The Travellers and Other Stories by Carys Davies Page A

house, but in a shabby little flat over someone else’s shop, whose sister looked nothing like him. Needham who wore on his feet black elasticated plimsoles instead of shoes. Needham who always wore the same stale pair of washed-out grey shorts, whose green scout’s shirt looked like something he’d made himself, whose grandma drank and drifted about in an ancient dressing gown in the middle of the day.
    The morning we left for the Lakes he was there before anyone, standing on his own waiting for the coach. He was wearing his usual clothes: the plimsoles, the washed-out shorts, his peculiar home-made scout’s shirt. The thin navy mac he sometimes wore to school hung from his hand. The only thing that was different about him was that he looked, in an anxious sort of way, rather happy. He shifted about excitedly on the thin rubber soles of his plimsoles, craning his neck to see if the coach was coming yet.
    He was smiling, and he had brought with him the most extraordinary bag.
    It was the little red suitcase I had seen in the corner of his grandmother’s flat, made out of molded plastic with a metal lock beneath a long handle. It was the most completely unsuitable thing, and drew attention to itself almost monstrously as it sat there upright on the pavement in the place where the rest of us had heaped our drab green and brown rucksacks.
    His blue sleeping bag was all right. There was nothing really wrong with that, it was only rather thin and grubby. He’d tied it round with string and it did not really stand out from the others in the pile. I recognised it from my visit to his home.
    But the suitcase shocked me. It was like a cheap version of something my mother might use, a coarse copy of the leather week-end case she used for short trips away with my father, the sort of case that had a shiny fabric lining and a ruched pocket for brushes and combs and an oblong mirror set into the lid. I’d watched my mother pack hers on several occasions. I’d watched her take her cosmetics out of the bathroom cabinet—her Helena Rubinstein Washing Grains, her Revlon moisturiser, the round cake of Roger & Gallet soap in its green opaque box. I’d watched her zip them into her sponge bag and put the bag in the suitcase with her nightie, her underwear, her Carmen rollers. I’d seen her turn the small, flat key in the lock beneath the handle, and carry it down to the car.
    Some of the boys laughed openly at Needham’s red suitcase.
    ‘Nice bag, Needham,’ said Qualtrone.
    But Needham raised his pointed chin and ignored him, he looked steadily at the approaching coach as if all he was thinking about were mountains and rivers and fires, and all the things we were going to be doing in the Lakes, all the things he’d heard us talk about over the years but had never yet experienced for himself. Mr. Persian arrived then and we loaded everything on, and the others seemed to forget about the little plastic case.
    It disturbed me though, this woman’s bag of Needham’s, with its long handle and its lock, and its suggestion of lace and stockings and perfumed soap.
    We all thought of Mr. Persian as an old man, but I see now, when I conjure again his broad open face, that he was young.
    He had dark, almost black hair, which he wore smoothed with Brylcreem close to his scalp, and parted in a clean white line on the left side. He was short and powerful, always very smart and neat in his uniform.
    A scout is clean.
    He reminded us often of this and it had always been a mystery to me how he could tolerate someone as slovenly and ill-kempt as Needham when he was himself so careful about his appearance and ours. Only Mr. Persian’s fingernails let him down—he was ashamed of them, I think—they were chewed to the quick and didn’t belong to the rest of him. They were the hands of another man and he hid them away whenever he could in the pockets of his shorts.
    We all liked him very much. We liked him better than our teachers, who were