by Dai Smith
I walked up the open metal staircase to the first floor. Tables, chairs, coffee, Welsh cakes. And, unexpected by me, a pitch-roofed gallery space. More sentiment I guessed, and so only half-glanced at the walls. That stopped all the assumptions I was making right there and then. I opened my eyes and began to look. Maybe that’s when my heart opened again, too. Or maybe that was later. Either way it wasn’t shutting down now.
There were five or six canvases and a few drawings from each of the five painters on show. The work was certainly singular in each individual style but it hung together, more like a collective emotion than a group. I felt the need of the old man’s guidance for detail but its overall glow washed over me in any case at the fag end of a sodden afternoon, with only the unforgiving glare of the overhead panels of electric light to pick out colour that was insistent but mostly muted. There were no eyeball-teasing globs of colour erupting off board and canvas in great tears of flaking pigment. And though there were entrancing and painterly marriages of acid green and frothy underskirt pink and gritty ochre to quiz comic book blues and reds, this work, as a totality, was not about sensing delight, it was a structure. It was a scaffolding, one erected to climb towards an idea. The work was a counterclaim against what had been stolen, what had been hidden away, or mislaid, or forgotten, or neglected and abused. They had painted the structure of lives. How it felt. How it was. How it should have been understood. How it could be. How, whatever the contrary outcome, it still mattered.
It had been seen, then. The structure of that culture which I, too, had once had inside me, and held and let fall. It had been seen, here, variously, and transfigured into something it was not other than as a vision that was as unmistakeably real as it had once been actual. This was, I could see, what, and maybe only this of it, could be taken forward. In all this work there was not a trace of the identikit Valleys, stereotyped and drooled over in words and images by force of their once eccentric particulars and through a vestige of falsely heroic narratives. In these native hands these places and people had been disassembled, and put back together.
The last section of one wall of work held me longest. It seemed attuned to a future. The painting technique was looser in execution, enormous canvases filled with brushstrokes that owed their liquidity to the reckless arm more than the dab of a controlling hand. The customary framework of a familiar landscape was intact. A look down from the mountain plateau back into the rash of buildings below. Homes slotted in clumps, and rearing public houses on perpendicularly set street corners. The legacy was there still to view, and to live in, albeit unusually caught, as if in sun traps. But it was the bodies that were so different. They did not stand or sit as if defined. They jumped and raced and swung each other around and somersaulted on trampolines in a riot of upside-down mobility. Limbs were muscle taut beneath short-sleeved shirts. Or calves and legs, brown and liquescent, were running free of flying skirts. The painter moved in and through his mobile subject-matter, refusing the viewer the luxury of seeing anything as settled. If the past was a place that made the present a prison for the mind then this blotchy capture of living was a signal for release. In the light of the exhibition I sensed all my old man’s early courage more than his late resignation.
* * * * *
It was dark, a crespuscular enfolding light, when I finally left that gallery. I asked downstairs when Haf would be coming into work since there was no sign of her anywhere there that afternoon. No one had even heard of her. But they were helpful. The senior manager was called. She was young, pretty and smiled a lot. She was helpful, too. I smiled to help her helpfulness along. I wasn’t young though, and a second glance hadn’t impressed her. She frowned and asked to see my scrap of paper. Just Haf and Heritage Centre was what it said, scrawled in Bran’s near illegible sloping hand in black ink. Mont Blanc ink. And pen to match, I’d noticed. The manager now came all over dismissive. She tapped the paper with a false plum-coloured nail. Maybe, she said, it wasn’t the museum and gallery but the hotel just up the road. I was duly dismissed.
The hotel was an unexpected take, in red colonial brick and white stone pediments, on an American cross between a motel-lodge and a small hotel. Its automatic doors slid open to let in the passing, weary commercial traveller, or more likely wedding guests as I sleuthily surmised by the reception rooms and banquetry suites on offer, their insides a glimpse of silver and gilt carved chairs, with green or purple crush seats, all set before long white-linen-draped tables. I asked for Haf at the main reception desk and was, without a query though maybe a once-over of my drawn face and downmarket clothes, courtesy of Lionel, told she was working her shift behind the bar.
The bar room was more wood: upright struts as in a cowboy movie to partition sections, and the black beams of a false plasterboard ceiling as in a Pickwickian tavern. The bar had brass rails at its foot and ran across the entire length of the room. The muzak was treacly Kenny Rogers or entreatingly twangy Tammy Wynette. The girl behind the bar was pressing a nozzle to deliver flat-topped pints of urine-coloured liquid. Four silent customers sat together, waiting at a centre table which was covered with paperwork and by four mobile phones that the group had ejaculated in front of them in premature expectation of a call to bring them to life. No chance of that, I thought. I stepped a few paces further into the room. I looked across the patterned expanse of swirling brown and orange carpet at the young woman who had called me daddy from across the Atlantic. I stared. It took me a while. She was busy serving and washing glasses. She didn’t look up in my direction. From the tables on the outer rim of the room, and a step up behind the railing of uprights, there was the beginning of the buzz of early evening, post-work drinkers. Local government officers, some business people, the newly retired, a collar-and-tie brigade that would have discouraged your Tommys and Lionels from entering as much as the chemical sniff coming off pints of filtered and resurrected lager would have disgusted them. An aftersmell of lunchtime’s industrial vinegar combined with the dead pasteurised beer to hang over the atmosphere as a formaldehyde gag. I could have done with the devil-may-care rapture of tobacco smoke to remind me that death usually came after life. The cigarette smokers were in the purgatory for exiled puffers outside the main lobby. I chose a table at the back near the door and further from the bar. There was waitress service if you waited long enough. I was happy to wait. I inhaled the forlorn cinema-goer’s memory of Jeyes cleaning fluid that came my way every time the toilet door opened and closed. I was beaten-up, tired, emotional, and sober for once. What more could you want? I was beginning to wonder. A wine list, perhaps.
When my turn came I asked for a glass of red wine, anything I said that had never been in contact with Antipodean soil or been inside the staves of an oak barrel. I made myself understood by simplifying it to “Nothing from Australia”. Customer service was delivered – to an extent. The wine came in a glass that could have doubled as a small bucket. I tasted more pampas than eucalyptus. A malbec to put a twist in a gaucho’s boleros. I decided sipping would be an effete pastime with this drink, so I just drank. I ordered another, with peanuts on the side. The waitress seemed to approve of this as a gesture to the normality of the local culture. An hour or so passed. The bar was fuller, but still appeared empty as if it was waiting for the Cattlemen’s Convention to roll up. I kept the bar and its attendant in my sight. It was early evening when Haf was relieved. She checked out her till. I checked her out as she said her goodbyes and exited via the servants’ quarters. At least I presumed that’s what the door at the side of the bar was. I followed as discreetly as I could, and into the car park behind the hotel. She walked over to a dented Renault with red trim and the puckered look of a veteran boxer, and the name of a Muse. I moved a hundred yards behind her as she searched in her pocket. The rain was back but softer now. It made water droplets glisten in her black hair. The hair was jagged, off her neck, and spiky on top, fuller on the side, an ugly frame that still couldn’t spoil her face, though one that seemed more fatigue
d than her age deserved. She wore jeans and a shapeless red puffa jacket and she cursed as she scrabbled for the car keys. I moved closer. She turned the keys in the lock and opened the door and looked up to see me at the passenger side. I was afraid I might startle her but she said “Hello” even before I did, and told me to get in. So I did the same. She ran her fingers briskly through her hair to shake out the drops that had clung to the thick, short strands. She gave me a long enquiring look. I seemed to be attracting a lot of those lately. She saw my bruised face and my puffy eyes, and said nothing But I was not being dismissed. What I saw was how lovely she was. More Bran than me. I stayed silent. Her mouth was turned down at its corners. More me than Bran. I wanted to hold her, to kiss that pursed mouth’s hurt away and tell her I was sorry. She could see that anyway, and I was no longer being thoughtfully silent, just struck dumb. She fired up the damp cold car at the third attempt and we jerked out of the car park onto the empty road to the south.
I asked where we were going. She said, “Home”, as if she meant it. I was all for that belief. Besides it wasn’t far, a few miles back and on through the town, then a backstreet tour of brick-trimmed homes which were evidently, from the rubbish outside and the old bangers parked up on the kerbs, student accommodation. Owned by Maldwyn no doubt. There was no number on the house. There was a white cheap wood-panel partitioned door with peeling varnish and a flaking gold-coloured knocker. The curtains of the one ground-floor window were thin and brown and floral, and pulled together like a geriatric’s stained lips. The passageway was littered with unopened bills, flyers for takeaways and free newspapers. We walked past the doors to all the downstairs rooms, and up the stairs past a kitchen area which was sending a reek of cooking oil through the house. There was a landing to the right, and at its far end the locked door of what had once been the front bedroom of three-up three-down working-class respectability. There was a Yale lock which Haf snapped open with another key on her car ring. And we were in.
It was not what I had expected. There was a colour scheme – deep blue walls, a stripped and waxed pine floor, a rug with a geometric red and black zigzag pattern within a cream border, a dark grey woolly sofa with Scandinavian rectilinear understatement in front of the two sash windows. The wood was painted white, the floor-length curtains heavy calico and lined, but somehow light bearing even before she turned on the two yellow floor lamps, and the one on a cubbyhole desk in the left corner. A simple bed, white coverlet and blood-orange scatter cushions in a knobbly silk material, was butted up against the same back wall. She took my coat and draped it on the bed alongside her own. She took a black angora sweater out of a wall cupboard and put it on over her white linen shirt. There was no chair so she waved to the low Swedish sofa. I sat and she stood, quizzically in front of me, the third wall behind her. There were no books. No television. No racks of CDs, DVDs or whatever other disc storage system had come to pass. A laptop and printer and all the gubbins was the exception to the rule on the desk. On the wall were photographs. Some copied. Some blown up. Some from magazines and newspapers. Some small and original. All of them mine. She saw me looking at them, taking it all in. Or some of it.
When she finally spoke the voice was low. Quiet. Every Welsh-accented syllable like the ding of an alarm clock’s bell. “Well, what did you expect?” she said. “I’ve been living with you, for years, one way or the other, haven’t I? And now you’re here. At last. I knew you would be, you know.”
I retreated into small talk. How long had she been living here? A year or so. Was the kitchen shared? Yes. Two boys downstairs. Bathroom and lavatory. One up, one down. It was OK. Did I want coffee? She wouldn’t be long. I stood up and looked at the pictures. That one with a Leica. That with a Rolleiflex 2¼ inch that had survived a dunking in a south-east Asian river. That one in a bright sunlight which had made the shadows elongate like dark accusers. This one worked and cropped from years before. These done as quickly as they had had to be. My eyeballing life laid out and reduced to a wall-poster display. I looked away.
The coffee arrived in thick, plain white china mugs. No sugar as requested. We stood, awkwardly, my back turned as hers had been to the wall of memories. I was waiting for her to begin. It was unfair, but whatever had brought me here was her doing and only Haf could make this happen now. So she did.
“You were good,” she said.
And I laughed: “Was, is right!”
“Time to be good again, maybe,” she said.
“Time has to come with a chance to be good,” I said.
“But that’s what’s brought you here, isn’t it?”, she said.
“I don’t know yet, Haf. I don’t know what you think can be done or should be done.”
“You said my name,” she said.
She sat down. I sat beside her. And Haf told me her story. She already knew mine. Or thought she did. When she finished talking the coffee was cold and my heart was colder. She picked up the two mugs and stood above me as I muttered something that had words about me and sorrow stitched into their hopeless apology. I had learned some things I’d be better off not knowing and some I couldn’t forget. She was more stone than flower. It was all over and not finished. Not by any means.
She looked at me as if she meant it and spoke the sentence that I knew I had to hear.
“Do you want to fuck me, too?”
TUESDAY
The signs to the nearest railway station had encouraged me to walk. A quarter of a mile felt like a marathon. The train encouraged me to sleep. I resisted until I made my way back to the city centre hotel, showered and slept with a Do Not Disturb card attached to a doorknob that the cleaner still insisted on rattling the next day. Twice. At noon and then at one. My deep fellow feelings for those on minimum wage, or less, dwindled, then vanished. I opened the door. I enquired “Yes?” She looked. I was scowling. She smiled. She left. I was sorry. I closed the door. I took my battered and naked body back to bed and slept some more. A lot more.
In dreams, maybe, I had made up my mind.
I made a few calls to old journalist friends, still suppurating away on columns that were always going to be more Wurlitzer than Pulitzer, strictly regional papers whose declining circulation was a constant reproof to their national pretensions. That’s what I had to listen to on the phone anyway, from one veteran hack after another until one finally yielded up the extra-directory and private mobile number of Sir Ceri Evans, of whom, once, well more than once, and long ago, my old man had sourly said, “His cock will find him out”. He’d been wrong about that, too. So far.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to find that Ceri – even after 20 years – wasn’t fazed to find me on the other end of a phone. He’d come straight to it after the perfunctory, gushing but patently disinterested, greetings. He said that the others had been a bit put out and were hoping I’d ring so that, with all that had been close between us once, or at least with him and the old man, he could put me straight, clear up any misunderstandings. Relax over a drink. Lunch perhaps, or dinner if I preferred. He mentioned a brasserie on the waterfront. Oysters, ice cold chablis and a sidelong view of the hot new government building, if you really must, he laughed, or the mercy of nightfall. I opted for dinner and the dark. He was in Brussels, negotiating for Wales he said, but a small plane was bringing the Big Man home the next day. We arranged for dinner around eight o’clock the following night, Wednesday. He told me that on Thursday he had to first finish and then make the speech which he was to give at the conference on a New Valleys Dawn to be held that same morning. Good, I told him. I’ll be there. He thought I meant only at the dinner. Good, I thought. And that gave me the Tuesday to rest, and the time before I met Ceri to be a tidy boy.
The rest of the day passed in a haze of occasional room service and frequent painkillers. When I surfaced from a stupor every now and then I attended to bits of business. I booked an airport hotel room at Heathrow for Friday night and an early Saturday morning flight back to JFK. I read the file Haf had given
me one more time, checking dates and facts and figures. Then I slept some more. When the dreamtime ended I got up and showered myself awake. I dressed, ordered coffee, stared out at the usual mixed bag of weather, and then I picked up one of the lined yellow pads which always travelled with me and began to write.
What I wrote was a conventional putting together of quotes from private notes and letters and bank accounts. Conventional and, if read the way I intended it to be read, lethal. And what my friend the hack would make of it was a storyline that had ‘A’ (or Mal) linked to successive sales of low-grade or contaminated land over a period of years since the mid-1990s. Councillors and council decisions were drawn into this web and innocently so on a separate basis, but more intriguingly not when they and the land parcels were totted up altogether. Then there was the grouping of these heads of the valleys plots under the holding company, Valleyscorp, which had been put in trust in Haf’s name but directed by ‘B’ or Bran until her daughter was eighteen. That date had been reached three years ago. Less formal documentation placed ‘C’, or Ceri, in the frame as a key player in regeneration policies from Poland to Penrhiwceiber and back. Perhaps they hadn’t felt the need for discretion. Why should they? Loans and gifts were not directly connected to any of this, were they? Not until, maybe, the payment details grew more frequent and larger as the scheme unfolded. Which is where ‘D’, or Gwilym, came into play, as the respected deviser for Tir Werin, adjunct to the Research Park, of an ambitious regeneration project which required both funding – from Europe – and land – available, at a seemingly reasonable price from Valleyscorp. Our ‘A’ had, by this time, long resigned as a director of Valleyscorp but as chair of the board based in the adapt-or-die Wallace building encouraged, and you might say, led our ‘D’ to the fruition of his scheme. Or, at least, to parts one and two of it. Money and land. Construction and delivery would be later. With Ceri and Gwilym as principal trustees of Tir Werin, lines of profitable communication would be kept open. What I had was a prospectus for growth that bore all the hallmarks of idealism and was, in its outline, all in the public domain. But I had little doubt that the career of Ceri would be, at the very least, tarnished by the detail of transactions; that the reputation of Gwilym would not be enhanced as he planned for his birthday honours; that Bran could present herself, at best, as a virginal third party with her daughter’s interests at heart; and that Maldwyn could be legitimately accused of chicanery, underhand dealings and collusion with others to subvert the use of public funding. Maybe even be convicted. Underneath all this laying of explosives though, was the fuse that had been lit to set it off as dynamite. And the fuse was Haf.