‘So,’ said Myfanwy, injecting an artificial warmth into her voice, ‘you two had a date.’
‘We went to see Clip.’
‘How nice.’
‘You should try and see it.’
‘It wasn’t really a date,’ I said lamely.
Tadpole shot me a look of angry consternation and said, ‘Don’t you hate it when they do that? We’ve been seeing each other for a while now.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Myfanwy. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Have we?’ I said.
‘He really knows how to charm a girl. Trip to the cinema – tickets to see Clip, of all things. Champagne and roses; holding my hand; whispering sweet nothings. Oh, my head’s still swimming.’
Myfanwy stared down at her food. After a while she swung her arm out, brought her wrist up to her nose, and peered at her watch in the familiar dumbshow of someone who is going to announce a pressing need to leave. ‘My goodness! Is that the time?’
‘Do you have to go?’ asked Tadpole.
‘No she doesn’t.’
‘Yes, I think I do. It’s getting late.’
‘No it isn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s not even seven o’clock.’
Tadpole had finished her plate of sweet and sour and was looking hungrily at Myfanwy’s. ‘Aren’t you going to eat your food?’
‘No, I’ve lost my appetite.’
‘Pity to let it go to waste.’ She picked up Myfanwy’s plate and held it above hers. She was about to scrape it onto hers, but I stopped her. I took Myfanwy’s plate off her and put it back down in front of Myfanwy.
I said, ‘What are you doing here? Myfanwy and I are supposed to be having dinner together.’
‘I’m not stopping you, am I?’
‘Yes. Now, why have you come?’
‘Oh God, Louie. Don’t be so dense, will you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know why I’m here. Don’t make me say it in front of Myfanwy. I’ll die of embarrassment.’
‘Say what?’
‘You know. About our little secret. Spare a girl some blushes, please.’
‘I have no secrets from Myfanwy. State your business and go.’
‘Oh, Louie, please don’t make me say it, please don’t. I’ll go red. I hate it when that happens.’
‘Just say what you have to say.’
‘I’ve come to collect . . . you know . . .’
‘What?’
‘Them.’
‘Them what?’
‘Oh, Louie.’
‘Stop saying, “Oh, Louie.” It’s driving me nuts.’
‘All right, you asked for it. I’ve come for my pants.’
What?
‘I think I left them here the other night.’ She stood up surprisingly quickly. ‘No, don’t you two move, I’ll get them. You just enjoy your dinner.’
She rushed up to the other end of the caravan and whipped back the bedclothes. There lying on the sheets on one side of the bed, just below the pillow and about as wide, neatly laid out, was a pair of pants.
‘Oh, here they are. How embarrassing.’ Tadpole scooped them up and stuffed them into her pocket.
I looked at Myfanwy. ‘You’re not buying any of this nonsense, I hope.’
Myfanwy glared at her food and refused to look at me.
I stood up and walked over to Tadpole and took her by the wrist. ‘Come over here. I want to tell you something in secret.’
I took her coat off the hook, thrust it into her hands and pushed her to the door.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Throwing you out.’
I opened the door and pushed Tadpole onto the step. ‘Now push off,’ I said.
‘But, Louie—’
‘Get lost!’ I closed the door. I walked back to Myfanwy and sat down.
Tadpole appeared at the window. Her fist was in her eye and her mouth contorted into that familiar figure-of-eight on its side; she wailed. I mouthed my parting words through the Perspex and she wailed even more. I drew the curtain across. There was silence for a second and then the sound of a pudgy fist beating on the side of the caravan and a voice crying, ‘Let me in!’
I put my arm round Myfanwy.
‘Louie it’s so awful. Why won’t she leave us alone?’
‘Don’t worry, she’ll soon get tired of banging on the wall. Eat your dinner.’
There were tears in her eyes; she sneezed them back and picked up her fork. She started moving the food around the plate. After a while the banging ceased. Myfanwy stopped playing with her food and we sat there waiting, holding our breath, silently praying that Tadpole had finally given up and gone home. We sat still as statues, listening. All we could hear was the thin tap of rain on the metal skin above our heads; and distant creak of the Lyons Maid sign outside the newsagent’s. And then beyond that a soft roar as the wind picked up. I wondered what made caravans so cosy. Maybe it was the very thinness of the membrane protecting us from the wilderness. Out there beyond that line, the little crooked rectangle of white pebbles taken from the beach, you could die. You could wander onto the sands, oblivious in the night, and never return. You last memory would be the sea; the dark salty glugging liquid forcing its way into your mouth and nose and ears.
Myfanwy sank into my side; I nestled my chin on her head and rested my gaze on her hair, the colour of conkers. Some girls try to buy it in a bottle, but all they buy is a colour, and colours on their own are nothing: flat expanses of undifferentiated hue, like a song with only one note. In truth the colour we call chestnut is really a swirling sea of many different hues: of mahogany and umber and sienna; faint swirls of black; and lighter russets like the flecks in a tawny owl’s eyes. . . . As a child in autumn I knew the secret; when I prised open the lime-green thorny shell and popped from the moist sucking socket an egg of wood, it’s shine so deep I saw my own puzzled tiny face staring back against the backdrop of the wide unfathomable sky. You can’t buy it. It is a gift from your ancestors. You have to be born in these parts and inherit the green-grey eyes and the fair skin, lightly speckled with pale freckles like eggshell. Or you have to imprison it in the bars of a song. They used to specialise in it: those bards and ovates with their long oaken tables, clanking jugs of ale and rustling chain mail. Bring on the minstrel! the poet! bring on Taliesin and sing to us of this girl’s hair while the wolf howls and we quaff. They’ve all gone now; the bards, the warriors and, saddest of all, the wolf. What was it the poet said? Driven from their halls by brambles. But the beauty they sang of, the ancient beauty of the hills and feral sky, you can still see it in Myfanwy’s face.
There was a loud clunk against the side of the caravan. We froze. There was a pause; and then the rhythmic scraping sound of boots on the rungs of a ladder. Seconds later the noise was above our heads, as if the caravan was at the bottom of the ocean and a deep-sea diver in lead-soled boots was clumping across the roof.
‘Oh, my God, she’s on the roof.’
‘Louie!’
‘Just sit there. Don’t do anything.’
I stood up and from the air vent at the other end of the caravan came Tadpole’s voice, slightly warbled and distorted as if she too were under water.
‘Loooooouie!’
‘Look here, you!’ I shouted up at the vent.
‘You shouldn’t have done that. I’m angry now. You shouldn’t have made me angry, Louie.’
‘Get off my roof.’
‘Or you’ll do what?’
‘I’ll come out and drag you off.’
‘I’d like to see you try.’
‘If I come out there I’ll break your goddamned neck.’
‘I’d soon sort you out. I’ve been trained by the Soldiers for Jesus.’
‘We’ll see about that.’