by Tom Bullough
He stopped at the boundary with Werndunvan – the top of the longest uninterrupted slope on the farm, where an audience of sheep had converged noisily to meet them. For the most part, the boundary fence ran along the crest of the hill, although one of Werndunvan’s fields did spill over onto their side – cut in half by an old track lined with hawthorns, the link between the two farms – meeting their own land only a hundred yards from the back of the house, where the ruins of a tiny cottage were pressed against the hedgerow.
“No!” Tara insisted, shaking her head and laughing. “Birthday privilege! Nothing is going to get me sliding down that hill today… I’m thirty-one, for God’s sake! I’m much too old!”
“Ta-ra!” Robin and Martin chorused, but she leant obdurately back against a fence post, and looked away at Offa’s Bank as if she’d suddenly seen something there of terrific importance.
“Okay,” said Adam. He sat down on the toboggan behind the boys and locked his arms round their shoulders, his breath warm and rich-smelling, making clouds between them. “Here’s what you do, okay? If you want to go left, then you dig in your left boot, and if you want to go right, then you dig in your right boot… Got it?”
The snow flew up so fast that Robin could barely see. The dogs were barking and spinning through the snow beside them. The world was passing at a horrendous speed, the hedge at the bottom accelerating towards them. For a moment he remembered asteroids, the excitement rising in a wave in his chest till he thought that they might burn up. Then they hit a lump of some kind and all three of them were rolling over together, whooping and screaming, the dogs hovering beside them now, unsure if this was a game or a terrible accident.
Face-down in the snow, Robin was laughing so hard he could scarcely breathe. Once or twice he tried to roll over, but he only managed to move again when he heard Adam cackling and a snowball burst on the back of his head. At once, he scrambled back to his feet and launched himself towards him, wrapping his arms round his waist while Martin grabbed one of his legs, trying to sweep it out from underneath him. Adam stumbled, waving his arms as if they really were going to be able to knock him over, but then he swept them squirming onto his shoulder and set off back towards the toboggan.
“Come on!” he said. “Let’s have another go!”
“Yeah!” said Robin.
“Another go!” said Martin.
He dropped them back in a heap on the toboggan and, frowning slightly at the sound of a tractor, wrapped the string round his hand.
The sound of the tractor grew steadily as Adam dragged the two boys back up the hill, and, by the time they reached the top, there was a tatty red Massey Ferguson on the far side of the fence, all four of the Werndunvan dogs sniffing through the wire at the two sleeker dogs from Penllan, while the sheep of both farms watched from a wary distance. Philip Tolland was pacing out a circle in his field, his eyes pinned to the ground, muttering something incomprehensible to Tara.
“Adam,” he nodded, pausing and looking up.
“Philip,” said Adam, dropping the string of the toboggan, adopting the Radnorshire slur that he always used with other farmers.
Philip nodded a few times, and adjusted his cap. He wore the same clothes, irrespective of the season – a threadbare jacket over a brown sleeveless jumper, grubby black braces holding up his trousers – and his smell was noxious even at several paces.
“What you got there, boys?” he asked.
“It’s a toboggan,” Robin murmured, skidding his boot in the snow. “Adam made it for us.”
“Beauty, innee!” said Philip.
Behind one of the tyres of the Massey Ferguson, Robin noticed a slight movement: a small dirty face peered out and vanished again, eyes gaping, with a flat cap, a worn old jacket with the sleeves cut short, coming down nearly as far as his knees.
“Hello, Andrew!” said Tara.
“Tara?” said Martin, rubbing his head against her thigh. “Tara, I want another go on the ’boggan!”
“Hang on a minute…” Tara’s accent never changed a bit, under any circumstances. “Aren’t you going to say Happy Christmas to Philip and Andrew?”
“Happy Christmas, Philip!” said Martin, still half-concealed behind her. “Happy Christmas, Andrew!”
“Happy Christmas!” said Robin a moment later, staring at the pair of enormous boots beneath the tractor.
“And you will send my best to Dora from us, won’t you, Philip?” said Tara.
“Right you are,” said Philip.
“Please, Tara!” said Martin.
“Well, why not, then?” she agreed, crouching behind Robin and Martin as they climbed back into their places, looping the string over their heads. “So long as we miss that molehill!”
* * *
“How old is Andrew?” asked Robin that evening, once their mother had finished reading to them.
He and Martin were sitting on the arms of an armchair, to either side of her, the hoods pulled up on their green and red dressing-gowns. The living-room was lighter than the drawing-room, with two sets of windows instead of one, fragrant plants on the windowsills, toys, tapes, a telephone and other signs of livingness scattered about the place. The book that Tara had been reading from lay open on her lap – an illustration showed a thin, bedraggled knight in rusty armour clambering from a ditch with his broken lance in one hand.
“Andrew must be almost seven,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “He’s just a few months younger than you, Robin.”
“I’m four,” protested Martin.
“You’re an idiot,” said Robin.
“No, I’m not!”
Unusually, Tara paid no attention to their squabbling, stroking her chin with her finger, and instead she seemed to be inspecting the wall across the room. In the hall, Adam was picking out a few chords on the piano – a song by John Lennon, who had recently died – and the smell of his pipe tobacco wafted through the intervening door.
“Why doesn’t Andrew go to school, then?” asked Robin.
“Why don’t I go to school?” said Martin. “It’s not fair!”
“You will go to school soon, Mart.” Tara put a hand on his hair. “And Andrew ought to go to school. I’m sure that he’ll go there soon enough.”
There was a series of high, rippling notes on the piano, then the clack of the lid, and a moment later Adam’s head appeared around the doorframe, the pipe in his mouth and his hair standing upright at the front.
“Good story?” he asked.
“There was a knight,” said Martin. “And he was riding on his horse, and he went riding right into a branch of a tree and he fell off and he landed in the ditch!”
“Was he okay?” asked Adam, with concern.
“Yes,” said Robin. “But his armour was all bent and then his horse went riding off without him!”
“Well!” said Adam, lifting his eyebrows. “And do you think it’s your bedtime now, or do you think we ought to go and watch the telly for a few minutes?”
Robin stared at him. Then he turned to Tara to check that this wasn’t some kind of joke.
“Oh, go on, then,” she said, closing the book. “Seeing as it’s Christmas. But only for a bit. Then you are both coming upstairs for a bath.”
The two boys scurried through the hall into the drawing-room and Robin jumped over the back of the sofa, rolling on top of the cushions. Going to the corner, Adam unlocked the cupboard and fiddled with the dial on the television until the air was filled with strange, high noises.
A series of white dots moved across the black-and-white screen, then a tall dark man in a suit and a bowler hat came striding into a circle, turned and fired a gun straight towards them. A moment later, there were the shapes of dancing women, rising strings and the twang of an electric guitar, and, curled next to Adam, who for once smelt of whisky and tobacco instead of sheep, Robin watched almost without breathing – jumping when a man got shot in the back, and when a car came screeching from a shadowy side-street and carried t
he murderers away.
Across the room, Tara sat in the armchair near the woodburner, writing in her diary, as she did every night. From time to time, she looked over at the three of them – Adam jiggling his legs when things got exciting, Martin perched on his lap, Robin goggling from the cushions and the folds of his dressing-gown – and she watched for a few moments before she returned her attention to the page.
Later, when Tara had dozed off, the tall dark man was in a jungle full of waterfalls with a beautiful blonde woman in a white bikini, and when the woman declared that there was a real, fire-breathing dragon nearby Robin thought that nothing in the world could have got any better. He loved dragons, and especially the battling red and white dragons that Mr Gwynne had told them about at school, that King Lludd had captured by digging a hole in the precise centre of Britain and lowering in a cauldron of mead to make them drowsy.
King Lludd had moved them to Snowdonia, of course, where he’d buried them in a kistvaen, and where, five hundred years later, the evil King Vortigern had tried to build a tower, which invariably fell down during the night. It was the boy Merlin who had revealed the truth, digging beneath the tower to uncover the dragons who, by night, were fighting each other still: the cowardly white dragon of the Saxon invaders and the brave red dragon of the Celts.
* * *
Beneath the kitchen table at Werndunvan, Andrew and Meg were playing with a ball that had materialised from somewhere earlier that evening: red, pink and white, carved with the smiling face of an old man with a beard. The two of them fought for it, wrestling and feigning anger, occasionally darting out across the floor to catch it before they darted back behind the blue plastic curtains of the tablecloth, where you could pretty well believe that you were invisible, where no one else could possibly ever know that you were there.
Outside of the tablecloth, a couple of the dogs were dozing among the scattered chairs, gnawed bones and bits of shredded newspaper that covered the floor – as near to the Rayburn as possible without getting under Dora’s unpredictable feet. As usual, she was in the coveted spot, rocking gently over the bar, the front of her black dress lifted slightly by her stomach, her thin dark hair tangled with grey, cut vaguely to her shoulders. Four or five plumes of steam were rising around her. The droplets that formed on the ceiling converged into drops, which hung more and more heavily until they splashed back down to the floor in splotches of cleanliness.
Outside of the kitchen, the night was clear and far below zero. The stars seemed hardly higher than the chimneys, shining from the fat waves of snow spread across the hills, while the smudges of woodland looked more like holes in the earth than anything substantial. Only the one window of the house was alight – small, dirty and all but buried in the hillside. The front gate seemed open in welcome, not because its hinges were snapped and the earth and grass had moulded themselves around its lower bars. A foot of snow hid the broken slates and the corrugated iron that clung to the roof. The glass in the windows shone in independent constellations.
With a rush of freezing air, Philip reappeared with Vaughn in the kitchen door, kicking off the snow on the doorstep and his boots on the lino, padding across the floor in poorly darned socks till he reached the shelf where he kept his GL cider. Taking one of the brown litre bottles and the glass that he always used, he sat down at the table, pushed his feet towards the Rayburn, tipped back his cap on his head and filled himself a pipe.
On the television, James Bond had finally been trapped, his sidekick killed and the dragon revealed as a tank with a flame-thrower on the front – not that Andrew, Philip or Dora was paying it much attention.
“Buggerin’ hell, but it’s cold!” said Philip contentedly, through the smoke. “What’s for tea, missus?”
Dora’s rocking steadied a little and she began to shuffle the pans around on the hotplates.
“Lamb,” she muttered, stirring something furiously.
Vaughn cocked his leg against the sideboard and Philip swore at him, inspecting the couple of cards they’d received from the neighbours: the usual mix-up of reindeer with fluorescent noses, mistletoe and small blond children with wings. Naturally, they hadn’t sent any cards themselves. Under the table, Andrew and Meg remained motionless, the ball still on the floor behind them, Philip’s face discernible through the crack in the tablecloth that followed the crease on the corner.
“I’m going to build a fucking good shed, I am,” remarked Philip, his eyes on Ursula Andress while Dora stumped across the room with a saucepan, steam billowing out behind her. “We need a shed and that’s just the bloody place for him. On the flat behind the barn, there! Perfect!”
Dora returned to the Rayburn with a leg of lamb and poured sauce onto it from a second pan before she deposited it on the table. The meat had been boiled till it had mostly come loose from the bone. The sauce, on inspection, was custard. Philip clasped his fork and moved several large lumps to his mouth. Then he drained his glass and filled it back up again.
Leaning back in his chair, he lifted up the edge of the tablecloth and peered beneath it, frowning.
“You under there, boy?” he said. Then, seeing that he was, he removed a piece of the lamb with his fingers, dunked it in the custard and tossed it down to him.
“Here you are, girl,” he told Meg, as he threw her down a piece of her own.
CHAPTER THREE
A NEW FOCUS
In February, the snow turned to rain, dissolving the ice on the grass of the open fields and filling the streams again so the intricate ice constructions that spanned the banks or stretched between rocks were smashed and sucked away. The rain ate into the snowdrifts in the valleys, driving them back into the hills and shaded places, until by the end of the month the only snow left was in the quarries on Cold Winter where the sheep sheltered, and in the gritty remains of an immense heap that Adam had built behind the house with the Fordson Major. This – to Robin, at least – came finally to resemble Criccieth Castle, which he had learnt about at school: the great thirteenth-century stronghold of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, the famous towers of its gatehouse jutting on its headland into the clear blue water of Tremadoc Bay.
* * *
At Werndunvan, a week or two before lambing, Meg gave birth to four puppies in the loose hay beneath the haystack – squirming and squeaking, swatting one another with their frog-like legs and dragging themselves blindly towards her leaking teats. Suddenly, the world had a new focus. Vaughn paced around them, eyeing the nest, the balls of black-and-white fluff, sniffing at the raw, new smell and not at all sure what to make of it. Occasionally, when the puppies were asleep, Meg stretched and wandered out into the rain, her teats flopping beneath her. But she never went further than the edges of the yard, never pursued a departing car, ignored the postman as he deposited the letters in the box on the gatepost.
It wasn’t so much that Meg’s character had changed, more that she seemed to be operating under instructions from somewhere else. The instructions told her to eat the gore in the hay behind her, to lie on her side, to lick these little creatures clean as she licked herself, to attempt to keep them warm. Initially, she had been just as surprised by it all as Andrew was, but soon enough it was as normal to her as anything else and the look of astonishment faded from her face.
The nest was in a corner against the draughty back wall of the barn, and the wind sang as it came through the holes. Andrew sat beside her for much of the first day, watching her, watching the reactions of the other dogs, until, as night began to come on and his eyes peered deeper into the darkness, he felt instructions of his own rising up in him and lay down with his back against the wall, sheltering the puppies from the rain running in between the weatherboards, wrapping himself firmly in the hay.
Peculiar thoughts came to him sometimes, whilst he was lying there, stroking Meg’s throat, talking in whines or singing her tunes from the telly. Instead of things that were, he’d think of things that could be. He’d look at the puppies, or smell them if it was
night-time – their raw smell thickening with shit and piss, milk and saliva – and then he’d think about an animal who might come to hurt them: its teeth, its claws, its eyes yellow with cruel thoughts. But, instead of simply feeling fear, the back of his head would start to prickle, his lips would twitch and pull away from his teeth. He would even try to wish this animal into existence, just so he could destroy it, just so he could tear it to shreds in their defence.
* * *
The morning after the Frickers arrived, the entire house at Penllan smelt of old cigarette smoke, and the kitchen table was covered in empty wine bottles, scrunched-up cigarette packets, beer cans and ashtrays which had flooded in every direction. A series of big muddy footprints trailed across the red tile floor from the boot-passage, circled among the scattered chairs and headed back out again, and on the sideboard there was a funny little man whose matchstick legs were buried in a dollop of wax, his bright-orange face grinning from a fat cork body.
“Who made the little man, Tara?” asked Robin.
“Can I play with him, Tara?” said Martin. “Tara!”
But Tara said nothing as she brought them their wheat flakes – the two of them perched side by side on the bench, beginning to wonder what had happened – and she returned to the washing-up in such a way that the sink, the plates and the water might all have evaporated and she would probably have gone on making all of the same movements irrespective. She was wearing a strange, long, hairy coat that Robin had never seen before and staring out of the window at the ridge of Cold Winter above the bare, brown larch wood, where the two boys would sometimes point out a dinosaur with a long neck, nodding continually, although Tara had always seemed unable to see it.