Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  No, Aneurin, you’ll just have to hold on I’m afraid.

  He’s whining for a widdle but you can bet, the moment we get into the loo, our names will be called and we’ll miss our turn. When I get home I’ll dump them for a nap and have a wank. How pathetic is that? Keeps you going, needs must.

  Wow, you are pongy, I tell Viola. You are one ripe stinky malodorous lass. And she suddenly and surprisingly topples her head back like a heavy chrysanthemum and falls fast asleep, dead weight on my left arm. With the burp still in her.

  Dr Williams has been called. He looks confounded and doesn’t respond. As if by some Kafkaesque turn of events, he found himself transformed into a dental emergency in the middle of a seminar pontificating about his favourite, I don’t know, Welsh adverb, and suddenly all his stained teeth sprayed out, revelatory, over the somnolent beery students.

  Hi, I buttonhole him as he picks his way past my bratlings, remember me? He pretends not to hear my Hi, not to see my little Peauties. I should have set them on to him while I had the chance. Why keep a weapon of mass destruction to yourself? But he’s gone. So that means we’ve got to wait for him to be drilled before we get our turn. And all we’re in for is examinations.

  Excuse me, I petition the crazed-looking receptionist. Can’t my kids go in first? Then you’ll have a nice quiet place to sneeze and the other patients can rest in peace.

  Not if ’E says no. What ’E says, goes. Sorry, Mrs Powell.

  Miss, Ms or Dr, I say. Take your pick. But married I ain’t. Doesn’t matter about the wait. They might as well run riot here as anywhere. Aneurin, come and sit on Ms, Miss or Dr’s lap, you yowling little sod. I yank him by his dungarees.

  The guy next to me who’s been used and spurned by Magdalena looks at his watch. He read her something about Janet and John, of which she heard not one word, gazing with forensic curiosity into his face, squirming her behind on his knee until she got tired of it and announced her botty was itching. She’d sucked all the juice out of her prey, ground him around a bit on the squeezer and left his skin. If she goes on like that she’ll turn into a mantis, either that or she’ll have a bun in her oven before she’s fifteen. Now they scramble for my lap. It’s a conflict Magdalena’s bound to win, since I’ve strapped Viola into the pushchair and Aneurin, for all his cheek, is a coward. When Magdalena comes at him punchy fists flying, with her stocky body, thick little legs and arms, eyes on fire like Boadicea, he has to bow to superior force. I adore her, I adore her. I see Aaron’s face in her face swimming up to the surface as the baby plumpness of her cheeks recedes.

  Come here, gorgeous, angelic, peautiful. I kiss her cheeks and she snares my neck with both arms, lovely and solid, kneeling up on my lap. And she kisses back, with rapture, her mouth open and wet on my cheek. How I cried for Aaron, how I drained my self in tears for Aaron, but ah-ha little did Aaron know, he’d left me with you, my Magdalena.

  I have two children pack in Chermany, my neighbour confides Two lovely little kirls. Rosa and Gabi. May I show you a picture?

  They’re dear.

  Yes, aren’t they already?

  He says no more. I ask no more. Funny, pictures of people’s children: what can you say? His thin, fastidious fingers restore the two-dimensional girls to his wallet, tucking them into the compartment where they are housed. Nice quiet, paper children who don’t require to be fed, potted, washed, hugged, lugged upstairs on your back and lullabyed half the night. Got it easy, haven’t you, mister. And what a wallet. Fancy, swanky. Any number of pockets and receptacles. Now that we’re on benefit our purse is notably light.

  So you come to us complaining you’re skint, are you, having thrown away all your advantages? Don’t you know we scrimped for your education, and what have you done with it?

  Given you grandchildren?

  Any fool can do that. And Magdalena being, well, coffee-coloured. Aren’t you ashamed?

  Proud, I said quietly. Proud. Magdalena is my life.

  I’d hoped for more sense from an educated woman. But I suppose you’re after money, is it?

  I grabbed the cheque, mortified. Done for myself good and proper. Still there was something mysteriously thrilling about being a pod. Going with my tummy spherical, like Plato’s all-round men who rolled around without the need of legs, they were so perfect, and the babe-enclosing skin tight as a drum: well, that doesn’t sound too pleasant, but…

  That’s the way, Aneurin, you go sleepy-byes, curl up like a kitten… yes, I know you’re hungry, we’re all hungry…

  …but it was a feeling of being ripe, fruity, and lusciously mindless, just drifting on a current, thinking of nothing but the next meal because, talk about hungry, I snaffled Mars bars galore, I was a frigging Mars bar, and I said to Aaron that time, I’ll have your child, Aaron. Then I’ll be content. You’ll not be able to hurt me, no one will hurt me then, I’ll be.

  Be what?

  Just be.

  He made no reply but I could see him chewing it over. Well I got over him. And the others. Problem with kids is, you can’t put them away in your wallet until convenient. Because I am ravenous for life. For pleasure. So, Dr Powell, why did you not insure against inconvenience by investing in the pill? Haven’t a frigging clue. I seem to have lived in a dream.

  Wish I hadn’t blown it at the Institute. Good feeling, that was, perched on the desk, swinging my legs in the tiniest skirt and the highest heels whilst confiding the obscene habits of Caligula to an agog packed lecture theatre. Invented novel and ingenious vices on the spur of the moment, on the best scholarly principles. They lapped it up. Gives you a buzz to wow a couple of hundred guys at a sitting. Not wowing anyone much now with my tall tales, my svelte figure. I mean, pods don’t, do they? Two a penny in every supermarket. God I could get maudlin if I let myself, I could be hangdog.

  Williams reels out. Looks fit to puke. Excellent. So it’s our turn? But of course we’re all in the land of nod. Some of us are even snoring. We’ve red cheeks and a sleep-sweat. We’re curled up like kittens, we’re sucking our thumbs, we’re an army that has fallen corporately asleep on the watch. And we are deep asleep, make no bones about that, the waters have closed over our heads and we are full fadom five. Thus it is, Mr Dentist Davies, that you have robbed me of my postprandial wank, which these characters would have granted me by toppling asleep en masse after their beans on toast. Thus it is that your ears will be assailed by God awful roaring when you wake them up from dreamland. You have buggered up our day, Mr Davies, good and proper, and you will suffer.

  Williams totters, a pitiful crock, with flecks of blood on his chin. Obviously one tooth lighter than when he went in. Relief suffuses his face at the sight of Ginger. Salvation is nigh. A female person to moan to, lean on, leech from. And oh is she asking for it. Leech me! Leech me! You daft bugger.

  Mrs Powell, would you all like to come through?

  Ms, Miss or Dr.

  Oh, yes, right, Mrs Powell.

  I’m not married, you see. Powell is my name. I’m not Mrs

  Well, anyhow, would you like to come through?

  Oh yes, that will be very easy, won’t it, now that they’re all fast asleep.

  Well, I’m sorry, Mrs Powell, we’ve been running late as you know, what with sickness and understaffing, we do our best.

  I’m – not – Mrs.

  Tell you what, if I take the little one, you could carry the little boy and … we could come back for …

  Allow me, says the Teutonic white knight. Allow me to transport my, if I may so style her, little friend Magdalena.

  So my trinity of young souls trumpet-voluntaries its outraged dolour, its berserk triumph over the forces of fogeyness, bellowing fit to wake the dead, which, as Mr Davies jests, is handy, since it serves to pop open everyone’s mouth for inspection, without need of coaxing or bribery, and all at once we are out in the street and headed for home, fish fingers and an hour’s serious solace under the duvet.

  BLOOD ETC.

  Gee Wi
lliams

  The house, Carousel – a piss-poor, schmaltzy, inappropriate name for a buff-brick nineteen-thirties house, he thought – stood at a bit of a crossroads. Not a roundabout, which might at least have made explicable the overlarge sign they were always meaning to get changed. Just a crossroads. A crossing of two unimportant minor roads, neither of which provided the best or shortest route to the built-up areas they joined together. Tatten Lane passed under Carousel’s front wall. It brought sporadic traffic to annoy anyone attempting to read in the sitting room or sleep in the guest bedroom, before it wandered off in the direction of the river and the old packhorse bridge. Only an ugly bungalow (dwarfed by stables the size and shape of a modern factory unit) stood between Carousel and where Dial Green petered out. The wider Old Wrexham Road ran along the side of the house. It made for the country town with more obvious brio but was kept at bay by a large, shrubby garden and the remains of an ancient orchard. In season its ripe fruit, spurned by the inhabitants of Carousel, still fell from the branches, rolled onto the tarmac and were pulped by passing cars…

  Or were snatched up by the more quick-witted of the animals being chivvied to and from Tatten Livery by a succession of lithe, young riders. All female.

  When they moved in Mel must’ve been one of the first locals he’d become aware of: a young girl – that’s the mistake he’d made and only when already close enough for speech had Alun clocked how, under the hat – the helmet – there was a girl/woman.

  Round, fresh face. Dark, slightly protuberant eyes under fleshy lids. Freckles across the nose and upper cheekbones. When she smiled it was with rows of small regular teeth, though a shade too ivory for perfection. When she swept off the hat, whose black silk cover had slipped askew giving her a bit of a tipsy air, the red hair sprang shocking out.

  Sixteen he reckoned. (Afterwards, after the accident and the passing around of fragments of that day’s happening as though they were a new currency the whole neighbourhood had gone over to, he’d found she was nearer twenty.)

  ‘Let him have it!’ he’d suggested as he saw the huge horse snatch at the bit, lunge forward in its quest for fruit and the rider with equal determination haul on the reins. ‘Let him have an apple. They’re only going to waste.’

  ‘That’s not the point!’ Mel had snapped back.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  The horse swung immense, brown hindquarters at Alun’s face and he dodged back to the sanctuary of steps up to his gate. A spark was kindled as the iron shoe struck a stone where an instant ago his own feet had stood. He’d never seen that before, but then he’d not had much to do with horses before. ‘Why isn’t it?’

  Breathing hard with the effort the girl circled the horse and its threatening hooves out into the lane before turning its head in Alun’s direction as though the animal were a boat in a heavy swell and Alun waiting on the dockside. ‘Because,’ she said, still panting, ‘he mustn’t think – stand up, Samson, stand up! – he mustn’t think when he’s working he can just stop for something to eat. When he wants. He has to—’ but in giving her attention to Alun for the moment it took to frame the reply, Samson had shot out his muzzle and grabbed up a half-apple from the gutter. The blunt lower jaw slid from side to side as the fruit was pulverised and the juice ran. And there was nothing Mel could do to hinder it.

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Alun, ‘that’s exactly what he can do.’ Mel had let out a hoot of laughter and slapped the blissfully masticating brute on its arched neck. ‘I know! He’s a greedy sod. Just look at the weight on him.’

  It gave him a thrill that voice. Not because it was anything special. Not because of its light, girly tone and easy half- Welsh, half-English border accent. But because it was not the voice of a three-year-old boy – the only other, apart from his own, he heard all day. Not that looking after the child, his child, was bad – how could he ever allow himself to think that? Or if it was, when it was, it couldn’t be blamed on Charlie. That day, the day he’d first spoken to Mel, he’d retraced his steps and picked the boy from the lawn and hoisting him onto his shoulders had said, ‘Come and see the big horse, Charlie,’ and Charlie had shrieked with excitement at the movement and new elevation.

  ‘Hor-orse! Hor-orse!’ the child demanded.

  ‘D’you want a ride Charlie, hey? A ride on the horse? Can he?’ he added almost as a formality and in the act of passing the small body from his own shoulders to the animal’s neck.

  Samson’s head jerked towards his massive chest as he reined back one stride, two strides, out of reach. ‘No, sorry,’ Mel said. The action had seemed like a rejection from the horse itself but now he realised it was just a trick, a manoeuvre inspired by some signal of hand and heel that he’d missed. ‘Too dangerous. The kid could get hurt.’ She sent further directions to the beast – ah, yes, he saw that one: the left boot tap, the right rein twitched – and away they went leaving him standing, the child still offered up in his arms.

  The kid? Alun’s temper kindled at the slight. The kid? Immersed for the better part of Charlie’s short life in Charlie’s care, his desire to indulge the boy was affectively maternal though masculine in sheer force. His own belief in Charlie’s status as a small but priceless household god was rarely subject to challenge.

  ‘Miserable bitch,’ he muttered.

  But she was right. Imagine the possibilities, the explanations and Holly’s face, angry, flushed and incredulous. You did what? And then what? Christ Alun, what the fuck were you thinking of?

  What the fuck had he been thinking of? Of course she was right.

  And a good thing not to have taken against Mel, newcomer as he was. No one the length of the straggling, half-pretty place had a word to say against Mel and he soon learned why. She and Samson were local celebrities. Twice daily they’d make their way though the alarums and excursions of The Square to gain access to the old bridleway running over the hill, mile after mile. Local lads – rough as they looked – raised unironic open bottles to them as they passed in front of the Pendy Arms or the Full Moon. Mel and Samson had once been on television. You don’t go disrespecting someone who’s been interviewed for nearly a minute on Wales Today. And Mel acknowledged them. Though she came from The Old Rectory, though her father was a consultant at Maelor Ears, Nose and Throat – and wealthy enough to keep a jobless daughter and a vast, money-munching horse – Mel acknowledged them. (Hi- yer, Scott! See you, then, Tim! The first time Alun witnessed it, he found himself troubled with unaccountable pain). She nodded to Scott and Tim and the weaselly Neil. She nodded to the driver of the ad-daubed single-decker bus that backed up onto the garage forecourt rather than crowd Dial Green’s star. In the store, Mel and Samson’s success at the last Royal Welsh Show remained prominent, if yellowing, in the window. The horse’s bulk improbably hovered over a construction of striped poles and Mel’s small figure, well out of the saddle, hovered above him. Gravity, the picture demonstrated, gravity – for those with the knack – was a sometime force.

  On local radio, one endless afternoon, ‘a young Dial Green rider proves unbeatable’ was actually the before-these-and- other-stories headline. Or it was until an explosion at the soap-powder plant knocked it out of its slot.

  One endless afternoon…

  In the city where he and Holly’d met, in the tight, modern flat they’d brought Charlie home to, the afternoons hadn’t had so many hours in them. It was something to do with the view, he decided. In the city you were connected to a squirming vista, opening up and closed down by high-sided traffic so that pass the window on your way to the kitchen and a whole Victorian canyon of buildings terminated only in the distant prospect of the Cathedral – look again on your return trip and the Japanese tourists in a coach not ten feet away smiled up at you, edgily courteous. Beyond your window, in any half-day period (the time between Holly popping in to breastfeed Charlie his lunch, say, and the first hope of her return) – beyond your window was bound to offer something in the way of a buzz. A rear-ending with or without
rage, an assisted fall from a bike… a dog’s suicidal dash into the carriageway, lead flapping. He had enjoyed a bag-snatch, a police car’s totalling against a concrete bollard and an old lady’s collapse and removal by paramedics without accompanying siren – so a probable death right there as he watched.

  ‘How awful!’ Holly had murmured over her pasta.

  A jolt. Yes, it was awful, wasn’t it, another human being subsiding beneath you, breathing her last next to the teak- effect structure holding communal bins?

  In Dial Green there was no movie running constantly within the window frame. No free, chaotic fringe-show. There was a painting. The trees in the redundant orchard made him cranky with their sluggard ways. ‘When are we going to see some apples on those things?’

  ‘Don’t be impatient – the blossom’s only just fallen.’ Holly was country-bred as Charlie was going to be. Holly had been accurate in this as in most else. Apples had appeared in pointless, messy profusion – and he’d spoken to Mel.

  Was it the height of the horse that meant she always had him at a disadvantage? It was a couple of weeks later. The boy was having a nap and Alun was released into the September sunshine and free from the nagging vigilance of care. Mel had surprised him on his own property. He was caught examining fruit still attached to a squat, cankerous branch of apple that was becoming lost in an unpruned briar.

  ‘I’ll bet you’ve got enough there for a ton of jam.’

  He spun round to see her head and shoulders above the hedge. Slowly, weirdly, the disembodied living bust slid along the shaggy hedge-top, turned and slid back to its original position but facing the other way.

  ‘Jam?’

  The fruit already picked that was in his free hand he dropped to the grass.

  ‘Well if it was me, I’d do cider. I think the old bid lived here before you did cider. Always had a smile on her face.’

  He shrugged. Beyond the hawthorn the horse snorted and a V-sign of brown ears flicked up.