Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  ‘It’s not a day for quarrelling,’ my mother pleaded.

  ‘I know. I’ll listen to Uncle Glyn. I’ll be polite,’ I assured her.

  ‘He’s trying to help you. Isn’t that what family is for?’

  ‘Mam, please—’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to stay around here long, love. Once you’re appointed you can move on. It makes sense in times like these, Gavin. Everyone needs a start.’

  ‘I’ll be polite.’

  In the living room Uncle Glyn was calling for attention, so we went back there and listened while he told everyone which car to ride in. Tall as I, he looked like a stout chief of police. He was a man with one face and one voice for all occasions. I found myself in the first car sitting between him and my mother. My mother’s sister, Dorothy, sat in front of us with Auntie Laura and Wyn. Auntie Laura’s ginger curls tumbled down the back of her black dress. ‘Well preserved,’ my mother always said. ‘And so she should be,’ my father would reply.

  Gone the days when funerals crept along. We sped through the rain behind a hearse that seemed intent on losing its cortege. Funerals fitted into thirty-minute slots and ten of those minutes were for arrival and departure. The chapel doors were open, we found, because of the numbers. I was amazed to see so many people. The rain stopped as we arrived and the sun came out briefly as if just for us. People were lowering and shaking umbrellas. The tarmac gleamed like anthracite.

  Reverend Watcyn Pritchard was inside, the only man for the job, my father’s friend since schooldays, cheeks like red slippers, nose knitted out of biro refills. His bulky figure was behind the lectern waiting as the coffin with its shiny handles was placed to his left.

  We began, not with a hymn, but a song in Welsh, chosen by my mother because my father used to sing it around the house. His favourite verse:

  When I see the collier’s scar

  Or blood on the blue slate’s face

  Then I know what love is

  For a people and a race

  After that I went up and read from Corinthians about eternal life. We sang in Welsh, ‘Give me the peace the world knows nothing of.’

  Then, shifting between our two languages, Watcyn delivered the tribute. Even back then, in 1993, it sounded like history.

  ‘How many memories of Aneurin have been brought here by so large a number of mourners, I wonder. He was a man who thought it was human nature to help those in need, who agreed with Gandhi that poverty is the worst kind of violence and that small communities are the best; a man who spent the last year of his life fighting to save Cwmffynnon school from closure, because he believed young children should go to school where they are loved and feel secure. Fighting for justice, that is the story of Aneurin’s life.’ Watcyn reeled off a list of battles fought, half of which I knew nothing of.

  Watcyn shook his large head sadly. ‘Some of you may remember that less than four years ago I stood in this place saying similar things about Aneurin’s brother, Dafydd.’ He shook his head again, abstractly this time, looking genuinely moved. ‘An old Welsh proverb comes to mind, Ni wyr werth y ffynnon nes elo hi’n hesb: “The value of the spring isn’t known till it runs dry.” We are in bleak times. We may wonder who today or tomorrow, will be willing to give selflessly, without profit to himself, out of a sense of humanity and justice. My friends, Aneurin would never let himself think that man’s humanity can run dry. So why not let ourselves be led by him?

  ‘Soon we will sing the 23rd psalm: “My soul it doth restore again and me to walk doth make among the paths of righteousness.” Paths are there because those who tread them mark the way for those who follow, who maybe carry a different light and speak different words, but are nonetheless on the same journey.

  ‘Perhaps you wonder if it is a journey made in vain.

  ‘I know what Aneurin’s answer would be. He would remind us of those who fought the injustices of their day in these valleys, out of a conviction that it is man’s nature to cooperate and contribute, and improve things. However bad times may get, goodness remains, because it does not come from the times or the system under which we live, but exists within us. It is “the true light that lighteth everyone that cometh into this world,” whatever our beliefs. It is a light that cannot be extinguished. Aneurin is lost to us, and we grieve, but in our human, grieving hearts we know his journey was not in vain.’

  As I said, Watcyn was the man for the job. But who saw any paths anymore?

  The Watcyn who drank tea in our house, talking politics, was as devastated was as everyone else by what had befallen us, so I wondered if he fully believed what he said. In the fullness of time new people would repopulate this valley, no doubt, but it would not be the same valley. The young were already gone, like me. My own kids would probably end up further from me than I from here. Relocation was the only way now, not just in Wales but everywhere. It was no longer called ‘exile’. It was ‘relocation’. There was a certain conflict beween that future and Watcyn’s tribute, with its suggestions of heritage. Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta più caramente.

  We prayed. We sang ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’.

  Then Watcyn offered the committal and my heart flew to my throat as the coffin started moving. Suddenly, his words were poignant, relevant and true. They were all that prevented this being just a horrible, mechanical conjuring trick.

  The family led the way out to the sound of canned music, a song by Schumann, called ‘Dreaming’. The hearse was gone and the cars were turned around facing the exit.

  A woman detached herself briefly from the crowd: ‘We could never repay what he did for us,’ she said to my mother. ‘Nobody else would have helped us.’

  Glyn, a widower with no children, was visibly affected by the service. Maybe feeling his own mortality, he presided over silence in the car on the way back. Feeling something rustle in my pocket, I found the scrap of paper from my father’s desk, and read the rest of it. We are light years ahead of other life forms. We have been to the moon.

  Back in the house, when the reception was underway, Uncle Glyn asked me to step into my father’s study. I remember thinking how someone was going to have to go through everything in the study, encounter all those memories. I was aware of my mother watching. Without preliminaries, Glyn got to the point. He puckered the skin between his heavy brows, fixing me with his eyes: ‘This may not be the best time, but you’ll be going back, and maybe I won’t see you. How are your applications going?’

  ‘I’ve still got two to hear from,’ I replied.

  I had applied for over three dozen full-time posts.

  ‘You’ll probably be waiting till next April, now.’

  ‘There’ll be the odd one coming up.’

  ‘There will,’ he agreed. ‘Indeed, there will be one right here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘There’ll be a vacancy in Ystrad School after Christmas. It’ll be advertised as a Scale 1 this November. I can guarantee you’ll be on Scale 2 within two years. I don’t see anything else coming up for quite a while.’

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘It’s not that I am ungrateful, Uncle Glyn…’

  ‘This is the worse slump since the Thirties, Gavin.’

  ‘I’m really trying, Glyn. I’m well qualified, and I’ll be getting experience. I’ve got a few hours part-time at the FE college.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but you are rowing against a strong tide. Every job has more applications that you can shake a stick at. I am not saying you have to stay, Gavin. I am saying that it’s a start. In times like these, a start is hard to get.’

  There was more silence.

  We had been through it before and Glyn didn’t let it go on too long. ‘All right,’ he sighed, putting a friendly hand on my shoulder. ‘But at least say you’ll think about it. Think hard about it. This could be a long recession. Your mother worries. Your father did, too. You know your father would have wanted this.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Think about that Scale 2. It’ll establish you. After
that you can move on to whatever you want, anywhere.’

  I promised I would think about it.

  Glyn added: ‘It is a lot easier to get a job when you are already in one.’

  ‘I’ll be teaching part-time,’ I reassured him, ‘and I’m hoping to earn a bit extra, correcting PhDs by foreign students.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, resignedly. ‘I’ll be here if you need me, for as long as I am alive and well.’

  ‘Thank you, Glyn, I appreciate that,’ I said, and meant it.

  I meant it for the first time in my life, and I think he recognised it. He went back to the reception.

  I stayed and looked around the study. I flicked though a file of cuttings, things my father had published, mostly in the local paper.

  Wales has national plans for Health and Education, so why not planning? Should not towns and villages have a say over what development should overtake them? Get rid of the County Councils and let the Welsh Assembly fund our town and district and community councils. That would be devolution.

  You’d have thought he’d have made enemies among the powers that be, but he never seemed to. If he’d lived eleven years longer he’d have seen the localities he defended deprived by a planning act of any say in their own development, and a lot more, too, that he wouldn’t have liked.

  My mother fetched Dad’s retirement present from work, his Omega self-winding watch.

  ‘Here, Gavin,’ she said. ‘You should have this. It’s rightfully yours, now.’

  I sat sipping drinks with my mother and Dorothy, remembering my father and wearing his watch. What we remembered was how ordinary he was, how he kept his false teeth in his pocket, slipping them into his mouth if he saw someone he knew, how he sang arias above the sound of the vacuum cleaner, hated baked beans, never walked under ladders, was too superstitious to have a picture of birds in the house, and how anyone could approach him, how he always managed to find time. What a unique amalgam of qualities was a person, and, indeed, the age he lived through. How essential and irreplaceable, and gone.

  POD

  Stevie Davies

  Three kids in four years. I suppose it could be worse: four in three years would be biologically feasible, she’s murder, is Mother Nature, considering the diameter of the head to come out and the narrowness of the tunnel to be shoved through, all due to our calamitous bipedal status with no regard for ease of parturition, a design fault that…

  Just stop it, Aneurin, stop it now. Put the magazines back. I said… put them back.

  …is nearly as bloody woeful as situating the vagina next door to the anus, because next to childbirth cystitis has to be the worst pain, doesn’t it, the very worst, I slew in my chair just to think of it and my urinary passage winces, flinches, ouch, as if it remembered, but can tissue actually be said to remember, the delicate, delicate place where such gross pains come to pass and searing pleasures, such violence, such throes…

  That’s right, come and sit here next to Mami, Magdalena, that’s right, you snuggle up … and the dentally immaculate suited guy reading the Financial Times flashes us a surprising grin, very nice, very sweet, given the trauma we’re subjecting him to, and Dr Up-his-own-Arse Williams from the Institute (he doesn’t deign to recognise me, I’m just the ex-academic mother of three human nuisances, well stuff you, Williams, stuff you all) reluctantly simpers at Magdalena, and the ginger biddy grins too, and suddenly everyone’s smiling, a festival of sunlight breaks in on us, while Magdalena turns and whispers breathily behind her dimply hand, Dat man’s got hairs up his nose, Mami.

  Shush Magdalena.

  She’s got an unusually carrying whisper. Oh God, Christ, what a darling she is, what a precious beauty, I ache for her, for her father in her, for those wormy little fingers and her mass of brown soft curls against my face and lips. Treorchy-Gran had seven living children, two stillborn, goodness knows how many miscarriages, shucked like a peapod once a year she was, but what’s my excuse, educated with the toffs at Cambridge, criminal casualness, I just love fucking, I love it in the way nature intended: pity ratbag nature pays you back with this excess fecundity, this fat billowingness, and there are times I’ve felt like a pod, a gourd, a clay pot just abjectly mindless brooding on its own rotundity, so damned conspicuous, not human any more…

  I said, Aneurin, put them down now, stop annoying the people, I won’t tell you again.

  Oh what’s the use? Marie Stopes might as well not have existed for all the notice I’ve taken and I don’t like condoms and I do like risks, I expect it’s something Freudian, I’ve impaled and imperilled myself and these little loons are the result. Viola wants feeding, my Christ, does her nappy smell ripe, so, Dr Williams, you’re going to get a sight of tittie, that’ll put the fear of God in you if the dentist doesn’t, watch him vanish up his own arse, old poker-face: remember him chairing the library committee and me wandering in from sunbathing with the third-year students, and I slid in beside him, what was it he said? At long last we are quorate. How solemnly he said it, what reproof for female lecturers gassing with a bunch of lads on the grass, sucking from a Coke bottle, in a strappy sundress. At long last we are quorate. Shuddering with aroused distaste.

  And they got rid of me, the wankers. You have hardly produced at all, Dr Powell. That’s a joke: I’m a one-woman Harvest Festival. A total of one article in five years shows a certain lack of commitment, said the Dean. Well, look on the bright side, I sealed my fate, I score with the students.

  Out flops my tittie, pop it in your mouth, Viola, and let sucking commence. She makes such a noise about it too. Little guzzler. All that lip-smacking, slurping, dribbling from the corner of her mouth, her small palm on my breast, Jesus it’s still so sensual, the sensations radiating out in a star, ley lines to pleasure, the sweet drag on the womb, I’ve had many a happy secret orgasm through this, just cross my legs, so, and…

  That’s right, Aneurin, you read the nice article…

  Aneurin has a premature interest in Things Sexual and Experimental, especially when someone’s having a suck, he’ll be fingering his willy or, as now, his little blond head (hair wants cutting but I can’t be arsed, my God, three scalps, thirty fingernails and eke toenails, the maths of the thing goes into a dimension that’s truly round the bend, and that’s without adding in the teeth) and you, you snorting, snotty little brat, you’re spoiling my fun, you seem to have needles in your gums and want to sink them into my tit when you batten on, Mother Nature has a lot to answer for.

  How old are the little ones, may I ask? enquires the foreign guy sitting nearest to our menagerie. Magdalena is standing with one hand lightly on his knee, the other bunched against her lips, just staring. Is she all right in the head, I sometimes wonder?

  Four, three and ten months.

  Well, really, they are peautiful children.

  Thank you. I think they’re peautiful children too, I can’t resist mimicking. It’s a pain waiting around with them though. I hope we’re not disturbing you?

  Not in the world.

  This I like. Not in the world. Meanwhile there’s a flurry of coming and going: Old Williams and Ginger have had their jabs and been put out to freeze, and the girl on reception is sneezing away remorselessly over the queue. Give them one, girl, that’s the spirit.

  Wot you speak for like dat, Old Man? Magdalena is enquiring.

  Well, I come from Chermany. In Chermany we speak Cherman. Not Inklish.

  Magdalena is fascinated. Then, without warning or seeking permission, she clambers on to the German knee and gazes into the German eyes.

  Oh glory. Do you mind?

  I am honoured, he says. Let us read a book together, Magdalena. Off she trots to fetch one. Such a charming name. Is she musical?

  Very. On the drum.

  The drum is a very robust instrument.

  Especially at five in the morning.

  I swap Viola to the other breast. By God, I’ll be a sad, saggy woman after all this suckling which I do not do, please n
ote, Eternal Powers, do not do to protect my little darlings with my antibodies, no way, though, OK, sure, it makes sense and saves them and me a load of hassle, but because I personally happen to enjoy it, the tender, dragging, horny feeling that puts the light on in your body even when you’re overworked, which by Christ you are, you’re nine tenths dead by bedtime and feel fifty.

  Williams is fingering his jaw in bewildered dismay. Asks Ginger in an undertone how her injection is taking. Blimey Charlie, the old goat, I’m sure he’s got the hots for her, shouldn’t she be warned about being at long last quorate?

  He was on that panel that gave me the push. They all fiddled with their ties, while Dean Dai Thomas (whose fingers have been lubriciously active in generations of girls’ knickers, pantihose, jeans, right back to corselettes and whalebone bras if the truth were known) enquired was I was a mite overburdened? Not wholly suited temperamentally to…? No! I should have said. No way mister are you taking my livelihood! But Viola chose that moment to wrench round, grinding her unborn bum on my bladder. My belly stretched so taut I gasped and felt I’d split. Uncharacteristic tears sparked. I fatally crumbled, under bombardment without and battery within. Lumbered up, said, Sod the lot of you, you dessicated load of coconuts. I resign.

  Pure folly. I heard their basso profundo murmurings behind me. Knew it for a catastrophic mistake the moment I was through the door but at the same time there was an exhilaration, a punching of the air.

  I’ll reintroduce myself to Colleague Williams. When this little sprog of my loins has sucked me dry – oh for someone to fuck me dry, it’s an age since I had a proper shag, by which I mean a shag where you see stars, you can hardly move afterwards and your flesh is so tender and lax that your pee scalds, your legs tremble, oh gorgeous, and the guy is still up for another go – oh for that fuck – anyhow, in the absence (temporary, I trust) of such, when Viola has sucked her fill, I’ll introduce myself to old Quorate and watch him squirm. With any luck Viola can do a projectile vomit, I’ll aim her at him, she’s spectacular at those, I kid you not.