White Trail (6 page)

‘Before you come in I think you should know that Doged's death was nothing to do with me,' Cilydd blurted out, ‘and I'm not in the habit of inviting strangers into my house.'

The word ‘stranger' stood between them, blocking the entrance to Cilydd's home. It came out too quickly, and he regretted saying it. And yet, this boy was a stranger. He knew that what he saw in front of him was Goleuddydd's head on a young man's shoulders, with his own ears appearing as an awkward appendage on either side, but the strangeness, the distance between them, was there all the same.

‘If you let me in I'll explain it all. You know who I am, don't you?'

In all the times Cilydd had envisaged this happening it had never been like this. Once the boy had entered his home, it seemed that words merely evaporated into the fraught air between them. There were too many questions for Cilydd even to begin asking, and fifteen years' worth of history lurking on the boy's tongue which Cilydd, for some reason, wanted to keep at bay. It all seemed too much. And so Cilydd kept conversation to a mini-mum. He merely asked the boy if he would like something to eat, for he looked hungry, and then asked him if he would like to lie down. He looked as though he had been walking for miles, his hair was ruffled and dirty, and his eyelids drooped. He watched him – his son, the stranger – devouring a ham and cheese sandwich, and scrutinised every single munch and grab and grunt and fidget to see if there were traces of himself in there anywhere, (and still he saw nothing but those ears), and then took him to the spare bedroom and let him lie for a while. He kept the door ajar – mainly to reassure himself that what was happening was not just a figment of his imagination. Creeping silently to the door every now and then he watched the rise and fall of that pale, adolescent chest, and knew with certainty that this was his son.

A little while later they met, awkwardly, on the landing. Cilydd had been pacing back and forth on the same patch of carpet for what seemed like days. It was the boy who spoke first.

‘Thanks for the room,' the boy said.

‘A room is not a house,' Cilydd said, recalling a line from a song he'd heard many years ago. ‘And a house is not a home...' Cilydd realised too late that he was mildly hysterical now, that the situation had thrown him out of himself, into some parody of the man he once knew.

The boy looked at him and smiled uncertainly.

‘Do you always talk like that?'

‘Like what?'

‘Like you're rehearsing or something.'

‘Yes, I suppose I do,' he replied, thinking how unrehearsed he was for this particular performance. The boy's face remained serious, unruffled by expression. ‘Do you have a name?' He tried to recall which names he and Goleuddydd had discussed. He had liked simple, old-fashioned things: Alys, Gwen, Cadi for a girl; Tomos, Huw, Rhys for a boy. Goleuddydd, of course, wanted something more eccentric, something she could lay claim to. Splitting her own name in half like a fortune cookie she'd said, how about Dydd,
Cilydd?
A child that was perpetually a new day. Or Golau, a shining beacon of a baby. And yet no matter how many times they'd discussed it, that little thing that was furling inside her had always been nameless.

‘Culhwch,' the boy said. ‘My name's Culhwch because I was born in a...'

‘Oh, God,' Cilydd said, cupping his face in his hands. ‘Yes, I do know where you were born. That much I do know.'

Cilydd found himself returning on his hands and knees again to the globular dark of the pigsty. Cul-hwch. A name even Goleuddydd couldn't have conjured up. The pig-run. Pig boy. A detestable name; forever binding the boy to the awful fate of his birth. ‘But where have you... I mean what have you...' his voice was trembling now, and he realised, too late, that he was about to cry. When it came there was no stopping it. It seemed that it gushed forth from a place that had been holed up for years and years, and there was so much water there; muggy, stagnant, stinking, that he couldn't stop until it had all come out.

When he looked up, the boy was looking down at him, consolingly. Suddenly he was the little boy; this man his father.

‘I know this must be terribly difficult for you,' he said, laying his arm on Cilydd's shoulder. ‘I'm really very sorry about the phone calls. I hadn't meant it to start like that. But you see, it's just something I happened across and I thought...' He stopped in his tracks and took his arm away, as though it had wandered there on its own and needed to be retrieved.

‘Let's just say I thought it best that I had something over you.'

‘I didn't kill Doged,' Cilydd said. He said it firmly and surprised himself by how much he actually believed it. He hadn't killed Doged.

‘I'm sure you didn't. And the person who thinks you did is probably mistaken. But I need your help. And I wasn't going to take any chances. I suppose it's possible, isn't it, that you will help me anyway. Will you, help me?'

‘I'll help you as much as I can. But you have to tell me where you've been. We have to sit down and try to make sense of it all. There's so much to get through, isn't there. And I suppose we'll have to inform the police and...'

‘No,' said the boy, slightly panicked. ‘Not the police.'

‘But we have to, you've been missing for... for years and it's our duty to...'

‘There's another duty I'm obliged to fulfil first. Please. You have to help me. Not the police. Not yet.'

As he looked at the boy, tracing once more the familiar curve of flesh around the mouth and nose, something like calmness enveloped him. He couldn't fathom it – right now he should have been panicked, stressed, grappling with the phone, dialling emergency numbers. Shaking his son by the shoulders, mopping up the last of his grief with the sleeve of his dressing gown. But he wanted to do none of those things. The boy had convinced him, just by being here, that the best thing to do was nothing. Just keep looking at one another, take every new, surprising moment as it came.

‘OK,' he said. ‘No police. But you have to tell me what happened to you. You have to understand that this is a shock. I'd given up on you. You do realise that. I thought you were dead. Please just tell me what you know. Who were your abductors? Were they... I hope they were kind to you.'

‘I'll tell you everything when we get to Arthur's house,' the boy said.

‘Arthur? What's Arthur got to do with this?'

‘He's got everything to do with it. He's the one who found me.'

‘Arthur's never found anybody in his life.'

The boy smiled. Even the crooked teeth were Goleuddydd's; a bridge of imperfection across a cavernous mouth.

‘Oh, he doesn't know it yet.'

‘But... look, Culhwch, I think this is all moving a little too quickly...'

‘Not quickly enough,' the boy said, looking at his watch. ‘We have to go now. Right now. You said you'd help me. So let's go.'

‘What do you mean, go? Go where?'

‘To Arthur's house...'

‘But it's, it's past midnight and....'

‘Arthur will be up, won't he?' said the boy knowingly. ‘Arthur's always up. Come on.'

The boy tugged him lightly on his sleeve and it seemed that this was all it took – a gentle gesture from the son he'd been looking for most of his life and he was out in the thick of night, driving into the unknown in silence.

Culhwch seemed to know exactly where the flat was, walking a few paces ahead of him down the street. Little flaws jumped out at Cilydd. A tiny little scar on his son's forehead. A chicken-pox pot hole on his cheek. A scratch dulling on his left eyelid. Imprints from the life he had lived up till now; falls, grazes, illnesses his father hadn't been there to witness. A whole history of happenings, furrowed in flesh.

Arthur took his time. Cilydd heard him stumble down the stairway, working his way through the forest of Post-it leaves to get to the front door. How much would Culhwch tell Arthur? He wondered whether the whole nasty business with Doged would have to come up.

His cousin opened the door wearing only his boxer shorts and aT-shirt, clutching a glass of whisky in one hand and a pen in the other. Insomnia lurked in his irises.

‘Cilydd,' he said, wearing a faint look of amusement. ‘Who's your little friend?'

‘Who do you think? It's him. He's come back,' he replied, letting the information hang in the air between them. He thought of the fifteen long years that had passed since he and Arthur sat hunched over his desk, going over and over the details of Goleuddydd's disappearance.

‘Who's come back? 'Arthur asked.

‘My son,' he said, although even in saying it he felt ridiculous, a sham of a father who hadn't even been there to nurse his son through chicken pox.

Arthur stared at the boy, before walking right up to him and tracing his nose with his fingers, as if trying to work out whether what he saw before him was real.

‘My God... I've never, never been so right about anything before,' he said, breathlessly.

‘You're quite the artist,' his son said.

‘What do you mean? What are you both talking about?' Cilydd was starting to get angry now. Already his son – his rare find on this fateful night – seemed to be falling out of his grasp.

Culhwch walked past them both and climbed the stairs. Watching him disappearing onto the landing Cilydd instinctively followed – he knew how easy it was to lose someone; that they were always a split second away from disappearing. He was afraid Arthur's house and all its paraphernalia would swallow this boy up and they would have to start all over again. Arthur pulled him back.

‘Don't be angry with me, Cilydd. All I did was refuse to give up, that's all. You know most private eyes give up on a case after two to five years. They terminate their contracts. But not me. Not this time. In the absence of a body, there is always hope. And this just proves that I was right. He was out there, wasn't he?'

‘What exactly did you do?'

‘I think it's easier if I show you.'

Culhwch, it seemed, was one step ahead of them. He stood in the doorway of Arthur's study, his arms folded, contemplating what he saw inside.

‘Go ahead,' Arthur urged. ‘Take a look.'

What Cilydd saw next left him reeling. The walls were covered in various sketches – all, it seemed, of his son at different phases in his life. There was one of him as a baby, one of him as a nine-year-old boy, one of him on the brink of adolescence. And one which exactly mirrored the way he looked now.

‘You're good,' said Culhwch. ‘You're really good. I mean, it's pure guesswork as far as I can see. But somehow, you knew what combination I was going to be. Of my mother and father. Didn't you?'

‘I used to do hundreds of these things, sitting in the town square. Parents would come, wanting pictures of their children. The likeness was always easy for me, so I never even had to really concen-trate when I was sketching – but one thing I always did notice was the similarity to the mother in every single child, even the boys. The mother would always be there, dawdling about, doing other things, maybe looking after other children, and it was always the dad – the proud dad – that would be standing over me, watching me do it, looking for himself in there somewhere. And I'd just stare at the mother and stare at the child and would see it all in there – maybe not in an obvious way, but hidden in little pockets of flesh, little mannerisms, little expressions that were the mother's alone. And if the mother was of a certain ilk – I mean if the mother had presence, and we both know, Cilydd, what
presence
she had, what a fireball she was – then you could guarantee that it would be in the child, too. A magic touch of flesh, holding all the features together.'

Arthur was right of course – whatever inexplic-able, potent thing Goleuddydd had had, this boy had it too, and he sat there, emanating it, oozing her iridescence all over the place. His son stared on at sketches of himself as a toddler. Arthur had been inventive in his artistry – it showed the boy engaged in all sorts of infantile activities. Holding a beaker, munching on a banana, things which may or may not have happened, but which were, angle by angle, stroke by stroke, handing fragments of his son's stolen history back to his father.

‘After you stopped working for the network I began posting these pictures up, attached to your son's profile. I knew you wouldn't have liked me doing it, so I didn't tell you. I remember you saying once that you could never create a likeness of someone who's never existed. I suppose it posed a challenge to me when you said that – so I defied you. That is how you found us, isn't it?'

They both turned to look at Culhwch.

‘It took me a while, you understand, to know that I was a missing person in the first place. But once I knew it, things came together. And if it wasn't for Arthur's work I'd never have known that profile was mine. I had no name, no identity. I was nothing. Until those pictures appeared there. And when I was ready to go searching for myself, well, it was easy. Here I was. And there was my mother. And there was every thing I needed. Even down to the addresses and... and the phone numbers.'

At that point he avoided Cilydd's gaze. Cilydd recalled the blank profile – the hateful question mark. He hated the implication that he'd given up on his son; that he'd allowed him to become a non-entity, a nothing, as he put it. It was only Arthur who'd been brave enough to give him a face, to illuminate him, to let him pierce through the darkness to arrive back where he belonged.

It was almost as if Arthur had sketched him into being.

Culhwch told them he was brought up on a smallholding on the edge of a large forest. From when he was a child his parents had insisted the forest held unknown dangers, he would be swallowed up by it, engulfed by the greenery, they said. He was home schooled – something he never challenged, for his mother told him that this was what happened when you were exceptionally bright – and they lived without a television, a computer, without any form of news from the outside world. It was merely the way of things. Occasionally some other adults would come over for a day out – friends of his parents. Although he never saw them arrive he knew, somehow, that they had come through the forest. They were an odd bunch, too, of all ages, all looking peculiarly pale and gaunt. None of them had children. But they would play with him, and this was compensation enough. Swinging on a rope amidst haystacks, running through the fields, hiding in bushes; laughing – it was a rare rush of activity and happiness which left him elated for days. There was very little laughter at home – and he felt it was somehow inside him, this laughter, a natural part of him, an impulse which was never fully satisfied. But even as he laughed, he was aware of his unsmiling parents lurking behind him, two shadows that were always hovering on the periphery of his life, as though they were nervous about what such laughter could bring.