Owen walked the dog down the lane and turned towards the Norman castle. It was very quiet there, befitting Christmas eve. The Teifi gorge around two sides of the ruin was invisible, making its threat of a blind descent into the underworld stronger than ever. The dog was nervous. Usually it loved the lane, its smells. In pitch black Owen was about to turn back when, atop one of the castle’s walls, he saw a figure, like a lonely guard defending his prince’s grounds centuries after his master’s death. He looked again and the solitary warrior had vanished. He and the dog both slunk home with their tails between their legs, unsettled.
‘I thought I saw someone,’ he told Cerys.
‘That’s that Christmas G and T for you,’ she scoffed.
Cerys was the necessary solid ground beneath his wings, but a side effect was her lack of imagination. A shame that.
/
Robert pushed the wheelchair closer to the table. It was a steel contraption, a sort of jail really. ‘OK son?’ His lad, Stuart, thirty, tiny, malformed, head tilted to one side, drool seeping from his mouth, made excited noises. He had no speech, his brain was damaged from birth, but Stuart somehow knew it was a special day. Perhaps it was the cooking smells coming from the kitchen.
‘Turkey, lashings of it, gravy, roast spuds, sprouts. Like that, don’t you Stu? And presents after from the tree. I’ve got yours nicely wrapped. One for your mam too.’ He turned to his wife, grey-haired, sitting beside Stuart. ‘It’s just something small, Helen.’
He picked up the box of crackers. ‘What say we pull one before the meal?’ He and Helen tugged and she got the prize, a plastic whistle. She blew it and Stuart chortled. Then he put the paper hat from the cracker on Stuart’s head. His son made a laughing sound.
A knock came at the front door. Robert shuffled slowly into the hall in his carpet slippers, his arthritic knees painful. It was his next door neighbour.
‘How’s it going, Rob? Me and Cerys were wondering if you’d like to pop in and share a glass?’
‘That’s nice of you. Now?’
‘Fine. Lead the way.’
‘Aye.’ Robert hobbled from the room with a stick.
At the sitting room door, Owen looked back at the table covered with a cleanish table cloth. Three empty plates lay on it between the three knives and forks.
Owen closed the front door and followed his limping neighbour along the drive. Robert had cried when his disabled son had died, but when he’d lost Helen a few months ago he’d been stoical.
He saw again the set table, no food on it. Robert, he thought, can’t let go of his family. Or maybe they won’t let go of him? The dead in these out of the way parts stand guard around your home while you slumber, don’t they? For an hour, anyway, he and Cerys could distract him.
