White Trail by Fflur Dafydd Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m inside. I don’t like being outside. ’The boy’s tone was impossible to detect – one minute it seemed thick with condescension, the next minute, thin with naivety. A little boy who did not like being left outside.
    â€˜Before you come in I think you should know that Doged’s death was nothing to do with me,’ Cilydd blurted out, ‘and I’m not in the habit of inviting strangers into my house.’
    The word ‘stranger’ stood between them, blocking the entrance to Cilydd’s home. It came out too quickly, and he regretted saying it. And yet, this boy was a stranger. He knew that what he saw in front of him was Goleuddydd’s head on a young man’s shoulders, with his own ears appearing as an awkward appendage on either side, but the strangeness, the distance between them, was there all the same.
    â€˜If you let me in I’ll explain it all. You know who I am, don’t you?’
    In all the times Cilydd had envisaged this happening it had never been like this. Once the boy had entered his home, it seemed that words merely evaporated into the fraught air between them. There were too many questions for Cilydd even to begin asking, and fifteen years’ worth of history lurking on the boy’s tongue which Cilydd, for some reason, wanted to keep at bay. It all seemed too much. And so Cilydd kept conversation to a mini-mum. He merely asked the boy if he would like something to eat, for he looked hungry, and then asked him if he would like to lie down. He looked as though he had been walking for miles, his hair was ruffled and dirty, and his eyelids drooped. He watched him – his son, the stranger – devouring a ham and cheese sandwich, and scrutinised every single munch and grab and grunt and fidget to see if there were traces of himself in there anywhere, (and still he saw nothing but those ears), and then took him to the spare bedroom and let him lie for a while. He kept the door ajar – mainly to reassure himself that what was happening was not just a figment of his imagination. Creeping silently to the door every now and then he watched the rise and fall of that pale, adolescent chest, and knew with certainty that this was his son.
    A little while later they met, awkwardly, on the landing. Cilydd had been pacing back and forth on the same patch of carpet for what seemed like days. It was the boy who spoke first.
    â€˜Thanks for the room,’ the boy said.
    â€˜A room is not a house,’ Cilydd said, recalling a line from a song he’d heard many years ago. ‘And a house is not a home...’ Cilydd realised too late that he was mildly hysterical now, that the situation had thrown him out of himself, into some parody of the man he once knew.
    The boy looked at him and smiled uncertainly.
    â€˜Do you always talk like that?’
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Like you’re rehearsing or something.’
    â€˜Yes, I suppose I do,’ he replied, thinking how unrehearsed he was for this particular performance. The boy’s face remained serious, unruffled by expression. ‘Do you have a name?’ He tried to recall which names he and Goleuddydd had discussed. He had liked simple, old-fashioned things: Alys, Gwen, Cadi for a girl; Tomos, Huw, Rhys for a boy. Goleuddydd, of course, wanted something more eccentric, something she could lay claim to. Splitting her own name in half like a fortune cookie she’d said, how about Dydd, Cilydd? A child that was perpetually a new day. Or Golau, a shining beacon of a baby. And yet no matter how many times they’d discussed it, that little thing that was furling inside her had always been nameless.
    â€˜Culhwch,’ the boy said. ‘My name’s Culhwch because I was born in a...’
    â€˜Oh, God,’ Cilydd said, cupping his face in his hands. ‘Yes, I do know where you were born. That much I do know.’
    Cilydd found himself returning on