29

I look around carefully. The crows, as I have mentioned, are silent, and the songs of the other birds are muted, an unusual state of affairs on an early summer’s evening. I, of course, with the ridiculous sensitivity to such things brought on by my maddening insomnia, immediately begin to read meaning into this, but it frequently happens that there is a lull in birdsong on a June evening. This is a fact.

I wonder where the thief could have gone. I have heard nothing – although of course I was inside the kitchen when the theft took place, and O’Hallaran and Alice are washing and drying the dishes, that is the arrangement because Gabrielle has done the cooking, and she is curled up in the single armchair in the kitchen, reading a sports magazine. So I hear nothing, only the background buzz of their conversation as Alice and O’Hallaran stand by the sink, chatting as they always do. And I don’t say anything to the others about the disappeared food at this point, instead returning outside on my own, feeling slightly exhilarated by the mystery.

For a few moments I enjoy standing there on the patio outside the library, listening to the absence of birdsong. I wonder about the fox. I half expect to see him standing at the edge of the woods, his snout quivering in the air and tail erect, trying to discern if there is any supper for him tonight. But perhaps the fox knows better. Perhaps Foxy knows he has a competitor and is not going to show. Animals know these things.

I begin to pace towards the vegetable garden. If the thief has been watching me clear the table, then he (or she, or it) will have had to calculate how much time they need to steal the food and hurry back to safety before I return outside to collect the remaining items and potentially catch them in the act. They will have chosen the quickest route back to the nearest hiding place, and that would mean sprinting to the vegetable garden where the runner beans have grown tall, or the greenhouse, where the tomato and ganja plants provide ample cover. So there I go, taking my time, and I search for any traces, any tracks on the ground, but can find none, or else am not observant enough to spot any. I stand in the greenhouse, inhaling the rich perfume of tomatoes and cannabis sativa, before stepping outside and wondering where to search next.

The path in front of me leads directly up to the woodshed, where O’Hallaran hid after being ousted from the tent. It seems an unlikely hiding place for someone who needs to be on the constant look-out, but what do I know? I follow the track towards the shed.

My first impression, on stepping inside, even with the door ajar, is the darkness of the place. It is hard tomake things out. I push the door shut behind me. My eyes take a while to become accustomed to the dark, but I notice a thin shaft of light, a narrow luminous beam filled with motes of dust that traverses the shed in a straight line from the door, and turning back I see a bright aperture in the door itself. A hole has been bored into the wood, a spy-hole, an inch in diameter, and I am sure it was not there before, when I visited the shed with Alice, following Gabrielle’s assault on O’Hallaran. Someone must has drilled this hole very recently, but with what?

I pick up one of the heavier logs and wedge it against the door, forcing it wide open, to ensure the greatest possible amount of light comes in. This gives me a better overview. On one side, to my right, stands the old-fashioned lawn-mower, a petrol-run machine, which once, last autumn, I had attempted to start, but gave up and called in a proper gardener, or so-called landscaper, who used his own buggy-type mower and spent an entire day around the grounds, charging me so much I never asked him back. There are also shovels, rakes, two wheelbarrows, an assortment of buckets, a few items whose purpose I do not recognise, and some sheets of tarpaulin. Lying on top of the tarpaulin is an old-fashioned hand drill, a so-called brace and bit, clearly the tool used to make a spy-hole in the door. A few shavings of wood around the base of the door frame complete the evidence. The shed is large, by the standard of sheds, and the supply of logs seemingly inexhaustible. Rows of them stretch back towards the end of the structure. And then I notice, towards the left-hand side, a gap in the stack of wood, where a section has been removed and the missing logs lie scattered nearby. This opening is too small to accommodate an adult.

Lowering myself onto my haunches, I examine the space, which forms the opening of a tunnel. The distance to the wall is six feet at most, and at the end of the tunnel, staring at me with big eyes, barefoot and shivering, is a child.

When I say a child – although it takes me a few seconds to discern this in the dusk – I mean a boy: at least, this is my first impression. He has long dirty hair, light brown in colour and falling over the eyes, although parting naturally in the centre. Then I am not so certain, and my first impression is immediately superseded by a second, that the child is a girl. Boy or girl, it hardly matters. A child is living in the shed; filthy, undernourished, unshod, its face smeared with snot and gunge. It is wrapped in a blanket that I recognise as having disappeared a week or so back after Gabrielle and Alice had been sunbathing on the back lawn. And held tight in its right hand, clutching it like a crucifix against impending evil, is the salt cellar.

It takes me a while to adjust to this scene. The kid keeps staring at me. I guess I am supposed to make some kind of first move, to speak to it. I am not very good with children. I mean, I am not very good with adults, but am significantly worse with children. I am not even sure how old it could be. Six perhaps? Seven? I have not really had any cause to take notice of the age of children since I ceased being a child myself. Apart from my visits to Llys Rhosyn and Aunt Megan, my childhood, as I must have intimated (and if I haven’t, I should have), was not a happy one and I have found no need to revisit it by proxy, as it were, by associating regularly with children. I decide to speak to it then, as though I were speaking to an adult.

What are you doing here, in the woodshed? I say, in a friendly fashion. And I feel like an idiot, because already I know for a fact that the child will not answer. Instead, without taking its eyes off me, it carefully shakes some salt from the cellar into the open palm of its left hand, and licks it, licks the left palm clean. Licks it two or three times, and then, although there cannot be any more salt left, continues licking its own palm, and in between these slow brushes of the tongue, looks up at me, as if sending me a message of some kind. This disturbs me. I want it to desist, but do not know how to make it stop. I do not know how to make it do anything without frightening it. So I ask it a question.

What is your name?

It stares at me with renewed intensity, its eyes bulging. The eyes have long dark lashes, darker than the hair on its head.

It starts to dribble. I am even more upset than when it started licking itself. It doesn’t seem to be aware that it is dribbling, the thin stream of bubbly saliva hanging from its lower lip. Then it lifts its free hand and wipes its mouth. I am relieved. I am glad that this has happened. It means that the child, the boy or girl, has the ability to stem the tide of dribble, to clean itself, to look after itself, if only in a rudimentary way. This gesture – along with the evident ability to operate a brace and bit – suggests that the child is not an imbecile.

I crook my finger and make a beckoning gesture. Will the child recognise this signal? Apparently not. It looks at me with profound distrust, imbued with an element of sadness, and shakes its head, once, twice, raising the chin slightly, in a strange, affecting movement. It is a gesture which, inexplicably, causes a flickering of loss and grief to settle in my stomach, and my eyes brim with tears, which I brush away with my sleeve at once, unconsciously mimicking the action of the child wiping away its dribble. The child’s head-shaking suggests that there is nothing that I can do, that my tears – if it is responding to my tears – are of no use. In this gesture I recognise hopelessness on an epic scale.

I am at a loss how to act. I cannot crawl along the little passageway that the child has constructed (skilfully, I must concede) by taking apart a large section of logs and re-arranging them to form a tunnel, as I am too large, or the tunnel too small. My only chance might be to coax the child out, but I have nothing with which to tempt it.

I must stop reacting emotionally, and start thinking. Evidently the child has a passion for salt. This in itself is quite odd. I would normally expect a child to be tempted by sweet things. But to date, if the disappearances are any indication, the child has shown a preference for savoury food, including salted crisps and olives. And it enjoys licking salt from the palm of its hand. Then I remember that there is some cold bacon in the fridge: O’Hallaran cooked a fry-up for breakfast that morning, and there was some leftover bacon. I could go back down to the house and fetch the bacon. I would then attempt to lure the waif from its hiding place with a tasty morsel of pig-meat.

Listen, I say (although I have no way of knowing whether the child understands a word I am saying), I am going down to the house for something. I won’t be a minute. You stay here, right? Don’t go running off anywhere.

It continues to stare at me with lustrous eyes.

My fear is that once I leave the shed, the child will dart out behind me and run off into the woods. I cannot risk this. I need some help. So I leave the shed, take a few paces down the hill towards the house, and I shout for Alice. I can hear the strains of panic in my own voice and it must sound as if something terrible has happened, but this does not matter if it has the desired effect. Which it does, eventually, when she appears in the doorway of the house. I have a flashback to that first time I watched Alice open the back door, when I was looking down on the house from the fallen trunk at the top of the woods, and realise that now, like then, she is wearing blue jeans and a black top.

What’s going on? she shouts back at me. What’s happened? Have you had an accident?

Come up here, I yell back. I need your help.

When Alice reaches me, I have walked a few more paces down the hill towards her.

There’s a child, I say, breathlessly, hiding in the woodshed. I’m worried that it might try to run off. I think it needs help, but I can’t reach it.

Can’t reach it?

You’ll see. It’s made itself a little nest. It likes salt. It likes salty food. I thought I’d go down to the kitchen to fetch some bacon, as bait, to lure it out, but I didn’t want to leave it alone in the shed in case it runs off into the woods and we can’t find it and it dies of malnutrition or exposure. So I want you to keep an eye on the kid, talk to it, don’t let it get frightened, while I go down to get some food. It’s hungry. It’s been taking food from us. It’s where the missing food’s been going. Just go inside, you’ll see what to do.

It? Girl or boy?

I have no idea. You decide.

And so I return to the shed with Alice, open the door, and show her where the child is hiding, still squatting at the end of its little tunnel.

Then I run back down to the house.

I don’t see O’Hallaran or Gabrielle in the kitchen. I am in a hurry, as the incident with the strange child is, I am sure, the delayed product of the tent, and I am obsessed with all that the tent brings me. Obsessed, and now disturbed. I had thought that perhaps the tent had come to the end of its projections or ejaculations, but apparently it was saving its biggest surprise until last. I rummage in the fridge, find the few cooked rashers that O’Hallaran has left there for his pal, the fox, and return up the hill to the shed.

The door of the woodshed remains jammed open, so I have a clear view inside as I step over the threshold. Alice is sitting with her back to the wall, in much the same place as O’Hallaran occupied when I found him on the night that everything happened. She is sitting there, and nestled into her side, its head nuzzling against her neck, its thin legs wrapped around her waist, is the child. It makes no sound, but clings to her like a frightened monkey.

Well, I say, you’ve made progress. I step towards Alice and the child raises its head, fixing me with its big eyes, still nervous of me, but no longer quite so fearful, now that it has found its protector.

How did you get it to come out? Has it spoken yet? I say. Alice doesn’t answer at first.

The poor child is traumatised, she says, eventually. By not attaching any gender to the utterance, I take it that she is as confused about its gender as I am.

I wave the rashers of bacon in the air, and take a step closer towards them. Alice takes one from me, and when she offers the strip of meat to the child, a small hand emerges and takes it, slowly, tentatively, but then, with extraordinary speed, delivers it to its mouth, and it bolts the food, barely chewing, like a dog. It holds out its hand for another rasher. I pass them on to Alice.

They sit there against the wall, Alice feeding bacon to the foundling child. I am utterly external to the scenario, apart from serving as a bacon-dispenser. I can offer nothing more. The picture in front of me reminds me of some primitive rendition of Madonna and child. In which case, I conclude, I am the painter.