Traces of Alys

1995, rural Wales: a Transit van crashes and a teen-age girl escapes the vehicle to be chased and caught, and would have been beaten to death but for the arrival of a farmer and his son who attack with fists and shovel and rescue the child.

The crash is reported to the police but not the presence of the girl. This appears unnecessary because she is claimed by the farmer’s neighbour, a poet, who maintains that the waif is Alys, her missing daughter who has finally found her way home.  Idris, the rescuer, accepts the subterfuge regardless of his boy’s scepticism. Father and son are a second family to the woman: her sole support since her abusive partner walked out, taking her beloved daughter to England and disappearing. Idris has become quietly devoted to this wild and slightly fey woman and would walk through fire to see her happy with the girl to whom she has already given her daughter’s name, Alys. The child can remember nothing of her past before the crash, let alone what she was called.

And now the scene changes, the time too, not to the past but to the future which is about to explore that past: to Surrey, England, twenty years ahead. Another unbalanced mother, this one ostensibly suffering from postnatal depression following the birth of her second baby. But Kate Prothero’s trauma goes much deeper, originating in events of twenty years ago when two nice middle-class girls were fifteen years old and best friends. On a quiet night in    September, the pretty one, Emma, disappeared.

They were closer than sisters, Emma the aspiring actress, Kate the writer: acting out their life stories as they lived them, inspired and incited by their exuberant young drama teacher, Terry Timson. He said he could make stars of them both but Kate was only the confidant when Emma asked her to cover while she spent a weekend away with him, a prelude that was meant to lead to auditioning with a famous director, eventually to her name in lights.

After Emma disappeared, Kate openly accused Terry of her murder despite no body being found. No one listened to her and very shortly there was news of Terry Timson’s dying in a road crash in Wales and no mention of a passenger in his vehicle. Bewildered, Kate started her long search for the girl she hoped might still be alive but after twenty years she had conceded defeat and now she felt only sad resignation at the discovery of bones in one of their old haunts. Demolition workers had uncovered the remains in a suitcase entombed in cement in a park. They were a child’s bones and media speculation was rife before identification but Kate was convinced that her long search for Emma was over.

At this point Traces of Alys breaks into Part 2 and the rupture is seismic. Once the bones are named the timing goes wild: back and forth, between then and now and points between, clarified and obfuscated by the mature Kate alternating with the woman called Alys. And they occupy separate countries - cultures, rather - the Wales of poetry and fiery nationalism - and Surrey: bourgeois, diversified, cool. Between them there is an emerging horror of murder and rape, of infamy, and outrageous lies that have to be told in order to protect the innocent.

It is of course, all about women; men are stock: thoughtful father figures or vicious predators, but Kate and Alys are fully fleshed like the bevy of delightful teen-age girls who come dancing off the page. Silly girls, gullible girls - one may suggest that, for all its omens and innuendoes, some of the outcome was predictable but that’s hindsight and immaterial; girls form the plot, and that’s plausible enough. The two parts mesh and resolve, one way or another, not eschewing fantasy and with more than a touch of madness.

The denouement is merely a matter of technical clearance and then you come to the end and you can go back and start again to see how it was worked, observing and applauding a different kind of craftsman.