The Travellers and Other Stories by Carys Davies

was just him and his grandmother at home, and a dark-skinned little girl who was supposed to be his sister but looked nothing like him. None of us knew his story, he kept it locked up inside himself, inside his closed-up little heart, inside the small, bony scaffold of his head.
    I didn’t like him. He had grime under his fingernails and a rude, aggressive manner, and on the one occasion I’d tried to do him a kindness, he’d shown no gratitude whatsoever. I’d found a book of his on the path on my way home one afternoon and, knowing where he lived, I took it to him.
    I could see his place, a shabby little flat over somebody else’s shop, from my house. I could see it in the distance on the other side of the park, beyond the high creosoted fence and the glittering screen of poplars there.
    A short metal staircase led up to a concrete porch and a hollow wooden door with a straight handle. His grandmother answered when I knocked. She was small like Needham and had the same pinched angular features. She was dressed in a droopy flesh-coloured dressing gown with a man’s striped tie for a belt. On her head, beneath a see-through lemon scarf, I could see a few wisps of white hair, soft and flyaway like a baby’s. She looked me up and down, her eyes travelling slowly over my blue school coat, my brown shoes.
    I gave her Needham’s book. She took it without looking at it and carried on looking all over me, at my coat, my legs in their grey school trousers, my shoes. She moistened her lips, as if seeing me had made her hungry. She had the same hard look as Needham but her voice when it came was soft and slow and vague.
    ‘Are you going to wait for him?’
    I had no intention of waiting, of going inside or staying, but she had already turned to lead me in. As I followed her, I could see through the gauzy scarf on her head and the sparse white fluff of her hair that she had the same ridge of bone at the base of her head as he did. Where it made him look stubborn, it made her look fragile, brittle. It looked like a fault, a fissure, a place you could tap and it would crack open and show you what was in there.
    There was no hallway. The door opened immediately into a room which was part kitchen and part bedroom, there were three narrow beds spread with thin nylon sleeping bags against one wall. On the other side of the room stood a gas stove with two burners.
    There was no wardrobe and there were no cupboards, the only place where anything could have been stored was in a little red suitcase which stood all by itself in one corner.
    One door led off the room. Through it I could see a low yellow bath draped with a balding green hand towel, a pattern of glue on the wall behind where tiles had once been. There was no sign of Needham’s dark-skinned little sister. There was a smell of fishpaste and digestive biscuits.
    Without asking if I wanted it, Needham’s grandmother made me a horrible cup of powdered coffee with dried milk. I drank it in silence, and then Needham came in through the door.
    ‘This boy brought your book back,’ said his grandma in the same sweet dreamy voice as before. I wondered if she drank. She smiled at Needham as if she couldn’t see what had happened to his pale face when he saw me in there, hadn’t seen it turn even harder and tighter than usual. I’d never seen him look so mean.
    Needham ignored her and didn’t say a word when I handed him his book. He stood stiffly near the door and watched while I drank the horrible coffee. It tasted of chicory and sand and I wished I hadn’t come. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be away from this strange dirty boy, his odd family, his rude challenging stare. I drank as much of the foul coffee as I could and then I left.
    Needham had never come with us to camp before that summer.
    It was a shock to see him there that morning, waiting on the pavement in front of the park for the coach. It was a shock to see him coming with us, Needham who lived, not in a