Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  He returned to the pollarded willow. Old longings stirred, disturbing his dryness like the peckings of feeble squabs. Lewis sat up, wrists on his knees, hands dangling. He remembered Esther, the cool girl of seventeen. Cool, helpless, useless – his desperate, wild rage. She’d sickened his guts. Was it worse, any worse than this, the X-rays, the medical board, the final evidence: hundred per cent dust? She stayed cool, always. Bloodless Esther. Daft, her and Bessie, both daft. Young Bernard, he followed his mother. Tall rope of a bloke, no strength in him anywhere to do anything. Lewis flapped his hands. ‘All of it’s bloody senseless, the whole lot.’

  He cursed quietly to himself, stream upon stream of cursing. Incoherence waned to misery. He drooped back against the tree. She meant nothing. Bessie, nothing. William, nothing. Bernard, nothing. It’s me, Lewis Rimmer, fifty-seven, that’s all, fifty-bloody-seven. Man for man I’ve filled more coal than any collier in Fawr pit. Now this. Here I am. What’s my next move? How carry on? What’s next? Jesus Christ.

  He glanced around for his pigeons. Bare sky, two carrion crows winging down, down below the high level rim of Pen Arglwydd. His dark eyes blinked, kindling memories, falcons shot on the mountain, hours spent waiting for Johnny-hawk to cop in to roost. Warm, dusky summer evenings hiding in a den of fallen boulders, puffing Gold Flake fags inside his folded cap, blowing the smoke down between his knees. Long, long time ago. It’s well over twenty years since I climbed Pen Arglwydd. Can’t manage it now. Finished. Christ, aye, I’m finished. What shall I do? Gardening. Huh, mess about like some old betsy. Not likely. I’d sooner jack it in altogether.

  He heard his pigeons, the frantic clap of pinions as a bird tumbled against telephone wires strung from the school down to the road, wires dotted with split corks. Lewis cursed. Plodding slantwise down the mound, he cursed the wires. Aware of his violence as he banged into the kitchen, Bessie left him alone.

  At four o’clock he whistled the birds in, fed them, and carried his shotgun back to the house. Bessie replaced the cartridges in a drawer of the sideboard.

  On Monday morning the manager visited Lewis’ heading. Behind him came the overman, safety stick tucked under his arm. ‘Lew,’ said the manager, ‘I’ve got some bad news.’

  Lewis sent his young butty up into the low face – a narrow layer of rider coal and shale. They were driving through to a virgin seam. ‘Pack the right-hand side, boy. Make sure you wall it up properly.’

  The men hunkered beside a half-full tram of rubble. ‘I know all about this bad news,’ said Lewis.

  Elderly, with blue scars freckling his left temple, the manager unclipped his cap lamp. ‘I’m down for ten per cent myself. Early stages.’

  The overman said, ‘Take it from me, Lew, these quacks don’t know everything.’

  The manager scowled. ‘Wait now, wait. Regarding Lewis, there’s no question of error, and there’s damn all I can do about it. Not a damn thing. Understand, Lew, my hands are tied. Truth is, Lew, your fourteen days’ notice is in my office.’

  The overman squirted tobacco juice. ‘First hundred per cent case since we worked the old Four Foot seam through to the boundary. Real hard coal up there, hard as the hobs of hell.’

  Lewis spoke to the manager. ‘Job on the screens would suit me.’

  ‘Impossible, only wish to God I could put you somewhere on top pit. If I can do anything for you, Lew, let me know. Anything at all outside the colliery. And listen, try not to worry. The man isn’t born who can cure worry.’

  Lewis watched their cap lamps retreating from the heading. He shouted to his butty. The youth jumped down into the roadway. Lewis continued prising rock from the blasted roof. Behind him, his butty filled rubble into the tram. Bent over his shovel, the boy said, ‘So you’re going on compo, Lew.’

  ‘You’re all ears,’ said Lewis.

  ‘Last night, mun, I heard it in the club last night.’

  ‘Never mind what you bloody heard.’

  ‘You’re hundred per cent, right? That’s what they reckon.’

  ‘Let’s see that dram filled,’ Lewis said. He knew the arguments in the club. Lew Rimmer’s finished. All the slashers travel the same road to Coed-coch cemetery. Pig-headed Lew, never wears a mask when he’s boring holes. Tight-fisted money grabber, won’t wait for the dust to clear after shot firing. Big Lew, he’s packing muck in the gob walls when you can’t see your hand in front of your eyes. Typical slasher. They all go the same way. Silicosis or pneumo. Loaf around on street corners until they’re only skin and bones. Nothing but skeletons by the time the undertaker comes to measure them.

  Conscious of damaged pride, of his reputation in Fawr pit, Lewis elbowed out his gaunt arms, hung his whole weight on the crowbar, pressing evenly. The long slab of rock cracked on, then he shuffled backwards, prised again, arms outstretched until the rock crashed down. Lewis broke it with a sledgehammer. His butty lifted the stones into the tram. Lewis moved forward, he swung a heavy pick, ripping back the sides of the road. Soon he had a pile of rubble in front of his working boots. Stepping up on the loose stones, he struck ahead with his pick. Pride again, remorse, smothered grunts, his spoiled self-esteem turned vicious, aiming the pick, his body angled away by instinct, teetering, the soft-jointed stone sliding soundlessly out from the side where he’d been ripping, falling edgewise on his outflung forearm, breaking the bone.

  The youth dragged Lewis around the tram. Frightened, running out, around to the next heading for help, he kept hearing the muffled crack of bone breaking, and Lewis blaspheming like a lunatic.

  For two days Bessie endured a brooding husband. Lewis slept and ate in the armchair near the fire. Unshaven, sullen, he remained there with his feet set straight on the coconut fibre hearth mat. She fed and watered his pigeons. Early on the third morning she heard him cursing in the hallway. Bessie pulled the soiled double-breasted jacket across his shoulders.

  ‘Be careful, please, Lew,’ she said.

  Humbled, the plaster-cased left arm swung up to his chest, he walked the dirt lane, moving stiffly, jerking along, Esther Rees watching him from her kitchen doorway. He climbed the mound in sharp zig-zags, the humped shape of him alternately profiled. Poor Lew, she thought, letting himself go to rack and ruin. Distaste wrinkled her nose. She closed the door and returned to ironing Bernard’s white shirts.

  Lewis freed his pigeons, he cleaned out the loft, scraping laboriously, wheezing breath through irregular, dry clickings of his false teeth. He felt tired, inwardly softened, sluggish in his blood. Something had drained out of his system, seepage finding outlet while he waited behind the tram with his numb arm held to his stomach. He sat on the wooden steps outside the loft. Down-valley, he could see the smoke stack above Number 2 pit, the railway footbridge and far off, hazed by morning sunshine, the dwarfed spread of terraced houses, shops, stone-built chapels and pubs mapped each side of Melyn brook. His tiredness succumbed to alien contentment.

  Images of Bessie flowed, from her gamin childhood to nubile adolescence to the hulking slovenliness of her middle age. Soft sniggers warmed Lewis’s throat. After a while he filled the food hoppers, brought fresh water into the loft and he shut the wire screen entrance door.

  He walked down in a state of infantile euphoria. Bessie cooked breakfast. He mocked her chickens. Bantams laid bigger eggs.

  ‘My life,’ she vowed, humouring him, ‘I haven’t seen you like this since I went pregnant on William. Anyway, my fowls show more profit than them bloody racing pigeons. Now look, I’m doing my shopping this morning. Mind how you go with that arm of yours.’

  ‘Old gel,’ he said, ‘never panic over Lew Rimmer. There’s no need.’

  Alone in the house, he sat on the lavatory for an hour, broken circulation deadening his shanks. Lewis giggled, stamped his feet on the landing. Giggling induced coughing, a harsh, prolonged bout toppling him to his knees. Time went by. He crossed to the small bedroom, raised the floor board and stuffed seven hundred and eighty-four pounds into his pockets. Downsta
irs again, Lewis emptied the tea caddy, a sweeping fling showering tea grains around the kitchen. He crammed the notes into the caddy.

  Very slowly in warm midday, he climbed the green mound to his loft, shotgun held balanced, carried at arm’s length. His birds were down. Lewis carefully stepped among them, he named his favourites, praised their courage and suddenly, gently, he shooed them all way.

  Stooped in the aisle, cursing, pressing off the safety catch, blindly cursing, his broken arm hanging, clenching the mouth of the double barrel between his teeth, Lewis gagged curses as the trigger slicked back under his thumb.

  Time went by. The pigeons came floating down. A few copped on the roof of the loft. Crop puffed out, a dark chequer cock made deep, rich cooings, strutting around a grizzly hen. She responded, nibbling his shoulder feathers, her wings partly opening on the instant as she rolled slightly sideways beneath his tread. They frisked apart, the dark chequer volplaning into the loft, where he gobbled two maple peas spilt from Lewis’ pocket.

  BOY WITH A TRUMPET

  Rhys Davies

  All he wanted was a bed, a shelf for his trumpet and permission to play it. He did not care how squalid the room, though he was so clean and shining himself; he could afford only the lowest rent. Not having any possessions except what he stood up in, the trumpet in an elegant case and a paper parcel of shirts and socks, landladies were suspicious of him. But he so gleamed with light young vigour, like a feather in the wind, that he kindled even in those wary hearts less harsh refusals.

  Finally, on the outer rim of the West End, he found a bleak room for eight shillings a week in the house of a faded actress purply with drink and the dramas of a succession of lovers.

  ‘I don’t mind a trumpet,’ she said, mollified by his air of a waif strayed out of a lonely vacancy. ‘Are you in the orchestra, dear? No? You’re not in a jazz band, are you? I can’t have nightclub people in my house, coming in at all hours. No?… You look so young,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Well, there’s no attendance, my charwoman is on war work; the bathroom is strictly engaged every morning from ten to half past, and I do not allow tenants to receive visitors of the opposite sex in their rooms.’ Behind the blowsiness were the remnants of one who had often played the role of a lady.

  ‘I’ve just committed suicide,’ he said naively. She saw then the bright but withdrawn fixity of his eyes, single-purposed.

  ‘What!’ she said, flurried in her kimono, and instinctively placed a stagey hand on her bosom.

  ‘They got me back,’ he said. ‘I was sick. I didn’t swallow enough of the stuff. Afterwards they sent me to a – well, a hospital. Then they discharged me. From the Army.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ she fussed. And, amply and yearning: ‘Did your nerve go, then…? Haven’t you any people?’ There had been a suicide – a successful one – in her house before, and she had not been averse to the tragedy.

  ‘I have God,’ he said gravely. ‘I was brought up in an orphanage. But I have an aunt in Chester. She and I do not love each other. I don’t like violence. The telephone is ringing,’ he said, with his alert but withdrawn awareness.

  She scolded someone, at length and with high-toned emphasis, and returning muttering; she started to find him still under the huge frilled lampshade by the petunia divan. ‘Rent is in advance,’ she said mechanically. ‘Number eight on the second floor.’

  He went up the stairs. The webby carpet, worn by years of lodgers, smelt of old dust. A gush of water sounded above; a door slammed; a cat slept on a windowsill under sprays of dusty lacquered leaves. Later, as he was going out to the teashop, two young girls, silent and proud, sedately descended the stairs together in the dying sunshine. They, too, had that air of clear-cut absorption in themselves, unacknowledging the dangerous world. But they were together in that house of the unanchored.

  And he was alone, not long back from the edge of the dead land, the intersecting country where the disconnected sit with their spectral smiles.

  That evening, in the tiny room, he played his trumpet. His lips, as the bandmaster of his regiment had told him, were not suitable for a trumpet; they had not the necessary full, fleshy contours, and also there were interstices in his front teeth; his face became horribly contorted in his effort to blast ‘Cherry Ripe’ out of the silver instrument. Nevertheless, when the benevolent spinster in the cathedral town where he had been stationed and sung Elizabethan madrigals asked what she could buy him after he had left the asylum, he said: ‘A trumpet.’ And, alone, he had come to the great city with his neurosis and a gleaming second-hand trumpet costing sixteen guineas. On arrival he spent half his money on four expensive poplin shirts and in the evening went to a lecture on world reform; the night he had spent in Regent’s Park, his trumpet case and parcel on his lap.

  The landlady rapped and came in. Violet circles were painted round her eyes and her hair was greenish. Within a wrap large, loose breasts swam untrammelled as dolphins. She looked at him with a speculative doubt.

  ‘It’s very noisy. Are you practising? There are neighbours.’

  ‘You said I could play my trumpet,’ he pointed out gravely.

  She said: ‘I am artistic myself, and I have had actors, writers, and musicians in my house. But there’s a limit. You must have a certain hour for practice. But not in the evenings; the mornings are more suitable for a trumpet.’

  ‘I cannot get up in the mornings,’ he said. The trim, fixed decision of the young soldier stiffened his voice. ‘I need a great deal of sleep.’

  ‘Are you still ill?’ She stepped forward, her ringed hands outstretched. He sat on the bed’s edge in his clean new shirt, the trumpet across his knees. From him came a desolate waif need. But his round, fresh-air face had a blank imperviousness, and down his indrawn small eyes flickered a secret repudiation. ‘Are you lonely?’ she went on. ‘I play the piano.’

  ‘I don’t like trembling young girls,’ he said. But as if to himself: ‘They make me unhappy. I usually burst into crying when I’m with them. But I like babies; I want to be a father. I used to go into the married quarters in barracks and look after the babies… Sometimes,’ he said, with his grave simplicity, ‘I used to wash their napkins.’

  In her slovenly fashion she was arrantly good-natured and friendly. ‘Did you have a bad time in the orphanage, dear?’

  ‘No, not bad. But I cannot stand the smell of carbolic soap now; it makes me want to vomit… I would like,’ he added, ‘to have known my mother. Or my father.’

  ‘Hasn’t anyone ever cared for you?’ she asked, heaving.

  ‘Yes. Both girls and men. But only for short periods.’ Detached, he spoke as if he would never question the reason for this. The antiseptic austerity of his early years enclosed him like a cell of white marble; later there had been the forced, too-early physical maturity of the Army, which the orphanage governor had induced him to join as a bandboy, just before the war. He had no instinctive love to give out in return for attempts of affection: it had never been born in him. ‘People get tired of me,’ he added, quite acceptingly.

  After that, in her erratic fashion, he obsessed her. She occasionally fed him; in his room she put cushions and a large oleograph of Dante and Beatrice on a Florence bridge; she even allowed him to play the trumpet when he liked, despite complaints from the other lodgers. She badgered her lover of the moment, an irate designer of textiles, to find him a job in the studio of the huge West End store. But the boy categorically refused all jobs that required him before noon. His head like an apple on the pillow, he lay in bed all the morning sunk in profound slumber.

  In the afternoons he would sit at his window drinking her tea or earnestly reading a modern treatise on religious problems. He insisted to her that a fresh upsurge of religious awareness was about to arrive in the world. He had already passed through the hands of a hearty, up-to-date Christian group, and he corresponded regularly with a canon whose sole panacea, however, was an exhortation to pray.

  ‘But I can’t pray,’ he gr
ieved to her. There was a deadlock of all his faculties.

  Only when playing his trumpet he seemed a little released. Harshly and without melodic calm, he blew it over a world in chaos. For all the contortions of his round face he bloomed into a kind of satisfaction as he created a hideous pattern of noise. Cast out of the Army as totally unfit for service, it was only in these blasts of noise that he really enjoyed his liberty – the first that had ever come to him.

  ‘Your rent is a fortnight overdue,’ she reminded him, with prudent urgency. ‘You really must find work, dear. Think of your future; now is your opportunity, with so many jobs about.’

  ‘What future?’ he asked curiously. ‘Why do you believe so confidently in the future?’

  He could always deflate her with this grave flatness. But her habit of working up emotional scenes was not easily balked. She would call him into her sitting room and, stroking his hand, among the billowy cushions, heave and throb about the rudeness of her lover, who was younger than herself. ‘We are two waifs,’ she said, while the telephone concealed under the crinoline of a doll rang yet again.

  But he did not want the sultry maternalness of this faded artificial woman; unerringly he sensed the shallow, predatory egotism of her need. Yet neither did he want to know the two beautiful and serious girls, flaxen-haired and virginal, who lived on the same floor; he always ducked his head away from them. He wanted to pick up a prostitute and spend a furtive quarter of an hour with her in the blackout. But he could not afford this. He was destitute now.

  ‘You are horrible,’ she exclaimed angrily when, in a long talk, he told her of this. ‘You, a boy of nineteen, wanting to go with prostitutes!’

  ‘You see,’ he insisted, ‘I would feel myself master with them, and I can hate them too. But with nice, proud girls I cannot stop myself breaking down, and then I want to rush away and throw myself under a Tube train… And that’s bad for me,’ he added, with that earnest naiveté of his.