Ghostbird Read online

  ‘I know he was your brother and you loved him.’ Smoke coiled through Violet’s hair. ‘But for god’s sake, Lili, try and see it from my point of view.’

  Why can’t she say his name? Lili felt her irritation rising again.

  ‘Cadi trusts me, Violet.’ She always has and I’m letting her down.

  When Teilo died, Violet’s grief had seemed pitiful. The death of a child is appalling by anyone’s standards. For the mother to lose her husband, less than a month later, was beyond understanding. In the presence of Violet’s naked anguish, Lili had felt her grief for her brother was forgotten. Had it not been for Cadi, she wasn’t sure she would have got through it.

  ‘Yes, well, she would. Her wonderful father’s perfect sister with her WI and her miraculous bread.’ Violet sneered. ‘You don’t even like most of the people in this village.’

  ‘Now who’s being bitchy? Who do you think you are? This is my home, Violet; it’s where I come from. I may find some of them set in their ways and too nosy for their own good; they’re still my people.’

  ‘You despise them; I’ve heard you, laughing behind their backs.’

  ‘You know what, Violet? It’s no wonder Cadi has no respect for you.’

  Violet stood up, her long hands trailing at her sides. Her face crumpled and Lili felt a moment of shame. That’s what real misery looks like. That’s what Teilo did to you.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lili said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I think you did.’

  Lili watched her, wanting the conversation to be over.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Violet said. ‘What I’m saying is, deal with it.’

  ‘You think I don’t deal with it?’

  Violet stabbed the butt of her cigarette into the saucer. ‘He’s dead and he can rot in hell for all I care. You can threaten all you like. I mean it, if you tell her anything, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Oh, Violet, don’t,’ Lili said. ‘Don’t say things like that.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  Lili was tired of tip-toeing around the edges of Violet’s hurt, and fed-up with being insulted. To fend off Violet’s words, she looked out of the window and conjured a picture of her brother and his little girl. She saw them, returning from a walk, waving from the path, flushed with happiness. The child clutching wild flowers for her mother – harebells and cuckoo flowers tangled up with stitchwort and buttercups.

  ‘Listen to me, Violet. How can I promise not to tell her, if she keeps on asking, if an outright lie means I betray Teilo’s memory?’ Lili’s head throbbed, with the smoke and her weary anger. ‘And what about Blodeuwedd’s memory?’

  Violet’s eyes flashed with hate. ‘Don’t call her that!’ She wrapped her hands into fists. ‘How dare you call her that?’

  ‘It’s the name Teilo gave her.’

  Violet grabbed her head with both hands, her pale hair flailing like grass caught in a wild breeze. ‘Shut up, Lili.’ She drew in a great gulp of air, as if her lungs were starved. ‘Dora was real. That other creature, that thing, she was a myth, a stupid made-up nobody.’ She turned on the spot. ‘I’ve had it with your sanctimonious interfering. You want everything to be my fault and it isn’t.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Lili said. ‘That’s not true; you’re completely over-reacting.’

  Violet turned the full force of her own broken anger on Lili. ‘No, I mean it, if you tell her anything – anything at all – I swear I’ll never speak to you again. I’ll take her away if I have to and make sure you never see her again.’

  If you tell her, I’ll kill you.

  Shaken, Cadi slipped downstairs and went home. Tell me what?If Owen’s back, you can’t pretend he wasn’t part of it.

  Part of what? She’d heard nowhere near enough and yet, more than she could understand. And now she couldn’t believe her ears.

  I hate him… He was a coward…

  Once inside her mother’s kitchen, she closed the door behind her and slid to the floor, the wood solid behind her back.Tears threatened and she tried to swallow them.

  He was a coward… I hate him…

  Above her head she heard a thud.

  All thoughts of her mother and Lili vanished. Cadi ran upstairs. Standing outside her bedroom she heard what sounded like a child’s voice, muttering in Welsh. The only word she could make out was maddau. She had no idea what it meant. On the other side of the door she could hear things moving around and falling. Unnerved, she held her breath and carefully edged open the door.

  The room felt icy cold. And the scent of meadowsweet clung in the air. As she stepped inside, a shadow caught her eye – a figure in the curtains. As Cadi blinked, it vanished.

  Strewn across the floor lay a jumble of books tipped from the bookcase. She bent down and picked up a fragment of a little glass swan, smashed into three pieces.

  No! Lili bought me that. Holding the swan’s head in her palm she fought the urge to cry.

  Her bed was in disarray.

  A flash of fury ran through her. Who could have done such a thing? And even as she wondered, she knew. Placing the broken swan on the floor and crossing to the window, Cadi pushed it open as far as it would go and leaned out. There was nothing to be seen and only the sound of the rain as it began to fall.

  In amongst the scattered books lay the photograph of her mother and father taken on their wedding day. It looked as if it had exploded; her parents’ miniature faces half hidden between shards of glass. The sight of them tipped Cadi over the edge. In the face of such deliberate destruction she was overwhelmed and left breathless.

  Crying quietly, she felt in the bookcase for the bangle and the pouch. Both of them were still there. Had the ghost been in here? Was she looking for the bangle? Why would she make this mess if she hadn’t been looking for something?

  ‘Damn you, you stupid ghost!’

  She began picking up her books. A few of the feathers she used as book marks lay in amongst them.

  She stroked one against her face, tracing her tear-stained scratches. How am I supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t?

  The books were solid enough – the messed-up bed and the broken swan. But was the voice real? She trembled, like one of the feathers lying in the debris. Worried about Mr Furry, she picked up the pieces of glass. A sliver pricked her finger and she licked the blood. It tasted sweet and very real and all the turmoil she was feeling welled up again. The terror she’d felt on the day of the ghost’s attack still clung to her. Everything crowded in, overwhelming her. She felt sick.

  Sitting in the middle of the floor, sniffing, a few tears splashed onto her hand and mingled with her blood. She heard a door slam and knew her mother was back.

  Wiping her face with the back of her hand, she climbed onto her bed. She can rot. I hate her.

  No good ever came of eavesdropping. Everyone knew this. Pulling the duvet over her head, Cadi sobbed into her pillow until she cried herself to sleep.

  Seventeen

  Fragments of the past slid through Violet’s memory.

  Each one felt tinged with treachery. She sat on the sofa, her arms tugging her cardigan like a strait-jacket around her body. Lili is a fool. She knows nothing.

  When she was seventeen, Violet went out with a boy called Martin because he asked her. Up until then no boy had asked Violet to be his girlfriend. She was too silent, too haughty, and so pale her skin seemed as transparent as tracing paper.

  Martin had seen the pulse in the fine veins at her temple as if it beat in time to the rhythm of his own.

  ‘Are you a virgin?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ Violet said, and later, feeling the blood on her thigh, seeing the shifty look on his face as he pulled on his clothes with such haste it felt like an insult, she knew the price of love was sometimes too high.

  Until she met Teilo, Violet hadn’t had sex with anyone else, and when he asked, she claimed her virginity with such blushing conviction he believed her.

 
The silence fell around her and Violet thought she heard a ghost shuffle along the wall. She was back in the house where she grew up. She held her breath and heard her mother’s laugh, high heels clicking on the tiled floor of the hallway, the door slamming as she left the house, the thud of another door closing and a man’s voice, the sound of a car as it drove away.

  Violet stole her mother’s frock, ran through the streets as fast as her legs could carry her. She recalled the way her heart had thumped against her chest. The way the moonlight through the trees spread like lace across the pavement. How it caught on the edge of her stolen frock. She remembered thinking all she needed to do was open her arms and she would fly. Now she knew better. She knew trapped birds with broken wings died.

  Violet had had a lifetime of invisibility, of waiting for people to come back. This village is my prison. These ghosts are my jailers.

  It doesn’t matter where you start out – what counts is where you end up.

  Afraid to stay and terrified at the thought of leaving, Violet had been lost for years with neither map nor breadcrumbs. She wasn’t like clever Lili with her words and her magic and her independence. Other than her knitting, Violet had no skills and besides the wage she earned in the supermarket, no money.

  There is more to dread than destitution. Her fingers plucked at the sleeves of her cloud-coloured cardigan and no matter how she tried she couldn’t stop them from shaking.

  Love and hope were for fools.

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Violet?’

  ‘Who is this?’ She swayed and reached for the wall, pressed her hand again it to steady herself. ‘How did you get this number?’

  ‘It’s in the book, Violet.’

  Memories carried her away again, this time to a day when the sky had turned the colour of ash and her heart had torn in two.

  ‘What do you want?’ Strangled words, burning her mouth.

  ‘What do I want?’ His voice sounded harsh and different. ‘Now there’s a question.’

  Before he could say anything else she slammed down the receiver. There was a smell in the air, as if a dead animal lay under the sofa or the walls of the cottage rotted under the plaster. Violet gagged and stumbled to the kitchen, heaved over the sink. When nothing came up she ran the tap and splashed cold water over her face.

  Is this the past, catching up with me? It seemed that way.

  There is good love and there is desperation.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Teilo had paced, frustrated by the restrictions of the room. Watching her husband’s fury, Violet finally understood how deluded they both were. Teilo’s jealously had begun to frighten her. Fists clenched against his thighs, he bumped into furniture, displaced a chair, knocked a rag doll to the floor. As if to highlight the tension in the room, a sunbeam drifted through the window, falling across the floor like a ribbon.

  On the other side of the village, the church bell chimed the second quarter.

  Violet leaned into the wall, the stone cold against the backs of her legs. ‘And I don’t think I care anymore.’

  ‘You’re lying, I know you are. I’m not stupid, Violet.’

  ‘That’s the whole point though, isn’t it? You are, and you can’t see it. You don’t see anything. No one does.’ Even to herself she sounded so sure and so sad, as if she’d spent her whole life unnoticed and nothing could surprise her. ‘The biggest fool is me, for putting up with it.’

  He’d stopped pacing. ‘So where were you?’ The words slid from between his teeth like snakes.

  When she spoke her voice was soft, with no hint of the turmoil inside.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you and told you until I’m sick of explaining. And I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if you don’t believe me.’

  Teilo banged his fist on the table. ‘No more lies, Violet, do you hear me? I won’t be made a fool of.’ The impact shook a small jug of wild flowers releasing the scent of honeysuckle. Violet inhaled it as if it might transport her somewhere else.

  ‘I saw you, damn it, with him. With him.’

  ‘Because we met on the path, like I told you.’

  ‘Because he’s your lover and you’re a liar.’

  You were supposed to rescue me. Make me feel safe, not trap me in this mistake, a love story where no-one really fell in love. Needy girls should be wary of selfish, jealous men and Violet, leaning against the unforgiving wall, knew in that cold moment that when she had offered him her soft centre, he had taken it with no thought other than to eat her up.

  Violet’s guard slipped further away. ‘Think what you like, I told you, I don’t care. If you can’t trust me then you certainly don’t love me.’ Not grown-up, unconditional love. ‘Go away, Teilo. It’s what you’re best at.’

  The silence hung in the air, dark amongst the glittering dust motes. He looked at her, frowning, and something inside her unravelled.

  From upstairs the child cried out, a joyful, demanding sound.

  Violet’s shoulders instantly relaxed. Teilo opened his mouth as if to say something else and stopped.

  As Violet moved toward the door, he touched her arm. ‘It’s alright, I’ll get her.’

  She pulled away. ‘No, it’s fine, I’ll go.’

  He was already half-way up the stairs. ‘She’ll be full of beans. I’ll take her for a walk.’

  His eyes were dark as lake water.

  ‘Daddy!’

  Violet couldn’t breathe. Rooted at the foot of the stairs, her stomach lurched and she took a breath, the way a diver might. She wanted to protest, wanted him to reassure her and knew, with his anger too recent, he wouldn’t.

  From her room, Dora called again – insistent now.

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’

  ‘If you think there’s any point.’

  Please, she whispered to herself, please don’t go.

  She crossed to the window, opened the curtains as wide as they would go and let in some light.

  He came downstairs, the child in his arms waving her tiny hand, a silver bangle on her wrist catching a sunbeam.

  ‘It’s a mermaid day, Mam. We’re going to the lake.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Lies, like smiles, come in every shape and size: small, mocking and clever, hurtful, and deliberate. There are so many ways to tell them, there was probably a book explaining how.

  Teilo smiled at Violet as he told her another one. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort it.’

  Twenty minutes later she heard the rain pattering against the window, and couldn’t be sure they would ever smile at one another again.

  Eighteen

  The ghost of Isadora Blodeuwedd Hopkins is tied to a small world between the cottages and the lake.

  Now her wings are beginning to grow, she feels a little bolder.

  She remembers her names, recalls liking it when her mother called her Dora and told her she was adorable. And when her father called her his little flower face, the ghost remembers feeling like a princess in a fairytale.

  She wishes her sister could see her, and wonders what else she has to do to attract her attention.

  Lili watched Cadi like a hawk, certain her niece was hiding something. Her nerves had been replaced by grumpy rudeness. The bruise on her face was turning yellow.

  ‘Have you fed the birds?’ Lili asked.

  ‘No, why should I?’ Cadi’s face was drawn with exhaustion, her head bent over her book.

  ‘Because I asked you to?’

  ‘They’re your stupid birds, you feed them.’

  This was so out of character, Lili was momentarily lost for words.

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my mother.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there, cariad,’ Lili managed. ‘It’s every bird for itself in Violet’s world.’

  ‘Exactly. And she can’t stop me going anywhere I like, not even the lake. And neithe
r can you, so don’t bother trying.’

  Lili looked up. ‘Number one, don’t speak to me like that. Number two, how many times do I have to remind you, your mother has a name. And number three, grow up, Cadi. It’s not just about you.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Lili. It’s never about me. That’s the point.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Lili paused. ‘Listen to me, Cadi. I don’t know what’s going on and part of me doesn’t want to. But I won’t be told to shut up, not by you, not by anyone and certainly not in my own home.’ Lili managed to say all this without raising her voice. ‘You’re obviously upset – I can guess some of it, so why don’t you tell me the rest?’

  Cadi flung her book aside. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

  Lili pretended to consider this and turned to her laptop.

  ‘You know what’s wrong,’ Cadi muttered. ‘Bloody secrets.’

  ‘Please don’t swear, Cadi.’ Lili closed the laptop. ‘I know. Honestly, I do and I wish…’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I wish. I wish I was six again, when I realised whatever the secret was about my sister it was dangerous. I’d be braver and ask questions and make you tell me.’

  Lili flinched. ‘It wasn’t dangerous. What makes you say that?’

  ‘It felt that way to me.’ Outside it began to rain and it sounded like gravel against the window. Cadi’s anger stilled. ‘Do you remember when we went to Barry Island with Mam?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Lili said. It had been her idea: a day away for Violet and a chance for Cadi to have some fun. ‘You wandered off and we thought we’d lost you.

  ‘I was collecting shells – I found the tent where they took lost children. And when you and Mam found me, she was so angry she slapped me.’

  Already able to read ‘Lost Children’ in large letters on a striped marquee had intrigued Cadi. She knew all about lost children, or so she imagined. For as long as she could remember, she had been aware of the whispers surrounding Violet’s lost child. She wondered: had her mother been careless and left the baby on a bus, like a parcel?

  Wandering into the tent, she asked: had anyone seen the baby?

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ one of the women said. ‘Where did you leave her, bach?’