Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  He drowsed, hungering, cuddling his privates for warmth, the only wistful reach of life in his humanity. Subsequently through his drowse, emerged a large amorphous female, soft concubine of dream to give succour, dissolving benevolence throughout his bones and flesh. Instantly losing her. Afterwards deep sleep, peaceful, and all lost forever in the spastic rigor of his awakening.

  The pilot bulb glowed like a cigarette, outlining its single filament. Gabe stared, his other hand reaching for the lamp on the tram of debris. Now he curled himself with Billy’s lamp ready between his knees. He gazed at the slender curve of reddened wire, waiting for the glow to die but the glow remained, ceasing when he was already blind, tranced from staring at it. He thought, I should be working from this end. No timber, nothing, nothing. Nothing left. Despair chuckled, ‘I’m not a fucken mole.’ It’s me, Gabe Lloyd… NCB champion two years ago.

  He switched on Billy’s lamp and briefly wept, pleading, ‘I can’t last much longer. My butty, he’s dead in here.’

  Water trickled under the far side of the tram, spreading outwards to Gabe’s shaly bed. Unclipping his own lamp and spent battery, he placed them beside Billy Holly’s feet, ‘Mine for yours, Coch-boy. You don’t need light any more.’

  The fragile corpse stank, stained teeth bared inside tightened, spread-away lips. Like a foolish, sentimental child, Gabe caught up the nozzle end of the tough rubber hose and he fanned softly purring compressed air over Billy’s face, saying, ‘Can’t bury you, Coch. Pointless even if I could, same it would be, the stink. I’m taking a real bloody hammering. I’m weak as a kitten. Aye, weak.’

  He dropped to his knees, complaining as he crept into the burrow, ‘God knows how long I’ve been in here.’

  One knock on the pipe brought immediate ringing reply, nearer, urgent, distinct, as if the rescue teams were a couple of rooms away. Gabe clanged the pipe with the blade of his shovel. Someone answered furiously, loud kettledrum syntax, reverberations thrumming the narrow burrow. Stupefied, Gabe crawled out. Unable to lever upright, he kept moving, hands and feet each side of the rail. Face down on the shale, light switched off, Gabe breathed shallowly across the back of his hand. Asleep, he lowered into disintegration. Eighteen hours later, chewing and swallowing pellets of greaseproof paper, ugly jeering taunted as a threat: Jibber, you’re jibbing, Gabe.

  ‘Nuh,’ he said, sinking away.

  He lay there to the eighth day, curled in darkness, small pieces of leather bootlace inside his mouth. Total blackness no longer disturbed him. There weren’t even any terrors. Billy’s broken hacksaw blade hung from his wrist. Short lengths of bootlace clustered meaninglessly in his stomach. Like an infant he licked the dried, coal-grained cuts on his hand, puckered skin cold against scant warmth of his tongue. He moaned to sighing, very, very slowly creeping his thighs to his belly, sighing, sighed into the coma which sustained him on ebb until Monday evening, when the first rescue miner found him.

  Crouching out from Gabe’s burrow, he came bowling forward on hands and feet like a grounded ape. Pausing short of the team, hand clamped over his nostrils, the beam of his lamp shone on Gabe. He shouted into the hole, ‘Come on! Safe! We’re too late by the looks of it!’

  Rescue miners were grouped around the tram. Saying, ‘Right now,’ they lowered and covered Billy Holly’s body on a Stokes stretcher. Heads shook, twisting aside, ‘Ach,’ they said against the foul smell. The ambulance man trickled diluted brandy down Gabe’s throat. He convulsed, jackknifing trembles from his groins. They wrapped him in blankets.

  ‘Carry Billy out to the main,’ ordered the team leader. He spoke quietly to the ambulance man. ‘Open the flask.’

  The ambulance man spooned patiently, ‘Good on you, son, you’re all right, you’re safe. Slow now, slowly does it.

  Gabe strained for consciousness. Neural tics plucked his face. His tongue felt huge, wooden.

  The ambulance man laughed up at the team leader, ‘He’s ours! Aye, great!’

  Monte Leyshon finger-wiped his nose, inquiring, ‘Where’s Jobie Lewis?’

  ‘Top pit cabin,’ they said. ‘Old Jobie’s knackered, been working too many doublers.’

  The manager kneeled into the burrow. ‘Bring Gabe out to pit bottom when you’re ready. I must speak to Jobie. He’ll have to let Mrs Holly know about her man.’

  A miner said, ‘Don’t forget Sue Lloyd, for Christ’s sake.’

  Another miner said, ‘Sooner Jobie than me.’

  Gabe’s speech broke through whining, ‘I was licked. Billy Coch, see, it kill’t Billy.’

  The ambulance man wiped his mouth with cotton wool. ‘We’re taking you out, Gabe.’ He cautioned the miners each end of the stretcher, ‘Gentle, lads, lift altogether.’

  Gabe moaned as they dragged him through the hole, ‘Ah, Christ, I was all in, I was beat.’

  ‘Talking bloody daft,’ said a man at his feet. ‘I saw you fighting Nobby Graham. Guts, boy, you won on guts.’

  Out on the main, Stan Evans leaned over him, ‘Gabe, I didn’t expect it to come in like that, indeed to God I didn’t. Whole place fell in. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t warn you in time.’

  The team leader pushed at Stan’s chest, ‘Be quiet. No call for you to take it on yourself. Nobody’s bloody fault.’

  They lifted Gabe on his stretcher into a tram, men squatting each side, easing jolts as they journeyed back to pit bottom. A chatty young GP examined him in the ambulance centre. Gabe swallowed more soup. Sue was holding his hand. Befuddled, Gabe grinned at her and the world before sleep collapsed his senses. He fell away, emptied into warmth.

  Mid October and after-dark chill scuttling customers into the public bar. Gabe stepped to the curb as Lucy Passmore’s little car circled outside the prototype Edwardian Great Western Arms.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you so soon, Gabe.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘How’s trade in the canteen?’

  ‘Pard’n?’

  He gripped her knee, squeezing hard. ‘Knocking somebody else off these days, girl?’

  ‘You’re hurting me!’

  He rolled his shoulder against hers, saying, ‘Dyffryn Lake, let’s find out if it’s the same as it used to be.’

  ‘My knee! You’re cruel Gabe, cruel.’

  He said, ‘Aye, I know that too.’

  ‘Everyone kept saying you were dead. Morning, noon and night in the canteen, Gabe Lloyd is gone, he’s bound to be dead. Even Mr Leyshon, he believed you were dead.’

  He jammed his fists into his pockets. ‘OK I don’t want to hear any more.’

  Lucy turned into a lane at the lower end of Dyffryn Lake to the gate of a derelict sheepfold.

  He loosened his shirt collar, ‘We’ll stay inside tonight.’

  Her lips found his mouth, ‘I’m trying to be nice to you, Gabie-love.’

  ‘You were in my mind, Lucy. That was cruel.’

  ‘I missed you, darling.’ Carefully moving away from their kiss, she opened her handbag, ‘Cigarette?’ Her lighter spurted flame. She puffed contentment, glow-’puhh’ glow-’puhh’ glow-’puhh’, her plump, perfumed body sagged behind the wheel. Awkwardly in the cramped space, the seats creaking, pulling closer to her, his hand reached down between her thighs. Lucy sat motionless. Cigarette smoke whoofed softly at his ear, preceding benign fatalism, ‘Poor Gabeie, you’ve picked the wrong night.’ Crossing her legs, she embraced him affectionately, ‘There, that’s better. Now we can have a lovely cwtch.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

  ‘You’re ever so greedy. For one thing you’re not fit yet. They kept you in hospital for ages. I mean to say, I had no intention of meeting you tonight, only you insisted. You did, Gabe, after all you’ve been through.’

  He said, ‘You should have told me straight off.’

  ‘Dear God, what a way to talk, as if I’m some kind of um, well, y’know Gabie you’re only concerned about sex.’

  ‘Lay it on, girl,’ he said.

  ‘I’m
telling the truth.’ Strange to his ears, Lucy giggled, ‘Matter of fact the under-manager, he asked me, offered to make a date.’ She pressed her knuckles over his mouth, ‘Sshe, wait till you’ve heard the bleddy story. It was for Rosser’s sake. The undermanager promised he’d try to find Rosser a job in Bothi stores. My husband can’t do heavy work, his chest being the way it is. By damn, I’ve kept our home going for years and years!’

  Gabe said, ‘Been out with him?’

  ‘Once. We saw a show in Cardiff.’ She gushed nasally, ‘Bleddy Kairdiff. Lousy it was, I couldn’t follow it myself. As for him, he was really chuffed.’

  ‘What about after the show?’

  ‘We had a meal. Oh, shurrup, Gabe. No reason for you to criticise. Stop quibbling. Honest to God, you’re narrow-minded like all the rest. ’Tisn’t as if there’s any future. Where’s our future? Least we can do is be friends. Don’t make bad blood between us.’

  It was a serene Autumn morning when Sue went upstairs to Gabe’s room. She stood beside his bed.

  ‘C’mon, move, it’s eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Be right down.’

  ‘When you starting work?’

  ‘Monday, day shift an’ all, my own stent.’

  ‘Wake up, you loafer.’

  ‘Al’right, al’right.’

  After breakfast he walked alongside a feeder stream to Dyffryn Lake. Drought-weather fog capped the low hills. Dark-mossed stones were drying out above the water level and still green clods of sedge tufted vagrant pointillism. His first long ramble since rescue teams stretchered him from Bothi Number Two, Gabe making the most of it, scorning his sloth, the flabbiness of his belly muscles. He broke into jog-trotting, leapt to and fro across the brook, made short sprints, and turned, setting himself a brisk homeward pace.

  Near the village football field, Gabe met Rosser Passmore.

  Riven-faced, tormented by sickness and conscience, Rosser stamped by his walking stick, ‘Glad to see you out and about, my boy. Must have been terr-rrible for you down there in the bowels of the earth. Remember the proverb, The finest blades are tempered in the fiercest fires. Oh yes, our time of trial will come. Tell me true, you prayed to the Lord when you were trapped down there.’

  Gabe stroked his nose, ‘Can’t say I did.’

  Rosser made high, shaky baton strokes with his stick. ‘There isn’t a man alive who can afford to neglect the Almighty in his hour of need. Every day of the week Christian lives are saved by prayer.’ Climbing to the Pentecostal fervour Rosser hovered his stick above Gabe’s shoulder, ‘Without prayer our sins mount up higher and higher! There can be no salvation…’

  Gabe snatched the end of the stick, Rosser blinking skywards, gulps of irritation stringing his throat. ‘Excuse me,’ said Gabe. ‘If you don’t mind, Ross, You’re spouting to the wrong fella.’

  ‘Then you are blind and proud!’ accused Rosser.

  ‘Doesn’t matter about that for now,’ suggested Gabe, ready to appease. This man was a wreck, old Bible-puncher not far short of his coffin. He says, ‘Cheerio, Ross. My dinner’s waiting for me.’

  ‘Hear the word of the Lord!’

  The walking stick whiffled above his shoulder again, victimising him.

  ‘Don’t fucken-well do that,’ snarled Gabe, attack glinting his grey eyes. He flung down the stick. ‘Belt up, you drippy old bastard. Buy a pair of working boots and get your missis to fill your tommy box.’ He returned walking stick to Rosser, ‘I’m on my way home. Just leave me alone. You go your way, I’ll go mine.’

  Rosser was gasping, ‘God-bless, God-bless, God-bless,’ his arms jerking fore and aft, seeking to propel his legs.

  Gabe nodded, ‘No offence, it’s only, aah for Chrissake listen a minute.’ And it blurted out, ‘Do something about your wife, will you! She’s chasing ’round like a bitch on heat.’

  Rosser Passmore’s head planed forward, vulture hanging.

  Short cutting across the field, Gabe cursed himself for a bloody fool. Typical. No better and no worse than Sue. Two beauts under the same roof. What in the name of Christ am I any good for? What? Five bloody stents a week. So he talked to the grass under his shoes, ‘Act your age, Lloydie, for Christ’s sake grow up, man.’

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  Raymond Williams

  ‘A liberal man in a liberal place’: that had been Evan Richards’ reputation until the events of November 1963, when, if in different ways, both the man and the place changed.

  The occasion appeared to have little history in it. As announced and as initially performed it was, rather, the principal event of the year in the artistic life of the college, which was not, it is true, especially a centre of the arts, apart from the occasional gift of sculpture or silver at a death or a centenary, but which nevertheless, like any other Cambridge college, had its appointed moments of traditional celebration and cultural event. Yet this November evening was rightly seen as exceptional: a first performance, in the college chapel, of the fifteenth-century miracle play, The Feast of Belshazzar, with new music by Luke Beit, the young Rhodesian who had been the college’s most brilliant organ scholar in memory and who was already gaining national recognition as a composer. The inspiration for the music had been the new college organ, commissioned, after long controversy, to replace the attractive but failing early Victorian instrument which for so long had filled the small medieval chapel and the tiny Chapel Court with its shuddering music for evensong. Evan Richards, as it happened, had led the opposition, in Council, to the new organ, wanting the money spent instead on three new Research Fellowships. He had collected a sizeable negative vote, but its grounds had been mixed, ranging from a general unwillingness to spend money on anything to a middling agnostic and small atheist wing who wanted no expenditure of any kind, beyond maintenance, on anything to do with the chapel. The traditional vote for the chapel and for an instrument of divine worship had been significantly smaller, but it was joined by a decisive musical vote, especially among the scientists. The magnificent new organ had been finally installed in the summer, and Beit’s Belshazzar was to be its first public performance.

  ‘At least,’ Evan Richards had said, ‘it will, as a Feast, go down well in the college.’

  But that was a standard liberal joke, as conventional, in its way, as the College Feasts themselves. There were no hard feelings. Even the close vote – there had been only one closer, in recent years, on a scheme for reforming the gardens – had been taken in the usual watchful, soft-voiced and relaxed atmosphere of all college business: what the young sociology Fellow called ‘the “with-respect-Master” bit’.

  Certainly this liberal unity in diversity was sustained, at least socially, in attendance at the occasion. Almost all the Fellows were there, with their wives and guests, and the free public tickets had been all taken a week beforehand. The atmosphere in the dimly lit chapel, which converted so well to a theatre auditorium and stage, was warm, appreciative and even, in its way, emotional. Evan Richards and his wife arrived at the low door at the same time as John Forrester, the Senior Tutor, and his wife, and they walked in and sat together on reserved chairs at the front of the nave. The conversation, until the lights were switched off, was, as so often, about examinations.

  Belshazzar the king-actor did not dine with a thousand of his lords, but the deep power of the new organ, and the strong singing of the augmented choir, were, if anything, too crowded, too rich and impressive, for the small space of the chapel. Richards noticed that the audience – the congregation, he had momentarily thought – were pulling back slightly from the swell of the music. On most of the faces near him he could see that expression of a strictly guarded interest and an always tentative benevolence which he had learned to recognise as a university habit. An exception was Mrs Forester who, although her husband was Senior Tutor, had as little as possible to do with the college and nothing at all to do with the university: they were, she insisted, uncreative places, deficient in all the emotions to which the arts appe
aled, lacking the aesthetic sensibility which nevertheless they persistently discussed. Richards guessed that his own face had the standard expression of sceptical attention – a tutorial look – as he watched Mrs Forrester’s settled raptness of reception: what he had heard her refer to as her physical openness to the music. But as the chorus ended and the dialogue began his own attention shifted and he listened curiously.

  Like many others in that predominantly academic audience he had looked up the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel before coming to the play. Every story has a version, and the whole point of training is to identify it. What had the anonymous author of the medieval play added to and taken from that chapter? What had the adapter, an English research student, himself added or subtracted (though that could be only inferred; there was no easily accessible text of this relatively unknown play)? It quickly appeared that from one or the other or both there was extra emphasis on the captivity of the Judaeans; on their status, in effect, as political prisoners (but that was surely the adapter). Then there was an elaborated (probably medieval) mockery of the parade of stolen wealth: the gold vessels taken from another people, another god, another land. The court’s pride in wealth and in power was made simple and explicit, and the crescendo of organ music which was the climax of its celebration was indeed overpowering. But then it was broken off, with startling effect, in mid-phrase, and above the screen of the chancel, now for the first time illuminated, appeared the known, unknown words: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Richards was as little able as the theatrically startled Belshazzar to see quite how it had been done. It must, he supposed, be some effect of fluorescence: the startling successive appearance of each word, on what he could see was black muslin, without even the Biblical part of the hand to write them.