White Trail (7 page)

His parents slept in separate rooms. When he was a little boy, he used to dream of having a family where everyone huddled up in bed together, like they did in his books. When he asked his mother about it she would say something about ‘special' children having ‘special' parents – and that one day he would understand why things had to be like this. One day, she said, they would explain everything.

On the farm they bred only birds – there were no livestock, bar the ones he saw dotted on the faraway hillside. There were several aviaries in the back garden, and a huge, empty pigsty in the yard. The pigsty became his den – he would sit in there for hours on end and play out his fantasy of being a swineherd, with real swine to look after. He was never let near the birds. He was faintly aware of them, just sitting there, beyond the mesh, hardly moving at all. Every now and then the birds would be sold off – leaving the smallholding eerily empty. On those days he snuck into one of the aviaries, hoping to collect a few mementoes. But there was never any trace of those birds. No scent, not so much as a tiny feather.

Once a new batch of birds arrived, he would watch his father transferring them from the cages into the aviary. Birds were squawking, active creatures – so he thought from his books – and yet these birds would sit entirely still on their perches while they were moved about, their feathers hardly ruffling at all. When they flew they simply slid into the air, as though easing themselves into some glutinous substance, opening their beaks as though drinking it in. The only moving part of them seemed to be their restless orange eyes – which followed you wherever you went. They were beautiful, too, like no other birds he'd seen – their coats velvety blue, with a green sheen, and their beaks mustard yellow. He'd never seen them eat anything, and so one day, when his father's back was turned, he fished a piece of bread out of his pocket and held it up to the mesh.

To his surprise, the aviary erupted – a volcano of feathers tumbled down upon him, and he felt the sharp sting of beaks as the bread was wrenched from his hand. At that point he remembered his father shouting at him: ‘What have you done? Oh Culhwch! What have you done!' He was sent to bed without supper, and the next day the aviary was completely empty. Neither his mother nor his father ever commented on the event but within a few days a fence had been put up around the aviaries so that he couldn't get to them. He hovered outside them often, but never heard a peep from those birds ever again.

Years passed by; the birds and strange, random visitors came and went. He learned about places in the world in his geography lessons yet his mother insisted that you had to cross the forest to get to them. Then, something surprising happened. A few months ago, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, a girl arrived in the house. There was commotion in the thick of night, and he listened to the whole exchange through a crack in the kitchen door. A booming male voice instructed his parents to keep the girl for a few months, while things ‘settled down'. He heard his mother saying that one child was enough, with all the birds to care for too – she would not be able to do it. The man retaliated by saying that he had the power to take the boy away if they did not do as he asked. ‘Remember, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he's still missing,' he heard him say, before adding, in a gentler voice: ‘Look at her, she'll be no trouble, she never has been. Until now. You owe me this much. I haven't forgotten what you did. You still haven't been forgiven for it.' Through the narrow slit Culhwch could not see the girl properly – but he somehow developed a sense of her – a restless, moving thing under the man's grasp, there was a kind of white dazzle about her, bright blonde hair and pale toes.

For fear of getting caught he went back to bed, thinking he'd be offered an explanation the next day. But at the breakfast table there was no mention of the previous night's escapade. His mother sipped her juice gravely, his father shoved little hummocks of cereal into his mouth; neither one of them said a word. There was simply no trace of the girl; not so much as a stray hair on the kitchen floor. It was the first time Culhwch realised that the world in which he lived was somehow not real at all.

Days passed, and life carried on as normal. And yet, everything seemed to have changed. There was – he could not really explain it – a new energy in the house. White flowers sprung up in the garden, and the patches of damp that had been collecting on the bathroom ceiling suddenly receded. There was a new lightness and freshness about the place. He knew the girl could not be far.

One morning, when his father had fallen asleep in his chair, he followed his mother on her morning stroll. To his surprise, she entered the forest. He waited a while before entering himself, remembering his mother's warning. But soon enough he found himself following her footsteps through the wilderness, which was easier than he'd anticipated, for every few steps he noticed a curious little hollow in the soil, as though something had been uprooted. This dark trail led him to a clearing in the woods, where he came upon a small hut perched on the edge of a stream. There, he saw his mother, kneeling on the muddy bank, sleeves rolled up, pouring a bucket of water over the head of a naked young girl, gently washing her hair. There was such tenderness between them, even as his mother sighed and puffed and pretended to find the whole thing bothersome, he saw that she enjoyed it, that the girl's presence was a joy to her. She shampooed the hair as though it were fine silk between her fingers – and the girl, muted, frightened-looking as she was, yielded her head to his mother's hands and gave into the caress. It wasn't until the girl got up and stood there, illuminated in the sun's rays that Culhwch saw how truly beautiful she was. He had never seen anybody's naked body except for his own before, and it seemed to him the most wondrous, the most pure thing he had seen. And yet there was something odd about the body, something imbalanced, which he couldn't put his finger on. She did not look like the girls in his books.

The moment his mother stepped back from the water, she seemed to harden, taking the girl by the hand and roughly shoving her back into the hut. As she turned away to lock the door, Culhwch saw his chance and made a run for it back to the house. He arrived just as his father was waking up, and pretended he'd been reading in his room. When his mother came back he could not resist the temptation of asking her how her walk had been. ‘Oh lovely,' she said. ‘Such lovely flowers springing up at this time of year.'

He snuck out that night, following the moon's path through the wilderness until he came to the hut. As he walked he had the feeling that someone was watching him, but when he turned back there was no one there. He carried on. Still the feeling persisted, and slowly he began to realise that the watchers were above him. When he looked up, there they were – the birds. Around a dozen of them, silently flitting from branch to branch, moving as he moved, stopping when he stopped. He wondered if his mother knew they were out. It wasn't until he reached the hut that they descended, perching themselves on the wooden porch, a barricade of orange eyes. And yet, when he moved, they shuffled sideways to let him pass. He knocked at the door. No whimpering came from inside, just a small, quiet voice, asking him what he wanted. Within a few moments her face appeared at the mesh window. He could only see her hair, shining white in the moonlight, dazzling him. The door was bolted shut. He told her he wanted to help.

‘You can't help someone who doesn't exist,' she said. ‘There's no point in freeing me. Who would have me?'

A bird hopped up beside him, scratching the mesh with a sharp claw. He thought he detected a faint smile from her at that moment. She raised her own pale palm to the window as a greeting.

‘Hello you,' she said to the bird, in lilting tones, so unlike the tired voice he had just heard.

‘I've never seen the birds out,' he said. ‘My mother would never let them out this far.'

‘Oh, don't you worry about them. They can look after themselves. Can't you?'

The bird squawked – the first time Culhwch had ever heard one of them make a sound. It was curious, somehow melodic and off-key at the same time. He tried to touch the bird but it hobbled away from him, keeping its eyes fixed on the shadow behind the door.

That's when he asked her who she was. He asked her for a name.

‘A name... is about the only thing I have got,' she said. ‘My name's Olwen.'

Olwen. A white trail. He thought of the damp receding, of the flowers rising like bold sails from the ground. So it was her, sweeping her whiteness over their lives.

‘But why are you here?' he asked. ‘Why are you with us?'

‘My father, Ysbaddaden, sent me away. He's going to do something awful while I'm gone, I know it. I'll be going back to him once it's over.'

He asked her what she had done to make her father want to send her away. She would not tell him. She asked him who he was.

‘The son of the woman who locked you up.'

She asked him if he was sure. He'd never thought about it until that moment.

‘Because I think... I think you might be the one... the one left over. They made a mess of things so they had to send you away. Otherwise, you might, might have been me. But you're not me. I'm me. Though it doesn't feel like it sometimes. All I know is... I don't think you are their son.'

The moment she said it he began to feel funny. His chest constricted, his eyes suddenly began to droop and his whole body felt as though it would slump to the floor. A grey haze began to settle over his mind. It was as though the truth had winded him. ‘Oh,' she said, seeing him grab the wall of the hut for support. ‘Oh no. You have to go. Quickly – before it takes hold.'

‘Before what takes hold?' he asked her.

‘Please, go now,' she said.

There was such urgency in her voice at that moment that he had no choice but to listen to her. He struggled for breath in the dark, turned on his heels and trudged slowly back through the forest, back to the farm, to certainty, to order. The closer he got to the smallholding the more the heaviness lifted, his legs became his own again, his eyelids sprung open. Even without looking up he knew the birds were not with him now; that he had only been a means of leading them to her. In the distance he heard that one faint squawk swell into bright, triumphant chatter.

By the time he was back in his own bed, his head was clear once more, and he knew that she was right, he was not their son. Perhaps he had always known.

He waited before going to see her again. His mother came and went, and he dreamt of the damp flaxen hair in that stream, longing to touch it, to see her properly. He thought of nothing but her, this girl in the hut in the forest. And yet his parents acted as though nothing was amiss. He had expected them to find the birds missing on their daily rounds, and yet there was no mention of them at all. The three of them would still sit around that table and pretend their life together was entirely normal and ordinary. As if there was not a girl living a few feet away from them, caged, like the silent birds in the aviary. As though his parents had not done something so terrible that they had to keep looking after her and had little or no say in what they could and could not do.

He was determined to set her free. Grabbing his father's tools the following night, he had never felt such bravado. He would wrench that door open and she would fall into his arms, he envisaged it time and time again. His heart was pounding as he approached the hut. To his surprise the door was wide open. The strip of light from his torch revealed it to be bare and empty. Fury rose up in him; he kicked the door, punched a wall, shouted into the night. He had not been prepared for the physical pain of losing her, and he knew – at that moment – that there was nothing more important to him than finding her again. Once he was able to still himself, he lay down on the wooden floor, frantically sniffing the air for any trace of her. That's when he became aware of a silhouette in the doorframe, one that was all too familiar. His mother.

‘What are you doing here, Culhwch?' she asked. He could hear the fear in her voice. ‘What have we told you about the forest?'

‘You've told me a lot of things,' he said, without getting up. ‘None of them seem to be true.'

‘I think we'd better go back to the house,' his mother said. ‘We can talk things through. Perhaps we could answer any questions you may have. It isn't... we aren't... we aren't bad people, me and your dad. It's just we got... a bit caught up in some things and...'

‘But you're not my parents, are you?' he said. The sentence surfaced in the dark between them.

‘No,' his mother said quietly. ‘No, we're not.'

‘What's going on? You always said you would tell me. One day, you said. We'll tell you – you'll understand. We'll explain everything. Isn't that what you said?'

‘I always wanted to – it was your father...'

‘He's not my father though, is he! Stop pretending.'

‘No, he's not. Culhwch, I'm sorry, he's not... he's not... not my husband either. He's nothing to me. This whole thing... it's just not... not real. I'm as tired of it as you are.'

His mother burst into tears. He'd never heard her cry before. He wanted to put an arm over her shoulder, but he stopped himself – holding on with all his might to the anger which rose in him, a new and delicious feeling. He kicked the wall again. Enough to hurt himself. Enough to feel alive.

‘What have you done with her, with Olwen?'

‘She's gone home, Culhwch, that's all. Let's go back to the house, eh? I'll explain things.'

‘Was it the birds?' he asked. ‘Did the birds set her free?'

His mother gawped at him, as though he'd said something ridiculous.

‘No, Culhwch. God, no. The birds wouldn't be able to come here...'