Trudi

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

The place looked no more than a ruined graveyard. The broken teeth of headstones sprouted higgledy-piggledy from the turf threatening as though wanting to devour the church walls that scowled above them.

There was no roof. The crumbling masonry resembled shed skin. In the distance, fields dotted with cattle and the odd farmhouse stretched to the horizon or were lost in the murk of the louring skies.

On a pleasant and sunny day, it could have been a spot for a picnic where children might have a good time exploring. Today was not one of those. The weather was dire and threatened to get worse, casting a gloom over everything.

His was the only car there. And why not, he thought? Who would bother to come out today?

Mad dogs and Englishmen, that’s who. Except the noonday sun was nowhere to be seen. He was a tourist and he had to make the most of the time he had. If that made him crazy, well so be it. He’d paid good money to be here so forget the weather, he told himself, and enjoy.

His sensible self looked up at the sky and grunted. ‘Easier said than done!’

Had he ever been on a holiday when the whole time was Camelotesque? Of course not. But holidays were holidays. Take the good with the bad. ‘Suck it up, sunshine,’ he said without the faintest hint of irony.

He turned off the engine. It began to rain. Then came the wind. Outside the torrent came in horizontal and kamikazied against the windscreen. Those trees he could see were bending and tossing as though they might break. He prepared to leave the warmth of the car. ‘Are you mad?’ he grunted.

Today had promised to be a lost cause from the moment he stepped out of his hotel door. Overhead, black clouds hung low and pendulous. He was more than tempted to turn around, go back and spend a profitable day reading in front of a fire in the lounge. A day off with a drink or two and a snooze was tempting. ‘You’ve come this far,’ he told himself.

Finding the place and driving here became a triumph of hope over experience. His despondency increased when he was forced to put on his car lights as he drove along country lanes looking for what his guidebook described as a charming ruin.

It wasn’t. As if to greet his arrival the black clouds above the hotel had followed him. It was too much to hope that it wouldn’t rain and, as he drove into the carpark, it did. After the initial downpour, it settled into a windy and steady drizzle.

So, here he was, and there the charming ruin sat. Unexplored. Unphotographed.

After half an hour he bit the bullet and got out of the car, but not before he wrapped himself in waterproofs, pulled a beanie low over his head and tucked his camera under his arm. ‘Just in case,’ he muttered. Going back without photos would be an admission of failure.

Rain and wind that didn’t seem so bad inside the car, attacked his face with hammers when he got out. He willed himself forward. Rust stained his numbing fingers with the dark smudge of metal flakes as he opened the gate. He wished he’d remembered his gloves. There was a squeak of hinges as it opened.

Beyond the fence a few sodden cattle stood unmoving, backs to a cold wind that felt like iron in his teeth. Straight out of the Arctic, he thought.  His mind drifted to the heat of northerly winds back home. He could use a bit of their heat about now.

It was well into the afternoon. What light there was brooded over a sodden landscape of lengthening shadows. From the time he drove out of the hotel car park, it had been more like a real-life ghost story than a red-letter day for travelling.

But here he was.

And so was Trudi.

He saw her after he’d passed through the gate and was closing it behind him.

Trudi. That was her name. Trudi, not Trudy. The metal tag around her neck spelled it like that. She was ghostly pale, and he almost missed her sitting as she was behind a wall in a kind of hidey-hole, out of the wind. Not huddled like he might expect anyone out there to be but lying flat on her back with her arms out wide as if she welcomed both him and the weather.

He looked down. ‘Hello,’ he said when he saw her. She wore a red liripipe of a thing on her head looking for all the world like one of Santa’s helpers. Whatever it was, she needed that head covering on a day like today. He just wished the long ends were around her neck like a scarf for extra warmth.

She was saturated and glared rather than stared up at him but said nothing. It was impossible to say how long she’d been there, but however long it was she looked in reasonable condition despite the elements.

He bent down and looked her in the eye. She wasn’t shivering like he was. Her fur would have kept her warm, but it couldn’t stop the rain from soaking her.

He picked her up. ‘I used to have someone just like you at home,’ he said.

Her beady eyes didn’t blink.

‘You are a cutie,’ he said.

Her long floppy ears were brown like the soles of her feet and her hands.

Some child might, even now, be grieving for having lost her. He could imagine distraught child and harassed parents searching to no avail for lost Trudi who sheltered in a charming ruined churchyard. He imagined the owner as a little girl. No little boy would own a soft toy bear with a name like Trudi on a tag tied around her neck.

He held the bear in one hand. Taken from the protection of the wall, she was getting wetter, if that was possible.

Water dripped between his fingers and he could feel her soggy fur. He squeezed and she squelched liquid from beneath her skin.

At once his mind was not in that graveyard. It was years ago and thousands of kilometres away in another place where another teddy bear had watched over a child like a guardian angel. ‘I’d like you to have met a friend of mine,’ he said to Trudi. ‘But he was called away to take care of someone I loved.’

Trudi stared up, uncomprehending, silent.

Much as he was tempted, Trudi wasn’t destined for him. They were both a long way from where they should be. Sometime soon his holiday would end, and he’d have to go home. Trudi, he knew, would have to stay here. Someone was missing her. He could identify with that. Someone would, he hoped, come looking for her and rescue her, dry her off, tell her they were sorry they left her behind before warming and drying her by a fire. Life would then go on as it should.

Trudi and he were no more than ships-passing-in-the-night.

He dried her off as best as he could. He straightened her liripipe and wrapped the ends around her neck. ‘There,’ he said, that’s better.’ Trudi was stoic in her silence.

He reached down and tucked her into a niche between the walls, out of the worse of the weather but now in sight of anyone who came through the gate looking for her. She was not like him or the teddy bear he’d owned all those years ago that was now lost to him. He hoped that sometime soon, a child he would never know would push open that rusty gate to find Trudi waiting, wrapped up and more or less out of the weather. Once lost, that little bear would, like a prodigal daughter, be found alive and well.

He closed the gate but before he left he turned and took the camera from under his coat. ‘May I?’ he asked. He thought he saw her nod, a smile on her sewn mouth.

He got in the car and started it up, He glanced back at Trudi in the rear-view mirror and gave her a thumbs up. He could see her staring at him. He felt a tinge of regret when she didn’t respond.

At that moment the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds and Trudi’s milky colour was accentuated by a beam of light that hit the charming ruin.  It came alive and looked for all the world as though the Pearly Gates had opened. In Trudi, Heaven might have found another angel to welcome. Her metal nametag glowed, a pink diamond among the rocks.

Trudi and he would never meet again but he wasn’t abandoning her. On the contrary, one way or another, he was giving her life.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.