White Trail (4 page)

Every Christmas he organised the Missing Persons' Network minibus down to the Assembly, where they all went to hang the name of their loved ones on the Christmas tree. Some Assembly Members came down and talked to them in serious voices, then disappeared back up the stairs to get on with their business. A minister shook hands with them, as though congratulating them all for some huge feat.

One morning Cilydd woke to the startling realisation that he himself had become a missing person. That all this talk of absences had rubbed off on him, and that he had somehow become absent from his own life. It seemed that no one looked at him in the street anymore, no one called his name. Sometimes, the air that surrounded him seemed so joyless, so thin and insubstantial, that he forgot to breathe, until his lungs lurched forward and forced him to. The more he thought about it – the more he realised his life was over now. It had run its course. And that's when he decided that he was finally going to do it –remove himself from life, and make his absence official – a permanent state. Before the day was out. As the hours ticked on, he felt incredibly restless. He'd heard of the serenity that befell suicidal people when they were about to kill themselves, and yet he possessed none of it, he was a fidgety, bumbling mess. He dropped his keys into his cereal; he could not decide which shirt to wear, he tripped over some loose carpeting and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table, nearly taking himself out before he'd even left the house. To try to calm himself, he started on some paperwork for the Missing Persons' Network, filling in some of the most recent profiles – he could not bear to leave things undone, and it focused him for a few hours, at least. Then he felt the necessity to write a few letters, just in case his body was never found (for he could not bear to be missing out of spite, to leave others in the lurch) – writing one for Arthur, one for Anlawdd, and another general note to the members of the Missing Persons' Network, informing them of his intentions, telling them not to give up hope, though he realised how fruitless and depressing the whole act would be; what impact it would have on them. He then ambled his way to the cliff tops just before dusk, posting all three letters on his way (with a second-class stamp, so as not to arrive too early), and before he knew it, he was there, on his island. He looked behind him and realised that the tide was too low to claim him yet. He had come too early. Then again, what was the point in waiting? For all he knew the tide could well decide to deliver him back to shore. No, if he was going to do this, he had to do it properly. He clambered up onto a rock near the cliff face and stared down into the water.

He stood there, poised at an angle, wondering how he would do it. Birds circled around him – dark birds which came in clusters, egging him on. He shooed them away and stared down once more. What if the shock of the water was not enough? Should he try to make sure he hit a rock on the way down? What if he only hit his head or his leg – and ended up drowning slowly in still waters, in horrific physical pain? No matter how much emotional pain he had endured over the past few years, the notion of actual bodily pain, the externalisation of all the grief and loss he had endured still seemed unbearable. He thought again, reluctantly, of Goleuddydd's womb being torn open, and those pilfering, reddening fingers taking his son. That was when he decided he would have to make his own end as tortuous and painful as hers.

Then – just as he was about to do it – a shadow crept across the rock. He was aware of someone breathing behind him, someone – he guessed – who was too afraid to make his presence entirely known in case he were to startle him. Cilydd was inches away from a fall. Don't look back, Cilydd told himself. Once you get engaged in a conversation, that's it. He moved closer to the ledge. But the silhouette moved along with him, inch by black inch.

Cilydd held his breath. The waves beneath him were ferocious swirls, sickening him. Just as he lost his balance, he heard a rustle of fabric, and a flash of something familiar caught his eye. Something urged him to see the person behind him before he fell, in case they had something to tell him. Perhaps it was Arthur or Anlawdd, breathless with news after all these years –
they've found him
, the words that echoed around his head daily, the faint echo of hope that was always there.

But perched on that rock was not Anlawdd or Arthur or anyone who even remotely knew him. It was someone who looked familiar but whom he could not place – a rambler who, in seeing Cilydd's head turn and his shoulder sway slightly towards him had made the brave decision to try to reach out and save him. And all Cilydd did was slap his hand away, one light, fly-swatting move which was enough to make this robust rambler lose his balance, and before either of them knew it, it was the rambler who was tumbling down over the rocks, banging his head on the rocks below (Cilydd closed his eyes and heard the awful coupling of rock and bone) before his body thundered into the water. Cilydd lay down and listened to his heart thumping through the rock. Behind him a wax jacket lay limply in the place the rambler had once stood. Something beeped in the pocket; vibrations of life pulsing through the fabric. Cilydd got up and ran – running over the tiny bridge of land, just as the tide was coming in – running in wet shoes all the way back to his car, his mind racing, his veins full of adrenalin. He felt alive. Terribly, awfully alive, and present; he put his hands to his chest, felt the rhythm of his heart, felt his pulse, all the necessary things that kept him from disappearing and suddenly he was glad that it had not been him. But how to undo what he had done? This man had interfered, he thought. This man had brought it on himself. But the more he saw the man's face leaning forward towards him, that palm outstretched, the more he was convinced that there was something familiar about him.

He couldn't contact the police. One phone call and he would be culpable, though in actual fact he'd done nothing. Nothing but be foolish enough to believe he could actually kill himself. He started the car, and drove out of the car park. All the while his mind swished and swayed with the dark waves, those very dark waves that were, at every moment that now passed, carrying the rambler's body further into the grey void of the sea.

He did nothing. He went back to his house and sat all night at his kitchen table. Someone would find him now, Cilydd thought. The ubiquitous man and his dog, whose early morning walks would never be the same.

And before the end of the week was out (a week spent undoing his so-called suicide, collecting his suicide notes from the postman before they could reach their destination, hiding in Anlawdd's bushes, stalking the pavement outside Arthur's flat) he knew who the man was. It was Doged, the health minister, whom he had met once at the Assembly. He read the story in the papers, saw his widow – a rather good-looking woman – staring back accusingly at him from the front page. He remembered Doged as one of the ministers who'd been particularly kind to them, who had sat and listened to several of their stories with real feeling, or so it seemed, while the other civil servants around him looked on, bored and expressionless. So there it was – he'd managed to top the health minister, of all people, bringing the uncommonly healthy Doged to his sudden death through his own ill health. All the papers claimed he was missing, of course. They still hadn't found a body. But the abandoned wax jacket and Blackberry seemed to confirm things. ‘Health minister missing; feared dead.' There was also a cluster of white shells found on the precipice (for all Cilydd knew, he could have kicked them there himself), which might be significant, one journalist claimed, before going on to suggest that Doged had probably left a suicide note spelt out delicately by shells, but that the wind had rearranged them, making it impossible to pick out his message. Even more intriguing was his wife's insistence that he had meant to kill himself. ‘He had not been happy for some time,' she was quoted as saying. ‘The pressures of a top job. The ill feeling towards him in the constituency over the closure of the local hospital.' Cilydd had seen none of that in that outstretched hand, the rosy, well-meaning face. The more he thought of it, the more he realised that Doged had actually looked him in the face as he fell, that there was a winged grace to him, a glint of Icarus in his eye.

But it was his wife's second comment that made him sit up and take notice. ‘He always said that if anything happened to him, I was to remarry. Of course it's too soon to think about such a thing now, but it just goes to show the generous spirit of the man.'
Do remarry.
Perhaps that was what Doged had spelt out in tiny patterns of shell, before the wind scattered his good intentions. Cilydd saw it as some sort of sign.

The next day, he urged the secretary of the Missing Persons' Network to contact Doged's widow. Before the week was out, he was shaking her hand. Gwelw she was called – a name that suggested no more than a ghostly outline of a woman. Yet somehow she exuded warmth, right to the tip of her cold fingers. Doged had been good to them, he told her, they would like to help her, and her young daughter (Lleuwen, her name was, suitably, a moon-surface of a girl, pearly and blotchy in turn) to get through the next few months. Gwelw started attending their meetings. She stood up and said Doged's name, peacefully, as though she had already let him go. When he told his own story, (‘My name is Cilydd, my pregnant wife was abducted and murdered and her abductors took my baby') her hand found its way into his: a soft, comforting creature, which he tried to lure into his grasp again and again.

Her own grief seemed short-lived; her husband, after all, had killed himself, she told the group. He had chosen to go. How could she even lament the loss of one who wanted so desperately to be dead? If she truly loved him – she told them – then she should be happy. Happy for him that he had come to his desired end, and that she would be moving on with her life. Once her eyes rested on Cilydd when she said this. He was jolted by it; and for one moment it felt as though she looked right into him, and saw the film that was permanently playing in his mind, of Doged tumbling through the air. She knows, he thought irrationally, she knows. But she didn't, of course. The look, the one she fixed him with week after week was actually tinged with desire, and in a bizarre twist of fate he found himself, after one particularly morose meeting, making love to her in a secluded spot in the community-hall car park. It was the most wildly irresponsible and impetuous thing he had done since he had inadvertently pushed her husband off a cliff. When he came it felt as though the whole world thundered beneath his feet, the ledge disappeared, and the world clicked back into place.

Curiously, after that, he did not think much of his part in her husband's death. He began falling in love with her. She was the complete opposite of the volatile Goleuddydd, a woman who thought about things, who did not wear her beauty boldly, but who hid it behind a dark, slick curtain of hair – who smiled only when she thought something well and truly funny, a kind of smile you had to fish for in her unquantifiable depths, and which, when it surfaced, seemed like a reward, a pearl in the hand. She was an orthopaedic surgeon; effortlessly brilliant, and saw things with precision and clarity; as though she had an innate x-ray vision. She spoke in careful, measured language, not in expletives and hyperbole as Goleuddydd had – when she was positive she was ‘encouraged', whenever she was keen to do something she told Cilydd that it was ‘probably appropriate'. She was clinical and beautiful, somehow the woman he'd been looking for all his life. They understood one another – for she, like him, had lost someone. And he wanted to marry her.

Although his wife's command was still fresh in his memory, still as starkly unmistakable as ever – over the years it had accumulated invisible clauses. He convinced himself that what Goleuddydd had meant to say was: don't remarry unless… Unless you really fall in love. (Which he had – helplessly, passionately.) Unless there is some deep desire in you to have another baby. (It was at the front of his mind, though he wondered whether Gwelw, at 42, was rather beyond such things.) Unless that is the only thing that will save you. (Doubtless that – unless he found someone to ward off the emptiness with him – he would end up back on that ledge.) And another one of those unlesses would surely have stipulated that it was OK to marry a widow, one who had been through the exact same miserable grief as himself, even if he had unwittingly eradicated her husband so that he could find a way to survive.
Unless it's
absolutely essential Cilydd
, Goleuddydd would have said,
then don't
.

But if you must
, the bunches of her red hair would have rustled.

And so at the end of the year, with Doged's body still drifting in the sea somewhere, Goleuddydd's fiery light was replaced with the more demure rays of Gwelw and Lleuwen. The wedding was a modest affair. A register-office ceremony with a few witnesses and then a reception at a boutique hotel with a few close family and friends. Arthur was the only one Cilydd could think to invite. He turned up with an enormous gift lapped in lavish gold wrapping paper, beneath which was a striking canvas portrait of Cilydd, Gwelw and Lleuwen that he himself had painted. Cilydd looked up at his cousin in gratitude and read the relief in Arthur's eyes. The portrait was a means of painting over the past – and Arthur had done so with a flourish.

Though the bond between himself and Gwelw's nine-year-old daughter was rather strained at first, Cilydd was determined to forge a relationship, if only to fill in that last gap in his life. She needs time, Gwelw said. She had adored Doged. She had been his little shadow. They needed to make sure she felt loved and wanted and that she understood families changed, they were renewable things; that that's how life was. Sometimes mummies and daddies, for no good reason, died or disappeared and when that happened then someone new came in their place.