A.S. Robertson
When she holds the tin up to her ear, she could swear that she hears a voice. Not enough to recognise. It is, without doubt, one of the boys there for the season. One of the new friends her brother recruits every summer. Never the same — they seem to outgrow him, all of his games, from one year to the next. And then, buzzing resolves itself. The words are clear.
“Come in, Dan Dare, come in.”
Pa has already hauled Euan away to have the skin off him for wasting the twine on his tin phone. For wasting time. For doing something, anything at all.
Rhona puts the tin to her mouth. Pulls the string as taut as she can.
“Mayday, Digby. Mayday.”
The twine goes slack. The voice doesn’t return. She hears the dull thudding of shoes across the turf as he runs away.
Even in the dark, Euan’s eyes are very blue. Not like some that go grey on a dark day. They are bright, even from beneath his bed.
“Come on, come with me,” she says. She can always talk him out from under. “There are all sorts of nasty things under there. Mice. Beasties.”
He holds on to the bed slats. If she pulls him, those slats would be wrenched out of the frame before he would let go. She doesn’t have the heart or the strength to do that.
“Did you see the frogspawn by the gate?”
There is a silent nod and she tries to think of other things that boys might like. The big barn cat and her latest litter of kittens, he likes them. And there is the chance that the shop might have the latest copy of The Dandy or The Beano. He shakes his head: No, they do not. Some other boy has already been and reported.
She holds him and feels his little boy heart pounding under her hand. They both listen for the door.
When does he stop telling her everything? The year he comes home from university at Christmas with a green scarf instead of the red one that she had packed him off with, the one that she had bought. Rhona tells him that green is a fairy colour and that the fairies will steal him away from her. Just a wind up, the kind he gives her.
But in the summer, it isn’t him that comes home. He doesn’t speak any more. Not the way he had. She goes to his room, sits on the bed, and asks him if he remembers when the men used to come for work. Travelers, he says to call them. Not what their father did. There was the woman with the sad, sad songs, the man with the sea shanties. Even Pa would get out his whistle and play. Euan ran every morning to walk to school with the other boys and she envied the girls’ ponies.
And one morning, when the work was over, he would run out and the barn would be empty. All the children gone. The teacher had said as much.
“You’d stand and cry. You’d cry for days. Do you remember that? Crying for all your little ti — Traveler — friends that had gone away.”
“Because they hadn’t taken me with.”
He was the only child for miles who couldn’t be frightened by the idea of someone taking him away in the night. Of being stolen. Peter Pan was an escape manual to him, the plan for the wa