The Runaway Read online

  THE RUNAWAY

  “Claire Wong’s beautifully crafted debut both moved me and brought to life once again the power of storytelling.”

  Susan Lewis, Sunday Times bestselling author

  Text copyright © 2017 Claire Wong

  This edition copyright © 2017 Lion Hudson

  The right of Claire Wong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Lion Fiction

  an imprint of

  Lion Hudson plc

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road

  Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com/fiction

  ISBN 978 1 78264 242 8

  e-ISBN 978 1 78264 243 5

  First edition 2017

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  to my grandma,

  for teaching me the magic of stories

  and the beauty of words

  Contents

  Part One: Key

  Chapter One

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Part Two: Rose

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Part Three: Book

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Reading Group Questions and an Author Interview

  Acknowledgments

  Huge thanks to Jess Tinker, who has been brilliant to work with during this whole process, to Julie Frederick for her editorial wisdom and insights, and to everyone at Lion Fiction.

  Thank you to my mum for proofreading early drafts, to my dad for sharing his wealth of knowledge about Welsh rural communities, and to Emma for being the first person to read The Runaway all the way through!

  There are two friends without whom this book would probably still be hiding on my laptop: thank you to Hugh for your well-timed encouragement, and to Lois for pointing me in the right direction. And thank you to Mari for letting me ask Welsh language questions.

  Thank you to all the friends, family, and colleagues who have been so enthusiastic about this project. Writing can be a solitary pursuit, but it’s great to share this with you.

  And finally, thank you to Dave for your encouragement and constant optimism.

  Part One:

  Key

  Chapter One

  Rhiannon

  I never meant for this to happen.

  I could still turn back before I pass the last houses and really have to commit to this. I could make the walk home along Church Road and onto Heol-y-Nant, where the window ledges are bright with marigolds at this time of year. But this is not how it was supposed to be.

  I’d expected a shout to follow me down the road. I scripted the whole apology, and prepared how I would react on receiving it. I’d pictured it so perfectly: Aunty Di running after me, my cousins hugging me so that we look like a real family. People would have stopped what they were doing and turned to watch as we made our way back through the village. The twitch of net curtains would have betrayed the nosiness of our elderly neighbours. But I would have smiled reassuringly to all the families I know on these roads, as if to say don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere after all, and I would have seen the relief in their eyes. I’d be known after today as “Rhiannon, who we almost lost forever”. And I would have been far too gracious and sensitive to tell them it should be “whom”.

  I would have let them persuade me to come home, if anyone had followed me. But nobody came. Instead, here I am, already at the edge of the village, with Dyrys Wood spread out across the hills before me.

  I don’t understand how no one has noticed, but I won’t go back, not after everything that has happened. I grit my teeth and walk on. The road slopes down towards the farmhouse where the Evanses live, and after that the river snakes southward, and the green valley rises back up, and then there’s nothing but Dyrys Wood as far as the eye can see. If we’d grown up in another age, we’d have probably been allowed to play there as children, but these days no one thinks they are safe, and Aunty Di worries more than anyone I’ve ever met – not that she would ever admit it. So of course I was never allowed there without an adult to walk with me and call me back to the path when I ran off. Maybe that is why I find myself heading straight for the woods now.

  Shifting the shoulder straps of my rucksack, which is already uncomfortable, I keep walking down the road, though it is becoming more of a muddy track now, and my feet are sinking deeper with every step. Not many cars come this way – just the occasional farm vehicle or some lost hikers looking for their campsite. Most turn back before the bridge anyway, because it’s so narrow. People like to say that our village, Llandymna, was never built for an age like this: nothing seems to cope well with cars or technology round here. Visitors call it quaint; everyone at school calls it boring.

  I stop on the bridge for a moment and look around the valley. It’s peaceful here. The only sounds are birdsong and farm animals in the distance. I breathe in the clear air deeply and lean forward over the low wall. Blood rushes to my head as I tilt my weight down to get a better look at the waters ambling below. They say the basin this river runs through was first hewn out by ice millions of years ago, carved from its slow crawl across our land. The stones that make this bridge might be that old. They might remember the years when everything was frozen white, before sheep and humans and green grass came to cover the slopes.

  Thinking about the oldness of everything calms me, and suddenly this afternoon’s row with my aunt seems less important. Not so unimportant that I will forget it, mind. She treats me like a child, and it’s time she learned to take my threats seriously. If I go back, she will think I didn’t mean it when I warned her I’d run away from home. I thought I meant it at the time, but standing here on the bridge I feel so unprepared for whatever follows next that I wonder how sincere I really was. I will never let anyone else ask that question, though. I have made up my mind: I am never going back.

  I might still be visible from the village here. Someone walking down the west side of Llandymna, by the White Lion pub, could see me if they looked out towards the hills. I need to get out of sight if I’m to properly disappear. The dark green of Dyrys Wood stretches, rich and inviting, up to the horizon, and I am drawn to it.

  I run up to the forest that unfolds ahead, climbing over the stile in the low fence that keeps sheep from straying there, passing through the gateway of those first few tree trunks, and overhead the sky is suddenly gone. The forest is cool, the air rich with the smell of earth.

  There’s a rough pathway, which I follow between the trees. Everyone knows that Dyrys Wood stretches for miles ahead and that you can walk and walk for ages here
, and that’s even if you manage not to get lost from the path. Even its name, Dyrys, means something wild and entangling. I picture briers and thorns gathering around me, like the enchanted forest in Sleeping Beauty. Not that I look like anything out of a fairy tale, with my rucksack on my shoulders, and my phone sticking out of the pocket of my jeans. I have always loved fairy tales, even now at the age when I am supposed to be too grown up and cynical for them. I love how the characters get to be heroes, no matter what they are working with: whether it’s because they are clever, or kind, or brave, things work out for them. Whereas in real life, you can be as clever or brave as you like, and you might still live with a guardian who sees you as nothing but a nuisance and punishes you every time you disagree with her. Or you might be stuck in a tiny, inward-looking village where people gossip and interfere and your so-called friends are fickle with their support, and life never hands you the adventure or rewards that you hear about in stories.

  I put my hand to my throat, and find the familiar shape of the pendant I always wear – a chain with three charms on it: a key, a rose, and a book. Each one is an emblem from a fairy tale. I wear it because it feels like carrying a little bit of another world, a better world, with me wherever I go.

  The path through the wood hasn’t been cleared for some time, and thorny stems have crept out to tear at my clothes. It seems to make little difference whether I walk along the path or over the forest floor, so I turn away from the narrow road and choose my own route. A startled blackbird flies away with a trilling alarm call.

  My pocket buzzes. I take out my phone and see it’s Aunty Di calling. She must have finally realized I have gone. This is quite slow to start worrying, by her standards. I know what she’ll say. I can already imagine her voice, telling me off for making such a fuss, demanding I come home at once. As I stare at the screen, I know that if I answer this call I will inevitably end up going back. And if I ignore it? Others will worry too. They will finally pay for how they treated me. They will no longer be able to laugh at me, or ignore me. All the peacefulness I felt standing on the bridge minutes ago ebbs away and I am only angry now as I think of the people I have just left behind. I want them to miss me. I won’t let them mock me by going back and being accused of melodramatic empty threats. I let the phone keep ringing.

  llandymna

  Tom Davies knows his sergeant would advise against this, but he knocks on the next door all the same. Either you are on duty, or you are not. Taking on unofficial search parties confuses things: it blurs the boundaries, which a young police officer at the start of his career cannot afford to do. But Diana seems worried. It can do no harm for him to ask some questions this afternoon. Besides, it is a quiet day in the village; in Llandymna, Tom reflects, every day is a quiet day.

  It takes a while for this door to be answered, but eventually it opens, and a small white-haired woman invites him inside. Maebh O’Donnell has wrapped herself in a plaid shawl though it is the height of summer, for Llandymna’s old stone cottages never really lose the chill that clings to their walls. Tom has to duck under the doorway as he enters the house. He always feels just a little too tall and gangly to be properly comfortable in his surroundings. Maebh offers him a cup of tea, which he declines. She returns to her armchair by the fireplace, lowering herself with knees that groan in protest at the strain put on them. Movement is something Maebh often views as an unnecessary luxury these days.

  “Well then, what can I do for you, Thomas Davies?” she asks in the song-like Irish accent she has never lost, though she has spent most of her life in this little village on the side of a hill in Wales. Her eyes are sharp and searching, and Tom wonders if she already guesses the answer to her own question. She has known him since he was a child, and even though Tom has finished his two-year probation with the police force now, he knows Maebh still sees the boy who once crashed his bike, stabilizers and all, into her doorstep.

  “I came to ask if you have seen Rhiannon today.”

  Maebh sits back slowly and clicks her teeth. “She is missing, then?”

  “She isn’t at home, and Diana is worrying. I hoped she’d be here.”

  “Rhiannon hasn’t been to visit me lately. I take it there’s been another row, then?”

  “You know Diana. She isn’t going to admit that in front of me,” Tom answers, and Maebh nods. Diana is a self-possessed woman with a lot of influence in the village, but her relationship with her niece shows cracks in her polished image. Nobody would dare suggest that she actually resents caring for her late sister’s daughter, but Rhiannon’s behaviour gives gossips something to chew on as they imagine what shouts and insults must be exchanged in that house.

  “But if they have argued,” Tom continues, “Rhiannon may have just gone to get some space, and she could be back home in an hour or two.”

  “And yet here you are, on your day off, asking me if I’ve seen her, and wearing that look of concern on your face.”

  Tom sighs. Maebh has a particular way of seeing through people with her steely blue eyes, and getting to the hidden heart of a matter with a single incisive comment.

  “You know what she can be like,” he replies. “She’s a teenager with a fiery temper, and apparently a grudge to carry against almost everyone she knows. I don’t know what she might do to prove a point.”

  “I imagine she’d do a great deal,” Maebh muses. “I believe she’s threatened to run away from home before now?”

  “There wasn’t much she didn’t threaten at the school fundraiser last week.”

  “Ay, I heard about that.”

  “Could she be avoiding everyone out of embarrassment over that? She did verbally abuse most of the people there, after all. And significantly damaged one of the school’s display cabinets. I had to attend the scene after that, in an official capacity. The headteacher considered pressing charges for vandalism.”

  Maebh barks out a laugh. “As if that would help! Besides, I can’t say I really blame her.”

  Tom does not react to this last part. He has grown used to the fact that, at unexpected moments, Maebh will utter a sudden attack on the people of the village. He does not know why exactly, and nothing has ever come of it. When he compares her to Rhiannon, he wonders if there might not be the same rebellious streak in both of them.

  “Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  “She never spoke to me of planning to go somewhere, if that’s what you mean, and she talked to me about most things. I have enjoyed her visits. We always have so much to talk about, she and I. Rhiannon understands the importance of stories, and you know how I do like storytelling!”

  Maebh speaks lightly, but her bony fingers twist themselves up in the folds of her shawl, as if another, deeper worry is gnawing its way to the surface.

  Rhiannon

  If I’d been born into this community a thousand years ago, they would probably have decided I was a changeling. Even when you account for the fact that I was brought up by my aunt, even when you consider my mother’s wild spirit, it would still be easier to explain away my inability to fit in here by saying the fairies swapped me for the real Rhiannon early on, during that stage when all babies look pretty much the same, even if no one will admit it. We could have imagined her: the real Rhiannon, out there somewhere, dutifully fitting in with her surroundings, doing her homework on time and asking no difficult questions while I, the imposter, use my fairy-magic to dream much too dangerously, and to see far too much of what is rotten in the very fabric of the village, while others go on blindly.

  Nobody believes in changelings any more, though we do still like to be able to explain things simply. I wonder if knowing my mother better would explain me.

  I like to think she had something of the fey spirit in her. When people who remember her better than I do talk of her, she is always described as headstrong and irresponsible, which, if you think about it, are just different word
s for untameable. The wind is untameable, and so are rivers, and there is something poetic in that. But in my mother, I am told, there was more trouble than poetry.

  She was Aunty Di’s sister. She loved being outdoors, and never walked anywhere if she could run or skip, even after she outgrew the age when people allow you such indulgences. I like to picture her racing along the hedge-lined track to the church on Sundays, with Diana walking all the slower and more stately to indicate that she was not participating in this behaviour. Di worries about what people think. She wants me to worry too. “Brush your hair, Rhiannon. Don’t you know you’ll look a state to your school friends if you go like that?” I don’t think my mother spent hours untangling and rearranging her chestnut curls, even after she met my father.

  I forgot where I was for a moment there. I do that sometimes. Normally, it’s hard to come back to the real world when my thoughts have taken me away, but today the fresh air and the birdsong make a more refreshing setting than my tiny bedroom. I am sitting in a clearing in the forest. Opposite me, two trees grow a few paces from one another and a dead branch has come to stretch from one to the other, caught in the boughs. I wonder if I could use them to build a shelter. If I had some kind of blanket, I would hang it over the branch, like a child’s den.

  Going home is out of the question, obviously, but I don’t exactly know what I’m going to do instead. I didn’t technically plan or pack for this outcome. As I left, I grabbed the bag on the landing because I figured that if you storm out without taking anything with you, you’re just an angry person going for a walk; but if you’re carrying some kind of luggage, then you’re someone who is leaving for good. It’s my old camping bag – not the full-size one with all the really useful stuff, but the smaller one Diana pulled out of the loft, saying that since I never did get around to doing the Duke of Edinburgh award with the rest of my class, we would have to get rid of all this clutter. It was taking up valuable space for my cousins’ finger paintings or something, and besides, no one from Llandymna would be mad enough to choose to go camping. The farmers around here tend not to take holidays: they can’t afford to leave their animals alone, and those who can leave for a week in the summer usually make the three-hour drive to the coast for a picnic where everything tastes of sand. Mind you, Hannah Bromley from my English lit class went to the Caribbean with her parents last summer, and she came back all tanned and told the rest of us we hadn’t seen real beaches if we’d never been to the Bahamas.