The Traveller and Other Stories

by Stuart Neville

  The Coroners Service for Northern Ireland has ruled that the recent drowning of a fourteen-month-old girl was a tragic accident. The coroner stated that weather conditions in the days previous to the incident contributed not only to deeper and faster-moving water at the Folly Glen River, but also to poor footing along the path that runs alongside.

  I know the river. I’ve been there lots of times.

  Once, Mum took me. She walked me along the path to the fence made of wire and wood with the steep drop on the other side. Mum said the fence didn’t use to be there. She stood beside me, holding my hand tight, looking at the water. It moved slow and lazy.

  She asked me if I remembered. I said no, I didn’t.

  I’ve gone back other times. Sometimes if Mum has a nap, and Dad’s upstairs working, I go to the river. It’s only a few minutes away from our house. Some days I go to that spot, where the fence wasn’t before, and other times I don’t. I like the trees and the quiet. In the autumn, the squirrels run and hop through the leaves on the ground. I wish I could bring Angus so he could chase them.

  I think he could catch one. I would watch him eat it, his teeth red. The guts spilling out.

  I’m kneeling by the chest of drawers, the newspaper pages on the floor in front of me, picturing the dog eating the raw meat. The tiny bones breaking. It gives me a feeling that I think I shouldn’t like.

  A movement in the corner of my eye. I spin around, fall on to my arse.

  Melody sitting on the edge of Mum and Dad’s bed.

  “You were touching yourself again,” she says.

  “Piss off,” I say. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes you were. Pervert.”

  I stand up. I cross the few feet of floor to the bed. I open my hand and slap her cheek. Her head rocks back. She closes her eyes for a few seconds. I feel the burn on my own face, and the heat on my palm.

  When she opens her eyes again, she asks, “Do you want to bite me?”

  She reaches out her bare forearm. I take her skin between my teeth, close them until I can’t stand the pain anymore. Tears roll down her cheeks, and she wipes them away. I see the twin red crescents on her forearm, exactly the shape and colour of the ones that have appeared on mine.

  She looks down. I know what she’s looking at. I want to hit her again, but instead I walk towards the door.

  “Hey, Walrus.”

  I stop. My insides are hot with anger. “What?”

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  I turn and see her pointing to the newspaper pages on the floor. “Shit,” I say. I go back and gather them up, put them in the folder, return the folder to the drawer, arrange the old clothes and broken things as they were before I disturbed them.

  Melody asks, “Why don’t you ask Mum if you can look at the papers? She’d probably let you.”

  “I don’t want her to know I’m looking at them,” I say.

  “Why?”

  Her cheek has a red handprint on it. I can still feel the sting of it on my own skin. The anger that burns my insides turns to something else, something heavier.

  “Because she’d look at them with me, and then she’d start crying again.”

  Melody shrugs. “Why do you want to look at them anyway?”

  “Dunno.” I sit on the bed beside her. “To see if I remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Falling in,” I say. “Drowning. What it felt like.”

  She takes my hand in hers. “But you didn’t fall in. I did.”

  “But I am he—”

  “—as you are me. I know.”

  We sit quiet for a while. Her fingers aren’t warm or cold on mine. They’re just there. I ask, “Do you remember what it felt like? When you fell in. When you drowned.”

  “No,” she says.

  “You’d think you’d remember something like that.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am he—”

  “—as you are me—”

  “—and we are always together.”

  Those aren’t the real words, but it doesn’t matter. They’re still true.

  Quiet again. Then I say, “Sorry for hitting you.”

  “S’all right,” she says. She leans close to me. “Do you want to go to the river now?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I peek into the living room. Mum is lying on the couch, her breath raspy in her throat. A bottle of red wine is open on the table, a mostly empty glass beside it. I leave her there and close the front door as quietly as I can. The garden gate squeaks. Inside the house, Angus barks like he does at the postman. I know if he wakes Mum, she’ll just shout at him to shut up before she rolls over and goes back to sleep.

  I go to the end of our road, turn back into the Crescent, then into the Ballynahone estate. The houses here are smaller than ours, newer, and uglier. I’ve been beaten up here a couple of times. Today it’s all right, though, because most of the kids are at school. Except the ones who mitch off, but they aren’t around either.

  There’s a playground down some concrete steps. Mum used to take me here when I was younger. She says I’m too old for swings and slides now.

  The Folly is on the other side of the playground. You have to open the gate and go through. A path leads down into the trees. Soon, you can’t see the houses, only the brown and grey trunks, and the leaves, still green. Conkers, hidden in their shells, lie on the ground. I kick at them as I walk. Some of them I stamp on. Like little skulls crushed under my feet.

  The river cuts through our side of town. It used to be bigger. It carved a bowl out of the earth, Dad told me, and that’s where the trees grew. The ground slopes down towards the water until you reach the gravel path at its bank. Today, there isn’t much here. Just a stream. It smells of chemicals, and suds clump on the surface, foaming around the stones that poke up out of the water. Dad told me there used to be fish here. Tiny ones called sticklebacks, he used to catch them in buckets when he was a kid, but they’re all gone now.

  Melody walks behind me.

  “Are you going to that place?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  I walk towards the bridge. Halfway across, I stop and look over the railing. I see a wheel off a bike gathering mud and weeds. Rusty beer cans and plastic bags. Next big rainfall, when it turns from a dirty stream back into a proper river, the rubbish will be washed away. Like old memories.

  “Come on,” Melody says.

  I follow her across the bridge to the gravel path on the other side. She stays ahead of me. The ground dips up and down. We pass the picnic area with its benches and burnt patch in the grass. Where the path cuts closest to the river, there are fences of wood and wire. Melody stops at one.

  I put my hands on the fence. Look over. There’s a drop on the other side, straight down into the water. Even if there wasn’t enough water to drown in, you’d break your head on the stones. I lean a little farther.

  I imagine my head hitting the stones, going blind from the pain and the shock of it, warm things spilling out.

  Dad says imagination is a curse. Picturing the worst horrors you can think of, then writing them down. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to write anything anymore.

  The water moves like a fat snake.

  “It was summertime when you fell in,” I say.

  “Was it?”

  I imagine what it felt like. Slipping, falling away. A hand holding my hand, then not, then down into the water.

  “I think it must have been cold,” I say. “Even if it was summer.”

  And how fast the water. Swept away, just like that. They found the little body half a mile downstream, snagged on fallen branches.

  “Why don’t we remember?” I ask.

  “Maybe we were too young
,” Melody says. “Or maybe we don’t want to remember.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  I know Melody isn’t real. Not real in the way Mum and Dad are, or even Angus. I know she lives in my head. I know the real Melody I talk to has never been, never grew up like that, never learned to talk and run and hit and bite and all the things she does.

  But still, there she is. And she is we and we are all together.

  Melody stands close. “I think what Mum says isn’t true.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “About you and me.”

  “What about you and me?” I ask.

  “About you being me.”

  I don’t answer. I look at the water, the fat snake.

  “What if you’re not me?” she asks. “What if I’m not you?”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  “What if you’re just you and nobody else?”

  “Fucking shut up,” I say. Loud enough so my voice comes back to me through the trees.

  “I think she didn’t slip,” Melody says. “I think I didn’t fall.”

  “Stop it,” I say.

  “I think she carried me down the bank,” Melody says. “I think she brought me down there, and she put me in the water.”

  “Stop,” I say.

  “I think it was cold,” Melody says. “So cold. Right to the bones of me. I think she held me under. I was scared. I looked up and I could see her face through the water. Her hands were hard on my shoulders. I think I could hear her screaming. I tried to cry but I was too cold inside and it hurt.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” I say.

  I turn to look at her, to slap and bite her, but she isn’t there. Instead, along the path, Mum stands staring back at me. Slippers on her feet. Her coat buttoned tight. Her eyes wide. Her mouth turned down, her lip shaking.

  I try to think of something to say. Some reason I can give her.

  Mum marches towards me, her open hands cutting through the air. I open my mouth. She raises her fist. It hits me below my eye, a hard slam against my cheekbone. I fall down, my head light.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice is high and shaky.

  I scramble back. The gravel is wet and stinging on my palms. The heat beneath my eye grows hotter and heavier.

  She follows me. “What are you doing here?”

  I try to speak, but I can’t find the breath.

  “You’re not allowed to come here on your own.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. It comes out as a whisper.

  “You’re sorry?” She shakes her head. “You’re fucking sorry? You little . . . you . . .”

  She falls on me.

  I bring my forearms up, try to keep her hands away, but it’s no good. The nails and the knuckles, the ring she wears on her left hand.

  I wish someone would come, pull her away, make her stop. But no one does.

  Hot, hot pain above my eyes, and they fill with blood. I am blind. I cover my face with my hands. Her weight shifts on me as she leans back.

  “Oh my God, sweetheart, I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  I hear her voice. Know her position. I take my hands away from my face, blink, see light and shade. Push myself upright.

  Her voice wavers as she touches my cheek.

  “Sweetheart, I—”

  I put my shoulders and my neck into it. My head snaps forward. I feel her nose crushed against my brow. She rocks backwards and I feel the heat of her blood on my chest. I roll sideways, and she topples over.

  She cries out. I wipe at my eyes, regain something of my vision. She falls back against the fencing, nothing more than sticks and wire. It cannot hold her weight. The sticks and wire give way, and she tumbles back.

  I wipe at my eyes again, watch her fall, taking the fence with her. As she slides down the bank, her foot catches in the wire, whips her body back and down.

  The sound of her head meeting rock echoes through the trees like a gunshot.

  I stand, wiping more blood from my eyes, blinking it away. At the edge, at the torn-away fence, I look down. Her eyes are open wide. Her mouth is working, like she’s trying to tell me something. The shallow water around her head swirls with red.

  Melody stands beside her, looking.

  Mum’s eyes turn to where Melody stands. Wide and wild. Melody says nothing, only watches as Mum becomes very still. Then she climbs the bank, up to where I wait. I follow her home.

  I go to the bathroom, undress, and clean myself up. The cut on my forehead isn’t as bad as I thought. I hold a wet facecloth against it, and the bleeding slows.

  When I go downstairs, still in my underwear, Melody sits beside me on the couch. We watch cartoons on the television. Old ones and new ones. Most of them I’m not allowed to watch, but I don’t care, I watch them anyway. Melody holds my hand, the one that isn’t holding the facecloth against the cut.

  We know this time is precious. We know it will end soon and we will have to talk to the police and think of lies to tell.

  But for now, there are cartoons.

  London Safe

  Jason McCoubry’s mother stared at the postcard in his hand, her mouth a thin straight line. Her window didn’t allow much light into the room, and sometimes he thought that a blessing. The drab painted walls, the bed with its rails to prevent her from falling in the night, the vase of plastic flowers. They had to sell her house to pay for this place, and she had wept when he first helped her through the door. The carers did their jobs well, but still, leaving his mother here had been about the hardest thing he’d ever done. Until now.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “There was nothing to tell,” she said, her voice as dry as the card in his hand.

  “Nothing to tell? You said he’d left us.”

  “And that was the truth.”

  “Not the whole truth, though, was it?”

  He was getting angry. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t. She was a frail woman, mostly intact upstairs, but her body had failed her long ago. It wasn’t fair to harangue her. But it wasn’t fair that she’d lied to him. He swallowed the anger, pushed it down as far as he could.

  “He left us,” Margaret McCoubry said. “That’s all you needed to know.”

  “But we never knew why,” Jason said.

  She lay back in the bed and looked up at the ceiling tiles. “What difference would that have made?”

  “At least I could have understood. Maybe I wouldn’t have wound up hating him the way I did. Thirty years, carrying that around with me. Thinking he didn’t want us.”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “If he cared about you or me, he would never have done what he did.”

  What he did.

  Informant was one word for it. Snitch was another. Or around here, in the towns and villages, in the cities like Belfast or Derry, the word was tout.

  Touts out. Snitches get stitches.

  He remembered the graffiti on the gable walls of the estate. Keep your mouth shut. Say nothing.

  When Jason was eleven years old, one week after he started at the local grammar—the first in his family ever to pass the exams and get into a good school—his father wasn’t at the breakfast table. Jason and his little sister, Claire, had sat in silence as their mother filled the bowls with cereal and milk, radiating fury and pain. She didn’t have to say anything. He and Claire both knew something was terribly wrong.

  Margaret told them that evening. Their father, Dan McCoubry, had abandoned them. Just gone. No explanation, no warning. Jason knew his father hadn’t been himself this last while. He had become sullen and withdrawn when he’d always been jovial and outgoing. Everyone knew Long Dan, so-called because of his six-foot-four height married to a painfully slender frame. Long Dan the Handy Man. Those words were hand-painted on the side of the little Renault van h
e drove about the town, doing odd jobs, clearing gutters, papering walls, painting doors. He worked hard to feed his family, some years even made enough to pay for a stay in a guesthouse in Portrush in the dying days of August.

  Long Dan McCoubry was a good man. Jason had been certain of that until his mother told him otherwise. That had been a Monday. On the following Friday, they moved house, moved town, moved county. Not even a chance to say goodbye to their friends. Barely even two weeks at the good school before Jason had to leave, starting over again at a place where he knew no one.

  Six months ago, Jason had had to clear out his mother’s house before it went on the market, and boxes full of letters and documents had been stacked in his garage ever since. Two days ago, he began sorting through them, filling bags for recycling, shredding the more private correspondence. He had found the postcard, dry and yellowed, in the bottom of a biscuit tin. It was bound up with a rubber band along with a selection of old photographs and envelopes. Blue ink in a meticulous script. He read it once, twice, three times before he understood.

  Maggie—

  I’m sorry. I had to do it. They would of put me in jail if I didn’t and told them I touted anyway so I have to go. You know its for the best. Tell the wee one’s I love them and I will always miss them. Try to make them understand its for there own good. I don’t want them to see me shot in front of them. Don’t worry about me in London. I’ll be safe.

  Dan

  Jason held it now in his hands, read it again.

  “What did he do?” he asked.

  “He turned on his own,” Margaret said, “that’s what he done.”

  He waited until she glanced at him. “Tell me. I deserve to know. So does Claire.”

  “What have you told her?”

  She seemed concerned now, her face darkening. Her daughter had always been the delicate one, the one who needed protecting.

  “Nothing,” Jason said. “Yet.”

  Margaret let the air out of her chest, deflating, withering beneath the bedclothes.

  “They came for him in the middle of the night,” she said. “Near kicked the door in before he got to it. They never explained anything, just told him to get dressed, follow them in his van. He didn’t come home till the morning, after youse had gone to school. I never asked him what happened, but he told me that afternoon.