The Travellers and Other Stories (4 page)

For some time now I've been avoiding my mother because of her trick of looking inside me. She's been looking at me in quiet moments of the day when Dad is asleep and Tanya is out. When she thinks I've been sitting too long without saying anything, she comes up to me and touches my cheek with the back of her hand.

I never planned to steal the clothes, and, really, it's not that I've stolen them, it's that he gave them to me and I've not given them back. A little while ago it was so hot one day after school that we went swimming in the black pond in the Dip at the bottom of town with all our clothes on. We had a bath at Tom's house and he gave me a set of his clothes to wear.

I don't know if it was in my mind then to keep them, but I do know that when I put them on I didn't feel like Flipper Harries any more.

Yesterday I left a note in Angela's desk. I didn't sign it but I wrote it in Tom's handwriting, the same writing I use when I do his schoolwork for him, with the tall
t
s and the round
u
s.
I will be under the trees by the stream in the Dip tomorrow at nine o'clock. Please come.

Undressing, I glimpse myself in the long wardrobe mirror, stooping over the clothes. It's such a shock to see my old familiar body that I close my eyes against the sight of it and pull the knitted shirt over my head, but a cold skin has begun to close around my heart and before I know it the thought of Voyle Peg's plastic leg is bringing a swelling into my throat, because even though Voyle is old and dying from the coal dust silted up in his yellow lungs, he can still stand on the pavement outside the Red Cow with the creases of his trousers breaking over his black shoes and no one would ever know there was a plastic leg hiding inside. He can go about with his peg between his shoe and his bum and if you didn't know, you'd be completely fooled.

But this feels to me like the only chance I'll ever have. In ten minutes she'll be there, searching in the dark for the bright white gleam of the stripes in Tom Ellis's long-sleeved shirt.

‘David?' calls my mother from the front room.

I do tell her goodbye but I'm not sure if she hears. My voice comes out as a croak, and then I'm out the door into the night, the cuffs of his shirt tucked carefully into my belt.

It's so quiet here tonight, nothing but the shuffle of branches above my head, a slow dropping where the water slides into the black pond.

Here she comes.

A little way from me still, she stops, and seems to give her head a little shake. In the dark I can't see her face, only the shimmer of her blouse. One of the empty sleeves has worked loose from my belt and in the cool breeze I can feel it wafting about, like a scarf.

For a long frozen moment I stand with my eyes closed and pray for the thick waters of the black pond to rise up and swallow me whole.

‘You're a daft idiot,' she whispers, and laughs quietly into the darkness. There's a soft cracking in the long grass beneath her feet, the cold touch of her hands under the woollen cloth of the perfumed shirt. She reaches up under the shirt and holds my face between her hands and kisses me on the mouth. Still holding my face, Angela Hansford pulls me down into the grass.

Oh bloody hell. Oh Jesus
Christ
!

MY NAME IS FLIPPER HARRIES AND I AM A GIFT FROM GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!

GINGERBREAD BOY

I ALWAYS HOPED
it wasn't someone old who took Bobby. He was afraid of old people. He'd look at the yellow whites of their eyes and their ugly teeth and the shiny brown skin on their hands and then he'd push his face into Lily's skirts and hide. He was afraid of old people and dogs and witches, though he was very fond indeed of fairy tales and I always thought it likely that he was lured away, not with the offer of sweets or a drive in a nice car, but with the promise of a story. He was like Lily that way—you have to hold onto Lily when you come out of the cinema so she doesn't fall under a pram or a bus. You have to hold onto her until she comes back to herself, until you're sure she's not still dreaming about the fading characters in the film.

We should have called the police immediately of course, but when you open the back door and you can't see your four-year-old where he was five minutes ago, playing on the flagstones with his blue metal car, you don't think, ‘He's gone. Someone has taken him and he's gone.' You experience a little jolt, yes, your face goes hot, there's the icy, shrinking feeling in your chest you get whenever they give you some kind of scare, but you don't think, ‘This is it. This is the end of our life as we know it.' You hunt around for a little while. The garden, the house. Under his bed and in the wardrobe where he liked to sit and play sometimes. Then down the street. Sick with dread now. You knock on doors. Then you call the police, but by this time he's been gone half an hour and the trail is already cold.

There's a photograph of him my wife Lily and I have kept—it has been our favourite photograph of him, the one which shows him at the age of nine, the one which seemed to us to prove that he was still alive somewhere.

The eyes are mine, the serious mouth belongs to Lily, the pointed chin to my brother Jack. I don't know how they decided on the hair: curly hair that falls over to the left from a small widow's peak. My father is the only one of us who ever had curly hair. His hair was very curly when he was a little boy.

They did the photo when Bobby had been missing for just over five years. We had, I think, all but given up hope when one day, out of the blue, the police rang us and said there was something new they wanted to try.

We thought they'd forgotten all about us, that they had closed Bobby's case, but the next day they came to the house and took away a shoebox full of photos Lily put together for them—photos of Bobby himself along with photos of me, of her, of our parents, of my brother Jack and her sister Carol. All the photos she could lay her hands on of any of us growing up. They studied all the eyes and all the noses; they looked at the thick eyebrows on Lily's side of the family, at the funny widow's peak on mine. They looked at Bobby's four-year-old hairline, at his small round face and our long bony ones, and picked the things they wanted and scanned them into a computer. Then they put everything on a grid and manipulated all the different pieces and stretched Bobby's face until they came up with how he would look if he was nine years old and still alive.

They made leaflets and posters with the new picture on them and, gradually, a few calls started to come in reporting possible sightings, and they began to follow them up.

They cautioned us, though, not to get our hopes up too much; they admitted they couldn't really hold out a great deal of hope. They'd had some success with the photos, but those were cases where the children had been taken by a parent—a mother or a father in a messy divorce. In those kinds of cases putting the new photos out sometimes got a result.

I knew what they were saying. It was what I knew already. It was what Lily knew. That children abducted by strangers are very rarely found alive.

‘But,' they said, gently, trying to be kind, ‘in our experience the photos can be a great comfort. They can give people something to hold onto.'

When they showed us Bobby's new picture for the first time, we held the precious image in our trembling hands and whispered to each other, ‘This could hold us forever.' I watched as Lily touched his curly fringe, very lightly, with the back of her little finger, as if she thought it might be getting in his eyes and annoying him.

‘Hello there my darling,' she said, her face breaking into a wondering smile.

We had two large 10" × 8" copies made and framed, one for our bedroom, one for the dining room, an 8" × 5" for my desk at work, some passport-sized ones for my wallet and Lily's purse, so we could take them out and look at them wherever we were, whenever we felt the need—in restaurants, in the car, walking down the street.

Lily began talking to him quite often, telling him all her news. At first this made me uneasy, but after a while I found myself doing it too. Within a few weeks we had both fallen completely under the spell of the new photograph. On his tenth birthday Lily made him a vanilla cake and in front of his framed picture in the dining room, we blew out his candles and made our wish. We forgot the cautious words of the police: for us, the photograph had fixed Bobby in our minds and in the world and made it impossible for us ever to give up hope; it was like a prophecy, a promise that he would come back to us one day and we clung to it—this amazing thing, this beautiful collage they had conjured for us out of our own history, our own flesh and blood.

It is hard for us, now, to know what to do for the best.

He fought them when they found him and took him away from Terri and Shaun Glaister. He bit them and kicked them and clung sobbing to Terri Glaister, his arms around her neck, his fingers locked together so tightly they had to pry them apart one by one.

They found him just over a year after they did the photo and sometimes I wonder how it is they took so long to locate him, because in my opinion his resemblance to the photograph is really quite good, and although the Glaisters did not send him to school, they seem to have taken him out quite a lot.

The chin is wrong, it's true, and the hair—his hair hasn't turned curly in the end the way my father's did at that age; it has remained as soft and thin as it was the day he vanished. But other than that, I think if you ever saw Bobby, if you ever had the chance to compare him with the photograph, you would agree that it is not a bad likeness.

He remembers his blue metal car.

He remembers his blue metal car but he does not remember us.

It is five months now, since he came home, and he still cries for Terri and Shaun Glaister. We have told him, of course, that he can never go back to them. We have explained everything to him, but he says he doesn't care what we say because he hates us.

He is frightened of us too, you can tell. I think we seem very old to him, being as we are so much older than the Glaister couple. Yesterday he drew himself a picture of them—of Terri Glaister with her short black hair and her narrow face; Shaun with his big hands and big feet, his short red beard. It is not a good drawing, it doesn't much resemble the young elfin-featured woman we saw in the courtroom, nor the bulky man who stood beside her, but it is all Bobby has and it seems to be a comfort to him. This evening he came downstairs, the picture trailing from his hand, and asked Lily, could he—please—have a frame?

ROSE RED

ONCE, THERE HAD
been the fisherman and for a while Harlean had sold her memories of him to the red-haired women of the island.

Harlean claimed to have spotted him in the mud one evening, all loose and dead-looking and jostled by the pink, lacy edge of the in-creeping tide; to have put him on her back like a basket of shrimp and carried him home. Harlean (shrunken, old, ugly as a toad) claimed he'd stayed with her till morning, when his friends came in a flat-bottomed boat with a square sail and took him away. She said his hair had been black, and so had that of his friends. ‘Black like night,' she'd told the women as they took their coins from their apron pockets and dropped them into the clay dish next to the door.

But after the initial excitement, the women had grown bored. They were tired now of Harlean's story and wondered if it had really happened or was something she'd made up so she could take their money. Harlean still insisted it was true, and when the red-haired women stopped coming, she sat in her little house and looked out at the huge rose-coloured sea and the coral sky and told herself that if he ever came back she would keep him and not let him go. She would put him in the low room under the eaves, bring soft pillows and a lamp in there, and charge them all a shilling a time.

Only Gerda still came whenever she could, with the occasional halfpenny she managed to smuggle out of the crimson teapot where Lorm kept the money.

‘Tell me again, Harlean,' said Gerda in a whisper, as if she thought Lorm might have followed her along the beach and be listening outside, his thick, rufous beard pressed close against the rough planking of the old woman's little door.

‘Go on, Harlean,' she said. ‘Tell.' And when Harlean heard the clink of the coin in the dish, she told. The thing about Harlean—greedy, old, ugly Harlean Gill—was that she had a poet's tongue in her frizzled auburn head. To hear Harlean recall the day she found the fisherman was to see him lying across the filthy vermilion quilt of her wooden bed, breathing softly in his sleep and muttering words from his strange language like the lines of a jumbled song. To hear Harlean describe his black hair was to feel it fall across your rust-freckled shoulders; it was to forget, in the cool inky glitter of its touch, the dreary russet monotony of your own people, the red-kissed dot in the ocean where you lived and died.

To Gerda, Harlean's fisherman was a wonder, a cup of water in the desert, as much a miracle as the rainbow that had appeared once in the coral sky when she was a girl, revealing to them all possibilities they had never dreamed of. She confided to Harlean that at night when Lorm was asleep she searched her skin for the coarse red threads his beard had left behind there; she climbed out of bed and crossed the small dark room and dropped them on the fire; watched them sizzle and turn to a pale-pink ash. Night, she said, was her favourite time, when the dark quenched the island of all its lurid pigment and you could look at the black sky and the pale moon and the blinking stars and feel refreshed.

She said she longed for some kind of change, some interruption in the eternal sameness of the island and its inhabitants. She told Harlean how the red dust from the streets coated the inside of her mouth like fur, that she felt thirsty all the time, that she gagged on the shrimp and the ruby-fleshed fish Lorm brought home every night for supper. That she spent hours in the woods hunting for undiscovered leaves and flowers to make new dyes for their clothes, as if by some miracle she might manage to produce a new colour. She cried with fury when everything came out the way it always had, everything the same ancient, familiar shades of raspberry and rust; salmon, carrot, madder, rose. Scarlet shawls and crimson skirts till you were sick of the sight of them. Every object looking back at you out of your own four walls: the quilt on the bed, the teapot, the floor's woven rug, Lorm's clay pipe, his soft work cap, everything washed with the same dull repeated palette.