Sabrina Fludde (14 page)

Abren fell asleep, slipping into a world where she couldn't hear her mother's voice. Occasionally, she awoke to find landscapes that she didn't recognise slipping by under wide blue skies. At a halfway point they shared Pen's sandwiches and bought drinks from
the refreshments trolley as it rolled past. Then Abren went back to sleep and didn't stir again until they arrived at their destination.

Here her mother had to shake her hard.

‘Wake up, Abren. Come on – we've arrived! Don't just sit there!'

Abren stumbled off the train to find herself in a small country town, whose name she didn't recognise. All she knew was that it was as different from Pengwern as anything could be, with quiet streets and half its shops closed for lunch.

Abren's mother went in search of Mr Morris's taxi, and Abren went into a post office and bought a bar of chocolate and a postcard. She ate the one while writing the other to Phaze II. What she wanted was to invite him, again, to come and stay. But what she wrote instead was,
‘I'm feeling frightened. Nothing seems right. Please don't forget me.'

It was a strange message from a girl on her way home, who'd been so excited last night that she couldn't sleep. But Abren posted the card, just in time before her mother returned, riding in the oldest-looking taxi that Abren had ever seen. They piled on their luggage and climbed in, and the taxi set off down the street, over a small stone bridge where boys sat fishing, and out of town on a narrow, bumpy switchback of a road.

The road home.
At last
. Abren leant forward in the taxi, waiting for the moment of recognition, which would surely come. They drove through an oak wood, the sun shining through branches which were thick with new leaves. But her home wasn't down there among those mottled trees, and it wasn't in any of the
farms and cottages which lined the road – some of them her friends' homes apparently, and her mother said they couldn't wait to see her again. It wasn't tucked away across fields, or anywhere else that Abren could see.

She started to grow restless. How much longer? she thought, but she had the sense not to ask.

Her mother glanced at her nervously. She had stopped chattering and an awkward silence fell between them. The further they travelled, the more it seemed to grow. Abren's mother's hands twisted in her lap. The taxi drove into a pretty hamlet comprising cottages, a farm, a school and an old stone church. The road sign announced Old Hall, and Abren found herself hoping that this would be her home. She saw a stream with a church set behind it, between rows of sloping graves. Shafts of sunlight shone upon tall arched windows and in one of them Abren glimpsed a face. It looked at her as she drove towards it, and Abren's heart began to pound. Did she know that face? Did it know her? Was it one of her friends, looking out for her?

The face was still there when the taxi left Old Hall, bumping its way over the brow of a small hill. Abren turned to take a last look and there it still was, a white face looking after her.

‘Not long now,' her mother said, breaking their silence at last.

Abren shivered. Old Hall disappeared and the road ahead was dark with trees. These weren't golden oaks any more, but fir and spruce trees casting soft grey shadows. The taxi drove between them and the air turned damp and misty. Abren leant forward, hoping
that her home wouldn't be here. What she wanted was a bright house full of sunlight and white paint – somewhere like Compass House, not a dark house in a forest full of trees like soldiers guarding the road.

The taxi spluttered up between them, and Abren imagined it breaking down so that they would have to haul their luggage the last long mile to a horrid little house which she'd remember with dislike the moment she set eyes on it. To her relief, however, they emerged into a road which ran between a sunny glen and a disused quarry, completely overgrown.

The taxi drove up past this quarry and drew to a halt.

‘This all right for you?' the driver said.

Abren's mother nodded, but Abren couldn't see a single house anywhere. Her mother got out of the taxi and started unloading their luggage. Abren got out too. Her mother paid the driver and he turned the taxi round and started back the way he'd come. Abren watched him disappearing back into the forest. Now they were on their own. The glen stood silent.

‘What are we doing? I don't understand.'

Abren couldn't but ask, even if it gave the game away. Her mother turned and looked at her, and for a moment Abren thought that she was going to have to own up about not knowing where she was. But then a vehicle came lurching down a track which joined the road, and her mother said, ‘What are we doing, indeed! Gwyn should have been here waiting for us, but he's late as usual. Look at him!'

The vehicle pulled round in the road – an old Land Rover whose cough and splutter made the taxi sound healthy. Behind the wheel sat a boy in dungarees and a
checkered shirt. He was older than Abren, had the same untidy hair, and their mother's eyes. Abren's brother Gwyn, obviously.

He drew to a halt. Abren looked at him, her heart thundering. He nodded tersely, and she smiled back. Then he smiled at their mother, and something fleeting seemed to pass between them, without words. She went and hugged him. Neither of them said anything. Quickly and efficiently they loaded the luggage into the Land Rover, then they climbed in, setting Abren between them on the front seat.

They started up the track, travelling in silence. Abren looked at her brother's face. She didn't recognise it. Didn't recognise anything about him at all! Her own brother – but she might never have set eyes on him before!

It was a sickening moment for a girl who'd banked so much on getting home and finding her memory. Abren watched the landscape in trepidation as the Land Rover spluttered up the track. This was the landscape of her home, but its dark trees and plunging drops, grassy meadows and little streams meant nothing to her. She might never have seen those grazing sheep, or those browny-red birds wheeling in the sky, or those old boundary walls.

The Land Rover carried on, like an instrument of torture. Abren tried not to panic, but failed miserably. What if she reached journey's end and still didn't recognise anything? Not her home, nor her mother, nor her school friends, nor anything at all about her old life? The game would be up, and she'd have to confess. But, worse than that, she'd have to face a life without a memory. Without a childhood and a past.

With nothing but what she had now.

Slowly, the Land Rover pulled round a great sweep in the track. Ahead of her Abren suddenly saw an ivy-covered ruin with tumble-down barns behind it. The Land Rover drew close to them, and to Abren's surprise she saw curtains at windows and pots of geraniums on sills. Smoke was rising from a chimney. It wasn't a ruin after all!

It was her home!

Gwyn drove into a yard between the house and the barns. ‘Here we are,' he said, relief in his voice. ‘Back at last. Back at Blaen Hafren.'

Abren stared at the house, and couldn't move or speak. She waited for the moment when it would all come flooding back. But Blaen Hafren stared back in silence. It was just some old ramshackle farmstead, stuck up a track. It was nowhere special.

Nowhere that Abren remembered.

Abren sat in her bedroom, surrounded by luggage. Her mother brought up the last bag and dumped it down, then left the room, pulling the door behind her as if she knew that something was wrong and that Abren wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Her footsteps faded on the tiny winding staircase, and the house fell silent.

Abren sniffed the air as if she'd never smelt this musty bedroom before. Her own bedroom – but it felt as strange to her as the bedroom in Compass House. As strange as the railway bridge had felt when Abren had first gone there. As strange as that first night on the Bytheways' sofa-bed.

It was as if Abren had never smelt this musty air before, or seen the old oak beams and dipping floorboards of her bedroom. Never sat at this dressing table with its speckled mirror, or washed at this marble dresser with its jug and bowl. They could have been museum exhibits. They didn't feel like a part of her life.

She turned away, her expression grim, and started unpacking. Each item, as she brought it out, told more of a story than anything in this room. Underneath the new clothes which her mother had brought her were gifts which the Morgans had pressed on her. Soap and towels from the blue-and-white bathroom, books from their shelves, banners full of sweet dreams,
which had once hung over her head. And last of all – completely unexpectedly –

‘
Sir Henry Morgan's cutlass!'

Abren lifted it out. The cutlass had been wrapped carefully in layers of paper and a note had been attached to it, which read,
‘Never be afraid again – All our love, Pen and Henry.'

A lump formed in Abren's throat. It had been their only pirate treasure, but they had given it to her. Gently she removed the paper. The cutlass gleamed in the afternoon light – cold steel, and scary, too, even though Abren knew that if she put her finger on the blade, the edge would be blunt.

Abren wrapped it up again, and put it in a drawer with clothes on top, as if it were a special secret, belonging to another life. Then she sat on the bed and wondered at herself. What sort of girl was she, whose memories began and ended in Pengwern? What sort of girl, who could forget her family and her old life? She felt ashamed. Blamed herself, yet again. Felt hot and panicky and sick.

Suddenly, as if she couldn't stand her musty bedroom any more, Abren jumped up. She had to go outside, breathe fresh air, get away on her own. Perhaps then, without her mother watching her, and her brother staring awkwardly, as if not knowing what to say – perhaps only then would everything come back.

Abren hurried through the house, trying to work out how to tell her mother that after months away, all she wanted was to be alone. But she never had to. Her mother was out in the back pantry having words with Gwyn. She didn't notice Abren slipping outside,
crossing the yard, finding the stream which ran down the back of the house, and walking up beside it, lost in thought.

Abren walked until she found a waterfall, which she didn't remember, just like everything else. She clambered up beside its pools, shoots and gulleys, and found herself on the edge of the forest. Shadows fell across her, and she felt small beside the great trees. Felt like a nobody. A nobody without a memory.

Abren started up between the trees, climbing over roots and fallen logs, scrambling up a carpet of pine needles and following a path cut by the stream. Time passed, but she didn't notice until she emerged on to a vast open grassland, with the sun lowering in the sky. She looked at hills rolling off in all directions, and valleys fading into the night. The view stretched for miles, and she suddenly realised that it was no ordinary hill that she had just climbed.

It was a mountain
. And what a mountain, too! Abren heard a symphony of breezes rippling through the long grass, birds singing their goodnight songs and dogs barking up ahead of her somewhere. She looked at tall reeds and bright mosses, stretching away like a sea that carried on for ever. And she saw the world beyond her, hill after hill and valley after valley, spreading out like a vast blue shadow which had no end.

Abren gazed at it all, completely mesmerised. It was only when the sky darkened and the rim of the forest faded with the light that she realised how late it was. She turned back, looking for the stream which was her only path home. Suddenly, a man appeared in front of her, looming out of the fading light.

Abren had thought she was alone up on the
mountain, but the man straightened up from a smoky fire which wrapped itself around him like a grey cloak. A pack of dogs played at his feet – steel-grey dogs with strange red spots. Perhaps they were the dogs that Abren had heard earlier. He waved a hand, and Abren waved back, taking in long leather boots, grass-green canvas trousers full of useful-looking camper's pockets, fiery gold-red hair and strikingly black eyes. A sky-blue shirt was open at the man's neck, and a chain hung round it, thick with silver charms.

Abren stared at the charms, and couldn't take her eyes off them. The man smiled.

‘Are you lost?' he said. ‘Out on your own?'

‘I'm – I'm with my mother,' Abren said. ‘She's just behind me.'

The man looked behind her, and the mountain was empty. Not a sign of anybody's mother. He smiled again. Looks like your mother has got lost,' he said. ‘Where are you from?'

Abren didn't want to tell him, but she somehow couldn't help herself.

‘I'm from Blaen Hafren,'
she replied.

The man looked at her as if she weren't just mildly entertaining any more, but suddenly of real interest.

‘Blaen Hafren?' he said, and his eyes seemed to tighten in his head. Like sharp black lenses they focused on Abren as if they hadn't really noticed her before.

‘What of it?' Abren said.

The man shook his head. ‘So the old girl's back. And so are you. The lights are on again, are they?
You must be Abren.'

He took a step towards her and the dogs leapt out
of his way. His charms glinted at his neck, and Abren stared at them again. The man moved closer, holding out his hand.

‘Don't be frightened,' he said.

Abren panicked and cried out. Immediately a sound came from the forest – answering as if on cue!

‘Abren!
Abren –
is that you?'

Abren could have wept with sheer relief. ‘It's my mother!' she said.

The man withdrew his hand. ‘Oh, well,' he said. ‘Tell her an old friend was asking after her. That he's glad to know the lights are on again at Blaen Hafren, and he's glad she's found her Abren. Tell her that we'll all meet soon, and that
her old friend hasn't forgotten her.'