Rhaia's Children

By J S Leitch

The Frackers are coming …and Rhaia has arrived from impossibly far away to try to locate and put a stop to a world-splitting event. She has an ally waiting to help her, a Wicker Witch dying of cancer who can’t really do a lot except to enrol a couple of existentially-challenged luvvies and a fighting spirit or two. And, of course, they need someone to help them stay in (and on-) line.
Holly and Rowan are two local teenage misfits who end up embroiled in Rhaia’s hunt for the Thunderstone which is threatening her ‘children’. They have their own problems – family strife, school, financial insecurity – and really don’t have time to get involved in a struggle that takes them from the Haworth moors back and forth across the Bowland Basin.
They get involved anyway – teenagers are like that…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781326007928

Book preview

Rhaia's Children

RHAIA’S CHILDREN

J S Leitch

Copyright © J S Leitch 2014

The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-1-326-00792-8

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

Places, institutions and locations are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Dedication

For Eloane, Holly & Tristan

And the other magic people I know

Thanks also to the 3R’s for their invaluable input.

Disclaimer

Any science in this book is for narrative purposes only. Please don’t take it seriously and don’t try it at home (except for the solar road panels – they’d look nice on your patio.)

This book contains language, some of it a little bit on the strong side. Characters have been requested to behave appropriately, and they have. Not all of them are nice people anyway.

Quote

....and with impious hands

Rifled the bowels of their mother earth

For treasures better hid...

Milton:  Paradise Lost

1. Rhaia 

She landed.

It was a storm of mixed emotions, a hurricane of weird body feelings, a tsunami of first and second and third impressions, some of which blasted right through her and out the other side. Others wormed their way in more insidiously till they were chewing her up before she realised they were there. She was alive – point one. A very important point since all the clever clogs back home had tried to impress upon her the huge sacrifice she was – possibly – making.  This could cost you your life. It hasn’t been tried in human memory (odd rumours and ancient myths excepted). It’s a dangerous undertaking, we don’t know for certain about conditions there. We can only guess at the hazards, the atmosphere, the natives. We’re not certain if we can bring you back. It might be a one-way trip, it might be total catastrophe for yourself and your family, it might be your demise or permanent disability. We’ve arranged support but we don’t know if the agents are up to scratch. You might find people just like us or just as possibly find yourself surrounded by screaming savages wanting to tear you limbs from limb. We’ve done our best to identify the best touch-down conditions, but there are no guarantees. We’re not even sure if we’re sending you to the right place. It might just kill you, it will be certain death for us and the world if you don’t.

Will you do it?

Like she really had a choice.

She was cold – point 2.  Oh yes, the aforesaid cleverish clogs had said the temperature might be different.  She was landing at a latitude nearer the poles than she was used to, they weren’t really sure how the climate would affect her, they’d kitted her out to the best of their ability, but it was obvious (too late, too damn late) that the outfit she wearing would do nothing to keep out the searing wind or stop her from losing body heat. She held out her hand to catch what seemed like snowflakes blowing in the wind.  She’d rarely seen them this close, she’d rarely seen them full stop.  She held them in her open palm. They felt strangely soft and weirdly shaped.  They didn’t melt.

She was overwhelmed by the noise – point 3.  Yes, they had told her the island is likely to be full of noises, sounds and sweetish airs, but it was debatable that they gave delight and hurt not.  The air around her was truly filled with a thousand twangling instruments, and voices, and rumbling, hissing, banging, booming, thundering, growling, whispering, snarling, singing, a wild cacophony not of noises, but Noise, loud and complicated and deafening.  It swirled round her thoughts and threatened to turn them to mush.

And the strange thing was, she couldn’t see where it was coming from.  There was nothing around her that was capable of generating so much sound.  In the far distance, she could see patches of world as she knew it, and other patches – grey and gnarled and more solid-looking – as she didn’t, but here, here where she had landed, there was nothing but what looked like baby shrubs, clinging to each for comfort in a continuous growth sweeping around the surrounding hills, with  - as her eyes adjusted to the pressure and started to pick out details - some weirdly-whitish things that appeared to be moving aimlessly around the scrubland. She had never been anywhere so totally and utterly barren and bare.

Point 4 – aye, here’s the rub, she was suddenly, intensely, uncontrollably homesick.  It wasn’t just the cold and the thin, clamorous air that was turning her legs to jelly.  She’d never realised before how much she loved them all, her clown of an older brother and his equally preposterous crew, her younger sibs and their endless demands on her time, her cousins, her neighbours, her tribe, her gruff but generally amiable Dad, her sweet bully of a mother, all the children. The thought that she might never see them again struck through her like a swordfish, cutting her to the quick and beyond, a searing icy-hot pain that was chewing up her insides and threatening to abort the mission before it had really begun.

Pulling her so unfamiliar suit more tightly around herself, she drew in deep gulps of oxygen (well, she hoped it was oxygen – it tasted of other stuff besides, but she’d been here almost a full half daysplit and was still alive, so it must have oxygen in it) and turned to face the lightening of the cloud cover that indicated the direction home, preparing to transmit the message she hoped against hope would get back to them.

‘Mother, Dad, World – I’m alive. I arrived safely. Part 1 of plan accomplished’.

2. Holly

Holly Berry hated her parents. She hated them with a passion rare even for fourteen-year-olds. It wasn’t just a game, a way to kill time while waiting for the bus, which, according to her mobile, had been due here in five minutes for at least the last ten.   It wasn’t just the name, I mean what reasonable parent with a surname like Berry would have called their child Holly? I mean, like, yeah, alright, it’s not like they called me Rasp or Logan.  Maybe they were, like, saving that for me brother if I’d ever had one – would they have called him Bill? No, it wasn’t just the name, though, that rankled – I mean, like, if they’d been called Royd, would they have called me Emma? Nora if they’d been Carrots?

Didn’t they think, in their drunken stupid little ‘oh great we’ve had a baby’ way, that a name wasn’t just for the birth, for friends and neighbours to coo over, that she’d have to carry it to nursery, and junior school, and the comp, where it was a source of endless amusement to the slimy spiders from the local sink estate.  She’d have to carry it ever after or at least until she was old enough to change it by deed poll. They hadn’t even bothered giving her a middle name as a fallback. If they had, it would probably have been Myrtle, or Canter or something equally daft and hugely embarrassing.

No, it wasn’t just the name. There was Trevor as well, Trevor hanging around like Marley’s ghost – not Bob Marley either - dragging memory chains across her thoughts when she least expected them (like now, what’s Trevor doing here at the bus-stop?)  It was the hills, of course, the ones she could see peaking over the edge of the castellated and defunct mills and dingy rows of terraces that brought Trevor clanking back through her head. They should be higher, and sharper, and rockier, like Yr Eifl, they should run from edge-to-edge across the horizon, with the distant ones carrying little cloud caps that talked of rain.   I should be able to see them glowing pink in the sunset, I should be able to turn from them and look at the sea. Damn Trevor.

It wasn’t really Trevor, of course. He wasn’t like a paedophile uncle (though she had one of those as well, but he was called Ryan) or nosey neighbour or something.   Trevor was just a colonial spelling which Holly had reverted to using just before they left, to emphasise how much she despised the place and was leaving not because she had to, but because she couldn’t stand it anymore. It was Trefor, which, as Holly would tell anyone inquiring into her history or the lilt which still underlay her Yorkshire accent, is Welsh for ‘Hole’, a one-eyed little dump in the middle of nowhere (but what a beautiful nowhere, whispered the treacherous Trevor into her ear), with a poxy little school (okay, she struggled with the language, but the teachers were nice and tried to be extra kind to her and if some of the kids were a bit icky, it was wasn’t because of the … the Other Thing, because to them all Other Things belonged to being Not-Welsh. Which was, like, sort of accepted, and it was really great being able to whisper bore da to Yr Eifl towering above them every morning on her way into school, and hear the sea from her bed at night), and a beach that was all rock that tore your feet to shreds if you weren’t wearing jellies  and warmish water that let you paddle when me mam wasn’t looking and sea-birds lining up with the divers on the little stone jetty and air, air …Holly’s fingers rolled round her constant-companion inhaler in her pocket, the one she was strongly advised never to leave home without ...air you could breeeeeathe. 

Holly couldn’t cope with Paradise Lost. With time and longing, it had to turn into a place she was glad to escape. She hated it how Trevor kept turning up, uninvited, to remind her that yet again, they’d passed another summer holiday stuck in Keighley and yet again her only summer sea-encounter was a day trip to St Anne’s, which was nice enough in its own way but the only Yr Eifl in sight was a six-foot- high fake stuck in a phoney duck pond near the salt marshes.

The bus pulled up and Holly got on, pushing Trevor back into the darkness.  She’d gone there aged not-quite-five and left three weeks after her ninth birthday.  So I’ve really, like, spent more time here than there.  I remember us living for a time with me Nan before Dad had had enough and managed a down-payment on a Welsh cottage with his redundancy money or something.  She’d been told they’d calculated that the two spare bedrooms could be turned into a bed-and-breakfast income, but cheap flights to Ibiza and Lanzarote crept into their calculations and stole too many of their mortgage-paying customers.  It was really weird the off-hand the way Mum had told her not long ago that Dad had left when the bailiffs started coming, as if it hadn’t really mattered to anyone.

Yes, you bastard, you shite, you coward, you horrible lousy creep.  Do you really think fifty lousy quid stuck in a lousy card twice a year really makes up for what we lost?

Holly showed the driver her pass; yeah, like, she could have walked really, even with the bag and its overnight stuff. It wasn’t hugely far, but there was still some time on the card before it ran out which she wasn’t going to waste and at least she could renew it after that without having to fill in those silly forms asking for the colour of her granny’s socks and her skin. When faced with one of those, she usually ticked the box marked ‘Other, please specify’ without specifying.  She was definitely ‘Other’.

She held her head high as she sauntered down the bus to the empty seats at the back.  She didn’t want to look at people in case they were people she knew.  She really didn’t want to talk to anyone today, especially not some bieberphiliac twit who thought they were best mates just because they shared a bench in Chemistry, nor any of the flowers and plants who thought they had something in common. Lily and Ivy and Rose and Hazel and Yasmeen, not to mention Jagoda-pronounced-Yaggodda (but who still ended up as Jagger-Jaws) who kept sidling up to her to claim that they were two berries – jeez, why do people name their kids after vegetation?  There’ll be a Cabbage and Kale-y turning up any day.  Thank the gods that Petunia and Marigold and Daisy and Laurel had gone out of fashion, it would be a right ruddy nursery otherwise.

Boys seemed to get off lightly in the plant-name game, she hadn’t met a Basil anywhere yet, though she had known a dog called Aster, and the only plant-boy she knew was the geeky Rowan she was actually going to see, oh and Bloom, but that was a surname and at least his parents had thought enough of him not to call him Orlando, (but not enough apparently not to call him Cyril). If they had to be cabbaged by their name, why couldn’t it be something really interesting like, er – Holly scoured her word-stock and lighted upon the names from a food-foraging book she had picked up cheap from The Works ‘just in case’ – yes, Amanita, Amanita Berry would have been brilliant, that really would have punch.

Holly gritted her teeth and stopped herself from slamming her fist into the back of the seat in front of her. 

Yes, she was bloody angry.  Nearly the end of the hols, back to school the week after next and she’d done nothing with the time, even one lousy day at the Fest had been ruled out-of-bounds, supposedly because she was too effing young. As if.  They’d not been away again because after the paying the rent on their poxy little terraced 'cottage’ (just because it had low ceilings and a sort of view from the corner of her bedroom window didn’t make it an effing cottage),  her mum didn’t have enough from her poxy little shop job for just a weekend away. Jeez, she could have gone into a supermarket or something, at least they’d have got staff discounts on the food, but no, she had to work in a poxy little boutique in Bingley which paid next to nothing but had class, class but no ruddy holidays apart from the occasional day trip limited by bus routes because she couldn’t afford to run a car. And she only worked there because it was a bit out of Keighley and charged the earth for stuff that looked like it was made out of it, so it was unlikely that she’d get customers who knew her out-of-doors. She really didn’t want her neighbours knowing she worked in a shop, like it was a brothel or something.  Load of bull.

One of Holly’s older mates from the Arts Centre was moving out of a huge town centre flat. They could have had it for half the money they were paying out for a lousy two-up, one-and-kitchen-down that her mum insisted on after they had to move out of Nan’s the second time because at least it was ‘above the scum line’, but her mum didn’t want to know.  Jeez, who did she think she was?  Princess Poshnobs?  Is that why she’d been hogging the PC for every vid of Swan Lake posted on Youtube? Hoping that a prince will come to lift her away from the pond life?

Holly’s anger churned to a halt as a mental picture of ‘me mam’ (‘Talk properly, will you? Don’t go all regional now, it’ll make a difference when you go to Uni’) drifted unbidden into her head.  Her mum looked so tired nowadays, pale and unsmiley, like she never saw the light of day.  There were definite little crowsfeet gathering around the edges of her toddler-blue eyes and the bottle-propped natural blonde hair didn’t have the sheen it had in the days when she had walked Holly to school (and the other kids whispered to her ‘Is that your mum? Are you adopted, then?’) and she definitely, definitely didn’t really want to be here more than Holly did. And there was sweet eff-all Holly could do about it at the moment, whether she wanted to or not.

She looked at the view through the bus window, at the valley down below with a little steam train sending little white clouds into the air, very Thomas the Tank, the increasingly wooded hillsides,  the moor-tops converging  in  the misty-blue  distance.  It was pretty, really, it wasn’t all bad. She had some good mates  (like Rowan, nerd though he was, he was still aware that she could use the money from the job he’d offered to share with her, and Squirrel Bloom, and some of the Flowers weren’t too bad when they weren’t being twittish, and Jagger-jaws had even done her hair for her on credit or at least promise of help with this year’s projects, because Jagger still struggled with her English), not to mention countless e-friends, most of whom she’d struggle to recognise face-to-face. There was the Arts Centre, which was a decent crowd. She could pop into Leeds or Bradford any time where she could stop being ‘Other’ and be ‘Us’;  but, but – she pulled out her inhaler and took a deep puff – it just wasn’t Trevor.

She slammed the bell for her stop harder than she intended and gave an apologetic half-smile to the other passengers as she rose to get off. No sink spiders on board, something to be glad of. It wouldn’t have been her tongue that spoke the anger of her heart; she really would have kicked them in the balls if they’d done their usual trick of calling her Blackberry.  

3. Gorrup

Musgrave the Brave unsheathed his sword, raised it above his head and advanced across the stone-and-gore-strewn land to where Gorrup and his evil crew were gathered.

‘We meet again, Gorrup. I’ll to face you man-to-man. Or is it man-to-beast?’

Gorrup shook his huge, helmet-horned head.

‘Puny Terran!  Do you dare challenge Gorrup? Do you think you are capable of bringing down a true Anuran? Do you seek revenge for those of your ilk who thought the same and paid the price for it? Do you wish to join them in the ground, where their shattered bones are rotting?’ Gorrup snarled. ‘Yes, Musgrave the man-mouse, yes, we will fight, man-to-man, big beast-to-little beast, we will fight and you will die, as all before you have done.’

Musgrave looked around to where his faithful followers, those who had survived, were standing at the edge of the forest through which they had just travelled. Goodfellows all, stout and true - Big Biggin and his younger brother Little Biggin, Swinin, Yocken and Kellet, Brownbear as tall and gruff as his namesake, aye, and the ghosts of  Hanlith, Langcliffe, Holden and Feizor, and the countless others, men, women and children, felled by Gorrup’s rapacious appetite for brutality and Meugher the Magician’s treachery. Good, honest men. Musgrave felt sick at the thought that he had led these -  his few, his band of brothers -  into this trap, that he, who had for so long sought to keep the last lingering flame of resistance alive, should have brought them to this evil place where they would surely perish.

‘Man-to-Man, Gorrup, this fight is mine and mine alone,’ said Musgrave. ‘My men have had no part in our quarrel. You must promise to let them go, whatever happens here today, whoever wins.’

Gorrup threw back his head and let out a roar of laughter that pierced the air around them and sent a flock of crows skywards from the nearby trees.

‘Fool! And even if I gave my promise, will you be here to see me keep it? Will you…Rowan – Holly’s here…’

Rowan sighed and looked at the last few lines on the screen in front of him.  He had the whole death scene word for word, had carried around in his head for three days now, safely tucked away from the onslaught of GCSE results and A level subjects-to-be-taken and the whole going-on-to-the-sixth-form  operation and looking after Miss Dickson’s poohs. All he wanted was to get it all done and dusted before term started and here was Holly turning up – he looked at the time showing in the corner of the PC  - almost exactly to the minute that he had asked her to. 

Damn.

‘Hi, Hol,’ he shouted to the open doorway behind him. ‘I’ll be down in a sec, just finishing off here.  Can you make her a drink, please, Mum? I won’t be long.’

Time really was being curiously elastic at the moment, though Rowan, stretching out for all the boring mundane stuff and py-onging back in to make a few hours pass in minutes when he was writing.  It probably didn’t help, he had admit, that half the time he sat in front of the screen was spent on reading the book reviews in his head – ‘brilliant! Hard to believe that this author has just turned sixteen’. ‘A marvellous first attempt from a rising literary star.’ ‘An action-packed read, deep and incisive in its understanding of the human condition.’ Shame really that he had to get the book finished before he could get the plaudits; it didn’t matter about the brickbats, he’d no intention of reading them anyway, real or imagined.

He had to admit the book would be better if he didn’t have as good a relationship with names in fiction as he did in real life – basically none. He couldn’t really people an all-action fantasy thriller with what’s-his-face and whatsit and you-know-who-I-mean and buggsie and thingy. He’d become aware on a trip to Portmeiron a few years earlier that half of the characters from the Lord of the Rings had descended, with a few subtle changes, from the road signs off the A55 and  A487.  He had tried the same trick with place names from the Yorkshire Dales. He’d put them all in straight off the map and then gotten too carried away with the action to get round to the tweaking that would render this a genuine work of fictitious fiction and not a local gazetteer.

All, that is, except for Gorrup; Gorrup was born a couple of years earlier as a typo on the front page of a Year 9 Gorup Survey of Wildlife in Lund Prak and sort of hung around from there. He felt he’d got to know him quite well in some dark tunnel of his mind before pulling him up to the light to play the bad guy. If pushed, Rowan would have to admit that he even occasionally dreamt about him, but in his dreams, Gorrup felt a lot more human than he’d allowed him to be in the real world of his imagination.  To dehumanise him, Rowan turned him into a Chelonian, complete with spiky shell and slit lips, but this Gorrup rapidly headed for extinction after Rowan discovered that the Dr Who writers had got there first. It was a smallish step from there to resurrect him as a toad – a stony, seven-foot high, bipedal toad with tusky warts round his mouth and skin you sharpen knives on, but Anuran he became and Anuran he stayed.  Rowan wasn’t going to go through any more rebranding of his anti-hero. He felt sure you couldn’t actually copyright biological classifications.

As the book progressed, it had also struck him that, brilliant though his imagination was with other species, he was struggling with his own kind. Few as his band of brothers were, there were even fewer sisters. Sisterless himself (well, Linden did do some weird things with his hair and occasionally had worn make-up, but that was more to do with acute bouts of thespianism than any gender identity crisis) and still being just half-an-item even though he’d turned sixteen,  his imagination struggled with the fairer sex in more ways than one.  

He had a heroine or two lined up, brought down from a road-map of Scotland; it couldn’t really get much better than Lynn of Lorne, could it?  But no matter how they started out, whether flame-haired Celtic she-warrior or delicate but deadly English rose, she always ended up dark-eyed, long-limbed and slender, a lot, in fact, like Holly, who was Just a Good Mate.

Rowan sighed as he closed the ‘book’ file and e-mailed it to himself.  He didn’t trust either the back-up on his PC or his drop-box. Apart from anything else, he hadn’t had time to sort it out properly after the last file-switch.  The PC was new(ish), which meant he’d had it for eighteen months, long enough really to sort out the back-up properly, too short in the greater scheme of things for basic house-keeping.  It was a machine, wasn’t it?  Machines worked for him, sometimes without him even trying.  He trusted ‘book’ to Cyberia, the ever-more-efficient goddess of cyberspace. She would carry it for safe-keeping up into the clouds and he could only hope that if she ever asked for a sacrifice, she wouldn’t be tempted by something just called ‘book’ instead of ‘my novel’.

He switched off and headed downstairs, wondering if he should push his luck and ask for a hybrid tablet for Christmas.  He knew things had been a bit tight lately, with Dad having to re-apply for his job on a zero-hours contract, but Linden had finished his course now and, they’d heard on Friday, had been one of the lucky ones in the post-grad jobs lottery.  His elder brother was now Earning, also known as paying-back-your-student-loan, or at least would be by the end of September, so maybe the family finances just might come together by Christmas. 

‘Hi, Hol, like the hair. Got here okay then?’

Holly looked up at him, freshly-made cup of tea in her hand, holding back the sarky replies she had in stock for anything ID’d as Stupid Question. No, I was kidnapped by a bunch of Somali pirates and. .., ...oh, forget it. It’s Rowan, looking more Hamletty every time I see him,  and he doesn’t do small talk, just stating-the-obvious for something to say.

‘Fine, thanks.  The bus was a bit full for a Monday and they seem to have changed the timetable, I’d been expecting more buses than there actually were.’

‘Sunday services today,’ said Mrs Selby, who was finishing off a wipe-the-kitchen-sink episode, taking longer about it than strictly necessary, but she didn’t know Holly all that well and Holly guessed she was undergoing some sort of awkward Suitable Friend test. From what she knew of Rowan and seen of his parents – just the usual quick exchanges at waterholes like parents’ evenings and school do’s -  she suspected  they weren’t the sort to make an issue of a mongrel in the house, even one with freshly plaited cornrows emphasising the coffee-coloured scalp,  definitely not racist, but maybe, just maybe, a little bit house-price-ist, like a lot of people she’d met in the village.  She would be okay staying there as long as she didn’t try to buy the house next door, not really likely as her worldly wealth currently came to £12.50

‘Oh, of course, I’d forgotten it were a bank holiday,’ said Holly, hoping she didn’t sound like a dope-head, not knowing what day it was, but suddenly remembering that Rowan was School as well as Friend, so Yorkshire grammar was de rigeur. And yeah, I do know what that means, living in Yorkshire doesn’t make you illiterate. Anyway, holidays were something that happened to other people and hadn’t Mum gone to work today, a bit later than usual but still in her work togs?  No wonder she hadn’t noticed at the time that the bus passengers were more day-trippy than usual.

‘I thought the village looked a bit full.  We used to live here, you know, but we left when I were five. We were back for just a short time later, but I don’t really remember a right lot about it.’

The look from Mrs Selby said  ‘Really?’ followed up with a more open ‘Yes, I remember now, that’s when were first saw you, wasn’t it?  At the first school?’ There was just the tiniest hint of sympathy there – of course she’d remember the only black face out of a couple of hundred kids, even if it was technically only half black.

‘Yes, that was ages ago really, I was only in reception for a few weeks when we moved and then we returned about four years later, and I started back for another few weeks but me mam had to move again…’ Holly tailed off, feeling that maybe she didn’t really need to talk about changing houses every few weeks like they were pikeys or something.

‘It’s a nice place, has its drawbacks, of course,’ continued Mrs Selby.  ‘We’ve been here for fifteen years and still feel like offcumd’uns, but it is opening out a lot more compared to when we first came.’  She finished the wipe-down and took a seat at the table across from Holly, ‘We were living near Leeds but needed somewhere a bit bigger when Rowan came along, so we thought we’d get somewhere nearer the countryside. Whereabouts did you live? I don’t suppose you’d remember much about it, being so young when you left.’

Holly’s mouth headed for a grimace that was forced into a smile to mask her irritation – why do people really need to know my life story?  Or assume I don’t remember anything before the age of ten? I remember that stuff clearer than yesterday.

‘Yeah, well, we lived with me Nan.  The house wa – er - were right on the road out to the moor. It were a semi, like, but really great views from what I remember of it.’

She wasn’t sure where the conversation was going, but felt that maybe she ought to put something in about her Nan being a resident – birthright, I have a right to be here. It wasn’t like they’d been squatting in a campervan or something.

‘Oh that’s nice,’ said Mrs Selby.  ‘Is your Nan still here?’

‘No, she moved out to Keighley a while back. I don’t know why.’

‘Well, the winters here can be very cruel, especially for the older folk.  Are you still with your Nan?’

‘Nah, she’s got a place of her own.  It’s just me and me mam now, we’ve got a place just off New Road Side, the views aren’t bad there.’

‘You’ll be able to see the trains from your window,’ mum had said. ‘It’ll be just like the Railway Children’ but all I can see from the corner of my bedroom window is the smoke and steam going up the valley during the holidays and at weekends. It’s not like I even got to ride on them, except for just the once. The first Christmas we were back, we took the Santa Special –  Santa scared me shi … scared me into swearing. I kept looking for Dad in the crowd and he just wasn’t there. It was our first Christmas without him – I thought they’d locked him in the coal wagon or some’at.  She’s going to ask me now what’s happened to me Dad. Please, please – don’t ask.

Mrs Selby didn’t ask.  Single-parent families were her bread-and-butter, not to mention jam as well if the Christmas bonus stretched to it. She worked as a lowly paralegal in family law in Halifax and knew just about every variation on the single, double, treble and quadruple parent scenario. She was frankly amazed that there were any nuclear families left.  Though Rowan would have happily confirmed that his parents were equally happily married, he never knew how close his mum was to