marched. The red, white and black of the Nazi flag was raised above every unit as some inhabitants from the very first car fired single shots into the air. They had arrived in this place, perhaps for the first time, and they were keen to make it known. The boy who I occupied let his strong stance deflate, his anger and fear fading off to give way to sorrow. He raised one smooth hand to his temple, rubbing the space above his ear.
“Min elskede Oslo,” he whispered.
Oslo! So something had gone right in my practice after all.
“Hvem sa det?” the boy said, looking around him frantically. The rest of the crowd gave him funny looks, some shook their heads. I felt his eyes narrowing in suspicion, his ears pricking as he continued to look around. Had he heard me? I focused hard on him and what he was doing. It felt like deep concentration, like listening. He closed his eyes, turning my viewpoint black.
Oslo, I thought again.
He jumped, startled. His eyes flew open and once again he looked around for the source of the voice, but the females in this room were older women who were all staring out at the display on the street. My boy pushed his way through the crowd and out of the room, into a poorly lit corridor with a buzzing electric bulb. I didn’t know what to do, but I felt I owed him some kind of explanation. I thought of what my mother would do if she were addressing someone from foreign parts.
Hello, I thought, Do you speak English?
The boy let out an audible cry as he scanned the corridor around him. It was totally empty. So now he knew my voice had no body. I didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing.
“Some English, yes,” he answered. He was more nervous now than when the Nazis had arrived. “Please miss, where are you speaking from?”
That was a loaded question, but I decided on honesty.
Great Britain, I replied.
“But that is impossible,” he whispered. I liked his accent, the way he pushed his vowels out of his mouth with stress.
Yes, but it’s true.
“Why can the others not hear you?” he asked, his nerves abating a little once more.
I’m afraid I have used your mind to see what’s happening in Oslo. It was true enough; he didn’t need to know it had happened accidentally.
“You have powers,” he began uncertainly, “Synsk… I do not know the English word. But this is very, very impossible.”
He understood it better than I thought he would, which told me he had enough sense about him not to think himself mad for hearing voices. He believed that people like me existed, however afraid he might be of the idea. I was about to speak again when that familiar cold shiver started to creep up my spine, the dark little corridor was fading in and out. I panicked, focusing hard to maintain for a few seconds more.
Your name, I demanded, Please, I have to go, but give me your name. I can find you again with your name. I clung desperately to Oslo, hoping what I’d just said was true. And then I realised that perhaps he wouldn’t want me to find him again. I started to sink away despite my efforts; almost everything in the corridor was gone when one last sound reached my ears.
“Henri.”
I was too exhausted from the length of the visit to focus on finding Henri again right away. I went to bed that night hoping my mind might take me there anyway, but had no such luck, and the next day there was no peace to be found at all at Ty Gwyn. Mam was intent on mending the impenetrable rift that had built up between Blod and I during my eight months thus far in North Wales; she thought a nice trip to the cinema was the solution. Blod only agreed because my wheelchair meant that she would most likely get a seat right at the front of the picture house.
Unfortunately Mam also made the insane decision to break a piece of bad news to Blod on the way to the cinema, namely that she couldn’t have the dress she wanted for her 21st birthday. Blod hit the roof shamelessly as we went down the uneven streets of Bryn Eira Bach, but for all her complaints there simply wasn’t enough money in the family to give her what she wanted. Fabric was in short supply and necessary for the war effort, so the few new dresses that remained in Evans the Tailor’s window had more than tripled in price since the start of the year. By the time we reached the ticket booth Blod had a face that could summon stormclouds and though we did get our seat at the front of the tiny screening room, she slumped back into her chair, crossed her arms and stared at the screen determinedly even before the reel started to run.
The first thing that popped into life on the screen was a news reel detailing the current state of the war. At first there were some flickering images of our boys in ranks, saluting and waving their sweethearts goodbye. People in the picture house cheered all around me. But the atmosphere dropped into a sombre one as the great black and white screen was overtaken by the Nazi swastika flying high. The narrator of the bulletin erupted into a deeper, darker tone.
“But out in Greater Europe our allies are falling to the great German threat.”
Still photographs appeared of people being flung out of their houses by German troops, children crying in the streets and properties smashed and destroyed. Until one image flickered into focus, an image that made me gasp aloud. Oslo. The boulevard that I had been looking down on with its leafy green trees and the lines of soldiers in their big black boots next to the open canvas trucks. Except that now those soldi
ers were dragging people away, and part of the street in the forefront of the image was smeared with something dark. Blood.
“The occupation of Norway began this week seeing hundreds of innocent residents in the capital city of Oslo taken away. These propaganda photographs released to the European newspapers claim that the Nazis are hounding out traitors and resistors to their cause. The Norwegian government has been overthrown and replaced by…”
I couldn’t bear it anymore. I closed my eyes and my mind to the cinema screen. Henri was there in that awful place. He’d have seen the blood on the streets; he might even have been taken away. I had met with him for less than half an hour, but I knew he was a good young man. I considered my state carefully, deciding that I was no longer as tired as I had been in the morning. Perhaps I had rested enough to reach him. Blod was still sulking to my left and Mam was in the chair on the other side of her, engrossed in the newsreel still. I sank back into my wheelchair slowly, putting my head out of their field of vision.
My arms and hands took their usual position as I nervously began to shut out the sounds and sights of the screening. Perhaps if they saw me, they would just think I had a headache, or even that I’d nodded off to sleep. With a nervous, thumping pulse building behind my ears, I took my two deep breaths, thinking hard on the scenes I had just witnessed, the young smooth hands of the boy in the store room. His voice and his name. Henri.