“Stay here, I’ll try to call Mum.”
The child watched the man pull out his phone and amble off across the near-empty car park. Eventually the man put the phone to his ear, and started talking periodically, though he was so far away now that what he said was indistinct. The boy looked around the car park; the two other sedans on the far side had been there since they arrived, their windshields collecting autumn leaves from the chestnut trees above them. He jumped down from the stone wall he had been sitting on, rubbing where the big hard rocks had dug into his backside, and ambled around in circles until he found himself at the foot of the path to the lookout. Very quickly, he glanced up the path, then ran out into the car park, waving at the man and pointing up the path. The man seemed not to pay him any attention, and the child slowly walked away, always looking at the man, until he reached the path. He paused, then began to run.
The path was much darker than he expected it to be, the tall oaks on either side obscuring what was left of the watery sun. He quickly gained a stitch and had to slow to a walk. With one hand on his tummy, and his eyes half down at the leaf-covered path, he began to sing:
“Black is the colour of my true love’s hair / Her lips are something rosy fair.”
And he kept singing those two lines over and over between deep in-breaths, until he saw the path ahead of him lightening, and soon he emerged onto the lookout.
There were only two other people there, and they had their backs to him. Running up to the railing, he gazed down into the valley from the top of the sharp precipice. The rocks were the same kind which had been used to build the stone wall at the car park. They fell away down into the green valley, and the only thing to interrupt the green was the quite small collection of houses far below him. Otherwise it was just varying shades of green out across the valley, and even further away rising up into yet more mountains. The top of the mountains were white – snow, he thought, not realising that it was not even winter yet. Seeing the clouds close in and finally obscure the last bit of blue in the sky, he began to sing again: “Black is the colour of my true love’s hair / Her lips are something rosy fair. / The prettiest face”—
“That’s a nice voice you’ve got, my boy.”
He turned, without much surprise. One of the other people on the lookout, a man, had made his way over from the far railing and was now standing close by, looking down at him. “Thank you,” the boy said.
“Who taught you that song?”
“John did.”
The man smiled. “Who’s John?” The boy bowed his head. “Is John your brother?”
“No.”
“Is he a friend?”
“No.”
“Who is he?”
The boy looked down, and began picking some skin from the bed of a nail.
“What’s your name, my son?”
The boy did not look at him. “Charlie.”
“Charlie, that’s a lovely name. Nice to meet you Charlie!” The man bent down, and offered the boy a handshake. The boy looked at him somewhat askance, then extended his left hand. The man chuckled, twisting his hand around to shake the boy’s. Then he stood up. “Martha!” he called over his shoulder. “Come and meet Charlie.”
The woman with whom he had been looking out into the valley walked slowly over to them. She was larger than he was, and looked older. “Hello Charlie,” she said with a smile.
“Hello.” The skin of his nailbed was starting to annoy him.
“I heard you singing earlier,” she said. “You do have a lovely voice.”
She looked at him, as if expecting a ‘Thank you’ or some such. Instead the boy just looked up at her sceptically, rubbing his nailbed.
The man and woman exchanged a look and glanced over at the path, but said nothing. A bird cried far down in the valley – an eagle perhaps. Eventually the man spoke. “How long have you been singing for, Charlie?”
The boy looked up at him without raising his head. “I don’t know.”
The man laughed. “You don’t know?” Silence. “Well, I suppose that must mean that you started when you were very young!” Then, “I was a singer too, when I was a boy. In fact, I won a prize at school for my singing.” He bent down so that Charlie could not avoid looking at him, and smiled, with a glint in his eye. “But I still couldn’t sing as well as you can.”
The child suddenly looked up, and saw the man’s face properly. He saw the glinting eyes and smile, but now for the first time he could also see a flat, red nose and dark grains in the creases of his face. There was something strange about his teeth – the top ones were well-aligned but the bottom ones were all crowded and misshapen. And all of a sudden, the man began to sing:
“Black is the colour of my true love’s hair / Her lips are something rosy fair. / The prettiest face and the daintiest hands, / I love the grass whereon she stands.”
Seeing the change in expression which had come over the boy’s face, the man began to laugh. The laugh grew and grew as he stood up, growing to the point that it seemed to roll down from the lookout and echo all the way around the valley. The boy began to back away, before raising a long cry of “Heeeeeelp!” and turning to run back down towards the car park.
He collided with someone a way down the path, someone who put their arms around him.
“Charlie? Charlie, what is it?”
He must have finished phoning the woman, the boy thought.
“Charlie? Are you OK?”
The boy pointed up the way he had come. The man looked at the boy, then up the path, then back, before grabbing the boy’s hand and striding up towards the lookout.
When the man got to the lookout, he saw a couple, both of them quite large, and both walking towards him with apologetic looks on their faces.
“We’re very sorry,” the fat man said with a nervous laugh. “We didn’t mean to scare young Charlie.”
“We were only singing to him,” the woman said, “though it sure didn’t sound as nice as his singing.”
Both of them laughed nervously, and the man looked at them without smiling, before turning to the child whose hand he still held. “Did they scare you, Charlie?”
The young boy, standing half behind the leg of the man, nodded, keeping a wary eye on the couple, who laughed again.
“Sorry about that,” the man said, “He can be a real scaredy-cat when he wants to.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” the woman said. “It shows he’s got good stranger danger. That’s how we raised our kids of course, isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” the fat man said. “And Charlie’s learnt it well.” He bent down once again, and Charlie did not retreat this time, though he was still wary-eyed. The fat man said nothing to Charlie, but eventually got up, and extended a hand to the other man with a smile. “We’re kindred spirits, him and I. Charles Holzheim. This is my wife, Martha.”
The man shook a cautious hand with the both of them. “John Smith.”
“Ah!” the fat man said, nearly laughing. Then, “Actually, we asked young Charlie who had taught him ‘Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’, and he said, ‘John’.”
The man’s faint smile began to fade. “I sing it from time to time.”
The woman glanced sideways at her husband, who stuttered. “Oh. Well, it’s a lovely song. I learnt it at school. Many a moon ago, of course.” He gave another laugh, but nowhere near as hearty as the first – as if he had tried to make this one grow and grow as well but it just deflated like a punctured balloon.
“What brings you up this way?” the woman asked.
“Just passing through,” the man said, with a nod, eyes flickering between the two of them. Then, “You?”
“We’re locals,” the fat man answered. “We like to come up here occasionally, when we’ve got some space to ourselves on the weekend.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “We came up here for one of our first dates, so it’s always nice to come back!” The two of them laughed and looked at each other, then at the man, and finally at the boy, who had come out from behind the man’s leg.
“But our youngest has moved away to college for the fall term,” the fat man continued, “so hopefully we’ll be able to come up here a lot more often! Say, Martha?”
“Hopefully!” They laughed again, and looked at the man, who nodded in reply. The boy was glancing up at him, then at the couple, then nervously up at him again.
The woman cleared her throat. “So, did you come up here by car?”
“Yeah.”
“Whereabouts are you headed to?” the fat man asked.
“Just a way up the road.”
The woman cocked her head. “What, into town?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. OK.”
The man nodded at them, eyes still darting from one to another. They noticed that he was still holding onto the boy’s hand, and the boy was looking at them fully now and glancing out of the corner of his eyes up at the man.
A distant rumble of thunder came from over the mountains. “Sounds like it might storm,” the fat man said.
“Maybe,” said the man.
“Hopefully it’s just a passing squall,” the woman said. “They’re generally not too bad, though one can never be sure, can one?”
“No.”
Silence again. “Well,” the fat man eventually said, “we’d best be letting you get along, I suppose.”
“Sure,” said the man, already beginning to turn towards the path, still holding the boy’s hand.
“Don’t want to get caught in some bad rain or lightning, do we?” the fat man asked, half at the other man and half at the boy, who gave him a hint of a smile for the first time. “Well,” he continued, striding forward with arm outstretched, “it was lovely to meet you, John.” A quick handshake. “And lovely to meet you too Charlie,” he said, bending down and shaking the boy’s hand with a smile on his face.
“Yes, lovely to meet you both,” the woman said, shaking the man’s hand and giving the boy a hug. The boy gave a tentative hug back with one arm, the man still holding his other hand.
“Nice to meet you,” the man said, walking towards the path with the boy. “Take care.”
“You too!”
“Farewell.”
“Bye,” the boy said back at them over his shoulder.
“Bye, Charlie!”
“Bye, my boy! Keep singing!”
The man and woman were left on the lookout, and stayed still, looking at the path for a very long time. Their smiles had dissipated, and they exchanged looks with furrowed brows. He sighed, and began to half-heartedly hum the tune that the two of them had sung. Hearing an engine start and the sound of tires screeching, they looked at each other again, and the man began to stride down the path. The woman glanced over her shoulder, and saw the sun lying low over the mountains, weakly trying to poke through the clouds and illuminate the valley, before turning back and hurriedly following her husband down the path.
