The Blue Tent

by Richard Gwyn

  History repeating itself, says Alice, as she strokes the dog’s head. Funny, isn’t it? What shall we call him?

  If Alice is to be believed, we have hit the animal along the very stretch of road on which my Aunt Megan almost ran her down a decade earlier. I have to admit this is a convenient coincidence, although unfortunate for the dog, an unsuspecting pawn in the fabrication, by Alice, of a patterned and cohesive universe.

  The vet, a woman whose seriousness is compromised by large maroon spectacles, overwrought lime-green plastic earrings and hair streaked to match, attends to the dog while Alice and I look on. He plays up, is resistant to her attentions and nips her hand, so she gives him an injection – Ketamine, she explains, with a wink – and the dog yelps, then flops in a heap. The vet attaches a splint to his rear left leg, bandages it, and presents me with a bill and Alice with a small packet of pills that are to be crushed and administered to the animal’s food. Outside, the sky has cleared, but evening is closing in.

  That was the night Alice moved into the house. After the storm, and the prospect of more rain, it only seemed right to ask her to stay. I had the whole of Llys Rhosyn to myself, whereas she had only the blue tent. Whatever its special properties, I refused to believe that the tent was entirely weather-proof. So, while I set about cooking the lamb, Alice brought the few contents of her tent inside and took over one of the spare bedrooms – the one she said she had used when visiting Megan. It made no difference to me which room she took. Once dinner was in the oven I ventured to the upstairs bathroom and found a cluster of unfamiliar, feminine accoutrements on the shelf by the bath-tub, which brought me an odd sense of comfort. I picked up a bottle of body lotion, unscrewed the top and smelled it. I went through the process again with the hand cream and a tiny bottle of perfume. I felt at once invigorated and displaced from my own centre, like a spy in my own home.

  When we eventually sat down to eat, it was late. The storm had started up again briefly, but had passed over, leaving in its wake a light but persistent rain. The dog, still sleepy with the painkiller that the vet had administered before setting the leg, lay determinedly across the foot of his rescuer, his one cerulean and one hazel eye blinking in unison as he followed my movements around the meat while I carved.

  I wonder which farm he’s from, I said, hoping to remind Alice that we were not the dog’s owners. I can’t see why else he would be out on the road, miles from anywhere.

  Unless someone abandoned him, she said, hopefully. In any case, I don’t fancy trailing around asking all the farmers if they’ve lost a dog. They’d think I was a stupid city person.

  I didn’t know border collies could have blue eyes, I said, let alone eyes of a different colour. And that streaky grey coat is very unusual.

  I checked it out already, replied Alice. While we were at the vet’s. It’s called Merle, the colouring. It’s not uncommon, apparently. And the eye thing, it’s called heterochromia …

  So the dog with the startling eyes stayed – for now, at least – like its human counterpart, as though there had never been another possible outcome; as though there were a contract between the two of them, my strange guest and her familiar.

  9

  After supper, Alice having retired to bed with the drugged and pampered pup – which she has named Ketamine, following the vet’s prescription, though I’m sure the name won’t stick – I return to the library, light the fire and settle into my aunt’s favourite armchair with A.E. Waite’s Works of Thomas Vaughan (1888 edition). But the turbulent prose, combined with the arcane – not to say preposterous – subject matter, is more than my powers of concentration can endure, and within minutes I am, miraculously, asleep, and dreaming.

  In the dream I am being stretchered into hospital by paramedics. There is a glaring purple mark or blemish, the size of a dessert spoon, on my inner thigh. It stings horribly, as though lacerating the flesh. Nurses bustle around me. I am given blue pyjamas and allocated a bed. The consultant, an elderly man, arrives, followed by eager acolytes, examines the mark on my thigh, and announces that I have an Alice-head Derm, a species of ailment that he, the consultant, has only once before encountered in his long career. The poor man is perplexed, but so am I. I know that I will have to show the mark to Aunt Megan, because she will know what it means. I find her at a fancy-dress party, a carnival of some kind, and I sway through the crowd of revellers towards her, carrying a tray laden with drinks. People keep knocking into me and I am afraid that I will drop the tray. It is vital that I get to Megan without spilling any of the drinks. Many of the party-goers have chosen to dress in military uniform from different historical periods, but I am still wearing my hospital pyjamas. When I finally reach my aunt, she is the Megan of my childhood, a woman of around forty, dressed elegantly in evening gown, and wearing a necklace with a striking pendant of red and gold. I lower my pyjama trousers and she drops on one knee beside me and inspects my thigh. ‘You should take less salt in your diet,’ she says, ‘otherwise you’ll get an Alice-head Derm.’ She ignores my protestation that according to the doctor I already have one, and continues: ‘You must never reveal what I am about to tell you, except to my child, and my closest friend, so that you are me, and I am you.’ But she never tells me what she is about to reveal, because I wake up.

  And there is something else, there is always something else, that elusive quality inherent to dreams which you can never quite recapture when you attempt to remember them, or make sense of them; the thing that constitutes the secret heart of the dream and which will always be beyond recall or the powers of description.

  I am certain of those final words of Megan when I wake (with a start, as though I were expecting to be somewhere else, or even somebody else), but as the minutes recede and I sit in the warm glow of the fire, they seem less certain, less fixed, and I become unsure whether they are the exact words spoken to me by Megan in the dream. You must never reveal what I am about to tell you except to my child, and my closest friend, so that you are me, and I am you. I scribble them down straightaway, on a notepad that I keep on the desk. I pick up The Works of Thomas Vaughan and flick through the pages I was reading before falling asleep, in order to check that amidst the largely incomprehensible alchemical jargon and prophecy I have not unwittingly retained these lines and then attributed them to the dream character of Megan, but I can find nothing resembling them.

  I check the time – it is 3.45 a.m. – and start leafing through the Anima Magica Abscondita, wondering whether I should move to the sofa in the living room for greater comfort, when the library door pushes open and Alice walks in, barefoot and wearing pyjamas (mercifully they are striped in grey and pink, rather than blue, like those in my dream). They are men’s or boys’ pyjamas, lending her an androgynous aspect and they suit her well.

  I couldn’t sleep, she says, settling down on the rug before the fire, almost at my feet. It is the same place she chose to sit that morning – or the previous morning – and again she folds her legs beneath her in a half-lotus. Alice wears a necklace hanging outside her chastely-buttoned pyjama shirt; a scarab beetle in gold, a ruby held between its front legs. It is the necklace from my dream.

  Nor me, I say, although on this occasion the statement is not strictly accurate.

  She sighs and picks up the poker, gently prods a slow-burning log. Orange sparks drift up the chimney.

  That necklace, I say, you weren’t wearing it before, were you?

  Alice shakes her head.

  It was Megan’s, she says. I sometimes wear it at night. Or in the evening. But it’s not a daytime piece of jewellery.

  It takes me a minute to think that through. Alice caresses the pendant between her thumb and forefinger.

  I was dreaming just now of Megan, I say, without thinking. She was at a fancy-dress do.

  And?

  I hesitate. Quite apart from the pet name the doctor had attributed to my unusual skin condition, some code of propriety prevents me from disclosing the contents of a dr
eam to someone I have known for little more than a day. It seems almost indecent.

  And nothing much. That is, I don’t remember. She told me not to take so much salt on my food.

  Hmm, says Alice. That’s probably sound advice.

  I laugh weakly. She knows there is something else, something more significant; I can feel it in the cadence of her words. Without intending it, my gaze shifts towards the desk, and the notepad where I have jotted down the words from the dream. Her eyes follow mine.

  You can tell me, she says. But, of course, you don’t have to …

  It would serve no purpose to conceal what I have written. Besides, the offending name of my skin condition does not appear on the notepad.

  Over there, I say, gesturing to the desk. She gets up from her cross-legged pose in a singular, fluent movement, takes the notepad from the desk, and plants herself on the well-upholstered arm of my chair. Her hair falls forward across her eyes, and as she sweeps it behind an ear, the back of her hand brushes softly against my face. The contact, though slight, sends a tremor through me.

  She looks at the notepad and reads the sentence aloud.

  Does this mean anything to you? she says.

  I don’t know. It seems familiar. As if it were something I had once read, but I’ve read so much here over the past year, it could be from almost anywhere …

  Alice leans back on the arm of my chair and rocks back and forth, her eyes lifted to the ceiling. I get – or do I imagine it? – a whiff of patchouli, and a vague childhood vision of Megan flutters by me.

  Nothing else from the dream? asks Alice, as she slides off the arm-rest and stands, facing me. You said it was fancy dress.

  I am staring at Alice’s necklace. Without thinking I reach out and touch it, and I stand up in the process. My fingers graze the flannelette of her pyjama shirt as I lift the pendant, and briefly, almost imperceptibly, and without the least conscious intention on my part, the palm of my hand nudges against her breast, or rather, against the distension in the cloth made by the bud of her nipple. It is such a fleeting moment, and such minimal contact, but her proximity, the scent on her skin, and the inexplicable intensity of the moment together cause me to catch my breath, and for the second time in two minutes something inside of me shifts.

  Alice takes a half-step back. I endure a moment’s discomfort, feeling inept at my clumsy movement and incapable of reacting with the lightness appropriate to a genuine mistake. I’m sorry, I mutter. Alice’s eyes are averted from me, as though studying a pattern on the parquet of the library floor. Then she steps forward, places a hand on my shoulder and looks at me, the notepad held tight against her chest, covering that part of her body which I have unwittingly grazed with my hand – the breast of course being an intimate zone of the body with which my fingers, unbidden, are not permitted contact, whereas my face, or more precisely my cheek, exposed at all times to the vicissitudes of weather and the eyes of the world, is not an intimate zone, which excuses her almost identical brushing of it with her fingers a few moments earlier, without even the most formulaic of apologies – and my own chest churns in a chaotic soup of anticipation or of desire as she kisses me lightly on the cheek, yes, the same cheek she had – no doubt about it now – intentionally brushed with her fingers only moments earlier, and, still clutching the notepad, my notepad, against her breast, Alice turns with a ‘goodnight, again’ and a parting smile, crosses the library, her feet silent on the polished wooden floor, her pyjamas with all the buttons neatly secured and the collar upturned, out of the door and up the stairs to her bed. I hear the creak of floorboards as she traverses the landing to her room, adjacent to my own (in which I never sleep) and then the twanging of springs as she settles into the big, ancient bed.

  10

  Early the next day, sleepless and somewhat tetchy, I decide to visit a couple of the nearby farms, but not before leaving a note on the kitchen table for Alice: ‘Have gone to see if any of the neighbours are missing a dog’.

  I start with Morgan, as the nearest of these, and steer the old Mercedes up the winding, pot-holed track to his farm, which lies half a mile off the road just beyond the entrance to my own drive. I am greeted, as expected, by a posse of sheepdogs, five in number, of which one – with the same streaky grey colouring as the dog we hit – is particularly enthusiastic in its brand of fierce welcome. I am not put off, however, and stride purposefully past the dogs across the yard. One cannot afford to display fear on these occasions.

  The view from the farmyard is spectacular. Looking down the valley, I can see Llys Rhosyn tucked beneath low wooded hills, the great ridge that forms the ancient border with England rising behind them. The stream that flows close to the house glints silver in the sunlight, and the whole vista conveys a sense of green serenity. Paradisal, no doubt. Not so the view across Morgan’s yard, strewn with rusting cars and a plundered van, its bonnet flung open like the broken wing of some giant lepidopteran, and numerous green plastic crates, scattered at random around the muddy perimeter. The centre-piece of this study in neglect is the corpse of a tractor, half a century old, tyre-less and of indeterminate colour. I make for the barn, with my restless, canine escort, now less vocal. A few desperate chickens scatter on our approach.

  Morgan is tinkering with another farm vehicle, the successor to the tractor in the yard, his head and one arm plunged inside its entrails, his free hand clutching a spanner. I know to shout, as he is deaf as a post.

  Good Morning, Mr Morgan, I bellow. I am wary, as Morgan is a drinker, and prone to violent mood swings.

  He pokes his head up from the mess of metal and engine oil, wiping his hands along the sides of his dungarees. He must be eighty, and he moves with a slight limp, but he is lean and agile and has the eyes of a bird of prey, the beak to match. And he speaks in the old tongue.

  S’mae ‘achan, he begins, confirming, to my relief, that he is in a benign mood, or at least sober, and that he still thinks of me as a boy, and always will. Morgan is one of the few remaining indigenous hill farmers in this part of the world. Once relatively prosperous, he lost his herd of Herefords in the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 – the same year in which his wife, Angharad, died of leukaemia. He never recovered from her loss, nor did he replace the cattle. He had taken to drinking and tirades against all forms of government, which necessarily involved a jaded attitude towards his neighbours over the ridge, whom he referred to, disparagingly, as saeson. Whereas most people hereabouts held an ambivalent sense of dual identity, the border zone having been, historically, pretty much anglicised, Morgan adhered to a more ancient, fundamentalist set of beliefs.

  Come in boy, have some tea, I was about to make a paned, he says, somewhat to my surprise – or perhaps something a little stronger? It is eight o’clock in the morning, but Morgan does not adhere to any schedule, outside the routines of the farm.

  I won’t, but thanks, I begin. I can’t stay. The reason I came … I hit a dog in the road last night, a sheepdog, grey and white, and wondered if it might be one of yours.

  Morgan grunts. A half-grown thing? he asks, thick eyebrows raised. Grey and white, male? Good riddance to him. He’s no use to me. An idle, wandering good-for-nothing, that one. Mae’n dda i ddim. You can always tell the ones that won’t be trained. He chases the ducks and next he’ll be chasing sheep and next I’ll have to shoot him.

  Morgan wasn’t exactly soft on any of his dogs. That was the way of things, up here. Little room for sentiment. I wondered what had become of the rest of the litter, but knew better than to ask.

  Don’t you want him back then? I ask feebly. I was rather hoping you did …

  Didn’t you hear me, boy? I don’t want him. If you want to keep the pup, I won’t charge you for him. Wouldn’t want to waste your money. Though, he adds wistfully, I might have got a hundred pound for him in town.

  Now, that is something, Morgan being famously tight-fisted.

  Really? Are you sure? (Though I have no idea why I am pressing this point,
as I don’t want a dog.)

  Sure, boy. Think of it as a gift. In honour of your auntie.

  When I return to Llys Rhosyn, Alice is in the kitchen. She has read my note and looks up hopefully as I come in.

  You can keep the dog, I tell her. If you want.

  I have no idea why I was so easily won over. No, that’s not true: Alice wanted to keep the dog, and I wanted to please Alice. It was perfectly simple. The potential disagreement over the dog, which I had anticipated as a burgeoning irritation over the course of the night, and for which I had planned a lengthy speech, was lost without a struggle.

  We decide to go on another outing. Indeed, I propose it, although Alice prompted me by suggesting over supper the previous evening that, while the good weather holds, ‘it would be nice to do some more exploring’. It occurs to me that we should visit somewhere of special significance to my aunt: the Mid Wales Hospital at Talgarth, abandoned now, was once the largest psychiatric hospital in the region, and Megan’s workplace for twenty years.

  Back in the car, we head up to Capel-y-Ffin and over Gospel Pass towards Hay. A small herd of feral ponies near the summit eye us suspiciously, and Alice sings, her feet up on the dash once more. The dog lies curled on the floor. He can’t believe his luck. She’s given him more painkillers, so we haven’t yet witnessed any of the errant behaviour Morgan warned me of, though there’ll be time for that. Talgarth lies another fifteen minutes up the road from Hay.