by Dai Smith
On Friday morning, on the portable TV in the kitchen there was an appeal from Rhymney Valley Fire Service for kids to stop setting fire to the mountains.
‘Nine times out of ten it’s arson,’ the man’s voice boomed. ‘It’s children with matches.’ The volume’s broke, see, either it has to be on full, or it has to be on mute.
‘That’s kids, is it?’ my mother said, hanging over the draining board, a red gingham cloth stuffed into a tall, transparent cylinder. ‘I always thought it was bits of glass left in the ground starting it. It can happen like that when it’s hot can’t it?’ My father ignored her, standing at arm’s length from the frying pan, turning sausages over with his chef’s tongs. She gave up pushing the cloth down into the glass and washed the bubbles out under the cold tap. I watched the rest of the announcement, spooning Coco Pops into my mouth, the milk around them yellowy and sweet.
‘The mountains are tinder-dry,’ the man said, ‘so please don’t go near them with matches. While we’re attending to an arson attack there could be a serious house fire in the town.’ I remembered the look of helplessness on the fireman’s face while he sweated over the ferns, Holly asking him to fuck her. He knew that as soon as he’d gone we’d start it again so he’d have to come back, sweating again. I opened one of the blue cover English exercise books my father was marking at the kitchen table before he got up to cook breakfast, and I read some kid’s modern version of Hamlet. Crap it was, but I found two new words, psychodrama and necromancy.
Later, at Rhys Davies’ house, his mother was still cleaning spew off plastic beer-garden tables, and his father was still in jail, so Kristian and Rhys, they were drinking a box of cheap red wine.
‘Matt,’ Kristian said, dropping the PlayStation pad on the carpet. ‘Holly got her tits out last night.’
‘No she fuckin’ didn’t,’ I said.
‘She fuckin’ did and you missed it,’ he said.
‘No she didn’t,’ Rhys said.
They offered me the wine but I didn’t want it. I went to the kitchen and scoured it for Mrs Davies’ chocolate. She had a shitload hidden from Rhys’ sister in Mr Davies’ old lunch box, under the basket-weave cutlery tray.
‘I wouldn’t poke ’er anyway,’ Kristian was saying when I went back. ‘She’s a snobby bitch. She’s the only form five girl I haven’t poked and I don’t want to poke ’er. She’s frigid, inshee?’
I didn’t know what frigid meant but I made a note in my head to find out and another one to remember to poke some girl before people started to think I was gay.
‘Imagine all the new girls when we start tech!’ Kristian said. We were starting tech in a month. Kristian wanted to be a plumber. His father told him, with some prison guard standing nearby, that he’d always have money if he was a plumber. Strange, because Mr Davies was a plumber but he tried to rob an all-night garage with a stick in a black bag. Kristian and me, we were doing a bricklaying NVQ because the careers teacher said it was a good course.
‘The girls from the church school’ll be starting the same time and none of them ’ave got pinhole pussies,’ Kristian said. ‘Johnny Mental told me, they’re all slags.’
I was leaning out of the window watching the elderly woman next door feeding lettuce to her tortoise. It was still really hot but she was wearing a cream-colour Aran cardigan. I was wondering if there was a job somewhere which involved collecting words to put into a dictionary or something, or a course which taught you to play drums like Tommy Lee so I could throw sticks into the air after a roll and catch them in my teeth because I didn’t find bricks and girls with big fannies that exciting. I unwrapped the chocolate but it had already melted.
That night we were on the mountain again, standing on the roof of the old brick caretaker’s hut, looking down into town at the small groups of women walking like matchstick people pubs in their sunburn, their too-tight trousers and gold strap sandals, the men in blue jeans and ironed shirts. Holly, Angharad and Jaime, they came up via the new road because they had Holly’s collie dog on a lead. There’s a farm across the road, see, with a sheepdog in the field, a white one with black patches around its eyes like a canine panda. It barks at the sight of another dog and keeps barking until the farmer comes over and tells us to fuck off before he shoots us. He thinks anyone under the age of eighteen is committing some heinous crime just by breathing. So we missed looking down into Holly’s cheesecloth blouse as she passed underneath us. Sarah was five minutes behind them, wobbling over the banking, her thick white shins shining, her short yellow hair bouncing on her fat, pink head. There was some kind of in joke going on with Kristian and Rhys and Angharad and Holly and Jaime. They all seemed to be winking at one another, or talking to one another but with no words coming out of their mouths. I thought I caught Kristian doing a wanker signal behind my back but I passed it off as a hallucination, with the sun being so fucking hot. Then the dog began to cough.
‘Holly, there’s something wrong with your dog,’ I said.
‘I think it’s dying.’
‘Take her to the dam,’ Holly said, because she thinks I’m some kind of PA, put on the planet to look after her. I took the dog to the dam, watched it lap up the slimy water and when I came back everyone had gone. You get used to that when you’re a teacher’s son, your friends disappearing to smoke fags or sniff glue and aerosol canisters without you.
It had been an hour before I thought of something to say to Sarah and even then I didn’t say anything. She blew a great big bubble; I saw it growing from the corner of my eye where I was sitting next to her on the grass. I put my finger straight up to her face and burst it. For a second everything smelt like fresh apples. That’s what made me want to kiss her. I just pinned her to the ground and kissed her, my eyes wide open, her tiny blue eyes smiling up at me. Inside her mouth the chewing gum tasted more like cider. I found her tits under a thick vest but there was no shape to them. Her whole chest was like an old continental quilt, all soft and lumpy under its duvet cover. I kept on kissing her, my front teeth bashing against hers. She didn’t flex a muscle, just lay there looking amused by me. When I had her bush in my hand, her pubes rough and scratchy, that’s when I noticed the dog looking at me funny, its brown eyes staring down its long snout. I tidied Sarah’s clothes up the best I could and ran away sniffing my fingers and I thought that was the end of it.
On Saturday morning – the next day – Kristian, Rhys Davies and me, we were sitting on the pavement in the street flipping two and five pence coins. It’s the main thoroughfare, see, for the town. When it’s sunny we just sit there watching women going shopping in cotton dresses, pushing prams with big, bald babies inside. Our street was built during the coal boom, my father said, a terrace with a row of small houses for the miners and their families on our side, and a row of bigger ones with front gardens opposite for the mine managers and supervisors. Johnny Mental was sitting on his porch wearing sunglasses, drinking lager, his teeth orange and wonky. Someone was painting their front door a few yards away, with a portable radio playing soul music, Diana Ross or some shit. A big burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier came around the corner, real slow like an old man on a hill, until it stopped next to us and I saw Jaime in the back looking worried, her eyes tiny and sinking back into her head. Her father got out, a tall broad man who looked like Tom Baker in Doctor Who, and he picked Kristian up by the collar of his best Kangol T-shirt because that’s who he was closest to.
‘You raped my daughter, you little prick,’ he said. My stomach did a somersault inside me and got all twisted up. I looked at Jaime through the smoked glass of the car but she had the back of her head to me, looking at Johnny Mental. He’d stood up and was watching us; the lager can tilted in mid air towards his chin. Jaime’s father punched Kristian in the midriff, cleverly so that none of us could see it, but we all knew it. ‘Look at you – you dirty fuckin’ paedophile,’ he said to Rhys Davies and he spat on the pavement next to his feet. ‘Won’t be long until you’re eating breakfast with your f
ather, will it?’ he said, but he didn’t touch him. He picked me up by my ears, by my ears. My heart stopped beating then and my blood drained away. I don’t know where it went but I felt it go. ‘Was it you?’ he said, and he knocked the back of my head against the brick wall of the house. ‘Did you rape my daughter, you sick little cunt?’ I could feel myself disappearing in his grasp when I heard Jaime shouting, ‘C’mon. C’mon Dad, get in the car.’ I heard the door slam behind him but it didn’t sound anything like relief.
‘You’ve gone all fuckin’ white,’ Rhys said, looking down at me when the burgundy car had been out of the street for a good two minutes.
‘So have you,’ I said, even though I couldn’t see him properly. All I could really see was the bright yellow light of the sun but I imagined Johnny Mental smirking at me from across the road. I was thinking that if a stick in a bag was actually armed robbery then just having a cock could make a kiss and a crap fumble into a rape. I tried to look as confused as Kristian and Rhys were, as we all looked at each other, pale-skinned and speechless, and I tried to drift back to myself.
I never really got there. My parents went to the town hall that night to watch a play about an old writer dying of the consumption. I went walking. I walked through the comprehensive school, even though I thought I’d done that for the last time after my exams three months ago. I didn’t have the energy to lift my feet but at the same time they seemed to lift all by themselves. Over the running track I kept thinking about Sarah. I tried not to. I tried to think about words but the only ones which came were the ones that came out of Tom Baker’s mouth with a spray of bitter saliva: sick and paedophile and rape. And underneath them I could see Sarah on the grass, smiling at me, her skirt hitched up her fat legs. There was no way it was rape or even molestation, she was fucking smiling at me, and she’s fourteen, not a child. I’m not a paedophile. Jaime’s sixteen and she’s sucked the whole village’s dick – that’s what I told myself. But the longer I looked at the picture the more her smile turned into a frown, like looking at the Mona Lisa too long, and she was starting to shake, her arms flailing on the ends of her wrists. Then I was here, on the railway track, lying down, the rails cutting into my hamstrings and the small of my back. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die. No, I didn’t want to die. Not forever anyway, only until it was over, until it was all forgotten. I remembered Geography classes in school, where the teacher would talk about physics instead because he was a physics teacher really and we’d get bored and stare down here to the track and talk about how many people had died here. Kristian said there was a woman who tied herself in a black bag and rolled onto the track so that when the train came she wouldn’t be able to get up and run. I didn’t need to do that. I stayed perfectly still. Didn’t even slap the gnats biting my face. When the train came, the clacketyclack rhythm it made froze me to the spot. I just closed my eyes. When I opened them again the train had gone, gone right past me on the opposite track and splashed my legs with black oil. I don’t know now if I’m brave or just stupid. It isn’t easy to be sixteen, see, and it isn’t that easy to die.
WASTE FLESH
Gee Williams
When Vinny came home and turned the corner into Melidan Street just for a second he saw it as a stranger might: two rows of identical dolls’ houses psyching each other out over a strip of new tarmac. The council must’ve made it No Parking because there was a brace of acid-yellow lines now painted on top. Gary Bithel’s old Norton 500 was breaking them up across from Vinny’s mam and dad’s.
The Crawfords’, two doors down, had been pebble-dashed as a late riposte to the Flynns’ stuck-on stone… while Mam and Dad… oh, shit! Mam and Dad had new white plastic windows with diamond-shaped leaded lights and the excess mortar still coating some of the old Ruabon bricks like badly applied coffee icing.
Once Vinny started thinking about the people who lived there the street clicked back into its old remembered form. He couldn’t really see it anymore. Eighteen years opened up the buildings, spewing out their inhabitants, past and present, the Bithels, Vaughans, Crawfords, Lanes, Wynns, Flynns – and himself and parents at different ages… so that when Number Six really did open and Gaynor Flynn stepped in front of him with kids and a big mongrel dog on a chain and a black bin bag clutched in her bare, round arm he felt crowded.
‘’ello Vinny,’ she said, ‘ not more bloody ’olidays, is it?’
Gaynor was only a year or so older than Vinny and to hear her talking in the tones of Grandma Crawford while her bright hair shone like a torch against the dark interior gave Vinny the instant blues.
‘That’s right. Easter vac.’
He watched her take in his new goatee, well-worn boots and the camera slung about his neck. ‘Lucky sod.’
‘I know.’
‘You photographing all them top models yet?’
‘No. Not interested in fashion.’
‘Oh I can see that… well just you let me know when you want me to pose Vinny… get my kit off, yes?’
‘I will.’
‘Yeah – you let me know when… and I won’t be in.’
The little group made off at Gaynor’s brisk pace with only the dog turning to look back at him. Regretful, it seemed.
Vinny had to knock at his own home because his key wouldn’t fit the unfamiliar mahogany-panelled monstrosity.
‘Hi, Mam. Bit of a change, huh?’
‘I know. Kept it as a surprise – that’s what your dad said to do. D’you like it?’
‘No.’
‘What d’you mean, no? Cost three thousand pound that did, what with security locks throughout and the bit of stained glass. Look at that!’ Vinny’s mam made the door pivot to catch the late-afternoon light. ‘Look at that. Red tulips – see the red on the wall? Lovely they are. Your dad wanted roses – you know, for the Labour – but they didn’t have none in stock.’
‘It could’ve been worse, then.’
‘Oh, so you’ve come back a Tory, this time?’ His mam couldn’t stop playing with the coloured refractions … back and forth, back and forth as though she were being hypnotised by them – or trying to hypnotise her son. ‘D’you ’ear that Col? Doesn’t like the new door and he’s pining for Benny Potts!’
Sir Benjamin Potts was the local Conservative, put in for years by the regiment of the retired living along the coast. The Bungalow Fascists, his dad called them. Vinny could glimpse his dad now at the far end of the house, eating at the kitchen table, framed by two doorways but offset to the left.
Radiance from an unseen source caught the pottery mug, the aluminium teapot, his big, pale hands. ‘’ello there,’ he called to Vinny in that odd tone he’d always brought out for greeting his son. It was the tone people used when they met someone they didn’t really know for the second time.
Vinny’s dad was the handsomest man in North Wales – now that he’d travelled a bit, Vinny thought it might well be in the whole of Britain – this darkly dangerous James Dean with the brains not to kill himself before reaching forty-three. ‘Looking good, Dad.’
His dad nodded. The perfect lines of his face held sepia shadows beneath brow and cheek-bones so that whatever he did, wherever he went, he always managed to look like a movie star playing the part of husband, father, miner, union activist… security guard.
‘Catch you in a minute, Dad.’
Vinny vaulted up the stairs and bashed his way into his room using the bag. A new plastic window with stick-on leaded lights looked out over the strip of dandelions and lawn. ‘Last Shift at Point of Ayr’, a two-by-four blow-up, semi-matt finish, had fallen off the wall and lay rolled on the bed. Gently he unslung the old Canon Program and laid it on the quilt. In next door’s garden Mrs Lane walked into shot shouting abuse at her hyperactive grandchild but no voice filtered through Vinny’s double-glazed lens on the world.
Down in the kitchen while his mother washed lettuce and sliced cheese he said, ‘I’ve got this project to do. Photo-journalism it’s called. I thought I’d
do this place. What d’you think?’ He mimed the camera’s focus and click, missing the familiar weight of the Canon against his breastbone.
‘What? How we’ve done it up, you mean? Like in one of those magazines?’
‘Na… not the house. The whole place.’ Vinny turned away so as not to have to catch her disappointment. ‘Thought I’d do a portrait of the… er community. You know, the end of the Flintshire coalfield… unemployment. Social problems… decay. Vandalism.’
‘Oh well, if it’s vandalism you want you better go to Rhyl. Wrecked the bus shelter, they ’ave… and paint – all up Undersea World! But I don’t think you should be taking pictures of that. Just encourages them. Makes them think it’s clever… and they’re selling drugs in that little café me and your dad did our courting in. Smack… right opposite the Sun Centre.’
‘It’ll be a few spliffs, Mam, if you’ve seen them at it.’
‘It’s all drugs. You take their photos and these druggies think they’re somebody.’
‘Mam if I started taking smackheads’ pictures I’d end up in the Marine Lake.’
‘That’s what I said,’ said his mam.
‘No,’ said Vinny, ‘it’s not about deciding to make some things look important – that’s not why … I just want to show what’s here… there’s the mine – or there was – which was work and the seaside which was… well holidays, the opposite… and this village, with no real reason to exist anymore.’
‘Oh, thanks very much.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
He tried to make eye contact with his Dad wanting to share some feeling about his mam that he had no word for. ‘We have this tutor – he did a whole book on the Shotton Steel works when that went. Black and white – thirty-eight full-page bleeds using only natural light.’ His mam stared uncomprehendingly.
‘Sounds like it’s all been done, then,’ his dad said. ‘Been done to death, that sort of stuff… down South. Big thing, mining and steel was to them. They’d got nothing else at the time.’ Vinny tried not to smile: down South meant London to him. ‘Still haven’t. Anyway, nice to see you back… I’m off up the road for a couple of hours – committee meeting… keep an eye out for some social problems for you, shall I?’ He was looking sharp – well defined – in black denims and a blue shirt, which somehow made it sound even more ridiculous.
