The Travellers and Other Stories

by Carys Davies

  It is six days since I came back from the library and found one of Ellen’s silver bangles in our bed and I can think of no sensible way to proceed. I am frightened of speaking, of saying a single word, either to Ellen, or to Francis. I’m certain that if I put anything of what I feel into words, I will poison the air we breathe and none of us will ever recover. I have become increasingly certain over the past week that the best thing to do is to say nothing, to let things run their course. To stay quiet until whatever is going on has come to a close; to hope for some kind of invisible mend.

  When we are almost ready to leave, Ellen says she won’t be a second, she just needs to go to the bathroom. I watch her get up, thread her way between the little round tables. At the first bookcase she turns, points back at her chair, mouths, Watch my purse a second?

  Ellen’s Cole Haan purse, boxy and black with two tall handles, is sitting upright on her chair. The shiny leather is cool to the touch. The zipper makes almost no sound. There is very little inside. House-keys. A hairbrush. Chase Manhattan checkbook in a navy blue plastic case, a single lipstick, her maroon wallet. I fan my thumb across the checkbook stubs looking for I don’t know what. The lipstick is nearly finished, its scent powdery and delicious, the scent of Ellen herself. In her wallet she has forty-five dollars and some loose change. A receipt from the One-Hour Photo on Clark Avenue, a pink dry-cleaning ticket.

  There is one last mouthful of cherry crumb cake left on my plate. I pick it up with my fingertips, put it in my mouth. Then I eat the dry-cleaning ticket.

  It is, I know, a small, stupid thing to do.

  I know also that I might just as well have crushed it in my palm and dropped it into the metallic trash can over by the cakes, or just slipped it into my jacket pocket—it’s very unlikely Ellen would ever have found it in either place. But sitting here now, thinking of Ellen’s silver bangle, the shock of it against my foot, eating the ticket seems the only available thing to do. It is almost impossible to chew, it skates between my upper and lower teeth like the squeaky scraps of articulating paper Dr. Sandusky has me bite on when he’s checking a crown or a new filling. In the end I munch it into a ball and with one painful swallow it’s gone and all that’s left in my mouth is the sharp, inky taste of Hwang’s bitter scrawl. A picture in my mind of Ellen, rooting hopelessly through her purse. Hwang behind the counter, arms folded. His pugnacious fury, his proud, frigid grandeur. Fixing her with his ninja’s glare.

  WAKING THE PRINCESS

  SHE WAS THE widow of the Customs House clerk and she had never liked me. I was only after one thing, she said, and I could forget about that because I repulsed her. I disgusted her. She loathed the sight of me and as long as I lived, she told me, I would never ever find the key to her heart.

  I had tried to kiss her once outside her front door—a terrible, greedy, darting, desperate sort of lunge I have always regretted—and after that she took to shouting at me through the window when I came to call.

  ‘Lizard!’ she shouted. ‘Toad!’

  Her name was Elizabeth and she lived with her children in one of the tiny dark houses which lined the narrow streets behind the Customs House in our town at that time. Every day she appeared at her door in the same dingy, high-necked gown, her brown hair scraped back and pinned behind, a drawn look to her face. But she was tall and strong and big-boned and to me she resembled the gorgeous painted figureheads on the ships that came up the river and lay anchored outside the warehouses on the quay. I thought about her all the time.

  I had brought her presents—a paper flower from the fair at Appleby, a tea canister with a design of roses on it from Atkinson’s on China Street, a pair of combs for her hair—but she left everything on the doorstep for the beggars to steal. I sent her letters and poems but she screwed them up in her fist and tossed them out into the sewers; when I called she closed the door in my face and shouted at me through the window and I was left to loiter in the street outside her house with nothing to do but wait and watch for a glimpse of her.

  Which was how I began to observe the way she lived.

  The front door was almost always open and I could see the dead clerk’s shabby black coat, still hanging on its hook in the passageway. I could see her ragged children running in and out all day long. Elizabeth herself seemed to do nothing but tend the fire and clean the floor. In the early mornings, she was there crouched in the crooked doorway, a donkey-stone in her hand, whitening the edge of the step. The rest of the time I could see her through the open door, trudging around with a bucket of water, a handful of brushes and a heap of rags. Half her life, she seemed to spend on the floor, trying to scrub it clean—all the time with her dirty children charging in from the street, down the dismal passageway beyond the front door, mud and sewer-slop dropping off the flaking soles of their boots and mingling with the blown soot from the fire and sinking into the furrowed boards and lumpy flagstones of the floor. She’d yell at them then to look at the stinking grime they’d brought in on their shoes from the filthy street and how they were trampling it into the floor.

  Once a month she bought clean sand from the old man who hauled it into town from the shore on his cart. Then she’d be on her knees again, scouring her pock-marked flags and greasy, blackened floorboards with the sand and a bucket of steaming water. As far as I could tell, she owned just one carpet, a small woven thing like a tab-rug only heavy. This she would heave out into the street every Monday morning on her back, like a stevedore, then beat it against the stone wall of the house. Vast puffs of black dust drifted up into the air, getting smaller and gradually paler until she seemed to be satisfied, and then she’d drag the carpet back into the mean, dark little room at the front of the house she called the parlour. She only seemed to rest for a few hours a week, on Sunday morning, when she’d stand at her bedroom window wrapped up in a blanket. There she would shake out her drab, solitary dress and beat it like her old carpet until it was as clean as it ever would be, and then she’d put it on again and go to church.

  I decided I wouldn’t bother any more with the tea canisters, the paper flowers, the combs for her hair, the poetry. I would give her something she would value above anything. I would give her something that would change her life.

  I visited shops and markets and fairs. I looked in newspapers and catalogues and scrounged enough money to travel the country. I went to Manchester and Edinburgh and to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace but found nothing anywhere that came close to what I had in mind.

  I decided I would make what I wanted myself. Something different. Something new.

  I did more research; I investigated the price of raw materials. At the end of nine months I bought what I could afford, the rest I stole late at night from the warehouses along the quayside. In the end, after weeks of skulking around and waiting, I bought or stole everything I needed—china clay from Fowey in Cornwall, linseed oil from the Baltic, cork from Morocco. After half a winter hanging about at the docks in Liverpool I got rosin; in Glasgow, naptha and jute.

  In my room I ground the cork with the pestle from my landlady’s kitchen and mixed everything in a bucket to a nice gloopy kivver. I hung the jute on a tall wood frame. I dragged a ladder upstairs and troweled my secret recipe onto the jute. When that was dry, I smoothed and polished it with pumice. I worked night and day. I mixed a varnish and tested its consistency on my tongue, and once that was on, and dry, I was ready. I shaved in hot water and dressed in a clean shirt. With a sharp meat knife I cut a small section away from the frame, rolled it inside a piece of brown paper, and with my heart knocking in my chest like a hammer, set off with it under my arm.

  It was late in the evening when I arrived. I had not called at her house in nearly a year. She had lost weight. The skin of her beautiful face looked grey, almost transparent with fatigue. In one hand she carried a stiff broom, in the other, a damp foulsmelling rag. She sighed.

  ‘You,’ she said, weary, impatient, and began to close the door, but this time I was too qui
ck for her. I got my shoe into the space next to the crooked door-frame and began to peel the brown paper away from the package. In the quiet street, in the darkness, the paper crackled, and beneath it the stuff shone with a light of its own.

  ‘Look, Elizabeth,’ I said. ‘I have brought you something.’ In the pale light coming from her house, the weird cloth glowed. It gleamed like the belly of a fish. She reached out and she touched it.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  I took off the rest of the brown paper and bent to the gutter for a handful of muck. ‘Look,’ I said, and smeared it across the silken surface of the cloth, then took the rag from her fingers and in one swift easy movement, wiped it clean again.

  She gasped, and let me in.

  In the parlour I laid the cloth on the splintered floor, scooped a handful of soot and ash up out of the hearth and scattered the whole lot over the cloth.

  This time she clapped. Two quick hurried smacks, one hand against the other.

  ‘The rag!’ she said. ‘Quickly!’

  She was laughing now. I’d never seen her look so happy. In fact I realised now I’d never seen her look happy at all ever. She’d become almost playful, as if in bringing her something that would change her life I had also introduced her to an exciting and delicious new game.

  ‘The rag!’

  In my haste to get into the house I had dropped her rag outside in the gutter. Both of us scanned the room now, hunting for something to use to wipe away the smuts. I had nothing with me—no necktie, no handkerchief, nothing. I waited for Elizabeth to run to the kitchen for something, but she seemed irritated, exasperated at the delay—too excited and eager to bother going to fetch anything. She looked down at her dress and lifted the hem. For a moment she held it between her fingers and seemed about to use it on the smuts, but then she seemed to remember that the dingy garment was the only one she possessed; that it was too precious to use. She let it fall, and began instead to loosen her hair, pulling out the pins which held it in a neat mound above the buttoned collar at the back of her dress. Then she sank to her knees and as she wiped away the scattered soot and ash with her hair, her face seemed to glow with delight. She knelt there, gazing at the precious cloth, fascinated.

  Then—and I had not expected this—she began to unbutton her boots and when they were off, she removed her stockings. Long grey knitted things that had covered her legs like chain mail.

  I watched as her feet came into view for the first time. Pale and perfect and very white against the black of her skirt and the gloom of the horrid little parlour—nothing like her poor calloused hands which were rough and criss-crossed like an old fisherman’s with deep lines and scars. She stood on the cloth and arched her back.

  ‘Aah,’ she sighed and closed her eyes and I knew that in her whole life she had never felt such a cool kind of smoothness beneath her feet, such a clean softness. I pictured all her children racing barefoot along pristine passageways, stepping pink and scrubbed out of a warm tub onto my satin-finished floors. ‘Does it have a name, Henry?’ she said, her voice soft and dreamy and contented. ‘Does it?’

  Henry. She had never called me Henry before. Always Toad or Lizard or some other unpleasant and insulting thing.

  Upstairs one of her children had begun to moan in its sleep but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy flexing her bare toes on the cloth.

  ‘Well?’

  I had thought long and hard about a name for my creation and it had come to me in the end in a kind of day-dream one evening while I sat slumped on the floor in the corner of my room, exhausted after working so hard for so long, waiting for the stuff to dry. I had been sitting for hours, breathing in the mellow fragrance of the linseed, and a name—smooth as the cloth itself—had drifted into my mind.

  I repeated it now. She mouthed the word slowly, stumbling over the syllables as if I had given her a tongue-twister, mixing up the ls and the n and making both of us laugh, until at last she got it right. She was smiling—a dizzy, ecstatic, faraway smile—dreaming like me I am sure of how the linoleum would cast its lustrous moonshine over all the rooms of her little house and drive out the forces of darkness that haunted every grimy corner, every broken floorboard, every pitted, potholed flagstone, and I have always, always wished that at that moment I could somehow have managed to do things differently. I have always wished I could somehow have managed to take everything just a little more slowly. But I lunged forward then, burying my face in her hair and covering her neck with dry, hungry kisses. ‘Elizabeth,’ I groaned and pulled her close. One of my knees began to pry its way between her sturdy legs. My fingers fumbled with the tiny buttons at her throat.

  With the force of a falling tree branch she slapped away my hand.

  ‘Snake,’ she hissed in my ear, and stepped off the linoleum.

  Her eyes flashed and her smile was gone and she was straightening the rumpled collar of her dress; she was pulling on her chain mail stockings and shaking the soot from her hair and pinning it up more quickly than I would have thought possible.

  ‘Goat,’ she said, in a hard, quiet voice and pushed the precious cloth across the floor towards me with the edge of her toe.

  ‘I’m sorry Elizabeth,’ I said, humbly, but she ignored me and carried on straightening her clothes as if I had not spoken. Last of all there was the brisk popping sound of her buttoning her boots, and then she looked at me and shook her head and laughed a little and said, how could I ever have thought she would be that easy?

  MONDAY DIARY

  MY NAME IS Flipper Harries and I am a gift from God. Neither the midwife nor Dr. Beynon was ready to catch me when I came shooting out like a sleek fish into the hot little room. Through the open door, my sister, Tanya, stared at the creature lying in the kicked-up sheets of our mother’s bed. Green and glistening with a small red face and at its shoulders—Tanya could see—tiny wings, coiled like the ferns on the mountain behind town in springtime.

  Tanya was sent to give the news to our father. She searched through all the dark legs in the Red Cow, but his big shape was lost somewhere in the warm noisy crowd along the bar. The only face she knew belonged to Voyle Peg, alone in a shadowy corner, sprinkling salt on his crisps, the dark blue skin of his face glowing beneath the fluorescent lights. He saw her too and knew that I’d arrived.

  ‘Boy or girl then, Tanya?’ he asked my four year old sister, cupping his hand behind his ear and stooping closer to her face for the answer.

  Tanya, very serious, shook her head. ‘Neither.’

  And then, in a whisper so small he could barely hear it, ‘An angel.’

  She spotted Dad then and went running off to tell him the good news and Voyle Peg was left opening and closing his thin navy lips without making a sound.

  When my mother wouldn’t look at me, Dad sent for the minister, Mr. Morgan, because he didn’t know what else to do.

  Mr. Morgan took me, wrapped like a pupa, like an ordinary baby, from the midwife. ‘Remember, Marion,’ he said to my mother, ‘every baby is a gift from God.’

  When she didn’t move, he put me on the pillow next to her face. ‘This one is too.’

  None of them knew yet that the doctor’s magic pills were to blame for the way I am. (He’d fed them months ago to my sick mother with a cool glass of water and she’d called him a miracle worker). Nobody knew then, not even Dr. Beynon, that there were other babies being born all over just like me, hands like wings and no arms at all.

  My mother has kept those words of Mr. Morgan’s, like something precious in a box. She has a way of seeing inside me, and at certain moments during the day, she comes over and takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes and repeats them to me. ‘Remember, David, you are a gift from God.’

  My name is Flipper Harries and I am fifteen years old.

  I’m surprisingly good at rugby, terrible at the piano. At school I’m considered neither stupid nor clever. I’m cleverer than Mr. Clark thinks—he’s forever yelling over the nois
e, ‘No shouting out. Hands up!’ But he doesn’t mean hands up, he means arms up, and in the forest of limbs he never notices my waggling hand, flapping like a flannel with the answer.

  I’m cleverer than Tom Ellis, and quite often, I do his schoolwork for him. I’ve perfected his handwriting, the tall left-sloping ts and the way his us are almost closed at the top like an a. I’ve been doing it, off and on, for ten years, ever since we were in class one and did Monday morning diaries. He could never think of anything to put, so I began taking things out of my life and writing them into his:

  On Saturday we went all the way to Porthcawl for Angela Hansford’s birthday. Flipper bought her a pet chicken for a present. Her dad has built a wooden hut for it in the back yard.

  A gypsy read Flipper’s fortune with a pack of greasy cards. He wouldn’t tell anyone what she said.

  Tom Ellis is probably the most beautiful boy who has ever lived.

  He has dark hair and dark skin and a narrow jaw and such a serious, almost stony expression that when he smiles it feels like a prize you have won.

  He’s tall and lean and there’s not one single girl in the entire valley who’s not in love with him. His mother accentuates his beauty with the clothes she gives him to wear, most of which she makes herself. She knits strange, striped shirts for him and washes them in Dreft so they always have a sweet fresh smell in them which I’ve come to think of as his smell. All of them are soft and fall in folds from his shoulders like the loose wrapping on a present. When the girls get half a chance, they stroke and tug at his shirts.

  It’s a mystery how anyone as fat and ugly as Annie Ellis could have produced someone like Tom. There’s something strange and foreign in his looks, his skin has a dry, dusty quality quite unlike the soft pale skin of the people here. He’s like a warm thing that’s fallen out of the sky into our damp little town. It’s impossible to think of him ever going underground and turning pale like the men here, and old before his time. I think that’s partly what the girls love about him, that he’s different, that he doesn’t seem to belong here. He’s like the bright vinyl paint the girls’ mothers put on their doors and window frames, Tango and Bermuda Blue, a bit of colour and excitement against the dark stone of the houses and the black of the mountain and the mine. He’s all the colour and excitement of their lives. When he and I are together, they follow us about like a plume of smoke, all watching and waiting to see who he’ll chose.