The Meifod Claw

Five-1

Five

Dampened, drained and somehow burnt by the morning, Benjamin pushed the wheelchair onto the drive while Derek huddled and Herbert squirmed in peremptory looks and glances between his sister’s car and the kitchen door, his every step leaden like shipwrecks dragged along a sea bed. And yet, with each glance, he saw the kitchen door close in, evermore . . .

‘What are you going to say?’ asked Benjamin, his tone low with burden.

Herbert looked at him as though he already knew how this was going to play out. ‘What bits and pieces, so to speak, did we leave around the kitchen?’ he asked in return.

‘Everything that we didn’t take with us and drag up a hill.’

‘Then I think we’re going to have to try and coast it on charm.’

Derek spluttered, looking over his left shoulder at Herbert with warm and hopeful eyes. They were an honest sight by the time they rumbled from the track and onto the courtyard. Honest but begging of questions . . . and not good ones.

The kitchen door soon opened and Herbert’s sister Felicity was standing inside, looking keenly upon them, her shoulder-length brown hair framing occasionally placid features on the mornings that were not this one. With penetrative hazel eyes, she watched them while pulling on a hand-rolled cigarette. Then she spoke first.

‘Morning, boys, I see you’re settled in.’

A sincere greeting, but then she looked over her shoulder at the various pieces of drug paraphernalia that littered the kitchen table. She took a pull of her cigarette before looking them over and taking another.

‘And I see you’ve been for a walk. Healthy.’

Benjamin was anxious and began to shuffle, hoping for some sense in Herbert’s delayed response. Herbert settled for saying nothing and Derek began to wheel himself towards the door with creaks both mechanical and physiological.

‘Aren’t you a sight?’ he said, looking up at his niece. ‘Have you made some cups of tea to go with that little cigarette of yours?’

She smiled at him, relaxed her poise and stepped to the side of the door. Derek wheeled himself with some effort up over the doorstep and down the other side in a manner akin to a long-distance runner falling across the finish line.

‘Come on,’ Felicity said to him. ‘Let’s get you sorted out.’

Her manner was gentle, perhaps almost forgiving. Herbert and Benjamin stepped towards the door with a cautious supply of confidence, but Felicity’s hand went up, telling them to wait right there. Benjamin looked once more to his friend and then Felicity stepped out of the kitchen and into the morning, her voice directed to her brother, though some of its residue naturally drifted to Benjamin.

‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen the state of him in there?’ She pointed towards the kitchen, and though only three years Herbert’s elder, the gesture came across as generational.

‘You said you’d brought him here to look after him, Herbert. This is not that, this is . . .’ She looked over the pair of them, their horsefly eyes and what could be seen of their flesh beneath the scales of mud they wore. ‘What is this?’

Herbert traced his eyes about the courtyard and looked back at her. ‘It’s just the first night, we’ve hardly had time to sort anything out.’

‘Apart from yourselves,’ she told them both but looking only at her brother. ‘I take it from all this that you’ve already met Llewellyn?’

‘You mean The Badger?’ Herbert asked, feeling the words drop from his mouth before he had the chance to fight them.

Felicity stood bolt upright, dropping any façade and flicking away her cigarette so she could use all her fingers for pointing. ‘You think you can just move here and behave like t***s? You think the locals about here don’t know that new people are filling this old house? Of course they do, but you don’t think for a first impression. Buying coke from the local supplier just hours after you moved in – how much are you looking to stand out? Obviously a lot because as I’m driving up here, I see you all doing a slalom run down private land, with Derek at the front of the parade, kicking and screaming like an asylum. And all in the f*****g daylight, Herbert . . .’

She stopped herself and took a breath, then allowed herself to continue. ‘I’m just saying that it’s not exactly subtle given that there’ll be a little cottage industry grow room going up somewhere around here . . . I assume?’ She looked beyond them both and over to the barn and in doing so, saw Benjamin properly. He looked like a stray cat, she thought, waiting to be run over. Perhaps he had been.

‘Morning, Benjamin,’ she said cordially. ‘How’s the physics?’

Benjamin flashed a smile through what could be seen of his face and sighed for this situation – he felt that he had been little more than a guest to it all so far himself.

‘The physics,’ he said quietly. ‘When you find the position, it’s hard to get the momentum. And then the momentum gets going and gets in the way of the position.’

Herbert’s amusement at this only refortified Felicity’s displeasure. Luckily for them both, Derek appeared at the back door, naked from the waist up and standing from the waist down, leaning heavily against the sideboard just inside the door.

‘I’ve managed this far,’ he started, ‘but someone is going to have to do the trousers and pants.’

Felicity looked to her brother with wide eyes. ‘I can’t possibly think whose turn it must be?’ she said lightly, trying to bring some reason back to a situation where the horse had already bolted from the stable, along with two other horses, a chariot and all the cocaine.

Herbert cautiously stepped towards his sister with a smile and open arms. Rain dripped from his clothing in a thousand muddied droplets, and Felicity realised she was about to be gathered up into every one of them. And then she was.

‘That’s more like it, everyone getting along,’ Derek said from the door. Felicity took a step back and looked at the streaks and blots of mud across her fine woollen jumper. Herbert then put his hands full splat onto her shoulders.

‘I’m glad to see you, Flick,’ he said, and though he meant every word, she was quick to free herself and look close into his face.

‘You still looked wired, little brother. All three of you have faces like radishes. I suppose you ought to come in.’

Herbert opened out his palms in a wide gesture. ‘Well yes, I think we should, what with it being my house and everything.’

‘On second thoughts,’ Felicity said, ignoring her brother, ‘maybe you and Ben should at least leave your clothes outside. And the rain wouldn’t hurt either of you, either.’

Benjamin wasn’t sure about this and his face ploughed a fresh furrow of wrinkle right there in front of them.

Herbert shook his head. ‘I don’t think the rain could get us any more soaked now,’ he told her, adding that they would be careful and reminding her again that it was his house.

‘I paid for some,’ Derek reminded him from the door.

‘Yes and you’re inside of it, Uncle.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s true enough, but I still think that your sister is right. Of course, that means that she’ll have to tend my rudiments, but such as she would have it . . . Now then, my dear, you’ll catch a cold out there so let’s go in. Boys, I’ll have a joint sent out, and some clothes.’

Felicity turned about and went inside the house, closing the kitchen door slowly behind her. Outside, the rain began to swell again and it was clear that Benjamin was deep in thought and he could be for some time.

‘I’m going back up the hill,’ he then said flatly and left in that direction.

Suddenly left alone, Herbert stood surrounded by a property that he had bought but that he did not know. He began to peel off sodden clothes from around his body and arrange them in a shabby pile. The wind caught at his flesh and rain immediately peppered him with cold.

Inside the kitchen, Derek was naked, sunken as an hourglass in his chair.

‘Are we being mean to them?’ he asked, looking up at his niece.

‘No. Well, you always get the best out of Herbert if he feels a little guilty so let’s not jump to their aid just yet.’

She looked out of the kitchen window and saw Benjamin heading away along the drive.

A minute later, Herbert watched his friend climb back over the gate they had recently come back through and head once again up the hill, stopping for abrupt lurches and pernicious dives to the ground. Herbert knocked on the back door, asked his sister a quiet question and a few seconds later he had his dowsing rods clutched in his grasp. Sitting himself down naked in the centre of the courtyard, he took a dowsing rod in each hand, closed his eyes and became very distant.

Back inside, Derek clutched loosely to consciousness and Felicity wrapped him in his old brown dressing gown.

‘What’s he up to out there?’ he asked, though he did not hang on for the response.

‘You mean your nephew? He’s sat down out there dowsing, or at least pretending to,’ she said, looking back from the window to see Derek with his head down, asleep in the low tide of his chest. She watched him for a little while, cradled over like a weathered newborn. Perhaps she had been hard on them, upon reflection. They had not only taken an old man in and seen to it that he had a witness to the world, they had done so out of a choice of company and not charity.

Crouching beside the Aga, she gently filled the wood burner and closed it up, looking outside the window again to speak out loud and as if to herself, ‘I suppose Herbert’s always been like this and I suppose I always worry, especially these days. But even so, he’s up to something irregular here, Uncle. And bringing Benjamin with him, that’s just plain suspicious. I hope he’s not planning to waste his share of the money. Sometimes it feels like that’s all we have left of them, so I can’t just let them waste it away.’

‘Now you do sound like your mum’ said Derek briefly from behind closed eyes, deep within a fissure of mind that had been drawn awake. Breath began to stir in him again and he blew deeply from his nostrils.

‘Well, I suppose someone has to,’ Felicity responded, with a look of affection that ran from her uncle and then to the heavens. The kitchen began to warm around them, while outside the morning dulled into seamless dark clouds and raindrops. Derek fell peaceful again and Felicity leant against a worktop, her figure at ease yet her mind folded elsewhere. Something silent drew about the kitchen and Derek twitched.

‘You know, I really like you all moving this way,’ she continued. ‘But I really don’t want to have to play nanny. There again, I suppose if the other choices for that role are Ben or my little brother. Well, no offence to any of you, but someone has to. I’d just rather you didn’t try and make it me.’

‘No offence taken, my dear,’ Derek said, humoured, from behind his eyelids.

‘Thank you. I hope you understand. I even came here with some coke this morning thinking that we could treat ourselves after we get the boys unpacked. I don’t plan to be that responsible myself, but when I come upon a scene like this . . .’ She looked about the collective detritus of the kitchen, how it all appeared to have been sneezed across table and chair, top to tail, in one expelled moment. She pushed herself away from the worktop and made for the kettle.

Then, at the sharp hollow sound of the kettle filling with water, Derek spoke from apparent great distance. ‘Shall we have something to smoke to go with that?’

‘You know it’s not 9 a.m. yet?’

‘Mother again, my dear.’

‘Well, she was a good one.’

‘One of the best, that sister of mine . . . You look very much like her and that is a pleasure to see.’ Derek opened his eyes wide and round, looking at his niece and thinking of what she and her brother had come to lose, what they must live with, what they must live without. ‘Which is not to take anything away from your father,’ he then thought to say. ‘He used to bring me the finest Havana rum, my goodness . . .’

Felicity went about making tea and feeling she ought to say something, but by the time she sat the kettle down and looked back, Derek was peaceful once more. A quiet moment began to seed itself around her, the thought that her parents had both disappeared from the world suddenly, without warning or chance. This thought began to permeate the atmosphere in the kitchen and seek tears. For a minute, she soaked herself in this before a hundred lost memories appeared behind her naked eye and then all around her, drawn from shadows, spilling from cupboards and walls . . . leaking one drop at a time from the tap. She looked out of the kitchen window but her brother was gone.