Runt (9 page)

—Oh thank Christ thank Christ … you’ve come back to me … oh good Jesus …

I felt Drunkle’s bristles all a-prickle on my face as he kissed my head. I looked at Arrn and he stopped his worried whining noises and went wag but he still looked dead worried. I wanted to pat him on the head but I couldn’t move my arm.

My Times.

My Times.

Drunkle looked into my face and I saw the redness in his eyes but not like Arrn’s ears and the red veiny spiderwebs across his nose and his chin-bristles like a crop. He asked me if I was okay and I could nod then so I did and he took me into the tent and put me down in a gentleness and he pulled the sleeping bag up over me and told me to get some more rest and Arrn came into the tent too and lay down by me and I lifted one arm and put it down across him and he liked that cos he went wag and Drunkle smiled too but both of them still looked dead worried and I thought of the illness that waits for them and the sadness in and under everything but I didn’t tell them
about
them things and I thought I knew what I had to do but I wasn’t sure.

Sleeping, it’s like My Times. Cos falling asleep or falling into My Times it’s like I’m nothing but in the seconds before I fall into them I am happier than I have ever been before in my life. Even with all the things I knew then about the Lords and the sadness and Everything else, all them things I knew and didn’t know what to do about or with I was very much happy’d to be there with Arrn and Drunkle, in the tent in the wet High Parts, falling into sleep in my head, oh yes.

My Times this is what they are like. Sometimes they are like this.

It was still dark when I woke up and I knew I was still in the tent cos I could feel the side of it pressing against my face a bit cold which I didn’t like so I rolled over on to my back. The sleeping bag went tighter around my body. I couldn’t hear the rain go pat pat on the tent any more so it must’ve stopped but I could hear two snorings, one from Arrn and one from Drunkle, and I could smell Arrn’s dogness and the drink coming out of Drunkle’s snorings cos he was my Drunkle. I knew where I was, oh yes, in a tent in the High Parts by a hole in the ground and the spring and the stones, that’s where I was, and there was a beast somewhere outside in them High Places but I was safe from it in the tent and warm and dry with the two snorings around me and I felt happy to be there. I liked being in that tent between the two snorings.

I thought about My Times and about the last one I’d had with the sadness and Fay and the Lordy fellers and my arms and legs going off. Always My Times were a bit like that, as much as I can remember them, always the going-up-ness and the pea planet and the birds and the talking with the ghosts and stuff but never before had I seen My Own Bones like that or had my arms and legs going off like that. I’d seen crows and hawks and other animals and things in My Times in fact there are
always
crows in My Times lifting me up off the ground but never before that Good Hawk which came to save me. I’d been a salmon as well before in My Times and a hare as well and one time even a bat but never before had I swam up through a spring like that and back into My Body like that. And I’d never been told of that sadness stuff before and the illness stuff, I’d never been told about them things before but it was like I’d known that stuff all along anyway and the Everything shape and the Lordy fellers just told me things that I knew anyway but I’d never
felt
that sadness before, never had it put in me like that before. And I didn’t really know what any of it meant only that there was something I had to do not really with my body and arms and legs outside on the world but kind of
in
me somewhere in the place where the Teifi runs when I’m just about to have a My Time. In
that
place.

Dreams and stuff, the things I see in My Times, they all go away when I wake up or Come Back. They all go fadey like the photographs of
her
Mam that My Mam Bethan keeps on the dresser. They all go fadey, kind of brownish and you stop being able to see the
people
in a clear way any more and they go into a ghostment and that’s what it’s like when I wake up from dreams or Come Back from My Times and sometimes I wish it wasn’t like that but It Is. They might mean nothing they’re just My Times. Just my dreams.

I’d had them before and I’ll have them again I thought then and started to nod off again in the safe dark tent with the snorings and the smells and the beast-world outside. And as I fell into the sleep again I started to see things, other things in my head even tho it wasn’t a My Time but I saw other people having Their Own Times, in other countries far away and in other past-nesses, people like me but
not
like me, Eskimo fellers in the skins from seals having Their Times on fields of ice and red-skinned fellers having Their Times in snowy forests and fellers wearing blankety things in deserts and black fellers in Australia and Africa and places like that. Some of them were Long Ago and some of them were in the Present Day and some were even in the Future-times like Auntie Fay-in-the-whiteness told me there would be and all these people were having My Times but they weren’t My Times of course they were Times Of Their Own but then I knew that I had brothers and sisters all over the world and always had had and always would have even tho we would never ever meet and they would be dreaming of me too and I liked that thinking very very much.

I was better’d big by that thinking and that dreaming, that there was people like me All Over The World at all different times. All of us doing the same thing, having Our Times in our Own Different Ways and
places.
No need to feel so lonely, see? No need to feel so sad. And I fell into the sleeping with a smiling part inside me going glow like a little sun like the fried egg I hoped Drunkle would be making for me in the morning when I woke up.

A mushy blackbits banana and a cup of tea no flippin fried egg.

—Get it down you quick, boy. Packing the tent away soon. How you feeling?

I told Drunkle okay but I wanted a fried egg.

—Up here? And where am I gunner get eggs from up here then? Buzzard’s egg for your brekkie, is that it?

He smiled and patted my head like I pat Arrn’s and I felt a bit happy’d by that but was still eggless.

—I’ll make you all the fried eggs you want back at the house. Hundreds of the buggers.

He went back out of the tent and I opened the banana and it was yick so I gave it to Arrn who ate it cos he’ll eat anything then he went fast outside the tent probably to do a poo. I sat up in my sleeping bag and drank the tea which was hot and nice and put some clothes on and felt something sticking in my ear and it was a feather, the sharp end of a feather like people used to write with. Forsooth and prithee. It was black and white so probably a maggie’s. It didn’t need to be there any more so I took it out of my hair then took out all the stones and bits of moss and stuff from my pockets and dropped them by the spring when I’d got outside the tent then looked at them in the mud there at my feet then pushed them into the
water
with my shoe-toe and they went plip and sank except for the feathers which floated like little flat boats.

Drunkle was packing stuff away, pans and his gun and stuff. I asked him for some toilet roll and he gave me a roll of it and I climbed a little mound and went down behind a rock and had a poo like Arrn did and wiped my bum which Arrn does sometimes as well on the grass but I used toilet roll and then I put another rock on top of the poo and went back down off the mound and helped Drunkle to pack stuff away. We took the tent down and rolled it up and put it in its sack and I put that on my back and I was made into a snail again or a crab. Drunkle put all of the rubbish into a plastic bag that said LIDL on it and was yellow and blue and then he put that into a bigger bag which he put into his rucksack which he put on to his back and he was snail’d too like me. He put his gun over his shoulder as well and it stuck up over his head like one of them horny eye-pole things a snail has and he whistled Arrn who came and then we all three in Our Little Army went away from the stones and the spring and the big deep hole in the ground back over the ridge and the boggy bit, back towards the pub where Drunkle’s truck was waiting.

We didn’t say much on that walk back. Drunkle just looked ahead of himself with his hands in his pockets and didn’t say many words and didn’t drink from a bottle which put a surprise in me because he was my Drunkle. Even Arrn didn’t say much, with his tongue-slobbery mouth or in my head, and he didn’t do his normal Arrn-y stuff either like run around like
a
mad thing everywhere sniffing or whining or growling he just trotted towards the pub ahead of us as if he was the Army Leader stopping sometimes to look back at us over his shoulder to check that we weren’t lost. And I didn’t say much either cos there was enough words going on in my head about the pea planet and the Lords and the sickness and the sadness and all those other things I’d learned in the last My Times. I didn’t really feel like
me
any more, not properly, after all that. It was just a My Time which I’ve had hundreds of before but after I’ve Come Back from them I’ve always felt like Me but I didn’t then cos it was as if I’d been changed in that last My Time. Still Me but a different Me there were new things I knew but didn’t know I knew them and then of a sudden I did cos the Fay-ghost and the Everything-thing and them horrible Lordy fellers had told me them and that made me different but I was still Me underneath it all cos there were things I still didn’t know why or how I knew like why I can understand Arrn when he speaks to me sometimes or what a buzzard is saying or what a fox says or why that little black-and-white kitten was chosen to bite Me.

We came down off the Dead High Parts and on to a flat bit between High Places and I didn’t remember crossing that bit and was going to ask Drunkle about it but he shook his head and told me to shush but not in a NotDad way and he pointed out into the field and there were loads of things to look at in that field and I didn’t know which one of them he was pointing at so I just looked at them all or just at those ones I could see with my person’s eyes. There was a
fence
going across the flat bit with dead crows nailed to the posts like black rags and their wings flapping a bit in the wind as if they were still alive and trying to get free. And there was a tree all twisted and burned and black cos once it had been Struck By Lightning and around the bottom of that tree were lots more crows and they were all kind of hopping up and down and flapping their wings but not taking off and they were making their Crow noise kind of like a laughing and a bark but also not like a laughing or a bark at all.

—They’re having a parliament, Drunkle said in a voice all low and whispery and then most of the crows went quiet but they did not look at me or Drunkle or Arrn, they just went a bit quieter and stopped flying and jumping so much and just started walking around the tree looking at the ground with their wings folded and it was like they had their hands behind their backs and were walking and listening and thinking and were all important.

—I have come to tell you that my wife is dead, Drunkle said in a louder voice to the crows who carried on walking around the burned tree and staring at the ground. Some of them pecked at the ground really hard and it was like they were stabbing the mountain with their beaks like blades. —She took her own life by hanging herself from the branch of a tree. I had to take her down myself and I carried her dead body with me for some time. My heart is broken now and will be for ever and to me the world is a lot less without her in it. I am shattered by her death and I will never be the same man again but my heart
continues
to beat and I have accepted that and I will let it. But I need you to know that there is no longer a Fay in the world. She is dead and gone for ever and nothing will ever bring her back.

The crows marched and pecked as if they were thinking about them words of Drunkle’s then Arrn made one woof of a sudden and that made all the birds flap up into the air making a cackley noise but they didn’t go up far cos they landed in the branches of the black tree. It was then like they were the leaves of that tree and them also made black, burned too by the lightning. They settled in the branches but carried on making a big noise as if Drunkle’s news had given them Something To Talk About and they all now had an excitement on them and in them and it made my head go spin cos they were like talking leaves and one time I’d had a Bad Dream about that and I thought of the crows that had carried me off last night in That My Time and it made me go more spinsome and I looked up at Drunkle and he was giving a bit of a smile to the sky and his skin didn’t look as yellow and his eyes didn’t look as red and he looked down and saw me looking up then he put his arms around my head and pressed it into his chest and it was warm and nice there and I could smell a saltiness and an oiliness in the clothes on his body and woodsmoke too and I could feel the weight of him against my face not as heavy as normal and then he let me go and I patted Arrn who wagged and we went back to the pub still not saying much but Drunkle seemed better’d somehow, more happy’d, and his feet did not make such a loud sound when he walked across the
empty
car park when we got back to the pub which Didn’t Take Long At All.

Empty of people I mean but full of cars with no people in them. We put the stuff the tent and things into the back of Drunkle’s truck and then we got into the truck and we drove away, back to Drunkle’s house. All the other people must still have been out in the High Places looking for the sheep-killing thing and I wanted to ask Drunkle why we weren’t still out on the High Places too but I didn’t cos I liked going home better and when we got back to Drunkle’s smelly house Arrn took off across the yard probably to look for rats and not the black-and-white kitten I hoped and me and Drunkle took all the stuff the tent and things back into the house and Drunkle made eggs like little suns with beans as well and toast and tea and we ate it all in the kitchen watching the little telly in the corner and I liked it there in that kitchen with my Drunkle and the food and the sunshine coming in all slanty through the window. No nasty Lords in there, oh no. No Everything-thing turning away altho of course that
was
in there because it was Everything it was in the eggs and the beans and staring up at me out of the tea in my mug and hiding in the oven and even on the telly but I wasn’t scared or sadded by that, there, then. After the food I went up to watch Bala Lake and look out for the monster but nothing moved across the lake except for a few small slow boats and the breath of the Everything-thing and I watched that for a bit then felt tired of a sudden so I turned Bala Lake off and got into the bed and I heard Drunkle downstairs whistling and I could smell bleachy stuff
coming
up through the floor and then I heard a Hoover and Duw Duw I thought my Drunkle is having a clean.