by Rebecca Bryn
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Maddy looked flushed. ‘I ran all the way from the tube.’
‘Sit down and get your breath back. Mind the instruments, while I fetch us a drink.’
Maddy pursed her lips. ‘You’d better make mine a double. Look at all these people.’
He returned with a pint of cider and a lager. ‘Drink it slowly… we have three hours to get through. The landlord says word has got around. It’s you they’ve come to hear, Maddy.’
‘You’re joking…’
‘I said you had a great voice.’
‘I thought you were humouring me.’
‘You know all your lyrics?’
‘I think so.’ She brought a bundle of pages from her pocket and studied them.
He picked up his guitar, struck his tuning fork against the table leg and plucked a string. He tightened the string slightly before plucking it again; satisfied he moved on to the next. If it went well tonight, word would spread far beyond the walls of The Flying Horse. The call-centre job was boring beyond belief and trying to sell a product he didn’t believe in was soul-destroying: even he would slam down the receiver on him. Singing was his passion and he wanted it to be his… their future, preferably before he got the sack.
Maddy mouthed her words in time to imaginary music, moving her hips and feet as if imagining the dance. He set up the microphones and tried a practice strum: a woman at the far end of the room winced and he turned down the volume. He’d brought an electric guitar as well as his acoustic and violin, and a tambourine for Maddy.
‘Ready?’
She nodded.
He grinned. ‘We’ll go straight in with Whisky in the Jar. It should get them in the mood. Just keep time with the tambourine, like I showed you.’
Maddy’s head nodded in time to the beat as she counted herself in; faces turned towards them but the hum of conversation didn’t dim. She moved closer to the mike, tapping the skin of the tambourine and the room fell quiet. By the chorus, Maddy and the audience were singing along. After six songs they took a break. He reached for his beer. ‘Do you think you could learn to play drums, Maddy?’
‘And sing?’ She looked doubtful. ‘Maybe we should find a drummer?’
‘And a bass guitarist, and a keyboard player.’
Her face lit. ‘You mean form a proper group?’
‘Why not?’ It was time for Maddy’s first solo. He’d chosen a Beautiful South number that suited her voice perfectly and followed it with a selection from Fleetwood Mac, and gentler songs by Dido. She had the audience in her hands.
He waited as Maddy took a bow to well-deserved applause. ‘Take a rest, Maddy. You’ve done enough. This one’s for you.’ He strummed the opening, liquid chords to Dire Straights’ Brothers in Arms and a hush fell over the room. Mist-covered mountains echoed with the rumble of guns. A soldier lay dying, knowing he’d never see home… someone’s son, just as he was. His heart rang with the futility of war. There was loss enough without killing.
Maddy sat at their table, her small face framed by spiky blonde hair with green highlights, her chin cupped in one hand. Her eyes shone and her mouth curved, forming dimples in her cheeks, as his final chord fell on silence.
He held out a hand to her, wanting to hold her, kiss her. She stood beside him, her hand warm in his, and melted into his arms as the room erupted into applause. The audience wanted more, but he smiled and shook his head. It was midnight, the end of the pub’s music license, and they’d been singing almost non-stop for three hours. He was emotionally exhausted.
Maddy helped him pack their instruments. ‘That last song was beautiful.’
‘It’s my favourite. I wish I could play guitar like Knopfler.’
‘I love the electric guitar. So what about this group?’
‘What we need most is a drummer.’
‘We could call ourselves Waifs and Strays.’
He laughed. People drifted to the bar. Waifs and Strays. ‘Good name. Let’s get this stuff in the van and I’ll run you home. You must be knackered.’
‘I could dance all night. We’ll go back to mine and have a coffee. Maybe pick songs for next week? We should be looking at more recent stuff too.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Dire Straits and Fleetwood Mac. It’s sort of folk-rock.’
‘It depends what crowd you’re playing to.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’ He was wound up too much to sleep, too. ‘Okay, we’ll go back to yours and expand our repertoire.’
***
It was the top floor and the lifts were out. Maddy unlocked her door and he followed her inside. The small room was minimalist. Bare, polished floorboards, simple furniture and plain, neutral walls made a perfect setting for a series of large black and white photographs in clip-frames. He appraised them critically. ‘Did you take these?’
‘Yes. Most of them were for a college project. Narrative in image.’
‘They’re very good.’ One was a photograph of a busker with a cloth cap and a neckerchief. ‘Hey, is that me?’
She blushed. ‘It certainly is.’
‘When did you take that?’
‘Just before Christmas.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about being photographed and I really wanted the picture. I wore a hoodie and hid behind a fat lady.’
‘You sneaky, madam.’ She grinned and he moved towards her. ‘You’re very talented Maddy Wilder. One day, you’ll be famous.’
She looked up at him, the smile fading, and then stepped away, her eyes serious. ‘Greg… I didn’t ask you here to choose songs.’
‘I hoped you hadn’t.’
She looked away. ‘I’ve something to show you.’
He’d misread her signals. He must be thick. What had made him think she’d be interested in him, a nobody, who was going nowhere?
‘Greg, it’s about your mother, Nerys Reece. It’s important.’
‘I told you, Maddy…’
‘Listen to me, Greg. In 2004 the government ordered a review of cases where mothers had been convicted of murdering their babies. A court of appeal ruled that they shouldn’t be prosecuted for a sudden unexplained infant death where cot-death syndrome may be a cause.’
‘But they weren’t just cot deaths, were they?’
‘They overturned the case of Angela Canning, who was convicted of murdering her two baby sons. They said medical science was still at the frontier of knowledge about unexplained infant deaths. Hundreds of cases were reviewed… that’s hundreds of women who’d had their children wrongly taken into care. Greg, they ruled your mother’s conviction unsafe. There was doubt over the diagnosis of the babies’ deaths.’
‘And Bethan and Cadi? You’ve conveniently forgotten two little girls disappeared. Why are you so keen to dredge this all up again, anyway? Justice or a story?’
Maddy glared at him. ‘Don’t you think the stories of these women should be told? The witnesses who testified against your mother were questioned again. It took a long while for her appeal lawyers to build a case, but it seems the police were over-eager to get a conviction for the child murders, if that’s what they were and not abductions. Several of the witnesses told conflicting stories that even thirty years couldn’t account for. They ruled the evidence was unsafe to convict her on either count of murder. She was released last year.’
‘Released… Unsafe evidence doesn’t mean she was innocent.’
She shook green spikes at him. ‘What happened to innocent before proven guilty?’
‘Even if she was…’
‘Can you imagine the stigma? The doubt planted in people’s minds wouldn’t wither and die. How would you go about rebuilding your life after years in prison, never mind after losing your entire family? I can’t imagine what that would do to you.’
‘It doesn’t alter the fact that my father divorced her. If he’d thought her innocent, surely he’d have fought for her, launched appeals… kept their only s
urviving child.’
‘We don’t know the circumstances. Stories have more than one side.’
‘Like I said, stories are your stock in trade.’
Maddy lost patience. ‘For pity’s sake, Greg. I’m not pushing this because of a story. She’s your mother…’
‘I have a mother. I don’t need another one.’
‘It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Try losing your mother…’ Maddy stopped short, her hands clenched.
‘You lost yours?’
She nodded. Her lips clamped then relaxed. ‘I was seven… You weren’t to know.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m a jerk.’ He took her hand in his: it was tiny in his broad one. He wanted to hold her and comfort her: she moved closer and looked up at him. ‘Maddy… I’m terrified of what I’m going to find. What it’s going to do to my relationship with my parents.’
‘But they know you sent for your birth certificate?’
‘Yes. They’ll support me, whatever I decide, but… she could be a murderer, or insane… Why put myself and them through that?’ He softened his voice. ‘Leave it, Maddy, please.’
Maybe Maddy was right and the stories of these women should be told. If an injustice had been done to his birth mother, and her husband didn’t give a shit, shouldn’t their only surviving child try to set the record straight? Why did the thought of finding her fill him with cold dread?
***
Alana looked critically at the four paintings she’d worked on from her sketches. They were among the best she’d ever produced but she needed an outlet for them, and soon. A week of rain had turned the garden to a bog but, this morning, the bushes and trees hung with tiny spherical rainbows of distilled light. She should be researching galleries among the paperwork Aunt Siân had neatly filed… she should be cleaning the outhouse to make room for the block of stone that had almost caused Minnie’s final demise.
Should lost out to want, as usual. She grabbed a coat, her car keys, and Aunt Siân’s digital camera and headed for the hills. The sketch she’d made of standing stones in the mist was atmospheric, but she needed to see the stones again within the landscape to understand them.
She parked on a rocky patch of close-cropped grass at the side of the road. A tall finger of lichen-covered rock leaned into the soft breeze, beckoning her. Heather moorland, bleached by the salt wind, stretched in every direction; higher up the slopes sheep and ponies grazed. She slung her bag over her shoulder and followed a rocky track towards a low mound in a depression among what Harriet laughingly called the mountains. The low hill wore the stone circlet like a crown.
Twelve huge stones erupted from the ground like teeth: they were ancient, even she could see that. Frost, rain, wind and sun had cracked and eroded them; sponge-full emerald mosses and tufts of brittle green-grey lichen clothed their sides. The sun followed its low arc as it had for eons, and a sea mist obscured the headland across the bay.
She walked to the centre of the broad circle and mounted the smooth, flat stone slab, letting her mind drift back to those who had stood here thousands of years before. The breeze lifted her hair as it had lifted theirs, caressed her cheek as it had touched theirs. She closed her eyes; the sun rose and set, rose and set again, lower, ever lower until she feared it gone forever. A sacrifice would appease the sun god: blood stained the stone at her feet. She turned slowly and opened her eyes. Hills undulated into a blue distance, hill fort called to hill fort, and the sea sparkled with the sun reborn.
The mewing of a large bird of prey brought her back to the present with a jolt. It spiralled in ever higher circles: a buzzard? Dad would know and he’d never tell her unless she made her peace with him. He was still her father, despite her having Dafydd’s genes. None of this was his fault.
She made a quick sketch of the stones within the landscape, and took photographs from different angles, then crossed to examine one tall stone more closely. Where it faced the sun it was bare of growth. Grooves came alive beneath her fingers, making shapes in the stone. She peered closer. They made the pattern of an arrow pointing skyward. Other, fainter, parallel lines ran in from the stone’s edge. They looked older, more primitive, but too regular to be natural.
The next stone had markings, too. Two oblique strokes, like the mathematical sign for less than, again too precise to be accidental, preceded something like a wilted F. The third looked like an egg-timer on its side and the last one was the fat-topped I that had been on her door when she’d first come to The Haggard. What did it mean? Who’d put it there and why? Lower down was another I, the edges sharper.
She moved from stone to stone: it was hard to tell which marks were natural, scratches made by glaciers, and which were man-made signs. Harriet had mentioned a sign when she told her about the house fire. She pushed down a feeling of unease as an idea took shape. Courage was freedom. She sketched the symbols; if they were a long-dead language, could she, in her own way, make the stones speak again?
She roughed out three-dimensional images of the scratches in the stones, joining them in a circle of symbols. A giant crown of stones, leaning towards each other and whispering, like the gravestones; a sculpture, not of the stones themselves, but of the symbols, of the mystery hidden within.
She worked feverishly, searching each stone with her fingertips, noting any marks and drawing their relationship to one another. She would make working drawings, buy more stone, mock up a small version and sell the idea of the larger sculpture, maybe as large as the original circle, to The Arts Council or whoever in West Wales would pay her to carve it. She must identify a site where it could be placed.
She was letting her imagination run away with her. ‘There’s nothing like not knowing what you can’t do, Alana.’ It was a maxim that had always stood her in good stead. Satisfied she’d done enough, she put her pad and pencil away, suddenly aware of the damp chill blowing in on the quiet air. The light was fading and the bright sea had gone, devoured by a mist that had crept along the coast and up the valley. The hills had disappeared and the stones pulled their shrouds around them and returned to their silent secret vigil. She swivelled on one heel. She couldn’t see the car anymore. Which way was the car?
She pushed down a surge of panic; she only needed to locate the stone that she’d first approached, the one with the arrow mark, and then she’d find the track that led down. A stone ahead of her disappeared into the mist. She kept her eyes focused on the spot and moved towards it. She tripped and landed face down in spiny bilberry. Her hand found soft dark soil: a mole-hill, newly excavated. She grasped something. It looked like bone. Next to it was part of a dog tag, rusted beyond reading.
She scrambled to her feet and tossed them away. Which direction had the stone been? Suppose she’d walked past it… she could walk right out of the circle and off the edge of the world.
A broad, squat stone hunkered into the ground not far ahead of her, menacing and unyielding. She was still in the circle. She traced the grooves on its surface and her finger came away covered in dirt. It wasn’t a mark she’d noticed before. It was the same shape as the less-than mark, but the other way round and the edges were sharp. An arrow pointing to what? She peered closer; the dirt made it blend in with the rest of the stone’s surface, but it looked newly carved.
***
Alana dripped onto the bank manager’s carpet more full of enthusiasm than hope. Her dream needed cash, before Mr John found her and forced her to liquidate her eighty percent.
‘Thank you for seeing me at short notice.’
He wiped a damp hand on his handkerchief. ‘What can I do for you, Miss Ap Dafydd?’
‘I need a mortgage.’
‘I see you’re not a customer.’
‘My account is with your main Leicester branch. My aunt left me property here. It’s been valued for probate at one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, but I have to raise thirty-f…’ The fifteen thousand in cash wasn’t a fortune; think living not surviving… ‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds, if I’m to k
eep it. It has great investment potential.’
‘Do you know your account number?’
‘Not off-hand.’
‘And your first name is?’
‘Alana.’
He opened his office door. ‘Penny, can you request the account details for Miss…’
‘The account is in the name of Miss Katherine Alana Harper.’
‘Miss Katherine Alana Harper. Leicester, St Martins, Penny.’
‘And how do you service your account Miss… Harper.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Salary… regular income.’
‘I’m an artist and sculptor… regular doesn’t compute.’
‘I see. Can you provide records of annual income for the last, say two years?’
‘No.’ She dealt mainly in cash. She’d never found time or reason to keep records.
‘So how do you propose to make repayments?’
‘I have plans… I can show you sketches, ideas…’
‘Ideas won’t service a loan. Is there someone who would stand security?
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry. The answer has to be no.’
‘But…’ Her dream faded to reality. No way could she raise such an amount. She had to sell The Haggard.
Home, she sipped coffee. She wouldn’t give up on her dream. If she could understand the marks on the stones, she could better pitch her idea to some other organisation with cash. Aunt Siân’s computer was as silent as the stones. What password other than Bramble? Dafydd? Password invalid. She stroked the glass over the photo of Siân, Cadi and Dafydd. What had he been like, her father? She wished she’d known him. She tried to see a likeness between herself and him, between herself and Cadi. Hair colour, maybe the eyes… Cadi was the sister she’d always wanted: the one she’d never have.
