The Red Judge

by Pauline Fisk

  This, unfortunately, was true. I sat on the window seat by Cary’s side, staring into the darkness and trying to take in what I had done. It had all happened weeks ago, and I’d almost forgotten it until today. Now I cursed the evening when I’d picked up the phone, and it had been my sister on the line, going on about her new college life. She’d told me all about the exciting places that she’d been to, and the music in the clubs and the wacky clothes that people wore.

  On and on she’d gone, as if she’d seen it all and I was just some baby-brother hick from sleepy Pengwern. Some of her new college friends had body piercings and tattoos, and she was thinking of having something done too. One of them even had a stuffed albatross superglued to the top of his head. I said he sounded like an idiot, but Cary was impressed.

  ‘He’s one of fashion’s foot-soldiers,’ she’d said. ‘I admire him. I really do. Imagine being brave enough to go out looking like that!’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it brave,’ I’d said. ‘I’d call it stupid. All your friends are stupid, and so are you for going round with them. I mean, an albatross! Nobody in their right mind would do a thing like that.’

  Cary hadn’t hesitated. ‘I would,’ she’d said.

  I hadn’t hesitated either. ‘Ten pounds says you wouldn’t,’ I’d said.

  ‘You’re on!’ Cary had said.

  And now she’d won. I’d thought that she was joking, but here she was, sitting next to me on the window seat, her hand outstretched, waiting to collect.

  ‘You old stirrer, you. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you? You’ve really got me into trouble!’ she said. ‘Come on. It’s payback time. The least that you can do is give me what you owe!’

  I left the room, saying that I was going for the remains of my Christmas present money. But, no sooner were the doors shut behind me, than I fled. I knew that it was cowardly of me, but all I could think about was getting out before our father came home. Upstairs my mother was crying, and downstairs my sister’s ugly, sad face was a testimony to what a terrible person I was. This was my fault and mine alone. Once the dust had settled, I was going to have to take the blame for it – but I wasn’t ready yet.

  I left the house and headed up Swan Hill, telling myself that I wasn’t coming home until everybody had gone to bed. Christmas shoppers streamed past me, laden with their purchases, weary but happy. I had been like them only a few short hours ago, but now I pushed my way between them with only one thing on my mind – looking for somewhere to hide.

  But Cary didn’t let me get away as easily as that! Before I even reached the top of Swan Hill, I heard her voice behind me. She yelled at me to come back and, when I turned round, I saw her charging after me, light bulb and all.

  Other people turned as well, and I pushed my way between them and cut down through a network of alleys, hoping that she wouldn’t know them as well as me. She was a High Street girl, after all, not a spray-can troublemaker who spent half his life skulking down alleys.

  Finally I emerged into the main town square, where a crowd was thronging round the town’s main Christmas tree, and a band was playing carols. Only a few hours ago I’d been like these busy people, buying in a panic. But now that panic faded into insignificance. I couldn’t imagine what I’d been worried about. A few stupid family presents – what did they count for?

  I cut across the square, pushing my way between the crowds. ‘Hey Zed, you rat – wait for me!’ my sister called.

  I turned round, and there she was, still behind me. The crowds parted to let her through, and everybody stared, just as they had done on Swan Hill. Cary was getting closer all the time, shouting for all to hear that I was a stinking pig and a filthy traitor.

  ‘We’re both in this together,’ she yelled. ‘You come home with me, right now!’

  Later I was to wish I’d listened to her. Then my story would have turned out differently, and so would hers. But I was the sort of boy who always had to turn a little drama into World War Three. So I carried on regardless, promising myself that when I reached the shops on Pride Hill, I’d shake Cary off for good.

  It was a stupid thing to do. But something got into me, and I was determined not to give up without a fight. Suddenly it was like those games of hide-and-seek we’d played when we were little. She’d been the older one, and cleverer by far, but I’d been the one who ran rings round her and always won.

  Now I told myself that I could do it again. I cut across the High Street without stopping to look left into the oncoming traffic. And Cary ran behind me, without looking either, as if following me exactly was all part of the game. I reached the middle of the road and a small black car bore down upon me. For a split second, I froze, not knowing what to do. And, in that split second, the car swerved to avoid me – and hit my sister instead.

  It missed me by a shaver, but it got Cary like a bull catching a matador in its horns. It’s a sight I’ll never forget. One moment she was right behind me in the road, then the small black car was going one way and Cary the other, flying straight into a bookshop window that shattered into pieces.

  It all happened so quickly. Everybody screamed, and the traffic on the road screeched to a halt. A crowd started gathering, but the only person that I recognised was our father. His collar was turned up against the cold, and he held a black umbrella over his head. Under one arm was tucked a bag of Christmas goodies and, under the other, a bottle of champagne. Maybe they were gifts from grateful clients, or maybe he’d bought them to celebrate Cary’s return.

  Either way, we’d never enjoy them now – and neither would anybody else. The goodies fell from my father’s hand, never to be seen again, and the bottle smashed all over the pavement. But he didn’t notice. He was too shocked. His face was white as if, like me, he’d seen the whole tragedy unfolding.

  Which meant that, like me too, he knew who was to blame.

  3

  Rowley’s Riverlife Museum

  On ordinary days, Rowley’s Riverlife Museum closes at five-thirty, but on late-night Christmas shopping evenings, it stays open like everything else in Pengwern, and the last visitors don’t leave its museum shop until seven-thirty. Then the sales assistant closes it down, and the coffee shop too, and the curator goes round the whole building, pulling down blinds and drawing curtains. She shuts all the doors behind her, then moves through the building to the entrance hall where she sets the burglar alarm. The front door stands open and, in the time it takes her to nip into the cloakroom to pick up her handbag, anyone could slip in.

  I know this for a fact, because that’s what I did the night of Cary’s accident. I tiptoed past without her noticing, and got myself locked in. It was a crazy thing to do, but seemed to make sense at the time. I’d been wandering round for hours, and it had started raining and I was soaked to the skin. I couldn’t go home for fear of all the trouble I’d be in, and was even more frightened of going to the hospital.

  So, needing somewhere warm where I could dry off – and somewhere dark, too, where I could bury myself away – I slipped in past the curator. She shut the door behind me, double-locking it from outside. Then her shoes went tapping down the cobbles, and I had what I wanted.

  I was alone. Silence fell, along with all the darkness I could ever ask for. Immediately, I realised what a stupid thing I’d done. What if Cary called for me from her hospital bed, and nobody could find me? What if she died in the night, and I was stuck here unable to say goodbye? I imagined everybody around her bed – all the Fitztalbots silently blaming me for what I’d done to her. I had made things even worse – what a fool I was!

  I went from room to room, lifting blinds and looking for a window to get out through. But all of them were locked, and so were the fire exits, and the kitchen door, and the museum office where I’d at least hoped to find a phone.

  I banged on the front door, shaking it on its hinges, and jumped up and down in the hope that I’d somehow activate the burglar alarm. But it stubbornly refused to go off, and I tried sho
uting through the letterbox instead, and running through the building, banging on the windows and calling for help.

  But nobody heard me. Rowley’s Riverlife Museum is situated in a quiet part of town between trees and empty office buildings and, even when I switched on all the lights, there was nobody to see.

  So much for police protection of public buildings, I thought. So much for town centre closed-circuit TV, and neighbourhood watch, and everybody being on the lookout to beat crime. I’m stuck here and, by the look of things, I’ll stay this way until morning.

  The lights went off again, on a timer, and I was plunged back into darkness. Deciding to make the best of things, I helped myself to biscuits and milk sachets in the coffee shop, and a plaid rug ‘woven from Shropshire wool’ in the tourist shop. Then I made my way through the building looking for somewhere to sleep or, at the very least, make myself comfortable.

  But that was easier said than done. Once Rowley’s Riverlife Museum had been a merchant’s mansion, teeming with warmth and activity – a grand Tudor family house, as full of life as a walled city. But where there once had been huge old fireplaces and four-poster beds, now there were information boards and display cabinets, paintings and photographs, stuffed fish and birds, models of flat-bottomed river boats called trows, old maps, old fishing nets, long eel baskets called putcheons and nastily pronged eel forks that looked like the devil’s own favourite weapon.

  There wasn’t even anywhere to sit down. I did find a coracle in the Sabrina Room – dedicated to Pengwern’s queen of rivers, known commonly as the River Severn, but locally, as the Sabrina Fludde – but it was a fragile-looking thing that could be hundreds of years old, and I was afraid of breaking it.

  In the end, I curled up against a storage heater in the Wye Room, dedicated to the river that Grace, my other grandmother, had always called by its Welsh name, the Afon Gwy. I’d always thought of it as her river because her house looked down on it, and perhaps that’s why I chose it now.

  I huddled against the storage heater, looking up at an old painting of the Afon Gwy, remembering swimming in that river and watching Grace fish. Not much had changed since that picture had been painted, as far as I could see. The river still flowed down from Plynlimon Mountain on exactly the same course, and the valley was just the same, winding between great flanks of hills that rose to hidden summits.

  The only difference was that Grace had gone. She was dead, I mean, struck down in her garden pegging out her washing, with not a hint of a warning that a heart attack was on its way. It had happened a year ago now, but I was still trying to come to terms with it. As much as I had always hated my Fitztalbot grandmother, I had adored Grace. Now, with her gone, there was nobody to stick up for me, getting on the phone to tell my mother to go easy, and refusing to hear a word against me, no matter how much trouble I was in.

  Not that she could do that now! If Grace were still alive, I thought, there’d be nothing she could say this time. What was there to stick up for?

  What indeed? In my mind, I played the whole thing through again. It started with my sister standing in the doorway, and ended with the ambulance taking her away, with my father clinging on to her. You could see from his eyes that he didn’t know a crowd was watching. All he knew was what he’d seen – Cary getting hit and me, who’d led her out into the traffic, getting off scot-free.

  Except that I hadn’t got off scot-free. I’d done something terrible and here, curled up against the storage heater, shivering in my soaking clothes, I knew that life would never be the same. Everything, everything, was my fault. How many times had my mother said, ‘If you carry on like this, my boy, you’ll get yourself into real trouble one day.’

  And now I had. In the darkness of that cold museum, I was haunted by her words. They picked at me like goblin fingers, making me afraid. It wasn’t the sort of fear that I’d once enjoyed, either – the sort I’d felt when spray-can painting on the railway bridge or watching scary movies on the telly. I couldn’t just shiver, and laugh, and live to tell the tale another day. Here in Rowley’s Riverlife Museum there was no other day. I was trapped in the darkness, alone with my thoughts. I couldn’t shake them off.

  I reached for the plaid rug, and pulled it round my shoulders, but couldn’t stop shivering. Cold-eyed gargoyles from some ruined Wye-side abbey glared down at me as if they knew what I had done. Old fishermen and riverboat men glared down, too, from their photographs on the walls. Their faces seemed to condemn me, as if they all knew what I’d done. I felt on trial, with nobody to defend me and not a word that I could say on my behalf.

  Even the Cŵn y Wbir looked down at me – Plynlimon’s legendary hounds of hell whose hunting grounds were the skies above the mountain. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I could see them in the painting of the Afon Gwy, and see their master too, the famous Red Judge of Plynlimon who – as every child knew – would ‘get you’ if you were naughty.

  And I’d been naughty, all right. I’d been more than naughty, and it seemed to me, looking at the painting, that the red judge knew it too, standing on his mountain holding up the black corph candle, that only ever burned for a death.

  Guilt does funny things to you. In the morning, there were no candles in the painting, nor was the red judge in it, nor his Cŵn y Wbir. It was good to wake up and find myself lying on a cold, hard floor beneath a painting that had nothing in it but mountains, hills, a river and a few sheep.

  I sighed with relief, and would have dropped back to sleep if a door hadn’t sudden banged shut somewhere. Footsteps rang out in the big main hall and I heard a rattling sound – chains or keys, or something like that – and the beeping of the burglar alarm being switched off. Then voices started chattering, and I realised that a radio had been turned on.

  I crept out on to the landing to see what was going on. Downstairs in the hall, a man in overalls was hauling a heavy-looking industrial-sized polisher across the floor, heading in the direction of the stairs. He was the cleaner – and he was coming my way. I looked around for somewhere to hide, and managed to get behind a door before he reached the top of the stairs. He passed me without noticing and, the moment I heard his polisher whirring in one of the rooms, I made my getaway.

  I headed down the stairs and across the hall. The front door was still locked, so I turned towards the kitchen door instead. This was open, and through it I could see a vacuum cleaner and a microwave, plastic buckets and detergent bottles, mugs, a kettle and a big jar of instant coffee, all lit by a fluorescent strip-light.

  I could also see the back door – which was open too, and led into a narrow alley where the week’s rubbish had been lined up in black plastic bags. My escape route at last! I leapt over the bags and made the quickest exit possible, not even stopping when I tore one of the bags open, strewing its contents halfway down the alley. I was out of there, and no looking back – on my way home, ready to face whatever I was in for when I got there.

  I couldn’t get home quickly enough. But when I slipped through the side gate, the house stood in darkness as if none of us lived there any more. It looked abandoned, and a shiver ran through me. I let myself in, telling myself that everybody was asleep, and that was why the lights were off. But my parents’ bedroom was empty and their bed unslept in, and the rest of the house was empty too. I went up and down every staircase, and in and out of every room, including the laundry room and even the cellar.

  But nobody was home, and there wasn’t as much as a note to explain what was going on. In the dining room and kitchen, I found tables and work surfaces laden with untouched food and, in the drawing room, I found the remains of the Christmas tree bauble that I had dropped, still not cleared up.

  Obviously everybody was at the hospital – and that was where I should be too. I ran upstairs to change into some fresh clothes. On my bed were strewn the wrappings of the presents that I’d bought the day before. I stared down at them, remembering another world where joke books had seemed funny, and plastic turds a go
od idea. Now that all felt so long ago.

  Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of crunching on the gravel outside. It stopped beneath my window and car doors banged. My mother called something to my father, but I couldn’t hear what. I heard them entering the house, their footsteps ringing in the hall. Then they started up the stairs, and the hairs rose on my head. I remembered the candle burning in my imagination – the black corph candle burning for death – and prepared myself for the worst.

  But my parents passed my door and carried on to their room. They didn’t even check that I was home. Through the wall I could hear their voices murmuring to each other, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Glasses chinked as they helped themselves to stiff drinks. Then I heard them on the phone, passing on their news to everybody in the whole wide world, it seemed.

  Everybody except me.

  4

  At the Hospital

  I hid in bed, pretending to be asleep in case my parents came in. I didn’t want to find out what was going on, not any more. There was something grim about the voices through the wall – something about them that frightened me. I didn’t want to know what had happened to Cary, and lay with my eyes tightly closed every time anybody went by.

  But I needn’t have worried because nobody came in.

  Later, I heard my parents leave again. The front door slammed behind them and immediately I knew that I’d made another mistake. I leapt out of bed and ran to the window, wanting them to come back. I even leant out to shout at them, but it was too late. The automatic gates swung shut behind them, and my parents’ car disappeared from sight.

  I was alone again. I stood at the window, watching people passing down the hill. The rest of life – including Christmas – was still happening for them, but not for me. Sleet began to fall, and the day began to darken. I knew what I had to do, but couldn’t find the courage. I stood like that for ages, wasting precious time – Cary’s time as well as mine. Then, in the end, I phoned for a taxi, knowing that if I didn’t go to the hospital and find out what was going on, I’d never forgive myself.