The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  No matter how far he progressed across the room, Andrew found the same, beautiful pattern, and as he was following it, tracing the cracks with his fingernails, he came across an object beneath the dust: rectangular, bound in a kind of black skin, the size of his two hands put together. Andrew picked the object up. He polished it on the sleeve of his jacket, turning it with interest and inspecting the little gold latch on its side, the frayed corners where the skin had come away to reveal the wood beneath it.

  Fiddling with the latch, the object fell open, and, holding it up, Andrew was presented with a small, dark face, staring at him from the shadows across the room. He moved his head to one side, looking around the object, waiting for a movement to reveal where the person had gone. Yet, when he looked back at it, there was the face again, gawping at him with its wild dark hair, its mouth hanging open as if it was taunting him.

  Andrew became confused. He dropped the object and peered with swelling panic at the door where the person must have disappeared. He had heard nothing, no voice or footsteps, either of the person coming or of them going away again. But then, there were noises everywhere, once he started to listen: the hiss of his breathing, the thin bleats of lambs in the shed, the wind sucking round the walls and corners of the yard, the grinding of machinery in the bottom field. Perhaps, after all, he had simply been too immersed to notice.

  After a minute or two, Andrew became more confident that whoever it was had gone, or that perhaps he had imagined it all, and his thoughts slipped back towards the object on the floor in front of him. He picked it back up and inspected it in more detail, stroking each part with his fingers and murmuring to himself. Around the corners, the outside skin stopped almost immediately. The object had become a pair of thinner rectangles with a pair of gold hinges between them. One of these rectangles was lined in a soft, smooth material which his fingers found delicious. The other was a sheet made of some kind of glass, although unlike any glass that Andrew had ever seen. It was shiny, rounded slightly towards him, and it was black.

  Around it was a thin golden border, wrinkled and ornate, like the one around the man on the wall by the staircase.

  * * *

  “You two wait here a moment,” said Tara distractedly, opening the car door for Robin, waiting as he sat down next to Martin. “I’ve just got to have a word with Mr Gwynne, okay?”

  Robin watched as she leant against the jagged-topped wall next to the large grey playground, where Mr Gwynne was waiting for her, playing with his glasses. Beyond them, squeezed beneath the end of Offa’s Bank, the school was solid and fringed in white, with a red-brick extension poking from its side and a bell-tower sitting on the roof. Tara had one leg tucked behind the other, her hair hanging straight down the sides of her face so it was hard to see her expression, but when she turned round to check on them her eyes seemed worried and a frown line was running down her forehead.

  “Look, Robin!” said Martin, who was playing with a model crossbow that Adam had made for him. “Look! Look how far I can fire a matchstick!”

  A horrible cold feeling was trickling through Robin’s stomach at the thought that he was being talked about, and the longer he watched, the worse it became. Looking back inside the car, he noticed a neatly folded tartan blanket on the front seat, where he and Martin weren’t allowed to sit, and suddenly he had an idea.

  “I know, Mart,” he said. “Let’s make a den!”

  He grabbed the blanket and tossed the edge over the back of the grey-blue seat, the two of them pulling the rest over their heads, tucking in the corners so the only light was the reds and the browns of its pattern. It made Robin feel better almost immediately – apart from the outside world, like when they climbed inside the duvet cover.

  “Where shall we go?” he asked.

  “Wales,” said Martin, definitely.

  “Yes, but what castle?”

  “I want to see the castle on the rock!” said Martin. “Harley Castle. And I want to see some dungeons!”

  “Harlech,” Robin corrected him.

  Ever since he had borrowed Mr Gwynne’s picture book on castles, Robin had decided that he was a world-famous expert on the subject, and that Martin could ask him anything he liked about it and he would always know the answer. Most of all, he liked to talk about the castles of Wales – hung with mist and steeped in legend – but he had recently found out about Crac des Chevaliers in the Holy Land, too, and already he had drawn himself a big, colourful map, and he was working out the best way to walk there.

  “Harlech Castle is in North Wales,” Robin began. “It’s on a great big cliff near the seaside, and no one can attack us because we’ve got a drawbridge and we can pour boiling oil on them!”

  “Has it got dungeons?” asked Martin.

  “Yes,” Robin nodded, “but we’re the only ones who know where they are. No one else has ever found them!”

  “Has it got treasure?” asked Martin. “Robin? Has it? Has it got treasure?”

  In all of their stories, there had to be treasure. The two boys longed for it and looked for it everywhere – beneath the barns and at the old quarries up on Cold Winter, because clearly someone had been digging for something there and, no matter what Adam said, no one was going to go and dig up ordinary stone. Cold Winter was the perfect place to build a castle – even Mr Gwynne said that – so perhaps the whole hill was a labyrinth of vaulted passages, abandoned for centuries like the cave beneath Snowdon where Arthur and his knights were awaiting their time to return.

  There was a clunk from the car door and Tara sat down in the driver’s seat, wiggling the gearstick before she started the engine.

  “I’m not sure,” she was saying through the window. “They said they’d try and get round there next week sometime.”

  “Keep me posted, anyway,” said Mr Gwynne.

  “Try and get round where, Tara?” said Martin.

  Peeping from the side of the blanket, Robin discovered that Tara was smiling. So perhaps they hadn’t been talking about him, after all.

  “You know what, boys?” said Tara, pulling away towards the first corner where you could see Penllan isolated on the hillside. “A long, long time ago, some really quite famous people used to stay at Andrew’s house. The sister of a famous poet and all sorts… He’s an interesting man, your teacher.” She paused. “You’re a lucky boy,

  Robin. Do you know that?” Robin nodded at the mirror on the windscreen and fastened his seatbelt before she had to tell him, so she would like him even more. Then he turned his eyes to the telegraph wire rising and falling beside the car, which he often imagined travelling along with a pulley. Or maybe two, so he could swap them when he got to the poles.

  “You’ve had a good day, then?” asked Tara.

  “We learnt all about sieges,” said Robin. “We learnt how you can dig a hole under the corner of a castle, then you can put in wooden stakes to hold it up, and then you can build a great big fire in the hole so the stakes all burn and the whole corner of the castle falls down!”

  As he stopped talking, Robin had a feeling that Tara was about to broach something and he felt scared again and fell silent, watching her eyes in the reflection, which in turn were watching the road. They followed the sweep between a buttress of the hill and a ramshackle piece of woodland belonging to Bill Llanoley, the indicator ticking next to the steering wheel as they turned left onto the track, bumping over the lumps and the potholes.

  In the field to their left, lambs were streaking round the fences and hedgerows, climbing mounds and becoming monarchs, burying themselves beneath their mothers the instant anyone came too close.

  “Robbo,” said Tara, in the voice that Robin had been hoping desperately she wouldn’t use. “Do you think you can tell me about this Sheenah thing? What is it all about?” She paused, then noticed his face. “I’m not cross with you…”

  “The Sheenah’s the enemy,” said Robin, trying not to start crying.

  “Well, what do they look like?” asked T
ara. “Where do they come from?”

  Robin actually liked talking about the Sheenah a great deal, and he felt a little better. He glanced at her in the mirror, her eyes looking steadily at the track, the dingle around them an impenetrable mess of trees and dead ferns, nettles and brambles.

  “The Sheenah come from England,” he said. “The other side of Offa’s Dyke, where they cut the ears off Welshmen!”

  “They drive a Ford Granada,” added Martin, who didn’t like to be left out of things.

  “And they wear caps with peaks,” said Robin, “and they’ve got guns, but they can’t do anything because we’re going to build a trebuchet and we’ll squash them with a rock!”

  “Yeah!” said Martin.

  “Robbo,” said Tara. “I’m not telling you off, okay? I like you making up stories and everything, but there are one or two children in your class you’ve been telling about the Sheenah, and they’ve got themselves into a bit of a state about it. I know that Mr Gwynne has had to talk to you today. Debbie’s mother isn’t very happy, because Debbie has started having nightmares that these Sheenah people are coming to attack her…”

  Robin started crying, quietly, the tears tickling as they trickled down his face. He could have told Tara that the Sheenah were indeed about to come and attack Debbie, but his throat was all tight and he couldn’t make the words come out. They rolled up the last bit of the track, past the vegetable garden, past the laburnum tree which flowered yellow in the summer and Tara had told them never to touch, and came to a halt beneath the woodshed.

  “Look,” Tara turned round to face him. The handbrake ratcheted. “You’re a big boy now, Robbo, and Mr Gwynne is very pleased with you. He thinks you’re doing very well indeed. But if you’re going to tell stories, you can’t just tell them like they’re true. Okay? Because that’s a bit like lying. It upsets people, and you don’t want to go round upsetting people, do you now, eh?”

  * * *

  One good thing about wearing such a large jacket was that Andrew could put the object in his pocket and fit his hand in there as well, so he could play with it as he was wandering around the place. He loved the feeling of the two sides: the soft, furry cushioning which you could press down with your finger and feel as it rose up again, the cool, clean smoothness of the glass. At first, he had stroked the glass with his fingertips, following its curve from frame to frame, but his fingers were often sticky and more than anything he loved the feeling when the glass was clean. So now he always touched it with his fingernails, sliding them across it ceaselessly, the surface as slippery as ice.

  Andrew got such a shock when Philip appeared in the barn and took his hand that he very nearly wet himself. As with the person whose face he had seen in the big, abandoned room, he had somehow failed to hear him coming – dizzy with pleasure, immersed in the feel of the glass until the dogs, the hay, the smells and the sounds of the world had fallen clear away from him. The fact that his father was actually holding his hand only struck Andrew as he was being marched down the yard beside him, his fingers buried in the huge hard grip.

  “Hell, but she’s a machine!” Philip was saying as he dragged him round the corner at the bottom of the barn, through the gate towards the site of the new shed. “You ain’t never seen nothing like her, boy. I swear to fucking God you ain’t!”

  He stopped abruptly at the top of the new cutting, where the ground was scarred with the tooth-marks of the diggers. A JCB was working away, tidying off the edges of the new ledge, loading earth into an enormous lorry. But it was past them that Philip was looking, to the new stretch of track that looped down the hill from the yard, where an entirely new scale of machinery shook the ground around it.

  “A bulldozer, Andrew!” said Philip, his voice transported with excitement. “A bulldozer! Will you just look at her, boy!”

  Every tremor in Philip’s voice, every twitch in his hand, Andrew felt completely. He watched the bulldozer in a rapture, seeing it slice through the old field – the grass, the earth, the stones underneath it – shoving them all aside as if they were dust.

  “We’ve got to have a ride on her!” Philip went on. “Think about it, boy! We could change the whole farm around, we could! Make everything just exactly how we want it!”

  While the two of them were gazing from the muddy cliff top – still holding hands, dressed as ever in the same flat caps, the same threadbare jackets, the same muddy boots that Andrew might one day swell to occupy – a car appeared on the track to the left, weaving around the holes, windscreen wipers whirring against the spitting rain and the fat black clouds. Neither of them noticed it until it stopped at the last gate, and the driver got out and began to walk towards them.

  He was a tall man with a beard and long hair tied up like a woman’s on the back of his head. As he approached, he was looking at Andrew, not at his father, not at the bulldozer working to his left, and suddenly Andrew was confused again when moments earlier everything had been clean and beautiful.

  “Good… morning,” said the man, glancing at his wrist. He smiled. “Mr Tolland? And, you’re Andrew, right?”

  Philip dropped Andrew’s hand and advanced a few paces. He had a way of holding his arms out slightly to either side of him when he was getting angry, and, looking at the man, Andrew felt the same, defiant anger growing in himself. For once, rather than shrinking away, he took a couple of paces forward as well, watching the man, his head twisted slightly to one side.

  “I’m from the soc—” said the man.

  “I don’t care where you’re from!” barked Philip. “Get the fuck out of my yard!”

  “I’m sorry,” said the man. “You don’t under—”

  “Oh, I understand you right enough! Get the fuck out of my yard! Go on, fuck off!”

  The man hesitated, glancing behind him at his car.

  “Fuck off!” Philip repeated, advancing another step.

  “Fuck off!” shouted Andrew.

  The man turned without another word and hurried back towards the gate. Andrew shook with excitement. Philip turned and stared down at him with an expression of astonishment, becoming delight – the yellowed teeth exposed in his mouth and the lines bunched up around his eyes.

  “What did you just say, boy?” he asked.

  Andrew became crushed with fear and embarrassment. Whatever mood had just possessed him had deserted him just as quickly, and all that he could think of was the quiet sweet smells of the hay in the barn, the smoothness of the glass, the warmth of the dogs.

  “Go on, Andy,” said Philip. “What did you just say?”

  “Fuck off,” squeaked Andrew, one hand kneading the cushioning in his pocket, his shoulders crumpled, his eyes on the puddles.

  As they went down the new track to see the bulldozer, Andrew was riding on Philip’s shoulders. He didn’t know what had just happened, how he had got there, what any of it meant at all. Far down below on the ground, he could see Meg trailing along behind them, Vaughn and the other dogs joining her as they returned from chasing the man away along the track. The rain had stopped now, and strands of sunlight were moving over the great, dark hills across the valley.

  * * *

  Over Friday afternoon and Friday night, the roaring became gradually louder, until by Saturday morning – caught by the wind that swirled over the hill – it was all but deafening. Robin was running down the yard as it resumed, tearing through the air and water that funnelled through the space between the barns, hitting him in a wave which almost carried him upwards into the air, as it did in his dreams, when he soared out over the valley, catching the updraught from Offa’s Bank like the buzzards, sliding back into Wales, above the hills.

  Robin loved running in the wind and the rain so much that he even had a uniform for the purpose. For a time, he had worn a hat – an old flat cap of his father’s – but this had kept slipping down over his eyes, or blowing off altogether, so now he had reduced things to a favourite jumper with purple zigzags, a long black mackintosh that ha
d once belonged to Stuart, John the Glyn’s son, and a stopped watch which he’d found in a trunk in the attic. It was crucial that everything felt right when you were running in the wind and the rain: any compromise, anything to irritate or distract you, and the point of the whole exercise was lost.

  The roaring started just as Robin was returning up the yard, a lightness in his limbs and the air beginning to swell beneath him. He paused among the weeds, beneath the brick face of the workshop, and listened a moment. The noise was like thunder, shaking the ground. It was as if some monstrous tractor had come to life on the hill and was taking its revenge on humanity.

  Robin turned and ran up the path behind the house, past a farm cat lying on the wall with half-closed eyes, the daffodils jostling on the bank opposite the woodshed. He ran up the track beneath the small, vivid leaves of the chestnut, jumped the radiator serving as a drainage grille, climbed the gate and was halfway across the following field before it occurred to him that perhaps this really was the noise of some kind of monster, or the terrible Sheenah, and, even if it wasn’t, then he ought at least to be careful. He slowed to a walk and peered at the gate in front of him, where he could see the corner of the ruined cottage on the boundary, the cottage’s three little damson trees and the beginnings of the old track that ran over the hilltop to Werndunvan: a groove through the field, rutted and grass-covered, lined with ancient, budding hawthorns.

  Robin hated change. He had hated it when the old black barn was demolished to make way for the new shed, when the little red combine harvester was sent away on the back of a lorry, when he and Martin had been forced to move bedrooms because Adam had wanted to rebuild one of the walls – even if there had been some kind of wattle and daub behind the plasterboard of the exact same kind used by peasants in the Middle Ages.