Dream On

by Dai Smith

  “You think she may be your fuckin’ daughter, don’t you? Well, maybe she’s mine, eh?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And wrong, butty. D’you think you and me were the only ones dipping the wick in that honey pot?”

  I bridled. He noticed.

  “Oh, OK, you were in residence – sort of, as I recall. But there’s other possibilities beyond you and me.”

  “Such as?”

  “All I’m saying is that when Bran and I split, or were going to split cos it wasn’t getting any better, she told me it was you and she told Haf it wasn’t me. And you know what, I don’t fucking know, or care.”

  Mal stopped and stood right in my path, right in front of my face. His voice was dry and contemptuous. He said,

  “That’s why I threw Bran over. Know what I mean? That’s why Haf stayed here. See? And what’s it to you anyway? You left, remember?”

  Mal turned. My time was over it seemed. Again. I put my hand on his shoulder. Heavily. I pulled him back. He made no move to take my hand away. Mal had controlled things, all things in his path, for too long. I took the hand away. Mal said what Mal thought.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’ve pissed me off enough.”

  I said that enough was nowhere near enough and that I would hurt him before I was finished. I said he was one of life’s jerry-builders, and a bastard with it, and that I would pull him down. Mal grinned.

  He said, “A bastard,” and, liking the sound of it, repeated it in a whisper to himself. I saw Wheelie at the top of the steps, clutching what may once have been a pit mandrel but was now only a baseball bat.

  “I’ll see myself out,” I said and walked to the bottom garden gate, hoping an unlocked door would save me any grief. Probably very personalised grief. I lifted the iron latch and turned an iron hoop and went out onto the cinder embankment path. I followed it to the railway bridge, then left the path, crossed above the line and headed back into the town. It was time for that drink Mal hadn’t given me.

  * * * * *

  Once upon a time there were more pubs in this town than the buttons on a collier’s coppish; that’s a fly to anyone born before 1960 and a zip to the rest of the world. Me and the dead respected the fashion of fumble. But the buttons had gone from trousers as sure as the pubs from every street, whether main, high, back or back of beyond. The Full Moon had waned and The Rising Sun no longer brightened anyone’s day. I noticed the council office had abandoned their stand-out 1930s modernity in favour of a re-fit as a cavernous ocean liner’s bar-lounge, all shiny tables and chairs and brass-railed mini decks, one which had no doubt sailed into every small town. That was one voyage I would avoid then. But I did need a settling drink.

  My head no longer throbbed like a cold diesel engine so my stomach had assumed the role of chief victim. I decided to punish it some more. The rugby ground had once been the pulse, heart and, yes, the strained bowels of the place. I went there. A few cars in front of the clubhouse. The only faces I knew were on the walls, in black and white rows. I was amongst them. So were Tommy and Lionel. The bar had fizzy lager and frothy beer. I had a pint of Guinness and took it outside to the field. A steep concrete stand with plastic flip-up seats on one side, an open-sided shed over the stepped terraces opposite, two posts and a field. A visual cliché, of course. But what turned the truism into its own heart-stopping truth was the setting. From the stand you could take it all in at once, and behind the shed were the street-lined slopes of a town with more guts than sense and more passion in its life than almost anywhere else I’d ever been. Urbane it was not. But it summed up urban as a smack in the mouth to any country boy. Directly to the north the hills opened up to the higher mountains courtesy of a gap so narrow they almost folded over, one into the other. And every few minutes a train measured the distances in-between consecutive townships with that regularity of unstoppable motion which such places had once assumed as their rightful destiny. Only, the motivation to match the punctuality had been mislaid. It was all wound down.

  On the field I saw ghosts. On the terraces I glimpsed shadows. My ears boomed with the bass rumble of crowd noise, the smack of boots on ball, the slap or even crack of hands and fists on faces and legs. The stout I was sipping was as black and icy-cold as my soul felt. I didn’t have a matching heart anymore. Mal was right: what the hell did I care? What the hell did I want, coming back like this? Or maybe just what the hell? I needed another pint. My stomach stopped complaining so we went together in search of another afternoon of induced quiescence.

  I did the damage in a quiet corner of the upstairs bar of a workingmen’s club that had somehow survived into the new century. There was no one to bother me as I read the newspapers accumulated on the speckled yellow, blue and red formica tables. Formica had been posh, the latest trend when I was growing up. That and green leatherette banquettes. They still had those too, and they still had the Ronettes on the jukebox. Nobody tried to talk to me. Perhaps I wasn’t looking too nice and tidy. All these “ettes” had not extended here to baguettes. I ate a ham roll to see if the bread was still like pap and the meat like a rolled-out slick of piggy plastic. Tasted good to me. I had another to try to fool the alcohol. No fooling. I walked to where the river had once encircled the town’s early ironworks and the covered-in canal had once sent the barges to the sea.

  At the old Iron Bridge I took in, as if for the first time, that unity of hills and river which the makers of this town had managed to disassemble with every unplanned decision they had ever taken. The late afternoon light was being pin- pricked by car headlamps. Spring was not yet sprung. Me, I was springy as a newborn lamb to the slaughter. I hoped my last intended watering hole would not have been dried up by the dessication of fashion and youth. I needn’t have worried. The squat stone drinking den was intact and, though spotlessly clean and daily swabbed, its interior was as it had looked for half a century. No music. No distractions, and an outside urinal whose basic floor and lime-washed walls would have made a Frenchman blush.

  I sat on a wooden chair at a polished wood-and-iron rectangular table which was set beneath a mirror proclaiming Dewar’s whisky, and with the insignia VR. I don’t think the old girl had ever made it here. It had been a second home to my old man. I stayed as the lights went on against the fading afternoon, and silent drinkers drifted in and out. The rain was spattering against the windows again. It was drumming inside me, too, a persistent beat of melancholy and uncertainty which the booze had only helped dig deeper. When the barmaid began to give me a wondering glance just once too often for me to be misguided enough to consider it as admiration, I decided to move.

  I saw them at the pub’s corner, idling in the gloom, as I walked past them, but I only sensed their threat an instant before I felt the first blow to the head. Something wooden and weighty had opened up my skull. Baseball bats were far too universal these days. I went down into a loose slurry of small stones and gravel besides a row of empty steel barrels. I reached for the lip of one of them to get to my knees, but I never made it. A steel-capped boot to my arse took me down hard and another pain of sorts drove into my ribs and beat a tattoo on either side with a drum roll follow-up to the head. I was being worked over by boys who knew an established routine and didn’t deviate from it and didn’t care about leaving a mark and the occasional fracture or broken bone. I vomited the day’s pleasure onto a boot and was rewarded for my thoughtfulness with another kicking. The drink had been a temporary anaesthetic but the pain that surged through me was like shards of bone splintering and tearing into flesh. Those were my bones. That was my flesh. My eyes felt as if they were popping inside out and burning up like funeral pyres. Only my ears still seemed attuned to whatever my body was about to leave behind. And they heard a different kind of noise to the rhythm of boots. A shout. A voice. One I knew. Insistent and quiet as it delivered its own message to Maldwyn’s messengers:

  “That’s enough. Leave him be. Fuck off. Go on. Now, I said.”

  Tommy.
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  * * * * *

  Two

  His Old Man Said

  His old man said that “Sweet Dreams” was a lie fed to children. So he was brought up on memories. Sometimes the old man would call them history. Most of it wasn’t in any book. Daydreams, he would say, were the narcolepsy of those who drifted through lives too feeble for roots. He taught all this, sourly and as best he could, in and out of classrooms. It was his wisdom, from his experience. Only it didn’t connect. And when it did, when a generation appeared to come awake, and finally act, then he was curtly dismissive, in ways that could be both incomprehensible and hurtful.

  * * * * *

  His old man understood the eager impulse to act. To understand was not to approve. He said it was self-indulgence. He called it social gratification. He thought it was a political wank. He’d say that ignominy was seeking refuge in ignorance. He talked like that. It made it all the harder to pay him any attention any longer. When he was not angry he seemed almost sorry for it all, that it had come to this thrashing about, the lies of rhetoric fuelling the necessary expression of bravery. The way he talked was the way he thought.

  * * * * *

  His old man would nonetheless turn out of bed with him in the murk of a wintry dawn as the strike’s buzzsaw activity lengthened. They would join small nodes of men gathering into guerrilla squads to trudge over mountain roads into other valleys to bypass police blockades, and swoop to picket and push and shove. The old man would begin to argue that to compromise was not to surrender, only to be told to shut the fuck up. Billy would move away from him, using his camera as an excuse, using its viewfinder to find faces, locate gestures, swim amongst the sea of expectation that swirled around platforms of oratory where Scargill eerily referred to himself in the third person, and to them as if their individual lives had been melded together with his. Perhaps, finally, they had. Images began to define events. But not, ever, for the old man.

  * * * * *

  His old man cadged a lift to Paynter’s funeral in Golders Green just before the bone chilling cold Christmas of that year. Billy walked with him. At seventy, the old man was stooping a bit now. They walked through a dank late-morning gloom, past incongruous evergreens and dripping shrubbery, towards the crematorium. The old man had nodded to those he knew, acquaintances and former students, comrades he would have said once, all come to acknowledge the deceased eighty-year-old who had once had his teeth smashed out in police cells, couriered Russian gold through Nazi Germany, served as a political commissar in Spain, saw people killed there by decree, maybe even approved of it, and later through various modes of compromise led his union tightly and well. Billy had seen him once, in his retirement, shoulder to shoulder with the old man. Same height, short, and his breadth wide, and his temperament stubborn. Billy had photographed them, never seeing hero-worship in the old man’s eyes before. The camera failed to capture it.

  * * * * *

  His old man had winced and drifted when Billy stood off the path to snap the bareheaded, dark-suited men who walked up in clusters. Some old timers. Officials, of a later time and ilk. Like a family that was cold shouldering itself. Scargill at the centre of a bristling group. Greeted and shunned. Billy clicked. The old man was one of those to be called to speak. The president would have to listen, standing at the back. The old man had been measured about the life, but icy as to its meaning. When the old man mentioned 1926 it was not a banner to be waved but a shiver to be suffered. Resilience was always limited, he said. A union was not to be tested to destruction, he said. There was never one last punch to deliver. The president was grim and scornful but the family quarrel was open from then on.

  * * * * *

  His old man had predicted the way sense would finally be seen. He refused to give Ceri any credit for seeing it. For him that particular recanting had come too late and was as calculated, if self-interest allied to emotion was any kind of forethought, as the earlier embrace of madcap confrontation. For Ceri, he felt, this was yet another tack towards a career of contrariness, of the forthright that was a masquerade, of a transparency that was draped in shrouds of meaninglessness. It was an emptiness, a vacuum, filled only by an estimation of himself in which his own time had betrayed him despite his own best efforts. The old man said this was not, strictly speaking, the opportunism of a careerist; it was more the retreat of an integrity that could not be sustained in individuals when collective aspirations dwindled. There was less and less to be representative about more and more of the time.

  * * * * *

  His old man was big on generations. Billy’s was to be forgiven for its callowness. No choice there. But despised for its parasitical identification with others who would be made mere ciphers in the subsequent drive to harvest their experience. Utilisation masked as youthful altruism. The patterns could be seen even then. Gwilym, the railwayman’s boy, a PhD underway, one envious eye on Bran, already lecturing, available for blithe comment on TV and radio on “Our People’s History”. The old man spat at that. Maldwyn, electronics and engineering a genetic inheritance from a colliery electrician father, convinced and convincing that communications technology could democratise everything. Advising Ceri on the logistics of maps, communications and picketing raids. Bran already subbing for newspapers, readily welcomed into inner circles for her evident sympathy as much as her good looks, soon receiving exclusives and scoops and contacts denied others, and parlayed into TV pieces to camera. Billy, with his camera never out of his hand now, exhausted by the pace of things and the unrelenting tirades of his old man.

  * * * * *

  His old man had never liked cameras. Or so he said. He certainly never owned one, or borrowed one, or used one. He bought one for Billy when the boy was sixteen, out of an act of misplaced generosity, as he wrote on the card. Not so much a card, more a page torn from his sketch pad with a contrite fatherly face drawn in by the same hand which had endlessly drawn Billy’s mother. The sketches lay in a drawer, not forgotten but not looked at either. Billy preferred the few snapshots and the couple of studio portraits taken of her as a schoolgirl, looking demure and solemn. She smiled in the curling, fading snaps. At a desk, mussing up her pigtails, in a ruched costume by the sea, a face at the back in a garden, at the front on a protest march. His old man was in that one too. But his old man never took any photographs of the woman who had died giving birth to his son.

  * * * * *

  His old man said photographs were false prompts. They made the memory stutter out one instant which blocked all others. These were the fixed images which surfaced to hint at but not reveal the depth of a life. His son hated him for claiming to know all that. For Billy there were only such images of her, and they were few. They kept no family albums, no shrunken memorials. The old man pointed out that those keepsakes only captured what was meant to be happy or celebratory so, in their want of the ineffable melancholy of life, they betrayed twice over. For being what they were and for only showing the need of the perpetrator. The soul of the captured was never made captive. It only lived on in the mind. In memory.

  * * * * *

  His old man favoured painting when it probed the relationship of culture to nature. The camera could document and catalogue but its transposition always threatened to be the residual sentiment of nostalgia. When Billy grew old enough to argue he would counter with the works of the great mid-century masters. Magazines and books yielded their fruit to the boy and the old man had to agree that their cut-outs of wars and streets and industrial grind and resistance to it evaded the glib and the condescending. But he still insisted it was the subject that gave the work its substance, not what they had done with it. It was, he’d say, as if only the emotional spasm Bevan had once ridiculed had been revealed, but not the intellectual star-tapping which the Tredegar dreamer had wanted for us.

  * * * * *

  His old man said that the nouns “artist” and “poseur” were synonyms. Both paradoxically concerned with removing the self in the very act of observat
ion only to show how self-consciously it had been done. For him the vantage and the viewed were inseparable. His riff was that all life was memory even as it was experienced, there and instantly gone, so that we forever lived in the past, even as it left us. We lived on by imagining that past which was the future we yearned to remember. The dream of life was aspiration. Its nightmare was memorialisation. We trapped ourselves in the techno-present by the cloying memento mori that was the falsification that photography bought. Memory, which was History, was a jumble of relationships to be savoured, not a grid of relatives to be connected.

  * * * * *

  His old man fed the boy scraps about his past as if he was a hungry and insistent dog. Bit by bit. A piece at a time. His mother’s grandparents built up the picture of their daughter for him, but it came as coloured shards of a sacred window, so that he glimpsed the child and schoolgirl and trainee teacher only through their blinded eyes. “Good people,” his old man would say when Billy came back from visits there, to his own more pared-down home life, set amidst the old man’s canvases, brushes, easels and the lingering smell of gooey oils. They had died, young, in their sixties, the one after the other as if arranged. Billy grieved, just like a dog. And asked more about what he didn’t know, his teenager feistiness setting up confrontations which the old man diverted with trivia whenever he could.

  * * * * *

  His old man explained his own being alone in this way. He said his mother had tied him to a high chair when he was barely three years old and fed him, and then walked away. He was in a scullery kitchen. It must have been evening because it was next day that he had been found, his wrists chafed red, tear-streaked and piss-smelly with shit squashed beneath him on the chair seat. He had been given to a relative, his mother’s older sister, to bring up and never saw his mother again. His given name was David. Maddox had been her maiden name. She had been a maid, the old man said. In a big house. It was just after the first Great War. She was unmarried. The old man said he didn’t know, for certain, who his father was and that, anyway, at the time of his abandonment the man was dead.