Dream On

by Dai Smith

  I could have wondered about a lot. And worried, too, but all I was thinking was whether to tell her now what I knew of that convenient partnership and its convenient continuation and how all that I knew was only because of the papers which had arrived without further explanation the day after the telephone call. Instead I gave her my mobile number and asked her to call if Haf did get in touch, that I was going to look around to see if anything of the made-over old patch might stir my professional interest, and that, maybe, we could have dinner before I flew out.

  She looked quizzical.

  “Seems a long way to come after such a long time for such casual reasons.”

  “Well, I would like to meet her. Perhaps we’ll agree about something or other.”

  “The only thing you’ll have in common with her is a mutual distrust – dislike? – of yours truly.”

  I didn’t demur, just deflected the crack.

  “DNA?”, I asked.

  “For Chrissake! What for?”

  “Sentiment.”

  “Sentimentality is more your bag.”

  “Do they measure that in DNA?”

  “You’d have bucketfuls, you always did,” she said.

  We seemed depleted, and I was once more, somehow, dispossessed.

  * * * * *

  I walked out of the foyer minutes after she’d gone, leaving me with her mobile phone number and memories I kept batting away. I held tight to the manila folder I hadn’t opened to show her. I turned left and straight on, which were the only directions, my old man had said, that were ever worth taking. The city centre’s layout was an easy recall: a pedestrian grid lay on top of its nineteenth-century right angles and a few defiant statues of socialist politicians and Irish boxers had been more recently erected to match up to its capitalist and liberal founding fathers. No role models for women in bronze or marble yet. The girls were missing a trick there. No doubt it’d come. The only female equivalents were in stone, flanking the steps of the Old Library that stood kitty corner from the Victorian indoor market. They were still draped in Grecian finery and clutching books, and they were still called Study and Rhetoric, the monikers by which I fondly remembered them, but they weren’t ushering me in to find Power and Knowledge, their more worldly sisters any more; it was the milk of Lethe, strictly of the alcoholic variety, they had on offer nowadays. The library had become a pub, and not of the kind I favoured. It took a while to find one I did.

  If the library was a theme pub, then its satellite hostelries seemed to have become just as thematic. On every other corner there was a piece of Erin that should never have left the fantasy factory or an iron-grilled and Cajun-manufactured homage to New Orleans. The wine bars were like gentlemen’s dens with crazed brown leather club chairs and newspaper racks or decked out with splashing fountains, crushed velvet drapes and shameless stone nymphs last seen in a Naples brothel in 1944. Or so I imagined my old man, who’d been there then, might have got round to telling me. At this rate, the breweries would end up making replicas of the old pubs that were actually old, but on the same site. I found one that seemed reluctant to change and sat at its bar in front of its ornate mirror. There was a God after all, and He was still serving up the metallic, brassy and frothy beer I could taste on faraway nights in my close-up dreams.

  I found the new replacement library amongst a wall of designer shops and stores. Glass wallfronts soaring high. Berlin, Boston, Basingstoke. The new one had neither the sumptuous wall tiles or echoing terrazzo floors of the old one, and all yesterday’s newspapers were no longer preserved intact and bound into a giant’s commonplace book, but shrunk onto the pinprick palimpsest of the page-by-page screen. I whizzed as well as the next bozo of my deprived generation, slowly and irritated, blessing my having grown up without all this non-tactile blur of gadgetry. The electronic future had not just arrived, it had hit us on the blindside, uncaring of the way we had once groped with pen or paint or camera to shine some kind of light. What was once unknown or untraceable could be collated now or hyperbolically enhanced to give the impression of holding the water that still inexorably ran on. But my own hard-won vision had been no less fuzzy over time, and had left me sightless, a click or two away from the lies I had stopped peddling.

  Haf’s papers – copies of letters, of e-mails, of bank statements, of notes on hotel pads, figures and dates on envelopes, on everything except the back of the proverbial cigarette pack only punters and smokers still used – guided me haphazardly to the daily pages of record I needed to see. The story was sometimes half-hidden in an inside paragraph, occasionally hailed as another brilliant success for inward investment and, latterly, brought into the frame of the new government under the rubric of “Regeneration”, a concept which had struck me as a cross between the hopeful mythology of resurrection and the hopeless metamorphosis effected by the mortician. Why didn’t they just try to generate something instead? The past and its places were never quite the organic thing a notion like re-generation so smugly implied. Whatever the case in hand, and there seemed dozens as I read on – from building works to art centres to tip clearances to adult education classes in aromatherapy and IT training – money, large and small packages of subsidy and grant aid, did not seem to be a problem. It was more a question of how do they get it out of the door in sufficient bulk and with the speed that didn’t allow bureaucratic windows in Europe to shut. In a de-industrialised region of such classic proportions as this one had been, the fit was perfect even if the outcome was debatable. The longer timescale raised the cynical thought that the actual recipients, if not the potential beneficiaries, would be, one way or the other, long gone before the final reckoning.

  I whizzed on for a few hours. My notes grew fuller as I honed in on Haf’s direction finder. The penny-ante stuff was all about worthy efforts, statistically measured by lame targets and grandiose objectives, to “up-skill” and “re-train” for the “knowledge economy” that had passed a generation by and was, allegedly, still held back by the low aspirations entrenched in a stubborn work culture, one long dead in practice and suffused, as it resisted the social mortuary, with the undesirable luddite and gender attributes of a leftover underclass. The jargon fed by sociology to journalism came easy. But my confusion over what was being regenerated by whom for whom for why, grew incrementally. There seemed precious little that had come to fulfilment outside the cities of the plain. It seemed we were still looking to the hills in vain. I began to pucker up for an inner Biblical trumpet of warning. Still, capital projects, with big outlays and vague embracing ambitions, were more realisable, less measurable in their ultimate outcome, and very big bucks indeed. The one thing, it seems, we had going for us, benighted denizens of a blasted past in those hills and valleys, was land. It was filthy, useless, contaminated land, soil and acres where you couldn’t grow vegetables or re-create a pre-industrial haven, but it was land that was available, cheap to buy and, both subsequently and consequentially, expensive to purchase even if the purpose was only re-generative, the gain a social one and the project uplifting.

  Gradually certain names began to re-appear. A single speech. A stellar proposal. A projected consortium. A political desire. A community need. An educational enterprise. A PR exercise. A feasibility study. A government decision. Names I knew and some faces I recalled. Bran, Gwilym, Ceri and Maldwyn amongst them. I turned off the screen. An escalator took me down to street level. The streets looked greasy in a watery sunlight. People drifted along in a city adrift. I drifted amongst them. A stranger amongst strangers. One of them. Not of them. I began to stare. No kids this time of day, women, alone if young, in twos if not, married couples, yellow-jacketed building labourers in groups of five and six, and all clutching paper bags full of smeared baguettes, and the more than occasional street dweller even more adrift than the rest of us. What I didn’t sense, as a taste, or see, in an instant, was the feel of poor people in the way that was all around us a quarter of a century ago. I guessed that it was an advance, but at whose exp
ense I couldn’t be sure. Poverty came in all manner of guises, as my old man drummed into his adult classes. Maybe that had been the other problem. The drumming as opposed to the learning. The observing as opposed to the living. I had long felt separated from both. The escaping as opposed to the staying. Coming back was not my idea, I told myself. But I had and now I had to swallow my mistake and leave, or chew it so that I could spit it out and move on.

  I headed for the train station and a train north but first I called ahead to find out when Gwilym could see me. There was no “if” about it. Gwilym, I knew, would want to see me. I might even be an “opportunity”, and he would not have ceased his love affair with one of those, animate or inanimate. Late afternoon, lunch unfortunately “not-doable”, then wall-to-wall meetings, in his office, say 4.30, chirped a secretary who, if I knew him as I had indeed once known him would have the attributes to go with the breathless little-girl-lost voice.

  The approach to the railway station had had a facelift all right. The designer who had worked on it could have made Ava Gardner look like Bela Lugosi. He wouldn’t have spotted the reference as an insult. You could still, with a squint, detect the creamy ceramic tiles and wooden 1920s fretwork behind the monumental planed stone with chewing-gummed bench surround which he must have picked up in a Moscow 1950s catalogue of late Stalinist gesturalism. More street people, combining the hippie scruff look with beggarly homelessness, sat or lay in shop doorways wearing their obligatory dogs on leashes as filthy and braided as the owners’ hair. I glared back until they looked away. The dogs I mean. The street people kept their own eyes in touch with the infinite.

  The platform was crowded. A mix of shoppers, a glitter of mothers who outsmarted their gawky teenagers, older couples in beige and grey and wool, clutching their bags and each other against intrusion, and a swirl of students seemingly intent only on what their touch screens were telling them. I’d been prepared for the rash of bilingual signage in the streets and even for the Welsh-language announcements for “y trên nesaf” and, in Welsh, the correctly pronounced valley townships that followed, but what came after a posh and male Welsh accent, even to those whose grasp of Welsh foundered after the first few lines of the national anthem, was more alien yet. The train information given in English was impeccably English, with the syllables of every place name I had ever known or grown up with, separated out into a speak-your-weight tone that managed to locate every wrong inflection and stress possible in the brave new world of desperanto. Most of us on that platform were being addressed in two languages we did not speak. I felt more speechless than I had for two decades. I left the city and let the view between the hills open up. We seemed to stop every five minutes. In a bowl beneath the final mountain, an hour later, nestled my final destination.

  There was a new halt for the Research and Development Park just after the town itself. Gwilym would be at lunch, and allegedly meetings, for a few hours yet, so I got off the train early. The town’s river still ran through it. No one seemed to have honed in yet on the one natural asset, apart from the shrug of clumpy hills, which might have given it a focus to replace its vanished industries and lost trade. No change there, or in the boarded-up shops of a shopping precinct constructed like a pebbledash concrete box with a flap entrance and a soaked-in stink of urine. It had taken me no more than ten minutes to walk from the station, another glory lost to boy scout design, past the rash of estate agents, shoe shops, bread shops, junk jewellers and the flashing tumblelights of slot-machine joints spitting the crackle of their noise, endlessly, onto the streets. One or two Italian-owned and run cafés gave “generation” a good name and the cobbled square off the main and winding street whispered possibilities. But the indoor market was more shoddy goods and plastic utilities than the piled-high stalls of fruit and vegetables and locally slaughtered meat and home-cooked hams and pies it had once been. People must be eating something, though. There seemed more bulk on the pavements, more waddle in the shop doorways and more roll in the gait. I didn’t see any obvious students in the town. They must stay on the train and leave by train for the city when lectures ended. Familiarity was not cheering me up. I needed a drink, and The Lamb was nearby so I went there, and entered the past.

  A narrow, low frontage with a door and boxed-in entrance. Two bars to either side, divided by the central run of beer pumps and shelves of bottles, both long and hemmed in like railway carriages from a Western movie. The one to the right was slightly smaller, to accommodate a Ladies at the end and had an embossed and floral wallpaper pattern to support its claim to be the lounge. No one went there in the day. Some things would stay the same, wouldn’t they? I turned left into the bar proper where a rotund, sawn-off and silent, landlord had once patrolled behind his counter. His name was Idris. So he was known as Id. And one night an autodidact from my old man’s class had decided that made Id’s voluble wife, Mavis, Ego. Both Id and Ego were shades now, as shadowy as the black-and-white poses of half-naked men, some clutching enamel medallioned belts, which were framed and scattered over the spit-yellow, tobacco-stained walls. These were the champions, of the world some of them, from a time even before mine. Their shadow dancing in the ring had been as explosive in the mind as on the canvas. I took them in at a glance. Freddie, Tom, Frank and Glen, Tommy and Jimmy, Dai and Howard. All still there. Behind the bar a woman in her late sixties was adjusting a curly black wig in a cracked mirror. She glimpsed me in it and without turning, said “Waddya want, love?” I asked for a bitter. Her fire-engine red lips had been cut out from a pin-up of Marilyn, the effect only spoiled by the paint going up under her nose and almost down to her chin, and the ravines of powder-caked wrinkles that surrounded them. They scarcely moved as she said “Pint or glass, love?”

  From a corner at the far end of the bar where the light from the scrolled front window did not reach, a voice which didn’t need a bellows to fan fire rumbled.

  “He don’t drink no glasses, Doreen. Give him a pint of Whoosh.”

  I moved down the bar towards the voice, and left my tenner on the bar.

  “Shwmae, Billo,” Tommy said, and stuck out a hand that was no bigger than a shovel.

  “Long time no see,” said Lionel.

  “Siddown, butt,” said Tommy, slowly letting my own hand limp free from his calluses and pincer fingers.

  I sat at the round wooden-topped table that was held up and steady by buxom iron Brittanias bearing their shields. Either side of me, as in the Town XV’s second team front row of my youthful athletic prime, were Tommy “Coch” Harris and his fellow prop, in work and sport and drink, Lionel “Blondie” Pemberton, a surname that hinted less of vanished gentry and more of West Country farm labourers turned late-Victorian colliers. By the time I’d met them, colliers both, in the murk of the Second XV’s scrum, they’d already forged a veteran reputation as players who were as dirty as they were slow. Stalwarts by then, protecting a young hooker on rain-lashed nights on muddy fields from opposing sods no rougher or gentler than themselves. Their nicknames were for the ginger crew cut of the one and the tow-haired straw thatch of the other. Their short schooldays had ended with NCB apprenticeships as faceworkers, in the 1950s, and a succession of pits as they followed the few seams that remained stubbornly open as collieries closed as rapidly as flies’ eyes in the ’60s. Closures and forced redundancies finally drove them out, and into work as labourers and brickies. I had seen no better or tougher sight since I’d been home.

  “Aye, long time no see,” echoed Tommy.

  “Aye, s’right,” echoed Lionel back.

  “Pints?” I asked.

  These boys knew a rhetorical question when it was posed. About drink, anyway. They drained the fullish ones in front of them and Tommy tapped his empty on the table to alert the Marilyn lookalike, who had just pulled one for me, to keep going. Lionel got up to fetch them and set my change and three fresh pints before us.

  “Cheers,” he said and began drinking as Tommy, without bothering to ask, did what I wanted
and gave me a Whitaker’s Almanack tour of the town in the years I’d been gone. I listened to the lament of decline and deterioration.

  “Aye. Same old same-o,” agreed Lionel, when Tommy finally drew breath.

  Tommy wiped the froth of his grey straggle of a moustache after this reflective and biting bottom-up comment on the panorama of the recent past. Living it had aged them. Neither “Coch” nor “Blondie” quite did it any more as accurate descriptions of the now salt-and-pepper and bare-patched heads nodding and drinking on either side of me. I said as much. “Aye,” said Tommy. “That’s what a life on the buildings, humping bricks and mixing in the freezing fucking cold will do to you. You should see my bollocks!”

  “S’right,” Lionel added, and went for three more pints.

  Tommy was in full spate by now, a great circular flow of fact and opinion, all revolving around the life and times of artisan builder and bullshitter supreme, T. Harris, Esq. It all came back to buildings. They held us and defined us. So what was wrong was, in his opinion, that what lay behind them had changed. They were cheaper to construct, dearer to buy, quicker to deteriorate. The wood was not seasoned. The foundations were not settled. The exteriors were all cladding and the interiors all slotted together from a kit. So where was the pride in that, he wondered, and offered an answer by widening his viewfinder to people. The town had gone all to hell. Big City incomers, toffee-nosed, hippie, English, Welshy Welsh. The rugby club had gone all to hell, betrayed by Judases of various stripes and flavours. And now there was talk after the demise of Id and Ego of a makeover for The Lamb, to give it a more “authentic feel”, with stone-flagged floors and wooden beams and a re-faced bar to replace the truly authentic leatherette, plastic and formica it had worn in over forty years. All a disaster. Still, in The Lamb maybe, some work out of this for a pair of jobbing builders in semi-retirement, and a few pints on the job thrown in.