The Traveller and Other Stories

by Stuart Neville

  “Yeah,” I say, but I’m not.

  Two hours of forced smiles and thank-yous. No school friends will come because I don’t go to school. Mum teaches me. She used to be a primary school teacher. There’s a blackboard in the front room, but it’s rarely used. Mostly, I read books. People from the education authority come round sometimes. Mum smiles for them. So do I. They go away happy.

  The only guests at my birthday party will be my parents, Aunt Laura and her latest new boyfriend, and Granny Carol.

  Granny Carol will get weepy. Aunt Laura will put an arm around her. Mum will start clearing up while they’re still eating. Dad will wait for them to leave, then he’ll excuse himself and go back to his office upstairs in the attic.

  That’s the easy part. Before that, it’ll be the photo album. I wonder how long she’ll go before she gets it out. Maybe an hour or two, if I’m lucky.

  “Can I walk Angus?” I ask.

  “Your dad walks the dog,” she says, sitting down opposite.

  “He could walk him again,” I say. “Later on. Angus wouldn’t mind.”

  “No, sweetheart. It’s too dangerous. Those roads. And you can’t go into the Folly on your own.”

  “You said I could walk him when I was old enough.”

  “Twelve isn’t old enough. What if you fell in the river?”

  I realise my mistake.

  “I couldn’t lose you again,” she says.

  “Mum,” I say, trying to undo what I’ve done.

  Too late. She’s gone.

  She stands, goes to the bookcase against the far wall. I watch as she finds the darkest spine on the shelf, lifts it out, brings it back to the table. She tightens her dressing gown around herself, sits down, opens the photo album to the first page.

  A baby, pink and blind, in a clear plastic crib, white bands on its ankles. Its head lies to the side, a puff of dark hair on its scalp.

  “Eight pounds,” she says. “You were a good weight. Healthy. You came out at two in the morning. Like a purple mole, you were. But, Christ, you screamed the place down. Me and your dad in floods.”

  She touches the photograph.

  “No medication at all. I took the pain, every bastard bit of it.”

  More pictures. Dad holding the baby. Aunt Laura and some other boyfriend, Granny Carol with tears in her eyes. Stronger and bigger before the cancer broke her.

  The baby grows, gets longer in the limbs, fatter. The eyes open, first blue, then deep green. A helpless thing, held in someone’s arms, then sitting up and smiling, pink gums. Then one tooth. Then the single photograph of the child clinging to the edge of an armchair, standing, turned to the camera, grinning with that one tooth.

  Then still and pale in a box, a white gown, flowers all around.

  Mum weeps.

  I want to leave the table. I can’t. Not now. Her tears smack the plastic that covers the photograph.

  Finally, she sniffs. Exhales. She reaches across and squeezes my arm.

  “Thank God you came back,” she says.

  They sing “Happy Birthday” in the front room. The school things, the blackboard and the desk, have been cleared away. Mum sets the cake in front of me. I blow. Twelve flames die.

  “What did you wish for?” Granny Carol asks.

  “Can’t tell you,” I say.

  Can’t. Won’t.

  Mum would slap me around the ear if I said the wish out loud. Then she would go to her bedroom and wail loud enough for me to hear through the burn and the sting.

  The cake is from Sainsbury’s. It’s not bad. The use-by date was yesterday, but it isn’t dry.

  Granny Carol has a sherry. She asks to see the photo album. Mum says not now, maybe later. Granny Carol goes quiet and faraway.

  Aunt Laura’s new boyfriend is called Trevor. He is very polite, always apologising and stepping out of people’s way. Always offering to carry things, or tidy things away, or give up his seat.

  I think he wants everyone to know how polite he is, which means he’s not really polite at all.

  The talk has gone on for an hour, and I am half asleep, when Trevor says, “I was sorry to hear about your first child . . .”

  His words trail off like someone falling. I look up, a sudden hollowness in my middle.

  Everyone is quiet for a moment, then Mum says, “Thank you. We don’t talk about it much.”

  Aunt Laura’s face is pale, her mouth a perfectly straight line.

  Trevor shifts in the hard chair. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  His apology dies in his mouth.

  Granny Carol clears her throat and says, “I’d like to see the photo album, please.”

  Mum nods. She stands, goes to the kitchen and the bookcase there, and returns with the leather-bound album in her hands. She places it in Granny Carol’s lap.

  Granny Carol takes a breath, then opens the album. She stares at the first photograph, her lips rubbing against each other.

  “Such a wee dote,” she says. “So content. Most content child I ever saw in my life. She hardly cried at all.”

  She touches the picture, just like Mum did earlier.

  She turns the stiff pages, one picture after another. She cries.

  Mum watches me.

  I say nothing.

  Aunt Laura hugs me before she leaves. She hugs me hard, like she means it. I go upstairs. Angus follows, nuzzling my heels.

  Mum and Dad argue. I hear them barking at each other from below.

  I lie on my bed, grab Dad’s iPod from the bedside locker. He hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet. It usually takes him a week or two before he comes looking for it. I push the earbuds in as far as they’ll go. I choose a Led Zeppelin album.

  They’re from the olden days, but I like them. The singer has a squeaky voice. The song is called “Black Dog.” Angus is black, apart from the white patch on his chest. He curls up at my feet.

  Melody sits on the end of the bed.

  I ignore her.

  I sing to myself, a hoarse whisper about big-legged women and their lost souls.

  Melody stares. And stares.

  “Piss off,” I say.

  She does not.

  I kick her lower back. Angus hops off the bed. She stares harder.

  I groan and pull the earbuds out.

  “What?”

  She smiles. “Happy birthday.”

  I turn over on my side, face the wall. But I still feel her there.

  “What do you want?”

  She lies down beside me, her back against mine. Her bare toes seek the gaps between my jeans and my socks. They tickle, but I don’t tell her to stop.

  “Just to say happy birthday. No need to be a pishmire about it.”

  I think about getting up and leaving the room. Maybe see if Dad will let me use his computer. Instead I say, “You’d be fourteen by now.”

  “Thirteen and a half,” Melody says. “You can’t count.”

  “Mum doesn’t really do sums.”

  “It’s called maths.”

  “Whatever. We just do reading.”

  Melody asks, “Do you wish you could go to proper school?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “The other kids would pick on me, though.”

  “They might not.”

  “They would. Definitely.”

  I had a friend once. Just for a few days, summer before last. His name was Dale. He used to walk past our house when I was playing in the front garden. One time he stopped and asked what I was doing.

  “Building a fort,” I said.

  Four chairs from the kitchen arranged in a square, and a tablecloth over the top.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  We played all day until Mum realised I’d taken the chairs. She would’ve slapped me if D
ale hadn’t been there. She asked his name. She asked who his parents were.

  “Yes, I know them,” she said, like it mattered.

  Dale came back the next day. I took him up to my bedroom. He said “Wow” when he saw the toys. There were dozens of little men, a couple of women, and some robots. And a big spaceship. They had been my dad’s. He found them in the attic when Granda Tom died and Granny Carol wanted somewhere smaller. The attic that he made an office when we took the house. I don’t remember very well, I was small. But he gave me the toys.

  I explained all this to Dale. He picked up two almost identical figures.

  “You’ve got two Boba Fetts,” he said.

  “Two what?”

  “Boba Fett,” he said. “The bounty hunter. He was in Episode Five. The Empire Strikes Back.”

  “The what?”

  “Star Wars,” he said, laughing like I’d said something crazy. “The films. You know, the movies?”

  I shook my head. Fear crept up inside me, fear that I had failed some test, that he would walk out thinking me a fool for not knowing what he was talking about.

  “You’ve not seen them?” he asked. “Seriously?”

  I shook my head again, felt my eyes go warm, something thick in my throat.

  Do. Not. Cry.

  He smiled. “Look. This is Luke Skywalker.” He picked up one figure after another, showed them to me. They looked very small in his thick fingers. “He’s a goodie. He’s a Jedi Knight. But not yet, not in this outfit. And this is Darth Vader. He’s the main baddie. But he’s kind of a goodie as well. And this is Han Solo, and Chewbacca, and these are stormtroopers, they fight for Darth Vader. And you know what this is?”

  He pointed to the spaceship. I shook my head.

  “It’s the Millennium Falcon.”

  We played for three hours. Space battles. Dale was good at the noises. Pew-pew-pew! Vvvooommm! Grraarrr!

  He said I could come round to his tomorrow to watch Star Wars. Episode IV, he said, the best one.

  I told Mum at dinner that night. I told her Dale’s house was just around the corner, number twenty-three. I asked please, could I go, please? Dad watched Mum across the table while she sat there quiet. After a while, he put his hand on hers.

  “It’s just around the corner,” he said.

  I wanted to get up from my chair and hug him.

  “You can walk him round,” Dad said. “The film’s, what, two hours? Walk him round then go back and get him.”

  I wanted to say I could go by myself, but I knew to keep my mouth shut.

  Eventually, she nodded once and said, “All right. Two hours.”

  Dad smiled at me. Mum’s hands shook.

  I woke up early the next morning, my tummy full of scratchy things. I couldn’t hold a thought in my head other than Star Wars. Dale had said it was brilliant, told me the entire story, but I didn’t care if I knew how it ended. I wanted to see it anyway. I went to the toilet so many times, Mum asked me if I was ill. She picked out my clothes for me. She took a long time about it, crying when she couldn’t find the socks she wanted me to wear.

  I told her it didn’t matter about the socks.

  “Of course it fucking matters,” she said, her voice high and cracking.

  We found them at the bottom of the laundry basket half an hour later.

  At five minutes to two, the socks still warm and damp from sitting over the radiator, Mum closed the front gate behind us. We didn’t speak as we walked to the end of our road, and turned into the next street.

  Number twenty-three stood at the far end. It looked like a nice house. A nice garden. Flowers and all. The gate didn’t have any rust on it, didn’t squeak when Mum opened it.

  The doorbell worked. I heard it chime inside. I saw the shape of a woman through the frosted glass, and Dale beside her. I saw their hands moving. I heard them whispering hard. Then Dale walking away.

  The door opened. Dale’s mum was pretty, like in television adverts. She looked at my mum, then at me.

  “Hello,” she said. Her smile looked like it didn’t belong on her face.

  Mum nudged me.

  “Is Dale in?” I asked, even though I’d seen him through the glass. “He asked me to come round. To watch Star Wars.”

  Her smile looked like it hurt. “I’m sorry, love, Dale’s not well today. Bit of a cold. Sorry.”

  Mum took my hand in hers. “It was just for a couple of hours,” she said.

  “I know,” Dale’s mum said. “But honestly, he’s got an awful dose. I wouldn’t want your lad to catch anything.”

  Mum’s hand squeezed mine tight, squishing my fingers together.

  “He was so excited,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Dale’s mum said, easing the door over. “Honestly.”

  My mum said, “You bitch.”

  Dale’s mum stopped the door a few inches from its frame, her pretty face suspended between. “Excuse me?”

  “You fucking bitch.”

  I started to walk away, but she kept hold of my hand.

  Dale’s mum said, “Look, there’s no call for that kind of language. Not on my doorstep.”

  “He’s not good enough to play with your lad. I know. He’s got a nutjob for a mother, and a failure for a father. You don’t want the likes of him around your boy. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Listen, Mrs. Chaise, I know you’ve had some problems, and I do sympathise, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to go around abusing people in their own homes. Now, I’d like you to leave.”

  I tried to pull my mum away. She stood firm.

  “You’re a fucking stuck-up cunt,” she said.

  Dale’s mum stayed quiet for a moment, her mouth open, before she said, “Get out of here now or I’ll call the police.”

  She slammed the door.

  Mum let go of my hand.

  “Please, Mum,” I said. “Let’s go. Please.”

  Mum stood there, breathing hard. Then she looked around the garden until she saw a big green ceramic flowerpot. She picked it up, grunting at the weight of it.

  “Please, Mum, don’t.”

  She threw the pot at the door. Bang. Compost and green ceramic fragments scattered. A crack in the glass.

  Mum grabbed my hand, hauled me back home.

  The police came half an hour later. A man and a woman. The woman did the talking. Small voices. Kind voices.

  No charges. Just stay away. You and the boy.

  Mum stayed drunk for a month. Dad did the cooking.

  The next time I saw Dale, he called me a fucking weirdo, said my mum was a mental hippy, and hit me so hard in the stomach that my pee was red for a whole day.

  Melody stayed away for ages. Because I was angry, she told me later. She doesn’t like me when I’m angry.

  I don’t know if she really likes me the rest of the time. She says she does, but I’m not sure. Sometimes she calls me the Walrus. Not because I’m fat. I’m not. Because of the song by the Beatles.

  I am the Walrus.

  I am he as you are me, or something like that.

  It’s on Dad’s iPod. My back to hers, I take one earbud out and hand it over. She pushes it into her ear.

  We listen to olden-days music together until it gets dark and I get hungry. By then, she’s gone, but she’ll be back tomorrow.

  Mum says she’s too tired to do school stuff today. I can go and play in my room if I want. She sleeps on the couch. Dad stays up in his office.

  He says he’s working, but I don’t hear the clatter of his keyboard when I listen at the bottom of the narrow stairs that lead up to the attic. I’m not allowed to disturb him when he’s up there. That’s the worst thing I could do. It would break his concentration.

  Dad hasn’t written a book in years. He’s started lots, bu
t not finished any. He used to talk to Mum about it. Now he just stays in his office.

  I go to Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

  The curtains are closed, and the bed isn’t made. Clothes on the floor. The room smells like sweat and warm earth. I turn on a bedside lamp, the one on Dad’s side, with all his notebooks and the scribbles I can’t read.

  I cross to the big chest of drawers. The second drawer down is open a little bit, clothes spilling out over its lip. I open the bottom drawer and smell something like old damp towels.

  There are clothes in here that haven’t been worn in years. And broken things, a hairdryer without a lead to plug it in, a razor with no batteries. An old passport. It’s Dad’s. I’ve looked at it before. It has stamps from America and Australia and other places. He used to travel a lot for his books. Now the passport’s out of date.

  What I’m looking for is at the bottom. A folder made of orange card.

  Inside there are pages from newspapers. Some of them proper famous papers, like the Sun and the Mirror, but most of them are local papers like the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter and the Ulster Gazette. The pages have turned yellow. They all have that same photograph from Mum’s album, the baby holding on to the chair, smiling. That one tooth.

  Toddler Swept Away by River

  Swollen River Claims Little Melody

  Local Child Drowned, Family Devastated

  I read one of the stories.

  An Armagh family is in shock today as it comes to terms with the drowning of toddler Melody Chaise. The mother had removed the child from her buggy to walk along the bank of the Folly Glen River, known locally as the Folly, which had swollen due to recent heavy rainfall, when Mrs. Glenda Chaise reportedly slipped and fell, losing her grip on the child’s hand.

  I read another.

  The grandmother of local toddler Melody Chaise has spoken of her family’s utter devastation at the child’s tragic drowning. Carol Mawhinney said the little girl, an only child, will be desperately missed by all who knew her. Mrs. Mawhinney said, “I don’t know how we’ll get over this. I’m so worried for her mummy and daddy. How can they survive it?”

  And another. This one has a photograph of the funeral. Dad carrying the white coffin, his face all crumpled up. Mum looking like a ghost.