by Dai Smith
He sat there in the car looking out to his right where the graveyard fell away to the backyard walls of a row of terraced houses. There the graves were as old as the church itself, ornate Victorian angels, doves and floral crosses in stone for the comfortably pious dead. Most of the statues and markers had inclined with soil movement and the wind away from the true upright and the previous hot summer’s drought had brought the grass up as high as the grandest angel’s wings. They’d begun burning the stuff and it looked like stubble in a fired harvest field, as if Christ had come in blazing judgement and half done the job. Rain began to pattern the side window and he contorted himself behind the wheel to pull on a weather proof anorak over his jacket.
The driving seat and facia took a shower of water as he got out of the car. Without wasting time over fumbling with the keys he walked quickly for the shelter of the church, hands in the zippered pouch of the anorak, slamming the car door behind him with one foot. He stood there for a moment, shoulders bunching up and drawing his head down from the rain. There was no break in the downpour so he made his way around to the rear of the church, holding as close to the wall as he could. The blackened mass where they’d fired the long grass stopped short of the path and the plots at the rear of the church were still overgrown. There was the tap, its water pipe loosened and bending away from the green lichen of the wall. The niche smelt of decay, the previous weekend’s pile of dead flowers blackening in a wire bin alongside the top.
His grandfather’s grave was close surely; forward to his left and a matter of feet from the tap. But the sodden, matted grass seemed to blanket out all the graves’ edgings and chippings. Only the grander headstones had any permanency; it seemed from the path that the earth had drawn into itself all trace of those whose relatives could not afford the hackneyed art of the monumental mason.
Jane Thomas 1862 18 years
Calm on the bosom of thy God, Fair spirit rest thee now
Ever while thy footsteps trod, His seal was on thy brow
and
Severed whilst in bloom
The rain stopped and the fir tree’s soughing died with the wind. Glyn moved under the deep green of its lower branches and put his hand out to the trunk. The bark was hard and full like an exotic cork cut into vertical channels. He was aware of the town’s traffic noise building up to the later afternoon.
This church is like a bad film set, he thought. The tree is wrong, it’s not Wales, more a Japanese ceramic, though the houses surrounding the place are tight and comfortable in the way they hem in the graveyard. He remembered last summer’s holiday on the Lleyn and visiting Aberdaron. R. S. Thomas’ church, older than this one by centuries; small and simple, banked up from the sea and dominating the village’s cottages and narrow, winding road. Linking by death the hills and the waves.
Here at this moment there are two points of focus; as surely as the traffic and the land’s produce are drawn in towards the mart and market, so the neat townspeople who have built the town around that trade, are always moving in towards the graves at the end of their gardens and yards.
Two other churches: at Enbourne in Berkshire, a Norman squatness that had sunk lower into the earth over the centuries of its life, holding the dead generations of Reeves who had led to Ralph and John and Glyn’s father and himself.
And the village church in Pembrokeshire which rose above Jobstone Farm, directly across the road from the farm’s yard, that held the Barrah family and the Coles and Williamses and Vaughans who all formed Catherine and Rosie and the sisters and Matthew who’d taken a ship across the North Atlantic and disappeared in Canada.
The Church of England, the Church in Wales, the bell-ringing, the vestments and litany, the railway joining the two and letting the blood bypass the centuries of Welsh-speaking Wales, leaving him with a tongue outside the language yet stirred by the sense of being Welsh, of belonging here and nowhere else and wanting to understand his place, how Caer and west Wales had made him feel that way. A hybrid needing to draw diagrams of the twisted and confused roots that fed his life. He walked forward into the longer grass, feeling with his feet for the rise of graves, the hard edge of a stone kerb. There were two he located at the end of a row that must have extended beyond the tree. The first held James Davies and his wife Martha –1938 and 1945 – Cofio Rest Eternal on a black marble book laid open with ridged pages frozen at the place. Next to it the rectangle he could trace under the matted grass with his foot.
There were the beginnings of brambles curling through the grass and he scratched his hands in pulling back the thick covering. The vase had slumped to its side into the dulled gravel and it shocked him to find the decay of remembrance so complete. How many years was it since Gran had tidied the grave of the man who was her husband? When had the Sunday ritual become redundant? Glyn could not remember her ever going to church or chapel. His memory of her refused to conform to the hat, gloves and Sunday best of the proud, little women shuffling their way to heaven past their house and the green flecked gate he’d swung upon.
You learned to cope with death by developing a numbness, was that it? What am I doing here? he thought.
With loving memory of Dad
from Mam and the boys
What sense am I trying to make of all this, when Gran herself is lying in a bed two miles from here?
Why here? Why didn’t I drive straight over to her? What sort of concern was that? Are the dead and our memories to hold sway over the living, the daily dying of ourselves?
Glyn picked up one of the grave’s loose chippings. Trying his hand against its sharpened end, he threw it towards the fir tree and he walked back to the car. Here was the unifying image that could bring the generations to a point: this churchyard, the grave and its rain-polished chippings, this town with its pubs and chapels, and tired cinemas; this place, shaping all their lives like a funnel down which he fell. The novel he would start seeded and swelled like propagation in a speeded-up film as he joined the traffic and drove across town to the hospital.
A SORT OF HOMECOMING
Tristan Hughes
It flashes into view, hard and clear like waking, after the winding, cocooning green of the bends. The point is called Gallows. Masts are packed in the air over beached boats, a confusion of crosses, clicking, tinkling, whirring in the breeze; mad clockwork sounds that measure a chaos of time that runs not just forwards but backwards and sideways too. Crosswinds. Ropes hang everywhere, rocking like nooses. From the point (of no return, he can’t go back now, can’t run from this or here) the sea wall curves gently inwards while opposite, across the straits, the mountains bulge outwards into the horizon and are reflected down into the sea as though the whole scene is made out of mirrors. Seagulls swoop in distorted space towards the summits of the mountains in the sea. On the other side of the little bay the shore is a bright phalanx of colour where a Georgian terrace laps the water, painted pink and yellow and green; candy houses with marzipan walls and icing roofs, like those gaudy, confectionery cottages in fairy tale woods that lost and orphan children look hungrily towards.
‘There’s a message for you Robert, I think its kind of urgent.’ His boss retreats instantly, the onerous task performed, meandering past computers and their cables that sprawl, disemboweled, across the floor. Robert Llewelyn looks down towards his screen: ‘In De-Scribing The Savage, Professor Larkin, one of America’s finest critics, offers both a brilliant analysis of the colonial discourse on savagery and a major contribution to postcolonial theory. Concentrating on the textual representation of encounter Larkin unravels the…’ He feels himself unraveling, as he has felt for years now, stretched and dislocated as though all the hyphens he has had to rescribe in these fucking blurbs has hyphenated him. Yes, I’m Ro-bert, very good to meet you. They always give him this stuff to do. Ato, who works in the same office, is half Nigerian but they think it might be too obvious if they handed it to him, stereotyping: give the black guy the colonial material, he’s sure to be interested. They
’re still a bit guilty for it all, he sees – sorry about our empire fucking up your country, we feel terrible about it, we know better now. But as for a Llewelyn, well that happened seven hundred years ago, who even remembers, lots of time to get over it. Only a name, not even a skin, to remind them of ancient borders overthrown. To remind himself. They like it at dinner parties, it’s a good conversation starter: ‘Llewelyn, that’s Welsh isn’t it…You are…Where from…Can you pronounce that place with the really long name?’ A hint of ethnicity, very fashionable in London now. Savage, from the French souvage, a dweller in woods and forests; wild, uncultivated. When he first arrived he didn’t know how to use the underground or what wine to buy or where exactly Soho was. Everyone was surprised he wasn’t even more of a hick. Barbarian, from the Greek barbaros, to babble, meaning those who do not speek Greek. ‘Llanfair-pwll-gwyngych…’, low murmurings of amusement ripple into the room as the impacted double ls and rasped chs dance through the air like performers in a circus.
There is a small memo pad in the corner of the room with one line scrawled upon it. Nobody is around, they have left him alone with this. He reads it slowly, trying to make it last: ‘Robert, can you phone home immediately – your father has passed away.’ It is the full stop he notices most, thinking how he has never really felt a full stop before. They have helped him catch his breath but they have never taken his breath away. A life drifts around him in the room, his own, his fathers’, pieced together with a less harsh punctuation, a dash here and there, the odd semicolon, a mix of exclamation and question marks; clauses that seem to run on forever and forever… And then this little dot stares up at him, prohibiting extension, whispering that syntax isn’t going to help him here, that grammar is full of what is lost and irredeemable. It is a cruel sentence to be handed. It is.
Outside on the street the letters on the signs seem to have lost their coherence, their fixity, and returned to some primordial condition where they are just strange shapes stuck together. The alphabet has exploded and lies strewn in charred fragments all around. Everything is unraveling now and beneath it all is death. What did they expect? What did he expect?
Past the candy houses and around the corner and he has arrived. Castle Street is bustling beneath drooping banners that proclaim some town festival, looking exhausted with the burden of civic happiness they bear. A torn poster on the window of Edith’s Newsagents announces that there will be a Lithuanian jazz quartet playing at the Bulkley Hotel on Thursday, followed by Misty Twilight, ‘a world-renowned’ four-piece Celtic rock band. Looking down the sidewalk Robert wonders if this might all be too much for the slow-bobbing blue rinses that hover everywhere on the verge of the road, perched, as if on the very edge of eternity, while they wait for the traffic to recede so they may cross over to the Castle bakery and buy ‘authentic Welsh raisin bread’. They come all year, shipped along in gleaming metallic tubes – Fringe Express, World’s End Motors, Dragon Coaches – sealed off from the attritional, scouring rains and winds that arrive interminably from the Irish Sea; they have little left, more to preserve. Pensioners from everywhere, mostly women – the men die earlier – come to look at the castle as though it offered some vision of corresponding decay, of crumbling, rock-strewn endurance. He had grown up pushing impatiently between them and, returning, notices a faint aroma in the place that he has forgotten, an invisible patina that floats like scum upon the air, the scent of composty earth and slithery autumn leaves; a detritus of perished cells – the smell they have left over. Twilight: everywhere it is misting through their eyes, the light failing, falling, beneath it is… He is home.
Robert has not been back for years. Not since he began to feel his life spinning out of the orbit he had imagined it following, become sidetracked in an unmapped constellation that he knows now is failure, where the starlight shines at different angles as though viewed from some other hemisphere. This readjustment in space has made him shifty, furtive, a guilty interloper in the place where his dreams had formed. Coming back he feels a traitor, a betrayer of some earlier self that had formed out of this small island world a promise of undefinable vastness – of tundras, steppes, prairies – that would pulse and tremble behind the hedgerows and fields and houses and sky. That prior self and the quivering landscape that surrounds it will not leave him now, even in London, they are like an albatross hanging upon him, a hanging judge. What he has been and what he is are two places, two countries; borders that will not be broken. Outside Evans’ Funeral Parlour he sees John and Bev Roberts and ducks away down Church Street to avoid meeting them. It’s a reflex action, the traitor’s instinct: avoid eye contact, speaking, explanation, they might see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice. He knew their daughter Tracy in school, they were friends, lovers too he remembers now. Why are they here? Her grandmother, he thinks, looking back a decade to a liver-coloured old woman who lurked in a house, upstairs, an inconvenience to them both. He waits for them to walk past and prepares to see his father.
Mr Evans, tender of the town’s dead, meets him at the front of the parlour. Inside it is slatey-cool, refrigerated by a cold stone through which the spring sun cannot obtrude. ‘This must be a terrible time for you Robert, coming out of the blue like that. Nobody could have expected it.’ Evans speaks with professional graveness, the voice gently assuaging an unspoken indictment: he died alone, he died without you here, why didn’t you visit all these years? His father had nobody else, no other family in a family country. Robert’s mother had died in childbirth and become an invisible woman who lived in the melancholy glinting of his father’s eye. There were no aunties and uncles and cousins. They came from meager stock his people, barrens; producing even him had been too much, a fatal taxing of their paltry fertility. He thinks of this often during sex, imagines the deficient rush of his briny sperm as though it were some dead sea tributary trickling by in sterile, salty streams, not coming but departing. ‘You must have made good time to get back so quickly,’ says Evans, making small talk as they walk towards the room where the body is stored, the pronunciation careful, camouflaging the other language that lies behind it, the other accusations: why did you leave us, why did you forget what was yours? Evans knows that Robert has lost much of his father’s first tongue. Does it matter now? he thinks. Surely the dead cannot speak any language. There can be no bilingualism to link those in the grave with the living. Alone with his father, in a cold room full of slightly chemical smells that remind him of dissecting frogs in school, Robert is shocked by the silence. In his memory there is noise everywhere: the crackling, spluttering sounds of fat boiling in his dad’s chippy (what will he do with it now); the drunken, exaggerated loudness of the lads jostling around the counter on Saturdays; the gruff hwyl of farmers come by for a midweek treat of oozing, oily sglodions; the droning of an old radio set amongst plastic bottles of sauce and vinegar. His father is at the centre of all this noise, sharp-eyed and watchful, thick eyebrows arching over gleaming metallic edges that frame glass cases in which lie crusted slabs of fish, shriveled lengths of sausage, flaking pies. He is waiting in that noise, always waiting, for what Robert could never guess. Maybe for his wife to return, to materialise out of the frying, fat-sparkling air, her bones once more coated in a batter of pink, living flesh. Or maybe he had simply been waiting for the noise to stop. He had been a farmer’s boy and never forgot the corner of land his father had sold to buy the shop, the quiet fields he had worked as a child with only the rushing wind around him. He had been most cheerful on those Saturday afternoons when the farmers came to sell him potatoes, arriving in rickety vans and unloading coarse, bulging brown bags that smelt of fresh earth, moist and fecund. They would stand together at the back door, speaking raucously in Welsh, elated by the small harvest that sat on the pavement. Afterwards his father would linger by the open sacks, inhaling the scent of clinging dirt like it was a perfumed emissary from paradise. They were his link with the patch of ground where he had been happiest, where his wife had not died, where his
son would not leave.
The skin on his father’s face looks waxed and pallid as though covered by a layer of cold, congealed grease, and Robert half expects to catch the familiar aroma of stale chip fat drifting towards him. But there is nothing, there is not even the grief he felt welling within him when he first read the note. His father died then, this body is no confirmation, no accentuation of that moment; death cannot be extended, even by a body, its leftovers. The features are almost the same as when he left: the high cheekbones, the drooping nose, the little heart of a mouth. He has aged well. Only the slackness of the skin along the jaw and the extra layer of collapsed flesh beneath the chin acknowledge the intervening years, but perhaps that is what happens to corpses. How should he know, this is the first he has seen. In the stone-chill of the room he feels the desire to hide slip away, his betrayal is safe with his father, entombed. The past is comfortable here, with the dead. Suddenly he is a boy again, wandering along the shore of the small bay, picking his way through twisted clumps of seaweed, looking out onto the winking scintillation of the straits and the mountains beyond which loom darkly and flare into green luminescence as the clouds scud over the sun, a panorama of swift shadow and light. The world is hovering, fluttering like a hummingbird’s wing, its airy transparency irradiated by some great immanent space in which his heart expands until it is huge, until it could almost break. A promise, a secret, a revelation, given to him by this little postage stamp in the sea, that he carried with him always, that he went away that he might learn to translate it, to return it as a gift of thanks, but instead let wither and fade, finding in its vacated place an emptiness of unspeakable, mute vastness, a world in which he will always be lost. The cold eyelids of his father stare up at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers, tears wetting his lips, ‘I am sorry fy nhad.’