by Dai Smith
He let his thoughts trail off. I wanted an end to this. I told him I had written and that she’d sent an even briefer card back, but one that just said, “No.” I told him I hadn’t known about him. Or anyone else. And she had married Mal after all. So QED, and all that. Gwilym seemed to think this made us some kind of blood brothers because his face lit up again. He said that then it must indeed be Mal that was Haf’s father but that, for reasons beyond him, neither Mal, nor apparently Haf, now thought so. “Unless …” he began to say, looking sly and even more conspiratorial. I shook my head and half-turned in the bottom-scrunching bucket that called itself a chair to take in the room again. It was an oval office no less, with high ship-like portals for windows and, as well as the permanently closed books, an array of glass cabinets full of the kitsch and wonky macquettes and shields and framed certificates that academic dignitaries from all over the globe gave each other now, objects as pompous and self-proclaiming as those which former trade union leaders from the self-declared Socialist Republics had once carted over by the suitcase in order to show eternal fraternity and everlasting solidarity. But on the single biggest wall space was an enormous painting in oil and chalk. It would be vivid anywhere. In this room it was positively life-giving. I breathed it in as relief.
“I didn’t know you collected art, Gwil,” I said.
It was his turn to swivel slightly to take in his exceptional picture.
“Not me. Not really. It’s part of the university collection. Hanging in here on loan, for safe keeping, I’m told. Valleys boy. Dead now. I’m told it’s good. Is it, do you think?”
It was better than good. It was amazing.
On an overall background of night-falling blue, chalky ribbons of roads, lit by blindly groping yellow car headlights and the electric fuzz of stalked street lamps, switchbacked, and the outline of a black river curled down the canvas like an indolent tape worm. It was a map, a flattened-out cartography where hills and stars and the horizon of a sea were boundary markers. At the centre of the painting the artist had placed the open stage set of his house, the stairs, up and down which the same male figure serially, endlessly and repetitiously ran, and doorways in which the figure was framed as in a coffin, windows with the figure poised before a miniature representation of the whole. Exploding cones of orange and spurts of red scattered a scintilla of seeds to the horizon, and beyond.
“There seem to be collections of his work, private and public, but I’m told he’s not to everyone’s taste.”
“Not for the palate of those who are without taste,” I said.
Gwil let this one lie and returned to the bone I did not wish to pick. Not yet anyway. I told him, but without her equivocation, what Bran had told me that morning in person. I wasn’t in the paternity picture. That seemed to satisfy him, but to leave him with other niggling thoughts.
“That really puts Mal right back in the frame, then,” he mused.
“Is he around?” I asked.
“Still lives in town. We see each other frequently, of course. Officially, I mean. You know he’s my chair. Chairs the board.”
I nodded again. My neck was getting used to it. He gave me one of his helpless, not-what-you-think, grins.
“He appointed me, of course. But the thing is, William, we both saw that what this place needed, to take it forward, without losing its mission, its natural constituency if you like, was a leader who … who had the local in his – or her of course, though that was never likely here! – in his inner being, but had risen above, or rather beyond, it. Maldwyn knew my track record in admin and saw my ability to spearhead, well, a new way forward, tying the community and its civic leaders together more.”
“Tightening the bonds, so to speak,” I supplied.
“Exactly. Well, not exactly like that, but, yes, in a closer intimacy.”
I had my moment, like a gap in the field of play. I went for it.
“That’s what Haf has been telling me.”
“Have you seen her? I don’t follow. You’re losing me here, Billy boy.”
I didn’t want to do that, so I passed the folder across the desk. He opened it with the quivering annoyance of a man being told the revenue was making a random check of his self-assessment returns. As he read rapidly through the file, I began to think they should.
“Some of this, er, material is private. Confidential. You have no right to this. Not that there’s anything amiss, of course, but, what exactly are you doing, going to do, with it? Haf is behind this, isn’t she? She’s got her own agenda, you know … Green, anarchist, personal. Whatever.”
“Whatever you say,” was all I said in return, and held my ground.
The Director sighed the sigh of the weary and put-upon for whom all explanations were tasks to perform for the ignorant or unknowing. I interpreted his look for him. “Try me,” I said.
“It’s quite simple. We are part, or will be part, of a wider consortium putting an entrepreneurial park with equipped office space and conference facilities at the heart of what remains one of Europe’s most materially, and socially, deprived areas. We are engaged with our partners to match-fund, mostly in kind – time, salaries, facilities and so on – to secure the European grant, and the private funding, we will therefore attract. These … documents …” he waved an airy arm over them, “are records, open to misinterpretation, of necessary, and frank, private communications to make it all happen for the good in this part of the world in which you no longer live.” He snarled the last bit. “Incidentally, I’m the one out of touch, aren’t I? What have you been doing, Billy boy?”
“Small wars and bigger famines, Gwil. You remember Nye Bevan’s late-career crack about sitting on our arses watching the world starve on our television sets? I’m positioned at some useless end of that spectrum. Or I have been. As for private communication as you call it, don’t we have a Freedom of Information Act nowadays?”
“Not for all private and corporate issues, you’ll find.”
“Public interest, Gwil.”
There was a different kind of sigh, now, not of resignation but for the reconciliation of understanding he hoped would come. He prefaced it with the interchange of my given name, a trick which he had always considered cute. About as cute as a cat with the chicken roasted and ready on the table.
“Bill, Bill-o. William! This is still me. This is you. These are our friends. We, together, all of us are still getting things done. We can’t always go around declaring the detail for bureaucrats, can we, or nothing would happen. Again, only good things will come of all this. Believe me.”
“Good things?”
“For the people. For our future. For up-skilling and our global profile. For …”
I cut him short.
“Spare me the Rotary speech.”
I retrieved the folder. I reassured him.
“This wouldn’t convict anyone of anything. Just make a few scribes enquire into the nature of good friends and good things, that’s all.”
“Then, what d’you want with any of it?”
“I told you. I want to talk to Haf. I want to know why she sent me this stuff.”
“Because she’s a troublesome little cow, that’s why.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she fucks up her ‘A’ levels, and just about everything else, and I arranged for her to be admitted to the university and she, I don’t know! Spies, is that the word, and steals? Spies on Mal … on her own father? … and me … and her mother and, now even Ceri. God knows how, and makes it seem as if we’re a –”
“Conspiracy? Cabal?”
“Oh, fuck off, Billy. That’s stupid and you know it. This is all personal with her.”
“Is it?”
He suddenly stopped. Polite formalities were to be the order of the day. Back onto safe ground. I felt we were at an end again. He threw me the scraps he felt would take me off his territory. I could be someone else’s headache not his. He told me that he had no current address for Haf. She had b
een living in Mal’s house, he thought, in town. He gave me the address. He was sure Mal would explain it all better, and sort out any difficulties I might be misconstrueing. He might even know where his daughter was, if she was his daughter. He couldn’t resist that one. Meanwhile, he was sure I’d understand, he was very busy and, if I didn’t mind, he had to move on. I didn’t mind. I’d had my memory of him confirmed. Whoever was hurt, it wouldn’t be Gwilym. He played the cards he held in front of him at any one time. Back then they had been those of a political activist with showy zeal in place of any kind of a conscience, and upbringing for social camouflage even as he distanced himself from it. But the hand he played was always solo. The tricks were all for him. He showed me to the door and asked Josephine to guide me back to the outer world. The look on her face told me she had heard enough to disapprove of me, and seen enough of me to wish me out of her sight quicker than she could flounce. How clever of Gwilym to keep Temptation in his outer office. I didn’t let her in on the speculation but I wondered if she was about to enter the inner sanctum as compensation for the bad smell I’d brought into it to spoil her boss’s day.
* * * * *
This time, the train took me back to the city centre in under an hour. I kept looking at my watch and not the blurry scenery of my childhood – down the valley, through the market town where rivers met, trading estate, viaduct, castle, weir, human sprawl of back gardens and back lanes in a back catalogue whose pages I had no wish to re-visit. I drifted aimlessly away from the station, moving against the crowds going home. I needed to eat something, but pizza joints with cardboard discs covered in tomato gloop and spaghetti with a thousand meat sauces that all tasted the same held no appeal. A billboard said The Italian Restaurant as if it was the only one possible. I didn’t believe, but I walked into the connecting side street to take a closer look. Closer, it was called Casanova’s. Perhaps they were serving oysters on the half-shell and viagra in sweetie wrappings. It was an unassuming shopfront, discreetly shrinking away from the spaceship strut of the nearby rugby stadium that was the nation’s new Millennium mecca. It was a human apology in a monumental universe. I’d take priapic Casanova over phallic Mussolini anytime, and its modesty, as to décor and menu at least, sold it to me. I’d take a chance. Again. I could put up with pictures of Naples and coloured maps of The Boot if they really cooked their own food. They did. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Brooklyn. I mopped up the juices of a Roman beef stew with bread that tasted of bread, and considered the day that had been and the deeds to be done, and my only sour thought as I drained the bottle of Montepulciano was, if it was this good, how would it survive in this city of food brands and restaurant chains? A crowd came in as I paid the bill. Maybe I’d been given an answer.
It had been a drinking day and a drinking evening. I decided to give the night a chance to join us. I went back to the air-conditioned whirr of my tenth-floor room in the hotel tower block. I hit the button to stop the noise and drew the curtains to cut out the outside sodium-lit night. I located the minibar beneath the TV set. They had Famous Grouse, but Bushmills too. And Welsh water for the Irish I preferred. After that, if I needed it, there was some Welsh whisky to let my palate consider. Penderyn, it said on the tiny bottle. I thought they’d hung Dic, the village’s namesake, in 1831 and just two minutes walk from where I was now. The idea was to end rioting and riots forever. He’d come back though, it seemed, as a spirit. Like me. With that distilled Celtic trio to snuggle up to the beer and wine already inside me I calculated sleep would come when I wanted. I didn’t want. Not yet.
Instead I opened the folder. I spread the papers on the bed. Photocopies, faxes, handwritten scrawls, official letters, tables of figures, newspaper articles, photographs, bank statements, and a postcard with a Welsh Dragon on it that said, “Look, please. Then help. Love, Haf.” I looked, again. Helping and loving seemed a tall order. And, as Gwilym had told me, there was nothing to startle an old maid in any of it. Not unless she was an old maid who knew a kettle of fish from a posy of flowers. They were traces, indicators, connections, negatives that needed developing, and an investigative journalist to make them stick. I didn’t have the time or inclination for any of that. What I did have was a voice on a telephone and a signature on a postcard, both of which worried me in a way I didn’t want to think about too closely. That feeling then, and a hunch. I re-shuffled the evidence, some of it keepsakes that had been purloined, and picked up a small white sheet torn from a hotel notepad, somewhere boutique and bijou, by the look of it. Somewhere in London. It looked as if it had been left on the dressing table of a room, waiting for the return and attention of another occupant of the room. It had no date on it, just the message which read: “Ceri love, the Eurocrats’ meeting went well. All almost in place. Now Gwil to sort the board next week, with Mal in the Chair! A no brainer then! So, a proposition for you. Light shopping now. Meet me in the bar at 6: will be wearing new purchases but you won’t be able to see them … until later. Love, Bran.” Oh, and a large X in lipstick in case he was slower on the uptake than a cog-and-ratchet funicular railway on the upward slope. On the downward side, I grimly assumed the proposition had escalated into the position which explained the congregation of partners. My old friends. My dear friends. My friends with faces and parts, real and acted, crowding in on me. I swept all the stuff off the counterpane and reached for the Penderyn that might bring sleep, if not the noose-tightened slumber that had once done for Dic.
FRIDAY
This medicine always worked. But in reverse. First you felt better, then oblivious, then distraught. I must have slumbered like a mutt. A drugged one. Curled up and fully clothed. I woke with a growl even before I tried opening my eyes. I tried harder. I blinked to peel the eyelids back. They felt as if they were sellotaped shut, only on the inside of the shutters. I scanned the room until its blur came into focus. There was the untidy mess I’d made and left, and then there was the tidy ease, kitsch Cymru, from woollen-covered chairs in a Welsh blanket pattern to artfully placed wooden love spoons as wall decor, which they could re-assemble daily at will. Any dream would do, except for the one I was in.
The growl turned to a groan as the booze hammered away behind my dilated pupils. But I was master of those pupils and a lifelong student of these pulsating moments. Water. Aspirin. A shower. A sharp shave and vigorous toothbrushing. A naked foray into the corridor to retrieve the local newspaper they delivered daily for free. I guess they had to find readers where they could nowadays. A lingering shit in the company of said newspaper. These two faecal tasks accomplished in one sedentary motion, given the state of my bowels and the standard of the journalism. Another shower followed, and then into my visiting clothes. Old-fashioned jockey Y-fronts. Mismatching socks, but both dark. A button-down Gant shirt, blue-checked in a mix of cotton and poplin. Navy chinos pressed in-house the night before and cinched around my expanding, but still respectable, waist by a broad black leather belt with a rectangular Mexican silver buckle. The boots, bought in Tucson, Arizona after a trip to see the university’s photography archive, were squared off in front and slightly heeled, their blackness relieved by a tooled-in climbing vine pattern and a dull metal sheen where they were topped and toed. The jacket was a soft black cashmere, single-breasted and short-lapelled with big patch pockets by Hugo Boss, the burly man’s friend. Red capillaries were retreating in fleeing veins from the blue of my eyes, and my sour breath, coming up the airways from a stomach too turbulent for breakfast, was being held off by the toothpaste mint-fresh cavern that was my mouth. I looked and smelled as good as I could manage. After all, I was about to call on a millionaire, wasn’t I? That, at least, was how Maldwyn Evans was listed. He had got himself into the IT game early on and used that expertise, unusual in this place at that time, to make property deals which tied together entrepreneurial bullshit about the “knowledge economy” with a low level of kitting out. All the buzzwords – regeneration, media, hi-tech, computer literacy, low skills to high skills
, Silicon Valley in the Valleys – of the late 1980s, and of course a hotline to public grants. Buildings and land were the more old-fashioned, and more profitable, accompanying attributes. Not bad for the foul-mouthed and resentful Applied Science student we’d all patronised, and put up with and, clearly, underestimated. In the Miners’ Strike he had been good for spreadsheets, maps and plans and electronic jiggery-pokery with funds. The things we had all seen as incidental, and maybe he’d already known was the only manageable future in prospect. I checked the mirror. I called down for a taxi. Just hoped the cracks in the veneer wouldn’t show.
The taxi driver didn’t seem to notice, anyway. He began talking the second I stepped into his rattle-trap and sat on his shiny black and vinyl-coated seats. At least I blended right in. If I was sick I didn’t think anyone would notice the difference. His cab had certainly seen action in the line of fire. By the way he gunned the engine, so had he. We headed out of the city to the gap in the hills where the city dwellers thought the Valleys began. And he delivered his diatribe about all those beer-swilling, fare-dodging, vomit-flecked, rude and swearing, underdressed Valley girls and their worse, because violent, male paramours. In the end I told him I’d written the script, acted in the play and paid my dues in the audience so why didn’t he pull down the curtain and give me a break. I thought he was going to sulk but he just shit-grinned in his rear-view mirror and said “Got you goin’ there, mate, didn’t I?” And carried on.
There was a time the traffic would have thinned and eased as the road arrowed north of the motorway. Those days seemed to have gone. I clung to the suit strap-handle with my left paw and watched trucks cut in, boom past, get overtaken by midget cars and open-backed council lorries, and road spray kick up and slime windscreens. An unremitting ribbon of rushing vehicles ignored the constant warnings of speed cameras and the electronic boards flashing updates on hazardous conditions. The rain came down more heavily as we entered the driver’s fabled Indian territory, and he said, amiably enough, “Always the same up here, mate, innit?”
