Dream On

by Dai Smith

  Three

  Double Negative

  MONDAY

  Tommy told me I’d slept. On and off. For almost three days. That Lionel had remembered how he’d once been a St John’s Ambulanceman – a uniform, a peak cap and International tickets – and had strapped up my ribs. Only thing to do for them, apparently. They’d used Dettol to clean out the cuts. All they had in the house. I’d screamed. And cotton bud tips to swab out my broken nose. They used a lot of those. Tommy didn’t like to have wax in his ears. They stayed cleaned. The nose had to stay broken. But that wasn’t the first time it had been flattened, they laughed. Then they’d washed me, stuffed me into pyjamas. Old-fashioned wincyette. The jacket had big white buttons and the trousers a drawstring like a small rope. Blue convict stripes all over. Baggy but comfy, said Lionel. They had rammed aspirin down me and later, Tommy said, with a wink, what he called “specials”. Painkillers. I told Tommy killers weren’t what they used to be. Tommy told me to shut up and be grateful. Then they left for work.

  I lay back on an ivory-coloured leather couch with wrinkles as big and rifted as the elephant hide it resembled. They said that after they found and rescued me they’d carried me here. Tommy’s house. They told me it wasn’t far and they were strong. So not to worry. I hadn’t. I didn’t. It was now mid-morning, according to the alarm clock ticking away with no respect for its surroundings. It sat on a shiny mahogany-laminate mantelpiece above a stone-façade fireplace, all dimpled surface and in coloured pastels, baby blue to blusher pink with a predominantly woozy pearl grey. Or maybe it was just me that was woozy. The room was a knock-through from front door and white PVC window to artexed walls and ceiling and Goldilocks pine table and chairs, and a scullery that had grown into a kitchenette. It was functionally modernised with dishwasher, humming fridge and ceramic sink in white with chrome mixer taps. The framed pictures on the wall were photographs of rugby players – team photographs season by season, the rows stood behind one another, with the front tier sat on a bench as the club’s whole squad assembled pre- or post-season. I was in one or two of those, a sliver between the two behemoths who were my minders. I was duly grateful. Then and now. Above the clock and the mantelpiece was an enlarged portrait, tinted and soft-focussed head and shoulders of a woman with big, frizzy chestnut brown hair, a scatter of freckles, a shy smile made warmer by eyes that looked right at you, and the neckline of a 1970s cheesecloth peasant blouse with teasing drawstring. Norma. Nice Norma. Dead Norma. Tommy’s wife.

  I swung my feet off the elephant hide onto a wall-to-wall, off-white shagpile that had seen better action, and more days than it should have. From a sitting position I could see the fronts of houses above their stepped gardens. When I stood up I could see the pavement, road and river which ran past the house set in its terraced row. I knew where I was. A few hundred yards down from the car park where I’d been smashed up. If I squinted I could see the blackened plates and rivets of the iron footbridge over the river, and the adjacent modern road crossing. Modern being only a century and more away. I sat down again with a necessary suddenness. My head was expanding and contracting like a Tango player’s bandoneón. A concertina would have been acceptable. I felt my face, all bristle and grunge. They hadn’t bothered to shave me. Understandable. I fingered the broad part of my nose between index and thumb. Yeah, broader than I remembered it. And sorer too. My mouth tasted of fur and bile, clogged up and clingy at the same time. I decided to go back to sleep. It was an easy decision to make.

  When I woke next it was to the chimes of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. The yippee-ay-yey bit. Only electronic and insistent, so I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I could see a small shape on the other side of the frosted glass of the front door. The bell stopped but the image still shimmered through the double-glazed distortion. I was in no mood for apparitions. Particularly not bell-pushing ones. I stumbled across the shagpile towards the door and fiddled with the lock and catch before wrenching it open into the shimmer of a drizzly afternoon. The figure in the doorway tilted her head in a mock-quizzical way. She asked if she could come in. To see how I was. As if she couldn’t see that already. I held the door ajar and she stepped inside in front of me. I staggered back to the elephant’s graveyard and slumped back down. Bran smiled as I looked up at her.

  She had had her hair done so that it framed and softened her face and belled out in a thickly-cut sway above her neck. She didn’t sit down so I looked up from her feet, in black and red peep-toe court shoes with a higher heel than you’d expect, to her knees – one bigger than the other I knew – just on show below a short, wheaten-white, belted wool coat that looked, from its sheen to the detail of collars and cuffs, expensive.

  “D’you still like what you see?”

  I tried not to grunt and not to think of the strawberry birthmark on the left cheek of her arse. She loosened the belt and took the coat off, folded it on a chair. I shuffled a bit on the Babar couch, partly to ease my pain. I sighed. Not this, I thought. Yes, this, I hoped.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Chance. Or, sort of chance. I needed some work doing. I rang Tommy. Usually do. He told me you were here. What had happened. I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “You look terrible.”

  “Feel it.”

  “Can I do something? Shave? Wash? Toothpaste? Coffee?”

  “Can’t think of a thing I need,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  I employed the silent trick technique I had perfected in the days when I had once been as intent on pleasuring as on being pleasured. To avoid Rise, Decline, and inevitable Fall, I closed my eyes and Conjugated.

  Amo. And meant it.

  Amas. And once you did.

  Amat. He may still.

  Amamus. We were once anyway.

  Amatis. Anyone you wanted.

  Amant. Our present. From a Past. Without a Future.

  And then the whole imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect knowledge.

  Amabam, amabas, amabat, amabamus, amabatis, amabant.

  Amavi, amavisti, amavit, amavimus, amavistis and amaverunt.

  Amaveram, amaveras, amaverat, amaveramus, amaveratis, until amaverant.

  I opened my eyes. She was still there. I knew she knew no Latin but, as ever, Bran was in no hurry. She decided we needed coffee and she needed a visit to the bathroom while the kettle boiled. She could see the kettle and the coffee in the kitchen and walked in to switch it on, but she didn’t need to ask where the bathroom was. She went straight upstairs on the internal wooden staircase to my left. I watched her come back down in a cloud of certainty. I would not be hers to use again. The coffee came in white porcelain mugs covered with the blue of a forget-me-not pattern courtesy of the National Trust. Or so it said on the bottom. That Tommy never failed to surprise.

  “Instant OK?” she asked.

  Too late now, I thought, as I sipped the scalding hot gravy mix spooned from the industrial size instant coffee tin that was more in keeping with Tommy the builder than the mugs someone had bought for him, but I said:

  “Yeah – fine. So, tell me again, what brings you here?”

  She gave me a smile so coy she must have employed it last in nursery school.

  “I’d have thought that it was obvious. No?”

  “No,” I whispered back.

  “No” sounded a bit ungrateful, but I was compensating for broken ribs with my new monosyllabic personality. She sucked on her lower lip. That was awful pretty to see. I stirred again but this time, fat chance anyway, refused to be shaken. And my faithless companion was much reduced, and nubby anyway. Age, I guessed.

  “What did Tommy tell you?” was my only follow-up now.

  “What I told you … that he … and Lionel … found you. Being kicked. Rescued you. Brought you here to get better.”

  “How’d he know where I’d be?”

  “Sorry?”

  “No. I am. Tommy’s OK. He’s just not smart, is he?”

  Bran c
rossed and uncrossed her legs. It wasn’t meant to be distracting; it was just a reflex. I tried not to be distracted. My reflexes failed. Old nubby uncoiled a little but I needed to stay coiled. And to remember.

  “Bran,” I wheedled, uncertain what the dictionary said “to wheedle” meant, but effortlessly capable of it. “Look, whatever mess you’re in with Mal, let him bounce, not you. Haf may …”

  The name of her daughter altered the rules of engagement. She broke them off, let’s say.

  “Haf? What’s that bitch been telling you? Leave her to her own devices, Billy. Leave her be.”

  It was my turn to let steel pendulums swing and splice.

  “Leave her be? You let her go. Not me. You didn’t even tell me about her. When she was born. That she might be mine. Or, yet, how to find her. Why not, Bran? Why the fuck not?”

  Bran leaned forward. Her voice was the whiplash itself now. I heard it cut me before I felt it.

  “You want to know. You want to know. OK, you sappy bastard. You can know. I front, work for, I am!, ECA – EuroCymruAssociates – and we, I, lead on institutional bids for Euro initiatives – cash and projects, schemes and funding outcomes. Consultancy. Expertise. Advice. OK? Because the money has to be channelled. From Brussels. They don’t just give it away. Well not quite. There’s an audit, business plans, bids, and, crucially, match funding. So, that means finessing the time of an organisation’s staff – at premium rates – and its established assets, everything from buildings to porters to electricity and IT and onto the notepaper and biros – to ratchet up what can be turned into those particular lines in business plans that say “in kind”. Then, if we can, matched in cash from other sources. From government. From business. Keeping up? A trust, one with a worked out agenda in economic regeneration and social well-being like Tir Werin, and connected to movers and shakers, is not just ideally placed. It is the place, the virtual place.”

  She paused. None of this was exactly news. Nor was what she was presumably going to say next about to indicate any suit for possible malfeasance. Check out my legal know-how, I wanted to crow. But this was leading somewhere else so I stayed quiet. And continued to ache as her sweetness disappeared and she poured the old Bran vinegar into the wound she could always open.

  “Yeah, OK. I see you can guess all the moves, but, believe me, the outcome is one to leave alone. The moves … well, you know those; Mal had made a pile, dot com and all that. And he diversified. But not enough, as it happened. So he took out insurance, buying up land across the heads of the valleys. Cheap. Useless land. No good for local homes or for commuters to travel to work elsewhere, or for factory sheds and inward investors. Good for schemes, though. He persuaded the powers-that-be to establish a Research Park. He invested in it. Of course he made himself the chairman of the board, and had Gwil, dear, sweet, shitty Gwil, appointed as Director. With my contacts and Ceri’s profile, we promoted Tir Werin in Europe as a practical vehicle to make real the ideas and schemes dreamed up in the Alfred Wallace Building. Neat name, huh? Mal geared Gwilym up to write the business plan for a major regeneration centre, with social benefits and visitor offshoots. Feasibility studies. Project money. Grant aid and start-up money, to purchase the necessary land. Now, soon, take-off money. Follow?”

  I nodded. Bran said nothing. So I did the follow on myself.

  “Only the stuff I’ve seen kind of suggests the money went round and round, so to speak. From Brussels to the government to Tir Werin, to Valleyscorp, so to you, and Mal? and I’d guess to Ceri. Our old friend and comrade, Sir Ceri Evans.”

  Bran flicked me a smile. I threw another stick on the fire dying between us.

  “Suggest, you say. Doesn’t prove anything, does it?” she countered.

  “Not yet, no. I’ll want to talk to Haf, won’t I?” Was that a threat? She seemed to take it as such. She was right to do so. But then she surprised again.

  Bran stood. She picked up a soft leather handbag that didn’t gleam and was studded with dull bronze metal clasps and non-functional straps. She opened the clasp that was like an antique key and reached inside the bag for a shiny, black fountain pen with a snow cone on top. Nothing cheap for Bran. She unscrewed it, found a scrap of paper and scribbled quickly. She stood directly above me and crumpled it into a ball. She dropped it in my lap. An address, of a kind, for Haf. She said:

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t go on. I don’t like what happened to you, Billy. I wanted to make it up to you. No-go, it seems. Contacting her will do you no good either. But if you insist, go ahead. Maybe you can talk some sense into her after all. Remember she’ll lose out, too. Think of that, eh?”

  She turned, and then she turned back. I knew it was never going to be that easy.

  “You said you wanted to know, didn’t you? So, I’ll tell you. She thought you were – that you ought to be – her daddy, so when I told her you weren’t, she went with Mal. Her stepfather. And ruined our marriage, for what it was worth. Ended it anyway. Since then she’s just gone on making trouble and the latest is to have revenge – on him and on me – by spreading these lies. Which will only re-bound on her, the idiot. Or half-lies, if you like. Where the fuck does she think the money for her comes from? It’ll do no good. Mal is having her legally removed from Valleyscorp – incompetence, drugs, whatever it takes. Unless you can persuade her not to hold things up, to get in the way of things she doesn’t understand. Oh, and one more thing … you’re really not the daddy. Honest. Cross my heart. Hope to die.”

  And she let herself out. She left behind the smell of musk and a citric aftershock. And I felt, as I always did with Bran, that none of this should have been this way. And that I was not a fool to want it different, only one to think it had ever been possible.

  * * * * *

  I skipped the shower because of the bandages, and settled for a shave and a shampoo. I cleaned my teeth with my fingers and a pink-striped toothpaste. I found a T-shirt with the least naff print transfer in the quietest colour – army drab – some jeans and deck shoes and a pair of matching white socks and a red and yellow pullover that looked like a dog had revisited his dinner. Apart from my jacket, thoughtfully brushed but still stained with blood and dirt, my own clothes were nowhere to be seen, either torn and useless or washed. I guessed the former. My wallet was on the kitchen table and money and cards were still inside. I expected nothing less. These boys might have been rough, but they weren’t muggers. I didn’t bother with the thank-you note. I left by the door I assumed I had entered a few days before.

  A small rain was falling. Not enough to soak you unless you walked through it for hours. That wasn’t my intention as I winced over some broken paving stones back into the town, but enough for its prickly damp to blur the vista. Moving forward somehow eased the pain in my ribs, though I still had to stop to lean on a garden wall or two. My breathing was all of the outward kind, a desperate wheeze followed by a short hissing intake. I was beginning to sound like my old man. Probably looking like him too. The whole effect attracted a few glances. Not admiring ones. And not especially friendly or even concerned ones. Maybe they thought I carried a threat. From the outside. They’d be familiar with that. The more I saw on the streets, I was starting to think, the less I knew. If I wasn’t who I looked and sounded like, then who was? I heaved myself up off a low wall and left the side street. Public transport was fine by me, for all those other people. I needed a taxi. I stopped at a bus shelter to ask where I could find one. Right across the road, they said and pointed.

  A waiting driver flipped his lit cigarette out of his window, gently oscillating as he did the “Dim Ysmygu” sign hanging from his rear mirror.

  “Where to, butty?”

  The name on the scrap of paper which Bran had tossed me said Heritage Centre so I said it, too, and we took off. It took less than ten minutes to navigate out of the circular road system, hit the old road east, sweep past the long straggle of what the guidebooks and estate agents so emphatically called “Miners’ Cottages”, a
nd through the main gates of what had once been a working colliery. I paid. The taxi left, its socially considerate driver only lighting up as he pulled away. I stood in a tarmac-laid car park that was neatly marked out in bays, and looked at the glass front they had erected as a curtain across the dressed quarry stone in order to mark out a modern entrance to the winding house. Inside was a shop area littered with furry red dragons, giant glitter pencils, and tiny coal maquette sculptures of colliers, their wives and street ragamuffins. The entrance opened up further into a mock-up of shops, a coal-lit kitchen with Mam, her wire hair in a bun, larger than life and deader than the flanking models of the mufflered collier and the leaping-into-his-arms child. I averted my sensitive eyes. The only thing that was welcoming was the Croeso sign and the silence that truly meant No Visitors. The assistant at the shop’s counter hadn’t looked up from the receipts she was checking from all the profits the Centre was making in glinting paraphernalia. Everything else appeared to be free.