I shrugged, feigning indifference. “Had things to do.”
“What about today?”
“What about it?”
“We’re hoping you’ll both come. It’s our last day.”
Megan turned to me. “Oh Cai, please can we go?”
Annie said, “At least let Megan come. I’ll look after her.”
“I don’t need looking after,” Megan insisted.
I scratched my head like I was thinking about it. I glanced at Izzy and she smiled at me and that was it.
*
As Vic called out the count for the second game I scrambled down the terraced west side of the Fall of the White Meadow, crossed the river below the falls, and ran along the trail. Soon, I hauled myself up through the scrub and into a clump of ferns where I sat and waited. Jonathan’s desertion still bothered me but when a butterfly settled on a leaf I forgot about him and cupped it between my hands. The air was thick with the smell of must as I opened my hands and grabbed the creature’s wings. Its dark, hairy body vibrated with a strange energy as it hung between the taut, striped wings. I raised it to my face and its antennae twitched furiously, like it was sizing me up. When I let it go, it disappeared into the scrub.
Sunlight splintered through the trees and coils of mist spiralled into the air. By the time I saw Megan and Hector heading downstream on the far side of the river, I was itching to be the first to find Smee. I slid out of the ferns and headed south, dropping towards the riverbank. My head was full of smoke and whispers that made patterns I couldn’t read. Keeping low I scurried along the path, stopping now and again to listen. Presently, I heard a voice up ahead and snuck behind a tree. Glancing round, I saw Izzy calling to the shadows beneath an overhanging rock. Troy’s head popped out and he responded which meant it wasn’t him. I left the trail for a few yards so as they wouldn’t see me and continued south.
Through the trees the sky had started to lose its colour. Even so, the sweat was dripping off me. I crouched beside the water, scooped up a mouthful and drank. The reflection that stared back was troubled and restless. As I rose I saw another reflection move past mine. I spun and caught a flash of red vanishing in the trees. I chased after it, clambering up the bank onto the crag above the river and found no one there. I searched for five minutes before dropping back to the river. It seemed I was further south than I thought. Somewhere below the Fall of the Fuller. Disoriented, I retraced my steps, thinking I must have gone wrong back up the trail.
I left the river and climbed to the higher ground to get my bearings. I stumbled onto a wide track that might have been the Four Waterfalls Trail. The sky overhead was grey and looked like rain. I couldn’t see the sun or guess which direction it might be but I took off on what I hoped was the southbound path. Soon the trail began to drop steeply and when I came out on the Hepste, above the Falls of Snow, I had no idea how I’d got there. The path looped away from the river above the north side of the gorge and descended steeply, doubling back to the water below the falls. The trail led beneath the cliff and behind the curtain of water.
A little way along the trail I saw Annie standing by the river’s edge. She let out a cry when I called her name and backed up against the slick face of the gorge. As I approached her she slumped to the ground and held her hands up like she was trying to push me away. Her behaviour disturbed me. Though she was a couple of years younger than me I knew her pretty well and figured she wasn’t the sort to scare easily. “What is it, Annie?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
She tried to talk but couldn’t get the words out.
I crouched beside her and took her hand. She struggled for a few moments then went limp. “It’s me, Cai. It’s okay now, Annie, it is.” She went on sobbing and I wondered what it was that had her so scared. “What happened? Can you tell me?”
She looked up with red eyes and black streaks running down her face. She pointed downriver but couldn’t say what she wanted to say. I asked if she’d seen any of the others and she nodded. When I asked who, she whispered one name—Jumbo.
“What about him?”
She glanced downriver again and said, “I…I was Smee.”
“And he found you?” She nodded. “So where’d he go?”
Annie sobbed and I couldn’t get anything else out of her. I walked to the water’s edge and looked among the rocks, wondering if Jumbo had fallen. It wouldn’t have surprised me as he was big and kind of awkward. Anyone could easily slip on those wet rocks. It would explain why she was so upset. “I better look for him,” I said. “You wait here and one of the others will be along soon if I don’t get back first.”
Annie shook her head and indicated she wanted to come with me but I thought she’d slow me down. Besides, there was the game and she was Smee. I pointed to the falls and told her that was the place to hide. I took her arm and led her up the path behind the crashing curtain of water. “It’ll be okay, Annie,” I said. “I promise. You’re Smee, remember. You have to stay hid till they find you.”
She looked at me, kind of vacant, and said a word I didn’t catch.
*
People have been coming here for years to walk and see the falls. They call it Waterfall Country. Lately, there’s been others who come to try out kayaking and canyoning, things I don’t know much about. That’s what brought Troy Akeman and his friends up from England somewhere.
I was passing through the village with some groceries when I saw this fair-haired boy on the wall outside the Moon Inn, which was owned by Annie Meredith’s parents. They had a campsite out behind their house and they’d installed a few electric hook-ups for motor homes and caravans. The field was full if there were more than a dozen vehicles in it. At the far end of the pub was a small beer garden bordered by a whitewashed wall. The boy stood up there in striped, baggy shorts and a t-shirt with Blink-182 written on the front, knees flexed and arms waving in slow motion like a ballet dancer. His long hair hung over his face as he tilted his head to one side. I don’t know if he saw me but as I watched he raised one leg high, let out a cry and leapt to the ground. He gave me a bow and stood there like it was nothing. “I learned that move last week,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You know kickboxing?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s Te chiang. There’s different kinds but that was Thai.”
“You a black belt?”
I felt kind of foolish when he laughed. “No black belts in kickboxing.”
“You staying here?”
“Me and some friends. My dad’s gonna take us canyoning. He says this is the place for it.”
I asked him what that was and he went on talking a mile a minute about all these things his dad had planned and I could see no chance to get a word in. I was struck by his excitement, and the intensity in his eyes, like they were trying to tell me things that words alone couldn’t convey. After a while I guess he saw I was struggling to keep up, so he slowed down and asked if I wanted to meet his friends. I said I had errands to run, though I had none. I was overwhelmed and needed to draw breath. As I set off home I felt his eyes on my back and began to regret my caution. Much as I could tolerate my own company, seeing this other boy and knowing there were others, reminded me how dull my life was.
*
The next morning a steady drizzle was coming down but by mid-afternoon the sun came out from behind the watery clouds. I took Megan along as an excuse and walked the half mile to Ystradfellte. At the Moon Inn, we heard the commotion out back and found a bunch of kids playing football. Annie Meredith was among them, and another local boy, Jonathan Parry. The fair-haired boy was there too and he waved when he saw me.
He ran over to us. “You came back.”
“Yeah, well.”
He grinned. “I’m Troy. What’s your name?”
“Cai. This is my sister, Megan.”
He called the others over and introduced them. The youngest was his brother Hector who was just ten. The biggest was Jumbo Lauder, a bull of thirteen, same as me a
nd Troy, but he had a couple of inches on us, and maybe twenty pounds. He looked hard and seemed to know it. Then there was a sleepy-eyed boy of twelve whose name was Vic Blackwood, who seemed friendly enough but who I more or less forgot when Troy introduced Vic’s sister, Isabel.
“Don’t listen to him,” she snapped. “It’s Izzy.” She was fourteen with raven hair cut short and sort of ragged, and wearing ripped jeans and Doc Martens. In spite of it all there was no hiding how pretty she was. Her eyes were like pools of green water I felt myself drowning in, until she asked me what the fuck I was staring at. I guess I jumped a little when she laughed. I wasn’t used to hearing girls swear, except maybe my mother. I laughed it off, not wanting her to see how awkward she’d made me feel.
Troy introduced us to his parents and they seemed nice people. They had a metal picnic table set up outside their caravan and deck chairs all around and they drank wine with four others I guessed were the parents of the other kids. Mr Akeman, who was Troy’s father, gave us pop and his wife dished out bowls of ice cream. There was music and jokes and stories about what they had been up to that day. Mr Akeman asked me about the different trails and waterfalls and if it was true you could walk right behind Sgwd-yr-Eira, only he said it like Squidder Air. I told him it was.
After a time the adults got back to their own talk and Troy asked what else there was to do around here. I said there were plenty places to explore in the wood. “Waterfalls, caves and stuff. Plenty places you can swim if you can stand cold water.”
“How cold?” Izzy said.
“Freezing,” Annie said.
“You get used to it.”
“I could stand it,” Troy said. “Why don’t you show us?”
I led them down past the church on Penderyn Road to the bridge over the Mellte. Below the bridge the river widened out and there was a spot you could jump in where the water was about five feet deep. This was the nearest swimming hole but there were better ones further on, I said, down at the Fall of the Fuller. There’s a cliff you could jump off if you had the guts. Jumbo wanted to know how high and I told him maybe twenty or thirty feet.
He kind of sneered and said, “You never jumped off that height.”
I didn’t give a shit what he thought, but my sister had a chippy streak and she spoke up quick as a flash. “I’ve seen him do it.”
Jumbo looked at her like she was nothing. “Well you would say that.”
“I said it because it’s true.”
We shinned down the ditch at the far side of the bridge and sat around near the riverbank. Megan and Annie quizzed Izzy about where she went to school and what bands she liked and that sort of thing. Me and the others bullshitted each other the way kids do when they’re still getting the measure of each other. Troy wanted to know more about the wood. I wasn’t given to talking so much but my sister had a knack for stories so I gave her the nod and she told them the tale of the fairy folk.
“In the long ago days the Tylwyth Teg had lived all over,” she began, “but anywhere they tried to settle down they were persecuted because regular people didn’t understand their ways. One day they found this forest and because it was in the middle of nowhere, it was just right for them. They made their homes in caves along the rivers and sometimes behind the waterfalls, and they lived on fish and the deer that roamed the woods.”
“What did they look like?” Hector asked.
“Like us,” Megan said. “Only smaller, with strong arms and dark curly hair. They were shy creatures and liked to keep to themselves, but there were some who were mischievous and liked to play games. When humans came to the wood, the Tylwyth Teg began to play tricks on them, nothing bad at first, until the humans started chopping down trees and farming the land. Then the fairies got mad and stole their animals and burgled their houses at night. The humans grew scared and hired a man called Owen to get rid of them. Owen was a knight and he had a band of men that he sent out into the wood to search for the Tylwyth Teg. They searched all over with no luck until one day Owen found a woman weeping below Sgwd-yr-Eira, which means the Falls of Snow.”
I looked around. They were transfixed, caught up in the story and I felt pleased for Megan, proud of this strange power she had, and I wished that I had some of it in me.
“Owen took pity on her,” Megan went on. “She said her name was Gwenllian, and told him she was sad because she’d had a vision of all her people slaughtered. The knight fell in love with her and swore to protect her. He didn’t know it but Gwenllian was one of the fairy folk. When she found out she was going to have a baby she let slip to her maid that she was of the Tylwyth Teg. Well, the maid told everyone and they all insisted that Owen get her to reveal where the fairy folk dwelt. Owen had no choice and so he forced Gwenllian to spill the beans. Then Owen and his men found the fairies and killed them all. When he came home, Gwenllian cursed him for what he had done. In a rage he took out his sword and stabbed her in the belly. But before she died she said it wasn’t just her he’d killed, but his unborn son. ‘I have borne other children,’ she told him. ‘And there will come a time when my sons will wash their hands in your blood.’ Owen was sorry right away but it was too late.
“It wasn’t long before he was ambushed when he was out alone. He was at Sgwd Gwladus when a band of fairies, who were Gwenllian’s sons, set upon him and cut his throat and washed their hands in his warm blood. And that was the fulfillment of her curse.”
“Wow,” Izzy said. “That’s kind of violent.”
“It was a great story,” Troy told her.
Megan beamed with pleasure. “The wood is Fforest Fawr, but most people around here call it Goedwig Tylwyth Teg, which means Fairy Wood.”
Jumbo laughed. “Is that cos it’s full of gays?”
“She doesn’t mean it like that,” I said.
Jumbo spoke in a high-pitched voice. “She doesn’t mean it like that.”
I ignored him. “There’s all kinds of stories about things that have happened here.”
“What kind of things?” Troy asked.
“Getting bummed.”
I stared at Jumbo. “You’re the funny one, is it?”
“I dunno—are you the faggot?”
I made to stand up but Troy beat me to it. “Fuck’s sake, Jumbo.” He looked at me and shrugged. “He can’t stop himself sometimes.”
I stared at Jumbo, saw him struggle to bite his tongue. I rose and grabbed Megan’s hand. “We’d best be off.”
Troy seemed disappointed. “Don’t mind him.”
“I don’t.”
Izzy got up. She spoke to Megan and Annie, apologised for Jumbo being an asshole. The two younger girls laughed and said it was okay.
*
That evening I put two frozen pizzas in the oven and opened a tin of vegetable soup for my mother. I would have taken it upstairs but she joined us in the living room. She ate like a bird, perched on the edge of her armchair, dunking pieces of buttered bread in the soup and nibbling for a few seconds. She stared at The Simpsons on the TV and uttered odd phrases to herself, like, why’re they yellow? or it’s raining tomorrow. She never expected us to respond because whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t either of us. Megan asked me one time if it was the fairies she spoke to. She’d heard someone say that Mrs Treharne was away with the fairies. I told her Mam was just remembering stuff from when she was okay.
The show finished and Megan turned to Mam and asked her what a faggot was. I looked at her sternly and was about to say that Mam didn’t want to hear that kind of word. But Mam looked like she was considering it because she nodded and said, “It means someone who is a homosexual.”
“That’s the same as gay, isn’t it?” Megan said.
Mam looked at me, agitated. “Is this what they teach her now?”
“Kids just learn these things.”
Megan finished her milk and wiped her mouth. “I didn’t know fairy meant gay,” she said.
“It doesn’t. He didn’t know what he was talking abou
t.”
Mam got out of her seat and glared at me. “Who was talking about homos?”
“Nobody was.”
“Don’t you lie to me!”
“I’m not,” I said. She made a grab for me but I slipped by her into the kitchen.
“It’s okay, Mam,” I heard Megan say. “It was just this one boy. The others are nice.”
“What others?”
“We made some friends down at the Merediths’ campsite.”
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Mother wailed. “Who are these people, Cai?”
I put the plates in the sink and my hands on the taps. Not now, I whispered. Please not now. But I heard her go on, asking Megan what else she’d heard and what were they teaching her in that school and how she was going to set that Miss Watkins straight. I turned on the hot tap and half-filled the sink. In the living room Mam was in full flow and when Megan finally came into the kitchen, there were tears in her eyes. I took her upstairs and got her to tell me a story, which was about Harry Potter, who she was big on.
Downstairs, my mother had worn herself out and was slumped in an armchair, mumbling to herself. I helped her upstairs and got a glass of water for her night tablets and watched while she swallowed them and listened as she told me what a wretched and evil boy I was. I don’t know if she meant it. She could be cruel, sure enough, but I didn’t believe I was evil, not then. But in the light of recent events, maybe there’s more of that stuff in me than I thought.
*
After leaving Annie at the Falls of Snow, I followed the Hepste downstream. It took me a while to reach the spot where the river merged with the Mellte coming from the north. I’d kind of lost track of time when I heard voices further along the trail and ran into Izzy and Megan. I told them about Annie. “Jumbo found her but he’s gone.”
Izzy scowled. “He’s supposed to stay with her if she’s Smee.”
“And you should’ve,” Megan pointed out.
“I would but she was upset about Jumbo. I told her to wait while I went looking for him.”
The Dream Operator Page 8