Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  “How nice to see you again! Feeling poorly, Mr Stevens? Lost weight, too, I should think. What you want is a good long holiday in the country. Nourishing food, rest, change of atmosphere, that kind of thing. I know when I was awfully ill some years ago our doctor warned Mr Thorpe and by golly it made him sit up and take notice. I stayed with my sister in Devon, grand month, came home feeling like a new woman.”

  Somehow she gathered inquiry from the sort of grunted affability one is obliged to sound off against toothless fate.

  “Nerves, the doctor said. Me suffering nerves, when to all intents and purposes I never knew the meaning of nerves!”

  I said, “Tal Harding tried to cultivate this garden. He made a poor job of it.”

  “Yes, we heard, but Mr Harding had trouble at the time.” She coughed superbly beneath her fingertips. “You know, one doesn’t like to be nosy, pry into other people’s affairs.”

  The worry began again, the same fretful anxiety to make connection. Make friends with homely Mrs Thorpe. Simply connect. And then it came so simply, thinly vacuous as sand complaining against gravity, drawn only towards friendship while Grandstand and Eamon Andrews wound up with cricket scores all over the summer-afternoon island, my senses crawling troubled from insufficient sleep the night before, Saturday silence on Caib colliery, NUM and NCB ignoring the curse of Genesis, and that uncanny effluvium from Daren woods, August malevolence, traceless, anti-human. Anti-consciousness.

  “Ellen and I seem to be at cross-purposes these days,” I said. “Nothing works right for us any more. As you say, perhaps I should pull up my roots for a few weeks. But it isn’t nerves; more likely sheer boredom. Boredom and failure.”

  “Come now, Mr Stevens, failure, no,” — pleading softly, herself immunized, sweetly plump, warm, comforting.

  I said, “Something’s missing, gone, lost,” — banalizing the truth, covertly pleased to charge embarrassment upon Mrs Thorpe, her girlish shuffling lifting a fine, hissily fine uproar off the crushed gravel path, compassion lapping her round blue eyes, the gentle distress of a never-tempted earth goddess. Lower firmament eidolon softly foot shuffling in the pebbly gravel. “Never mind; most things have to get worse before they become better,” I said.

  She broke a husky protest, turning as Mr Thorpe came out to wave from the back door: “Bye-bye, Emily — hullo Mr Stevens, hullo there!” He canted sideways from a leather satchel in his right hand, a tight white linen jacket profiling his humped shoulders like uncooked chicken meat.

  “Bowls tournament,” she said. “They’re playing somewhere over in Brynywawr.”

  We watched him driving past Caib institute, under the railway bridge and out to the main road.

  “Good luck, George,” she called softly, placidly loyal. “My husband is skip this season. You wouldn’t call him a brilliant player, but he’s terrifically reliable. Do you play bowls, Mr Stevens?”

  “Old Sir Francis Drake’s pastime. No, Mrs Thorpe, the game doesn’t interest me.” Nor old John Vaughan, I thought; you’re getting to be like him, Reeso. Whited ghoul, shellacked in the guts, de-knackered, stoned in the gonads, killed in the pills, lonely. We’re all lonely, waiting for the trap-door loneliness that finished off Granny Stevens — hold on, Rees, connect, if you fail, fail trying.

  She came over to the garden gate. “D’you know, Mr Stevens, every Saturday throughout the summer,” — squeezing jubilance from her contentedly slack-pursed, fretless mouth — “he’s off playing bowls! It’s like a vice to him, truly, Mr Stevens!”

  I said, “What’s yours?”

  “Yours first!” — gamin delight trembling her evenly swathed brown hair.

  “If I told you my vice, you wouldn’t invite me into the house for a cup of tea,” I said. Fail? Fail in trying.

  She resisted contact at teacup level, blurting, “You’ll never believe! I love smashing glass, bottles, jars, all colours, then you make pictures and designs in cement. Lay them in quick, quick, you have to be ever so quick. My experimental shed, it’s over there behind the hydrangeas.” She spun limber as an athlete unable to stand still, heels spurting the gravel.

  Iesu, I thought, echoing Ellen’s echoes of Mrs Cynon, this great way-out Madame Thorpe. She’s on her own, travelling solo like old Charlie Page the Hunter and Fisher throw-back. None but the pure in heart shall inherit.

  She flurried around inside the shed, inch-thin slabs of decorated cement propped against the walls, crude cockerels, stiff-winged doves, a seaweedy crocodile in the dark green shards of a Houghton pale-ale bottle, stereotyped church steeples, fairy-tale-designed houses, arabesques, curliques, elongated diamond shapes. Beneath the shed window her glass smashing barrel, into which she drove a ball hammer time after time like an absorbed rampaging child. When I touched her shoulder she glanced shyly aside, offering a squat vino bottle plus the hammer to go with it. Conversation waned to exclamations, the blind intimacy that crows out from loneliness.

  We mixed a bucketful of cement, stirring it on a flagstone outside the shed. She shovelled it into a shallow plywood-based mould no bigger than a tea-tray, concentrating, teeth bared as she floated a smooth wet surface.

  “Ready?” she whispered. “Will you, or shall I?”

  “You, Emily, please,” I said.

  “Shall I?”

  “Yes, you, it’s your…”

  “Next time, then!” — her suntanned arm swooping, scratching out a huge sunflower head with a spoon handle in the wet cement. Watching her, I fell into the kind of reverent shock which ends childhood. The sunflower blossom was a ludicrous thing, setting hard, symmetrically shattered and setting shattered hard, painstaking Emily bent over the workbench in the early evening sunlight, shards clashing, her breathing faintly audible, happily, quietly demoniac.

  We mixed another squashy dumpling of cement and while she went indoors to brew some tea I scrawled a Cerne Abbas giant figure, decked his storming phallus with hydrangea petals, then outlined his loutish hulk and rib-cage with peaty-brown fragments from a large Nescafé jar. I felt the search was on, had to be signified, displayed. Failure meant nothing, not a damn thing. I saw myself male to plump Emily’s female. Begun at last, this bid, challenge, sweet hazard between every good and mutual evil.

  “We’ll have to break it before my husband comes home,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t understand.”

  “You understand, Emily?”

  “Not really. I don’t like flirting, can’t very well in any case,” — lowering her head. “Flirting makes me feel ashamed.”

  “I’ve been ashamed of myself for a long time,” I said.

  “Don’t you love Ellen?”

  “This is different,” — the truth of the difference beyond reach of reason.

  “I couldn’t face my husband,” she pleaded.

  “Emily, sometimes I can’t face living. We’ll give ourselves a week, shall we? Can’t you see, I’m more afraid than you are?”

  “Good-bye,” she said, braving trembles that shook her flared skirt. “Wait, I’ve made tea. Come inside for a cup of tea first, before you leave.”

  13

  Every afternoon I walked around the sprawl of Caib colliery. Six hundred men on three shifts and I knew them all by their Christian names. Knew many of their parents, wives, their skills and paucities. Most of them knew me, learned our leaked-out secret founded upon the workaday settling of history: Rees Stevens? Him? Poor bugger can’t make any more kids since he had his bump. See Rees in and out of Daren library? Bloody ghost of a man gone, no push left in him, be on the dole till his pension comes through. Reesy’s had his lot.

  And Ellen’s place, her designated role and character: Now there’s a smart young filly running to seed. Longer it goes on, worse she’s going to get. No argument, stands to reason. What’s good for the gander don’t have to be good for the goose. Not that it’s Reesy’s fault, s’just the sort of fuck-up on the home front that leads to what you read about every Monday in the old Dee and Dee Clarion.

>   Thirty men down at a time in the cages. Men only. Stacked tram-rails, steel roofing-rings, lagging timber, track sleepers heaped around the pit-head. Local workmen’s buses pitched on Harding’s Square. Two old steam locos shunting up and down the siding. Green Waunwen stretching steeply, bulking north and west. All that week I watched the day shift rising and the afternoon shift going down. Two-way streams of men from the pit-shaft to the baths.

  On Friday afternoon Charlie Page came straight downhill from Waun Level, his face weather dried, faunishly reticent.

  “Bit of foresight and they could’a saved Thelma Street,” he said. “That water comin’ out from the old Waun, see, Rees?”

  “It was trenched to run into Nant Melyn,” I said.

  “When? I’ll tell you when. The time Gibby built Thelma Street. That’s when. Only they filled the ditch with muck when they extended the aerials.”

  I said, “Aye, true enough. The stupid bastards.”

  “Rees, who was area manager in nineteen-forty-nine?”

  “No idea, Charlie. I was still in school.”

  “He’s the one who extended the aerials. So long, see you around, boy.”

  He skirted Caib top pit, a neat, leathery little man, lean growing, his gait rather flat-footed, the pad-pad of a long-distance rover. Pneumo caking fifty per cent of his lungs.

  The last afternoon shift bon went down. I saw a lad standing on a wheel-less tram, another lad kneeling up on his shoulders. Sparrows’ nests, I thought, under the caves of the old stables. The ex-wrestler colliery watchman shouted at them from the lamproom doorway. They ignored him until he began walking, then they ran around the long, derelict building. He returned to the lamproom.

  It was clouding over, gusts bringing the grinding clank of Rollo’s tip-washing plant way up the river gulley side of Waunwen. Rollo & Sons; they blackened Daren river every time it rained, their silt beds flooding over. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow at five o’clock, I hope — my own pale Ellen an idle stage prop, expediently off-stage as I headed for home.

  The watchman came out. “Hey, mate, you’re trespassing. Gerroff the colliery premises.”

  I said, “Shwmae, butty. I’m Joseph Gibby’s grandson. Who are you?”

  “Take no notice, Rees,” — the lamproom man sniggering like a prisoner released from solitary. Traditional cripple as in every pit-head lamproom, he said, “How’s it going with you these days, Rees?”

  “Not too bad, Erfyl. I’m not wetting all over the place any more.”

  “Compo run out yet?”

  “Christ, aye; we blew the lump sum on our house. Now I’m on twenty-five per cent disability.”

  “Same as me, Rees. Factory job in Lower Daren would suit you, boy.”

  “I’d have to change my sex first. Dabbo [Da bo’ chi], Erfyl.”

  “Cheerio, mate,” said the watchman.

  I agreed, “All the best, butty” — thinking, all the best, Emily, all, for us tomorrow afternoon.

  She insisted mildly, “Impossible in the house, no, no, I’ll follow you later, soon, please hurry.”

  We walked deep into the woods, dampness subsiding, smudging floppy scurryings in the upper foliage.

  “Might it thunder?” she asked.

  “We’ll be struck dead by forked lightning, lovers burnt to a single cinder in the very act.”

  “Shh, Rees, no.”

  Emily’s noes were the yesses of her docile heart, herself a lax, warm pasture of femality, and I had no touchstone, no measure, nothing to rouse, upraise, bear passion. Gentle Emily. Gentle Rees. Gently with myself, exposed Rees, like an outcast accomplishing breathing though scourged throughout his nerves. Scrupulously persistent, careful. Bearable. The hewn tender way of slaves honoured to eliminate any pain. Thrill purified, marrow-spitting thrill projected as goodwill, a sooth service because every alternative carried suffering. Our quiet riot, my own pale, humbly defenceless riot, and by the Jesus God I felt grateful, gentle Emily Thorpe’s quaintness flowering wondrous, becalming the arrogance of triumph.

  Man again, I thought, man alive. I’ve conquered the senseless host rattling my lifeline-dauntless Ellen still blurred, off-stage, a contingency, a past happening.

  Like ordinary lovers we were seated on my raincoat, mutually affectionate, Emily sharing a punnet of strawberries from her garden.

  “Ah-well, dear, feeling better now?”

  Necessary as faith, as breath, I said, “This has been the trouble between Ellen and myself.”

  “I’m sure, Rees, yes, surely. Do you know, for a while I believed you were George. Mr Thorpe was much the same at first.” Her large blue eyes blazed incongruously ferocious; “But once is enough, understand? I’m afraid of scandal. I’m terribly afraid. It wouldn’t be fair to George and Ellen. I think it’s shameful, really I do. We mustn’t get involved any more.”

  “You’re a good woman, Emily.”

  “I’m weak, awfully weak. My husband, I dread to think, I mean…”

  “You and I, we’re two of a kind,” I said, mountain fog lowering down, chilling the skin-prickling summer drizzle. Blanching browns and greens, the white fog filed in between the trees, enforcing primeval stillness, throttling coil pressed upon cold coil, driving life from the woods. The warm drizzle stopped, quenched by the fog.

  “Really speaking, no harm’s been done so far,” she said, worriedly crushing the empty punnet in her lap. Levering off one elbow, she funnelled her arm through a jungle of cow-parsley stalks, brought me a sudden, glorious close-up smile, and thrust the punnet away out of sight. “Time for us to go, Rees.”

  The following Saturday afternoon I watched George Thorpe playing bowls on the rink near his bungalow. Before the teams changed ends, I met Emily in her garden shed.

  This time panic helped, Emily’s inevasive urge to get the business over and done with, the shed window slatting a flat, glass-waxy apron of sunlight across her thrown-back throat. I felt impulsive as a street dog, without his limited, wise aggression. The hit and run, slash and snarl and whirling scamper of a street dog, Emily finally composed, marginally distressed, clutching, hitching at her clothes, her olive tawny legs nimbly co-ordinated as she slewed down off the work-bench.

  “There, now you don’t have to come again,” — patting her ovoid tummy, utter blandishment dousing the panic. “You’re all right now, dear, aren’t you?”

  Too much of a canine, lacking his scruff-necked resilience, his guaranteed guts for survival. My hackles were gossamer shreds and the pit of my stomach moaned leaden. I felt I couldn’t walk out through the shed door, meet Saturday afternoon. I felt scragged, Venus diseased, the old numbness returned, ego threatened by rigor, icicled spine swording through to my crying brain-pan. Brain mixture crying down upon castaway flesh and bones clotted around by sludge.

  Impotency leaves potent hurt inside the corpus.

  She whispered a frightened politeness, sidling out through the door, skimming straight-kneed along the gravel path to the bungalow.

  A small collapse of shards clinked in the glass-smashing barrel.

  Smoke I thought. Take it easy. Roll one of your A.1 burners. She can’t do any more for you now. Emily’s good, she’s been good to you. Aye, Rees, you’ve brought this on yourself. Take five. Greedy waster, count your blessings. Once in twelve bankrupt months, then second time you dive at it like a bloody Guy Fawkes with a dose of uncivilized napalm inside his trousers. Some Cerne Abbas fertility giant you are, mate. Guh, matey. Hey, you’re a Daren ha-penny sparklight. One of the NCB’s forsaken Foreskin Fusiliers. Ex-thigh rider from the Caib. Take it steady, Rees. As you were. All right now. Coming along nicely. Carry on, boyo. You’re a bloody pantaloon. Aye, one of them. Old John Vaughan, old Shon moaner, he didn’t have a donkey’s laugh in him.

  I day-dreamed about Ellen. Her and our two girl kiddies. Two little Stevens’s squabs. Ellen had it all planned out for Monday morning. Mrs Cynon would collect the nippers at eight-thirty. She’d take and bring Lydia home from school. A
ll I had to do was cook the dinner by half-past five, when Ellen came from the factory. Lovely Ellen, my Winchester beaut come home to Daren, dragged home by her old man.

  “Here,” panted Emily. “You look dreadful,” — peering closer, head shaking, whiffling the matching downfalls of her thick brown hair. “Has it passed over? Back to normal now, Rees? You really did look awful. Here, drop of Mr Thorpe’s Sanatogen wine. He drinks it when he feels off-colour, mostly during the winter. Exercise, I tell him, take more exercise.”

  I nagged stupidly. “You’re a good woman, Emily. Shall we make — ah, break some more glass next Saturday? They’re playing away next week-end.”

  “Go on home,” she said. “Rees, you must go. It’s bad, bad. I feel disgusted.”

  Saturdays my only living prospect, Emily Thorpe Saturdays: “Next Saturday, please?” — hoping to mend myself, thoroughly mend, uniquely as before, cherishable, ready for Ellen, but not even confronting the real Ellen, only stranded Rees between her breasts.

  She reached into the barrel for the small ball hammer. “I shan’t be your weekend habit! Go home, off home!” — hammering the bench, a frantic tantrum. “I’ll tell your wife about you, so there!”

  “I’m sorry, Emily, I’m sorry.”

  “Good-bye, Rees,” — whimpers trembling her girl’s mouth. “I don’t like it very much. You men never realize, never, never. Go to Ellen; she’s your wife.”

  Down to the blighted pith again, stuttering, offering for the last time. “You’re a guh-ood woman, Emily, good… good woman. Suh-so long then, love.”

  “It is best,” she said.

  The bowls players, ingrained champions one and all, were coming away from the changing-room, and out in front of the institute. Llew Hopkins leaned over the low, iron-spiked fence, snapped off a yellow carnation and skewered it in his button-hole.