Life is tough for Cilydd, after his wife Goleuddydd, who is nine months pregnant, seems to vanish into thin air at a supermarket one wintry afternoon. Cilydd gets his cousin, Arthur - a private eye who has never solved a single case - to help him with the investigation. So begins a tale of intrigue and confusion that ends with a wild boar chase and a dangerous journey to the House of the Missing.
In this contemporary retelling from Seren's New stories from the Mabinogion series, award winning Fflur Dafydd transforms the medieval Welsh Arthurian myth of the Mabinogion’s ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ into a 21st century quest for love and revenge.
Life is tough for Cilydd, after his wife Goleuddydd, who is nine months pregnant, seems to vanish into thin air at a supermarket one wintry afternoon. Cilydd gets his cousin, Arthur - a private eye who has never solved a single case - to help him with the investigation. So begins a tale of intrigue and confusion that ends with a wild boar chase and a dangerous journey to the House of the Missing.
In this contemporary retelling from Seren's New stories from the Mabinogion series, award winning Fflur Dafydd transforms the medieval Welsh Arthurian myth of the Mabinogion’s ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ into a 21st century quest for love and revenge.
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Overview
Life is tough for Cilydd, after his wife Goleuddydd, who is nine months pregnant, seems to vanish into thin air at a supermarket one wintry afternoon. Cilydd gets his cousin, Arthur - a private eye who has never solved a single case - to help him with the investigation. So begins a tale of intrigue and confusion that ends with a wild boar chase and a dangerous journey to the House of the Missing.
In this contemporary retelling from Seren's New stories from the Mabinogion series, award winning Fflur Dafydd transforms the medieval Welsh Arthurian myth of the Mabinogion’s ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ into a 21st century quest for love and revenge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781854115621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Seren |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Series: | New Stories from the Mabinogion |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 836 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The White Trail
New Stories from the Mabinogion
By Fflur Dafydd
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Fflur DafyddAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85411-562-1
CHAPTER 1
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 of 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.'
'So what are you saying?'
'I'm saying they might be linked.'
'And what about the money?' he asked.
The police had told him that Goleuddydd had taken a rather large sum of money out of her bank account the day before her disappearance. He caught the policeman and policewoman looking at each other as they told him this; it was as though a gust of cold air had blown into the room. The information changed their attitude towards him; the policewoman's hand on his went limp. He found them sweeping him with their eyes – trying to work out exactly what it was about him that was so overwhelmingly present, to make a woman want to be absent.
'No, there was no money missing in this case. But the girl had been acting strangely for a few weeks, according to her family. Look, just let me look into it. Trust me.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The White Trail by Fflur Dafydd. Copyright © 2011 Fflur Dafydd. Excerpted by permission of Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
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