The Blue Tent

by Richard Gwyn

  What’s going on? she shouts back at me. What’s happened? Have you had an accident?

  Come up here, I yell back. I need your help.

  When Alice reaches me, I have walked a few more paces down the hill towards her.

  There’s a child, I say, breathlessly, hiding in the woodshed. I’m worried that it might try to run off. I think it needs help, but I can’t reach it.

  Can’t reach it?

  You’ll see. It’s made itself a little nest. It likes salt. It likes salty food. I thought I’d go down to the kitchen to fetch some bacon, as bait, to lure it out, but I didn’t want to leave it alone in the shed in case it runs off into the woods and we can’t find it and it dies of malnutrition or exposure. So I want you to keep an eye on the kid, talk to it, don’t let it get frightened, while I go down to get some food. It’s hungry. It’s been taking food from us. It’s where the missing food’s been going. Just go inside, you’ll see what to do.

  It? Girl or boy?

  I have no idea. You decide.

  And so I return to the shed with Alice, open the door, and show her where the child is hiding, still squatting at the end of its little tunnel.

  Then I run back down to the house.

  I don’t see O’Hallaran or Gabrielle in the kitchen. I am in a hurry, as the incident with the strange child is, I am sure, the delayed product of the tent, and I am obsessed with all that the tent brings me. Obsessed, and now disturbed. I had thought that perhaps the tent had come to the end of its projections or ejaculations, but apparently it was saving its biggest surprise until last. I rummage in the fridge, find the few cooked rashers that O’Hallaran has left there for his pal, the fox, and return up the hill to the shed.

  The door of the woodshed remains jammed open, so I have a clear view inside as I step over the threshold. Alice is sitting with her back to the wall, in much the same place as O’Hallaran occupied when I found him on the night that everything happened. She is sitting there, and nestled into her side, its head nuzzling against her neck, its thin legs wrapped around her waist, is the child. It makes no sound, but clings to her like a frightened monkey.

  Well, I say, you’ve made progress. I step towards Alice and the child raises its head, fixing me with its big eyes, still nervous of me, but no longer quite so fearful, now that it has found its protector.

  How did you get it to come out? Has it spoken yet? I say. Alice doesn’t answer at first.

  The poor child is traumatised, she says, eventually. By not attaching any gender to the utterance, I take it that she is as confused about its gender as I am.

  I wave the rashers of bacon in the air, and take a step closer towards them. Alice takes one from me, and when she offers the strip of meat to the child, a small hand emerges and takes it, slowly, tentatively, but then, with extraordinary speed, delivers it to its mouth, and it bolts the food, barely chewing, like a dog. It holds out its hand for another rasher. I pass them on to Alice.

  They sit there against the wall, Alice feeding bacon to the foundling child. I am utterly external to the scenario, apart from serving as a bacon-dispenser. I can offer nothing more. The picture in front of me reminds me of some primitive rendition of Madonna and child. In which case, I conclude, I am the painter.

  30

  Alice carries the child back down to the house, still wrapped in its blanket. She, like the child, does not seem to need any help from me.

  We had better give it a bath, I suggest.

  Alice does not respond.

  How did you get it out from its hiding place? I ask.

  She sighs, heavily. I sat at the opening of the tunnel, she says, and it ran into my arms. And that is all she says, as if, by omission, she implies other things.

  In the kitchen we are greeted by Gabrielle. The child studies her carefully, but makes no response when Gabrielle speaks to it, cooingly, in French. Alice asks Gabrielle to go and run a bath for the child. I am offended that she seems to be ignoring me, when it was I who brought the child’s presence to her attention. How come Alice has so effortlessly taken command of the situation? Whose house is this anyway?

  I stand around, feeling useless. I wish O’Hallaran were here, so that we could feel useless together.

  I decide to make some coffee, by way of appearing occupied. When the electric mill starts making its grinding noises, the child is startled and looks up, but does not cry out, or weep. In fact, it has not cried since I discovered it. Unlike me. I am the only one who has wept. The child has merely observed us in turn, either anxiously, as at first it watched me, or in a state of fear, or – as now, from a position of safety, secure in Alice’s arms – with raw curiosity. Alice holds it lightly, but close against her body. If the child really is six or seven, as I first guessed, it is small for its age.

  I am upset that my few comments have been disregarded by Alice, and I do not want to face her disdainful or accusing gaze. I pour myself an espresso, and when I turn around I see that Alice has left the kitchen, along with the child. She has left without speaking, presumably to join Gabrielle in the bathroom. So I drink my coffee alone, and I stare out of the kitchen window, at the blue tent. I see O’Hallaran, standing to one side of the tent, in the failing light. He is sharpening a long stick, a kind of stake – the sort traditionally used for skewering vampires – with a large knife. He is lost in concentration and does not notice me, watching him from the window. I realise, once again, how tired I am. I am so very, very tired. My eyes are sore and my eyelids are heavy.

  I settle into the kitchen armchair, which is covered with faded Regency stripes, in soft, satiny material. I curl into the chair, drain my coffee, and fall asleep. I immediately begin to dream that I am in a Turkish or Levantine bazaar, perhaps Istanbul or Beirut, and I am lost in the endless alleyways of the market, one I almost certainly visited in my travels, I forget the name, of course I forget the name, why must I always forget the names of things, of places, of a market known to me, even one that is profoundly familiar from the time I lived in Istanbul, I assume it is Istanbul, it may be Beirut or Izmir or even Alexandria or Damascus or ancient Tarsus for all I know, where tradesmen are calling out, yelling the names of their wares, some of them occasionally following me down the aisles and shouting words at me that I cannot understand, in a language I have never learned, or have partially learned but cannot now recall. One of them produces a child, a scrawny urchin, and presents him to me. Over the salesman’s free arm, a carpet is draped. You buy my carpet, he says, I throw in the child. I recognise the salesman. I met him once before, in a dream or in fact, outside the Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet. Only ten thousand lira for the carpet, he says, and the child for free. I look at the child and I recognise him too, I have known him always, but cannot remember from where. I feel a burgeoning sadness, and know that again I am tearful. When I wake, I am rubbing away the tears. I am not alone.

  I cannot have slept for long, but it was long enough for Alice to have bathed the foundling. She stands before me, the child held upright at her hip, Gabrielle at her side. Alice, who appears to have bathed also (her hair is wet and she has changed into a patterned cotton dress) seems in her element, as though made for this display of surrogate motherhood. The snot stains and grunge have vanished from the child’s face. Instead it looks scrubbed and shiny, although its expression could not be described as cheerful. It is, if anything, intensely thoughtful, with that fixed studiousness at which the very young are so expert. Its skin is of a natural light olive complexion, which was difficult to discern before. The women have dressed it in clean shorts, a T-shirt and jumper, which I recognise as Alice’s, and all of them far too big, the shorts coming down to its shins. So the child is dressed, if still barefoot. Its feet have been washed, however: they are no longer encrusted with dirt as they were when I first found it.

  We tried out some socks, says Alice, but you would have thought we were carrying out some terrible torture, what with all the screaming and shouting. Nice soft cosy socks they were too,
she says, admonishing the kid in a child-friendly voice. So we stayed barefoot.

  We? Alice has turned into Mary Poppins.

  And then I recognise something else in the child, now that layers of grime have been removed from its face: it reminds me of myself, or rather of the way I appeared in photographs when I was a child. The realisation stabs at me. I stare at the kid long and hard. It is more than a mere resemblance. There can be no doubt about it: I am looking at an image of myself aged six, the year my mother died.

  I do not get up from the armchair, but remain seated, the three of them lined up before me. I can tell that Alice’s attitude towards me has mellowed. But why was she hostile before? When we brought the child down from the shed to the kitchen, what could she have been thinking? That I had hurt it in some way? Could she really consider me capable of such a thing? That Alice might think I had harmed the kid makes me weak with incomprehension.

  Just then O’Hallaran enters the kitchen through the back door, whistling. He stops short at the scene before him.

  What have we here? he says, putting on a face that certain adults reserve for interactions with small children and animals, and he approaches the child, raising his hand as if to chuck it under the chin. The child immediately flinches and buries its face in the crook of Alice’s neck.

  Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be … says O’Hallaran, shaking his head. And he makes his way over to the coffee machine, unconcerned.

  Anyone else for a cup? he asks, looking over in my direction. Not for me, I say, but make yourself at home.

  Meanwhile, Gabrielle, at Alice’s side, has adopted the role of assistant nanny, or rather nanny to Alice’s mummy. I need to speak to one of the women. I get up from the chair and, so as not to upset the child by demanding Alice’s attention, I take Gabrielle by the arm, leading her through the door that connects with the living room. The mere act of touching her, of leading her physically from the room, feeling the silk of her blouse under my fingers, makes me dizzy. I catch the scent of her shampoo, spring flowers.

  Well? I ask, steeling myself against the wave of desire that has swept over me: Did you make any discoveries? Did you manage to get it to speak? I’m sorry, I am still calling it it. If you gave it a bath you must know by now whether it’s a boy or a girl.

  Gabrielle looks flustered for a moment, and actually blushes.

  It is neither, she says, and hesitates – or rather, both. It is, how would you call it … ambiguous?

  You mean intersex? I say, helping her out.

  You don’t say hermaphrodite?

  I don’t think so, not nowadays. It’s inaccurate, and probably demeaning.

  Gabrielle nods, thoughtfully, and smiles. Then, lowering her voice, she tells me there were no signs of harm to the child, no bruising or indications of maltreatment. A few scratches, that could have been the result of wandering barefoot through the woods, nothing more. The child, she tells me … is feral. I am so relieved, about it not being injured, I say – I would be sick to know that someone had hurt the child.

  And before I know it, I am overcome by a fresh attack of tearfulness, and Gabrielle takes my hands and holds them between her own. She turns and brushes a loose strand of hair behind my ear – my hair has grown long, it is months since I had it cut.

  Don’t worry, she says. We’ll look after the child. And then, more softly, as she brushes my cheek with the backs of her fingers: we’ll take care of you.

  And this time she does turn back into the kitchen, to re-join Alice and the waif.

  I choose to ignore her final remark, about taking care of me. But how, I wonder, does she propose that we – whoever ‘we’ are – take care of the child? Not, I imagine, by reporting its appearance to the police, or by calling Social Services and passing the child into their care. So, what? By illegally adopting it into our little household, with its ready-made quartet of weirdo mammies and pappies?

  Rather than follow Gabrielle to the kitchen, I retire to the library, distracted both by Gabrielle, and by my recognition of the child as being a replica of – or identical to – my own younger self. At the rear of the library is a small store room, where I have rummaged on many occasions, and in which Megan kept several boxes of photographs. Among them should be one that will settle the matter of the child’s looks, if not its identity. When I reach the storeroom, however, I find that someone has been there before me. I knew from earlier visits to the room that it contained boxes of old things, other than photos: souvenirs from Megan’s travels; exotica from India and the Far East; brightly-coloured miniature paintings that I recognised from the street-sellers of Central America; trinkets; caskets of jewellery; fragments of pottery; coloured stones and buttons. But there was something wrong about their careless arrangement – Megan was always scrupulous about packing things away in neatly ordered piles – and the boxes look as if they have been searched and plundered, their contents removed and hurriedly re-arranged.

  When I return to the kitchen, Keto the hound has joined the little menagerie. Alice is now in the chair, the child on her lap, the dog at her feet. I think how naturally the dog has become a part of things at Llys Rhosyn – no, how easily he attached himself to Alice; how he seemed to need little or no training, especially when I consider what Morgan told me about the dog’s unruliness, how he was untrainable. Perhaps Keto was looking for Alice all along, when he came and stood outside the house the day of her arrival, and then launched himself at the car the following day. And from some distant memory I recall the legend that a ghost dog will precede the appearance of its owner.

  I look around the room. How busy things have become in my kitchen! My little empire is thriving, has borne issue. I again think of the Madonna and child in a particularly dark and vegetable rendition.

  Have you tried speaking to it in other languages? I ask.

  Her, says Alice. We cannot keep calling her it. Woman, as you know, is the first gender; the template. And she allows herself a smile.

  So, I say, returning to my question. French, of course. Anything else?

  Italian, says Gabrielle, when we were upstairs.

  Spanish, says Alice. No reaction to these.

  I could try some Turkish, says O’Hallaran, who is leaning against the sink, his back to the window. A little Slovakian perhaps.

  And he moves across the room, kneels down in front of the child, and utters a soft torrent of a language I recognise as Turkish. The kid, safe from her perch on Alice’s knee now regards O’Hallaran with a sort of detached but vague interest, as though he were a courtier returning from the colonies with a rare orchid. There is no indication that the child recognises any of the words that O’Hallaran is uttering, whether in Turkish, or in the language that follows. I have my doubts about O’Hallaran’s Slovakian, but I let it pass. It could equally have been Czech or Polish for all I knew, or none of these: a concoction of O’Hallaran’s. His performance, while having a negligible effect on the child, amuses Gabrielle, who rolls her eyes and grins at me.

  Heavens, I think, we are a polyglot bunch. But we haven’t tried Welsh yet, which, after all, might have been the best place to start, before embarking on the likes of Slovakian.

  So I try Welsh. I attempt a couple of lines of a nursery rhyme, and to my amazement – to the amazement of all of us – the child begins to laugh.

  Yes, he (I adhere to this gender, obviously) laughs out loud; a raw, keening sound, showing his teeth, and then breaks off into a staccato giggle before coming to a stop, and returning to silence, turning back towards Alice and resting his head on her breast, but – and this is encouraging – keeping one eye on me.

  What did you say? says Alice, excited. What were the words of the song?

  I say them this time, not singing:

  Dau gi bach yn mynd i’r coed

  Esgyd newydd ar bob troed

  dau gi bach yn dwad adre

  wedi colli un o’u sgidiau

  This time the child does not react with mirth, nor eve
n with a smile, but still keeps his eyes fixedly on me. So it was the singing he responded to, perhaps, rather than the language.

  In English? asks Gabrielle.

  Two little dogs go to the woods, new shoes on their feet. Two little dogs come back home, missing one shoe each.

  Or they never come back, I think.

  Peace they say, to the dog whose life is short.

  I thought it seemed an appropriate choice, I say, seeing as the kid has no shoes.

  I am quite pleased with myself, getting the only joyful reaction so far from the child, after being treated like a paedophile by Alice at the start of this episode. It also amuses me that my friends, my house guests, call them what you will, should have gone through their expansive repertoire of languages before any of them thought of the language of this country, of my childhood and my ancestors, as well – more significantly – as the first language of Megan, whose spirit so evidently pervades the house and unites the four of us adults in our dealings with each other and with her legacy.

  But in spite of all efforts I make to get the child to respond in some way to further renditions of my rusty Welsh, either spoken or sung, I draw a blank. I start to think that the kid was laughing at me, rather than at the words of the song, or in recognition of the language. At best my singing might have stirred a memory, but nothing more. Instead, he scratches his nose, sneezes a few times, even strokes the dog, nervously at first, and then with more enthusiasm, before abruptly losing interest, and remaining resolutely silent.

  Carla, says Alice, for no reason that I can figure: let’s call her Carla.

  Or Carlo, I mutter, half under my breath.

  We could kind of mumble the last syllable, suggests O’Hallaran.

  This is so stupid, says Gabrielle. LaPauvre petite. I mean, why should we care whether Carla, or Carlo, is a boy or a girl?

  We may not mind, I continue, but out there, in the big bad world, people are expected to fit in with out-dated gender categories, and are judged if they do not. For instance, children have to know which lavatories to use at school. Otherwise life can become hell for them.