Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  ‘It’s the size of the grips that gives them their special quality. That’s why I designed them big. You are so busy keeping your mouth around them you pay no heed to the call of fatigue. Once during my fourth year on the Social Insurance, they kept my teeth so occupied I even managed to turn a blind eye to the strong need for death.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to hear any kind of call with those things blocking you up… wait a minute though…’ Cynlais stepped very close to Onllwyn. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils swelled. He was clearly on some crest of cunning insight. Onllwyn blushed and trembled a little in his long drawers. With so little on he did not like anyone to look quite as infrared as Cynlais.

  ‘Now I’m up to you,’ said Cynlais in a rising voice. ‘I can see through all your tricks now, boy. I didn’t think you were so smart, Onllwyn, but lucky for me at the last moment I can see you for the crook you are.’

  ‘You’re off your head, Cynlais. Buck up, boy. Your thoughts are farther round the bend than normal.’

  ‘You’re as deep as a snake. Now I see the way you planned it. First of all you see I’m the only one who’s got a chance of walking you off your feet. You saw my rightful quality as a walker better than I did myself. You decided early on that I must be driven from the race by hook or by crook. With Cynlais Moore a cripple, you said, Onllwyn Evans need have no fears. When I came to you begging your help you must have thanked God for delivering your victim into your hands instead of having to wait and do the job by breaking my toes quietly whenever you stood next to me in the queue at the Exchange.’

  Cynlais, his eyes bright, paused here to go back over the details of his first interview with Onllwyn, which were now apparently becoming significant to him for the first time. Onllwyn and the boys, fascinated by the sweep of Cynlais’ narrative, sat down to enjoy it the more.

  ‘First,’ said Cynlais, ‘there was that amazing caper of the starting method. That should have put me on my guard, but I was blind with worry and want. You got me into as many wriggles as a lizard, then you tell me to shoot myself into straightness. What was that but an outright invitation to all the ruptures among these hills to camp out with Cynlais Moore. Abolish rent, ye ruptures. In Cynlais there are many mansions, and if you find them a bit cramped just give Onllwyn the wink; he’s the boy to have Moore walking lower than a duck at all points. But that didn’t work. So you rig up that coffin and treat me to a lot of chatter about that element Gito, whom you paint as a model Celt because he could run so fast he would have been able to catch even joy and a steady job in Meadow Prospect. I can see now how you meant the box to work. First, the sight of me in it was to craze Elvira, then with her crazed you would nip in and clamp the lid on, leaving me boxed for evermore and Elvira given the blame, you sly, seeing old sausage. Or I was to suffer some mental breakage from finding myself lower, flatter, and on an odder mattress than I have ever known since the Navy took to oil in the boilers and I took to tinned milk on the table. But that failed too. You didn’t count on that best of neighbours and ambulance men, Teifon Farr, who is on permanent duty waiting to find the whole of Khartoum Row pinned beneath the very rump of doom and squealing for splints, tourniquets, and testaments. Now, you come to your third attempt, and it’s the cool friendly way in which you hand these various courses to me that makes me marvel. Two bits of rubber big enough to choke a grown bloody elephant, and you ask me to fit them into my mouth.’ Cynlais was now shaking with anger and disappointment.

  ‘Come on,’ said Sylvanus to his uncle. ‘Give your advice and grips to Enoch Vizard, who’ll know better than to call you a snake and a crook.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Onllwyn. ‘Don’t be too hard on Cynlais. He’s worried about Elvira and self-conscious about turning up here with such tight revealing drawers and a singlet that looks as if it was bitten out of his grandmother’s coms. Now calm down, Cynlais, and tell me, do you or do you not want to win this race?’

  ‘Course I want to win it. Don’t pay any attention to what I said. I was nervous marching about here half-naked and all keyed up. I talked to you like an old rodney. You tell me what to do, Onllwyn.’ Around the corner they could hear Hargreaves marshalling the competitors. Onllwyn showed Cynlais the grips once more and once more Cynlais fell back, his face carved into the familiar zones of distrust and horror.

  ‘For God’s sake, Onll, isn’t there a way of doing without those?’

  ‘I can’t guarantee success without the grips. I’ve given speed, endurance, and that fleet, elusive Gito most of my thought, so don’t quibble.’

  ‘All right then, block me up.’ Cynlais turned his back to the boys while Onllwyn helped him to adjust the rubbers.

  ‘This one in the front and the other one a bit more to the back. You get fanatical once you get your teeth deep into these.’ The boys waited with great interest to see the result of all the manoeuvres of Onllwyn and the agonised twitching of Cynlais. Only Verdun among the boys had seen Onllwyn with the grips in position, and he was better prepared than Sylvanus and Elwyn to stand the ghastly contortion of Cynlais’ face when he turned round. But even he was shocked to see anyone look so much like a cross between a devilfish and a hellhound as Cynlais, his mouth painfully yawning and his eyes bursting with the strain of his gaping jaws and ripening indignation. He was letting fly at Onllwyn with a long speech of furious blame, but Cynlais might just as well have been praising Onllwyn up to the skies for all his listeners understood. They led him to the starting point. Hargreaves, still waving his pistol, looked closely at Cynlais.

  ‘Is this man fit to start?’ he asked Onllwyn.

  ‘Fitter than you.’

  ‘He’s looking as if he’s just taken his seat on a spike.’

  ‘As long as the spike’s not showing there’s nothing in the rules against that.’

  Cynlais took his place between Onllwyn and Enoch Vizard. Enoch was recovering slowly from his drink and grief and was wiping his eyes, groaning a little now and then to keep in touch with his receding mood. The first thing he saw when he took his arm down and looked around was the face of Cynlais, spread out in a fashion never before seen in Meadow Prospect, and going dark now with the savage effort of his endurance. Enoch darted from the line and made for the sheltering doorway of the Ark. He was dragged back by Luther Mitchell, who told him that Cynlais was no more than a trick of the shifting light, and also that if Cynlais with his look of being three-quarter strangled was the average sample of athlete entered for this race, then Enoch could afford to dawdle for a round of sobbing at every corner and still win.

  Hargreaves was inspecting his pistol. Cynlais was bending down, painfully full of deep, suffering sounds. Onllwyn was busy instructing him in the leg-twists necessary for the bullet-like start. Cynlais was whimpering like a dog now and getting into the most dangerous knot. He was listening too closely to his own welling noises to make any sense of what Onllwyn was telling him to do in the matter of his feet. In his tight drawers his backside was wearing the same expression of staring, mortal, atrabilious strain as his face, and Verdun kept passing from the front to the back of him to get the full flavour of this miracle in two shades. Hargreaves’ pistol went off with a great bang, scaring to death what little was left of Cynlais’ overwrought wits. With a tremendous shudder his body flattened out on the floor and he passed gratefully into a dead faint, his very last act before the eclipse being a brief look of loathing thrown at Onllwyn. His outflung arm tripped the feet of another competitor, an earnest man in his middle forties, Samuel Howells, and Howells went crashing to the floor and stayed there, unhurt, but with as little wish to move as Cynlais. A lot of these competitors, said Elwyn to Verdun, as they watched this scene, had been pushed into these events by their families who were greedy for money to make an extra trip to such places as that cinema, the Dog, and the alert, fit look of this Howells as he lay on the floor making no move to be up and doing proved it.

  The others set forth. It was clear from the start that there were only t
wo men in it. Onllwyn and Enoch Vizard. There seemed to be the dynamic of some desperate rage in Enoch, as if he knew that if this were to be the last fling then at least he would be really far-flung at the end of it. Onllwyn had all his work cut out to keep an even yard behind him. Their shoulders were working with a broad ugly swing that struck the eyes of Verdun, who was half running along the pavement, as downright sinister and saddening. They all urged Onllwyn to put a spurt on, warning him that Hargreaves seemed to have slipped a drop of elixir into whatever Enoch had been drinking in the Ark. ‘I’ll let him win,’ said Onllwyn. ‘I wouldn’t have the heart to beat him, honest I wouldn’t. This will be some sort of crown for his shrinking head.’ And as he said that he shouted to the unheeding Enoch to slow down a bit and take it easy, to watch out for that weakness in his head, that he was among friends, that after this day’s racing the White Flash, with an inch or two on his drawers and a bit less gasp in his average breath, would not be Onllwyn but Enoch Vizard.

  Eight minutes after the start twilight cracked down on Enoch. He went deathly pale, raised his hand to his head, and began reeling. Onllwyn and the boys broke into cries of sympathy and encouragement: ‘Steady up there, Enoch!’ ‘No need to strain so much at the leash, Vizard.’

  Even people sitting on their doorsteps who had been watching them without interest, thinking that the sight of voters half clad and walking at abnormal rates was only another twitch of the long Crisis, now stood up and started to take an interest in the problem of Vizard’s zeal and agony. Enoch was staggering on the largest possible scale. Onllwyn did his best to keep him standing, moving forward, and in the race. It was not easy, for Enoch’s movements were as tangential and odd as those of a rugby ball. Onllwyn kept close behind him, supporting him when Enoch showed a tendency to lurch headlong, and dragging him back whenever he went off the official route. Enoch in his bewilderment was going right into houses through doors that were never closed, either because the lines of doors and jamb were no longer parallel, or because the sight of a shut, staring door cooled the sense of community in a place where environment was already causing the blood stream of most voters to slow down and stop taking the thing so seriously. On two occasions Onllwyn had to go to the very foot of a staircase to rescue Enoch, who now seemed intent on going off permanently at a right angle to the course. The second occasion might have turned out awkwardly for them, for Enoch, in his rudderless stupor, went through the open door of Goronwy Blamey, a broad, jealous, fierce man, who lived under the constant delusion of being betrayed on every front by his wife, Gloria Blamey, who had once been an usherette and nimble in the use of her eyes in The Cosy, a cinema of Meadow Prospect where the town seemed to garage the central part of its libido. That afternoon, Goronwy, who had been celebrating the morning of the bank holiday with a few pints in the Con Club, had been letting it in for Gloria on a piled up series of charges and cuffing her in and out of the kitchen, working to a familiar pattern of violence that allowed them both to grab something to eat from the shelves as he backed her into the larder at regular points of climax, Goronwy carrying on just like Othello but smaller, less able at speech, and nowhere near as subtle. But Gloria had given him a fish-and-chip dinner, which always agreed with Goronwy when on the beer, and his mood had softened to a frenzy of wanting, and they had gone upstairs to an eager rhythm. It was when Goronwy was coming out of the kitchen, his mouth smiling and his braces dangling, with a cup of tea to take up to Gloria, who had just made him promise to be less of a silly billy in the future and to put aside his tormenting visions of men coming in and out of the house, love bent, that he saw Enoch and Onllwyn, apparently naked except for a few strips of cotton, come through the front door at a tremendous pace, heading straight for the stairs as if this had long been their rallying point.

  ‘So these are the games that go on behind my back!’ shouted Goronwy, ‘The rodneys are not even properly dressed.’ And he waded into Enoch with all his strength, boxing him hard about the head, sparing one for Onllwyn whenever the latter stuck his head in the way. But he did not single out Onllwyn, for he was reserving him as an item that could be properly dealt with when Vizard was dead. It was Verdun who put an end to this by tugging at Goronwy’s sleeve and saying: ‘There’s a fire upstairs, mate.’ A look that had wings of longing and terror came to Goronwy’s face and he vanished aloft.

  They got Enoch on the road again. But his experience with Blamey had finished off all his sense of balance and he was walking now with a kind of extreme leftward crouch that had the most baffling effect on Onllwyn. They came to a sharp slope on the left. Enoch went down it like a plummet and entered neatly into a bus that chanced to stop at the precise moment of Enoch’s arrival at the foot of the slope. The conductor of the bus tried not to look surprised and rang the bell to proceed. Onllwyn wanted to follow him and get him back, but the boys dissuaded him.

  ‘But what’ll he do?’ asked Onllwyn. ‘He’s got no kind of bus fare on him in that costume, and in the state he’s in he won’t be able to explain even by signs what he’s doing dressed in that fashion on a bus to Cwmycysgod or some such place.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Verdun. ‘The conductor of that bus is Morlais Morgan, my cousin, who takes a broad view of the bus company and is full of sympathy for all such elements as Enoch who don’t know where they’re going or what they are up to. Think of yourself now, Uncle Onllwyn. The race is to the swift. You’ve been waiting years for the chance to show people what you’re made of. This is your day, Uncle Onllwyn. You are crying out to Gito that the years of waiting are at an end. Let liars and madmen like Moore and Vizard find their own way to the culvert. Why should sorrow and pity be pulling you down forever into the marsh? Here we are at the homestretch, the new bypass back to the Ark. Hargreaves is waiting there with the money which will buy you those tools and the smallholding with its promise of new life for you and perhaps for us, too, if you can branch out with the right kind of crops and cattle.’

  Onllwyn’s face brightened as if a load had been taken off his spirit.

  ‘You’re right, boy. I owe it to Gito, to whom I must be a kind of son. I owe it to him and to me to shout up to life to waggle it about a bit and stop letting me have the whole torrent.’

  There was only one other competitor in sight as Onllwyn started on his last magnificent spurt along the new road, and as there was no second prize he gave up the ghost as he saw the quality of Onllwyn’s final effort. As he breasted the tape there was no cheering from the compact, excited group that had formed around the door of the Ark. Verdun noticed that Cynlais Moore was in the centre of this group, and there was a flushed, depleted look on his face, as if he had just finished a long speech.

  ‘I was first,’ said Onllwyn humbly.

  ‘First!’ said Hargreaves. ‘You, first! And no wonder. I have been a fancier in every kind of sport you can mention, but I’ve never come up against a dirtier passage of work than we’ve seen here this afternoon. And never do I wish to set eyes on another such scoundrel as you, Evans.’

  Onllwyn did not protest. He simply dropped on to one knee, resting the kneecap on one of the meagre bits of turf still left outside the Ark.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, as interested as if Hargreaves were putting on a drama.

  ‘Moore has told us everything. The rupture-stunt with the leg-twists, I saw that myself and it’s definitely booked for The News of the World. I saw the poor chap curved like an S with you bending over him trying to tie a fourth knot in his legs and cajoling Moore, who was stupefied with pain, to pull it a little tighter. It was cruel. Moore also tells me you had his drawers specially shrunk and if he had raced with those articles pulling at him his manhood would not have survived the first yard. Then there was that caper with the coffin. Who ever heard of anybody but a pagan stretching himself out in dung to get supple? No wonder things have got so slack in Meadow Prospect with boys like you badgering the Christians, Evans. But the final crime was those grips. The last time I saw contraptions of
that kind was with a horse dentist, and he was keen on big horses. A deliberate attempt to choke Moore. I’ve talked it over with the boys here and they agree that short of handing you over to the police the best thing to do is give the prize money to Moore.’

  ‘All right,’ said Onllwyn. ‘Give it to Cynlais. Cynlais has many needs.’

  Cynlais was delighted. He rushed into the Ark. When he came out, dressed, he was holding up the prize money.

  ‘Free beer for you boys tonight,’ he said. ‘This night will belong to Cynlais Moore.’

  ‘Don’t forget Elvira’s tonics,’ said Onllwyn.

  ‘She’s having Teifion Farr in now for massage. He’s a marvel.’

  ‘Don’t forget Maldwyn’s bare behind. He can’t sing as he is.’

  ‘To hell with Maldwyn. His butts are better bare and in any case I’ve trained him to sing with his front to the public.’

  ‘If you’ll let me,’ said Elwyn quietly to Onllwyn, ‘I’ll take Cynlais around the back and bring you a part of his head as consolation prize. What bit of Cynlais do you most fancy?’

  ‘Oh never mind, Elwyn. Nice of you to offer but Cynlais is all right. Slow to learn, that’s all.’

  Onllwyn slipped in for his clothes. The boys remained outside, thinking of Cynlais and of learning and pondering the notion of slowness. As they were about to set out, with Onllwyn between them, Verdun slipped back to the group which was still standing around the front door of the Ark, laughing and congratulating Cynlais.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this,’ said Verdun. ‘But just in case I forget and people start wondering, Uncle Onllwyn also did away with Enoch Vizard half way through the race. He’s really ruthless is Onllwyn.’