The Red Judge (20 page)

Perhaps she doesn't know about it, I thought. Perhaps it's been wiped from her memory. Or perhaps it was a dream, and never really happened. Or perhaps it
did
happen, but in another place and time and she doesn't even know that she was there. Or perhaps she does know somewhere deep inside, but she's so upset that she simply can't bear to mention it.

I wanted to ask her, just to hear what she would say. But my mother talked at me non-stop and I couldn't get a word in edgeways. It was as if she was afraid of what would happen if she stopped. She didn't mention my changed appearance, and I didn't mention it either. I was on my best behaviour, nodding like the perfect house-guest as if fascinated by the things she said.

‘Did we tell you that we're staying at your Fitztalbot grandmother's house?' my mother said. ‘At least we are until your father can make other arrangements. He wants to sell this house because he says it is unlucky. He won't come back to it, not even for a night. He's a deeply superstitious man, although you may never have realised it. Beneath his calm exterior, he's full of feelings and strange fears. He says he's always been uncomfortable living here, and we've never been happy, and he's convinced the house is cursed.'

She shrugged and smiled, as if the whole thing was ridiculous, but what could you do? People make their own curses, I thought. They curse themselves – and
they take their curses with them when they move.

But I didn't get the chance to say so, for suddenly my mother was on her feet, declaring that she had to go and pulling on her coat. She looked round at all the boxes piled up everywhere, and you could see from her face that she was deeply afraid. Her old life was crumbling away, and she was over the abyss and in free-fall –
and I knew how that felt!

What I might have said or done, spurred on by fellow feeling, I'll never know. Maybe I would have given her another chance – shown her the photograph and asked her if there was anything she wanted to tell me – but the phone rang and it was my Fitztalbot father wanting to know how long she'd be.

‘I'm just coming now. Yes, right away. I've got your books – I haven't forgotten them. Of course I've remembered to turn off the lights. See you soon. Goodbye. Yes. Yes. Of course. Love you, too.'

It struck a sad note, that word of love hanging in the air with nothing to cling on to. I looked at my mother, and she looked at me. ‘Your grandmother serves dinner at seven-thirty,' she said. ‘You can have a lift with me if you want to eat.'

Then she turned towards the door and I knew that, never mind the dinner, I was being offered back my old life, no apologies asked for and certainly none given. It wasn't much, but it was all my mother had to give.

I took a deep breath. Swallowed hard. ‘Thanks, but I'm not hungry. I think I'll pass,' I said.

My mother would never know what my refusal cost me – nor what it would have cost if I'd answered
yes
. After she had gone, I went from room to room one final time. A strange silence seemed to follow me around. I ended up in the kitchen again, standing at the table on my own, staring at the empty wine glasses, thinking nothing in particular. Finally I left, banging the front door behind me, knowing that I'd never come back.

I went up to the hospital, which was what I should have done in the first place, to find out about Cary. By the time I got there, however, visiting time was over. I took the lift to Intensive Care, but my sister wasn't there. The main lights were out and the corridors were empty. Occasionally nurses could be seen trailing between beds or sitting at lonely desks. I've no idea how they failed to see a late-night visitor creeping through the shadows, but I went right through the hospital and nobody noticed me.

Finally I found Cary in a private ward, which,
knowing our father, is where I should have looked first. Her name was on the door and I slipped inside. With thick pile carpets, flowers on a plinth, leather armchairs and a telly, it could have been a hotel bedroom. I tiptoed to the bed and looked down at Cary's face against the pillow. Her eyes were closed and a little scrub of hair was growing back. I could see the scar where the light bulb had been glued to her head, but the bulb itself had gone.

The monitors had gone as well, and so had most of the tubes. I remembered what Pawl had said about the fight being Cary's, and hers alone.

‘
Well done
,' I whispered.

Immediately, Cary's eyes opened, as if I'd woken her. She looked at me and neither of us spoke. I knew that she recognised me, even if I scarcely recognised myself. I also knew that, in the morning, she'd tell herself I'd been a ghost, come to say goodbye. She'd think that I had died sometime over Christmas, lost in a blizzard on Plynlimon Mountain. My father would think so too, and even my mother would think it, despite the evidence of her own eyes. She'd convince herself that she'd never really seen me at Swan Hill tonight, but had imagined it. Either that or, like Cary, she'd think I'd been a ghost.

My sister fell back to sleep, her eyes closed again and a little smile around her lips. I dug down in my pocket and pulled out the photograph of our parents on their wedding day, which I propped up by her bed where she'd see it first thing in the morning. Then I left the room, knowing that this was the real reason why I'd come back to Pengwern.

Outside the hospital, with nothing left to keep me
here, I walked back to the railway station. I'd catch the first train out, I decided. Buy a ticket with the remains of Pawl's money, and get as far away as possible.

When I arrived, however, I found the station locked for the night, all the platforms empty and not a hint of a train in sight. Unable to think of anywhere else to go, I squeezed in through a side gate that had been left unpadlocked, and found myself a night's shelter in a boarded-up building at the end of all the platforms, behind a row of advertising hoardings.

The smell that greeted me in there was rank, but it was warmer than outside, and at least I'd be ready to catch the first train in the morning. I pushed my way back into the darkness, looking for a corner to curl up for the night. But the building went back further than I anticipated, and it was darker too. As soon as I dropped the board back over the window, I was lost. I couldn't find any walls. Couldn't find any corners. Couldn't even find the window any more, in order to get back out.

I stumbled through the darkness, but it went on and on. All hopes of finding somewhere that felt safe enough to sleep quickly faded. Sometimes I fell down steps. Sometimes I hit my head. Sometimes I thought I saw lights, but then realised that I hadn't. Sometimes I heard noises too – rumbling noises that I couldn't figure out, and scuffling noises, as if I shared the darkness with rats and mice.

Finally I found myself on a ledge with water running under it. I could hear the sound of pigeons overhead, and make out what definitely looked like lights in the distance. At first I couldn't figure out
what those lights might be but, as I worked my way towards them, I realised that I could see moonlight reflected in the river.

I carried on until I could see stars reflected too, and streetlights and even house lights. It was if I'd stumbled upon a mirror image of the whole town. I stood looking down at it all, realising that I'd somehow worked my way into the underbelly of the railway bridge. The river flowed away beneath me, and the town rose overhead until it reached the spires and castle walls that formed its skyline.

I stayed awake all night, looking at that skyline and the moon above it, caught in a limbo-land between the bridge and the town, and my old life and a new one. I sat on a girder, my legs swinging over the edge, watching the river flowing out of sight, and remembering that day when I'd come up here to spray a zed. Then I'd wished, against all odds, that I could shake off being a Fitztalbot.

And now I had.

I sat there until morning, wondering who I'd like to be instead. The sun rose. The streetlights went off. The moon waned over the castle and morning broke in the sky over the English Bridge. I thought of all the things that had happened to me. Some made sense, but some were still a mystery. There were questions that I couldn't answer, and didn't know if I ever would.

But one thing was for certain.

There really
was
a red judge's court, I thought. And I really
was
on trial for my life. I didn't just imagine it in some state of crazed exhaustion. I really did cross swords with the Red Judge of Plynlimon. And I really
did defeat him.
At least for now
.

I shivered at the thought of him out there still, maybe plotting his revenge, maybe looking for another victim. But that was someone else's story, not mine. The time had come to put the past aside. My life was on the turn. It was changing, like the moon over the castle, passing from one phase to the next.

Finally I pulled my coat around me, and struggled to my feet. It was time to go. I should have felt excited, but all I felt was sad and lonely. People passed beneath me on the river path, never looking up – cyclists on their way to work and early-morning walkers with their dogs, all with lives to live and homes to go to.

But what did I have?

In the end, scarcely knowing what I was doing, I drew myself a map. I drew it inside my head because I didn't have a pen, and put Plynlimon at the top and the sea at the bottom, with the two rivers flowing into it – the Afon Gwy and the Sabrina Fludde. Then, as if the rivers marked the boundaries of my memory, I drew in my whole journey.

Everything was on it, from Swan Hill to Clockvine House, Plynlimon Mountain to the Speech House Hotel. And there were people on it too. Grace and Pawl. Cary and my mother. The red judge as himself, and in the guise of Dr Katterfelto. And Gilda was there, even though she wasn't real. And the Fitztalbots were there too, even though I'd rather not remember them. And the boy bishop was there, and the seven strange sisters who'd healed me by turning scummy river water into wine. And the man in Llewellyn's Cave was there – the one I'd thought must be a
pilgrim, but who could have been anyone, even Prince Llewellyn himself.

All of them were there, and the creatures too. I drew in the
C
ŵ
n y Wbir
because, as with the Fitztalbots, my story wasn't complete without them. And I drew in Harri and Mari in memory of a friendship that I swore I'd never forget.

Finally the map was finished. My whole story, mapped out in my head so that I'd never forget it, whatever happened next. And that's the story I'm telling you now. Maybe it's getting rusty and its finer details are beginning to fade. But everything that matters is still there. And I'm there too – drawn in with the rest of them because the map is big enough for everything.

You can even find my name on it, if you know where to look. Not my old one, Zachary Fitztalbot, because that boy has gone, and so has that old life. But the name I chose that morning, standing on the girders facing daybreak over Pengwern.

Phaze II
– spelt with a zed.

Pauline Fisk grew up in London, but has spent most of her life in Shropshire. She started making up stories for her friends and neighbours at the age of three and made her big career decision to become a professional writer at the age of nine. She has five grown-up children, an architect husband and a dog. She loves living in Shropshire, which she thinks is the most beautiful county in England, with some of the most interesting legends and history.

Pauline Fisk wrote
The Red Judge
as a companion novel to
Sabrina Fludde
, drawing on the legends, history and modern life of two of Plynlimon Mountain's great rivers, the Severn and the Wye.

‘
The Red Judge
grew out of my fascination with legends and history,' says Pauline, ‘and with the way that the past, the present and the future connect. It's a story about homelessness, and what it means to belong, and about discovering a rootedness that comes from within oneself. It's also a mystery about a magic mountain and its secrets and it's about the age-old battle between good and evil.'

www.bloomsbury.com/paulinefisk

SABRINA FLUDDE

Coming soon
MAD DOG MOONLIGHT

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in 2005

This electronic edition published in December 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com

Copyright © 2005 Pauline Fisk

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978-1-4088-5248-4

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