Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  It was dark inside Bopa Lloyd’s kitchen, but I could smell the fried onions and herrings cooking for dinner in the big fireplace where the row of bright candlesticks was and the brass horses in the hearth. The ceiling was brown wood with beams across, and the stairs curved down into the far corner. Some sheets of newspaper and two pieces of sacking covered the parts of the floor you walked on. When the back door opened it banged against the mangle which had a couch alongside with a bike on it. The wallpaper was brownish with purple birds and upright daisy chains of black roses, but Ewa Shad hadn’t put it on well near the curve in the wall made by the stairs, and all along that side the stripes were diagonal. Our Mam said Ewa Shad must have two left hands.

  ‘Emlyn,’ said Bopa Lloyd, ‘go and fetch your father’s slaps.’

  Four of us sat down to dinner, Bopa Lloyd, Ewa Shad, Em, and myself. Ewa Shad had washed a bit now, the middle of his face and the palms of his hands. He was a funny-looking man, pale, with a big oval face and round, popping eyes, whitish grey and very shiny and wet-looking. On his head he had a brown covering of my father’s armpit hair, and now that he had taken off his red flannel muffler I could see the swelling wen hung in his neck like a little udder, half of it grimy and half of it clean and white. When I went into the kitchen he was rubbing his back up and down against the edge of the open pantry door to scratch himself. He didn’t say anything to me, he just rubbed and showed his teeth with the dirty dough on them. Then he sat down and read the tablecloth with his head twisted round on one side.

  Bopa Lloyd sat on a chair without a back nearest the fire with her false teeth on the table in front of her. ‘There’s pretty trousers you’ve got on,’ she said, as she served me half a herring. ‘Let me see, a pocket and a coppish and all.’

  Ewa Shad ate his potatoes and onions without saying a word, but he looked over all his food before he ate it, and sometimes he gave a loud, wet belch. And every now and then he would start scratching himself, putting his arm inside his shirt and rubbing his chest, working around under his armpit to his back, and at last letting his fingers come back up through his open collar-band on to his wen. I was looking most of the time at the little purple potatoes sprinkled on Bopa Lloyd’s face; they were so tight they looked inflamed, like little bladders ready to burst. Then I heard Ewa Shad and Bopa Lloyd talking loudly. Suddenly my Ewa stopped and stared before him with his mouth open. I could see the spittles stretched like thin wires from his top teeth to his bottom ones in an upright row.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he growled at Bopa Lloyd at last. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ and he left the table and went up the stairs out of sight.

  ‘What’s the matter with him now, our Mam,’ said Em, as though he was going to cry. ‘What’s he gone to bed without washing for?’

  ‘Because he’s gone dull,’ said Bopa Lloyd, running her finger round her gums, her face very red. ‘Since he’s lost his job he’s not a-willing to eat his fried onions if they’re not all in proper rings. He’s going daft, that’s what’s the matter with him.’ Then she went quieter. ‘Have you had enough of food, bach?’ she said to me, putting her teeth back in her mouth. ‘Don’t take no notice of him. Try a bit of teisen lap, will you?’

  When she had sharpened her knife on the doorstep, Em and I sat down there, eating our cake and playing dixstones. We could hear Ewa Shad thudding about in his stocking feet upstairs. The rain was slackening and by the time we had reached fivesy, it had stopped.

  ‘Can we go out now, our Mam?’ said Em.

  Bopa Lloyd was sitting on the couch by the bike, sewing Ewa Shad’s coat up under the armpit, and she said we could. We went into the garden. The heavy rain had made the place look different, there was gravel about and dirty pools with small coal in them like mushroom gravy. And the earth smelt strong as an animal. But the sky was clearing again, although the sunshine seemed weak after the rain. Then after a bit, as Em was pulling up a long worm to give to his fish, we heard someone throwing the upstairs window open, the one with the blue blouse across for a curtain, and Bopa Lloyd, her face very red, leaned her body far out of it with her hands on the sill. ‘Stay where you are,’ she shouted, waving her arm, and then, clapping her hand to her teeth, she disappeared suddenly like a sloped nail driven out of sight into a piece of wood with one blow. And then we saw a big heap of bedclothes like a large white cauliflower bulging out through the open window, with smoke oozing upwards in thin grey hairs from it as Bopa Lloyd pushed it out; and almost as soon as she had dropped it into the garden she came running out of the kitchen door. She began dragging the smoking bundle of sheets and blankets across the wet garden towards the bath of water. ‘The silly flamer,’ she kept on saying, ‘the silly flamer. Matches with blue heads again. Every time he sees those flaming things he does something dull.’ She piled the smoking bedclothes into the bath and at that Em began to cry.

  ‘What are you grizzling at?’ she asked, turning her red face towards him as she stooped.

  ‘My fish,’ he answered, pulling a little Union Jack out of his pocket. ‘You’ll kill it, our Mam; it’s in the bath.’

  ‘Fish myn ufferni,’ she cried. ‘Your father sets the feather bed on fire and you grunt about your fish. Get out of the road or I’ll brain you.’

  She stirred the bedclothes and spat on the garden. Em and I moved away and climbed over the wet bedstead. As we went slowly up the tip, Em wiping his eyes with his flag, we could see her standing in the garden striking a boxful of matches one by one, while Ewa Shad’s two big staring eyes watched her without moving over the blue blouse in the bedroom window.

  We wandered about on the flat top of the tips for a long time, afraid of Bopa Lloyd. Em showed me the hole where Ewa Shad had been scratching for coal. At last we came in sight of the old air shaft in the distance, and Em said, ‘Let’s go right up to it.’ The shaft was a pale yellow tower shaped like a lighthouse standing far up on the lonely side of the mountain. To get at it we had to go through a lot of brambles and tall bracken with snakes in it, but we didn’t get very wet because we kept to the path. There had been a lean rainbow, but as we went towards the tower the sun blazed again, and the tips steamed like a train in a cutting. The shaft was very tall and built out of some cracking yellowish brick like shortbread. Some of the bricks were missing here and there, and right down near the ground we found a good-sized hole in the side. Em put his notchy head in and said, ‘Brain, look down there.’ I lay down beside him on the steaming stones and looked into the dim hole. Every small sound resounded there, it was like putting your head into the hollow between the two skins of a drum. The shaft inside was huge, like a vast empty hall, like some shabby ruin with the floor gone through, very cold and bleak, the walls disappearing below us into the blackness, making you feel giddy and sick. And the spiders hung their webs there, round like a gramophone record or strong and dusty as sacking. Then, Em picked up a piece of brick and pitched it into the darkness. It plunged down out of sight like a diving bird and we could hear it striking the sides of the shaft from time to time with a note like the loud pong of a pitchfork and a stone howling over the ice. Then when we had waited and waited, staring down with our heads hanging over the cold blackness, we heard a terrible splash and roar like a train in a tunnel as the stone at last exploded on the water at the bottom of the shaft. The hollow pit broke out at once into an uproar, it was filled with a storm of echoes and the splashing noises of the water, and when at last all the sounds had died away the darkness was as still and silent as before. I felt sick and frightened, and we ran away together, a long loose patch across the behind of Em’s trousers flapping like a letterbox in the breeze.

  At last we climbed the warm bedstead and Em made straight for the bath to look for his fish. ‘Go and ask Mam for a jam jar,’ he said to me, ‘she’ll give it to you.’ I went up to the kitchen door and opened it. It was dim inside at first, but I could see Ewa Shad sitting on the bottom step of the stairs that curved down into the kitchen. He had his shirt and trousers o
n, but although he was wearing his cap he had no boots on his stockinged feet. And his waistcoat was open, the front of it like a looking glass with grease. He was catching hold of the long, curved knife, the carving knife Bopa Lloyd had cut our cake with, and he was sticking the point of it as hard as he could into the side of his neck. He was using both his hands to push the knife in, and it was going through the skin just below his ear. When I saw him cutting himself like that I went cold between my legs. Every time he stabbed he jerked his head sideways to meet the knife blade, keeping his head stiff, so that the baggy wen on the other side gave a little shiver each time the point of the knife went out of sight into the side of his neck. There was blood all round his chin and his throat and down the front of his shirt, red and thick like jam. When I had watched him give two or three slow, hard stabs like this, showing his teeth out of the froth round his lips, he stopped and stared at me with his swollen white eyes. Then he pulled up the leg of his trousers and started to scratch the back of his calf as hard as he could. His scratching seemed to go on a long time and then, just as he was about to start using the knife again, Em screamed behind me and Bopa Lloyd came down the stairs, her nostril holes like thimbles as I looked up into them. When she saw what was happening, she pushed past Ewa Shad, snatched the knife from his hand and threw it on the fire. His eyes were like big, white milk-bubbles staring up at her, and the lining was showing at the back of his cap. Gradually he slipped sideways on his step as though he was going to fall to the ground. Then with a shout Bopa Lloyd pushed Em and me out into the yard, turning the lock behind us. Em stood crying by the kitchen door, rattling the clothes peg latch, and sometimes going to the window to look in over the cardboard mending the bottom panes. In a few minutes Bopa Lloyd unlocked the door and peeped out, and I had a whiff of the handle of the knife smouldering in the grate. Her red face glowed, it was the colour of a low fire, and the grey feathers of her hair were nearly all out of her combs. ‘Go home now, there’s a good boy,’ she said to me, ‘and tell your mother, thank you for the parcel and will she come up as soon as she can.’

  ‘What’s the matter with our Dad?’ asked Em, making a face and crying all over his mouth.

  ‘He’s better now,’ she answered. ‘Go and play with your fish, there’s a good boy.’

  As I went home down the road I could see the bloodshot mark like a little smudge of red ink on Em’s eye, and I thought again how lucky he was to have that. I told my mother how Bopa Lloyd’s chicken had fallen into the bath, and how Ewa Shad had stuck a knife in his neck and made it bleed. And every time I went into the pantry in the dark or when I closed my eyes I could see the inside of the air shaft with the big drop below me, and that made me feel sick and giddy. As my mother was dressing to go up to Ewa Shad’s, she said, ‘The fool couldn’t even cut his throat tidy.’

  SHACKI THOMAS

  Gwyn Jones

  Shacki Thomas was fifty-two, shortish, and bandy from working underground. Unemployment was straitening his means but could do nothing with his legs. But play the white man, he would say – though I’m bandy, I’m straight. It was his one witticism, and he was not using it so frequently now that his missis was in hospital.

  He was going to see her this afternoon. He gave a two-handed pluck at his white silk muffler, a tug at the broken nose of his tweed cap, and so went out the back way to the street slanting sharply from High Street to the river. The houses were part soft stone, part yellow brick, and grimy; the roadway between them was decorated with dogs and children and three new-painted lamp posts, and each parlour window showed a china flowerpot nesting an aspidistra or rock fern. He passed his own window, and saw that the fern was doing famous, though he’d forgotten to water it since Gwenny – oh, Gwenny, Gwenny, he was saying, if only you was home in our house again!

  Twenty yards in front he saw Jinkins the Oil and hurried to catch him up. Owbe, they said.

  ‘’Orse gets more human every day,’ said Jinkins from the cart, and to forget his troubles Shacki made a long speech, addressing the horse’s hindquarters:

  ‘Some horses is marvellous. Pony I used to know underground, see – you never seen nothing like that pony at the end of a shift. Used to rip down the road, mun, if there’d a-been anything in the way he’d a-hit his brains out ten times, over. Intelligent, Mr Jinkins? You never seen nothing like him!’

  As they approached the railway bridge, the two-ten to Cwmcawl went whitely over. The horse raised his head.

  ‘Now, now, you old fool,’ cried Jinkins. ‘It’s under you got to go, not over.’ He turned to Shacki and apologised for the dumb creature. ‘’Orse do get more human every day, see.’

  But Shacki couldn’t laugh. It was Gwenny, Gwenny, if only you was home with me, my gel; and fear was gnawing him, worm-like.

  Turning away beyond the bridge into High Street, he found the old sweats around the cenotaph. For a minute or two he would take his place in the congregation. A lady angel spread her wings over them, but her eyes were fixed on the door of the Griffin opposite. GWELL ANGAU NA CHYWILYDD said the inscription. ‘Better death than dishonour’; and as Shacki arrived, the conversation was of death. ‘I once hear tell,’ said Ianto Evans, ‘about a farmer in the vale who quarrelled summut shocking with his daughter after his old woman died. Well, p’raps she gave him arsenic – I donno nothing ’bout that – but he went off at last, and they stuck him in the deep hole and went back to hear the will. Lawyer chap, all chops and whiskers like a balled tomcat, he reads it out, and everything in the safe goes to Mary Anne and the other stuff to his sister. So they has a look at the safe, and what’s inside it? Sweet Fanny Adams, boys, that’s what.’ By pointing a finger at him, Ianto brought Shacki into his audience. ‘“And what’ll you do with the safe, my pretty?” asks the sister – like sugar on lemon, so I hear. Mary Anne thinks a bit and then brings it out very slow. “If it wasn’t for my poor old mam as is in Heaven,” she says, “I’d stick it up over the old tike for a tombstone.”’ He scratched his big nose. ‘What’s think of that, uh?’

  His brother Ivor picked his teeth. ‘Funny things do happen at funerals. I once heard tell about a chap as travelled from Wrexham to the Rhondda to spit into another chap’s grave.’

  ‘Might a-brought the flowers up,’ said Ianto.

  ‘No, not this chap’s spit wouldn’t.’

  ‘I mean, there’s spit and spit,’ said Tommy Sayce. ‘I mean, f’rinstance—.’ A moist starfish splashed on the dust, and he changed the subject. ‘How’s the missis, Shacki?’

  Shacki looked from Ivor to the lady angel, but she was intent on the Griffin. ‘Thass what I going to see, chaps. Fine I do hope, ay.’

  They all hoped so, and confessed as much. But they were all fools, and the worm-like fear was at Shacki’s heart like a maggot in a swede. ‘I got to go this afternoon, see,’ he said; hoping for a chorus of reassurance and brave words, but – ‘I remember’ – Tommy Sayce took up the tale – ‘when little Sammy Jones had his leg took off at the hip. “How do a chap with only one peg on him get about, doctor?” he asks old Dr Combes. “Why, mun,” doctor tells him, “we’ll get you a nice wooden leg, Sammy.” “Ay, but will I be safe with him, doctor?” asks Sammy. “Safe? Good God, mun, you’ll be timber right to the face!” Thass what doctor told him.’

  ‘Ah, they’m marvellous places, them hospitals,’ Shacki assured them, to assure himself at the same time. ‘Look at the good they do do.’

  ‘Ay, and look at the good they don’t do! Didn’t they let Johnny James’ mam out ’cos she had cancer and they was too dull to cure it? And Johnny, thinking she was better – the devils!’

  The worm went ahead with his tunnelling. ‘I carn stop, anyway,’ said Shacki, and low-spiritedly he left them to their talk. Not fifty yards away he cursed them bitterly. Death, death, death, cancer, cancer, cancer – by God, he’d like to see that big-nosed bastard Ianto Evans on his back there, and that brother of his, and Tommy Sayce, and every other knackerpant as hadn’t more feeling th
an a tram of rippings. From the bend of the street he looked back and saw the lady angel’s head and benedictory right arm and cursed her too, the scut of hell, the flat-faced sow she was! Nobody have pain, or everybody – that was the thing. He cleared his throat savagely and spat into the gutter as though between the eyes of the world. Self-pity for his loneliness brought too big a lump to his throat before he could curse again, and then once more it was all Gwenny fach, oh, Gwenny fach; he’d like to tear the sky in pieces to get her home again. If only she was better, if only she was home, he’d do the washing, he’d blacklead the grate, he’d scrub through every day, he’d water that fern the minute he got back – he was shaking his head in disgust. Ay, he was a fine one, he was.

  Then he went into the greengrocer’s, where the air smelled so much a pound.

  ‘Nice bunch of chrysanths,’ he was offered, but they were white and he rejected them. ‘I ain’t enamelled of them white ones. Something with a bit of colour, look.’

  He bought a bunch of flowers and three fresh eggs for a shilling and fivepence, and carried them as carefully as one-tenth his dole deserved to the Red Lion bus stop. Soon the bus came, chocolate and white, with chromium fittings. He found the conductor struggling with a small table brought on by a hill farm-woman at the Deri. ‘Watch my eggs, butty,’ he begged, and stood on the step till at last they fixed it in the gangway, where it lay on its back with its legs up in the air like a live thing gone dead. Through the back window Shacki saw a youngster running after the bus. ‘Oi, mate—’

  ‘Behind time,’ said the conductor hotly. ‘This here blasted table—’ He came for his fare and to mutter to Shacki. ‘I never had this woman on board yet when she hadn’t a table or a hantimacassar or a chest in drawers or a frail of pickled onions or summut. Moving by instalments I reckon she is or doing a moonlight flit. Iss a ’ell of a life this!’