New Welsh Short Stories

by Author: QuarkXPress

  It’s nothing, this. We’re used to this, the five of us, lined up in a row facing the window like Asters in a flower bed, Ruth plonked at the end, asleep in her wheelchair. The kids back away, bored, shrinking behind the sea wall. I narrow my eyes at the bicycle path, beyond it the wet sand and black swell. The great blast furnaces of the steelworks are just out of view. The ornamental grass shivers in the pebbled courtyard. The kids are coming back, the ringleader’s face blunt with resolve. He has something in his hand, the other kids bowed over with laughter, shrieking now and again. The boy holds the object to the glass, white and papery, an adult nappy. It’s one of Vessie’s nappies, purloined from the rubbish vat in the courtyard. Mint wrappers cling to its sticky tabs. ‘Dead, you lot,’ he roars and with his other hand he shows us a single unlit match. He points at the aluminium vat and mimics an explosion, his arms flung, silent-movie-melodramatic. ‘Dead you lot. Up in flames.’ It’s me they’re after, I think. It’s me who’s conjured this. I feel wobbly suddenly, nauseous, as if I’m standing on the top of a very high building, as if I’m falling in love.

  Vessie seems to register the match. Or recognise the nappy. She screams, a raw, clattering aria, her arms gripping the Queen Anne style chair, fingernails boring into the leather. Kylie’s the nurse on duty. She comes running out of the staffroom, Vessie’s tin of Walkers shortbread under her arm. She opens the biscuits, the tin clang stemming Vessie’s yelps. Apparently Vessie associates the sound with her seldom-seen son. He brought a tin for her once, just before she got really bad. She takes the shortbread finger from the young girl’s hand and flips it into her mouth; a thumbtack to a magnet. She gnashes her false teeth like some mechanical apparatus, grinding the biscuit to dust in seconds.

  ‘Ten more minutes, ladies,’ Kylie says, as if talking to children at a playground. She sashays back to the staffroom.

  ‘She’ll get a nasty case of lumbago in them heels,’ Bronwen says, watching her go. ‘That’s how I got mine, wearing high heels behind the bar. Now I can’t stand upright.’

  ‘Your lumbago’s nothing,’ Clare tells her. ‘Try lugging wardrobes downstairs your whole working life. The doctor had me on diamorphine for twenty years.’ To me she says, ‘Furniture removals, see. The only woman in the country when I started.’

  ‘Wardrobes?’ Bron says, caustic. ‘Give me wardrobes any day.’

  Clare’s tired. She only sighs at the barb. She smiles wearily at me, oblivious to my guilt, to my part in the kid’s fire-starting threats.

  A memory now, of the old Thornbush smallholding. Twenty-two acres. Chickens and pigs. The farmhouse was slowly crumbling, buckets for rainwater on the landing. Posies of mildew flowering in every corner. The whistling kettle cemented with grease to the hob of the Occidental Automatic. The view from my window was all field; Devon hedging and pig-wire marking boundaries like crossword grids, no humans in sight. Two miles to the nearest village, four miles to the nearest comprehensive school. My father used to drive me every day to St Brigid’s in his mud-splattered Land Rover. He’d be waiting on Newton Avenue when I got out in the afternoon. Port Talbot felt like an exotic country choked full of colours and complexity, an India to my Great Britain. The girls in my class went to the Pavilion on Friday nights, an extra mass on Sunday evening. Those long afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, knitting patches for blankets with my mother. I was lonelier than God.

  One morning in early August 1951, a red-hot Saturday, I’d promised to meet a couple of girls I’d acquainted in the school canteen for a picnic on Aberavon Beach. But my parents had already decided to take the swine to market in Sennybridge. I had to stay home to do the day’s chores. I’d telephone the eldest girl, Dolores; I’d apologise for my absence. I hoped they wouldn’t shun me. I hoped they’d invite me again to future outings. I went to the hall and lifted the telephone’s receiver, my free hand gripping the lip of the console table. Without warning I burst into tears, every flexor in my doughy fifteen-year-old body seething at the injustice life had dealt me: an only child, a farm girl, the maltreated heroine banished from the ball. My fingers seemed to move of their own accord, like a planchette on a Ouija board. Into the dip of the void nearest the dial stop. I pivoted the dial plate to its full extent. Nine. Nine. And in one electric moment of screw-it-all-abandon, I hinged it back fully a third and final time.

  The operator asked me which emergency service I needed. ‘A fire engine,’ I told her unequivocally, a poltergeist in me speaking. ‘High flames observed at Thornbush Farm.’ I banged the receiver down. I climbed to the top of the house and out through my parents’ bedroom window. A finely stirred blend of accomplishment and fear pushing me up onto the roof, where I waited, crouched at the corner of the left gable, still wearing my petrol-blue tea dress. ‘Where’s the fire?’ the ladderman asked, looking about, when he arrived. He was tall, blond. A big, tall, blond boy. Black felt topcoat, parallel rows of gleaming brass buttons. I held onto the chimney stack and shrugged. Toed the edge of a loose tile. ‘Just a cat. Got down before me.’ Couldn’t he see the fire? The great blaze was in me. He shook his head, holding the ladder firm for me to descend.

  ‘What school do you go to?’ he asked as I neared the base. ‘St Brigid’s, I’ll bet.’

  I jumped the last rung, his big hand clamping my forearm, sizzling currents racing through my blood vessels. I smoothed my skirt, my neck and cheeks burning. ‘How did you know?’ The small crowd of firemen behind us cheered. The ladderman winked. His blue larval eyes opened wide, drinking the light. ‘You Catholic girls, wild as snakes.’

  I became addicted to that attention, accustomed to the smile. I rang for the fire brigade every time my parents went to Sennybridge. I did it in favour of picnics in Aberavon and coach trips to Porthcawl. The ladderman was wrong. Not all of the girls at St Brigid’s were wild. It was only me who possessed the audacity to keep telling those sorts of lies. Just to be able to see his face, to feel his tight grip on my body. Some days he joked and laughed with me and I knew that the feeling was mutual. Despite the wedding band on his ring-finger he longed for me as much as I did him; the pair of us like a dried garden waiting for rain. Other days he was busy attending real fires and he merely tolerated me, his smile shrivelled to a simper. It went on for two whole years, this unusual pseudo-romance, a small knot of a secret, lodged like a pine nut at pit of my belly. And then the operator refused to deal with me. Dolores was engaged to be married. I spent my days and nights running about the farm, checking for fire hazards. If a real blaze sprang I knew the fire brigade wouldn’t show. The livestock would perish, roasted to ash.

  Kylie’s back, with the work experience girl in tow. Fleece sweater and leggings, cherry-red lipstick catastrophic against a light egg-shell skin tone. She takes the handles of Ruth’s wheelchair and swiftly twists her around, the rubber tyres numb on the check-rib carpet tiles. Kylie claps as if rounding sheep up. ‘Time for bed now girls. And it’s Wednesday tomorrow!’ she says, voice breathy. ‘Nigel from the social’ll be here with his bingo dabbers. What d’you think about that, eh?’

  ‘Not much,’ Bronwen tells her. ‘A tin of roses for first prize? Down the club you’d get a joint of sirloin for Sunday, a bottle of Blue Nun at least.’

  ‘You’re not in the club now, Bron,’ Kylie says good-naturedly.

  ‘Well I know I’m not in the club,’ Bronwen says, irritated. ‘I’d have had a good drink if I was, wouldn’t I?’

  In my room, the little flowers from the sunken garden dunked in drinking tumblers. The mantelpiece clock from Thornbush. My knitting needles and wool. Four books on the bedside; a bible, an old mass missal, the collected poems of Idris Davies and a daft and tattered paperback, a Mills & Boon, the cover showing some brown-bodied Adonis scooping a girl onto a motorbike. Pure rubbish. But you can get them from the mobile library and read them in your sleep. It looks like a pile of things saved from a flood. What are these things doing here, I think, and I remember: Two days after Geraint passed away his daughter
turned up, Teutonic hair, arms swinging. I’d met her once before, ten years earlier, when she’d come to ask for money for a deposit on a wedding venue. She was divorced now, she said. She wanted to know how much longer I’d be in the house. Her father was useful to her again in death. She’d booked an appointment for me at the Cilygofid retirement home off Heol-y-Nant. She’d booked a day off work to take me. She played my forgetfulness up to the saleswoman on duty. ‘She’s left the gas ring on overnight a few times.’ She turned, grinning at me, her little square teeth talcum-powder white. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Georgia? After my dad died? That’s what you said?’ Alzheimer’s had been in the news. Dementia was fashionable.

  A lustre came into the saleswoman’s eyes. ‘Well, this is one of the more exclusive establishments in the Neath Port Talbot area.’ She nodded at the window overlooking the beach.

  ‘She’s got the money,’ said Geraint’s daughter.

  And she was right, I did. I hadn’t touched my savings since I’d sold Thornbush to the O’Briens. They’d been after it for the duration. ‘Why the hell not?’ I said eyeing the two strange women in turn. ‘I know where I’m not wanted. And where my money is.’ In truth I liked the view. The daughter didn’t know it but many a Sunday her father and I spent sat on the giant concrete whale at the end of the promenade. Rum and raisins from Franco’s. The common room smelled like three different kinds of piss but here was as good as anywhere. The house meant nothing without Geraint in it.

  I dream of fire. Mad, crazy fire. Volcanoes erupting, spitting scorching orange magma. Matchstick Vesuvians running for their lives. The Britannia Bridge, flames licking the gangplank stretching all the way to Anglesey, reflecting gold in the iron water below. New Cross Road, charred red brick. Thirteen dead and nothing said. Windsor Castle, fat turrets lit canary yellow, smoke billowing across a milk grey sky. The images sway, overlap, superimpose, and then fade. There was another fire, a happy fire, in the old potato trench. Geraint helping me with the woodrush. It’d been weakening the soil in the green plot for years. ‘You’ll have to burn the roots,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’ He’d come to insulate the attic a few months after my parents had died, one after the other. I’d given up on the possibility of a life of my own. I was forty-six, a spinster. But there he was, a divorcee, as unexpected as internal combustion, leant against the Occidental drinking instant coffee. We had to wait for bonfire night or else the O’Briens would complain. I stood back, marking him, my heart in my throat as he poured the petrol, rockets cracking overhead, taraxacums of pink light detonating all around. The fire started with a woof, the glyphosate in the weed killer turning the flames emerald green. The white gloss cleaving to the chopped wood bubbling. When it settled Geraint held me, his chest pressed to my spine. My face was hot, piping hot. I stayed where I was. ‘You should sell up,’ he said. ‘It’s too much for you here on your own.’ I had to twist my head to see his face, his skin bathed in the honeyed light of the fire. ‘And go where?’

  ‘Wherever you want. Move in with me.’

  I squeezed his hands, my fingernails neat, painted ballet-slipper pink. Skin soft and firm.

  I hear laughter echoing down the corridor. Female laughter from the staffroom. I realise I need to pee. I reach out in the dark for the emergency pull cord, the red light surfacing dimly. Earlier than I thought, five past midnight by the old Napoleon. An hour has lapsed while I’d lived decades in my head. It’s the work experience girl who comes, red lipstick worn off. She turns away from me in the toilet cubicle, facing the door. ‘You like to knit?’ she says, raising her voice over the stream of urine, loud in the sleepy building. ‘It’s popular now, knitting. Girl on the bus this afternoon was making a shawl.’ Everything comes back to haunt.

  I scurry along the dormitory, my speed surprising the girl. I’m eager to plunge into my bed, to recapture the dream, to see Geraint’s face again. His big arms holding me. His voice, lazy and placid. I’d forgotten his voice but in the dream it was there, clear as a bell.

  The fire alarm wakes me, going through me like a screwdriver, pinning my shoulders to the mattress. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. Below the piercing noise another commotion, the automatic door closures banging like shotguns. My door opens, the work experience girl’s face floating in the cleft. Eggshell complexion withered to sallow white. ‘Georgia?’ she says, voice low and tense. ‘Georgia, there’s a fire.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I tell her. ‘Kismet.’

  ‘Can you get yourself out of bed and come to the corridor?’ she says. ‘I need to wake the others.’ She watches me push the eiderdown away. ‘There we are. Out of bed. Up we get.’ The alarm’s still blaring, marauding, round and round like the dial plate on an old rotary phone.

  They line us up in the reception, strip lights jammering. The Cilygofid motto is printed on a banner stretched across the front of the counter: Active Body, Active Mind. Posters on the walls of middle-aged models tending shrubs, playing chess, singing karaoke. The sulphuric reek of smoke is thick in our nostrils. Vessie’s out of her head, squawking like a wraith. Kylie hands her a whole tin of shortbread. She only hurls it across the room. ‘Today of all days,’ Ruth says with a pulmonary whistle, her cracked lips working. ‘My son’s due tomorrow. They’ll cancel visitors now because of this.’

  Bron’s nightdress can only be described as ugly, sage-green polyester exposing the outline of her huge spatchcock chest. The alarm stops abruptly, the ghost of it resonating momentarily in the back of my throat. The shutter on the front door comes up with a stinging squeal. I blush at the sight of a small party of firemen. They enter cautiously, wiping their bovver boots on the horsehair mat. They’re not as smart as they used to be, bandaged up in beige Kevlar suits. The man at the front lifts the visor on his yellow helmet as I grab at the tails of my pyjama top, the fleecy material wadded up in my arthritic hands. ‘Everyone alright?’ he says, smiling without looking at us. Cement-grey eyes. He makes a beeline for Kylie at the counter, pulling his gloves off as he goes, yanking at them, one finger at a time. ‘It’s obviously deliberate,’ he tells her. ‘But minimal, no significant damage.’ He casts his eyes down her legs, sleek in transparent tights. ‘A bit of smoke damage.’ Through the door I can see the blue lid of the rubbish vat melted to a thick formless plastic, the scorch marks, like arrows, pointing up the yellow-brick wall. It’s four in the morning, the sky a dark purple colour, the tide muttering mildly. The lack of fire is a disappointment, an anti-climax. I can’t live with this omen hanging over me. If they’re going to kill me I’d rather they do it.

  ‘What if they come back?’ Ruth says as if sensing my thoughts.

  ‘We’ve got them on CCTV,’ the work-experience girl tells her. ‘The police’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘I’m starving hungry, me,’ says Bron. She looks at the work-experience girl. ‘Do us a boiled egg, gul.’

  ‘The cook isn’t in yet,’ Kylie says, without breaking eye contact with the fireman.

  Bronwen jeers. ‘Let me in then, I can do a soft-boiled egg for myself. Did the buffets in the Molloy’s for years. Think I don’t know how to boil an egg?’

  ‘Was that when the environmental health shut it down for poor hygiene?’ Clare asks her. ‘Cockroaches. I heard it was riddled.’

  ‘We’ve secured the site for the police,’ the fireman says to Kylie. He puts a scrap of paper down on the counter in front of her, tapping it once with his thumb.

  I let go of my pyjama top and look down at my own hands, dry as parchment, freckled and veined. I’m old now, I know. I’ll never hold a man in my arms again, much less a young strapping engineman. But I know too that the fire wasn’t my fault, not really. Being here at the end of my life with these loud disparate women is karma enough. The obsession with the boy from the fire brigade was its own punishment. Had I gone to the beach with Dolores I’d have found a husband, I’d have had my own children. But I liked the danger, that feverish sliver of decadence. And I got Geraint,
unlooked for, his companionship sweetened by its sheer randomness. You needn’t go out searching for anything. Sit at your own kitchen table long enough. Life will come to you.

  A ROMANCE

  Sarah Coles

  I

  ‘Nimrod’. Sweeping views of the rolling Marches. Sweep … roll along the ancient Mercian kingdom to the edge of the Forest of Dean. Such vastness… A lone figure – distant. Elgar’s strings dip and soar (accentuating the figure’s remoteness). Closer: the figure is a man, and even at this distance, we recognise his gait as that of a hero. He is accompanied by a large, black dog. (He is a troubled hero, perhaps.) Ah, yes, closer now, we see his face is set against the world, his jaw clenched, his eyes fixed on the horizon: he is a man alone. Alone with his troubles. What are his troubles? Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that his hair is tousled against his forehead by an uncaring wind; that his jawline is square, strong, and that he is alone. As ‘Nimrod’ swells to its climax, our hero stands on the edge of the promontory and we see, through his eyes, the majestic view from Symond’s Yat Rock. The ponderous meander of the timeless Wye; our hero’s profile against the turbulent sky, his loyal dog (Saturn or Pilot, maybe) sitting at his feet. As he gazes, (stoic, flawed) we can only guess at the turmoil that is raging within that (brilliant, conflicted) mind…

  From left, there appears, in the background, a plump American tourist wearing a baseball cap, bright yellow T-shirt and shorts and eating an ice-cream cone.

  Cut

  Our hero deflates (fuckssake) as the director ushers the American (stereotype) away, off camera. We notice, with some disappointment, that our hero’s jawline is not quite as square and heroic as we’d thought; in fact, his chin slopes backwards a little. A young woman with a ring in her lip approaches and powders his face. He frowns and complains, and as he does, we can’t help overhearing a slight lisp. He flattens his hair and pretends to check his phone, to avoid the inconvenience and discomfort of conversation with the general public. He is a man alone.