The Gift (6 page)

While he was doing this, he found that the pressure on his mind was much less at the back of the house, so he took his homework into Mum's room and finished it there, very quickly and badly.

After that he watched from the bathroom window for twenty minutes, but saw nothing outside his mind. Inside there were the same pictures over and over again, either the house being attacked or the furious squiggles. Only twice was there anything else: The first time it was a man in a coverall huddled sideways on a muddy path, with a booted foot kicking fiercely at him. This had the clear feel of something that had actually happened and was now being remembered. The other thing was very vague and strange, a dark gray rounded mass, veined here and there with white. It looked, compared with everything else, cool and peaceful, but it seemed to have less meaning even than the squiggles.

Penny had switched off the TV.

“What was it?” said Davy.

“A documentary about Bolivia.”

“What about the other channel?”

“Huh. This is do-you-good night. It's all about prisons.”

“Oh, Lord! I'll try that.”

“In that case I'm going to bed.”

“Not for a minute, Pen.”

“I'm not going to sit up … Are you all right? You look awful.”

“I'm all right.”

“No, you aren't. You'd better go to bed.”

“When they come home. I'm not ill. It's …”

“Something to do with your gift?”

“Ung.”

“I don't want to know then. But I'll sit up and hold your hand.”

“Thanks.”

The TV was a way of keeping the door of his mind shut, something to wedge against it so that the heavy shoulder outside could not thrust it open and flood him with hideous imaginings. He watched men sitting dully in cells, or moving dully down long corridors, or working dully in the workshops. Sometimes they chatted, or laughed, but there was a deadness about the way they moved. At first Davy thought that this was something to do with the pictures being filmed so that you never saw any of the prisoners' faces, but then he decided it was real. To be in prison was a sort of being dead.

“You don't really want to watch this,” sighed Penny. “I'll play you racing demon. I'll have the pack that hasn't got the five of spades missing.”

It wasn't quite such an effective wedge as TV, but it worked well enough till Mum and Dad came back, a little tight but in good tempers and very lovey-dovey. Davy watched Dad lock and bolt the door, and sighed with relief.

But when he went up to bed, he found he could not begin to drowse without the pictures flooding through his mind again. He turned on his light and read
Greenmantle
for a while. Then he decided that the watcher might simply be waiting till the last light went out, so he switched it off, put on his sweater and trousers over his pajamas, drew the curtains open, and watched the street, standing well back from the window so that the streetlamp would not reflect from his face. The pictures came more weakly and confusedly now, as though the watcher himself were sleepy, but the fragments Davy saw were much the same except that the woman who ran out of the house was now Mum.

After about twenty minutes the darkness under the carport moved. Davy tensed for a dash to Mum's room, to shout to Dad that the house was being attacked; but the man who came down the driveway of the empty house swung off straight along the sidewalk. He was wearing a hat, so his face was in shadow; and the angle from the bedroom window made it hard to judge his height—about five foot six? Anyway, not tall. But big. Though his short overcoat was padded at the shoulders, even so Davy could see that he was really very broad across the back. The coat made him look like a soldier, and his hair seemed to be cut quite short, too.

But there was one thing, even in that tricky light, that made Davy sure he would know the man again: He walked with a curious, springy, balanced step, as though he had an extra set of muscles in his legs which made him walk with that tense wariness, poised, like a tennis player waiting for the serve or a hunter in the jungle ready for the spring of the tiger. Watching that walk, Davy decided that the man's name was Wolf. It would be easier to think about him if he had a name.

A minute later, well down the road, a car started. Its engine note muttered into the distance. Davy felt his way into bed, relishing the dreamless dark, and soon was deep asleep.

He didn't see Wolf again for more than a month.

It was rather a good month. Davy played regularly in the school Under Fifteen side; he joined a group of six boys who were making an SF film about the mice in the biology lab suddenly becoming superintelligent; Ted Kauffman discovered an old BSA bike at a dump, and Davy helped him drag it home and start trying to repair it. And at home Dad eased up a bit, back to what he'd been before the bad week when Wolf was about.

“I think it might be because he's actually doing a job he's quite good at,” said Penny.

“He'd say that anyway—being good at it, I mean.”

“I'm not talking about what he says. But he really is pretty clever about people. And this job seems to be mostly that—interviewing them, taking them on, sending them off to the places they're needed.”

“At least he'd know all the dodges for interviews,” said Davy. “He's flanneled his way through enough of his own.”

“You've got to stop talking like that,” said Penny seriously. “Stop thinking like that, even. I mean, we've got a chance of his being the sort of father other people have. We mustn't do anything to push him back to being old Dad.”

“Buy Super New Dad,” chanted Davy.

“With the miracle ingredient—
responsibility
,” breathed Penny.

“Can
your
Dad tell right from wrong?” intoned Davy.

“No?” asked Penny.

“But Super New Dad can,” they shouted together.

“Buy Super New Dad!”

One morning in Art Mr. Locke showed Davy's class a lot of reproductions of abstracts by well-known painters and then told them to go and do likewise. The only rule was that there mustn't be anything in any of the pictures that could be recognized as a picture of something. Davy hated this sort of artwork. He was fairly good at drawing animals and houses and trees, though not so good with people; but he was hopeless if he didn't have something to work from. However, he found a sheet of fawny yellow paper in the rack, pinned it to his board, and with the side of a stick of charcoal scraped a furry darkness around the edges. Then he used the tip of the charcoal to dash a whirling squiggle into the middle of the sheet. And another. And another …

“I should stop there,” said Mr. Locke quietly over his shoulder. Davy had in fact decided that already. The mess was just at that point of pressure where you thought you would yell if it got worse.

“That's pretty, uh, interesting,” said Mr. Locke. He was a tall thin man with bloodshot eyes and an orange beard that seemed to be all part of the tangle of his long orange hair. Penny said he washed it once a year. Now he stood swaying to and fro on his heels and looking at Davy's picture.

“Giving it, uh, a title?” he said in the mumbling voice he used when he was pleased with your work.

Davy moved away and looked at what he had done. It was not as bad as the real thing because the squiggles didn't dart about, but they looked as though they might.

“It's called
Fury
,” he said. “It's really a … a dream I once had—a sort of nightmare. The paper reminded me. I thought if I painted it, it might help …”

“Uh,” said Mr. Locke, seeming to understand. “Don't take it off the board till you've fixed it or that charcoal will rub. I'll, uh, put it in one of the frames.”

He did so, and hung it in the passage to Assembly, so that Davy had to pass it several times a day. He couldn't bear to look at it. The other children hardly noticed it, of course, but several of the teachers said it was disgusting and asked to have it moved. This only made Mr. Locke like it even more, so that Davy (who usually only got “Shows interest and tries hard” on his art reports) won a prize with it at the end of term.

But that was weeks in the future now. By then the whole hideous adventure with Wolf, and Mr. Black Hat, and Monkey, and Dad, seemed to be all over.

4

IAN

They had a bit of luck at half term. The school closed for a week, and Dad had discovered a truck driver who spent his whole time taking loads of defective gas boilers up to a factory in Birkenhead and bringing fresh ones down. His route took him past Chester, where he dropped Penny and Davy and arranged to pick them up six days later. They caught a chugging little single-coach train down the branch line to Wrexham, where Dadda was waiting for them in the same old car. It had been a cheap journey, but slow and noisy and very tiring.

Davy slept too late next morning to help with the milking, but he did his evening stint and thought that Bella was pleased to see him, insofar as it is possible to guess any of a cow's slow pleasures. He stood for a while watching the pulse of her milk through the bit of glass tube at the top of the bucket.

“I know that poem in Welsh, now,” he said. “I know it by heart.”

Dadda said nothing, but smiled.

“Do you know anything about Glyn Dwr?” said Davy. “I asked Mr. Lydyard, but he said it wasn't in the syllabus.”

“Ach, it's too little history I remember. Glyn Dwr was the last Prince of all Wales, wasn't he? He beat the English many times, but they won in the end. He didn't die, though. Vanished he did. And he is in one of Shakespeare's plays—
Henry the Fourth
, isn't it?”

“I expect so,” said Davy, not yet used to Dadda's habit of putting any statement he was quite sure of into the form of a question. He uncoupled the milk bucket, slapped Bella's tough flank, and carried the bucket up to the milkshed. It wasn't raining so he used the outside route, but when he got there, he found that Dadda had unlocked the top half of the connecting door and was leaning on the bottom half.

“Glyn Dwr met a monk in the hills once,” he murmured. “The monk looked him in the eye and said, ‘Prince, you are born a hundred years before your hour.' Then he walked on, saying no more.”

That didn't seem much help to anybody, Davy thought as he tilted Bella's milk into the churn.

“The hills are full of stories,” said Dadda. “My Nain used to tell me them, about Arthur and Gawain and …”

“But they're all earlier. A thousand years earlier, Dadda. Henry the Fourth is fourteen hundred and something.”

Dadda stroked his neck and thought about it.

“The stories will be truer then, won't they, bach?” he said. “You must ask Ian.”

“Is he coming? I didn't know.”

“He is a good boy,” said Dadda. “He rides up here most Saturdays to fill himself with Gwenny's cooking, and sing in Chapel, and talk to his mad friends in Llangollen. Indeed he is late today.”

“Oh, good. I haven't seen him for ages. Penny'll be glad, too.”

As he spoke, Rud dashed into the lane. His yelping drowned the deep burr of the bike as it took the steep inclines, and continued until Ian was actually standing there, straddled across the saddle, at the yard gate. The moment the engine cut Rud seemed to recognize who it was. Ian drew his left hand from his gauntlet and held it down for Rud to sniff; with his other hand he pushed his goggles back to show a savagely tired face.

“Hi, Davy,” he said, grinning. “Good to see you, Penny here?”

He wheeled his bike into the yard and parked it under cover beside the old blue tractor just inside the gate.

That grin turned out to have been an effort at goodwill. In fact, Ian was snarly with exhaustion, having broken down on the journey, and had to push his bike seven miles through Welsh hills till he'd come to a garage where he could repair his throttle link. He barely spoke to Penny and Davy while he ate a huge tea, and when that was over, he immediately put on his leathers again.

“Where are you off to, for heaven's sake?” said Penny.

“Llangollen, ducky. See you tomorrow.”

“Do you know anything about Owain Glyn Dwr?” said Davy, knowing it was a rotten moment.

“Look, I'm late, kid. And I'm not interested in historical nonsense. Look him up in the library.”

“I've tried that. I can't find anything useful in the one at Spenser Mills.”

“Typical English chauvinism. Anyway, I don't. Sorry. See you at breakfast.”

“Okay. I hope the bike behaves.”

“It better had.”

Penny and Davy waited despondently in the hallway until they heard the chuckle of the engine going easily down the hill.

“Has he got a girl in Llangollen?” said Penny as they went back into the kitchen.

“Ian has a girl in Cardiff,” said Granny. “Black she is, but comely, like it says in the Bible. From Nigeria, too. He has showed me her photograph.”

“What's the hurry to get to Llangollen, then?” complained Penny.

“He is to meet his Nationalist friends,” said Granny.

“Welsh Nationalists!” said Penny. “I thought they were a joke!”

“Silly they are sometimes,” said Dadda, laying his papers on his lap, “but I do not think they are a joke.”

“I thought they were private armies of six men who wanted to make everybody talk Welsh by law,” said Penny.

“Yes, there are some like that,” said Dadda. “A funny look in their eyes, they have, as though they expected the heavens to open and a troop of angels to come flying down, crying to the world in Welsh that the heaven on earth would begin on Thursday week.”

“That'd puzzle the people who didn't understand Welsh,” said Penny.

“Yes,” said Dadda, and reached for his paper.

“But it is different with the water boards,” said Granny.