The Blue Tent

by Richard Gwyn

  It is the third evening since I went inside the tent. Life at Llys Rhosyn has again settled into a kind of routine, with O’Hallaran and Alice working in the garden or the greenhouse during the day, Gabrielle busying herself in the kitchen or stretched out on the sofa in the sitting room, reading, and me toiling away at my desk in the library for hours on end, engaged in lacklustre, and increasingly disenchanted ‘literary research’, as I call it. I am waiting for something to happen following my fourth visit to the tent, because something always does happen but thus far, after more than forty-eight hours, there have been no new developments. Compare that with the fact that Alice showed up within half an hour of my first going inside the tent, and O’Hallaran appeared almost immediately after I ventured in the second time. With Gabrielle, we only had to wait a matter of minutes. The lapse between my entering the tent and someone turning up at the house has been diminishing, not growing. So this is an anomaly. Maybe the tent needs time to make up its mind. Maybe it has decided that this is the total sum of persons it has at its disposal – all three of them having acquired tents (or a tent, at least) from Aunt Megan. Maybe the tent has had its say and this is what it is going to be like from now on, with myself and Alice as friends and sparring partners, my relationship with Gabrielle shrouded in ambiguity and – on my part, at least – a hearty dose of lust; Alice and Gabrielle as room-mates, and Gabrielle and O’Hallaran polite and outwardly friendly, but still mutually suspicious of each other. A pretty standard kind of set-up within a dysfunctional family, no? The dog, Keto, has made himself very much a part of the place, and is the only member of the household unaffected by any of the fluctuating sympathies between the others in our little community.

  I have taken to spending more time with O’Hallaran. We go walking in the hills or else for excursions down the river, fishing (with earthworms) after O’Hallaran discovered a couple of old rods in the garage and gave them a rub-down. I recognised one of the rods, having used it a quarter of a century ago as an adolescent fly fisher. For a week, every morning, we collect bait from the compost heap at the edge of the vegetable garden and make our way down to the bend in the stream at the bottom of Morgan’s field. O’Hallaran insists on showing me how to thread the wriggling worms onto the hook and while we fish, we chat, and he tells me about his life as a vagabond.

  He tells me that during his travels he would sometimes find work as a gardener, his preferred occupation, and this necessitated travelling with some essential tools, which were occasionally confiscated by over-zealous customs officers, or policemen, who considered the tools of his trade as potentially lethal weapons. These he would replace on an ad hoc basis. He once worked as a gardener, he tells me, at a castle near Bratislava that had belonged to the Countess Elizabeth Báthory who, in the sixteenth century, was accused of the murder of six hundred and fifty virgins, in whose blood she liked to bathe. The Countess was found guilty, but because of her aristocratic status (she was cousin to the Prince of Transylvania) could not be sentenced to death, and was instead confined to one of her castles, under house arrest, as it were, although accompanied by a staff of many servants. The castle chosen was the one near Bratislava, where O’Hallaran worked as a gardener. He said he had seen the Countess – or her ghost – one evening, standing on the battlements, after the tourists had left, that it could only have been her, could only have been the Countess Báthory, he was certain of it, staring out over the wide Danube. There she stood, claimed O’Hallaran, majestic on the ramparts, oblivious to the passage of centuries, her cheeks flushed with fresh virginal blood, as she howled for her own lost youth.

  He could spin a yarn, could O’Hallaran, with his full head of hair, his rosy cheeks, his red nose and his bullshit. To the outsider, at least, our situation might have appeared quite cosy: two male friends, who go out fishing of a morning and exchange travellers’ tales; two lifelong female friends; and linking the various pairings of this quartet and forming, at least to my mind, the most meaningful bond, were myself and Alice, represented (as I imagined at times) by the king and queen carved into the fireplace at the heart of Llys Rhosyn.

  My last visit to the blue tent began to recede in significance and perhaps I was negligent, certainly I missed the warning signs (but we shall come to that), perhaps I even came to enjoy the relative stability of the new domestic arrangement – but the tent, I discovered, had not forgotten my most recent visit, and nor did it withhold from me for much longer what I had, in my ignorance, called forth from it.

  The newcomer’s presence was announced to us without anything ever being seen; by absence. More specifically, by the disappearance of food from the kitchen table and then later, from the refrigerator. I have no idea how long the visitor had been in residence. Perhaps, like Gabrielle and O’Hallaran, the visitor came among us immediately after I left the tent on the last occasion, when I was awakened by O’Hallaran in the middle of my bad red dream, as I began to think of it. The bad red dream stood out against the others; the good blue dream that presaged the arrival of Alice, the rustic green dream that heralded O’Hallaran, and the yellow or golden dream that presaged the coming of Gabrielle. But I am confusing myself with all this talk of colours; I do not even know if these were the true colours of the dreams or visions, or whether I have attributed them in hindsight. But of all the visits I paid to the blue tent, the fourth was the most dramatic and upsetting, and it affected me more powerfully than all of the other visits combined.

  I’m not sure if I was the first to notice food disappearing, but I was the first to follow it up. It was a balmy evening, and we were eating outside. And it was not the fox that stole the food this time. The fox would not have run away, not when there was more food available on the other plates; he would have hung around for second helpings. I was clearing the table, after our meal. The others had gone in. I had taken most of the plates inside, and the cutlery, but I had left my own plate outside, because I was not hungry that evening, and had left most of the meal, a pasta dish that Gabrielle had cooked. Delicious, or it would normally have been delicious, I am sure, but I had no appetite. I also left the salt and pepper on the table. That was how I noticed. I returned from the kitchen to pick up the last remaining plate, my own, and the pepper pot and salt cellar. In fact, I was intending to transfer my uneaten pasta onto an old tin dish, on which we left food for the fox, but when I returned from the kitchen to retrieve it, the food was gone. Our visitor hadn’t even waited for me to put the food in the fox’s bowl. They had run off with my half-portion of pasta, and the salt cellar.

  There was a faint breeze moving the leaves, and dusk was darkening the woods. I felt I was being watched, precisely as I had the first time I emerged from the tent, when I set off up the trail through the woods, and looked down and saw Alice (who I did not know was Alice) walking down the drive, a bouquet of wild flowers in her hand. That feeling that you are somehow prey, or else the subject of another’s gaze. I looked up at the woods but could see nothing. The crows were quiet. I don’t know about the buzzard. I hadn’t seen the buzzard for a month or so. I hadn’t seen the buzzard since that day when I watched it being attacked by crows, while sitting at my desk in the library, looking out through the big latticed window.

  And then, when I realised the pasta was missing, and the salt, I thought back, and realised that Alice had mentioned only the day before about leaving some toast on her plate at breakfast, turning her back to put more coffee on, and when she returned to her place, the toast being gone. It was a sunny morning, and the back door was open. Yes, the back door was open and her toast went missing. Someone might have snuck in quickly, grabbed the toast and run off through the open door. Someone with hands, rather than paws. Someone who was watching from outside, while hidden, from behind the half-open door, or peering through the crack between the hinges, waiting for their moment.

  Someone was stealing our food. Someone was stealing our salt. And it was not the fox.

  29

  I look around carefully. T
he crows, as I have mentioned, are silent, and the songs of the other birds are muted, an unusual state of affairs on an early summer’s evening. I, of course, with the ridiculous sensitivity to such things brought on by my maddening insomnia, immediately begin to read meaning into this, but it frequently happens that there is a lull in birdsong on a June evening. This is a fact.

  I wonder where the thief could have gone. I have heard nothing – although of course I was inside the kitchen when the theft took place, and O’Hallaran and Alice are washing and drying the dishes, that is the arrangement because Gabrielle has done the cooking, and she is curled up in the single armchair in the kitchen, reading a sports magazine. So I hear nothing, only the background buzz of their conversation as Alice and O’Hallaran stand by the sink, chatting as they always do. And I don’t say anything to the others about the disappeared food at this point, instead returning outside on my own, feeling slightly exhilarated by the mystery.

  For a few moments I enjoy standing there on the patio outside the library, listening to the absence of birdsong. I wonder about the fox. I half expect to see him standing at the edge of the woods, his snout quivering in the air and tail erect, trying to discern if there is any supper for him tonight. But perhaps the fox knows better. Perhaps Foxy knows he has a competitor and is not going to show. Animals know these things.

  I begin to pace towards the vegetable garden. If the thief has been watching me clear the table, then he (or she, or it) will have had to calculate how much time they need to steal the food and hurry back to safety before I return outside to collect the remaining items and potentially catch them in the act. They will have chosen the quickest route back to the nearest hiding place, and that would mean sprinting to the vegetable garden where the runner beans have grown tall, or the greenhouse, where the tomato and ganja plants provide ample cover. So there I go, taking my time, and I search for any traces, any tracks on the ground, but can find none, or else am not observant enough to spot any. I stand in the greenhouse, inhaling the rich perfume of tomatoes and cannabis sativa, before stepping outside and wondering where to search next.

  The path in front of me leads directly up to the woodshed, where O’Hallaran hid after being ousted from the tent. It seems an unlikely hiding place for someone who needs to be on the constant look-out, but what do I know? I follow the track towards the shed.

  My first impression, on stepping inside, even with the door ajar, is the darkness of the place. It is hard tomake things out. I push the door shut behind me. My eyes take a while to become accustomed to the dark, but I notice a thin shaft of light, a narrow luminous beam filled with motes of dust that traverses the shed in a straight line from the door, and turning back I see a bright aperture in the door itself. A hole has been bored into the wood, a spy-hole, an inch in diameter, and I am sure it was not there before, when I visited the shed with Alice, following Gabrielle’s assault on O’Hallaran. Someone must has drilled this hole very recently, but with what?

  I pick up one of the heavier logs and wedge it against the door, forcing it wide open, to ensure the greatest possible amount of light comes in. This gives me a better overview. On one side, to my right, stands the old-fashioned lawn-mower, a petrol-run machine, which once, last autumn, I had attempted to start, but gave up and called in a proper gardener, or so-called landscaper, who used his own buggy-type mower and spent an entire day around the grounds, charging me so much I never asked him back. There are also shovels, rakes, two wheelbarrows, an assortment of buckets, a few items whose purpose I do not recognise, and some sheets of tarpaulin. Lying on top of the tarpaulin is an old-fashioned hand drill, a so-called brace and bit, clearly the tool used to make a spy-hole in the door. A few shavings of wood around the base of the door frame complete the evidence. The shed is large, by the standard of sheds, and the supply of logs seemingly inexhaustible. Rows of them stretch back towards the end of the structure. And then I notice, towards the left-hand side, a gap in the stack of wood, where a section has been removed and the missing logs lie scattered nearby. This opening is too small to accommodate an adult.

  Lowering myself onto my haunches, I examine the space, which forms the opening of a tunnel. The distance to the wall is six feet at most, and at the end of the tunnel, staring at me with big eyes, barefoot and shivering, is a child.

  When I say a child – although it takes me a few seconds to discern this in the dusk – I mean a boy: at least, this is my first impression. He has long dirty hair, light brown in colour and falling over the eyes, although parting naturally in the centre. Then I am not so certain, and my first impression is immediately superseded by a second, that the child is a girl. Boy or girl, it hardly matters. A child is living in the shed; filthy, undernourished, unshod, its face smeared with snot and gunge. It is wrapped in a blanket that I recognise as having disappeared a week or so back after Gabrielle and Alice had been sunbathing on the back lawn. And held tight in its right hand, clutching it like a crucifix against impending evil, is the salt cellar.

  It takes me a while to adjust to this scene. The kid keeps staring at me. I guess I am supposed to make some kind of first move, to speak to it. I am not very good with children. I mean, I am not very good with adults, but am significantly worse with children. I am not even sure how old it could be. Six perhaps? Seven? I have not really had any cause to take notice of the age of children since I ceased being a child myself. Apart from my visits to Llys Rhosyn and Aunt Megan, my childhood, as I must have intimated (and if I haven’t, I should have), was not a happy one and I have found no need to revisit it by proxy, as it were, by associating regularly with children. I decide to speak to it then, as though I were speaking to an adult.

  What are you doing here, in the woodshed? I say, in a friendly fashion. And I feel like an idiot, because already I know for a fact that the child will not answer. Instead, without taking its eyes off me, it carefully shakes some salt from the cellar into the open palm of its left hand, and licks it, licks the left palm clean. Licks it two or three times, and then, although there cannot be any more salt left, continues licking its own palm, and in between these slow brushes of the tongue, looks up at me, as if sending me a message of some kind. This disturbs me. I want it to desist, but do not know how to make it stop. I do not know how to make it do anything without frightening it. So I ask it a question.

  What is your name?

  It stares at me with renewed intensity, its eyes bulging. The eyes have long dark lashes, darker than the hair on its head.

  It starts to dribble. I am even more upset than when it started licking itself. It doesn’t seem to be aware that it is dribbling, the thin stream of bubbly saliva hanging from its lower lip. Then it lifts its free hand and wipes its mouth. I am relieved. I am glad that this has happened. It means that the child, the boy or girl, has the ability to stem the tide of dribble, to clean itself, to look after itself, if only in a rudimentary way. This gesture – along with the evident ability to operate a brace and bit – suggests that the child is not an imbecile.

  I crook my finger and make a beckoning gesture. Will the child recognise this signal? Apparently not. It looks at me with profound distrust, imbued with an element of sadness, and shakes its head, once, twice, raising the chin slightly, in a strange, affecting movement. It is a gesture which, inexplicably, causes a flickering of loss and grief to settle in my stomach, and my eyes brim with tears, which I brush away with my sleeve at once, unconsciously mimicking the action of the child wiping away its dribble. The child’s head-shaking suggests that there is nothing that I can do, that my tears – if it is responding to my tears – are of no use. In this gesture I recognise hopelessness on an epic scale.

  I am at a loss how to act. I cannot crawl along the little passageway that the child has constructed (skilfully, I must concede) by taking apart a large section of logs and re-arranging them to form a tunnel, as I am too large, or the tunnel too small. My only chance might be to coax the child out, but I have nothing with which to tempt it.


  I must stop reacting emotionally, and start thinking. Evidently the child has a passion for salt. This in itself is quite odd. I would normally expect a child to be tempted by sweet things. But to date, if the disappearances are any indication, the child has shown a preference for savoury food, including salted crisps and olives. And it enjoys licking salt from the palm of its hand. Then I remember that there is some cold bacon in the fridge: O’Hallaran cooked a fry-up for breakfast that morning, and there was some leftover bacon. I could go back down to the house and fetch the bacon. I would then attempt to lure the waif from its hiding place with a tasty morsel of pig-meat.

  Listen, I say (although I have no way of knowing whether the child understands a word I am saying), I am going down to the house for something. I won’t be a minute. You stay here, right? Don’t go running off anywhere.

  It continues to stare at me with lustrous eyes.

  My fear is that once I leave the shed, the child will dart out behind me and run off into the woods. I cannot risk this. I need some help. So I leave the shed, take a few paces down the hill towards the house, and I shout for Alice. I can hear the strains of panic in my own voice and it must sound as if something terrible has happened, but this does not matter if it has the desired effect. Which it does, eventually, when she appears in the doorway of the house. I have a flashback to that first time I watched Alice open the back door, when I was looking down on the house from the fallen trunk at the top of the woods, and realise that now, like then, she is wearing blue jeans and a black top.