Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  It was raining that Bonfire Night. Everything was gleaming black with rain. And I can remember Sarah standing at the end of the bridge just in front of the club, frightened to go inside on her own. The tweed coat she had on was waterlogged and rucked up at the back, and she’d straightened her hair too much in the front, greased it so that the drops of water stayed in her hair and glittered like small glass beads. That’s what I remember: and the rain, the sound of it running into the gutters and flowing under the bridge as we walked up to her. And the child’s voice, reciting through the club’s open door, ‘Tiger, tiger, burnin’ bright, inna forest of the night…’

  On the Monday morning she was late for work.

  ‘A grown man, right? Wants to go out with me.’

  All five of us sitting around the canteen table looked at her.

  ‘What would he want with someone like you then, Sair, a grown man?’

  But the women on the table were nudging one another and laughing. Sarah laughed along with them, then she pushed a scribble of hair away from her face and took a swig from a bottle of Tizer. ‘She knows him.’ She nodded in my direction, smiling. ‘He’s a big feller, ain’ he?’ She took another swig from the bottle and burped. ‘An’ he wears this awful blue suit I’d like to set alight to, with a match…’

  The women around the table laughed, and someone said, ‘Well madam, are you going to meet up with this one or not?’ Sarah placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward. ‘Oh, I’m definitely going! He wants to give me breathing lessons, doan he? Says it’ll improve my singing voice, ahem!’ She coughed.

  They all thought that was funny, and they roared. Even Baby, though she had left the club with me, and must have been as surprised as I was. We did our encore, ‘Bye-bye Blackbird’, and we left. People were clapping us out, because we’d been a hit. Funny. We were supposed to be funny, but it was Sarah who had been the funny one, going cross-eyed in the background as I sang. She made them laugh, as I was singing. I had to turn round to see what they were laughing at. The piano was slow and lilting. It wasn’t him, he played it right. But she made it funny pulling her beret down over her eyes and acting gormless.

  I watched her wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. She hadn’t said anything nice about him, only nasty. She hadn’t even mentioned his piano playing, or his smile, or his beautiful razor moustache. Nothing, only smut.

  ‘An’ who d’you think you’re looking at?’ she asked, still smiling.

  ‘I’m looking at you,’ I said in a steady voice. ‘You’ve got no manners, have you? Sitting there with your elbows on the table, drinking out of a bottle!’

  The others were embarrassed to hear me coming out with something like that, out of the blue. Everyone stared at the Tizer bottle, mesmerized by the sudden shame of it. And Sarah’s mouth opened and closed a few times, before she leaned across the table with a little screech, and dragged her fingernails down the side of my face, once.

  Then she clip-clopped through the canteen doors and was gone before I’d even got to my feet. But I remember holding my hands to my breast and screaming after her: ‘You tart! You tart, you!’

  A storm in a teacup. No one had any idea what it was all about, least of all Sarah Vaughan, who got the sack for it. One misdemeanour too many, or so they said. I was only given a warning, because I’d acted out of character, they said. I saw her later on that afternoon, at four o’clock. She was standing by the fire-bucket outside the foreman’s office, waiting for her wages to be made up. I had to walk past her. She was wearing her old tweed coat, with the rucked-up hem. She muttered something horrible as I went past. When I got to the end of the corridor, I looked round; but she had taken her compact out of her bag, and was busy putting lipstick on, pulling her mouth over her teeth, and making her lips look like dark red wings.

  If I felt guilty about her getting the sack, the feeling didn’t last long, because only a couple of months later she was off with him, touring the Valleys as a Jelly Babe. And the rest, as they say, is history. But not for me, my mind keeps going back to it.

  I remember having to go up to his room on an errand, after the fight with Sarah. I knocked at the door, my face still smarting. I was holding the blue suit over my arm. My mother had had it cleaned and ironed for him. I was hoping he’d be out. But he was only getting ready to go out. His hands were slick with pomade, so he left the door ajar and I walked inside and draped the suit carefully over the chair. He had turned back to the mirror. The contents of the manicure case were spread out on top of the chest of drawers, all silvery and pretty, with the mother of pearl inlay along each handle. He’d been trimming his moustache, I could see that; prettifying himself.

  He said something about starting up a dance troupe. ‘I want you to come with us,’ he said, taking more pomade from the jar and smoothing it onto his head like green ice.

  ‘A Jolson Jelly Babe!’ He was laughing in front of the mirror. There was a white shirt on the bed, whiter that the one he had on. A tie had been placed alongside the shirt, ready for going out. The tie had a pattern of small red diamonds on it. Flashy, like a playing card, I thought.

  ‘I’m Alabamy bound!’ He waved his hands like a minstrel in front of the glass, laughing at his own reflection.

  ‘OK, OK, Grace.’ He could see that I wasn’t smiling back. He turned away from the glass and faced me.

  And I remember him putting his hand to my cheek and stroking it in surprise, when he saw the marks. ‘You’re a nice girl,’ he said, over and over again. ‘A nice girl, Grace. Did you know that?’ He stopped stroking my face and glanced towards the open door. Then he put his arms around my body, and drew me close to him.

  I felt his head against my neck.

  ‘Ma-mmy…’ he was crooning softly, singing against my neck, ‘ma-ha-ha-mmee…’ Leaning into my body, and singing like Al Jolson. I could see us in the mirror. His arms around the dark width of me, his head against my neck.

  And I held him to me, young as I was. I put my arms around his white-shirted back and held him. His shoulder blades parted under the pressure of my hands. I felt them opening out and spreading under my hands, like the white wings of a bird. Then still holding him with one hand, I leaned towards the chest of drawers, and picked up one of the silvery blades. It was the one he used for trimming his moustache. When he tried to move away, I brought the blade up against his chest, and stepped back.

  I let myself into his room after he’d left us. The blue suit was hanging up behind the door, on a wire coat hanger. I put my hand inside the pockets and drew out a card of matches. The pink had bled on the matches, so I threw them into the empty fire-grate. Looking down, I noticed his passport photo, wedged between a crack in the oilcloth and the clawed foot of the chest of drawers.

  I eased the photo out with my thumb and looked at it for a long time, but I didn’t see it. The wound was only a flesh wound, that made a small red diamond on his shirt, before it flowered into a buttonhole and had to be bandaged up. He had packed his bags himself, moving in with Sarah Vaughan that same night. But nothing came of it. Their love affair, so called. Which didn’t survive her fame, how could it?

  And now he was dead.

  Love is a bird, that flies where it will, that’s what it says in the song. But I think we travel in flocks; different flocks, cut into by our shadowy opposites always flying the other way. And not just for love, but for life.

  I tucked the tiny photograph inside the wooden frame of the mirror. I remember doing that then stepping back, further and further into the darkness of the room, until it looked as though his face had been imprinted on my forehead. His eyes were just gashes of black: with dots of light at the centres, like domino pieces. Then the photograph came unstuck and dropped to the floor.

  The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

  Father Farrell bares his teeth in a pearly-gated smile. A signal, but when I get up to sing, I find that my heart isn’t in it. My face is as dry as tobacco leaf, and my lungs feel shadowy
and empty like the branches of a tree in wintertime. I picture my lungs like that; and yet. And yet… as soon as the organist pumps out those opening chords… I shift my bulk and sing.

  ‘And I sing because I’m happ-ee, and I sing because I’m free!’ Vanity, I think, as I sense the congregation perk up behind me. All is vanity. But Baby Cleo is smiling, smiling and crying at the same time; and myself?

  I have hoarded my tears like a jewel thief, but one or two steal down my face now, as I look towards the coffin for the last time. Sing! I think, even as my voice veers out of control, and cr-a-ck-s…

  WOMAN RECUMBENT

  Stevie Davies

  After a day and a night of lying on bare tiles, shafts of cold penetrating her pelvis, hooping her chest, if human warmth ever came, it would strike like a grenade. Libby set rock-hard, puzzled at her rigidity when she inclined to move. Pain was glaciated, fear glazed. In the old days, the clemency of pneumonia would long ago have commuted her sentence: ‘the old man’s friend’. That friend had several times tapped lightly at her door, dithered and been turned away by the authorities.

  Prone on the kitchen floor, she spasmodically caught (as an eye twitched open) the wink of house keys hung high on a ring. Through the open door to the sitting room her glance angled the faint cream glow of a wall-mounted phone. Once, waking, she thought, it is never wholly dark. All night round light wanes but never succeeds in failing.

  Otherwise how could the remote keys, the phone hanging as it seemed in space, remain discernible? Men had space-walked on umbilical ropes. They had floated out where there was no height or depth, neither up nor down. In this cold, and with a cracked hip or thigh, which she had heard snap doubly like distant twigs, the kinesis had failed that might power an effortful raising of head, torso, belly, from the tiles. At first there was a dimming, then suspense, now fractional intimation of renewal: on the point of extinction light rallied, to tip dull mist on to dusty surfaces. Her immediate world was bounded by the edge of a dingy mat, inches from her face. How frayed it was, rimmed with hairs like lashes, or a centipede’s legs, grease-clogged. For years her soles had worn themselves thriftily thin on this mat, a squalid object if you thought about it, but its proximity now brought a tinge of dark comfort, like some pet, mangy and disgraceful, but known.

  She was numb to time. Chill glazed Libby’s mind and the long pauses between pulse beats stretched away untenably until the heartbeat (unexpected by now) came with a soft explosive startle of her whole body. There was no horror, none. Only the icy abstraction of waiting in death’s antechamber, so near to this familiar mat, with pearls of light dewing the pane of the living room window (for the door was open, ready to walk through with a tray of tea). An idea distilled. Pull down the drying up cloth, lay your head on that. It dangled above her, and so did the idea, but though she urged herself to claw, hook, flip, drag it somehow down, she could perform this only in imagination: her body withheld assent. Such baffling impotence impelled Libby to try again and again, enacting her project solely on the mental plane, whilst her hands maintained metal-cold inertia and her head continued unpillowed. Her skull might have cracked open like an egg, and all her yolk slopped out, so concussively hard had she come down.

  It dawned on Libby, hearing the sough of early commuting traffic on the Swansea road, that she must have spent her last or penultimate night on earth. They would all carry on threshing in and out of a city that had long been less of a memory than a rumour in her solitude; and she would be out of it. Well out of it. Yet some spasmodic instinct still thrust up towards warmth and life: the quickening sap of hope hurt mortally. Tresses of light wavered on the carpet and against the armchair in the living room, so comfy, so ordinary, holding the shape of Libby’s light frame. The curtains remained apart like wide eyelids: there’d been no time to close them before being caught short by this whatever-it-was, this seizure. Or had she tripped on something? A ruck of mat? Had someone got in and assaulted her, how could you know? All around her consciousness the house was open to the light of day. Nakedly open. Strange shame confounded Libby, lying here on the rust-red tiles, at the prospect of being found, her body putrefied perhaps, beyond recognition. How ghastly for them: she hoped it would not be Ceri, her young neighbour, great granddaughter of Libby’s decades-dead childhood friend, also a Ceri. I’m just popping in, Mrs Vaughan. Brought you some baked rice with a cinnamon skin, I know how you like it.

  They would blame Danny for not coming regularly to check on her. For always having excuses: I’ve got work to go to, a living to make, I can’t be round there all the time, it’s just not on, sorry. Poppers-in twisted the knife in Danny’s sullen back. Ah, they cooed, in unsubtle rebuke, she’s such a spry soul, isn’t it, you must be proud to have such an alert, intelligent mam, 94 years of age, and all her wits about her!

  And he made that face, that (to Elizabeth) highly legible face which had first appeared when he went away to school, a stricken guilty-angry scowl, bending his grey head like a schoolboy and mumbling. He had been the unintended child of her age, his debilitating presence in her belly mistaken for the onset of menopause until he could no longer be ignored as a human burden.

  Danny wouldn’t come. Why should he? She did not blame him. Not a whit. She should beg his pardon for knocking him down.

  Had she indeed knocked him down? On her motorbike? In the war she had sped through bombed-out Swansea bearing letters as a courier but could not recall knocking anyone down, let alone her one son. But he had come a cropper: of that there was no doubt. It was a conundrum and she let it go. Light washed on the green settee; it must be breezy out there. When you peed yourself lying here, for a moment the sensation was warm and comforting, then colder than before. Danny had been a bed-wetter: she had smacked, they endorsed violence to children in those days. And you, criminally, obeyed. A rapture of black impatience quivered through her: why couldn’t it be over, the punishment? Why be put on this earth, to rot like this, at tedious length? To suffer interminable resurrections. It is unnecessary, she thought. It contributes and amounts to nothing whatever. It is uneconomic.

  Uncle Evan with his healthy brutality, his sense of timing, had given equal weight to economy and mercy. With one clean wring of the neck Evan would slaughter chickens. Shot the tired and gallant mare through the temple. Libby had looked Jenny-Jill in the eye before Uncle despatched her. Trustfully she’d clopped along to her death between uncle and niece, the tumour in her belly pendant as though she were in foal. Elizabeth, gazing into the patience of Jenny-Jill’s eye, had fingered her velvety muzzle in awed valediction, the tapering bone so solidly defined; rushed away into the farmhouse at Uncle’s bidding and left Jenny-Jill to his canny mercy.

  Crack went the pistol shot. And your hip which was friable as a dead twig, porous, its vital juices and calcium leeched, cracked one evening, once, twice. No one came to offer the clemency of a bullet, a shot in the arm, nor had you means to make an honourable, a Roman, end of it. The long freeze perpetuated itself. Libby shut her eyes, to seal out the fringe on the mat, dust-puffs and decaying crumbs, the wanton bloom of light on the couch through the door. Everything drifted down in a fine silt, the leavings, skin-flakes, coffee-particles, dust powdering surfaces like a pall of ash.

  In this extremity appeared the most minor of miracles. A creaturely presence. The ant had scurried from somewhere into Elizabeth’s field of vision, where it now paused. Her jaw and cheek burned with the atrocity of cold as if her face were one giant toothache, while her eyes took in the visitation. It had roamed far from its nest: perhaps the community sent out scouts, to reconnoitre territory. And doubtless the ant, with its superior senses, intuited as foreign the presence of the mountain range of skeletal flesh that was Elizabeth, the foothills of her skirts, and waited irresolute, so near to her milky-blue eyes. She was herself terrain now.

  Libby pondered the ant. The habit of intelligence was tenacious. She felt bound to take the ant into consideration. It was a life after all. A creature at
eye level. Nothing to do with her, and what a relief. Inhabiting its own proximate world. You put down poison for the colony. It didn’t work, in her experience. A puddle of bleach sometimes did the trick. A cluster of brethren drowned, alerting the corporate mind. Then they’d all decamp. Disappear from the cracks in the tiled sill which was the entrance to their nether kingdom, pouring out to forage, pouring in with supplies, only to reappear on the counter by the bread bin. She didn’t much mind them. But she had never before been glad of one. She kept her eye on the ant, until it no longer seemed as miniscule, but a companionate presence which she tacitly saluted.

  And there beside it, one human hair. White, curved, single. How come she had not seen it before? It lay in an arc, curving toward the mat with its eyelash-fringe. One of her own hairs, for certain; yet it seemed alien, not pertaining to her as she essentially was, despite the fact that she had been grey for decades. Or rather, pure white, and sparse, so that the scalp showed through a fluffy cloud. But that this should be her hair, detritus of her head, and not her mother’s or grandmother’s, puzzled Libby, as if a system had slipped.

  Detached, the hair lay there, next to the ant, which appeared to have moved. Presumably as she’d pushed her hair back from her forehead yesterday or the day before, this individual had detached, hanging by a follicle to her jumper, then slipped away into these reaches she had never imagined. Indeed, why should she? What would be the utility? The schoolmistressy riposte rapped out in her head like a ruler on a desk (what attitudinising piffle it had all been, though, the geography and Scripture, the gold stars and the black marks, considering the finality of this perspective, getting down to it, level with this ant, that hair). Perhaps now, soon, she could be quit, make her quietus.