Disappeared, page 7
‘Help wanted with housework and sheep. Cottage available.’
Nothing more, just a phone number. Cerys frowned at it for a while and then popped into the shop to speak to the woman behind the counter. ‘P’nawn da! The postcard in the window about help with housework and sheep? Do you know anything at all about it?’
‘Oh, that’s Dilys,’ she replied. ‘Broke her leg, she has, and can’t get about proper.’
‘She lives on her own then?’
The shopkeeper looked her up and down, eyes narrowing. ‘You thinking of applying? I’ve not seen you before. You not from round here?
Cerys recognised the element of protectiveness in the way she was being assessed.
‘No, I’m not. I’ve come up to help my daughter look after my grandson and I spotted that postcard. I grew up on a sheep farm near Betws-y-Coed, you see. Wondered if I could be any help.’
‘Hmmm, well, Dilys is a sharp one. She’ll either like you or she won’t. Shall I give her a call for you?’
Again, the protectiveness of local people for their own; Cerys remembered that with fondness. It’d been years since she’d seen it. She almost laughed when the woman switched to Welsh on the call. She could understand enough of it to know that she was questioning the unseen Dilys about whether she felt safe, and to call her back as soon as this visitor had gone so she knew she was okay.
‘She says you can go up there now,’ the shopkeeper told her. ‘I’ll write the directions down for you.’
With them in hand, Cerys hurried off to meet Lily and Sammy. ‘We’re going for a drive,’ she said. ‘Checking out somewhere we might rent.’
They drove out of Beaumaris, Cerys reading out the directions from the roughly drawn map. After twenty minutes of winding lanes, they turned off down a narrow track.
‘Bumpy!’ Sammy said, his eyes widening as he was jolted about. ‘B-b-b-ump!’
Finally they came to a Welsh longhouse painted white. ‘Bryn Terrin’, the name on the wooden sign declared. ‘This is it,’ Cerys said. To the side lay a little stone cottage signed Yn Terrin with a small courtyard and patch of lawn in front.
The farm door swung open and a flurry of barking black and white fur flew out at the car. Sammy cringed in his seat. ‘Leave it to me,’ Cerys said. ‘You wait here.’
She got out of the car. ‘Come by!’ she said to the dog sharply and it paused to look at her. She clicked her fingers at her heel and walked towards the door. It dropped in behind her watchfully. As she neared the farmhouse, she could see the old woman lurking back in the doorway.
‘I’m Cerys,’ she called. ‘I’ve come about the job.’
The woman hobbled forward and stepped out into the yard awkwardly. She was on crutches with her right leg in a full cast. Cerys estimated her to be in her late seventies at least. She could well have been older from her weather-beaten face. No wonder the shop woman had been so protective. Dilys must be remarkable to survive up here on her own at this age.
‘Have you now? And what makes you think you’re suitable?’ Dilys eyeballed her. She’d been a tall woman once and even now her eyeline was on a level with Cerys’s. Cerys suddenly got a vision of her when she was younger – a strong and vital woman running this place on her own terms.
‘My dad was a sheep farmer. I grew up on a farm like this. And the housework – well, I’m a mother. I’ve been doing that the rest of my life,’ she said with a laugh.
‘There’s not so many sheep now,’ Dilys replied. ‘But what there is I can’t look after with this leg.’
‘What happened?’
‘Gate hinges broke and it cracked me on the thigh, then landed on me.’
‘How did you get help out here?’
She shrugged. ‘I was pinned there till the post came, then Kip alerted him.’ She fondled the collie’s ears. ‘So, what are you doing here and why do you want the job? Don’t give me no nonsense, mind; I’m not a fool.’
‘I’m here to look after my grandson,’ she said, pointing back at the car. ‘My daughter’s got a job in Beaumaris. Quite honestly, we need somewhere to stay and we can’t find anywhere. I passed the shop and saw your card. He’s a good kid so he’ll be no trouble – only four so he’ll tag along with me. Is that the accommodation there?’ She gestured to the cottage by the longhouse.
‘Yes, used to use it for holidaymakers but not for the last year. It’s in decent condition though. Three bedrooms, though they’re not big.’ Dilys peered at the car. ‘Why’re you both here with nowhere to live?’
Cerys met her eyes steadily. ‘She needs a fresh start,’ she replied, ‘and I need to make sure she gets one.’
Dilys looked back at the car again. ‘Bring her over.’
Cerys walked back to the car. ‘She wants to meet you both,’ she said to Lily as she coaxed Sammy out. ‘No, the doggy won’t bother you now. He was just doing his job and keeping watch.’
Lily approached Dilys nervously, a few steps behind Cerys.
‘You’ve got a job then?’ Dilys rapped.
‘Yes, at the hair salon,’ Lily replied with a nervous smile.
‘Oh, Angharad, yes – I knew her grandmother. She was flighty too,’ Dilys announced.
Cerys stifled a laugh. Anyone not farming was flighty, she guessed. Poor Lily just looked confused.
‘And who are you?’ Dilys demanded, looking down at Sammy.
He glowered at her and stepped behind his mother. Cerys looked anxiously to Dilys, who bellowed a laugh. ‘Good lad – don’t talk to strange old women!’
Sammy poked his head out and gave a tentative smile, then retreated behind Lily’s leg again.
Dilys looked over them all again. ‘I don’t suppose I have much choice if I want the sheep fed. But if you try to rob me, I’ll put a bullet through you.’
Lily blanched and put a reassuring hand on Sammy’s head.
‘Well, you won’t need to,’ Cerys replied firmly. ‘There’ll be none of that from us; we’re decent people. Now, when do you want me to start?’
16
It was their first night in the new cottage and a full week after they’d first met Dilys. They’d stayed on at the hotel a little longer and Cerys had negotiated a reduced rate without much difficulty as it was quiet in the trade at this time of year. Lily lay there in the dark, staring up into it as sleep slipped away from her again and again.
‘We’re decent people,’ Cerys had said to the old woman. Well, Cerys was but she didn’t know what Lily was. She couldn’t have said that if she did know.
She was eight years old when she realised what her mother was. It was a kid at school who told her and not in a nice way. It was screamed in her face as the other girl pulled her hair and shoved her to the floor and kicked her. She hadn’t done anything to the girl – she just hated her because her mother was a whore.
She’d seen the needle tracks on her mother’s arms. She’d seen her shooting up. She’d seen the men come and go when she was younger but they were boyfriends. She hadn’t understood what her mother did when she was gone all night. When she locked her in her bedroom at night so she couldn’t get out. Her mother would sleep in too late to get her to school in the morning so she learned to get herself up and eat cereal and walk herself there way before other kids walked on their own. She was careful about that though. She knew school would ask questions so she used to time it so she met the kids next door but one, whose mother always took them, and she’d tag along so it looked like their mum was taking her too. That mother wouldn’t say anything to the school – she had her own issues to keep quiet.
Still, everyone on the estate had known about her mother, it seemed. That’s what Lexi had said when she’d shoved her face into the asphalt and spat in her hair.
When that had happened, she’d wished her mother would die so they’d take her away and get her adopted. And one time when she’d got mad with her mother because she’d forgot her birthday when she was off her face on a bender that kept her in bed for three days, she’d shouted that at her. ‘I wish you were dead so I could live with a proper family.’
‘Get real,’ her mother had spat back, groggy and spiteful with it. ‘Nobody would ever want you. Useless little bitch!’ And then her mother had passed out back into sleep again, and she’d spent her birthday on her own, watching TV in the front room, her stomach aching with hunger because there was no food left in the house. She’d wished she was brave enough to go to the shop and steal some.
But she hadn’t been yet. She would be later. She’d had to be to survive.
17
The soft crunch of the frost-covered earth beneath her boots.
The quiet pant of the dog at her heels.
The click-snap of the gate latch closing.
All familiar from years back. The sounds of home from long ago. They should be no part of who she was now. Another time, another place, really another person. Or that’s what she’d thought.
Cerys was a mother, a wife, a suburbanite. No part of the farm girl remained.
And yet here it was, etched into her DNA. It’s where she’d returned to source, to end it all, and when that hadn’t worked, it’s like that part of her had been reborn again on that hillside.
The sounds of a quiet farm early morning – a sense of rightness deep down in her very bones.
She headed down the track away from the farmhouse, a puddle of ice in a wheel rut snapping under her boot, and away up the hill. The air was sharp and still with the frost hanging low over everything and spiking the trees. She could taste its tang.
The black and white collie clung to her heel as it was bred to do and she strode up the steep path, her breath coming faster and harder than it would have done when she was a girl, and almost painfully so at points. ‘I’m out of condition,’ she whispered to the dog, though there was no one to hear but a robin in the dark of the hedge, caught against the tangle of the branches in her torchlight.
She toiled up the hill, ignoring the burning of unfit lungs; the old woman had done this every day until she’d snapped her leg and so she’d be ashamed to slow or stop when Dilys would have kept going despite having three decades on her. The dog trotted beside her, keen and eager, knowing the job even though it wasn’t his beloved mistress beside him.
When they got to the top of the hill, the faintest glimmer of light lifted the darkness on the horizon over to the east.
Towards home, Cerys thought, and, as she must in order to survive, she turned that thought swiftly away. Even turned her head from the sliver of light.
Her first task was to walk the bounds and check on the dispersed flock. She needed the collie for this without the luxury of light. But the young dog knew his job and he’d find any sheep in trouble. Her dad’s old dog had been skilled at this – he had a nose for stress, her dad always said. Maybe she should have left it until the sun had come up with such a youngster as this but she wanted to be back to take over with Sammy before Lily had to leave for work.
She’d done this job in the dark with her dad on their hills many times. She followed the line of the hedge further up the hill and gave the dog the instruction to get out and search. Kip scampered forward without hesitation. She’d half wondered if he’d obey her out here, as she wasn’t Dilys, but as she watched his crouched pose in the lightening gloom, his slow creep forward, she could see how strong his bloodline was. He’d literally do this job for anyone.
But it was only Dilys he’d rest his head on by the fire when his work was done, and that was the difference. She knew dogs well enough to know that this was the way this one operated.
She walked the bounds of the field, letting the dog range out and scent. A sheep gave a grumbling ‘Baa’ and moved out of her path in the disgruntled way she remembered from her dad’s old ewes. The trudge through the frosted grass had a mesmeric effect on her senses. She could feel the peace flowing from the hoar-hard ground into her boots, through her, settling inside her in a deep, still pool of calm.
She walked the hill.
As someone had done for centuries, men, women like her, tending the sheep in the same way day after day, year after year, following the rhythms of the seasons and the land.
She was round the other side of the hill when the dog picked something up, with a prick of his sharp ears and a low whine. She followed his low creep across the grass to a thicket of thorn and bramble. And deep in the centre, a sheep was caught fast and dragged half over onto its back in its struggle to free itself. They could easily die like this if left too long, which was why a good dog really was a lifesaver. She gave the shaggy little head a pat, and pulled some cutters from the pocket of Dilys’s borrowed shepherding coat and waded in.
For a moment, she wasn’t quite sure how to get hold of the sheep, which kicked out at her despite its plight, as these hill ewes always did. The woman she was back in her pristine five-bedroomed suburban house couldn’t quite remember how to deal with this, or how to cope with getting soft hands ripped by brambles. But then instinct kicked in. She took two strategic handfuls of wool and twisted the sheep to clamp it between her thighs, gripping firmly while she snipped away at the thorn-tangled wool in the light of the rising sun.
The dog lay on the grass and waited patiently, its tongue lolling, watching her work with a vague interest.
It had been easier thirty-odd years ago with younger joints and stronger muscles, but she gritted her teeth as the ewe strained against her and hung on and kept clipping. Finally she clipped the last of the long, trailing brambles from its fleece and it sprang free, kicking its hind legs in the air as it went.
She sniffed and rolled her eyes at Kip as she stuffed the clippers back in her pocket and picked her way free of the thicket. ‘No gratitude!’ she said, and gestured the collie forward again to finish their work.
By the time they made their way off the hill and down to the farmhouse, the sun was weakly shining in that peculiar faint beauty of winter light. She lifted the thumb latch on the farmhouse door and the collie broke from its obedient place at her heel and rushed past her. Dilys was sitting by the range in the kitchen, the fire stoked within, and Cerys was met by a welcome surge of heat. The dog fussed round Dilys and then settled against her legs, its head cradled in her lap, its keen eyes watching her face.
‘Bore da,’ Dilys said. ‘Did it go all right out there?’
She had a terse voice, Cerys concluded, probably born of speaking to too few people on a daily basis. She took a closer look at Dilys. Her imagination, surely, but the old woman looked somehow diminished since yesterday. Cerys frowned and put the kettle on the hob.
‘All fine. There was a ewe caught up in some brambles up the top but the dog found her well enough and once I cut her free, she was on her way with no harm.’
Dilys grunted. ‘Good.’ She fondled the shaggy head on her knee. ‘He’s a great little dog. Should never have got him really, because I won’t outlast him but he’s such a wonderful worker that he’ll have a home somewhere. I don’t think you’ll like leaving here much though, will you, Kip?’
The dog’s fiercely determined stare was fixed on her face.
She meant he wouldn’t like leaving her, though she wouldn’t say it, Cerys realised. She frowned again. The old woman’s words took her by surprise and she wondered if maybe she wasn’t wrong about her initial thought that she didn’t look too good this morning. She made the tea silently.
‘Breakfast?’ she asked when she handed Dilys the mug.
Dilys grimaced. ‘I don’t like all this waiting on,’ she admitted. ‘It grinds my bones something awful.’
Cerys shrugged. Sympathy wasn’t the way with this one. She knew the type; she’d grown up around them. ‘You’ll be back on both feet soon. What do you want?’
‘Toast,’ she replied grudgingly. ‘Bread’s in the crock there.’
Cerys didn’t waste words on her but got about making the toast. It wasn’t long until Lily would have to leave.
‘Bring the boy over,’ Dilys said, seeing her glance at her watch.
Cerys looked at her in surprise.
‘It’ll save lighting another fire,’ she said.
Cerys buttered the toast. ‘Anything on it?’
‘Honey, there on the windowsill.’
Cerys obliged and handed her the plate.
Dilys raised a sparse white eyebrow at her. ‘Need some sweetening, don’t I?’ And she chuckled to herself. ‘Go on, get the boy so his mother can get off. He’ll come to no harm over here.’
Cerys slipped out of the farmhouse as Dilys fed a crust scrap to the collie. She wasn’t sure about this at all. Sammy was bound to be bored in there and Dilys didn’t strike her as the type to have much patience with a young child.
Inside the cottage kitchenette, Lily was waving a cereal box at a bleary-eyed Sammy.
‘I don’t want that,’ he whined. ‘Can I have toast?’
‘Sammy, I haven’t got time,’ Lily said, her voice edging on a wail.
Cerys recognised this sign. Lily was not great under pressure, especially time pressure. It brought out the worst in her constantly bubbling anxiety. ‘You get off,’ she said, shooing Lily away. ‘I’ll take over. I’ve finished with the sheep for now.’
‘But he hasn’t had breakfast …’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ she said firmly, before Lily locked into what Cerys now recognised as the girl’s crisis mode, spiralling downwards into thinking about what an unfit mother she was. ‘Off with you!’
Lily stared at her as she was shepherded to the door and handed her coat and bag. ‘I—’
‘Have a lovely day and we’ll see you later,’ Cerys said as she shoved her gently out of the door. ‘
‘Phew!’ she said to Sammy as Lily drove off, waving frantically back to Sammy who was seeing her off from the window. ‘Your mummy can be a worrywart sometimes.’ Sammy looked confused and Cerys laughed. ‘Never mind, let’s go and get your toast.’
