—Did her arse twice.
And again the laughter. But somewhere in it now is sound audible only to Cowley, a sort of growl from somewhere. Probably his own lungs.
—If yew see her, dive in. She’s taking on anyone. Drain yew dry she will.
—Can’t go to Aberaeron, Rang. An I can’t stand the shitty little place anyway.
—Aye but she lives here she does. Not even lying, she’s fuckin on heat, that one. Probably even let yew have a go, Cordy.
Mirth again, aimed at the fat and ugly one of their group, acne a furious crust across his lower face.
—Course she would, this one says. —Few roofies in her WKD, course she’ll let me have a go.
—Eyr alright, Cow, Steve says in Cowley’s right ear. Cowley leaning now, his elbows back against the bar, his crotch and belly and face thrust out into the room. —Eyr just pissed. Been at it all afternoon.
—Bet she’s a right fuckin munter. I’ve seen some of the dogs you’ve been up, Rang.
—Aye but she’s not, that’s the thing. She’s dead fit. Honest. Got these stars behind her ear, tattooed in, like. Look out for em, Rang says, and touches himself in that place. —Can’t miss her. Just follow the trail of fanny batter.
Steve picks up a remote and the news is replaced by football. —Swans, he says. —Friendly.
Cowley grunts. Ayew has a shot that knocks a pigeon off the Liberty Stand’s roof.
—And. The red-headed one leaning forwards again to be heard by his mates as if the pub is full, or like intimacy is something he’s yet to fully learn: – She’s fuckin nuts. Woke me up, she did, talking in her sleep, like: She’s here! That’s what she said. Screamed it like. Rang’s voice, in the two words, goes insectly shrill: – She’s here! Fuckin freaked me out, it did. Kicked her out of the carra. Had to. Fuckin bunny-boiler, that one.
Cowley’s lungs – they’re at it again. There is a sign given off him in his stance or expression that Steve recognises: – Don’t worry about em, Cow. Eyr okay boys. Just pissed.
But Cowley makes a noise, a kind of ‘yamyamyam’ sound. It is nonsensical, and loud, and it is designed to do one thing only. All four of them look over at that sound and Cowley leans at the waist towards them:
—What the fuck are you looking at?
Steve’s hand on his shoulder. —Peid, Cow, bois iawn. Bois siarad Cymraeg.
Cowley looks at the fingers on his deltoid and then looks back at the four. —Be’r ffwc wyt ti’n edrych ar? Be’r ffwc?!
And that’s the foreplay done with. The four are pushed back in their seats by the juggernaut rush of Cowley, the loom of his mayhem. A Magner’s bottle goes up and then it comes down in a slam, that quick. Yells and shouts, the bottle does not break but causes a rapidly widening zip in the scalp beneath the coppery hair. Cowley hears nothing, for he has known greater flames. But for a swift detonation the glow in him becomes blaze.
There was no way to escape the blood and pain, that much was known to the four. As soon as the manslide came away from the bar … A roar leaves the TV as Llorente scores. Steve is pressing a bar towel to a skull. Words burble. The attacker has gone, out and abroad in the town, and everything that the four have done this day, up to this point, has gone with him; their confidence, the ways in which they carried themselves – replaced now by the shame of vanity. What were they thinking of.
Some words, now, with clarity, out of the choppy scene: – Is he dead? Fuck me, is he dead?
—Ambulance!
—Course he’s not dead, Steve says, pressing the sopped towel. —But he’s gonner need stitches. Get him up to Bronglais.
Rang utters words: —Ow! What did he do that for?
—Dunno who he was, Steve says. —Just some nutter came in off the street.
Cordy speaks into his phone. Blood flows. Steve winces; whoever the Swans are playing have just gone close. Clipped the bar from outside the area.
THE EMPTINESS OF the house is immediately obvious, but still she shouts, from just inside the door:
—Mam! Dad! Tomos!
She wonders why she did that: the house’s hollowness was known to her even from the outside, and she wonders too why she stands and waits for a response because she knows one will not come.
She moves into the kitchen and drinks a glass of water – how cool it is, all pure – and even Waldo has gone; his empty bed by the stove with the blanket ruckled and his favourite toy, the red rabbit which once squeaked. There is a clicking from the boiler timer and that’s the only sound. Not unfamiliar to her, this kitchen and the things in it, just somewhat vaguer, as if they’re veiled to her, or she to them, or like they’re after-images; like they have an internal light and she’s stared at them then shut her eyes. The dresser and the crockery. The kettle and the toaster. The armchair by the window, the spider plant on the sill. The rug beneath the table on the slates and, on the table, a note – some words on paper underneath the paperweight of a cockle shell encased in perspex although where the breeze is supposed to come from with all the windows shut and locked like they are she does not know. The air in here has been baked and the roof must be buckling under the sun’s dry tonnage.
WHERE ARE YOU? the note says, like that, in capitals big and bothered. YOUR PHONE IS OFF. TAKEN T TO FOLLY FARM TO TAKE HIS MIND OFF IT ALL. WE ARE WORRIED SICK. GET IN TOUCH. The familiarity of her mam’s handwriting; known from birthday cards, Christmas cards, through decades of such stuff. Not seen for some time because of texting but as likely, still, to Emma as the blood vessels on the backs of her hands. She turns the page over and writes a reply. Makes something up; a job offer in Aberaeron. An interview to attend. Weighs it down again with the captured shell and wonders if perspex ever rots. Imagines a consciousness of sorts imprisoned like that, and the resultant insanity. Robbed of all stimulus for ever. Lunatic, lunatic. And yet there are striations in that small shell. Once it held a living thing.
Half in half out of the world. Shimmering woman she is. Upstairs, on the table in the room where she should be sleeping, with Tomos, her son, the laptop is closed clam-like. In it, she knows, and also in the phone unactivated in her handbag, she is living her real life. A duo-verse, one branch of it more real than the other, more solid, recovering its curious course in the world accessible through those things – the laptop and the phone. This is a dizzying feeling, and Emma takes her unreal half-self and positions it on the edge of the mattress. The window is open a crack for the freshness and she can hear birdsong. A distant tractor. The inbox, the retweets. The hits and the followers and the tens of thousands of queries, links, violently worded dismissals, all the swarm online of words without tongues which are more real than the things she can touch – the coverlet clutched in her fingers – or even taste, the hours-old cola. She must wait for the spinning to stop, there, on the edge of the bed in the small house in the big hills and all of the summer outside and its green seethe. There is a part of her that wants no part and needs to stay apart from the part of her that has become spectacle. Half in, half out. Needs the feel of water on her skin. Something physical to root her.
She undresses in the bathroom. Marks on the insides of her thighs that no soap will remove but will in a short time fade because they are bruises and that last man had pointy hip bones. Reminded Emma of a cow, them pelvic flats. He made no mention of the tattoo by her navel yet appeared to aim his come on it although that may not have been deliberate. She gently touches the inking on her tummy and thinks of the marks she’s never seen, except in the reflection of a reflection; the stars behind her ear. Mere hours after she’d had them drilled in and they were still rawly raised she showed them to her mam who’d been on the Penderyn for some reason. One glance and then she turned her eyes away and poured more whisky. Spoke about when Emma was born and when she was an infant and the way her skin was then, so new, so perfect, and that bit of skin behind her ear that was then marked forever was softer than silk and smelt of milk. The purest part of her, a secret place that only her mo
ther knew about, that only a mother could smell, and kiss, and now it would be always marked. And another inch of whisky left the bottle. And he had a hellish long tongue, that last man did, like a fucking anteater; Em remembers it wriggling, way up and wormy inside her. Felt like he was licking the back of her belly button. He said he felt the plates of his skull shift when she came, so fiercely did her thighs clamp, which makes her think now of fontanelle, the conical shape of T’s skull when he appeared on the planet. He’s been here before. It never stops, from dazzling, bloodied room to the oblong hole in the sloping hillside, it never fucking stops. Distract: move. Caulk the gap. One day this life will end.
A splayed star on the wall above the sink is a cranefly. Not many of his type seen this summer – too hot, maybe. Too dry. Positioning her hair back on top of her head in a scrunchie, he’s a thing to talk to:
—Is that why you’re hiding, then? Don’t like the heat? There’s many who’d say thank God for that because, and I hate to break it to you, feller, but you’re ugly. You are, you’re bloody ugly. Them legs and that face. But don’t worry. You can’t help it, can you? I’m not the type to kill things just cos they’re ugly.
She takes it in a hand to the window – the feather-flicker of it, in her loosely balled fist – and lets it go. It drifts as if caught in a breeze yet there is no breeze but were there a wind that whistled around the world, that teased the mane, in an outer lane, of a stallion walking stately in the dust. Were there such a thing.
Everything gets washed in the shower, every inch of her from sole to scalp and as much of the internals as can be reached with the probe of a finger, quickly because she needs to be gone. Out of the house, elsewhere before they all come back, bringing what they will all need her to give them and which, then, she will give them and there is not enough of her for that, insubstantial as she is, the meat of her that has cast this shadow now snared in the laptop and her phone and rent by the minds remote in their many millions and the smithereens sent to shape this form, here, wet from the shower and small in the small house in the big hills. Nowhere near enough in the un-reborn form to give them what they want, the flesh of its flesh and the old companion dog. They would ask too much and she would give it all to them and then there would be nothing left. This is a world in which women never glow and one day it all will end.
Back in the bedroom she dresses before the mirror and bits of her are given back; the ribs, especially, and the twin tracks of muscle between them. A rapid loss, she sees, as if whatever embers there are within her that give off no light nevertheless smoulder with a heat intense enough to melt fat. There are creams and lotions and then the skinny jeans, the cork-soled wedges, a top that ties tight across the tits. Racks of clothes remain in her home up the coast but that place belongs to that other woman, now, that other Emma that somewhere shimmers. And also to the landlord who no doubt put an eviction notice in the post box as soon as he was informed of the sanctions, but the consequential horrors of that also belong to the more solid one, she that can endure elsewhere, casting a shadow, displacing air. Such things are part of the midden, the distant midden over the hills, in the next town, wherever – far enough away anyway to give off no discernible stink.
And she moves now. With urgency. Takes up her bag and leaves the house, blinking in the sun and empty lane, and even while she’s waiting at the bus stop she is moving quickly, pacing, scratching, humming and muttering to herself, counting the daisies, putting up barriers against the mental amassing. Two cows at cud in the field over the road watch her as prey-species do, with a hazy vigilance sculpted down to one query: Can I be hurt, here. Emma watches them watching her. Their side-to-side champing and the deep brown orb-eyes. Will you hurt me? Not her, no. But creatures like her will. The sun is ruthless. Even the bees are sluggards, exploring the calyxes with an air of disinterest as if they can’t really be arsed, depite what they are. Just doing what’s expected of them. The air vibrates with birdsong and behind Emma, were she to turn to look, she’d see a kingfisher scorch that wobbling air, on its way to the stream.
She feels tall and sexy in her cork platforms, the shapes of her in the curves of petals and the under-swoops of the leaves above and yet these things do not twitch or thrum: out of any breeze they hang, in the hard heat. Only the legs of this woman seem uncomfortable in the stillness; that which mimics their slopes, or is mimicked by them, can be completed and perfected by the invisible sap that flows inside.
She hears a rumble and a hiss of air-brakes somewhere in the hamlet’s centre, such as it is; a war memorial and chapel. She digs in her bag for change. Way above her a chalky contrail scars the sky, hours old and feathering. A ripping, all the way up there, the plane that made it far gone. So far above this lone woman watched by cattle on this still summer day inside the relief-map of the hills, the arrayed green humps of them and the tiny trinkets of the shrivelling waters on some of their basin peaks.
The little bus appears chugging and Emma boards. The driver is an older feller, looks a bit like Neil Kinnock. Fading ostrich feathers tattooed on his forearm, blurred at their edges, something in them of the contrail, the dissolution of their pattern into the empty space around, skin or ozone both.
—Another scorcher aye.
—It is that. Emma puts some coins in the tray. —Aberystwyth.
She tears off the ticket-tongue and moves down the bus. The three passengers already on it register to her as nothing but lumps at her periphery. The bus pulls away and movement brings a cooling breeze. In her rear-corner seat she digs her phone and earplugs out of her bag and turns the phone on and puts it on silent so that the pinging of incoming messages will not be heard and then she scrolls down to her music folder and clicks the silent mode off and inserts plugs. Music. Noise. Goat Girl’s ‘Country Sleaze’ starts to swagger in her skull.
The bus trundles over the one-hump bridge that spans the river Wyre. Emma sees the old mine workings and the scars of industry in the earth, of the dig for ore, and too the tumbling pit-heads and sheds being absorbed by green in slow reclamation; the tendrils sprouting. She sees and feels all of the two, the one abrupt lift and drop of the bridge and the glyphs of the old dig. And the vile void of the unfinished list, un-whole. That’s also to be borne.
And maybe she should engage with it all – the tweets and texts and emails. The whole teem of it is here, in her hand. A few prods of her finger and she could be in it, of it. She could access her home page too, see what’s been going on in the world, how far to a new doom it has slid beyond the chambers she’s been taken in lately, she’s had to seek out lately, and the things in them with their grabbing hands and clutchings, their bristles and screaming needs and sometimes wives behind them and kids behind them and home lives and drudgeries and the sparks coming out of them in spurts. All the untamedness in the new discoveries. All that is not the dulling pulls of the world – that’d be like opening the brown envelopes which have no doubt piled up behind the door of her house on the banks of the Rheidol river to the north. All that she does not need is there. All that she can not bear is there, where there will be judgments leaving the mouths of men, where there will be absolutely no hope at all. Where nothing will glow, of that she is certain. Nothing will speak to her in that world. Yet it is all waiting for her further up the coast and after the bridge and the abandoned dig she has entered its purview and there is one thing missing with an absence that roars. Crude amputation. Not only limbs are taken by the men of that other place.
Fuck it. She needs the noise harder and the obviousness is not lost on her but still she does it anyway; she fills her head with ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ by Peaches and she is carried by the boiling bus down onto the coast road where the land hurtles down to meet the sea. There is a flash far away on the horizon’s line; the Fishguard ferry possibly. The sun has set a ship on fire at the end of the world. She gets on ‘Monkey 23’ by The Kills, during which she scratches her shoulder three times with a thumbnail. Fat White Family’s ‘Bomb Disne
yland’, her mind leaping this way, a sand-flea in sudden brightness. She calls up Germano’s ‘Darkest Night of All’ which in turn calls up an episode of Homicide and that is her past invading, her history hitting her, and she thinks that she might spew with sadness so she jumps into ‘Junkyard’. Her insides sizzling. Garbage in the sack. She crams her head with noise and her body responds so that she churns in a biological boil – horripilation at her nape and arms, the pimpling of her skin. Booming heart. Her mouth dries up and her toes twitch in the cork platforms. There is a cauldron at the core of her that brews this demented physical speech. She feels the dampness at her joins. A keening scream gathers at her larynx and stays there and the fingers of both hands curl into clasping talons as if in reaction to an imperative that has been given no form.
The bus rests at Aberaeron to change drivers and Emma gets off. It’s not really a conscious decision or anything, she just disembarks; a woman like her, in the state she’s in, she can make anywhere thrashy and unexplored, untamed, and Emma – here, now – is the wildest woman. There is nothing of her that is not perfect in just what it is and she is the wildest thing in this small town at the edge of the land at the edge of Europe where cracks yawn. This is languid day’s end, the sweat is beginning to dry and its salts are tugging skin taut and the gulls pant like dogs on the harbour walls and the boats in the marina seem glued down in gloop. There is a scrum outside the Celtic chippy. Way out in the sea where the blue becomes black great things loll and turn over. Giant flukes flash then dive. The face of Dylan Thomas peers at Emma from the posters in this year of something to do with him and there are guided groups about with cameras and notepads. None of this concerns her. None of it calls her in any way, her legs in the skin-tight denim and cork heels carrying her through all its insignificance. She moves with a smoothness an inch or so above the ground and people see her but she does not see them. Like she is all guided by laser and is locked on and will not deviate. She can’t wait for the night-time to come. She enters the Cadwgan pub through a huddle of torpid drinkers and everything then picks up speed.
Broken Ghost Page 19
