by Tom Bullough
All of this depended, of course, on whether any of them had managed to insinuate their way into the kitchen without being banished straight back out again. You could never really tell with Philip. Sometimes only the dogs got banished, sometimes it was all of them, and other times he said nothing at all, and simply sat there staring at the telly. The dogs liked to act fearless – to be the last to stop chasing a car away down the track, the nearest to sinking their teeth into its insolent foreign tyres – but the truth was that Philip had only to growl and they would be wagging pitifully. He had only to whistle for one of them, and the chosen dog would be preening itself for the rest of the day.
The kitchen had warmth, it had dryness and the promise of leftovers, but above all it had a sense of privilege. In the rare times when a neighbour had been over, the dogs would rove around the kitchen, the toilet, the lounge and the bedroom, cocking their legs on anything polluted by the smell, restoring everything to its natural order. Sometimes they would get so immersed that they would forget all about pursuing the intruder off Philip’s property, and the intruder would just drive away with nobody to remind him where he was at all.
The most coveted spot on the whole farm was the space in front of the Rayburn – rarely achieved because Andrew’s mother, Dora, was almost always standing there, the steam from her saucepans rising around her and condensing on the tattered wallpaper, with its muddy colours and strangled-looking flowers. Now and then, Andrew found it hard to tell where the Rayburn began and his mother ended. The two of them seemed to blur together, black cloth and black metal, the way that fence posts blur with the sides of trees.
The dogs didn’t pay much attention to Dora, except to ensure that they weren’t stepped on when she made one of her periodic journeys from the Rayburn to the sink. On one occasion, Vaughn had darted in front of her and had wound up with scalds all down his back. But the dogs learnt to look out for such things – like they learnt not to fall in the cesspit, not to climb onto the table and try to steal food, and not to wander off across the rotten floors and the scattered, broken glass of the abandoned rooms.
Werndunvan was a big old farmhouse, built on a ledge on the side of a hill named Cold Winter. Philip, Dora and Andrew lived in four small rooms on the downstairs floor, where Philip’s parents had lived before them, but above them and through the walls there were rooms where the windows were broken, where plaster had fallen in chunks from the walls and the ceilings and the furniture was sinking through the floors. Streams had worked their way down from the cracks and the missing slates in the roof, weaving down the corridors and the staircases, turning the hallways into deltas of lime-coloured dirt.
But there were dry rooms, too, and dry spaces even in the wet rooms, places where you could sit and play among the rubble and the mouldering upholstery. To Andrew these were places of wonder – crowded, as they were, with the wreckage of former inhabitants.
Philip had locked the door in the lounge between their side and the other, even blocked up the cracks at the edges with newspaper, but there was a door at the opposite end of the building which was always open, and Andrew could reach the catch with a stick. He would go through there often, wandering between the rooms, inspecting the pictures on the walls and the old carpets, peering into boxes or simply curled up in a corner, wrapped in a dust-heavy blanket, smelling the smells beneath the farm’s competing reeks: the sharpness of the mice and the bats in the roof, the sweetness of the alien plants in the jungle of a garden, the weight of the dampness in the stone and the wood, the essence of decay.
CHAPTER TWO
CHRISTMAS
Near the end of the winter term, Mr Gwynne, the new Infants schoolteacher, arranged a stargazing expedition on the hill beyond Offa’s Bank. Everyone in the class was invited, but in the end only three children came: Robin, Jessica, the doctor’s daughter, and Nigel, whose parents had moved to the village from Cardiff a couple of years earlier. Other parents said that they had quite enough to do already, what with the stock to feed and the nativity play coming up, and a couple of them muttered that old Mrs Crabbit had never had these crackpot ideas.
Mr Gwynne had moved to the village only that summer. He was tall and slim, with dark floppy hair that spilt onto his shoulders and little round glasses that he would turn in his hands when he was thinking. All the girls in the Juniors wished that he was teaching them instead. His family, they soon discovered, came from a town in North Wales, near a slate quarry where his father and his brother still worked. He had left to go to university in London and had lived there for several years, but his voice was still unmistakably Snowdonian – deep, soft and rolling. Indeed, he was the first person in the village actually to have spoken Welsh in over a century.
“Night eyes,” Mr Gwynne explained as he turned off the headlights, parking his car in a gateway on the left-hand side of the lane. “The sooner we get used to it, the better. Now, you’re all going to be warm enough, are you? It can get a bit nippy on these clear nights.”
Robin, Nigel and Jessica climbed carefully out onto the muddy verge, looking up at the sky, which for once was open in every direction – without a hill, a cloud or even a tree to interrupt it. Ahead of them, past the sign that welcomed you into England, the dark, flexing hills fell away beneath the thin moon, until there was only a plain where patches of orange smeared the air on the distant horizon.
“Okay,” said Mr Gwynne. “Who can see Orion?”
“I can!” said Nigel. “Up there! Look!”
“And the Milky Way!” said Jessica, not to be outdone.
“Caer Gwydion,” said Mr Gwynne. “That’s what they call the Milky Way in Welsh mythology. I don’t know if any of you remember, but Gwydion was a famous magician, the son of Dôn…”
“He turned trees into soldiers,” said Robin.
“Just so,” said Mr Gwynne, sounding pleased. “I’m glad you were listening, Robin. And he was the brother of Arianhod, whom he chased all along the Milky Way!”
The four of them climbed the gate into the nearest field and walked a few paces until the wall beside the road had shrunk back into the ground. They stood in a line, their backs to the lights and the complications of England, watching as the Milky Way fed itself into the Welsh hilltops. Robin was wearing gloves, a jumper and a thick coat, but already he was beginning to feel the cold and it was some moments before he could steady his arms against his chest and focus his binoculars – one eye after the other, as Adam had shown him.
“You’re cold, Robin,” said Mr Gwynne. “Did you not bring a scarf?”
“I think I left it in your car,” Robin admitted.
Mr Gwynne sighed and set off back towards the lane, his clean wellies crunching on the frozen grass.
“Anyone else forgotten anything?” he called over his shoulder.
“It’s not actually mine,” Robin called back, by way of a defence. “It’s Tara’s… She wanted me to bring it.”
The Milky Way ran straight above their heads, echoing the border from the faint glow of Abberton over Offa’s Bank to the rich black emptiness of the Cefns, and Robin soon began to follow it – past the arching moon, past stars that he knew, like Cygnus, the Pleiades, Castor and Pollux – until he came to a particularly bright star which was sitting on the opposite horizon.
“Is that the Dog Star?” he asked, when he heard Mr Gwynne climbing back over the clattering gate.
He lowered his binoculars and glanced towards him. It was odd but, faint through the darkness, he could have sworn that he saw his teacher press Tara’s scarf to his face.
“Whereabouts?” asked Mr Gwynne, enthusiastically.
“Over there,” said Robin. He waited until he was a bit closer, and then pointed to the north.
“Yeah,” said Mr Gwynne. “Sirius. How on earth did you wind up there, Robin?”
“I followed Caer Gwydion,” said Robin.
“Of course.” Mr Gwynne smiled and handed him the scarf, then he pointed out Sirius to the others. “And do y
ou know, Jessica, why Sirius is so bright?”
Jessica shook her head.
“Well,” said Mr Gwynne, and his voice began to rise and fall, as it always did when he was onto a subject that interested him. “For one thing it’s very, very big. Okay? It’s twice as massive as the Sun. And, for another, it’s really quite nearby. It’s only about eight and a half light years away.”
“What’s the most furthest star?” asked Jessica.
“Well,” said Mr Gwynne. “The furthest stars that anyone knows about are fifteen thousand million light years away! That’s way beyond anything we could see right now, I’m afraid, but… Let’s see. Can you all find Polaris?”
“I can!” said Nigel.
“Good, Nigel.” Mr Gwynne followed his finger. “That’s it. Dead straight above you. Well, if you look from Polaris across to the nearest part of the Milky Way, and you keep going straight, then you’ll come to a star which looks a bit smudged…”
“Is it a planet?” asked Robin.
“No. It’s a galaxy called Andromeda. It might look a bit small to us, but it is actually made up of hundreds of billions of stars!”
Robin craned backwards, the binoculars clamped to his eyes, trying not to shiver and miss the galaxy, and, while Mr Gwynne was explaining again how to find it, he suddenly came across a star that resembled a bright little cloud.
“That light,” said Mr Gwynne, quietly, a few moments later. “That light you’re looking at now set out towards us more than two million years ago! Two million years ago! That’s long before there were any human beings. Two million years ago, there were still woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. There were giant rivers of ice running all the way from here to the North Pole… Just think, you’re looking at something from all those years ago! You’re actually looking back in time!”
* * *
There were already several cars in the mangled snow of the car park when Robin, Tara and Martin arrived at the village hall for the nativity play. The village hall was quite a new building, with a shingled roof and walls of overlapping planks which shook whenever somebody slammed a door. Climbing to the ground, Robin could just make out the ranks of metal chairs through the ice-coated windows, the orange heaters hanging from the beams and the various mothers struggling with pieces of set and exotic-looking headgear, stumbling on their unfamiliar heels.
Tara draped Robin’s costume carefully over her arm and, taking Martin’s hand, led the way towards the big glass doors, her hips swaying and the flares of her trousers swinging round her ankles. Unlike most of the other mothers, Tara always managed to look graceful, whatever she wore. Other mothers would look uncomfortable in their best clothes – like they would have been far happier in overalls and wellies – but heels and sewn-on sequins would always make Tara look more like herself than ever, the same way that make-up would pronounce her eyes and lips.
Inside, a big empty space led away to the stage, where lights were turning green and yellow, blue, red and orange. Pretty much everyone in the village helped out with the school play – mothers and aunts made costumes, fathers and uncles built bulky pieces of set – and the place was swarming with old women carrying Welsh cakes, boys shouting and driving model cars along the walls, and, through the door of the canteen, Robin could see other children too, changing into their costumes among tea urns, cookers and cupboards, while their mothers made last-minute refinements with safety pins, despairing that they would ever get everything done in time.
“Hiya, Tara!” said Mary Cwmithel, who was crossing the stage beneath a donkey costume. “Alright, boys? Dad not with you?”
“Oh, you know Adam, Mary.” Tara smiled and rolled her eyes. “Always something to get finished up first!”
Robin saw Mr Gwynne almost as soon as they arrived in the canteen – sitting on a bench near the back of the room, surrounded by groups of grown-ups and children, his knees beneath a glittering backdrop, which he seemed to be trying to stitch together.
“Noswaith ddu, Mr Gwynne!” said Robin, keenly. “My costume’s got a galaxy on it!”
“Excellent, Robin!” Mr Gwynne removed his reading glasses. “And how are your lines getting on?”
“I know Robin’s lines!” said Martin.
“I bet you do, Martin!” said Mr Gwynne, shuffling aside to make room on the bench.
Tara hung up her coat and sat down.
“God, Huw,” she said, inspecting the backdrop. “What on earth happened to this?”
“Ah…” he laughed, and spread the material across her knees as well. “There’s been unrest among the angels.”
Robin took his costume carefully from its bin-liner, murmuring his lines nervously beneath his breath. The costume was a rich, deep scarlet – covered in planets and stars, comets and meteors – and it flowed most impressively behind him when he walked. These were the robes of the one Wise Man of the West: an ancient Welsh astronomer who had travelled to the Holy Land along the Milky Way, searching for clearer skies, carrying an early telescope and working on the phenomenon of moving stars.
There was only one Wise Man of the West because there were only twenty children in the whole school, and once you had accounted for Mary and Joseph, Herod, the innkeeper, angels, shepherds, cattle, sheep, both ends of the donkey and Three Wise Men of the East, there weren’t a lot of them left. In the Infants’ class there was only one other child of Robin’s age, Nigel, but he was a whole head taller, and tended to associate with the big boys in the Juniors as much as possible. Still, the two of them did share a passion for astronomy, and they would sit together during lessons, finding out from their charts what time Venus was rising, or building a giant spaceship out of cardboard and tinfoil.
“Did you see The A-Team last night?” Nigel asked Robin, as his mother made adjustments to his crown. “When Murdock jumped his car through the middle of that lorry!”
“Yeah! I loved that bit!” Robin lied. He was rarely, if ever, allowed to watch television. “It was like, kapow!” He threw up his hands and pretended to fly backwards through the air.
“And then when it exploded!” said Nigel.
Robin glanced across the room, to check that his mother wasn’t listening. But Tara had taken over work on the backdrop – deep in conversation with Mr Gwynne, their heads close together – and, even though he watched them both for several moments, resplendent in his costume, his lines churning and mingling in his head, neither of them looked back at him once.
* * *
Christmas Day was Tara’s birthday – as it had once been the birthday of Isaac Newton and Dorothy Wordsworth. It had snowed for most of the previous week and on Christmas Eve, Adam had been forced to use the new truck to get down the track to the main road, so that they could go and buy her presents in Abberton. Robin and Martin had stood waiting in the open field at the bottom of the track’s initial slope, wrapped in duffel coats and woolly hats, their gloves joined across the shoulders by pieces of string. The drifts between the hedges had been so high that the truck would vanish for seconds at a time with only the roar of its five-litre engine and the snow exploding behind it to reveal that it was in there at all.
After lunch – segregated as ever between meat and Tara’s vegan alternative – they presented Tara with handkerchiefs and a new woolly hat, then the four of them went out to the big shed that Adam had built off the edge of the old hay barns. The valley was temporarily calm, the snow settled, and the sky low and cheerless. From the barn, you could look right down into the village – its clusters of tiny stone houses divided up by white fields, the smoke rising straight from their chimneys – the bare English hills beyond them, and the Stone House on the horizon where, so Mr Gwynne said, the famous poet William Wordsworth had once been caught by a thunderstorm and been forced to spend the night.
Beside the shed door, the top of a giant rock protruded from the snowy ground – the visible part as long as the kitchen table. While the shed was being built, they had attempted to unearth it, dug down and
around it until there was an immense pit into which the rock went down and down. It was one of Robin’s earliest memories. The sides of the rock had been covered in tiny scratches, which Adam had explained were made by glaciers during the Ice Age, hundreds of thousands of years ago. But somewhere along the line Robin had begun to confuse it with a meteorite, and convinced himself that the scratches had in fact been caused by tiny meteors on its way through the asteroid belt, heading inexorably for their farm.
Just inside the door, there was a toboggan leaning against the wall, sleek and glistening with linseed oil. It had a length of rope attached in a loop to its front, and its runners were steam-curved, coated with metal and wax.
“Wow!” said Robin.
“Wow!” Martin echoed, reaching to touch it.
Tara, Robin and Martin took their seats on the sledge in order of size, and Adam attached the rope to the back of the Fordson Major tractor, warming his bare hands briefly on the chimney before he climbed onto the fertiliser sacks that cushioned the rusting seat. They slid slowly out of the yard, around the house and down the hill into their small offshoot of the valley, the dogs trotting happily in the ruts behind them.
The farm was a bowl shape set back into the larger hillside: steep fields gathered around a bog which became a sequence of ponds, surrounded by woodland, each with a small waterfall at its lower end when the water was high enough. They lurched across the frozen fields, trailed by sheep, and began to climb the slope of Cold Winter on the other side, Adam lifting the loader to put weight back onto the drive wheels.