The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  “Klaus is staying in Llandewi-Brefi,” said Tara.

  “Oh…” said Robin, wondering how this all added up.

  Mr Gwynne waved, but, as she turned into the road, Tara answered with barely a nod. She had the line running down her forehead that Robin had first seen in the barn at Werndunvan, and she drove fast up the hill, so that the engine bellowed and the air rushed round inside the cab, carrying straw and sawdust, baler twine and twizzling bits of wool.

  * * *

  Down at the ponds, Adam attached some sort of pump to the Fordson, and it began to run night and day, joined by pipes across the former bog, filling the troughs of the animals crowded patiently beneath the trees. Since they were rationing the water from the reservoir, every few days he brought a tank up from the pond to the house, which Tara, Robin and Martin would use to try and coax the flowers back into life, to revive the vegetables and flush the loos of their flies and their stench of bleach and urine.

  The best thing to do in this drought, so Adam said, would be to hire a small aircraft or scale a prominent hill, and see if you could make out any prehistoric earthworks among the jaundiced fields. Not that he seemed particularly convinced of this himself: day by day, the sun grew hotter, the higher farms were running out of water, the whole village was gripped by a sense of looming crisis. And Adam kept working through the long July days, from long before Robin and Martin woke up to long after they had gone to bed, the expression hard beneath the wide brim of his hat.

  * * *

  Robin, Cloud and Martin set off up the hill almost as soon as they got back from school, although Cloud had still not spoken and she looked as if she would rather not have been there at all. For rations, they had four wholemeal biscuits and a plastic bottle of milk, plus a pencil and a piece of paper to record their discoveries. To emphasise the seriousness of the mission, Robin had tied them all together with pieces of string, in case one of them fell off a precipice, and the three of them remained tied together as they climbed the gate beneath the chestnut tree, passed the tup in the following field and climbed the gate by the ruined cottage with its new roof and floors, arrows and instructions scrawled across the walls. Then one of the knots came undone and he decided that perhaps the string was unnecessary after all – at least until they had got to somewhere a bit more precipitous.

  “We’ve got a new tepee,” said Cloud finally, glancing at the boys to assess its impact. “A proper Red Indians one with a bonfire, and we all play drums and sometimes we do war dances all night until the sun comes up!”

  “Well, we’ve got a new cottage!” said Robin.

  “And we’ve nearly got a tree house!” said Martin.

  “Yeah!” said Robin. He paused. It had been some time since Adam had last mentioned it. “Adam’s going to make us a tree house soon and tree houses are much better than tepees! So there!”

  “No, they’re not!” Cloud scowled at him. Her single plait was bouncing against her bottom, her legs brown and spindly in her colourful shorts.

  “Robin?” Martin ran a few paces to catch up. “Robin? Are we walking all the way to Cold Winter?”

  “Yes, Mart,” said Robin.

  “Are we going to meet Andrew?” asked Martin.

  “Yes,” said Robin. “I promised.”

  For a few moments, they continued to walk towards the fat, green oak tree on the horizon, where the ground fell away towards Werndunvan. The milk slopped rhythmically in Robin’s rucksack. The shoots of grass were now long dead on the scar of the old track, eaten by sheep and rabbits and scorched back into the earth, while the grass to either side of them was tall and brown, with faded flowers – daisies, buttercups, dandelions, red and white clover – and the only thing that seemed to be doing well out of the drought were the thistles, which blazed white and purple among the bees and the wasps in the open air.

  “Urrgh!” Cloud stopped suddenly. She screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue. “Smelly, horrible Andrew! I don’t want to go and see him!”

  “He’s not smelly and horrible!” said Robin, angrily.

  “He’s a werewolf!” said Cloud. “That’s what Klaus says, and Klaus is nine and you’re only seven…”

  “You’re seven, too!” said Robin. “And Tara says he’s not a werewolf, and she’s much older, and, anyway, you’re just scared because you’re a girl!”

  Ahead of them, the oak tree was green against the surrounding hillside and the thick blue sky behind the leaves. It was the perfect oak shape, the trunk bulging towards the ground, the branches stretching from as high as the sheep could reach into a great ball of leaves which leant towards the east as if it was doing exercises or about to grab the old Land Rover that was mouldering in the next-door hedge, nettles sprouting through the floor and sheep in the shade beside it.

  * * *

  Beneath the oak tree, Andrew was sitting, looking upwards at the leaves, which rippled around him and rippled in shadows on the ground, so there was scarcely anything that he could see that wasn’t rippling. The leaves were beautiful, with crinkled edges, and he was thinking about those now, stroking the cushion of the little mirror in his hands, listening to the long, dry sighs of the wind – so immersed that he had almost forgotten about Robin and Martin, that they weren’t here to meet him like Robin had promised they would be.

  When a girl appeared on the stretch of earth where there had once been a track, followed by Robin and Martin, Andrew thought at first that he was imagining things. It was the same girl he’d seen on the day when all the tractors got stuck, her long hair waving behind her like a tail, and it took him some moments to remember why he was sitting here, not back at Werndunvan, by which time the three of them had practically arrived.

  “Hello, Andrew,” said Robin and Martin.

  The girl said nothing.

  “You know Cloud, don’t you, Andrew?” said Robin. “She was with us that time when all the tractors got stuck, and you and your dad came and pulled them out in the Mercedes four-wheel drive.”

  “My legs are tired,” said Martin. “Robin? Can we have our biscuits now?”

  “Where’s Di?” said Robin.

  Andrew shuffled against the mossy trunk. He glanced down the sharp incline through the gate towards Werndunvan, where the barns that weren’t in the old picture blocked the view from the front of the house, the forestry plantation encircled the pair of them and he could just make out the shapes of the dogs in the shadow near the big barn doors.

  “In the barn,” he said eventually. “She ain’t been well. Been in the sheep-dip…”

  “Why don’t you take her to the vet?” asked Robin.

  “I dunno.” Andrew shook his head.

  Robin put the rucksack on the ground beside him and scrambled up the tree, grasping the twigs that grew from the bulging trunk until he could get up into a fork and from there out onto a branch, where he sat with his legs astride, inspecting the bark in front of him. “There’s bracken up here!” he said. “There’s little ferns growing, and there’s nuts from the squirrels, and there’s woodlice everywhere!”

  After a while, the four of them pressed through the hole in the hedgerow to reach the common land of Cold Winter. It was only where the hill began to rise again, becoming broken with outcrops, shallow quarries, brambles and rowan trees, that they could see the actual ground. The bracken was a sea the height of a grown-up, waving in the wind, with the tall, thin foxgloves rising above it, bent by the weight of their bell-shaped flowers.

  “Do you want to join our gang, Andrew?” asked Robin, as they started down the narrow path. “We need a gang, or else there’ll be no one to fight the Sheenah.”

  Andrew nodded, partly because he had heard about gangs from the television, mostly because he always agreed with anything that Robin said.

  “We have to be blood brothers and things,” Robin explained. “You can’t be a gang without being blood brothers, but we can just do a promise or swap something for now, if you like, because I haven’t got a pin he
re, and you’ve got to do it properly. You can’t just use a thorn.”

  “Let’s play hunting,” said Martin, peering out between the fronds at the edge of the bracken. “We can be a team, Cloud, and we can hunt the others all the way over to the quarries!”

  Andrew was giggling as they ran through the forest – the high-pitched noise rising from his throat entirely of its own accord. For a time, Martin was chasing him, but he was able to pull away, slipping off down a sheep path where the branches made a tunnel above him, swerving and twisting, where the air was cooler and the ground was patterned with shadows. But the path emerged in a clearing, and there he saw Robin chasing Martin, laughing. So Andrew chased Cloud himself, back into the woods, where suddenly everyone had vanished, and as he ran he thought distantly of dreams in which he had run through the pine plantation with Meg and Di and countless other dogs whom he had never seen before, all of them running together through this world where the light switched roles with the darkness, and when Andrew tripped and went rolling through the tumbling bracken the grass was soft and mossy where he landed.

  Robin, Cloud and Martin were sitting in a line on a rock above the bracken as Andrew looked up again, and when Cloud saw him she rolled her eyes right back into her head until they went white all over. For a moment, Andrew felt cold in his stomach, like he felt when the other children were giggling and waving their hands in front of their noses at school. He might have turned and buried himself back into the forest if Robin hadn’t gestured to him, turning to look up the last bit of the hill that poked into the hard blue sky.

  Pulling himself to his feet, Andrew climbed over the first of the rocks, skirting one of the little quarries where the ewes would go to shelter with their lambs. He followed Robin through a thick band of brambles, listening as he told him about a special door which led into a dungeon somewhere nearby, while Cloud and Martin made their own way up the slope, all four of them aiming for the hilltop.

  Andrew was the first to arrive at the top, and he sat down to look at the view. From here, he realised, he could see all the way down to Werndunvan on one side and he could make out the back of Penllan as well, on the corner where the hillside began to turn towards the village. He had never been anywhere where he had been able to see both houses before, and he turned from one to the other, thinking as he looked at Penllan that, if he were somehow to turn back to Werndunvan in that precise instant, he wouldn’t see the house that he had left that afternoon, the ragged, colourless place where Di lay shivering in the shadows of the yard, but instead the vivid house in the old picture.

  “Our houses, look!” said Andrew excitedly, as Robin appeared a little way down the hill. “Here… Here, you see them both, look!”

  “We can use this as a look out point,” Robin agreed, taking off his rucksack and sitting down beside him. He shielded his eyes against the burning sunlight. “That way, if the Sheenah attack your house or my house, then we can see them and we’ll be in a good place to fight them, too.”

  Past Cloud and Martin, who were sitting on a big flat rock a few yards beneath them, Andrew could see the still-green sweep of the bracken on Offa’s Bank, the rowans on its side, the lessening hills and the plain of England. He could see the wall of the mountains to the south, the balers in the dry brown fields of the valleys, the waves of yellow leading off into Wales – lightening, when he looked at them in the little mirror, until there was nothing to tell them from the sky.

  “Can we have our biscuits now, Robin?” asked Martin, looking up at him.

  “Come up here!” said Robin. “Then we can all have our biscuits together!”

  “Can’t you bring them down here?” said Cloud.

  “You can see for miles from up here!” said Robin. He was staring at the rock where the two of them were sitting, patches of shrivelled plants around the edges. “You can see miles over Offa’s Bank! You might even be able to see all the way to Llanddewi-Brefi!”

  “It’s smelly up there,” said Cloud.

  “Tell you what,” said Robin, taking the mirror from Andrew’s hands and looking in it himself. He handed Andrew the one intact biscuit and put the mirror in the pocket of his shorts. “It’s Friday today, yeah? So, I’ll swap you the mirror for my rucksack until Monday morning, and I’ll bring a pin to school so we can all become blood brothers. I promise. Okay?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  INTO COLD WINTER

  It was around about lunchtime on Sunday when Adam finished work on the bottom fields, flicked away the throttle lever on the Ferguson and came striding over to the trailer where Owl was loading up the final cluster of bales. He was wearing a long white shirt which had once belonged to Tara’s father, attempting to stave off the sunshine – his hat throwing shadows across his sweat-streaked face, the fine white cotton and the intricate stitching smeared with oil and dirt.

  “Say what you like,” said Owl, settling down against one of the tyres and rolling himself a cigarette, “but this is pretty damned idyllic.” He made a clicking noise between his teeth and looked up past the yellow stubble, past the still-green hedgerows where bramble flowers and dog roses spilt between the leaves, the visible ridge of Offa’s Bank, until the sun shone straight into his face.

  Adam lit his pipe. “Well, we’ve got some hay, anyway,” he said.

  “What do you think, kids?” asked Owl, turning to look at Robin, Cloud and Martin, who hadn’t moved since he had dismantled their den of bales from around them. “You three going to be farmers when you grow up?”

  “I’m going to be a witch,” said Cloud, “and I’m going to put a spell on you and turn you into a toad!”

  Owl nodded, puffing smoke.

  “What about you, boys?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be a vet,” said Martin.

  “I think I’m going to be King of Wales,” said Robin, after a moment’s thought. “That way, I can live in Caernarvon Castle and have a trebuchet and dungeons and a whole mountain full of treasure!”

  Ever since he had reappeared, a couple of weeks earlier, Owl had hardly been asleep at all in the daytime. He had worked with Adam all the way through haymaking, becoming red and then brown, sitting on the lawn at sunset instead of sunrise, rebuilding the cottage when he had nothing else to do and, if he ever tried to stay in bed in the mornings, Robin and Martin were allowed to go and tickle his feet. Because it was always so hot, he only ever wore boots and shorts, and right across his back there had appeared a web of tattoos: foreign-looking writing, fire-covered monsters and cross-legged women floating above snow-topped mountains.

  Robin, Cloud and Martin were perched on the bales as the trailer returned up the hill – the tawny valley rising from the leaves of the wood, the earth in the gateways dusty and riven with cracks where it ought to have been muddy and rutted. Robin watched Tara on the Fordson in front of them. He watched Adam on the Ferguson a little way back down the hill, bumping and swaying through the pale grass, the baler and the bale-sledge slithering behind him, a pair of long shadows running down to the ends of his mouth, his head turning slowly to check the sheep in the shade of the hedgerows, his eyes invisible beneath the brim of his hat.

  “Last year we all went to the seaside,” said Cloud. “We went in a bus. Everyone in our house! Fifteen people! We all went to the seaside together and we stayed in a nice big house next to the beach…”

  “You’ve been to the seaside?” asked Martin.

  “Yeah,” Cloud sounded surprised. “Haven’t you?”

  “Of course we have,” said Robin. “You probably just don’t remember, Martin, because you were too young.”

  “Anyway,” said Cloud, “we all went to the seaside in Pembrokeshire. We played on the beach every day, and we went riding on ponies and everything! But then Mummy had an argument with Jason because he wouldn’t wear anything, so me and Klaus and Mummy and Daddy had to go home.”

  The trailer rolled and heaved with the lumps of the field, and Tara began to steer at an angle across the slop
e, making an arc to bring them in straight to the gate beneath the big shed.

  “How come Klaus didn’t come and stay with us, then?” asked Robin. “How come you came and Klaus didn’t?”

  “Klaus stayed at home,” Cloud explained. “He’s allowed to because he’s nine and he’s a boy, and I’m not allowed to stay at home if there’s only Judy and Jason looking after us.”

  “But how come your parents have gone away at all?” said Robin, knowing he was starting to push her. “How come they’ve gone away on holiday and they didn’t want you to come with them?”

  As the tractor slowed, Owl jumped down from the top of the stack behind them and opened the gate so that the cavalcade could lurch back up into the yard. They stopped on the enormous boulder that Robin had once persuaded himself was a meteorite, and, as he climbed down the back stay with Cloud crying behind him, he made himself think about the boulder travelling through outer space, about how different it might have looked if it had been carrying a Fordson Major, a trailer and an entire load of bales at the time.

  Tara left the tractor idling and, rubbing her hands on the back of her dungarees, she collected Martin from Owl’s hairy fingers and lowered him to the ground.

  “Cloud!” she said, as she turned back to the trailer. “Cloud, what on earth’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  “Robin—” Cloud was sobbing uncontrollably, tears streaming down her dark face. “Robin… Robin said my mummy and daddy have gone away… He said my mummy and daddy have gone away because they hate me!”

  “Robin!” Tara turned to him with such fury that he instantly began to cry as well. “Robin, is this true?” She gathered up Cloud in her arms, pools of a nasty, greyish colour underneath her eyes. “Cloud,” she said, softly. “Listen to me, okay? Robin was just being nasty, and he’s going to say sorry… Your mummy and daddy have gone away because they need a little bit of time to themselves, that’s all. They just need to sort a few things out. Grownups get like that sometimes… It’s nothing to do with you, okay? Believe me. Your mummy is my oldest friend. I know her better than anyone, and I know that she and your daddy love you and your brother, and each other, more than anything else in the whole, wide world!”