Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  He’s not smiling. —Where’ve you been?

  —Shopping. Lidl. Told yeh.

  —Thought you were having a bath?

  —Just about to. This isn’t a good time, Johnny. I’m dead busy.

  He stands close to me and sniffs. —You’ve already had one. I can smell it, yeah?

  Oh Christ. Dig and wild. I open the door and he follows me in and puts a bag of something on the table which clunks. He watches me as I put the shopping away.

  —What’s wrong, Ems?

  —Nothing.

  —What’s the puddy for then?

  —Just got a lot of stuff to do today, that’s all. No puddy.

  —You’re not the only one with stuff to do, aye. But take twenty minutes off, yeah?

  I’ve got my back to him cos I’m putting the sugar in the cupboard and then his hands are on me waist. Squeezing. His breath is behind my ear, on the stars. They turn him on, them stars. Every time he used to do me from behind he’d pull my hair back so he could see them. His breath is hot and kind of spicy, yick, and I feel meself go all shop window dummy.

  —Come on, Em. Set ourselves up for the day, yeah? This is what we do, innit, me and you. Fuck buddies, Ems. You know the score.

  I face him and take his hands off me and give him a bit of a push away. Just a gentle one, like, not a shove, enough to make him take a step back.

  —Not today.

  His voice goes all whiney. —Yeah but I’m going away tomorrow. Greece for a week, see?

  —Greece?

  —Aye. Dirt cheap over there at the mo, innit? Do anything for money over there they will at the mo. Me and my boys, we booked it online. Well not Ryan cos he’s on tag, but the rest of us, like. Week in Greece.

  He says ‘Greece’ as if it’s got eight e’s in the middle. Like a whine. He grabs me waist again.

  —An I’ve got you a present n all.

  —Show me it, I say, not because I want to see it particularly but to get some carpet between us both. He goes over to the table and takes something out of the plastic bag and he’s kind of giggling as he does it. He holds it up for me to see.

  —What the fuck, Johnny? A dildo?

  —Not just any old dildo, babe. It’s mine.

  —What?

  —Make-your-own dildo kit. It’s my dick, see?

  —You’ve made a model of your own dick?

  —From a mould, aye. Company while I’m away, innit.

  He throws it over to me and in the half-second or so that it’s in the air I feel the wild thing inside me stand up and scream. It’s a flash, like, just one bright flash in me brain, blinding white and with bared teeth. It makes me catch the dildo then instantly throw it back as hard as I fuckin can. It zooms like a bullet straight and perfect and the bellend goes thwock as it hits home, right between the eyes. Hell of a shot aye.

  —FUCK!

  Johnny goes down in a heap, his face in his hands. One hell of a shot, that was. Caught him a right crack.

  —The fuck was that for you mad fuckin bitch?!

  —Can’t be modelled on yours, that. For a start it’s all stiff. Fuck off out of my house, will yeh.

  He’s still on the floor but he takes his hands away from his face and I can see a swelling on his forehead starting to come up. Patch of skin starting to go purple.

  —What’s fuckin wrong with you? Mad fuckin sket, what’s fuckin wrong with you? What did you do that for?

  He stands up, a bit woozy. Feel like hitting him again, I mean a real clenched fist full in the face, like. But I don’t.

  —Think I’d like that, a plastic model of your dick? That your idea of a present, is it?

  I start to shove him in the direction of the front door. He rocks back and bounces off the wall and he’s looking at me with … well, I’ve heard it said that fear can be seen in people’s eyes but this is the first time I’ve ever actually seen it. It’s like a shadow in there. He’s shouting but it’s just a noise and the thing inside me, I can feel that it’s pleased here, with me and what I’m doing. Like a glow of warmth in me guts. Approval; that’s the word.

  —Get the fuck out. Just get the fuck out my house.

  I give him one last hard shove and his back hits the front door and makes it shudder in the frame. His eyes have gone hard now and I can see that he’s turned his hands into fists so I take a few steps back to be out of his reach. Not that he’s ever hit me before, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s been a bully in other ways so I’m sure that giving me a dig is not beyond him. All those times – the emotional blackmail, the violence in the sex after he’d been on hatefuck.com, all of that shite. The drinking and the passing out and then the being woken up with a bit of him rootling inside one of me holes. Fuck buddies. Plenty of one but not so much of the other in what we had. I’ve been tired of this dickhead for a long time now, aye.

  —Oh God you’re in trouble now, he says. Kind of a grin on his face.

  —Am I? Fuck off, will yeh.

  —Oh yes.

  —Be just your style to beat up a woman, wouldn’t it?

  —I am not going to lay one finger on you, you horrible fuckin skank. But I am going to fuck up your life, yeah?

  I think of the knife in the kitchen, wonder if I could run and grab it before he grabs me. Wonder what I’d do with it even if I could.

  —I’m just thinking that the people in the job centre will be very interested to hear about that work you’re doing on the side, wouldn’t they? And all that money you get from your fuckin folks every time you go crying to them. Oh, Tomos bach needs a new coat for the winter …

  The last words are said in a kind of high-pitched screech that screws his face up into a horrible mask. Spit flies out of his gob. Then he does a high girly laugh and I find all of this far more disturbing than anything he’s ever done or could ever do.

  —What work on the side?

  —Think I don’t know? The shopping you do for the oldies in the flats? Small town, this, babes. He looks at me as he spikes his hair up with his fingertips.

  Them teeth flash again inside me. —Aye cos the day centre’s been shut down! The Homecare scheme has gone cos there’s no funding anymore!

  —Doesn’t matter.

  —What d’you expect them to do? And it’s only a tenner a week anyway! Fuck’s sake!

  —Doesn’t matter. Then there’s all the money from your fuckin folks. Undeclared income, innit? I’ve got a good mate works in the jobbie, remember? Carlos? You fucked him as well. He was second when you went threes up at Iestyn’s party that time. His face goes into the mask again, kind of all folds in on itself. —You dirty fuckin disgusting whoo-er.

  Dig, now, dig—

  Bite him fucking bite him with these sharp and shiny teeth. I notice that the swelling on his forehead now looks more or less exactly like the bellend that hit him. Some beads of blood on it. All of a sudden I want to laugh.

  —Oh fuck off, Johnny. You’re a true dickhead.

  —I’m going, don’t worry. He opens the door. Stops halfway through, turns to have the last word but I give him another shove and slam the door in his fucking face. He shouts something then presses his face against the frosted glass and waves. I stick the middle finger up then go into the front room and sit on the couch and stare at the carpet until my breathing has gone back to normal and my hands have stopped shaking by which time I feel exhausted so I lie down sideways on the couch but my head’s like a storm so I go upstairs and take half a diazepam and then lie down on the bed and I suppose I fall asleep cos in an instant it’s nearly time to go and pick T up from school. I go downstairs and make the biscuits I promised him and as I’m leaving the house I see that stupid plastic prick on the floor underneath the table so I chuck it into the river outside and watch as the current takes it out to sea.

  I only stop seething, even with the diazepam, when I see Tomos at the school gates waiting for me and soon we’re back home on the couch, just me and him, eating warm biscuits and drinking m
ilk. Tom’s watching the telly. I can smell the outside coming off him, out of his hair, grassy. My little weasel. I fetch the laptop from upstairs and put it on the coffee table and make a blog entry while he watches CBBC and eats the biscuits. My wee wild thing.

  —Mam?

  —What’s up, cariad?

  —How’d you make these biscuits?

  I tell him and he looks puzzled. —But all that stuff’s wet, he says.

  —Ey?

  —The eggs and that and the milk. All that stuff’s wet.

  —Aye, so?

  —Well how come these are all crunchy and nice?

  —The heat in the oven does that.

  —How, tho?

  —Magic.

  —No but. How does it?

  —It’s just magic, cariad.

  He looks at the half-eaten biscuit in his hand. There’s a light graze on his cheek. Dig and wild. Dig and wild.

  —They’re dead nice anyway.

  —Good. I’m glad.

  —They’re always nice.

  I smile at him over the top of the computer. He doesn’t smile back but he looks at me with them blue eyes before he turns to look back at the telly.

  MESSAGES

  LLYN SYFYDRIN PENDAM sunrise saw woman floating in sky no joke!!! for real!!WTF?!

  Twitter.com/@EmmaMum1

  Small entry while T, who you all know about, watches OOglies and eats his fave cookies. Just got to tell you about this thing I saw in the sky a few days ago as the sun come up. On the Pendam mountain at Llyn Syfydrin (use the online OS map to find out where it is). Misty morning and there was a woman floating in the sky and I wasn’t the only one to see her either. There was three of us and all of us saw her. A woman floating in the sky. Kind of glowing too. No word of a lie. I heard her say three words – dig and bridge and wild. I think I know what two of them mean and watch this space for more on that but the ‘bridge’ I haven’t got a clue. Why did she say that word? I don’t know. Anyway just like to know if anyone out there has seen anything similar or can explain it or even just comment on it. Love to hear your thoughts.

  Http://Emmamum.wordpress.com

  TAGS: Emmamum, vision, dig, wild, bridge, cookies, OOglies 4:47 P.M.

  6:02 P.M., 304 hits

  6:56 P.M., 918 hits

  7:20 P.M., 1,100 hits

  8:00 P.M., 3,116 hits

  8:50 P.M., 17,340 hits

  Midnight: 471,886 hits

  #RT floatingwomanWTF?! You said it girl. Tell us more @EmmaMum1

  #RT floatingwoman: gweledigaeth? Beth? Dweud mwya plis @EmmaMum1

  #floatingwoman: too much to tweet check out blogpost

  Emmamum.wordpress.com/@EmmaMum1

  MEAT

  THE SLATEY WATERS of Llyn Syfydrin give back no sun as yet, still rising as it is beyond the hump of Disgwylfa Fawr. Soon they will; when the lifting wisps of mist have been hauled up into airy blue, then the disc will be seen, hovering over the islet on which geese and moorhens nest. The dry sedge of that island and the crisped rye grass of the banks and shores: soon a single match could sweep all of this up into one abrupt rush of flame. A breath ruffles the lake’s surface, strokes out from it foamy scrolls that tap at the pebble shore with the noise of a cat at a milk bowl. Used firepits crater this shore and a log once used as a bench moves with the rising and sinking of the sun between damp and dry, conditions of which the orange underlips of plate fungi have taken full and opportunistic advantage. Bogbean bows in the fleeting breeze, the ducking pinkness flashing its inside white. Little bombs of bilberries nod in the grasses. Yarrow galaxies slowly help to heal the acidulated standing pools that remain after the conifers have been cropped, the regulated ranks of them, ordered and uniform like the politicians who compelled their planting, ripped from the ridges and sides about. A rowan tree observes and maybe the hiss of air in its ferny leaves is a comment. Sand martins have returned to their warren in the powdery bank at the lake’s eastern end and are feeding now, their sickle wings skimming the water, gulping gnat and midge and joined by their cousins the swifts and the swallows, a tribe of screech and speed forever and deeply wild although their travels obey utterly dictates laid in their brains when the rock up here flowed and was still halfway soft. Tonight, when the sun will be sinking behind Craig-y-Pistyll into the sea at the valley’s end, Daubenton’s bats will join them, bulleting too, whitebreasted too, and chasing the same prey. Bird and mammal exulting both in flight and fright when the sun burns the sky scarlet and gold.

  The Dolgamfa barrow, the Bwch a Llo stones, the mines on the valley floor. Nant yr Arian – see the silver. Transhumance and tumuli. Industry and burial and worship, all from five-fingered hands, have in parts of this high land shaped and stained it for millennia, mapping the movements of the night sky, other patterns brightly high. Stone cottages crumble into mounds of mouldy boulders. Tunnels capillary the hills. Dug-out dwellings marked by huge chunks of quartz. The simple water that flows. Malleable land that endures yet as the people pass, always the people pass, their things seen off by the hives of hornets or the tunnellings of moles or even the thin marks that migrating birds make through the clouds. The oldest narratives made by them. When these volcanoes were active and the sky was red-threaded black and worms writhed away from bigger worms and left ribbony traces in the rock that was then mud. Such stories up here. And such echoes. And with what do we de-code and assess? All there is is flesh, in this. Infinity in the joints of a millipede’s legs. In the pulverised pearls on the wings of a moth. All the pallid empires of men … In the husky mutes of the owls are tiny bones of paper, skulls breakable by a breath. The merlin leaves small pancakes of shit on the blocks where he has butchered little birds and they resemble the pats of lichen yet in that lichen lies a world which also eats and ejects. Five-fingers formed some humps and tilted mighty stones erect and tamed the trees into uniform files but the flicking and creeping and crawling that steadily makes them nothing but matter find voice in the call of the vanishing corncrake and cuckoo and its only words are fuck you. Fuck you.

  And still the people return. Visions shimmer in the crackling air. Several of them, this early morning, on the shores of the lake, one wearing a clerical collar. Each isolate from the other as yet but they will talk and share, soon. Outfliers from the hive online, meat emissaries from the virtual world. One of them studies an OS map of this area, the lake and its surrounds, and points to a ridge and another follows his finger and speaks and these first words, although spoken low, do bounce back from the water and the encompassing hills:

  —Do you think?

  The figure with the map nods. Someone has lit a candle and balanced it on a rock. Some other is on his knees at the water’s edge and has genuflected and now appears to be praying. The two who have spoken now wordlessly begin to ascend the ridge and the man in the collar starts after them.

  On the road leading up to this lake, the road that serves the ridge hamlets of Llwyn Prysg and Penrhiwnewydd and the low-lying village of Pen-Rhiw-Newydd and then joins with the larger roads that feed the larger towns nearby, a lone man trudges up. Pine woods on one side of him and a drop on the other, steep, down to the valley floor on which he can see the roundish scar of the ancient settlement of Craig-y-Pistyll. Above this stretch hills, green fading to distant blue, some of them stippled with the skinny white mills of wind farms, their blades front-crawling above the crests. He trudges, this man, because the road is steep and the morning is warm, but the set of his shoulders and head, the fullness of him, somehow puts an elemental into his step, so much so that a line of cyclists, all Lycra and helmets and reflector shades, berth him widely as they pass, as if the strange stateliness of his carriage may be contagious. He stops and steps aside for them to freely pass. One of them thanks him. He walks on and where the road temporarily levels out he takes a left turn into the woods and down the valley side to Rhoserchan.

  CALON ONEST, CALON LN

  USED TO HATE the sun, I did. Never felt it on me as a blessin
g, if I ever felt it at all. Aye I’d sit in it, surrounded by people in shorts and vests and I’d be fucking shivering in a jumper with me arms wrapped around meself, teeth chattering. And birds; I’d hear them of a morning wherever the fuck it was I’d woken up and I’d think to meself shut the fuck up, there’s notten to fuckin sing about. Wanner shoot them, I would. But now I love it when they wake me up. I love it when I hear them sing. Walking up the mountain in the sunshine, listening to the birdies do their thing. Sweet moments, man.

  I hear an excuse me behind me as a cyclist bozzes past, all done up in the gear like, the helmet and the tight shorts. I step aside and watch them go by, hoping one of them’s a woman so I can blimp at her arse in the Lycra but no, they’re all blokes – hairy legs and that kind of squareness to their arse cheeks that women don’t have. They head on, up the mountain. Wonder if they’re going to the lake. My lake, I mean. They’re all sweaty determination and the gear on them, all the paraphernalia: pure obsession. Isn’t it meant to be fun? Each and every one of them looked in pain, to me. Slow down, lads, listen to the birds and feel the sun on your arms. Nothing is so important that isn’t, what, birth or death that means you have to strain yeh tripes out getting to.

  Ah well. What floats yeh boat, I suppose.

  Stop to get me breath back. Steep hill, this, and a warm morning. Gunner be another hot one. The trees form a cool and shady tunnel over me on the slope down to Rhos so I sit on a dry stump for a rest. Smells nice; pine and grass. I hear a bark and see, through the trees opposite, on the hillside, Ralphie the sniffer dog being exercised, chasing a ball. Can’t see his handler, whoever it is today who’s been given the job, cos they’re down in the hollow somewhere. Always got on with Ralphie, I did; he used to thwap me legs with his waggy tail. I remember wondering if he could smell emotions as well as drugs; sadness and loss and desperation and regret. But he always seemed too happy for that. But then he was a dog. An I remember when I first came here, at the end of a wet and humid summer, that hill over there that Ralphie’s bounding down was full of mushies, almost completely brown with them. Hundreds of thousands. All that free temptation … sensory derangement on offer, just growing out of the ground like. Woke up one morning and pulled the curtains back and the hillside had about thirty, forty people on it, each one on all fours, just plucking and eating like grazing animals. That afternoon I was sent out with a bucket to harvest the sheep shit for the tomatoes like and all the mushies had gone, every last one. There were a couple of pools of puke, still with undigested stems in them like worms. Easy enough after seeing that to resist temptation. Or was it? Don’t clearly recall. But I did, tho. I did resist. Learnt to make some cracking pasta sauces as well; the toms came out dead sweet.