Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

She was exhausted: it was obvious in her falling back onto the sofa cushions and wriggling half out of her coat where she sat… in making no move to dash straight up to Charlie.

  ‘Mel’s father’s Elvis Costello but completely slaphead,’ he told her, just after telling her that he thought Charlie might be sickening for something.

  ‘Glasses?’

  ‘Certainly glasses.’

  ‘You didn’t take to him?’

  ‘Too right I didn’t. His daughter’s nearly killed… her horse, well, I won’t bore you with going over that again… and all he can talk about is what it’s costing him?’

  ‘Well I suppose he’s had to pay out a small fortune over the years. But she’s OK, you said. Just a broken arm?’

  ‘If that’s OK.’

  ‘Oh you know what I mean!’ She hauled herself to her feet leaving her impression in the leather of the sofa seat and the creased silk lining of her coat. ‘I’ll just look in on him – is it a bug, d’you think? It’s not like you to make a big deal of things – the girl getting knocked off her horse, I mean. I couldn’t get a cup of tea, could I?’

  Perhaps real events could be fashioned through fiction. Perhaps Charlie was coming down with something after all. The child was fretful and uncooperative, seeming to become feverish mid afternoons only to cool and sweeten both days at Holly’s walking in. Magically the symptoms vanished for the weekend, returned, as did the nuisance early morning fog, for Monday.

  ‘Take him in to the surgery, will you?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong, Hol.’

  ‘Just to check, then. Oh, it’ll probably be nearer seven if the weather’s bad.’ She swept up her keys from the worktop and had one last scan of the kitchen for anything that still connected her with home, even as her mind wandered out to the car and the journey and beyond the journey. ‘Please. What harm can it do?’

  To the young locum Alun said, ‘If it was me, I wouldn’t be here. My wife’s bothered.’ Charlie sat on a folded blanket on the examination table, not flushed, not crying, not cowed in the least by his surroundings.

  ‘Well, you were bothered enough to have time off to bring him – let’s have a look-see, shall we?’

  But the look-see revealed nothing other than a touch of inflammation around a late-erupting second molar.

  And then there was Mel: when they came out, her brilliant red hair was startling amongst the grey and white heads of those seated around her. So unused was he to seeing her dissociated from Samson, Mel struck him as much smaller than he recalled. A child again, after the adult stoicism he’d witnessed. She was slumped in a corner, her legs drawn in tight and one arm cradling the other in its splint. Only a few days and already the cast, that began at the elbow, was grubby and frayed-looking about the wrist. There was time to note – before she glanced up and recognised him – the darkening of scabs on her hands and the bruise just above her jaw-line, where he’d seen the dirty streak on that day…

  ‘Hello Alun.’

  ‘How you doing?’

  ‘On the mend.’

  ‘You’re not having the cast off already?’

  ‘No, worse luck. Fracture clinic in another week.’ She stood up and moved toward the door, out of earshot of the assembled sick. ‘To be honest I don’t know what I’m doing here, really. I’m not sleeping – it’s probably just the arm and everything else aching but Dad said – he won’t give you anything of course! – he said to come and get something…’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I feel stupid now I’m here.’

  ‘I’m really sorry – about what happened.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He saw her swallow hard but she wasn’t going to cry on him. Then – horribly – he felt prickling in his own eyes. He was sorry. He was so sorry. Just a second sooner or a second later and… it shouldn’t have happened. Only swinging Charlie up into his arms gave him cover to turn away, to say, ‘Well, I’m glad I’ve seen you. I hope… things… work out better. I’m sure your father’s right though. You should get something, just to see you through it.’

  Charlie slipped over in the surgery car park: Holly had been right about that black ice. On the dark, dependable- seeming surface his sturdy little legs had buckled and shot him flat onto hands and chin. ‘Come on now! I’ll rub it, shall I? No? Well don’t make a meal of it, then. Be a brave boy. You’re not hurt.’ It set the tone for another day: the child, miserable, complaining, continually badly-done-to and himself, cajoling, snapping, sticking at none of the tasks he began.

  What was wrong?

  While he scrabbled in the freezer to exhume fish for the evening meal, while he sanded down a square of panelling in the hall, he asked himself: what the fuck’s up, Alun? For three years, almost, he’d cared for Charlie and now for whatever reason – for no reason at all – it was as though they’d fallen out of love. Or what he felt for Charlie was getting shot through with needle all the time, just spikelets of annoyance that were enough to… but, of course he loved the child and the child loved him.

  His son! A new person, different from himself, Alun, certainly but with Alun as the pattern. A son… a virtual copy, as he was of his father – but closer, more adequately expressed. Him and his father – don’t even go there, Alun – it was going to be a hundred times better than it was with his own father. And it could only get easier! As Charlie’s boyishness grew, as his gender took a positive form it was Holly that’d find her patience tested. Now when he thought back to the incident at the reservoir it was possible to see it reversed: an omen. The cabinet scraper slipped from his fingers. Rather than retrieve it he ran up to Charlie’s bright-painted room and wakened him with stroking his hair. ‘Hello Charlie! Are you going to get up, now? Banana and milk – how about that? And then help Daddy paint that fence?’ But the child hadn’t slept for long enough: Charlie’s eyes flickered and he moaned but he turned again beneath his quilt, clutching it to him with two small fists – and Alun found he had to resist the temptation to prise the bunched material from them, to break their grip.

  Meaning to fetch milk for his tea, he found a couple of bottles of Becks in the fridge and sat with them out in the garden, his back against the house wall, his buttocks and legs on the modest expanse of terrace he’d managed to lay in that first flush of summer enthusiasm. It was too cold for sitting but not quite chilly enough to force immediate movement. The sun had pierced the white mist at last, somewhere a blackbird (the only bird he could recognise) was cackling boastfully over its possession of the orchard’s rotten produce. When the glow of the first bottle hit and the second was started, he saw Charlie out here again, hooting with delight at the newly-arrived pile of red sand, rolling down from the top, gathering a coating as though it were breadcrumbs…

  Unidentifiable weeds sprouted from the near face of the heap now and the thrill of rolling was all worn out.

  Somehow the brown, fermenting pulp had got into the house. No – not into the house, through the house. ‘You’ve trodden it through the house,’ Holly said. ‘It must’ve come in on your boots – it’s all up the stairs.’ It was the weekend (nearly) again, two days he anticipated with pathetic eagerness and they were going to begin it with a Friday night bicker about this?

  Alun walked out into the hall. The pale carpet, left by Carousel’s previous owners, now showed the partial-prints of his boots. ‘It’s in Charlie’s room, as well, next to his bed,’ Holly called after him, ‘I thought it was dog shit at first…’

  ‘Oh it could’ve been worse then.’

  ‘But it’s rotten apple.’

  ‘I’ll get rid of it.’ ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know – clean it off – hire one of those machines, if that’s what it takes.’

  Later they ate across from each other without speaking, the kitchen television showing a sluggish documentary about a party of ologists, trekking through some… where on the trail of some lost… thing. Alun reached to click it off.

  ‘You’ve started
on the panelling – in the hall.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have got very far.’

  ‘Charlie woke up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He could always tell her about Mel, he thought, how he and Charlie’d met Mel in the waiting room – and later on, how the kid at the garage had said she was going to her mother’s in France to get over the accident. How everybody in the shop was saying she’d never get on a horse again – and not because she’d lost her nerve (because Mel was a local byword for nerve) but because they reckon Samson getting killed like that has broken her heart. But Holly had had no part in the accident, Holly had no part in what went on in Dial Green, though she’d wanted to come and live out here, no part in the house though it’d been her choice. He stayed quiet and cleared their plates away, topped up their glasses…

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘In what way, OK?’

  ‘Oh come off it, Alun! You’re not exactly Mr Chatty, are you?’ Eyebrows raised she watched him fill his own glass and stop short just at the point of overflowing. ‘And your hands are shaking?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m coming down with whatever Charlie’s got.’

  ‘But Charlie hasn’t got anything – you said.’

  ‘So he hasn’t.’ He’d genuinely forgotten.

  The evening dragged on: Dial Green time, that was the way he thought of it. He’d noticed this weird slowing of the hours in the afternoons and now the infection had spread. The evenings were going the same way, stretched out and thinned. There’d been a schools programme on recently, a twenty-minute Janet-and-John exposé of Relativity with a road, a country lane, pulled out and deformed like chewing gum, never reaching the place the signpost indicated but ‘still infinitely long’.

  He stood, about to draw the bedroom curtains, but not drawing them, looking down to the dark corner of orchard and beyond to the street light in Wrexham Road. No fog: now that it didn’t matter and Holly was safely home it was all icily clear. A single car passed and after a wait, another in the same direction. Back in Dial Green, the Pendy and the Full Moon were emptying out…

  ‘Alun?’ Holly was there, behind him, her warm breasts pressed into his back, the scent of her filling the space between himself and the bay window, her arms locking across his chest. He guessed she was waiting for him to speak or react in some way but he was under water – too much trouble to contest it – too much of an effort not to sink down – too tired to… to… no, that was Holly – it was Holly always too tired to but making a huge effort to…

  She said, ‘I didn’t know you’d come up to bed.’

  ‘Do you remember that time – we were in the flat and we were just looking out, just like this and we saw the bag- snatch? That boy, swiping the woman’s bag? And the big bloke chased him for it?’

  ‘Yes… I remember,’ Holly said.

  ‘Whose side were you on? I mean did you hope they caught him or he got away?’

  There was a long pause while she rubbed her forehead into the nape of his neck. ‘Um-m. Well, the man who was chasing him, I suppose. Yes, of course. The boy had stolen something – and it did look like a really good leather bag. Might have been one of ours.’

  Jesus Hol, you’re meant to be just five years ahead of me, not twenty-five!

  Or was she joking? He had no idea. Heart hammering! Suddenly and when he’d asked it for no effort – was it expecting to have to fuel a fight? An escape from something that he didn’t know was close? And here was Holly hanging about him, impeding his movements… it was all he could do not to pull her off, push her away. ‘I was standing here and I just realised. How I was on the side of the bloke then – but now I wish the kid had made it – got away with it, you know?’

  ‘What on earth are you on about?’ She let her arms drop and stepped back.

  ‘I don’t know. But… something’s got to change, Hol.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Really change.’

  ‘Yes. I think you’re right. I can really see it. Can we go to bed, though? I’m dead on my feet. We’ve got the weekend ahead of us. And nothing’s happened – what I mean is, we haven’t done anything we can’t go back on. We’re lucky. There’s nothing we can’t fix.’

  He peeled off his clothes, left them where they fell and got into bed. Later he felt her slip in beside him in the dark and her hand on his shoulder. Later still, her regular breathing. Sleep wouldn’t come; instead the scene played out again, this time with Holly not answering his question (or not answering quickly enough) and his turning and shaking her by the shoulders till she cried in pain, till she pleaded, ‘I don’t know Alun! Whose side do you want me to be on? The kid running away or the bloke after him? Which one?’ Her fear of him was new and thrilling. It kept his fingers digging into her thin shoulders. It made him want to keep shaking her as long as it lasted.

  It could have so easily gone that way.

  FRESH APPLES

  Rachel Trezise

  When you get oil from a locomotive engine all over the arse of your best blue jeans, it looks like shit, black and sticky. I can see it’s black, even in the dark. I stand on the sty and try to brush it away with the back of my hand, bent awkward over the fence, but it sticks to my skin, and then there’s nowhere to wipe my hands. Laugh, they would, Rhys Davies and Kristian if they could see me now. Don’t know why I wore my best stuff. ‘Wear clean knickers,’ my mother’d say, ‘in case you have an accident.’ She’d say knickers even when she meant pants. She’s a feminist, see. But it’s not like anyone would notice if I was wearing pants or not. Johnny Mental from up the street, he said when he was at school the police would pay him at the end of the day to look for bits of fingers and bits of intestines here, before he went home for tea. If it can do that, if it can slice your tubes like green beans, who’s going to notice if you had skid marks in your kecks? I can still hear the train chugging away, or perhaps it’s my imagination. Over in the town I can hear drunk people singing but closer, I can hear cicadas – that noise you think only exists in American films to show you that something horrific is about to happen – it’s real. It’s hot too. Even in the night it’s still hot and I’m panting like a dog. I’m sure it’s this weather that’s making me fucking crazy. I’m alive anyway; I can feel my blood pumping so it’s all been a waste of time. Forget it now, that’s the thing to do. Oh, you want to know about it, of course you do. Nosy bastard you are. Well I’ll tell you and then I’ll forget it, and you can forget it too. And just remember this: I’m not proud of it. Let’s get that straight from the outset. The whole thing is a bloody encumbrance. (New word that, encumbrance. I found it in my father’s things this morning.)

  Thursday night it started, but the summer has been going on forever, for years it seems like, the sun visors down on the cafés and fruiterer’s in town, the smell of barbecued food wafting on the air, and never going away. And the smell of mountain fires, of timber crumbling and being swallowed by a rolling wave of orange flame. On the Bwlch we were, at the entrance of the forestry. There used to be a climbing frame and a set of swings made from the logs from the trees. It’s gone now but we still go there, us and the car and van shaggers. Sitting on a picnic table with my legs hanging over the edge so I could see down Holly’s top when she leaned forward on the bench, her coffee-colour skin going into two perfect, hard spheres, like snooker balls, or drawer knobs, poking the cartoon on her T-shirt out at either side. She was drinking blackcurrant, the plastic bottle to her mouth, the purple liquid inside it swishing back and fore. I asked her for some. I wouldn’t normally – I’m shy, I’d lose my tongue, but my mouth was dry and scratchy from the sun. Yes, she said, but when I gave the bottle back she wiped the rim on the hem of her skirt like I had AIDS. Kristian and Rhys Davies John Davies, they had handfuls of stone chippings, throwing them at Escorts when they went past, their techno music jumping. Jealous they are, of the cars and the stereos but fuck that dance music, it’s Metallica for me. (Don’t tell them that.) It
’s his real name by the way, Rhys Davies John Davies, the first part after some gay Welsh poet, the second after his armed-robber father, shacked up in Swansea prison.

  Every time something passed us, a lorry or a motorbike, it grated on the cattle grid in the road. That’s how Kristian came up with the cow tipping idea. Only we couldn’t go cow tipping because you can only tip cows when they’re sleeping, in the middle of the night and it’d take ten of us to move one, so Holly had to go one better.

  ‘Let’s go and start a fire!’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘We should be proud of this mountain, Hol. They haven’t got mountains like this in England. And you’ll kill all the nature.’

  ‘Nature!?’ she said. She rolled her eyes at Jaime and Angharad. ‘It’s not the fuckin’ Amazonian rain forest, Matt,’ she said. She can be a cow when she wants, see. ‘C’mon girls,’ she said and she flicked her curly hair out of her face. ‘When there’s a fire, what else is there?’

  ‘A fire engine?’ Jaime said.

  ‘Exactly. Firemen. Proper men!’ And she started up off into the trees, shaking her tiny denim arse at us. The girls followed her and then the boys followed the girls. So that just left me. And Sarah.

  Sarah, Jaime’s cerebral palsy kid sister. She’s not abnormal or ugly, just a little bit fat, and she rocks back and fore slightly, and she has a spasm in her hand that makes her look like she’s doing something sexual to herself all the time. But she’s brighter than Jaime gives her credit for, even when she’s got that big, green chewing gum bubble coming out of her mouth and hiding her whole face. I just never knew what to say to her – how to start a conversation. I smiled at her clumsily and tried to giggle at the silence. We stayed like that, her sitting on her hands, chewing her gum loudly so I could hear her saliva swish around in her mouth, until a fireman came with thick, black stubble over his face, fanning the burning ferns out with a giant fly squat because he couldn’t get his engine up onto the mountain.

  ‘Come and get me you sexy fucker,’ Holly was shouting at him, hiding her face behind a tree. That’s when I went home.