‘Yes.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I saw you over there but I didn’t think you would want to speak to me.’
‘I’ve just had my fingers inside a girl.’
She doesn’t say anything.
‘It was a practical joke,’ I say.
Jordana’s skin has got worse again. She wears a choker of inflammation.
‘When did your skin get worse?’
She rubs her wrist against her hipbone. She still has a bag of dog shit in one hand.
‘Why have you got a dog?’ I ask. I’m just talking. ‘I thought you were allergic to dogs.’
‘Oliver,’ she says.
‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ I say.
She’s blinking.
‘Your skin’s looking bad.’
Her lips have disappeared into her mouth.
‘Your skin’s looking bad. It’s probably the dog.’
I take a small step towards her. She thinks about flinching.
‘I don’t care about my fucking skin,’ she says.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘After we broke up, I realized that our relationship will not matter when I am forty-three.’
Jordana makes a throaty noise.
‘You’re a fucking cunt, Oliver.’
She throws the bag of dog shit at me. It is a girly throw but she still manages to hit me on the neck. I do not flinch. It makes soft contact, a moment of gut-fresh warmth against my collarbone.
It’s amazing because, by all accounts, she was the one who cheated on me and yet look how easy it is to make her rub her eyes with her free hand until her eyelids swell like overcooked conchiglie.
‘You’re a fucking cunt,’ she says.
She has irritated her eyes as well. They look red and sore.
I could tell her: You are rubbing your eyes with a hand that was carrying dog shit.
She looks at me for a moment and I think that she is going to set me alight or beat me up, but then she starts running away. She’s not very fast because she has one hand held to her face, grinding her eye socket. I jog after her across the grass.
‘Go away!’ she yells.
I keep following her.
‘Go away!’
She’s actually screaming.
‘Don’t be mental!’ I say.
She keeps running, following the path next to the tall stone walls that protect the botanical gardens.
I feel exhilarated. And I’m smiling because I lifted the scab off and it turns out that Jordana and I did have an emotional connection.
Her trousers are catching on the bottoms of her trainers, getting tugged down as she runs; I see the first suggestion of her arse. A short length of lead is dangling out behind her like a tail. She reaches the big, green bottle bank and disappears behind it.
I stop and listen. There is the faint sound of her lungs.
She is tightly curled up in the dark behind the bottle bank. Some of her hair has fallen across her mouth. The ground she is lying on is muddy and bare. The dog lead looks like it’s coming out from her belly now, like an umbilical cord. There’s a fug of vinegar and beer slops from inside the recycling bin.
I think about what I ought to say. I know I don’t have to say I’m sorry because she was the one who cheated on me and she was the one who dumped me and she was the one who threw dog shit at my face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
And again: ‘I’m sorry.’
It only makes her worse – she nuzzles the dirt.
I lie down next to her: I am the serving spoon, she is the tablespoon.
‘Let me smell your fingers,’ she says wetly.
She grabs my forefinger and sniffs it.
‘I can’t smell anything,’ she says.
‘Try my knuckles,’ I say.
She snuffles them, one by one.
‘I’m happy for you,’ she says.
‘What happened to your boyfriend?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh.’
‘His name is Dafydd. You wouldn’t like him.’
‘How long does he last?’
‘That’s not important.’
He’s a fucking marathon man.
‘How long does he go for?’
‘Oliver, I can’t tell you that.’
She even respects him. I feel my stomach twist.
She holds my hand to her mouth. Her teeth knock my knuckles.
‘Who was the lucky girl?’ she asks with a bitterness that makes me happy.
‘Fat.’
‘Who’s Fat?’
‘You know, Fat. Used to be in our school. Fat. Pie.’
‘You mean Zoe?’
‘Yes.’
‘Urgh, she’s fat,’ Jordana says, suddenly snort-laughing through the wetness. It is a sound I have not heard in months.
‘She’s not that fat any more,’ I say.
‘Yehright.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Why did she leave anyway?’ she says.
‘She’s not fat any more.’
‘Parents didn’t think Derwen Fawr was good enough?’
‘It was because we pushed her in the pond.’
‘She fell in the pond,’ she says.
‘On about? We pushed her.’
‘I didn’t push her,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
‘Have you got a hard-on?’
I am a serving spoon. I am a ladle.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’
I try and recognize a new smell that is coming from the recycling skip.
It’s blood.
I take another, longer sniff and think back to my mother taking the hat off her middle finger with a handheld blender. The smell of the bloody kitchen tissue.
‘Ah fuck. Frieda!’ Jordana yelps, jumping to her feet and backing away.
The greyhound is at my feet, panting. It has a small duck in its jaw. The duck’s limp neck lolls around like a semi-on.
‘Oli, get up!’
They called their new dog Frieda.
Frieda pads towards my face and drops the bird in front of me as I lie still on the ground. The bird’s feathers are slick, spiky with blood and saliva. There’s a strong smell of drying pond water. The feathers around its shoulders are fluffy and newborn-looking, like cotton wool, while those on its wings are more battered. Its amber beak is slack and open.
‘You called her Frieda.’
‘In memory of Fred,’ she says. ‘Stand up Oliver oh God!’
‘You’re allergic to dogs,’ I say.
‘I know!’
‘Why have you got a dog then?’
‘Get up!’
‘Is it a replacement for your mother?’
‘My mother is not dead!’
‘Why have you got a dog then?’
Frieda nudges the bird towards my face as if to say: Here, this is for you. I am touched. Frieda’s torso expands and contracts, the skin pulling tight around her ribcage.
‘Why have you got a dog then?’ I say.
I am hungry.
Frieda’s tongue flops over the edges of her mouth, like sandwich ham that is too big for the bread.
‘Because I like dogs,’ she says, finally.
‘Wow,’ I say. I hadn’t expected that. I remember why I fell in love with Jordana.
It is past the watershed by the time I get home. My parents are watching TV.
I go straight to the larder, open the door and, taking the key out of the lock, I step into the darkness. I lock myself in.
I take a deep breath. The smell is an emulsion: fruity pots of shoe shine, musty stiff brushes, a sweet, moist waft from the gasoline-style tankard of Grade A Vermont Maple Syrup and an acid tang from jars of homemade Seville orange marmalade.
My parents’ lifetime collection of plastic bags looks like a large white cabbage, hanging from the back of the door. Each bag contains another bag which contains another bag – starting at Habitat, down through John Lewis, Debenhams, Sainsbury’s,
Tesco, Sketty Butchers, WHSmith, Uplands Newsagent, Boots and so on into infinity or close enough. I realize that if you really wanted to kill yourself you wouldn’t bother with mega-tonne pyrotechnics or hiring the Red Devils to write a suicide note in the sky. You’d just do it. With a Tesco bag tied around your neck, in a poorly stocked larder.
But I don’t want to kill myself. I’m just very hungry.
I pull down a packet of Bourbon Creams and sit on the tiles with my knees up to my chest. These packets are notoriously difficult to open. I scrabble at the seal, flicking at the plastic. I have no thumbnails. I get nowhere. I start to feel overwhelmingly sad.
I give up on the Bourbons and grab a small microwave chocolate pudding. I rip off the cardboard outer packaging and peel back the thin plastic tab. I shove two fingers in – it’s the consistency of foam. I eat the sponge off my fingers, going quickly, knowing that at the bottom of the cup is the chocolate sauce.
My gullet spasms. It is remembering how to digest.
I lick the goo from my fingertips. I think of Zoe in the old days.
The edge of my unhappiness softens. There is a gristly but manageable lump somewhere in my torso.
I try and focus on something positive. My experience with Zoe has made me sharper. I can compare myself to Zoe for the rest of my life. Every year, I will track her down using the internet and telescopes. It will be a healthy competitiveness.
My GCSEs are more important than my first relationship. My first relationship, which will not matter when I’m forty-three. Jordana would just have distracted me from my revision. My GCSEs will decide how the rest of my life pans out. In job interviews, they will not ask me whether I am still on good terms with my ex-girlfriend.
Jordana told me that her mother’s fine. She also said that she didn’t think it would be a good idea for us to meet up again. She said that if I really needed to speak to her I could send her an email. I told her that it would probably be easier for me to just wait around in the park until she turns up.
She walked away and told me not to follow her. She said she was going to bury the duck. This is the sort of person she has become.
I did not offer to help dig. I was far too hungry for that.
Port Talbot
My parents are not pressuring me to revise for my GCSEs, which I think is highly irresponsible.
One of my main problems is that mathematics is not nearly as interesting as Port Talbot steelworks, which I can see from my bedroom window, just beyond the docks.
I look at it and think of Mrs Griffiths constructing the world’s ugliest simultaneous equation on the blackboard – all numbers, dashes, scraping and chalk dust.
Port Talbot by night is GCSE maths as it ought to be taught: an equation with glitz – pipes run through the air unsupported, kinked at wacky angles just for the fun of it; rows of giant, bracketed smokestacks, wrapped in ladders, scaffold, long division; there are billowing yellow flames, dense blue flames, and sometimes, on a good day, a flame of toxic green. × equals one of the thousands of orange carbon lights that cling to every structure: the points of a line graph awaiting connection. There are tall, thin towers, dirty at the top like chewed-on pencils.
They should have a picture of it on the front of our textbook. They should include it in school trips. They should encourage us to go there for work experience: a fortnight in overalls.
And once I have stared at Port Talbot for long enough, I type the number 0.7734, which spells the word hELLO when you turn the calculator upside down. 7734 spells hELL. And 77345 spells ShELL. Which is the name of a garage that my parents boycott.
My parents like to blame Port Talbot for a number of local problems: leukaemia, lymphoma, asthma, eczema, brain tumours and the lack of investment in Swansea city centre. There is a stretch of houses between the motorway and the steelworks that Dad calls ‘Melanoma Way’.
I used to say: I do not believe in scenery. This is still true but I would send postcards home of Port Talbot by Night.
Rhossili
I am eating a plum on a gun installation. My father sips from a Thermos. My mother nibbles a Rocky Robin.
We are at the top of Rhossili Downs, sat with our legs hanging over the edge of a pocked concrete platform, looking out to sea. My dad told me that during the Second World War these platforms were built into the side of the hill to be used as early-warning lookout points and ground-to-air gun placements.
It is windy, but very clear: the sky is full-on blue. Three paragliders are floating just above the horizon and, behind them, a thin, dishcloth of cloud.
We are not going on a proper holiday this year until after my exams. Mum said that ‘she didn’t want to interrupt my flow’.
So in lieu of somewhere foreign, my parents and I have been going for walks on the weekends and I am doing my best to remain calm. I say things like: ‘Oh yes, I’d like to go for a walk,’ and ‘Cool, Mum! A walk!’
We have exhausted most of the other Gower walks – Mewslade to Fall Bay, Whitford Sands, Caswell to Langland – and so, today, we are doing Rhossili. It is very brave of us, as a family, because at one end of the down is Llangennith, home to Graham and Mum, the surfing lessons and the wee-woo. It is also the place where Jordana had a serious conversation with an older boy called Lewis, who seemed nice, which was the middle of the end for us. To the south is Worm’s Head. And beyond that, a few miles around the coast, Port Eynon and Graham’s house and the broken porthole window. So this is the Tate family showing that we are strong like ox.
We parked up next to the village church and walked down the steps on to the beach. We didn’t talk much as we walked along. Mum did well not to mention surfing or whether the waves were good or bad.
We passed a group of learner surfers in a circle around their instructor. You can tell the beginners because they use enormous blue polystyrene boards. They were practising their stance, pretending to catch waves on dry land.
We walked on the hard, damp sand. There were hundreds and thousands of those tiny, translucent sand-shrimp. They usually only appear when you start digging a hole, but today they were everywhere, just lying out on the surface, catching rays. With each step that we took, the shrimplets would jump. They were not jumping in terror or respect or anger, because primordial creatures don’t make such judgements. They felt the vibration of a foot landing on sand and they made a simple choice.
Sometimes they would jump into my shoe.
Then we turned up to walk through the dunes and climb Rhossili Downs, which is a hill – steep enough for a neck sweat – that rises up behind the beach. This is where we stopped for our picnic, at the gun installation.
‘Who would want to attack Swansea?’ I ask.
‘Swansea was a very important port,’ Dad says.
He finishes off the cashews, tipping the corner of the packet into his mouth: salt dust and nut crumbs tumble in. I watch him chew.
‘It was the fifth city on Hitler’s hit list,’ Mum says. She is not a historian.
‘Wow,’ I say.
The wind is making Mum’s weak tear ducts produce. She wipes the tears away with her sleeve.
‘The guns were never used though,’ Dad says.
Mum starts packing our rubbish into a Sainsbury’s bag: scrunched-up foil, an empty bag of Salt and Malt Vinegar McCoy’s, three banana skins and the wrappers from four Rocky Robins. She stuffs the plastic bag into the green rucksack and hands it to Dad for carrying. He dons the rucksack without fuss.
My parents are a well-oiled machine.
We stand up and start back towards Rhossili village.
‘Look,’ Mum says, laughing, ‘a political statement.’ She is pointing at one of the walls of the crumbling bunker. Some graffiti artiste-slash-poet has sprayed three words in red paint: I EAT MEAT. My dad laughs as well. They are sharing a moment.
I feel sorry for my parents, in a way.
We step off the concrete and back on to the uneven grass. I stomp on a molehill that gets in my way.
‘Have you heard from Jordana recently?’ Mum asks.
It is fine. I am enjoying this walk. I am calm.
‘Yes, I bumped into her in the park the other day.’
The wind makes our voices sound ethereal.
‘Oh right. Is she okay?’
‘She seems okay,’ I tell her. ‘Things are still pretty raw between us.’
Mum nods. We lean into the wind as we walk.
‘Her skin seemed worse,’ I say.
‘Maybe it’s exam stress.’
‘Or maybe it’s the dog. She’s got a new dog.’
‘What breed?’
‘Greyhound,’ I say.
‘Lovely dogs,’ she says.
‘It’s not a replacement for her mother though,’ I say. ‘Her mother’s still alive.’
I feel grown-up. Like I could talk about anything. I could ask anything.
‘Right. I’ve got a question,’ I say.
‘Okay.’
‘Me and Dad are in a house fire.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, given the hypothetical situation that we are both equally saveable, then who would you go for first?’
‘I’d go for you,’ she says.
‘Cool.’
‘But I’d feel bad for your father.’
‘Yeah.’
We go single file – me first – as the path cuts through a patch of purple gorse. We see Dad in the distance, starting to make his way down to Rhossili village.
I proffer some more information: ‘She’s still with her new boyfriend, Dafydd.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mum says, and she rubs my back as we walk along.
‘I hate him even though I haven’t met him,’ I say, over my shoulder.
‘That’s understandable,’ she says.
As the path opens out again, we see a group of people sat watching the paragliders. A bit further downhill, two men are tending to a purple parachute laid out on the grass – it billows like a jellyfish; its tentacles are attached to a man wearing a jumpsuit and a helmet.
I expect Mum to remind me that these relationships mean nothing when you are forty-three. Or to at least wheel out a cliché: there are plenty more fish in the sea. There are fish but also whales and crustaceans and shipwrecks and a dozen or so submersible military vehicles.
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