The Travellers and Other Stories (8 page)

Poor Will, he thought he was the only one who knew, but the truth was, we all knew. Everyone knew all along that she must have made the story up but nobody said so. The men knew it when they wet the baby's head that night with seven hundred pints of Brains bitter. And the women—we knew when we went piling into Mary's front room with all our makeshift presents. Talcum powder and cotton sunhats, booties and blankets, all the stuff we had lying around at home. I gave her Huw's Christening frock and she gave me a kiss for it, sweetly scented with the sherry we were drinking out of tea cups, marzipan crumbs on her lips from the Battenberg someone had brought along for the celebration.

You could say there was a conspiracy from the very beginning. Nobody laid their hand on Mary's thick arm and said gently, ‘Now, Mary…' We went further, said it was the pregnancy that had given her the yen for the sour cockles. Even young Dr. Clare, who surely should have known better, went along with it, arriving at Mary's house without his black bag, as if he'd already made up his mind not to look into things too closely. We all wanted her to be happy, you see, to have what she wanted, to have what the rest of us had. It was only fair. I remember leaving her house that night, looking back into the room, and seeing Mary by the fire, the baby looking so warm and peaceful on her huge pillowed chest you almost wanted to climb up there yourself and go to sleep.

Would she have tried to pull off such a preposterous lie if she hadn't been so enormous? Probably, yes, I think she would have. She began to forget she'd found a stranger's baby in the sand. She began to believe the story she told, how she'd lain down in the coarse grass and with three long and agonising pangs, pushed out the boy she hadn't even known was inside her.

She called him Thomas. Mr. Davies, our minister, baptised him in the chapel. Mary dressed him in Huw's frock.

Thomas Owen became part of our town. For a year he rode up and down the hill in a navy-blue Silver Cross pram. When he was three, Mary bought him his first pair of Startrite sandals, the red ones with the pattern of holes in the toe, the ones she'd lusted after, the ones she'd seen the other mothers buying, paying the extra because it was worth it, because you got the proper fitting. And there was the picture on the box she liked too, with the two Startrite Children, safe in their good shoes even though to Mary they looked as if they were heading off on their own into a dark wood.

Thomas had flat, narrow feet, like Will. ‘Look,' Will said to Mary one evening when the boy was in the bath, ‘he has my feet.' It always happened like that to Will—by the time the words in his head got out across his lips, they had knitted themselves into different shapes. He said the things Mary liked to hear and kept his worry to himself.

He pictured a fairground girl, a freckled creature with oily hair falling onto her blouse. A dull patterned skirt like the ones worn by the gypsies who used to camp under the lime trees by the river when his mother was alive. The girl had something of the look of the Blue Lady too, who had gold earrings and swung on the painted sign over the pub door. At night she wormed her way into his sleep, searching frantically through her pockets for the thing she had lost. Sometimes a hank of her hair blew against her mouth, and when Will woke, in the night, he felt the girl's matted hair on his own parched lips, dry and salty, and staggered out of bed to fetch a glass of water, past his sleeping wife and baby. When he climbed back into bed his thin body shifted itself about for hours before he finally fell asleep again. He knew nothing then of the folded length of linen with its half-embroidered flower lying buried beneath the mattress, but in the mornings he woke with all his bones aching, as if something hard had got into his dreams and turned him black and blue. He felt sure he would know her if she ever came looking.

When Thomas was four years old, Mary bought him a leather satchel from Howell's in Cardiff and he went to school with the rest of our children, a hundred and twenty-three of them in the low brick building under the slag. Another year passed, and a second, and Thomas Owen turned six.

It is strange to hear a sound and not know what it is or where it is coming from. It began softly, but seemed from the start to be very close—so close that at first, I looked for it in my kitchen.

In his house next to the chapel, Mr. Davies, the minister, heard it too. He paused in his writing. There it was—a low grumbling, and a gentle shifting, which became a roar. A vast deep moan of protest that seemed to rise up from the bottom of the world and come shuddering through his soul.

Through the bedroom window, Mary saw the slag move. The whole mountain seemed to swell, and then to billow, and to burst open and pour down in a filthy deluge onto the school. She watched as all the men in the town came swarming up over the muck. She watched them digging for the children. She gaped at the women standing about in small groups, very still and quiet, as if they'd had their hearts plucked out.

She shrank from the window, trembling and sick. The water in the glass on the dressing table still quivered. In the narrow bed, less feverish than he'd been in the morning when she'd decided to keep him home from school, Thomas slept on.

Another minister had to come to help us with the funerals because Mr. Davies couldn't do it. On the first Sunday after it happened he stood up in our chapel in front of the whole town and held out his arms to us as if he had something to give us, but then he put them down again without speaking and gathered up his pages of foolscap paper and went out through the big chapel doors, leaving us with nothing but the echo of his polished shoes clicking across the stone floor.

He didn't come back into the chapel after that, and spent his days at home, coming out from time to time to fetch bread and milk from the Co-op.

I began to cook for him. I took him hot soup and a bit of pie a few times a week, though more often than not he wouldn't eat them, and we would just sit by the fire in his quiet front room while he ate his loaf from the bag and drank the cream off the milk when it was still in the bottle. Sometimes he said he was very sorry that he had nothing to say to me, but that when your faith has disappeared into the mountain with a hundred and twenty-two children, it is probably better to shut up and be quiet.

On Sundays in chapel Thomas sat between his parents in a new black suit and you could see, in Mary's little coconut face, that all her peace had gone, and that she remembered now what she'd done. People couldn't help looking at Thomas. We all sat with our empty hands folded in our laps, and looked. Everyone seemed to be watching him all the time. It was like a hunger. Mary felt it, and began to hide her golden-haired boy away. One night, she went with Will to see Mr. Davies, and in front of both of them she poured out the details. How she'd found him and wrapped him up like a birthday present to herself and kept him. How in her mind the two things, her theft of the baby and what had happened to our town, had become connected
. Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not steal.
What was she after? Forgiveness? Whatever it was, she didn't find it in the minister's house because he had nothing to tell anybody anymore, he was lost for words.

The Owens have left our town. I saw them climb on the bus at the stop between the Blue Lady and the chapel. I could see Thomas's fair head, like a bright coin against the grey stone of the buildings. I watched the bus through the window until it disappeared.

Mr. Davies is gone now, too. I miss cooking for him. To pass the time, I come down to the beach at Ogmore and sit here in the prickly dune grass, looking out across the empty sand, the puckered water. I have been trying, these last few days, to dig a hole, but it's hard work, digging a hole in a sand dune, because the sand keeps running endlessly back through your empty fingers like dry salt. Sometimes, the local boys come up to the beach. When they pass close the dunes, their high voices distract me briefly from my digging. Then they go running off up the beach and leave me to it again, calling to each other, and glancing back over their shoulder at the funny looking woman on the dune—the sad lady from the valleys, digging for babies in the sand.

BOOT

I
'
D MISLED HIM
, apparently.

I'd confused him.

Everything I'd done, they explained, had combined to encourage him in his delusions.

Apparently I should never have fed him straight from my plate; I should never have given him my bacon rind, my left-over roast potatoes, the fatty ends of my lamb chops. I should never have thrown him peanuts from my handbag as we strolled down the hill to the beach.

Apparently it made him feel important.

Apparently I should never have let him ride in the front seat of the Renault, or on the raincover of the baby's pram and let him poke his big shoe-shaped face inside the dark hood and lick the baby's face with his big sloppy tongue. Apparently it made him think he
owned
us, it made him think we
belonged
to him. I should have stopped him—they explained—when he lunged at the people who came over to say hello, or to admire the baby. I should have grabbed him when he launched himself off the raincover, I should have yanked on his collar when he started racing round my legs and the wheels of the pram in a huge swerving protective parabola of flashing orange fur and yellow teeth.
Heel!
I should have said when he chased cars and bicycles and far-off noises and anything else that seemed to threaten the safety of his little family.

I should have insisted he stay on his blue wool cushion in the corner of the kitchen when he was in the house; I should never have allowed the snare-drum patter of his feet to follow me across the parquet floor of the hall into the sitting room. I should not have permitted him to lie on the sofa, to spend his afternoons lounging among the cushions with me and the baby.

Above all, I should never have allowed him upstairs at night.

I should never have let him spread his long wolfish body across the threshold of our bedroom, I shouldn't have stooped to stroke his sunken flanks on my way to the bathroom while he lay there, snoring softly and blinking his narrow yellow eyes. It only encouraged him.
No
, I should have said, on the nights when Ian's work took him out of town, and he started creeping into our bed, stretching out in the empty hollow on Ian's side.
No
, I should have said, because when Ian's taxi brought him home from the airport very early one morning, and he tried to slip into bed next to me, Boot didn't like it, he didn't like it at all.

We had two options, said Ian, tight-lipped and white with shock.

Either we took Boot in hand—firmly, properly in hand—or we drove him back to the pound that afternoon.

I nodded.

I'd finished washing Ian's wound and it was dressed now in a clean gauze bandage. I looked over at Boot, still sprawled on our bed amid the mangled sheets, smiling and panting a little.

‘Maybe we could try taking him in hand,' I said.

Ian said he'd make some phone calls, find out what to do.

Everyone he spoke to said the same thing—that I'd been much too soft with Boot, that I had confused him and misled him into thinking he was important, into thinking he was in charge. As one of them put it, I had misled Boot into thinking he was Ian.

They told us what we needed to do.

We were to give him only dog food—just biscuit and a very little meat—once a day. He was to sleep on his blue cushion in the corner of the kitchen and he was
never
to be allowed upstairs. He was banned from the sofa; there were to be no more pram rides; no more sitting in the front seat of the car; no more peanuts on our walks down to the beach.

On the advice of an old college friend who was now a vet's assistant, Ian borrowed his sister's cat, Beulah, and let her eat from Boot's bowl whenever she felt like it. From the pet shop next to the bus station he procured a long-haired black and tan guinea pig which he took out of its cage twice a week in the evening when he came home from work so it could take a stroll along Boot's deluded puffed-up spine and remind him that in the new pecking order, he came last, right at the bottom of the pile—lower than Ian, lower than me, lower than the baby, lower than Beulah, lower than the fat piebald guinea pig.

For a while, Boot tried to fight back. There was the odd skirmish with the cat; once or twice he swung his head round and snapped at the strolling guinea pig. Early on, he would sometimes raise his nose from the cold kitchen floor and look up at me beseechingly with his sad watery eyes as if he thought there might be a roast potato or the fatty end of a lamb chop still going, but all he ever got now was a sharp kick from Ian to remind him of his place in the world.

Boot changed.

By the end of a few weeks he was a different animal. Quiet, docile, humble. He slept obediently on the kitchen floor. When I came down in the mornings, he just lifted his shoe-shaped nose in a sort of muted, gentle greeting. He lost his twitchy, neurotic look when people came up to me and the baby in the street. He no longer launched himself into a wild, jealous helter-skelter around the pram whenever there was some unwelcome distraction—a new face, an approaching car, a strange noise.

He was like an old man.

On Sundays, if the weather was good, we loaded up the Renault and drove the short distance to the beach—Ian at the wheel, the baby next to him in her car seat, me in the back with the towels and the rolled-up windbreak, the deckchairs, the rug, the picnic; Boot on the floor at my feet with the baby's bucket squashed down hard on top of his head.

Usually we set up somewhere not far from the water's edge, and that's what we did on the Sunday I'm remembering now. We set up the deckchairs and the windbreak and laid out the tartan rug. I dressed the baby in her yellow swimsuit, the one with a ruffle like a ballerina's, and I watched her go crawling about after crabs and shells and bits of seaweed to pop. Ian went for a swim and I went to the kiosk for an ice-cream and then I settled down in one of the deckchairs to eat it.