Gwynfor took the bat and walked across to the door. I crumpled up a piece of paper and bowled. ‘Howzat!’ he cried, the ball of paper thudded against the window pane and, as if the gods were anxious for our party not to lose sight of its serious purpose, a van drove past outside with a loud-hailer on the roof inviting us to the circus at Ponterwyd. The shadow fell. Gwynfor looked glum. He nodded, finished his drink in one go, wished me a Merry Christmas one more time, and left with the bat.
Chapter 7
PEOPLE WHO ARE afraid of the dark are not being unreasonable. Our deepest fears arise from instincts developed at the dawn of time when the world was much emptier. There were not many folks about. Human beings were the hairy guys in fur swimming costumes, stooping a bit because they were still getting used to standing on their hind legs. They were harmless to everybody except themselves. All the early indications were, they didn’t like themselves much. In those days, if you happened to be walking through the vast untamed wilderness and encountered that greatest of rarities, a stranger, someone from another tribe, the safest course of action was to kill him. That’s why they invented the police. But that experiment quickly turned sour, one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease.
So humanity tried something more sophisticated. They invented something called the greeting. Just a little form of words, a comment on the weather, made as an opening gambit, trivial in content but far-reaching in its implications. It allowed men and women to come together and live in things called towns. Because they discovered a strange thing about the greeting. Nutters were incapable of exchanging pleasantries of this sort. It’s the same today. There has never been a more effective way of singling out the benign from the malign.
But it doesn’t work so well at night. If you encounter a stranger at night in a place where there are no street lamps, it is always an unnerving experience. Tadpole lived in a copse beyond the top of Penglais Hill where there were no lights, where the sun seldom reached, where families were often closely knit in ways proscribed by the Bible. A world with a high likelihood that anyone you encountered in the dark would be a nutter.
I had to leave the car at a five-bar gate held closed by a wire and counterweight strung over a pulley. The path was overgrown, a dark tunnel through wet black trees. I traced the route by gingerly testing the texture of dead leaves under my feet. Up ahead was a dark shape which might have been a clearing or quarry, or maybe the back door to Pluto’s realm. There was no light, except for a brief glimpse every now and then through gaps in foliage of the rectangular green direction sign at the side of the main road. It got smaller and smaller. The sounds of cars getting more and more muffled. I’ve always found those signposts strangely comforting, with the myth of order in the chaos that they suggest. You may be leaving town, they seem to say, but you will always be connected by the ribbon of tarmac, and you can’t go anywhere that those most prosaic of people, the council road menders, have not been before. But it was clear from the path beneath my feet that they hadn’t been here. An owl hooted. A lone star glimmered through a black cobweb of twigs and branches that groaned in the invisible breeze as if shaken by a giant’s hand. In my pocket my hand clutched the jar of Eye of Newt pesto that Tadpole had phoned and asked me to bring.
I came to a clearing in which stood a cottage. The windows were dark apart from one downstairs: black curtains edged with a glimmer of light. A man stood in the yard sharpening an axe at a grindstone, sending a flurry of blue sparks into the night. To the side of the house, there was a washing line hung with items that instinct warned one not to scrutinise; beyond that was a lonely grave. An invisible dog growled; the man stopped grinding and looked up.
‘Evening!’ I said.
There was no answer.
He was a fully grown man, maybe fifty or so, doing a man’s chore. But there was something about him that suggested a boy. It was difficult to say what it was, his demeanour perhaps, or his wardrobe – something about the cut or style of his clothes told you, in a way you couldn’t define, that here was a man in his fifties who was still dressed every morning by his mother. A man who lives his life in the feverish embrace, in too close and suffocating a communion with a mother’s love. A man who says little except for occasional grunts, and whom people refer to as ‘one of God’s children’. Until the time, that is, when the sheriff arrives late at night at the back door with a posse of men with frightened faces. The family sit in scared silence round the supper table, listening as Mother talks long and low under the porch. Then she comes back, her face having aged ten years in the space of that conversation, and says, ‘Billy will be going away for a while.’ And the men come in and take him away, their eyes narrowed and glittering with hate; and Mummy has no one else to dress and must face the terrors of this world alone.
I knocked on the door and Tadpole opened with the air of someone who has been peering impatiently through the curtains for the past hour. Yet when you finally arrive she makes you wait before answering to make it appear that she has forgotten that you were coming. The smell of Tadpole’s house was a sour mixture of infrequently washed flesh, soot, onions and dripping smells from the pantry; and the stultifying thickness of air breathed in rooms where the windows had years ago been sealed shut by paint, and the only fresh air that arrives enters via the chimney.
I’m not sure exactly what I had expected. A gauche attempt at dolling up, perhaps; a moth-eaten dress stored in the back of a wardrobe in a room no longer used; a dress last seen in a sepia vignette of Gran and Granddad on a day trip to Llandudno. But I was wrong. She was wearing military uniform. She had black trousers, sharply creased, with red piping down the inseam; a black military tunic with gold braid on the sleeves and epaulettes and medals on the chest. The whole ensemble mirrored in the brightly polished convex toes of her shoes. She looked like a bandsman who plays the French horn in a gazebo on Sunday afternoons. Her hair, the colour of wet straw, was parted manstyle and plastered down with something that might have been Brylcreem but could just as easily have been beef dripping. In the porch light I saw with grisly fascination that little flakes of dandruff were scattered in the furrow of her parting, like cornflakes from Lilliput.
She noted my surprise and mistook it for delight. ‘Not bad, huh?’ she said doing a pirouette. ‘I felt really stupid trying on a frock so I thought I would wear my Soldiers for Jesus uniform. It’s the one we wear for ceremonial occasions.’