White Trail Read online

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

  © Fflur Dafydd 2011

  ISBN 978-1-85411-562-1 (EPUB edition)

  The right of Fflur Dafydd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Mathew Bevan

  Inner design and typesetting by [email protected]

  Ebook conversion by Caleb Woodbridge

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

  for Iwan and Beca

  New Stories from the Mabinogion

  Introduction

  Some stories, it seems, just keep on going. Whatever you do to them, the words are still whispered abroad, a whistle in the reeds, a bird’s song in your ear.

  Every culture has its myths; many share ingredients with each other. Stir the pot, retell the tale and you draw out something new, a new flavour, a new meaning maybe. There’s no one right version. Perhaps it’s because myths were a way of describing our place in the world, of putting people and their search for meaning in a bigger picture that they linger in our imagination.

  The eleven stories of the Mabinogion (‘story of youth’) are diverse native Welsh tales taken from two medieval manuscripts. But their roots go back hundreds of years, through written fragments and the unwritten, storytelling tradition. They were first collected under this title, and translated into English, in the nineteenth century.

  The Mabinogion brings us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and a history of the Island of Britain seen through the eyes of medieval Wales –but tells tales that stretch way beyond the boundaries of contemporary Wales, just as the ‘Welsh’ part of this island once did: Welsh was once spoken as far north as Edinburgh. In one tale, the gigantic Bendigeidfran wears the crown of London, and his severed head is buried there, facing France, to protect the land from invaders.

  There is enchantment and shape-shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love, betrayal. A wife conjured out of flowers is punished for unfaithfulness by being turned into an owl, Arthur and his knights chase a magical wild boar and its piglets from Ireland across south Wales to Cornwall, a prince changes places with the king of the underworld for a year…

  Many of these myths are familiar in Wales, and some have filtered through into the wider British tradition, but others are little known beyond the Welsh border. In this series of New Stories from the Mabinogion the old tales are at the heart of the new, to be enjoyed wherever they are read.

  Each author has chosen a story to reinvent and retell for their own reasons and in their own way: creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to us as much of the world we know now as of times long gone.

  Penny Thomas, series editor

  The White Trail

  Cilydd

  It was on a day when Goleuddydd was at her most visible – more visible than she’d ever been in her life – that she seemed to vanish into thin air. How could you lose a pregnant wife in a supermarket? That’s what people were asking. Cilydd watched the news item every night in a stupor, as if he were watching a story about someone else, as if it were some other unfortunate being he saw snivelling into his fleece at the press conference, eyes at half mast. ‘We are all concerned for my wife’s safety,’ he heard the sap say. ‘She is nine-months pregnant and very vulnerable.’ Very vulnerable. How Goleuddydd would have hated that. She had never been vulnerable in her life, let alone invisible. She wasn’t a woman you could miss, a splay of wild red hair twirling like a tornado around her small, perfectly formed face, a woman who walked in bold, quick strokes; it was always you who had to step aside, never her. But, as she had prophesied, the pregnancy changed her. As she grew bigger and bigger she somehow retreated into herself, became half the woman she had been, even as her flesh doubled. Her red hair stood static on her head, became a matted pink mess. She walked as though trudging through treacle, the whole world around her a gloopy, arduous struggle. She was all too visible and yet ever so slowly disappearing.

  Something wasn’t connecting, she told her husband. Neurons were misfiring all over the place. She had dreamt awful things of late; had seen her baby shrunk to the size of a die, imprinted with dots. One night, Cilydd woke to find her shining a torch on the wallpaper, and when he asked her what she was doing she told him she was looking for the join of flesh and concrete – for she had dreamt that the baby had been built into the foundations of their home, squished in between two bricks. The most persistent, recurring dream was the one where she left the baby on a pub windowsill and, when she returned, found that the taxidermist had been at it, mounting her offspring on the wall: a dream which left her uneasy for days.

  In the final month she began taking down all the pictures in the house, in case they fell on her pregnant belly. She wouldn’t take a bath because she was afraid the floor would give way beneath her. It seemed that everything she had previously known and trusted; every static, fixed, screwed-on thing was now malleable, rickety, unreliable, including herself. And Cilydd, too, seemed to fit into that category.

  ‘Is it me you want or just the baby?’ she would ask him, sloping off before he could answer. Whenever he tried to reach out to touch her stomach she would stare at his hand as though it were a hostile creature, swatting it quickly away. ‘Is it kicking? What does it feel like?’ he often asked her. ‘Hard to describe,’ she’d say, before giving him a sly pinch in the ribs. ‘Something like that, I suppose, only firmer. Harder.’

  A stylist by trade, it seemed that she could find nothing that would soften or style her bump, favouring rather the unflattering smocks that were her mother’s hand-me-downs, merely emphasising how laborious and irritating the whole ordeal was to her. ‘Why are they all staring at me?’ she’d say.

  ‘Why do they all seem to think they can speak to me? Baby this, baby that. Do you know what you’re having? Why does it matter to them what I’m having? What I’m having, everyone, is a nervous breakdown.’

  Which wasn’t a mile away from the truth, Cilydd began to think. It was in the genes, she said; hereditary. There had been that incident with her grandmother and the maypole. Her mother and the suspension bridge. But so far none of them had made a run for it. He knew that’s what the police officers were thinking when he reported her missing. ‘She’s left him, hasn’t she? Made it look like a disappearance. Poor bugger.’ And the longer she stayed missing, the more certain he, too, became, that whatever had happened to his wife, she had brought it upon herself.

  It had been a Saturday afternoon. She was wad-dling around the cheese aisle at the time, perusing all those pearly triangles she’d been denied for so long, staring at the blue threads of Stilton as though they were her own veins. He was at the checkout (buying snacks for the maternity ward, sugary lolli-pops to help her in labour, little treats to help him through the night, and those maternity essentials for the things no one wanted to think about) and, as there was still no sign of her by the time he reached the entrance, he waited by the toilets. After thirty minutes he’d grabbed the elbow of a tiny, white-haired pensioner and pleaded with her to go in and check for him, and
when that proved unfruitful he’d gone back to the car. He’d sat inside with his snacks and breast pads reading the fine print on the pack of maternity towels, before scouring the supermarket one last time. There was an announcement going off repeatedly, calling someone to the flour aisle, and he wondered for a second if he should request such an announcement for Goleuddydd. But he could imagine being scolded for it later on. ‘So embarrassing, Cilydd, to have my name called out like that as if I were some missing toddler. ’And so he left it, went to his car, and drove home.

  Leaving the supermarket, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as though he were leaving the whole sorry situation behind. She’s at home, he thought with great certainty. He was convinced of it. Of course she’s at home. But when he arrived home the house was dark and empty. He sat there until all the light had drained from the room. Goleuddydd. Her name a combination of light and day; those bright, hopeful things. He recalled how last Christmas, in the days before the pregnancy, she had beckoned him to the window to see the sun rising over the snow, her face alight with childlike wonder. She was always showing him the light in things, the whiteness. When they first met it would pain him when she left the room, as though the light were leaving too. The day she disappeared happened to be the shortest day of the year.

  Of course the whole thing became a spectacle. It was Christmas. The silly season, with no hard-hitting news to speak of. Which is why a pregnant wife’s disappearance became TV gold. Much was made of her love of cheeses, the brokendown CCTV camera which cut out at the crucial moment, and of the argument he and she may or may not have had in the car park, which was really just a hair tousle (him), and an attempt to snatch a snowflake (her). These gestures, exacerbated by the fact that, according to one of his neighbours, they hadn’t been getting on, of course made the whole thing appear rather suspicious. Much was also made of the thin air into which she had vanished. As it happened, this was not thin at all; but thick and glutinous, dressed in tiny white particles. In the wake of his wife’s disappearance, the flour aisle curiously burst its banks, spreading tiny atoms of spelt, buckwheat, tapioca and rye into the stale air of the supermarket. No one seemed to have witnessed it happening. The few shoppers in that particular aisle only remembered the sudden sensation of flour-on-the-lungs, the uncontrollable cough, before tiny pale hillocks appeared mysteriously at their feet. Nobody actually recalled seeing the flour fall. When the bags were examined it was found they had all been punctured sharply and swiftly, though it was impossible to tell by what. Some other items were missing, too, some bread had gone astray, and some of the shelves also seemed pockmarked. Cynddylig and Tathal, the flour-aisle security guards, were actually on a sandwich break when it happened.

  ‘The holes and the indentations,’ the detective told Cilydd, ‘may prove to be a significant feature of our investigation.’

  This, of course, did not provide any consolation for Cilydd. He wanted something real and concrete to go on, to tell the rest of the family, to hold on to in those dark, lonely hours. A small hole was not enough. At his request, he was shown the CCTV footage again and again, watching his wife turning that fateful corner. The cheese-aisle security guard – Gorau – was reprimanded for his lax surveillance. ‘I’m paid to watch the cheese, not the people,’ he protested.

  They replayed the incident in the flour aisle too, looking for clues. The atomic eruption seemed to happen spontaneously, leaving grainy trails over the camera surface.

  ‘Could there be a fault with the tape?’ he asked. The policeman pressed rewind. Cilydd watched the white fug retreating back into the little brown bags. Chaos retreating into calm. On another screen – at the very same moment – Goleuddydd reappeared.

  ‘There would appear to be some sort of time-lapse here,’ said the policeman. ‘The supermarket tells us there isn’t. That it’s linear, continuous footage. But we think they’re hiding something. I mean, there might have been a robbery, and for some reason –we can’t think why just yet – they’re trying to cover it up. So perhaps your wife, in some way, was caught up in it all.’

  There was nothing for Cilydd to do but wait. His father-in-law, Anlawdd, was on the phone daily, shouting at him to get things moving. A formidable figure, a former chief constable, he had never thought Cilydd – a lowly loss adjustor – good enough for his stylist daughter. ‘It’s an adequate first marriage,’ Cilydd overheard him saying to one of the guests on their wedding day, ‘but let’s hope there are no offspring and that we can move on from this nasty business with minimal damage.’ From the second Goleuddydd told him she was pregnant, it seemed Anlawdd was waiting to catch him out, to bring the whole thing to an abrupt end, and to claim his daughter back as his own. Cilydd could see him working away at her during her pregnancy, a cup of coffee here, a lift there, until she was staying overnight at her father’s house on a weekly basis. ‘He’s taken such an interest in this baby,’ she would say, while Cilydd knew full well that the interest was not so much in the baby but in controlling the damage, as he would have it. And now the damage was colossal. It had started with the undoing of his daughter’s fine, shapely body, and had now ended in her obliteration in a supermarket on a wintry afternoon, while everyone else was staring at flour dust.

  ‘She’s got to be somewhere!’ he shouted at Cilydd down the phone. ‘Don’t snivel at me, Cilydd, just do something about it. Get that cousin of yours on to it. Lord knows he needs something to crack on with. I always knew this marriage would come to no good.’ Cilydd heard the reluctant gunge of grief in his father-in-law’s windpipes. ‘I’m just very, very worried that something awful has happened here. So get that cousin of yours to look into it. Right now. I shouldn’t say this really, having been in the force myself, but don’t bother with the police.’

  The cousin Anlawdd referred to was Arthur, Cilydd’s private-eye relative whose business was anything but private. He lived on the main street of the town, with only his first name printed on a plaque outside his house. ARTHUR, it said, in bold, gilded letters, against a red-painted backdrop.

  ‘It’s ambiguous, don’t you think?’ Arthur always said, flicking his dishevelled fringe over his left eye. ‘I mean, just giving one name like that, without any details underneath. They see it and they don’t think – accountant, lawyer, physiotherapist. They know I’m something else. But they won’t bother to find out what until they really need me. So it’s a win-win situation. Completely conspicuous but somehow entirely ambiguous at the same time.’

  Whenever you asked anyone on that busy main street what the ‘Arthur’ referred to they told you it was the house of the local private eye, and that he’d not managed to solve a single investigation since he’d started practising. They would also tell you he’d tried his hand at a million other things too, all of which had been unsuccessful. Carver, painter – candlestick maker. The only thing he’d been any good at, they would stipulate, was working as a street artist a few decades ago. His sketches were said to be uncanny likenesses, whipped out of the stub of his pencil in minutes.

  It was evident even from the state of Arthur’s house – his HQ as he called it – that his methods left something to be desired. Here was a man who’d been searching for a whole host of missing persons for twenty years and who couldn’t find so much as a clean knife in the kitchen. He ushered Cilydd in, between huge stacks of dishes, books and shirts that seemed to be looming in every corner, waiting to topple. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings and pictures of missing persons – they stared out at Cilydd from every corner of the room – hundreds of pairs of lost eyes which Arthur, as far as he knew, had never been able to locate. Accompanying most of these were Arthur’s own sketches of the missing – some of them a myriad of images of the same person ageing, over time; the guessed faces becoming dense with age, crinkling in charcoal. It sent a shudder down his spine to think of his wife, and maybe even his baby ageing, minute by minute, even as he was ascending the stairs now.

  And yet there was a kind o
f feverish excitement about Arthur which made someone believe that if enthusiasm were the only thing needed to solve a crime, he could do it. He had created a space in the living room, forging a little clearing in the mad woodland of his life, where he’d placed a pot of coffee, two surprisingly clean, new-looking cups, a notebook and some pens. Cilydd sat down and was surprised by how the day fell in through the skylight, illuminating, it seemed, only this particular corner. It was a light untainted by the dirty greying sky above – light that made him think of Goleuddydd. Suddenly, staring at the crisp paper, the concave china mouths waiting to be filled, seeing Arthur’s pen poised with sincerity and hope – it seemed possible that Goleuddydd and his child could be brought back to him.

  ‘I mean, there are bound to be other private eyes working on this, but they won’t have the inside info that I have – they won’t be hearing it all from the horse’s mouth,’ Arthur said proudly, passing the sugar bowl to his cousin as though he were expecting him to take one of the sugar lumps in his mouth and neigh his appreciation. This was the moment at which Cilydd realised Arthur saw Goleuddydd’s disappearance as rather a piece of luck, something that gave him an edge over other private eyes in the area.

  Cilydd learned that his wife’s case seemed to match another disappearance in a town fifty miles to the west. If they could crack this one, Arthur said, his eyes gleaming with hope, then it was likely to be the key to a major operation happening somewhere. Which could certainly guarantee that his reputation would be somewhat restored.

  ‘A fourteen-year-old girl disappeared just like that – from her bedroom. She was up there, listening to music, but when they called her down for supper, she was gone. When they examined her room they found these peculiar little dents in everything and her magazines had been torn to shreds.’