by Tom Bullough
A shiver of alarm crossed Dora’s blank, white face, and she glanced up the hill towards the brown smear where there had once been a track to Penllan.
“No, no,” she stammered. “No, no, he won’t like… No, you can’t…”
“Okay,” said Tara. “Okay.” She looked down at Martin, then over at Robin. “That’s okay… Er…” She brushed some hair from her face. “What do you think then, Robbo? You’re big enough to stay here for an hour or so, aren’t you? Just while Martin and I go and do a bit of shopping…”
* * *
It began to rain more or less as Tara and Martin drove away, and the dogs pursued them off along the track, barking and reaching for the wheels with their claws and their teeth. Robin was wearing a coat, so he did up the buttons and put up the hood, looked at Dora and waited for something to happen. Water ran through Dora’s thin, grey-black hair, down into her grimy black dress. She gaped at the chewed-up mess of mud and grass, the concrete and stray stones of the yard, then she shivered and turned around, blinking sporadically.
“Boys,” she said. “Boys, you best come in the house, you best… You… You… Chocolate, boys! You best have some chocolate!”
She trod heavily back towards the open front door, through the frenzy of circles in the puddles, and Robin glanced at Andrew, unsure whether or not this was a trick. But Andrew hurried straight after her, his puppy gathered up in his arms, so Robin decided to do the same.
The smell in the kitchen was overwhelming: somewhere between overcooked food and dog shit, sweat and decaying flesh. Robin paused a few steps inside, holding his nose despite himself. The table, the floor, the sink, the plates and cutlery, the windows and the walls, everything was encrusted in filth. The wallpaper dripped from the steam that was spewing from half a dozen pots on the Rayburn. It blossomed with moulds of strange and nameless colours.
“Mars bar,” said Dora, retrieving a tupperware box from the top of the television, which was showing a cartoon. She removed two, replaced the lid and put the box back in its place, then she handed one to Robin and one to Andrew, and shuffled over to the Rayburn, where she set about raising and lowering the lids of the pots, poking at them with a long-handled wooden spoon.
Removing his fingers gingerly from his nostrils, Robin found that the smell was not as unbearable as he had at first thought. He climbed up onto a nearby chair, where he took the perforations of the black plastic wrapper carefully between two fingers, prising them apart to expose a corner of molten chocolate. This he took between his teeth, biting off a small chunk, which he allowed to dissolve on his tongue as he turned towards the television.
The cartoon was set in a narrow street, with walls to either side of it as tall and as featureless as cliffs. Standing on a collection of barrels and boxes, an army of red, pink, green and yellow cats were drumming on dustbins, tapping on bottles and strumming on tennis rackets – all of them wearing hats, scarves, jumpers, coats and waistcoats. But then a man who looked like one of the Sheenah, with a blue uniform and a peaked hat, came along and they all had to run away, chasing up clattering staircases and sliding down washing lines until they came to a huge abandoned barn next to a river full of tooting ships with smoke rising in puffs from their funnels. And inside the barn was a pile of treasure so big you could hardly have climbed to the top of it! There were crowns and necklaces, rubies and emeralds, and they were about to collect it all up and carry it away when a stupid little fat blue cat sneezed so hard that the entire barn fell down around them, and they had to go back to playing music instead.
* * *
Even once the music had stopped and the screen showed only a long list of names, Robin continued to grin at it, formulating things that he could say once he got back to school – distorting the story until there were tractors involved, and tanks, and the barn hadn’t just fallen down, it had been blown up by an enormous bomb with little fins on the back.
When Robin looked round him again, the first thing he noticed was that Andrew was watching him from under the peak of his cap, his jaw shivering as if he was about to say something. Di was rolling in the filth beside him, occasionally attacking his boot. Dora was still bent over the Rayburn, stirring one of the pots with a circular motion, staring into the chimney breast.
“Robin?” said Andrew, at last. He jabbed his finger at the wall behind him. “You want… You want to see, then? You… You want to see where he were?”
Robin hadn’t thought much about the little black mirror since the three of them had been spinning, although he knew at once what Andrew was talking about. The mirror intrigued him like the drawing-room at home intrigued him. Their living-room might have been all bright and airy, with toys and plants, but the drawing-room was for the grown-ups, who could do what they liked, who understood things, and the grown-ups chose the television, the thick green curtains, the room that was dark and mysterious.
Out in the yard, the shower had almost stopped now and the puddles were overflowing into one another, trickling along well-worn routes towards the cliff above the new shed. Andrew led him past a disused front gate, past a thin strip of dead weeds and brambles which had once been a lawn, around the corner of the house to a small door with moss in its cracks. It had a latch near the top, which Andrew flicked deftly with a stick that was leaning against the wall, so that the door swung open without him even having to push it.
“’Ere,” he mumbled, bending down to stroke Di, whom he left on the doorstep, scratching at a missing chunk of hair on her flank. “It’s… It’s down ’ere, it is.” The two of them were standing in an abandoned hallway with the feel of age and dampness in the air. To the left was a room containing a mouldering bed, while just in front of them was a flight of dangerous-looking stairs with bits of stone and plaster forming a kind of stream-bed all the way down it. Light was spilling between the banisters, but Andrew led the way right into a dingy passageway, past a couple of paintings and some kind of living-room full of velvet and mould-covered chairs, boxes spilling rotten clothes, bits of old curtains, books and crockery.
“Andrew?” said Robin, trying to make his voice sound as fearless as Andrew appeared. “Don’t you ever get a bit scared, coming in here on your own? Aren’t you afraid that it might be haunted?”
“Haunted?” echoed Andrew.
They had stopped at a large, panelled door, which had a handle of the type that you could reach. Through another door to the left, through a broken window, Robin could see out to the garden on the far side of the house, where trees of species that he had never seen before coiled together, sprouting dark, fleshy leaves and the buds of fat, white flowers.
“You mean, you don’t know about ghosts?”
“Ghosts?”
“Ghosts!” said Robin, trying to speak with authority, even if they were in a dark and obviously beghosted passage. “Ghosts are when… Ghosts are when people die, but they stay behind as ghosts and they haunt places. You see them all over the place! Ghosts are white and kind of see-through, and they’re very, very scary! They do horrible things! They want to kill people!”
Andrew glanced at him and, for a moment, he looked a little nervous himself, shuffling from foot to foot, one hand still buried in his pocket. But then some other idea seemed to occur to him since he began to murmur a tune from the cartoon that they’d just been watching and turned back around towards the door.
The door opened into a room so big that it might have belonged to a giant: some immense ogre who would shortly come bursting through one of the other doors and start demanding the return of his magic chicken or carrying them off to become pets of the Queen of Brobdingnag. But the room’s thick dust showed no signs of enormous feet, with or without claws, and there was light from a pair of large, dirty windows, so you could at least look out onto the yard of the regular Werndunvan.
In the exact middle of the ceiling was a vast chandelier, so impressive that it made everything else in the room look a bit mundane for a moment: a piano, a number of bits of
furniture covered with sheets, a small black fire-place, a set of shelves lined with old books, a grandfather clock with a round white face. Then Robin noticed an area of the floor which was for some reason meticulously clean, like a window through the filth, and he realised that the chandelier and the room itself were of a piece.
He crouched down to look at the pattern on the floor, following its swarming with his eyes, trying to work out how you might put together such a mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle. “’Ere!” said Andrew, his left hand moving visibly in his pocket, his right hand pointing at the floor. “’Ere, he was! D… Down ’ere!”
“What? Just lying on the floor?” asked Robin.
“Ar,” Andrew nodded. “I got… I got others, mind! I got other things!”
He went to a corner, where he moved aside a heap of ancient newspapers, revealing a large magnifying glass, a hairbrush with half of the bristles missing, a comb, a fountain pen and a pair of pince-nez without the lenses.
“Treasure!” Robin breathed. He picked up the objects one after the other, turning them over in his hands. “These could be priceless! This could be the comb of… of… Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed! You could be a missing Welsh prince, Andy, hidden away as a baby so your… your evil uncle wouldn’t find you, and this comb could be the only way your old nurse will remember who you are!”
He looked at him excitedly.
“Ar!” cried Andrew. He picked up the pince-nez. “An’… An’…”
“Yes!” said Robin. “Her glasses! That’s her glasses! And we need this magnifying glass, so we can find clues, so we can lock your evil uncle up in the barn!”
Looking up, Robin could see thrones suddenly in the sheet-covered chairs, gold in the murky colours of the wallpaper, jewels in the drops of the chandelier. “It’s a palace!” he exclaimed. “Look, it’s a real, proper palace!”
He grabbed a couple of newspapers from the heap in front of him and rolled them up as tightly as he could, handing one to Andrew and swinging his sword through the air. Through the windows, coiling plants had surrounded the house and giant ferns waved tropically in the sunshine. You could almost hear the roar of wild beasts far off into the forest, but no wild beast would have dared approach the palace of Robin and Andrew: the fairest palace that man had ever seen, many-coloured and covered in gold and precious stones. Prince Robin and Prince Andrew were the noblest and the most valiant of princes, and they had a fair dog named Diana who guarded them day and night, and together they overthrew the Sheenah, and they slew the evil uncle, and it was they who brought peace and contentment to this Island of the Mighty!
* * *
Sitting high up on the haystack, not far from the top of the bale elevator, Robin looked into the little black mirror and made a picture from the arrow-slits in the thick stone wall behind him. The slits commanded views far off into Wales – a place, in the reflection, which might have been the shadowy world of Mr Gwynne’s stories, where dragons paced among the mountains and ruins dripped from the cliffs. Turning the mirror slowly, Robin inspected hills the colour of clouds, trees the size of toys, and he began to wonder if this hayloft might come in useful at some point – as a fortress in the war against the Sheenah.
“We can build battlements,” he said thoughtfully, waving his legs off the edge of the stack. “All we have to do is stand up bales in a line.”
“The… The Sheenah!” said Andrew.
“Exactly,” said Robin. “And if they try to climb up the elevator, then we can push it over, so they all die!”
He looked past his feet down the great wall of bales, imagining his enemies as they plummeted, spinning and screaming, to smash their heads on the hard earth floor.
On the bales beside them, Di was scratching again at her bald patch. Around them, the chickens were complaining to one another, brooding on their eggs or strutting over the topmost bales. Far below them, Dora had appeared and was looking up at them with her featureless face, and if you listened very closely you could hear her low, monotonous voice:
“Boys! Come down, boys!”
Andrew had a finger in his mouth when Robin put the mirror down, and he looked at him with interest.
“Have you got a wobbly tooth?” he asked.
Andrew frowned, and glanced at his mother.
“I have,” said Robin, wobbling his own. He flicked at some hay and sent it spiralling away through the air.
Regardless of Dora, Robin felt absolutely no compulsion to do anything at all. Werndunvan was a marvellous place, so far as he could tell, and the only thing that mystified him about it all was why Tara had been so enthusiastic for him to come here in the first place, given that it was full of all the things that he wasn’t supposed to do. It seemed very clear to him now that any time he disliked anything at home, he would simply run away and come here, where he would be able to stay until his parents became nice to him again.
Such were his thoughts as the sounds of a car appeared distantly on the track, growing louder through one slit after another.
“Boys!” Dora continued. “Come down, boys!”
Tara stood with Martin in the doorway and looked from Dora, up to the two of them sitting at the edge of the hayloft, to the towering elevator that they had recently scaled with its shaky limbs and its regular knife-like blades. A frown-mark like Robin had never seen before cut between her eyebrows and up into her forehead.
“Robin, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” she shouted, her voice shrill inside the heavy stone roof. “You two boys, get down from there this instant!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
INTO THE DANGEROUS WORLD
Spring always flushed Andrew with excitement. It was the time of warmth and safety – even in the early mornings, when the shadow of Cold Winter still curved out across the valley, the sky laced with thin clouds shining in the light of the arriving sun. Across the farm, the fields were covered with dandelions in clusters and constellations. Bluebells poured through the woods, and blossom burst from the hedges. They made Andrew want to laugh, to roll in the grass, to slither on his belly and chase the fat lambs across the hillside.
Yet the spring this year had brought as much punishment as joy. Twice his father had called him to sit beside him in the car, and had driven him through the village and away along the valley to a place called Abberton, glaring through the windscreen and cursing other drivers. Here, among the milling, nameless people, he had ordered Andrew into shops, where he had bought him the red shirt with the lines that went upwards and sideways, the itchy grey trousers and the stiff brown shoes that squashed and hurt his feet. He had taken him into a shop that smelt of wax and oil, where a man in an apron had shorn the back of his head and made a straight line of hair above his eyes. For fully fifteen minutes, Andrew had sat in front of a mirror, squeezing his eyes shut against the reflection.
That morning, when his father called for him, the dogs abandoned their patch of sunlight and slunk away nervously into the barn. Philip got into the car and leant across to shove open the passenger door, so Andrew climbed up next to him. But even as they began to drive off, only Meg reappeared to watch them, her face lowered and her tail pressed between her legs.
“Where… Now where, Dad?” asked Andrew.
“School,” spat Philip.
There was a pause.
“Ain’t never been to school,” said Andrew.
“That’s right,” said Philip. “And if I had anything to do with it, you wouldn’t be fucking going now, neither. School never did me no fucking good. It won’t do you no fucking good, you mark my words.”
“Is Robin… Robin at school?” asked Andrew.
“Ar,” said Philip, looking away from him towards the long-tailed lambs racing around the fields.
The car rolled down the hill towards the village, between the hedges, past the outlying cottages and the spire of the church poking above the yew trees. They passed the pub with its dark latticed windows and its hunched white walls, and if Andrew had been wearing his j
acket he would have pulled it over his head so he didn’t have to look at it all.
“Here you are,” said Philip abruptly, as they stopped among a flurry of cars, in the long thin shadow that lay beside Offa’s Bank. “Out you get, then. Go on…” He leant across Andrew to push open the door. “Go on, boy! I ain’t got all day! Out you get!”
* * *
Andrew stood on the pavement outside the school gates, and looked around him for something familiar. His trousers itched and his shoes cut into his feet. His collar squeezed his neck so that it was hard for him to breathe, and he would have turned and run directly back over the hill again, if only he had known which way to go, if only he hadn’t been so terrified.
The gateposts were tall and spike-topped, and behind them there was a yard covered in jumbled lines of different colours, and behind that there was the red-brown building where he had once seen dozens of children, turning grey as you looked higher, then white where the roof came to a point in the pale blue sky. In the yard, a crowd of people was watching him, talking to one another. Andrew tried to look away from them, down towards his armpit, but the collar dug into his neck and his breathing became even more painful, and the only thing that he could think to do was to close his eyes and imagine that none of them were there at all.
“How long has he been here?”
When Andrew tipped his head back and sniffed at the air, he could smell the sheep and the lambs in the nearby fields. He could smell the dew on the grass, the sunlight spreading across the valley. He could even smell Werndunvan faintly – the warmth of the kitchen, the dogs, and the pots on the Rayburn – and the smell made him think about the time when there had been only Meg, the rain and the circles in the puddles, the smells of hay and damp stone. And somewhere far beneath all of these, he remembered his mother in the dingle beside the house, before her face had lost its detail, before it had started to rain, when the sunlight still filtered down between the trees.