by Dai Smith
We would be glad to hear when you feel able to transfer the magnificent Urn we have all admired to our safe keeping in advance of this proposed Happy Occasion which I’m sure will inspire a great deal of Press and Media interest.
Yours sincerely,
W. E. Williams (Hon. Sec.)
Myra was in no doubt as to the importance of the letter, and its implications for her. She was giving Digger back to those to whom he belonged. It was appropriate. It was fitting. It was deeply symbolic. It was what They all wanted. And, she thought, folding the letter tightly into a square, it was what They will not have. It was wrong. He was hers more than he was theirs, and whether he liked it or not he was going with her. The more she pondered the more certain she became. She would sell the Victorian gothic pile and leave the town. She would live, permanently, in Geoffrey’s house and find someone to tend the garden. Perhaps Henri Gonzalez would know someone to recommend. She was sure he would.
And she knew, too, where she would scatter Digger’s ashes. He would rest beneath the male olive tree in touching distance of the female olive tree which had never fruited. Who knew, perhaps it would at last, with a little loving care and some constant attention, fruit after all. In any case it would be a talking point. She looked forward to that.
No Photographs Of Crazy Horse
“If life seems a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The visions of good men are good …
When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; … lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Illusions” in The Conduct of Life (1860)
First light. Slow and insinuating. Taking texture from its passage through the linen blinds. Splintering. Faster now. Refracted across varnished pine boards. Stirring shimmers of particles pooling into corner recesses. A noise. Muted and electronic, but abrupt, repetitive, insistent. He used his fists to bunch the pillow around his head. To stifle the burr of the bedside phone. And the prickly headache buzz of last night’s red wine, and Scotch. But the light, picking up speed from the day breaking over the Narrows, flooded in and veined his eyelids pink until they blinked open, swollen eyes contracting, gummily closed again, for mercy, then half-open, finally shuttered, like the blinds, against the light they had, nonetheless with no mercy, to let in.
“Hello?”
His voice thickly muffled with the mucus of sleep and the emery board rasp of booze. Again, stronger this time, with a rising note to his cautious early morning drawl. At the other end, somewhere, a hesitant, but audible, dry swallow. Silence. He sat up.
“Hello? Who is this?”
Uncertain. More silence. Annoyed. Do they know what time this is? What the hell? Put it down. Then a young woman’s sibilance. His hesitancy matched, and countered.
“Billy? I … I want you to find me. Please?”
“Who …?”
“It’s Haf. Branwen’s daughter. You know … Please. Please come soon. I’m sending you something. You’ll see. You’ll understand. Then. Please help. Come. Please. Come and get me back, help me, please … Daddy.”
The connection broke. He had sat up. Swallowing hard. The Welsh voice lingering, insistent in his ears, even after it had stopped. The accent had trailed memories. Conjured up bygone dreams. He looked at the alarm clock, black on white, the hands bumping its tick around the dial. It was nearly six in the morning in New York City. Just gone noon at home. He turned over. Restless now. Maybe a dream would come.
One
Shadow Play
WEDNESDAY
It did not feel like going home. Not even partly so. But it did feel like going back. It was not a comfortable feeling. I drove west into a late afternoon sun that slipped further down the horizon as I let the boxy diesel hatchback I’d hired at the airport scuttle and drone its way down the M4. I fought the mild jet lag of a transatlantic crossing more than I did the lane-switching traffic. Slow lane was fine by me. I needed some contemplation time before the city’s lights guided me straight to my hotel bed, and sleep.
You know how it is sometimes, when, because you must, you play a part, but for real I mean, because you don’t have any original lines to say or fresh ways to enact them. Too many life scenarios already seen and done, whether originally for real, or not. Journeys. Quests. Homecomings that were nothing of the kind. Umbilical cords that were never quite cut, and so could still strangle. And it’s as if you always have the clothes for the part, ready to put on. Where do they come from? You have the words queuing up to be said. How could that be? You even have the end in sight, but it’s one stumble at a time to get to it. And what is this ending anyway? Going back was like letting time that was past suck me back in, and I was ready for it. I had the stuff, all of it, that I’d need for the trip. None of it meant that I wanted to make it. Going home was going to a place which was no longer there for me. It was with me all the time, though. More ready for me than I could ever wish it to be. Intimacy. That was unavoidable. Knowledge. Now that was a category I truly despised. Something known already. So generally imitative of something else. My old man had never pretended to have knowledge. What he did have was wisdom, and his brand of wisdom was as cold and dark as a gun barrel and as cold and unforgiving as the air through which I had been funnelled home.
It wasn’t any kind of wisdom, though, that had brought me home. Worse, it was a lack of knowledge. Of certain knowledge that is, and certain came with two meanings, both of which I had to nail. For what was uncertain I could blame the postcard Gwilym had sent around five years before, and for what currently passed muster as certain there was Bran’s written reply to my enquiry. It was “No”, as I remembered. I had left no daughter behind, and so I had no daughter now. Yet that voice on my phone had coupled her own with mine and mine, it had said, was Daddy. So, yes, I knew what had taken me home, and, wise or foolish, what I needed to do. But first I’d need to see her mother again. There were things, it seemed, to find out. There were things, unbidden but undeniable, to remember. So, I remembered them. Even if all I had wanted to do for a very long time was to forget.
THURSDAY
I slept heavily and woke late. I cleaned myself up, and avoided the hotel breakfast. I’d kept the car overnight. I needed it for a quick burst of re-acquaintance, or rather a fresh acquaintance with the new city and all its novel markers. A proper capital city, I’d been told, at last.
I drove the hired car directly north out of the city centre. It was mid-morning and traffic was stop-start rather than snarling. The day was overcast for late March, but with an opaque white light behind the low cloud cover. Dishwater grey through the glare. It suited my mood, and my meander past familiar sights which some twenty years plus had done little to change. Not in this part of town anyway. The Edwardian wedding cake civic centre buildings still swelled with early twentieth-century pride. But in the interest of a future promise to be cashed in one day. Natch. And then almost straightaway, because this was a town that had been laid out cheek-to-cheek in its Victorian days of origin, the strings of red-bricked terraces like entrails pulled out and de-kinked. Student lets now, judging from the bicycles piled up in their tiny low-walled fronts and the oblivious helmetless riders weaving in and out of the stuttering line of cars. The dockers and railwaymen and steelworkers, who had once marked these streets with a confident workaday presence and crowded the brassy mahogany pubs, were long gone. I remembered them as men who, amongst themselves, acted as hard men even when they were not, all baring their lips to let go with an accent, peculiarly their own, which could slice through the thick tobacco blued smoke of saloon bars like wire through cheese. Something else gone from that rich pungency of the old centre was the sweet fug of mashed hops brewed up for the city’s very own beer, cloying the senses and swaddling early morning streets. Liveners being readied for the thick heads of the previous night an
d the deep thirsts of overnight workers. Once, and no longer.
It had been too early for a pint when I picked up the car from the hotel’s garage. I began to think I’d need a livener myself, and sooner rather than later. Maybe I’d need to find the brewery before I could locate that light and dry, cream and golden beer which my mouth could still taste. Maybe after two decades away there was no brewery, and none of that beer left as it was.
The thought curdled in the churn of my stomach as I left the centre behind and steered past batteries of traffic lights on every intersection of the four lane two-way avenue that tramlined me out of the plain. The city had grown, or rather spawned, in spreading concentric rings of housing from its docks and commercial heyday to the commuter and professional housing of the suburbs through which I was now crawling. Tree-lined avenues of brick-and-stucco semis built for the artisan and the salaried, even in the 1930s, a decade which had pissed over most people here with the freewheeling grace of a drunk in a urinal. The interwar houses had weathered better, despite the ceaseless rumble of cars and trucks, than their 1960s counterparts: flat-roofed boxes for housing, schools and hospitals. The one style fits all school of architecture from the decade that had misplaced its brain.
I’d bought a new map. I’d keep for later the grim dual carriageway that I knew from almost twenty years ago as a corridor through the hills and into the valleys I’d once escaped. It looked on the new map as if there were livelier arteries shooting off a pulsing interchange. On the actual ground it was more engineering circuitry than roundabout. I circled it twice before I picked the right lane, and took the slip road signposted for the west and the motorway. I had an appointment at noon back in the city. I took the scenic route. First exit off and flat out down the link road towards the bay.
I was on a highway belt that cinched in the older and flabbier bits as it bypassed them. An ersatz new world to anyone who had seen the real deal of any small American city. Deep cuts isolated the tough council-house estates where I had once roamed, camera at the ready. There were glimpses of skeletal iron frames cranked up out of building-site mud and the apple-green and white cladding of the retail sheds that were the winking outliers of a neon-lit twenty-four-hour world. They didn’t convince; more end of the line no choice than any kind of centre.
I slowed down as the road curved upwards on a stilted flyover that was just high enough to offer flashes of the former industrial core of the city to the south. It was gutted, rusty and leaking. Its roadside heralds were apartment blocks whose roofs curved and dipped like skateboard runs. The surfaces were weather-boarded in strips which had already turned from honey to flaked grey in the salt winds blowing in over the mud flats from the sea. Miniscule iron-railed balconies decorated their chunky bulk like bracelets on a bruiser. This was the sense of the place I had guessed from hearsay and the occasional letter but I had not been able to feel for myself: its broken rhythm, its re-drawn boundaries, its pretence of itself. I decided to save the full-blown, street-level version of the bay for when I was more attuned to the whole transformation. Perhaps the woeful tackiness had been avoided there. Perhaps. There would be hope in pretending so. Perhaps not. I followed the signs for the centre.
At least the jail was still stone-stolid and unrelenting in its mid-town location. It greeted me as I re-discovered the city streets and ended the joyride. I returned the car to the parking lot of the hire company and walked back to the hotel – another former office warren now decked out as a travel destination – ideal as neutral ground rather than the location of her doubtless ritzy apartment for a meeting that was as nerve-wracking as a French kiss on a first date. And I had reason to recall that encounter with a shudder of dread pleasure as I waited over a tepid filter coffee for my first sight of Branwen since the winter of 1985.
Even after more than twenty years she didn’t disappoint. I’d like to say she never had but I was too old to lie anymore, to myself or anyone else. Still, whatever she was doing to herself, she was doing it well. On the surface at least. There had always been murky depths with Bran even if it had taken me some time to come up for air. I stood up as she scanned the room to see which booth I was in. The smile was tentative but the way she cocked her head slightly to one side was no less coquettish than when she had posed for me with a lot less on than the blue striped seersucker suit, sharp jacket and skirt to the dimpled knee, which she was expensively wearing. I had time for the quick once-over before she crossed the coffee-room floor. She imperceptibly slowed down as if she knew it. Of course she knew it. This was Bran after all. Some things wouldn’t ever change.
Her eyes were the colour of anthracite, and just as slow-burning. Her hair, glossy, thick and black, framed the oval of a face which was almost Mediterranean in complexion. She used to say it was the Iberian heritage of the Celt. I’d countered it was the legacy of randy Spanish sailors shipwrecked from the Armada in west Wales. No make-up, just an amuse-bouche of a mouth and, I knew, a personality darker and harder than any mineral. At a modest 5’ 10” I seemed to dwarf her compact 5’ 2” even with the kitten heels she was wearing. A kiss, for which we both positioned awkwardly, drifted away in unease. She held out her hand. I touched it and the platinum wedding band on it.
“You’re looking great,” I said.
She shrugged out a thank you. I forced out a smile.
She sat opposite me, ordered a herbal tea, more coffee for me and we stared a necessary while longer. Then, as from long habit, we got down to it.
“Why did you come?”
“I told you on the phone. She … Haf … asked me to help her.”
“You don’t take that seriously, do you?”
“I don’t know. I did. Something in her voice. Shouldn’t I? Do you know where she is? What she wants?”
Bran fiddled with her granulated sugar packet, shifting the contents around in its unopened paper envelope like a blind fortune teller looking for a lucky grain of truth.
“She can be difficult. She’s … a silly bugger when she wants to be.”
“Meaning?”
Her one revelatory weakness, slight and momentary but intense through the translucent skin around her neck, was a flush that wrapped her like a scarf. Or a signal as I recalled and reminded her.
“Oh, you know it means nothing. I just can’t help it.”
“That’s why it says something, isn’t it?”
“You’re not listening, Billy. I’ve told you. I really don’t know where she went. Honest, as they say. She’s been gone for over two months.”
“The college?”
“Nothing. She hasn’t turned up for lectures. And no messages for any friends.”
“The police?”
“Why? She’s telephoned me … you … other people. You, less than a week ago. She’s not lost, Billy.
“She called me daddy, Bran. Why did she do that?”
“For God’s sake, she’s still a kid.”
“She’s almost twenty-one, isn’t she? I wasn’t there, remember.”
“Messing about. That’s all. I’d have told you, wouldn’t I?”
“Would you?”
“She isn’t.”
“She could be, though, couldn’t she?”
“No! It’s just a game. Hero worship.”
“Hero worship?”
“Of you. Of your work anyway. She’s got everything – the books, posters, photographs, clippings. She plastered them over her bedroom walls before she walked out.”
“Why? Did you tell her about us?”
“She knows. Not from me. Mal said something one night when he’d had a bit. After that documentary programme about you on television. She cottoned on. Worked it out, that ‘friends’ was a catch-all word.”
“How old was she then?”
“About sixteen. Later she heard us quarrelling. Things were said. Not by me. Look, I’ve never been close with her, this mother-and-daughter thing and such, and it just got worse after that. She practically moved out then. In spirit if n
ot in body. And this disappearing stuff, that isn’t the first time either.”
I tried to think it through but all I could see was the deceit by which we had all lived. I didn’t know what to believe. It was what had sent me away. It was what had pulled me back. I tried again.
“You were clear she wasn’t mine. I asked no more. I’m asking now. Again.”
This time the smile was more pitying than playful.
“You’re still a fool, Billy, you know that.”
She puffed her cheeks. Like an adder, I thought. And blew softly at me a breath that was at once sweet and rank.
“That summer after the strike you got more and more, I dunno, miserable … melancholy. Even before that you were down about everything and everyone. Worrying. Down. And for me it was still what I’d felt, something alive and different, as if that bloody history your old man went on about had come to life, and with me in it. Christ! I was even a star supporter! You and me were coming to an end anyway. You didn’t quite see it, did you, but then there were lots of things you didn’t see, or didn’t want to see.”
She paused, and calculated.
“I wasn’t wild and I wasn’t calculating. Not then. Maybe later. But at the time I just slept with the people I wanted to fuck or who wanted to fuck me, or neither but anyway! And you were around, too, when you weren’t off photographing and documenting and revelling in the whole mess, in your own sad way. So, like I said, I don’t know. Take that for a no, from me. And yes, maybe she thinks so.”
“Why did you marry Mal?”
“A marriage of convenience.”
“That all?”
“We’d been lovers. I was pregnant. Strictly, in case you’re still wondering, just after you’d gone, and I told him it was his. Later, we just became a partnership. And after that, four, five years ago, we split. Still married.”