by Heide Goody
Clovenhoof loaned Ben his hunting knife and watched the young fellow attempt to whittle the lump of scrap wood into a lovespoon for his girlfriend. It was certainly a welcome distraction from the monotony of the journey. A man with more hobbies than pants, whose misspent youth was spent making scale models of ancient battlefields, Ben was a natural craftsman and worked the blade more skilfully than Clovenhoof ever could. However, Ben’s tools and material were imperfect and, as he showered the back seat with woodchip and shavings, there was the occasional slip of the knife and delightful squeal of pain.
In the driving seat, Nerys kept up a constant narration, indicating ‘points of interest’ along the route. Here was Llyn Trawsfynydd with its defunct power station. Over there was Portmeirion which was supposedly very pretty and some weird sixties TV programme had been filmed there. They almost saw a steam train at Porthmadog, but only the steam was visible over a high wall.
Dressed in his spiffingly patriotic T-shirt and baseball cap, Clovenhoof tried to muster some enthusiasm for what he saw but it was difficult. As a former Prince of Hell, Clovenhoof had a fine grasp of all the tongues of men, so even the Welsh place names and road signs that amused Ben so much did little for him.
Maybe he was just too used to Birmingham, with its crowded streets and constant noise. He had not left the place in over a year, apart from their camping weekend before Christmas and even that had seemed like a mere dip into the quiet country. This countryside here, Wales, it was so…
"Where are all the people?" said Michael, echoing his thoughts. "It’s as though Wales has shut up early for the day and gone home."
"That’s Wales," agreed Nerys. "It’s charms are sometimes hard to see. But, you know, there’s a lot to like about my home town, Aberdaron."
"Oh, yes?" said Michael.
"Mmmm." Nerys thought for a while. "There’s, um, Y Gegin Fawr."
"The Big Kitchen?" said Clovenhoof.
"Yes. I didn’t know you spoke Welsh, Jeremy," she said, surprised.
"Lucky guess."
"Y Gegin Fawr was built in the thirteen hundreds. It’s a tea shop now. It was where the pilgrims used to stop for a meal before the crossing."
"Pilgrims?" said Michael.
"To Bardsey. The Island of Twenty Thousand Saints. It’s just off the tip of the peninsula. There’s a monastery. The church used to say that three pilgrimages to Bardsey was as worthy as one pilgrimage to Rome."
"Three Bardseys equals one Rome," mused Clovenhoof. "Interesting exchange rate. What do these pilgrimages get you, eh?"
"Salvation," said Michael. "Forgiveness." He suddenly sat up straight. "Pilgrims can seek forgiveness," he said, clearly intrigued by the idea.
Clovenhoof punched the back of Michael’s seat.
"It’s going to take more than a day-trip to a damp Welsh rock for you to be forgiven, Michael."
"God moves in mysterious ways."
"Shifty, you mean."
Nerys reached over and patted Michael’s shoulder.
"My lovely fake boyfriend doesn’t need forgiveness. He’s perfect."
"A perfect arse," muttered Clovenhoof.
"Ow," squealed Ben as the hunting knife made a nick in his thumb. Clovenhoof wished he had a camera in case Ben accidentally slit open an artery.
Ben had been intent on his whittling but, even so, Aberdaron appeared to be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of place. It was mid-afternoon and the winter skies were already darkening. The lanes were narrow and high-banked with prickly gorse. Ben wondered what happened when you met another car but, remarkably, they didn’t. Beyond the town, Nerys turned from a small winding road, onto an even smaller and more winding road and into the driveway of a large detached house.
"Okay," said Nerys, taking a nervous breath. "This is it. Everyone on their best behaviour. Remember, Michael is my boyfriend and we’re very much in love. Michael, just smile and nod. Ben, behave yourself. Don’t do anything geeky and weird." She glanced in the rear view mirror. "Why aren’t you wearing that lovely shirt I bought you for Christmas?"
"It’s in the packing somewhere," lied Ben.
"I’ve no idea what my sister sees in you but if you’re going to screw it up and get dumped, save it until we’ve gone home. And Jeremy."
"Yes," said Jeremy.
"Why did we bring you? I forget."
Clovenhoof scratched his chin in thought.
"You said I couldn’t be trusted to be alone in the flats while you were away."
"Oh, that’s right."
"I am a grown man. It’s not like I’m going to set fire to the place. Again. I mean, a third time."
Nerys pulled up outside the front of the house.
"You. I’d be more worried that you’d try to sell my underwear to Japanese businessmen or sub-let my flat to a suicide cult. Right, best smiles, gang."
They got out. Ben, brushed the wood shavings from his lap, sucked at the most recent of his fingertip injuries and regarded his workmanship. His lovespoon, his gift for his beloved was far from finished, but he was pleasantly surprised to see how spoon-like it was. It still needed some work and, for want of a better place, tucked it into the waistband of his trousers.
The Thomas house was a sprawling thing. The original house appeared to have been a fairly square farmhouse structure but had since been buried beneath extensions, a porch, a brick-built garage, a conservatory and the surface addition of white uPVC double-glazing, skylights and fascia boards.
The front door opened as they approached.
"Give me that," hissed Nerys and snatched two bags from Ben, filling her arms.
The woman in the doorway, gave them an appraising look. Ben attempted a smile as he approached but it crumbled under her gaze.
He had not met Nerys’s mom before but the family resemblance was clear. In a not unkindly way, Ben had always regarded Nerys as striking rather than beautiful. Nerys’s mother was not merely striking but downright stunning, at least for a woman of her age. Her nose was longer, sharper, her eyes more piercing, her arched brows more expressive. In fact, he concluded, she was just like Nerys, only sort of… stretched. Taller, slimmer and less curvaceous than her daughter, Mrs Thomas looked like Nerys after a lengthy session on the rack.
No wonder Nerys did everything she could to show off her cleavage. At least that was one thing she had that her mom didn’t.
"Having a bad shoe day, dear?" said Mrs Thomas, looking at Nerys’s pumps.
"These are for driving," said Nerys.
"Of course, dear."
Mrs Thomas made to kiss Nerys but Nerys’s bags got in the way. The older woman had to make do with kissing air. She looked her daughter up and down once more.
"Nice to see someone isn’t afraid of indulging too much over the festive season."
"Are you saying I’ve got a fat bum?" said Nerys.
"I hadn’t even noticed that," she said and made a point of looking.
She then looked at the three men loitering behind Nerys. Ben felt her penetrating gaze on him once more.
"Hmm, and you would be Ben?" she said, pointing a manicured finger at Michael.
"Er, no," said Michael, with a self-deprecating smile.
"Oh," said Mrs Thomas, clearly disappointed. "You then?" she said, pointing at Ben.
"That’s me," said Ben, not sure if he should be insulted at being her second choice or relieved at not being her third.
"Interesting," said Mrs Thomas thoughtfully and Ben didn’t care to imagine what that meant.
"I’m Michael," said Michael.
"My boyfriend," said Nerys and leaned heavily against him.
Mrs Thomas smiled, like a vet about to put down a kitten.
"Punching above your weight again, dear?" she said and gave Michael an openly saucy look.
"Michael is lucky to have a woman like me," Nerys retorted.
"Absolutely," said Michael emphatically and unconvincingly. "I can’t believe my luck sometimes."
"So who’s this?"
said Mrs Thomas, peering down her nose at Clovenhoof. "Are you Ben’s dad?"
Ben laughed.
"No, this is our… friend, Jeremy."
Clovenhoof stepped forward and placed an enthusiastic continental kiss on Mrs Thomas’s cheeks.
"Tasty. No, Mrs Thomas, I am their friend and neighbour. I suppose, to young Ben and Nerys, I’m like the father they never had."
"Nerys has a father," said Mrs Thomas sharply.
"So do I," chipped in Ben.
"Yes, but you’ve never had one like me," said Clovenhoof.
"Ben!"
Ben almost leapt at his squealed name. Jayne pushed past her mother, clasped his arms and grinned at him, teeth bright in the grey afternoon.
"You’re here," she said.
Ben shrugged.
"Astonishing, isn’t it?"
"Considering the way Nerys drives," said Clovenhoof but Jayne wasn’t listening.
She tugged at Ben’s hand and pulled him into the house, leaving Mrs Thomas tutting on the doorstep.
It appeared that the interior of the Thomas house had been decorated to replicate the pictures in a furniture store catalogue: colour co-ordinated furnishings and tasteful but meaningless ornaments perfectly arranged in spotlessly clean rooms.
But Jayne did not give Ben a chance to pause and nor did he care. She dragged him through the open plan lounge, along a short hallway and into a large hexagonal conservatory before physically spinning him round and planting a kiss on his lips that almost pulled out his fillings.
"You missed me, huh?" he gasped when Jayne was done.
"You know what they say about absence," she replied. "I get to spend a scant few weeks in Birmingham, with you, and then I have to return to this."
Ben looked about himself, at the fine wicker furniture in the conservatory, at the well-tended pot plants, at the sweeping lawn beyond the window.
"Oh, this definitely looks like Hell," he said. "Hey, that’s the sea."
"Very observant."
The back garden sloped downwards, between low hedges, past a large shed and greenhouse and then fell away to reveal the Irish Sea and, some miles off, a long hump-backed island.
"What’s that place?" he asked.
"Bardsey Island. There’s a big bird sanctuary there."
"That’s some view," he said. "Dramatic."
"Lydia likes to stand at the end of the garden like some doomed gothic heroine about to throw herself to her death. But only when she knows someone’s watching. I’m sure you’ll meet her soon enough."
Ben shook his head.
"There’s only one Thomas girl I’m interested in."
Jayne groaned.
"That is so corny."
Ben felt a quiver of inferiority and embarrassment take the colour from his face.
"But very sweet," said Jayne and kissed him again.
This time the kiss was less like an attack from an industrial hoover and Ben was able to respond without the fear of his kidneys being sucked out.
Jayne paused without breaking contact.
"What is that thing poking into me?" she said.
"Oh, it’s my lovespoon," said Ben.
Her lips smiled against his.
"Whatever."
Michael stood in the living room with Clovenhoof and Nerys while Mrs Thomas went to the kitchen to prepare what she had described as a ‘light supper’. In his stomach he felt one of those nameless emotions that he had never suffered as one of the angelic host. He didn’t want to stay standing up because he felt he was in the way, too obvious. He didn’t want to sit down either because that would suggest a sense of comfortableness that he simply didn’t feel.
Mrs Thomas’s gaze (and hands) had lingered on him too long as she greeted him at the door. The woman had the eyes of a raptor and less feminine modesty than her daughter who, even now when her mother was in a completely different room, clung to him like a lovesick teenager. He knew it was all an act on Nerys’s part but did she have to make it so… immersive?
He couldn’t now remember why he agreed to come with her to Wales, into this well-furnished Venus flytrap. He could just close his eyes and imagine himself somewhere else: back home, lounging on the sofa and watching trash TV with Andy, or down at the gym, doing reps on the weights with Andy, or up at the Moo Moo Club, throwing some dance floor moves. With Andy.
"Take a look at this," said Nerys, wheeling him round to face the fireplace and the mass of photos arrange on the mantelpiece and the wall above it.
"Very nice," said Michael automatically.
"No, take a look," said Nerys firmly.
Michael sighed internally and regarded the photographs. The largest was a wedding picture of a stubbly jug-eared man with a woman who looked superficially like Nerys, assuming Nerys had been subjected to expensive quantities of fake tan, cosmetic surgery and eyebrow plucking. Michael surmised that this was Catherine with her footballer husband. Arranged around that were smaller images, of the Thomas sisters or Mrs Thomas herself. Many were from a decade or more ago: prize-giving ceremonies, a gymnastics event, school presentations and holiday snaps. There were other family members in certain shots and the occasional family pet. It took Michael a while to find Nerys and then saw her university graduation photo in a small oval frame next to a modest-sized picture of Mrs Thomas and Nerys’s Aunt Molly that must have been twenty years old or more.
"Yes, very nice," said Michael.
"You’re not seeing it, are you?" said Nerys.
"That’s because he’s a doofus," said Clovenhoof, who was experimentally sniffing a houseplant he had picked up.
"Really?" said Michael. "What have I missed?"
"It’s a graph," said Clovenhoof.
"My mother’s love-o-meter," said Nerys coldly. "The bigger the picture, the higher up, the more she loves you."
"I’m sure that’s not true," said Michael generously. "And it’s not as if you’re the lowest or the smallest. Look there’s one of…" He peered closer. "…Twinkle."
"Great! I’m one rung higher on the ladder than someone else’s – oh, crap!"
She dropped Michael’s arm and dashed from the room. Michael frowned at Clovenhoof.
"She’s left the dog in the car," said Clovenhoof, nibbled at the houseplant and immediately spat it out.
"Why are you eating a plant?" said a young woman, entering the room.
"Wondered what it tastes like," said Clovenhoof.
"I should imagine it tastes like shit," she replied.
"I don’t know. What does shit taste like?"
The woman wore a sweeping evening gown that, to Michael, seemed wholly incongruous in the domestic setting.
"You’d be Lydia," he said, making an educated guess. "The youngest of the Thomas sisters."
"And the prettiest," she said matter-of-factly.
"I’m Michael," he said and shook her hand.
"Very nice," she said and then looked at Clovenhoof.
"What are you meant to be?"
Clovenhoof considered himself.
"I’m meant to be the Morning Star, the most exalted of all of His creations but, hey, best laid plans of gods and men…"
To Michael’s relief and amusement, Lydia stared at Clovenhoof as though he was some disgusting and impossible thing on the bottom of her shoe.
"And that’s a really tasteful T-shirt and baseball combo you’re wearing there," she said with dripping sarcasm.
"I know," said Clovenhoof happily. "Just blending in. I’m like a ninja of the valleys, hyfryd."
Lydia’s expression of disdain deepened in a way that Michael hadn’t considered physically possible and the woman was about to say something further when Nerys walked in, a wire dog carrier in her hands.
"Where’s Ben?" she said.
On a square cushion in the bottom of the carrier, Twinkle lay snoozing, oblivious to the fact that he was buried under a fine layer of wood shavings.
Nerys’s mother’s ‘light supper’ turned out to be a mo
nstrous buffet of pastry parcels, things on skewers and tiny piles of unidentifiable things on circles of bread. The seven of them sat either side of the long table in the dining room and watched each other carefully.
Nerys found the scene strangely familiar, no different to those times in her childhood when she had brought friends home for tea. Sure, more than a decade had passed since her school days but the Thomas family hadn’t changed. Lydia was twenty-five, going on fifteen. Jayne was still the spineless goody-two-shoes of the family. And Nerys herself, under her mother’s wilting gaze, felt very much the child again. With Ben, Michael and Jeremy as her visiting chums, it was just a case of waiting to see what happened first; whether her friends did something to trip up and incur her mother’s wrath or her mom embarrassed her by saying something pompously stupid, arrogant and parochial.
Clovenhoof was, of course, the number one candidate for screwing things up. She made sure he sat at her side and she poked him with a fork every time it appeared he was going to do something. He scowled at her, hissed that he was behaving and tucked the edge of the tablecloth into his collar as a napkin. Nerys rolled her eyes. At least it covered up the hideous red dragon T-shirt he wore.
It appeared Clovenhoof had done something to annoy Lydia who sat directly across from him, staring at him furiously. Lydia sat with her hands under the table, occasionally fiddling with something. Was she texting under the table?
"I don’t see why you still keep that thing?" said her mother, gesturing at Twinkle as he sniffed his way along the skirting board of the room.
"Because he’s lovely," said Nerys.
"I mean, I understand why you would tolerate him while Molly was still with us but you can drop the act now."
"He’s good company," said Nerys, ignoring Ben’s frankly disbelieving stare. "And, yes, he reminds me of Aunt Molly."
"You could have him stuffed," her mother suggested.
"Stuffed?"
Twinkle looked up. Nerys’s mother’s eyes sparkled.
"Got it. Have him made into a stole."
"What?"
"Or a nice fur wrap. Then there’d be a practical use for him and he’d be a lovely reminder of Molly."
Nerys nibbled for a moment on a cheese and asparagus blini.
"I’m not having him stuffed," she said.