New Welsh Short Stories (11 page)

She padded over to the open kitchen door. Inside was cooler. Nigel's kitchen wasn't new and modern like theirs. No island unit or collection of blue glass at the window. It was beige and 1970s but immaculately clean. Charlotte remembered hearing he'd inherited the house off his mother – Charlotte bet she would never have allowed her son to keep crocodiles in the garden while she was alive. On the drainer next to the sink stood a single washed mug. A pie was defrosting on the counter top.

She found quickly what she was looking for: the keys hanging on a row of hooks that looked strangely sharp, like you might cut your fingers on them. She discounted anything that might be house or car keys and swept the rest down into her hand.

She hesitated outside, wondering which to begin with first. The sheds running up the side were smaller – Charlotte guessed the crocodiles there must be smaller too so she started there. Her hands shook so much she dropped the keys and they fell to the ground with a horrible clang. But she scooped them up again and started looking through them one by one. There was only one that could be a padlock key – so all the padlocks had the same key – so much for his security precautions. She flung the rest of the keys into a bucket of sawdust by the door and slid the key into the padlock. It sprung open easily. She slid the bolt across on the door and it swung open.

Immediately, a horrible smell hit her. Sweetish, of earth gone bad. Things kept under glass. It was like no smell she'd encountered before. Inside was dark and her eyes had to adjust. There was a caged construction with another padlock. A greenish lamp lit up the water of a plastic pool in the corner, thick sawdust covered the floor. There seemed to be a dark shape submerged in the water, but she couldn't be sure. The lock on the cage door was only a few steps inside and the same key fitted that padlock too. Leaving both doors wide open, she moved onto the next one.

In the next shed she caught a proper glimpse of the occupant. It too was in the water, and appeared to be hiding, but a thick ridge of crusty scales was clearly visible, sticking up out of the pool. In the next one were two – both small. As the cage door opened they pressed against the back wall and threw back their heads, opening and closing their jaws as if trying to tell her something.

She carried on up the line, unlocking and flinging away padlocks until the yard was pocked with them, like small unexploded devices. Sometimes there was a scuttling inside, a scrabbling of claws. Other times silence. Once a pair of eyes shone straight at her out of the gloom. But she didn't stop. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a yellowish snout emerging from one of the first sheds, then retreating.

And all the time she knew what she was working towards. The big shed, with a black tarry roof, timbers baking in the heat, positioned against the back wall.

She stood in front of it, poised on the ball of one foot. The key slotted into the padlock in a ribbon of time that was slow, drawn out and stretched flat, like she too could be flattened by it. The bolt slid sideways in her hand. The door swung open and inside, the creature was staring at her, the one from the Florida pool of her imagination. She stepped inside and unlocked the cage.

The creature careened over his bathing area, back legs slipping and sliding into the water. She withdrew outside and picked up a metal pole leaning by the shed door. ‘Come on then you bastard,' she murmured. ‘You bloody, fucking bastard.'

The crocodile charged and time shot forward, concertinering on itself. The creature's claws slid on sawdust and it emerged from the cage door in one long, sinuous movement.

It stopped, so close Charlotte could have reached out her leg and kicked it. Its yellow brown eyes were the most devoid of any sort of compassion she'd ever seen. Worse than a murderer even.

She stood with the pole ready, waiting, and the crocodile's eyes flickered like shutter speeds before it rushed her. She closed her own eyes as she was nearly knocked sideways off her feet, felt a primeval rasp against her leg. She opened them again and saw the blood on the fair skin of her leg where its scales had scraped the flesh and glanced up just in time to see a huge tail disappearing into the house.

She followed it. Across the yard variously sized reptiles – though none as big as the one she'd just been ready to fight with – were dotted around. Some were already snapping and snarling at each other. A few just looked lost and confused. As she marched across the yard one small but wiry crocodile cracked open its jaws at her and she clanged it on the side of the head with her pole.

Through the kitchen and down the dim passageway that smelled of bleach. Two doors opened off the hallway – old
-
fashioned parlour and dining room. Nigel hadn't knocked his into one like they had. It could be in either of them. Or … she glanced up … could crocodiles manage stairs?

By the front door she hesitated. The light from the ugly half
-
arch in the door fell on a pink felt hat that hung from a nearby hook. An address book was open by the telephone with spidery old person's writing across it. Leftovers from Nigel's mother, she guessed, things he hadn't bothered to dispose of. Couldn't wait probably, to get rid of her, so he could move the crocs in instead. Charlotte had a feeling she would have liked Nigel's mother. Somewhere she sensed her ghost, chorussing her approval.
Stupid boy, look what he goes and does as soon as my back's turned…

Charlotte looked at the metal pole in her grip. She'd almost forgotten it was there. Nigel's mum's voice muttered around her:
You. Can't. Just. Do. Things. Like. This.
Silly boy
. She gave her head a shake and flung aside the pole and it crashed into a set of golf clubs leaning against the wall. It seemed to take a long time for the tinkling to finally die away. When it did she seemed to catch Nigel's mother's voice, close to her head, like an escape of gas – the final expulsion from the old lady before she finally disappeared, fading and bitter:
Who'd be a mother….?

Charlotte found herself craving the sweet relief of the addict, like having blood let, the urge to take the lid off something packed too tightly together. She opened the front door and the everyday sounds, the sounds of a London street, flooded in. And the relief came, surging through her bones in an elixir. She stood for a second, listening: car engines; the ringing of a bicycle bell; two men in conversation, their voices loud and carrying.

She paused at the door and, for a moment, thoughts of Mike, Sam – of little Fay – penetrated her mind. Soon Mike would be wondering where she was. He'd come out of the back door, leaving it open on such a warm night. Upstairs her children would be asleep, their breath stirring the summer air. She looked down and the sunshine yellow of her dress struck her as sickly; a kind of disguise of her own crocodile heart that pulsed beneath.

She stepped out and heaved air into her lungs, then started walking away leaving Nigel's door swinging back and forth in the hot breeze.

They were on their own now; they'd have to take their chances.

A LETTER FROM WALES

Cynan Jones

The Professor chose to withhold the information. He himself obliterated references to dates, children's names and specific places.
In his files, this first letter is referred to and catalogued simply as Letter from Wales.
It is possible that the specimens mentioned were destroyed or more likely relabelled to render them untraceable.

Address and date torn away

Dear Professor,

Given all the places you have sent me, all the places I have travelled in the name of our work, you can only guess my disbelief that such a thing as I will now relate has come to light just a short way to our west, on our very doorstep as it were.

As you read this letter you will understand how tenaciously I am having to check my emotions and write this account sensibly and scientifically. If I did not know it to be your habit to take correspondence in your private study, I would urge you to read this alone, where you will have full liberty to reflect on this discovery. I will put down the facts as empirically as I can.

The children that were ‘bitten' were young; the oldest just recently turned nine. It was clear from talking with them that they have a favourite place a little down the river A_, where the otherwise quite tightly overgrown bank opens out into a clearing studded with mature beech.

To the side of the clearing the ground slopes steeply up, forming a low hill which, once it breaks the woods, rolls away as farmland. The severity of the slope has led to a small landslide, and part of the way up there are some shelves of exposed rock. Given the steepness, and the mature trees, there is a swing rope. This, to the children, is the chief attraction of the place.

As each child, or parent in some cases, attested that the ‘bites' coincided with a visit to this spot, it was there I naturally began.

The ‘bites' themselves were uncomfortable looking and in some cases severe, but I did not take them immediately to be bites. In fact, given the raw, sore look of the injuries, my first thought was that something on the swing rope was causing damage, particularly to the younger children whose skin is that much softer. I wondered if there was perhaps some plant fibre or chemical in the rope. Comprehensive tests, however, revealed nothing.

Knowing the habit of younger children to be always playing in dirt and falling about on the ground, my next step was to undertake a thorough survey of the leaf litter at the clearing. It threw up the usual specimens: hexapods and Protura, threadworms, mites and pseudoscorpions. There were also larger arthropods, and, given the favourable dampness of the spot, a commentable quantity of snail eggs. But there was nothing untoward, and nothing I could see that would make the injuries.

After four days I was none the wiser. I had extended the survey. Fly papers and insect traps brought up nothing other than the common midges, notably
Culicoides
, associated with the waterside at this time of year. Bite they do, but they would not cause the type o
f
‘bite' I was seeing, which, on reflection, was in some cases more like a burn. Neither did a thorough catalogue of flora bring forth any suspects.

In the days that I was there, I watched some of the ‘bites' worsen. In two children, Ll_, aged eight, and B_, aged seven, a spreading damage, something like necrosis, set in and, horribly, there was nothing for it but to amputate.

While I am committed to relating events step by step and sensibly, you can imagine the pressure that came on me then to ‘solve the case' with this terrible new development.

I interviewed the children again.

It became clear that, with the encouragement of some older children who, as older children do, have taken it upon themselves to marshal the play space – a long
-
held ritual was afoot.

In order to have a ‘go on the rope', the younger children were required to scale the slope, which, to a child under ten years old, was no mean expedition; to pass through the crest of woodland, at that point mainly scrub oak; and bring back one of the ‘yellow flowers' from the field above. Then, and only then, could they play on the swing.

The ‘yellow flower' is
Senecio jacobaea
, common ragwort. (Not the Oxford ragwort I noticed on my journey, which has established itself here, as it does, with quick effect since the opening of the local rail line only a few years ago.) My analysis of the plant showed there to be a good deal of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, and more evidently, and as with many of the daisies, sesquiterpene lactones. It was my conclusion that, given the delicate skin of the children affected, a rather harsh form of Compositae dermatitis had manifested itself, perhaps aggravated by the action of trying to pull up the plants and injuring the outer layer of skin in doing so. It would account for the raw, blistered look of the injuries.

While I was still perturbed by the necrosis in some of the children, I extrapolated this to be down to some unfortunate hyper
-
allergic reaction in those individuals and resolved to research this further. Otherwise, it seemed the case was solved. I spoke with the local community, and instructed them to keep their children away from the plant.

It was the following day, as I packed my bags to leave, that a small child, G_ J_, was brought to me, insisting he had been bitten by a ‘red bat'.

I was convinced this was just the sensationalism that attends any such event, but examined the child nevertheless. His finger was swollen considerably, the skin tight and reddened. More notably, there was, this time, a tiny ‘bite' mark – a slightly blunted V shape – around which bubbles of thick yellow pus had formed. Around the bitten area, the capillaries and veins were shot through with a dark shade.

My immediate thought was that, in pulling up the plant, the child had cut himself. It is possible. The internode of ragwort is tough and somewhat triangular, perhaps stubborn enough to be a sort of blade to a young child's skin. But he insisted he had not been near the plants, and stuck with his story. The bite, he said, had happened towards dusk, when he was playing by the road bridge in the village.

I racked my brain. He was insistent on the ‘red bat'. Taking into account a childish and therefore suspect sense of scale, my first thought was a moth.
Deilephila elpenor
, (possibly
porcellus
) perhaps, drawn to the lights going on at dusk.
Deilephila
, of course, are really ‘pink', but again I adjusted this, given what a child might deem red.