Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  When Elis came he asked him who the woman was, knowing already, because he had asked at the shop, that she was Miss Thomas, Gwynfryn. She was a relative newcomer and kept very much to herself.

  ‘They say she came from Pontypridd,’ Elis said. ‘But then, I’ve heard too, that she came from Abergavenny.’

  Elis said it rather mournfully. He was a mournful man, recently widowed. There was loneliness in the angle of his cap. They sat on the bench talking quietly and irregularly for half an hour or an hour, watching but not watching the girls walking up and down and the boys, who sat on the wall together and swung their legs, and pushed their hair back off their foreheads and then, after a suitable interval, let it fall forwards again.

  The only thing left of her was an eye. It was the eye that he remembered throughout the following day, as he went from house to house with his legs getting heavier and his heart feeling large under his ribs.

  ‘A good cau-sa’, he said, again and again. And most of the men and women agreed.

  At the end of the afternoon he climbed the steps to the Town Hall and went in past the Corinthian pillars (too grand entirely for the building, and the building itself too grand for the town, but that was how they had done things in the old days, you could see it in all the big old buildings, the sense of getting ahead of yourself, the idea of somewhere big and important where, with a little effort, anyone could go).

  He offered his collection box to be counted, and sat down to wait. The room, which was a large room with high ceilings and a cornice, contained, as well as the tables where people were counting out the money, displays of all the uses the place had been put to over the years. There were photographs of it turned into a hospital during the war. Then in the first war, as a recruitment office. Alessandro recognized a picture of Kitchener. Then there was a faint, yellowy-looking photograph, the steps packed with people and a banner with Welsh words on it that he couldn’t understand, and a banner with English words that he could.

  ‘That,’ Elis said when he asked him about it later, ‘was the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Nineteen hundred and two, I think it was. Anyway. A long time ago.’

  Then there was tea, at the Coronation. A party for the Silver Jubilee. Brass band competitions. The crowning of Miss Miskin, a plain little girl with hair straggling on her shoulders. A rally, during the miners’ strike. Boxing contests, and wrestling, on a Saturday afternoon.

  The wrestling held Alessandro’s interest. The other pictures had bored him. It was not, after all, his country, and all the pictures seemed to be of grey, indistinguishable faces. But the last picture of all was of two women wrestling, and it held his attention because it reminded him that once two prostitutes had pretended to fight over him. He had forgotten, because it was a long time ago, exactly where. Perhaps it had been one of the Mediterranean ports, but he thought not. It had more the feel of South America to it. Anyway, they had pretended to fight over him, and his shipmates had been envious. He couldn’t remember which of the women had won. One had been darker than the other. One had been very thin. Had the dark one been thin? Or had the thin one had lighter hair, almost a reddish kind of colour, which grew down onto her forehead in a peak? It was odd how you remembered sometimes, the littlest of things. Afterwards he’d had both of them, the first in a proud way, offering his body as a kind of prize. The second he’d treated more gently, feeling for an instant an unfamiliar desire to console.

  He hadn’t thought about it from that day to this. But he thought about it now, and it made him restless, and he leaned forward and looked at the photograph closely, the one woman, fleshy and blonde-looking and with a lot of black stuff around her eyes, the other, darker and more wiry altogether, with her hair cut off short around her face, and a defiant look as she stared at the camera, the corners of her mouth pulled in tight. ‘Mad Marge’ the caption under the photograph said. ‘Mad Marge v Jinny the Giantess. September 1963.’

  And when I said ‘Yes’, Marged said (going to the window and looking out to where the grass was growing on the landscaped part, very green indeed all the way up the hill, but too smooth to be a real hill, and with a few black bits showing however much they tried to hide them, in between).

  When I said ‘Yes’, I hadn’t meant yes in the way people mean it, the forever kind of yes that lives with you and becomes part of you and you can’t get away from. I meant the for now yes, this minute, today, this week. But Yeses had a habit of catching you. Noes were safer. And all that time ago she’d said yes, just for the sake of it, really.

  ‘Marged,’ he’d said looking very sorry for himself one night, sitting in her mam’s back-kitchen on the way home from the pub. And she’d said, almost without meaning to, it was strange when she heard herself say it,

  ‘Very well, Ifor.’

  It was a grown-up thing to say.

  And after they were married, he stood at the foot of the bed and took his clothes off, one by one, his tie, his shirt, his socks, his underpants (she had looked the other way when he unbuckled his belt). He had stood at the foot of the bed, at last with nothing on at all, and his body rather thin and drab, and a thin streak of shadow under the curve of every rib, and almost directly under the electric light, so that his body looked elongated a little, although it cast no shadow, which was strange because everything else in the room had a rather black shadow attached to it. When she had seen him like that, she knew the true nature of the mistake she had made, and knew also that it was not something she could put right, not ever, because now she had done it it was part of what she was, and yourself was one thing you couldn’t get away from, no matter how long, or how earnestly, you tried.

  In the event, it was Ifor who had got away from her. Not that even that was true, really. He had never been hers, although he might have liked to be. And she had certainly never been his, except in the exchange of her body for his name, and in doing the things a wife does, like a maid really. Her mother had been a maid before the war, up at Canal Head House. Marged had seen a photograph of her with her hands clasped in front of a little white spoon-shaped apron, and another little bit of something white, with primped-up edges and a visible kirby grip, settled precariously in her hair.

  ‘Ifor not back for the weekend?’ her next-door neighbour Eirianfa said. (Eirianfa came from Dolgellau originally, and went back there not long after, the South never really suited her, it was impossible to settle, somehow, in the strange, pale air.)

  ‘Ifor not back?’

  Marged had said to herself, when she was child, that she would never be anybody’s maid. There was an old snapshot, quite bent around the edges, of her in a sunbonnet, staring out fiercely from the deep shade the brim cast across her face. She was waving a stick at the camera, and the little cluster of lumps that was knuckles stood out.

  ‘Fierce, by God’, Ifor had said when she showed it to him, the only time, really, she had showed him anything. The way he said ‘Fierce’ troubled her. He said it with that look she didn’t like in men, the mouth too relaxed, and the pupils of his eyes taking on a dark look, and the muscles in the neck tightening and then going slack again.

  When Ifor had left, eventually, not letting her know beforehand, just not coming back, and getting a friend to write her a letter, an English friend, they were working on the new road near Ross (the letter had a Hereford postmark), when Ifor had left she felt strange, and separate, and missed for a few nights the idea of him taking his socks off at the bottom of the bed.

  ‘Ifor not back, then?’

  Ifor will never be back. Ifor will never lift the latch on the gate, and take the three steps you have to take to get to the door, open it, and come in, bringing with him the smell of the outside, the town in his coat and in his hair, the smell of exhaust fumes, the cold wind under his fingernails.

  Behind the house where she had a room, in Cardiff, in a small street that didn’t lead anywhere, was a dug-up piece of earth, with primroses on one side, and daffodils on the other, and the brown-coloure
d bits of what was left of the snowdrops in between. (My life has been made up of back yards, and half-turned earth. And the walls of the houses going up very straight, and the roofs, in layers, angling back over themselves.) There was a lot of traffic and the shop windows were very shiny and you saw, as you went past them, your own reflection coming at you from different angles. It didn’t seem like you. You were no longer the person you had thought you were, but another person who looked rather like you but wasn’t. (And what is this strange sense every morning, waking up, of my self getting smaller and smaller, like an island in the middle of a river rising in flood?)

  ‘You,’ the man said, and pointed at you, there, in a line, waiting to see if you were any good at it, looking at you first as you walked up and down in a swimming costume, looking at you very closely indeed as you waited, your turn three away, then next-but-one, then next, and others already there and doing it, or having done it, the grunting and the falling, the pretending, and the odd occasional blow that caught you like a fiery and exploding thing.

  The man’s forefinger was stiff and straight at the end of his straight arm. ‘You!’ The finger moved twice, from the joint.

  She stepped forward. She felt like a schoolgirl. She felt as she had sometimes in Chapel, on a Sunday. If there had been any excuse for it, that would have been different. If she had done it for any of the reasons women do things, any of the old reasons—

  ‘You!’ the man said.

  And then she stopped thinking about it and climbed up, with big, fluid movements, into the ring.

  Now, Marged. What was it like? (looking out over the landscaped part and counting the black bits, one, two, three, four, see how they all link up and make a pattern, like veins the black bits are, snaking in and out of the green).

  When she had first come there, nearly thirty years before, everything had been black still. The wheel had been turning, the spokes of it all in a blur. Strange how memory took away the colour. The sky had been white. She had climbed up into the ring and felt the top rope scrape at the skin of her shoulder, and the middle rope press into the flesh of her thigh and then spring loose again as she let go. She had stood up in that square, free space that took away entirely and for the allotted time her freedom, and felt cut off from everything that she knew and was, from everything that she had ever dreamed of, or wanted to be. And yet, how solid the sweat had felt running down her back, and down her ribs at the sides under her arms. How real the faces were still, and the room, hot and tight on her, and the air thick with the tail ends of words. She never knew for certain whether she had been more herself at those times, or less.

  ‘Stick to what you know’, her mother had urged her once, fiercely, although her voice was getting very thin. But sometimes knowing (she had come to understand) can be more of a burden than a relief.

  And what do I truly know? (staring in the mirror in the room in Cardiff, with her back to the window, and the patch of earth unturned now behind her, and treacly-looking in the uncentred light).

  What do I truly know?

  There had been a man she went to bed with sometimes, but intermittently. His body had been solid and his steps definite on the linoleum as he collected up his clothes. And something in it had brought her afterwards back to this half-known place, rather like Eden, the old pictures of it, sketches in Borrow, Wild Wales. Eden no longer. (She had heard her mother speak of the boy from Canal Head House riding his pony up on Ferndale, late in the afternoon.)

  And yet it was in a way like Eden. Quiet, her house. Peaceful before the fall. The clocked ticked. The flames in her gas fire made little whiffing noises when the wind backed round. She had pointed herself, like a weather vane, in this inevitable direction. She did not long for, she resented rather, the sound of a step on her step, the rasp of the knocker, tentatively yet deliberately raised.

  Who is it? she called, in her head perhaps, because it was evening now and the children who played outside in the street had gone in, and a certain thickening in the outline of things told you it would soon be dark.

  Who is it?

  Alessandro took his hands out of his pockets. The edge of his pockets rasped over his knuckles as he withdrew his hands. A cool current of air wound up the street towards him and threaded itself between his ankles and slid up over his shoulders and around his neck. He put his head on one side at an awkward angle and looked up past the dark shape of the hill rising away. The sky was a colour he had never seen before. It was the colour he thought it would be the first time he crossed the equator. A dark, indescribable colour. He settled his weight back on his heels. Something ticked inside him, like a metronome. The street, where it fell away quite steeply, was dull under the lack of stars. A light came on inside the house, and went out again. He felt the wind lodge in a series of cold little bars under his fingernails. The town was yellow now below him, and the hill black and solid-looking behind. He strained for a sound of something inside the house, but there was only the wind out there with him, and the curious half-darkness lapping the promontories of his hands.

  TOO PERFECT

  Jo Mazelis

  The man and the woman were standing side by side at the marina, studying the new housing development on the other side of the water. He had been expressing surprise tinged with disgust at the sight of the red-brick buildings with their gabled windows and arches and as he put it ‘postmodern gee-gaws’. While she, having no knowledge of what had stood there before and no great opinion on architecture, said nothing.

  Then into the silence that hovered between them he suddenly offered ‘Do you mind?’ and before he had finished asking, took her hand in his. In reply she gave a squeeze of assent, noting as she did how large and warm and smooth his hand was.

  To a passerby it would have looked like nothing out of the ordinary. He or she, on seeing this man and woman by the water’s edge, would assume that this hand-holding was a commonplace event for them. But it wasn’t. This was the first, the only time of any real physical contact between them.

  Later, still awkwardly holding hands, each now afraid that letting go might signal some end to that which had not yet even begun, they made their way to the old Town Hall, once the home of commerce and council and now a centre for literature. This was the purpose of their trip, the reason why at seven that morning she had stood at the window of her bedsit in Cambrian Street, Aberystwyth, waiting for the tin-soldier red of his Citroen to emerge around the corner.

  Each had expressed an interest in visiting the Centre and had behaved as if they were the only two people in the world with such a desire. That was why, uncharacteristically, he hadn’t suggested the trip to the other members of his tutorial group. It was also the reason why Claire had omitted to tell any of her friends, why she had agreed to wake Ginny that morning at ten o’clock, despite the fact that she and Dr Terrence Stevenson would probably be enjoying coffee and toast together in Swansea by then.

  Terry, as he was known to colleagues and students alike, was a large man, over six feet, with large bones and large appetites, which now as he neared fifty expressed itself in his frame. He had once been lithe and muscular but his body had thickened with age. He blamed too many years at a desk, the expansion of his mind at the expense of an expanding behind. But he dressed well enough, choosing dark tailored jackets and corduroy or chino slacks, as well as the odd devilish tie, which was about as subversive as he got. In colder weather, as on this grey October day, he wore his favourite black Abercrombie overcoat of cashmere and wool mix. The coat hung well from the shoulders and had the effect of tapering his body, disguising its imperfections with a veneer of powerful authority and masculinity.

  Claire thought he looked like one of the Kray twins in this coat of his, and to her that signalled a sort of dangerous sexuality. She could not help but imagine herself engulfed in that coat, held willing captive in its soft folds.

  Next to him, she looked tiny, even less than her five feet and a half inch. Claire had very long hair, grown in excess
to compensate perhaps for her lack of height. It hung down, straight and sleek to her bottom and a great deal of her time was taken up with this hair: washing, combing and plaiting it before she went to bed each night. Most of the time she wore it loose and her gestures, the movement of her head, body and hands were all done in such a way as to accommodate her river of hair. When eating, for example, she would hold the fork in one hand while with the other she held her hair away from the plate. She was very proud of her hair and if asked which part of herself she liked the most, that would be what she would choose. Her last boyfriend, whom she had met at the Fresher’s Dance at college and dated for almost three years, had loved her hair; had sometimes spread it over her naked body, Lady Godiva style when they made love; had once even made the pretence of tying himself to her by it.

  Claire’s body was like a boy’s: flat-chested and slim-hipped. And today she was dressed like a boy too, with jeans and heavy black lace-up boots and a white shirt and a man’s tweed jacket two sizes too big. Through both her right eyebrow and right nostril she wore tiny silver rings and her eyes and lips were exaggerated with make up in shades of reddish brown. She seldom smiled, but when she did her entire face was transformed into something not quite wholly beautiful, but something very like it.

  They had trudged through an exhibition of artefacts relating to the town’s one famous poet: the scribbled postcards, the crumpled snapshots, the yellowing newspaper clippings, all framed for posterity like the relics of some dead saint. Terry had begun by clucking and tutting yet more disapproval of the venture, disapproval he’d been nurturing and planning since he first heard of it, but with Claire by his side he found himself softening, growing acclimatised to her open-minded acceptance of all such endeavours.