Ghostbird Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Quotes

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-one

  Seventy-two

  Seventy-three

  Seventy-four

  Seventy-five

  Seventy-six

  Seventy-seven

  Seventy-eight

  Seventy-nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-one

  Eighty-two

  Eighty-three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About Honno

  Copyright

  Ghostbird

  by

  Carol Lovekin

  HONNO MODERN FICTION

  For Molly and Josie

  Math and Gwydion took the flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet and from these conjured up the loveliest and most beautiful girl anyone had seen; they baptised her with the form of baptism that was used then, and named her Blodeuwedd.

  ‘Math, Son of Mathonwy’

  The Mabinogion

  Listen…

  Rain is simple and precious.

  It is language – it holds the trace of memory.

  The sound of rain is music and it can drive a person mad.

  One

  A girl with birds in her eyes ought to be able to see to the other side of the sky.

  It was an odd thought. Even though it made little sense, the idea appealed to Cadi. Her side of the sky didn’t have much going for it.

  Her irises, reflected in the bus window, were made of tiny black birds. Leafy branches decorated her face. Light filtered through the window, making her skin opaque, giving her face an unreal quality.

  She wondered if it was how a ghost might look.

  If I fell asleep, she thought, and never woke up, would the bus go on forever?

  She was the only passenger. (Her mother had missed it, a small mercy Cadi could only be grateful for.) The route was circular, meandering through half a dozen small villages and the nearby seaside town.

  Here’s the long hill, and there’s the dead tree where the kestrel sits. Her gaze shifted back to her reflection and she blinked to stay awake. Who am I? An all-alone girl with birds for a brain?

  Nothing hurts like not knowing who you are.

  Cadi’s life seemed to her full of mysteries, some trivial, others less so. She knew most children were kept in ignorance; it was part of being young. And yet surely, not all secrets were harmful? Not if they made you who you were? The ghost-Cadi blinked again, and darkened as the bus passed close to a high hedge.

  She shifted in her seat. Here’s the twisty bit I always think the driver will never get round.

  A flock of starlings flew across her face. As the bus approached the village the hedges and trees opened up, and all at once there was too much sky and she became invisible.

  Here’s the bridge and there’s the square. The bus stopped and Cadi made her way to the door. The driver smiled and winked.

  ‘Cheers, Lenny,’ she said.

  ‘Dim problem, bach; mind how you go.’

  As the bus pulled away Cadi paused, pretending not to see the two women standing outside the village shop, watching her. Talking about me as usual, the invisible, deaf girl.

  Cadi knew what the village thought about her. She was a Hopkins: secretive and private. Like her weird mother and her witchy aunt.

  Her mother was a Hopkins by marriage. Women born to the name kept it and the men they chose came to Tŷ Aderyn to live with them over the broom. Take it or leave it. Most took it: Hopkins women were beautiful and generous, black-haired, with eyes the colour of harebells and desire. Their children took their mother’s name and what appeared on their birth certificates was an irrelevance. Village opinion differed on this; it was united in its pursuit of scandal.

  Cadi never let on she heard a thing. It made no difference. Village whispers were as confusing as the ones she heard at home. And she didn’t believe the village knew as much as it thought it did. The only people who knew the truth about Cadi’s family were her mother and her aunt Lili.

  She flipped her long hair over her shoulders. It fell like blackbirds’ feathers. When she was four, Cadi had wanted to be a bird and for a whole year waited for her wings to grow. When they didn’t, Lili told her everyone had a secret life and if she wanted to be a bird she could be one; Cadi settled for that.

  The tarmac burned through the soles of her canvas shoes. Her feet felt stuck and she didn’t mind. If she stayed here forever, she could grow old, with moss gathering on her shoulders and birds nesting in her hair.

  Listen…

  She blinked against the beginnings of a headache. Glancing at the fading sky, she wondered if she would get home before it rained.

  Tall for her fourteen years, Cadi had the same long legs that once drew her father’s attention to her mother. Cadi, however, was nothing like Violet and had anyone suggested she was, she would have argued the point until her mouth dried up. Teilo existed in only a few snapshots in his sister Lili’s house. Violet cared nothing for convention. A dead husband, particularly one you despised, was no reason to clutter a house with old photographs.

  Obstinately certain she resembled Teilo, Cadi believed her mother’s oddness proved they had little in common other than a few random genes. Cadi couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be Violet. If her mother had a past she never spoke of it. Cadi didn’t know if Violet had owned a pet or if she’d believed in fairies, if she’d ever played truant from school or stolen a pen from a pound shop. Violet, with her knitting and her secrets, may as well have been conjured by magic.

  Cadi’s mother kept her secrets closer than the pages of a new book.

  A shadow swept across the road and a magpie landed on the roof of the lych gate.

  One for sorrow.

  The air was thick with the scent of honeysuckle and impending rain. Two more birds followed, swooping down to join the first.

  Three for a girl.

  A Jack Russell te
rrier ran through the gateway making straight for her. Cadi dropped to the ground, reaching out her hand. The dog wore a rough coat and a sweet nature.

  ‘Sut mae, lovely. Where did you come from?’

  She was answered by a wet tongue. On the periphery of her vision, someone whistled. Reluctant to abandon Cadi’s petting, the dog ignored it.

  From the shadow of the church stepped a tall, dark-haired man, a leather jacket hooked over one shoulder. Cadi didn’t recognise him; this didn’t bother her – tourists often wandered around the pretty churchyard.

  He raised a hand. ‘It’s okay, sorry.’ He whistled again. ‘Come on, Gertie.’

  This time the dog trotted away.

  Cadi watched as they disappeared round the corner of the church. The clock chimed the half hour.

  ‘I don’t think your mother would want you talking to strangers.’ Mrs Guto-Evans had the stealth of a stoat. ‘You ought to know better, Cadi Hopkins.’

  Cadi turned. Mrs Guto-Evans and her neighbour, Miss Bevan, regarded Cadi with bespectacled curiosity.

  My motherwouldn’t care. ‘It wasn’t anyone and I didn’t talk to him.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Cadi, best not to go wandering round by yourself.’

  Miss Bevan sniffed in agreement.

  Nosy old bats. Cadi looked down at her feet.

  ‘There’s a good girl.’

  How old do you think I am? Cadi shuffled from foot to foot. And you don’t think I’m good at all, you think I’m weird.

  The women walked away. Reaching into her shoulder-bag for a packet of crisps, Cadi remembered she’d eaten them on the bus. Her fingers found some loose change and she walked across the road to the shop. She heard them before they saw her. Hearing her name through the open doorway, she ducked out of sight, pressed against the wall.

  ‘What’s Owen Penry doing, talking to the Hopkins girl?’ Mrs Guto-Evans said.

  ‘And what’s he doing back here anyway?’

  Cadi craned forward.

  ‘He used to have a thing for the mother, didn’t he?’

  ‘More than a thing is what I heard,’ Mrs Guto-Evans said. ‘After the baby and then the accident and her expecting again, it’s no wonder he left in such a hurry.

  ‘He fell out with his own mother too.’ Miss Bevan poked the cellophane packaging on some Welsh cakes, set them aside and picked up a bunch of carrots. ‘That farm was a tidy place in the grandfather’s day. She’s gone now.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Owen Penry’s mother.’

  Mrs Guto-Evans leaned toward her friend and lowered her voice. Cadi held her breath, straining to hear.

  ‘Do you think she knows he’s back? The child’s mother?’

  ‘Now then, ladies, how can I help you?’ Gareth Jones appeared from the back of his shop.

  Pleasedon’t interrupt them, Gareth. For once, even though she didn’t understand it, the gossip mattered.

  ‘I’m sure if there’s anything Mrs Hopkins needs to know,’ Gareth said, ‘she’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Well, he looked shifty to me,’ said Mrs Guto-Evans.

  ‘He looked something.’ Miss Bevan snorted. ‘I’ll take the Welsh cakes and a packet of mints, thank you, Gareth.’

  While the women hunted out purses and change, Cadi slipped away. She felt faint. The square went blurry, houses and trees merged into patches of light. Her eyes stung and she thought she saw the vague figures of two people she didn’t know – a man and a little girl. As she dashed the back of her wrist across her eyes the picture vanished. She ran across the square. Out of sight, she leant against a low wall, her head whirling as if it might explode.

  What did the man in the churchyard have to do with her father or her mother? And what baby? Did they mean her sister? Her head hurt.

  Behind the wall stood a large whitewashed house, half hidden between tall trees set in a wilderness garden. The ‘For Sale’ sign had disappeared.

  That’ll give the village something else to gossip about. She didn’t trust gossip. Shreds of it clung to Cadi like goose grass. Resentment flared in her chest, a spiky, stinging flower. When I was a kid it didn’t matter. Her bag slipped off her shoulder. I’m not a kid anymore though, am I?

  As she bent to pick it up, she heard a shriek – the cry of a terrified bird. Clutching the bag, her heart thudded against the fabric. The sound echoed on, wretched with fear. Why does everything have to be so horrible?

  Beyond the wall in the shadowy garden, Cadi looked around for a cat up to no good. Nothing stirred, only the trees, rippling in the silent haze.

  Be safe, little bird. She leaned against the wall watching for anyone else who might see her. I can’t move for whispers and gossip and people talking about me instead of to me. She was, she knew, an object of curiosity and pity. It’s what they think.Poor Cadi Hopkins: with no fatherand a mad woman for a mother.

  It wasn’t any better at home. For once, Tŷ Aderyn didn’t feel either welcoming or safe. As she walked down the lane she sensed a change in the air. She eyed the sky and watched it cloud over, smelling rain.

  From the first day of August until the last, it rained at least once a day in the village. When the sun broke through, people caught their breath, marvelled at the glimmer turning raindrops to treasure.

  August rain wasn’t something the village questioned. A place this old must surely be a few parts magic, and who knew what ancient charms clung to the brickwork? Old wisdom attached itself, collected in puddles, slipped under eaves and down chimneys. Wild magic loitered in lanes, cunning as magpies. If it danced by the door, the village knew the wisest move was to drop the latch. Myths were entwined with reality as tightly as the honeysuckle around the cottage doors.

  And ghosts exchanged secrets with the shadows.

  Two

  The small ghost sits at the base of the tree overlooking the lake.

  Waterweed and the remnants of a daisy chain lie caught in her hair. Her skin hurts, as if thorns are trying to pierce it from the inside. Nothing is familiar. She is cold and wet and afraid: something woke her and she is filled with shock and confused anger.

  What am I doing here?

  She feels surrounded by a terrible loneliness and a sense of someone she ought to be looking for. In the gloomy dark there are only shadows and the dark shapes of roosting birds. The little ghost doesn’t raise her head; she is scared of the birds and doesn’t want them to see her.

  A voice whispers on the edge of her remembering. There is no face to go with the voice and no name.

  The ghost huddles under the tree and waits.

  Three

  Tŷ Aderynlay at the end of the lane, a stone’s throw from the lake.

  Her aunt’s cottage – and the larger one next door where Cadi lived with her mother – had been in the Hopkins family for more years than anyone could recall. Derwen Hopkins, a man of the old ways, fell in love with a woman whose hair was made of lake-weed; a woman with azure eyes who talked to birds.

  ‘Build me a house near the water,’ she said. ‘If you want me to stay.’ And he loved her so much, he did.

  When the crows and blackbirds came to watch what he was doing, and listen to the woman’s songs, Derwen named the house for them, and fathered girls with observant, iridescent eyes, and a hankering to fly.

  Lili’s great-grandfather (a Llewellyn by birth) later divided the Bird House into two, because Hopkins women rarely chose to leave, and most of them liked to spend time alone.

  At the front, the cottages leaned onto the verge with barely enough room for a cat to pass. Pots of sage, monkshood and belladonna sat on the step in front of Lili’s door. A wooden gate stood permanently open, the bottom rail embedded in a grassy rut. A narrow gravel and grass path wound round the back to a low brick wall neatly separating two gardens. If Cadi didn’t want Lili – or more often, her mother – to hear her coming, she remembered to walk on the grass.

  The back wall of the building was smothered by an ancient jasmine, t
he flowers so heavily scented they took your breath away. It twined round Cadi’s bedroom window and sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would wake and hear it sighing against the sill. Years of accumulated paint held fast around the window frames. Gutters wobbled and the weathered stonework needed pointing. In spite of an air of benign neglect, a sense of permanence belied the shabbiness, as if the place was held in a spell.

  As Cadi came through the door, Lili smiled and pushed the notebook she was writing in to one side.

  ‘Hi, lovely,’ she said. ‘Did you find something nice?’

  Cadi sat down at the opposite end of the table, unwilling to speak.

  ‘Looks like you made it just in time.’

  Rain began pattering against the window. Cadi leaned across the sill, watching a bead of water slip sideways, as if avoiding something – a scrap of dust maybe – and trickle across the glass.

  ‘Didn’t you find any jeans?’

  Cadi shrugged. ‘I looked, but it’s no fun on my own.’

  ‘I suppose Cerys is busy getting ready for her holiday.’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Lili said nothing and neither did Cadi. Her head was still spinning, filled with questions and something like fury mixed up with the threat of tears.

  Lili stood up. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she said and filled the kettle. ‘And Cadi, go easy on your mam today.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lili put the kettle on the hob. ‘It would have been Dora’s eighteenth birthday.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I forgot.’ And I’m not even sure I care. ‘It’s not really anything to do with me though, is it?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Lili, I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Well, can you at least make an effort?’ Lili turned her attention to rinsing the teapot.

  Her cottage smelled of sandalwood and bread. Everything had its place, even the dusty spiders. The kitchen covered the entire ground floor. Driftwood and pale bones littered windowsills set as deep as the thick stone walls. Dried herbs hung from a beamed ceiling. In the chimney recess stood a small black range and in front of it, a deep armchair: buttoned, shiny velvet the colour of port. Postcards and photographs crowded a mantle edged with an embroidered runner glinting with tiny mirrors.