Chapter 7

Callum’s drive home is uneventful. 

He knows all the shortcuts and backways that can cut his usual 30-minute drive down to a 20-minute one, and he keeps his music loud so he can ignore anything that isn’t the motorway in front of him, and he soon finds himself in his stupidly posh neighborhood, putting in his security code at the gate before he pulls up to his stupidly posh home. He sits in his car for a moment. It idles—engine silent—before he shuts the music off now that he’s back in a neighborhood where people will call the police over noise pollution. He lingers. There’s always this sort of subtle melancholy that strikes in these moments. 

Callum stares up at his house. It’s a sprawling, two-storey mansion with a small, immaculate front garden. The eastern cyclamens that Matthijs recommended are just starting to bloom, dotting the flower beds with little bursts of light pink and purple amidst the stark white of the snowdrops. His eyes trail over them. He’d wanted to plant them himself. Feel the cool, damp earth between his fingers. Let the smell of it wash over him like he was just a boy again at Nana’s small farm on the outskirts of Pentyrch, the one with a dozen cattle, a family of ducks that lived in the pond, and a pair of old rams. Unbidden, he slips into a memory…

Callum is seven, it is summertime, and he is at Nana’s while Mam and Tad are away on holiday. Callum is seven, it is summertime, and he is holding one of the ducklings that come from the pond on Nana’s farm. She is small, and she is soft, and she is sick, and Nana says it is dying. Callum doesn’t know why Nana calls her an it, but he knows it upsets him. 

“Sometimes,” Nana murmurs, cradling Callum in her lap the same way he cradles the dying duckling to his chest. “Sometimes, fy mach i, even the baby ducks can become sick.” Callum just sobs while he listens to the duckling’s rheumatic, shallow breaths. 

“But I don’t want her to be sick!” Callum wishes he could make her better. Her breathing is so weak, and her little heart is beating so fast inside her little chest. “Why can’t we call Dr. Howell, Nana? He’s an animal doctor!” Tears spill down his cheeks until he tastes the salt of them. Nana just sighs before she presses a kiss to his forehead. 

“Sometimes, fy mach i, even Dr. Howell can’t fix what makes an animal sick. Its own Mam left it. Animals do that when they sense it won’t recover.” Callum listens, and he holds the poor duckling, and Nana holds him until the poor girl stops breathing. 

“... We have to bury her.” Callum carries her to the back garden where the grass grows as tall as he does. Nana brings his trowel. The earth is soft and moist, and it shifts through his fingers. Some of it clings. He digs a small grave for the duckling before they hold a solemn, lonely service. “Her name was Priscilla. She was a really good duck. Her peeping was sweet. I wish she hadn’t gotten sick. I wish her mam didn’t leave her all alone.” Callum sniffles, then pats the small, raised mound of dirt with his hand. Nana brings him back inside and makes him wash his hands. When the tears start again, she doesn’t scoff or scowl the way Tad does. She just offers him a wry smile.

“You’re a very sensitive lad, Callum. Very sweet,” Nana muses. She brushes the tears from his cheeks. She clucks her tongue before she grabs the damp flannel, then wipes away the smudges of dirt on his face. “It’s good that you are. You keep that sweetness, fy mach i,” she murmurs. Callum cuddles up to Nana the rest of the day.

Callum is seven, and he is sweet, and he is sensitive, and he cries when Priscilla the baby duck dies in his hands, and Nana thinks it is good that he cries. Over the next 18 years, it is the rest of the world that slowly teaches him otherwise…