‘There’s another duty I’m obliged to fulfil first. Please. You have to help me. Not the police. Not yet.’
As he looked at the boy, tracing once more the familiar curve of flesh around the mouth and nose, something like calmness enveloped him. He couldn’t fathom it – right now he should have been panicked, stressed, grappling with the phone, dialling emergency numbers. Shaking his son by the shoulders, mopping up the last of his grief with the sleeve of his dressing gown. But he wanted to do none of those things. The boy had convinced him, just by being here, that the best thing to do was nothing. Just keep looking at one another, take every new, surprising moment as it came.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘No police. But you have to tell me what happened to you. You have to understand that this is a shock. I’d given up on you. You do realise that. I thought you were dead. Please just tell me what you know. Who were your abductors? Were they... I hope they were kind to you.’
‘I’ll tell you everything when we get to Arthur’s house,’ the boy said.
‘Arthur? What’s Arthur got to do with this?’
‘He’s got everything to do with it. He’s the one who found me.’
‘Arthur’s never found anybody in his life.’
The boy smiled. Even the crooked teeth were Goleuddydd’s; a bridge of imperfection across a cavernous mouth.
‘Oh, he doesn’t know it yet.’
‘But... look, Culhwch, I think this is all moving a little too quickly...’
‘Not quickly enough,’ the boy said, looking at his watch. ‘We have to go now. Right now. You said you’d help me. So let’s go.’
‘What do you mean, go? Go where?’
‘To Arthur’s house...’
‘But it’s, it’s past midnight and....’
‘Arthur will be up, won’t he?’ said the boy knowingly. ‘Arthur’s always up. Come on.’
The boy tugged him lightly on his sleeve and it seemed that this was all it took – a gentle gesture from the son he’d been looking for most of his life and he was out in the thick of night, driving into the unknown in silence.
Culhwch seemed to know exactly where the flat was, walking a few paces ahead of him down the street. Little flaws jumped out at Cilydd. A tiny little scar on his son’s forehead. A chicken-pox pot hole on his cheek. A scratch dulling on his left eyelid. Imprints from the life he had lived up till now; falls, grazes, illnesses his father hadn’t been there to witness. A whole history of happenings, furrowed in flesh.
Arthur took his time. Cilydd heard him stumble down the stairway, working his way through the forest of Post-it leaves to get to the front door. How much would Culhwch tell Arthur? He wondered whether the whole nasty business with Doged would have to come up.
His cousin opened the door wearing only his boxer shorts and aT-shirt, clutching a glass of whisky in one hand and a pen in the other. Insomnia lurked in his irises.
‘Cilydd,’ he said, wearing a faint look of amusement. ‘Who’s your little friend?’
‘Who do you think? It’s him. He’s come back,’ he replied, letting the information hang in the air between them. He thought of the fifteen long years that had passed since he and Arthur sat hunched over his desk, going over and over the details of Goleuddydd’s disappearance.
‘Who’s come back? ’Arthur asked.
‘My son,’ he said, although even in saying it he felt ridiculous, a sham of a father who hadn’t even been there to nurse his son through chicken pox.
Arthur stared at the boy, before walking right up to him and tracing his nose with his fingers, as if trying to work out whether what he saw before him was real.
‘My God... I’ve never, never been so right about anything before,’ he said, breathlessly.
‘You’re quite the artist,’ his son said.
‘What do you mean? What are you both talking about?’ Cilydd was starting to get angry now. Already his son – his rare find on this fateful night – seemed to be falling out of his grasp.
Culhwch walked past them both and climbed the stairs. Watching him disappearing onto the landing Cilydd instinctively followed – he knew how easy it was to lose someone; that they were always a split second away from disappearing. He was afraid Arthur’s house and all its paraphernalia would swallow this boy up and they would have to start all over again. Arthur pulled him back.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Cilydd. All I did was refuse to give up, that’s all. You know most private eyes give up on a case after two to five years. They terminate their contracts. But not me. Not this time. In the absence of a body, there is always hope. And this just proves that I was right. He was out there, wasn’t he?’
‘What exactly did you do?’
‘I think it’s easier if I show you.’
Culhwch, it seemed, was one step ahead of them. He stood in the doorway of Arthur’s study, his arms folded, contemplating what he saw inside.
‘Go ahead,' Arthur urged. ‘Take a look.’
What Cilydd saw next left him reeling. The walls were covered in various sketches – all, it seemed, of his son at different phases in his life. There was one of him as a baby, one of him as a nine-year-old boy, one of him on the brink of adolescence. And one which exactly mirrored the way he looked now.
‘You’re good,’ said Culhwch. ‘You’re really good. I mean, it’s pure guesswork as far as I can see. But somehow, you knew what combination I was going to be. Of my mother and father. Didn’t you?’
‘I used to do hundreds of these things, sitting in the town square. Parents would come, wanting pictures of their children. The likeness was always easy for me, so I never even had to really concen-trate when I was sketching – but one thing I always did notice was the similarity to the mother in every single child, even the boys. The mother would always be there, dawdling about, doing other things, maybe looking after other children, and it was always the dad – the proud dad – that would be standing over me, watching me do it, looking for himself in there somewhere. And I’d just stare at the mother and stare at the child and would see it all in there – maybe not in an obvious way, but hidden in little pockets of flesh, little mannerisms, little expressions that were the mother’s alone. And if the mother was of a certain ilk – I mean if the mother had presence, and we both know, Cilydd, what presence she had, what a fireball she was – then you could guarantee that it would be in the child, too. A magic touch of flesh, holding all the features together.’
Arthur was right of course – whatever inexplic-able, potent thing Goleuddydd had had, this boy had it too, and he sat there, emanating it, oozing her iridescence all over the place. His son stared on at sketches of himself as a toddler. Arthur had been inventive in his artistry – it showed the boy engaged in all sorts of infantile activities. Holding a beaker, munching on a banana, things which may or may not have happened, but which were, angle by angle, stroke by stroke, handing fragments of his son’s stolen history back to his father.
‘After you stopped working for the network I began posting these pictures up, attached to your son’s profile. I knew you wouldn’t have liked me doing it, so I didn’t tell you. I remember you saying once that you could never create a likeness of someone who’s never existed. I suppose it posed a challenge to me when you said that – so I defied you. That is how you found us, isn’t it?’
They both turned to look at Culhwch.
‘It took me a while, you understand, to know that I was a missing person in the first place. But once I knew it, things came together. And if it wasn’t for Arthur’s work I’d never have known that profile was mine. I had no name, no identity. I was nothing. Until those pictures appeared there. And when I was ready to go searching for myself, well, it was easy. Here I was. And there was my mother. And there was every thing I needed. Even down to the addresses and... and the phone numbers.’
At that point he avoided Cilydd’s gaze. Cilydd recalled the blank profile – the hateful question mark. He hated the implication that he’d given up on his so
n; that he’d allowed him to become a non-entity, a nothing, as he put it. It was only Arthur who’d been brave enough to give him a face, to illuminate him, to let him pierce through the darkness to arrive back where he belonged.
It was almost as if Arthur had sketched him into being.
Culhwch
Culhwch told them he was brought up on a smallholding on the edge of a large forest. From when he was a child his parents had insisted the forest held unknown dangers, he would be swallowed up by it, engulfed by the greenery, they said. He was home schooled – something he never challenged, for his mother told him that this was what happened when you were exceptionally bright – and they lived without a television, a computer, without any form of news from the outside world. It was merely the way of things. Occasionally some other adults would come over for a day out – friends of his parents. Although he never saw them arrive he knew, somehow, that they had come through the forest. They were an odd bunch, too, of all ages, all looking peculiarly pale and gaunt. None of them had children. But they would play with him, and this was compensation enough. Swinging on a rope amidst haystacks, running through the fields, hiding in bushes; laughing – it was a rare rush of activity and happiness which left him elated for days. There was very little laughter at home – and he felt it was somehow inside him, this laughter, a natural part of him, an impulse which was never fully satisfied. But even as he laughed, he was aware of his unsmiling parents lurking behind him, two shadows that were always hovering on the periphery of his life, as though they were nervous about what such laughter could bring.
His parents slept in separate rooms. When he was a little boy, he used to dream of having a family where everyone huddled up in bed together, like they did in his books. When he asked his mother about it she would say something about ‘special’ children having ‘special’ parents – and that one day he would understand why things had to be like this. One day, she said, they would explain everything.
On the farm they bred only birds – there were no livestock, bar the ones he saw dotted on the faraway hillside. There were several aviaries in the back garden, and a huge, empty pigsty in the yard. The pigsty became his den – he would sit in there for hours on end and play out his fantasy of being a swineherd, with real swine to look after. He was never let near the birds. He was faintly aware of them, just sitting there, beyond the mesh, hardly moving at all. Every now and then the birds would be sold off – leaving the smallholding eerily empty. On those days he snuck into one of the aviaries, hoping to collect a few mementoes. But there was never any trace of those birds. No scent, not so much as a tiny feather.
Once a new batch of birds arrived, he would watch his father transferring them from the cages into the aviary. Birds were squawking, active creatures – so he thought from his books – and yet these birds would sit entirely still on their perches while they were moved about, their feathers hardly ruffling at all. When they flew they simply slid into the air, as though easing themselves into some glutinous substance, opening their beaks as though drinking it in. The only moving part of them seemed to be their restless orange eyes – which followed you wherever you went. They were beautiful, too, like no other birds he’d seen – their coats velvety blue, with a green sheen, and their beaks mustard yellow. He’d never seen them eat anything, and so one day, when his father’s back was turned, he fished a piece of bread out of his pocket and held it up to the mesh.
To his surprise, the aviary erupted – a volcano of feathers tumbled down upon him, and he felt the sharp sting of beaks as the bread was wrenched from his hand. At that point he remembered his father shouting at him: ‘What have you done? Oh Culhwch! What have you done!’ He was sent to bed without supper, and the next day the aviary was completely empty. Neither his mother nor his father ever commented on the event but within a few days a fence had been put up around the aviaries so that he couldn’t get to them. He hovered outside them often, but never heard a peep from those birds ever again.
Years passed by; the birds and strange, random visitors came and went. He learned about places in the world in his geography lessons yet his mother insisted that you had to cross the forest to get to them. Then, something surprising happened. A few months ago, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, a girl arrived in the house. There was commotion in the thick of night, and he listened to the whole exchange through a crack in the kitchen door. A booming male voice instructed his parents to keep the girl for a few months, while things ‘settled down’. He heard his mother saying that one child was enough, with all the birds to care for too – she would not be able to do it. The man retaliated by saying that he had the power to take the boy away if they did not do as he asked. ‘Remember, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he’s still missing,’ he heard him say, before adding, in a gentler voice: ‘Look at her, she’ll be no trouble, she never has been. Until now. You owe me this much. I haven’t forgotten what you did. You still haven’t been forgiven for it.’ Through the narrow slit Culhwch could not see the girl properly – but he somehow developed a sense of her – a restless, moving thing under the man’s grasp, there was a kind of white dazzle about her, bright blonde hair and pale toes.
For fear of getting caught he went back to bed, thinking he’d be offered an explanation the next day. But at the breakfast table there was no mention of the previous night’s escapade. His mother sipped her juice gravely, his father shoved little hummocks of cereal into his mouth; neither one of them said a word. There was simply no trace of the girl; not so much as a stray hair on the kitchen floor. It was the first time Culhwch realised that the world in which he lived was somehow not real at all.
Days passed, and life carried on as normal. And yet, everything seemed to have changed. There was – he could not really explain it – a new energy in the house. White flowers sprung up in the garden, and the patches of damp that had been collecting on the bathroom ceiling suddenly receded. There was a new lightness and freshness about the place. He knew the girl could not be far.
One morning, when his father had fallen asleep in his chair, he followed his mother on her morning stroll. To his surprise, she entered the forest. He waited a while before entering himself, remembering his mother’s warning. But soon enough he found himself following her footsteps through the wilderness, which was easier than he’d anticipated, for every few steps he noticed a curious little hollow in the soil, as though something had been uprooted. This dark trail led him to a clearing in the woods, where he came upon a small hut perched on the edge of a stream. There, he saw his mother, kneeling on the muddy bank, sleeves rolled up, pouring a bucket of water over the head of a naked young girl, gently washing her hair. There was such tenderness between them, even as his mother sighed and puffed and pretended to find the whole thing bothersome, he saw that she enjoyed it, that the girl’s presence was a joy to her. She shampooed the hair as though it were fine silk between her fingers – and the girl, muted, frightened-looking as she was, yielded her head to his mother’s hands and gave into the caress. It wasn’t until the girl got up and stood there, illuminated in the sun’s rays that Culhwch saw how truly beautiful she was. He had never seen anybody’s naked body except for his own before, and it seemed to him the most wondrous, the most pure thing he had seen. And yet there was something odd about the body, something imbalanced, which he couldn’t put his finger on. She did not look like the girls in his books.
The moment his mother stepped back from the water, she seemed to harden, taking the girl by the hand and roughly shoving her back into the hut. As she turned away to lock the door, Culhwch saw his chance and made a run for it back to the house. He arrived just as his father was waking up, and pretended he’d been reading in his room. When his mother came back he could not resist the temptation of asking her how her walk had been. ‘Oh lovely,’ she said. ‘Such lovely flowers springing up at this time of year.’
He snuck out that night, following the moon’s path through the wilderness until he came to the
hut. As he walked he had the feeling that someone was watching him, but when he turned back there was no one there. He carried on. Still the feeling persisted, and slowly he began to realise that the watchers were above him. When he looked up, there they were – the birds. Around a dozen of them, silently flitting from branch to branch, moving as he moved, stopping when he stopped. He wondered if his mother knew they were out. It wasn’t until he reached the hut that they descended, perching themselves on the wooden porch, a barricade of orange eyes. And yet, when he moved, they shuffled sideways to let him pass. He knocked at the door. No whimpering came from inside, just a small, quiet voice, asking him what he wanted. Within a few moments her face appeared at the mesh window. He could only see her hair, shining white in the moonlight, dazzling him. The door was bolted shut. He told her he wanted to help.
‘You can’t help someone who doesn’t exist,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in freeing me. Who would have me?’
A bird hopped up beside him, scratching the mesh with a sharp claw. He thought he detected a faint smile from her at that moment. She raised her own pale palm to the window as a greeting.
‘Hello you,’ she said to the bird, in lilting tones, so unlike the tired voice he had just heard.
‘I’ve never seen the birds out,’ he said. ‘My mother would never let them out this far.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about them. They can look after themselves. Can’t you?’
The bird squawked – the first time Culhwch had ever heard one of them make a sound. It was curious, somehow melodic and off-key at the same time. He tried to touch the bird but it hobbled away from him, keeping its eyes fixed on the shadow behind the door.
That’s when he asked her who she was. He asked her for a name.
‘A name... is about the only thing I have got,’ she said. ‘My name’s Olwen.’
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