by Dai Smith
I wrote that story, too. It isn’t too pretty but this is how it went.
She’d been born in the summer of 1986. Maldwyn was to be her father figure since Bran and he first lived together then, and married a year later. Both, with the adventure of the strike behind them, had more to do with “getting on” in careers floated by the wider public recognition they had cashed in on, than they did with the daughter who lived with them, and a nanny, until she went to the school from which she could have come home every day but didn’t. Haf was a boarder with a home, or homes, as property moved them upmarket, but still just a few miles away. Holidays were periods of tension, not release. As she grew older the rifts and the rows between Mal and Bran first upset her as she tried to pull them together in a child’s fantasy way, and then they drove her down into herself.
Then, when she was sixteen, she refused to be a boarder any more. Refusal and resistance could not be overturned by an irate Bran. Haf paid lip-service to ‘A’ level study at a local FE college. Haf tried to shelter from constant recrimination by being closer to Mal. Indifference was her best reward until Mal walked out after a quarrel with his wife that was more explicit and even violent in its threat than before. It was after that splitting up that Bran, cruel or vindictive or just Bran maybe, told Haf that Mal was not her father anyway. That she’d been pregnant before they had come together. Then who? And she said me. Billy Maddox. That I’d left in the winter of ’85, and never came back. That my father had died suddenly before the Christmas of that year, when I was on an assignment in the Far East, and uncontactable. There were no other ties for me here after that, and she hadn’t told me of the one there was. End of story.
Only, for Haf, it was a beginning. She researched my life, my work, my pictures. Her bedroom filled with the grainy images of photojournalism and the edgy, tricked-out and edited compositions of the dark room. If that was the retreat inside herself, the outer journey was uninhibited by any baggage. She did what the abandoned young do, and on the streets there was booze and pills and sex, and then Mal again. He’d moved by now, and without Bran, back home to his mansion on the hill. Haf moved in with him. To hurt Bran? Not a chance. To infuriate? Every time. She fucked her “father”. He seduced his “daughter”. Who knows (she certainly didn’t) the sequence of these moves? It wasn’t a crime, was it? It wasn’t, she said, as if they were related.
It was a crime, nonetheless, so far as I was concerned. Mal’s crime. For Haf the crime that concerned her was happening elsewhere. When she hit eighteen and Mal talked of university she also found that she was required to be a co-signatory on all kinds of transactions in which there was no common denominator other than Tir Werin. She asked. Bran came into the picture again. She and Mal, it seemed, had interests in common that could elide other divisions. Gwilym spoke to Haf. A career was in prospect for her. He could see to it that she was, despite poor exam results, admitted into a Media Studies course at the university. It was her duty to help the Tir Werin scheme to fruition. She asked what it meant. She was told about Sir Ceri’s deep interests in its welfare. What a great man he was. Mal was blunter. If she didn’t sign there was no money. What the fuck was wrong with her? What indeed. Bran was less inquisitive. She told it to Haf as directly as Mal, only in language made more personal than maternal by a vicious anger. Mistake. Haf kept signing but she started digging, and enquiring, and collecting, and photocopying. Her silence was interpreted as complaisance at last. It was a cloak for snooping – in drawers, in briefcases, in handbags, in office files. Finally she stopped signing papers. She moved out.
WEDNESDAY
I spent the next morning re-writing and clarifying before putting it into my laptop. I was a laborious typer. It took me past an in-room sandwich lunch before I was ready. When I finally finished I found a printer and had copies made. I put them into envelopes marked by name for Haf, Ceri, and Maldwyn. I stamped and addressed envelopes to Gwilym and Bran, and a final one to my old friend the hack. I put the first three in the pocket of the navy peacoat I would wear over a pullover and jeans. The others would go into a postbox. The hack would only use his if I didn’t have my way another way, and either way it would keep others honest if I ever had to ignite it. On my way to the city centre railway station I found a DIY store. Inside I found a lump hammer, hard and squat and with a comfortable heft to it in my hand, and wrapped it inside a newspaper and dropped it inside a hessian bag. It swung reassuringly to my side as I walked. The rain fell all over the city again, and I used its incessant wetness to wipe clean a face that had seen too much to like anything much any more. What I was to do was maybe for Haf, perhaps for me, but mostly for my old man. He would have told me I was another Sam Spade, half a century and more too late. That I was still role-playing and knee-jerk reacting. And I whispered back into the rain that he was right, and that there was nothing else for it in the trap of image and imitation into which we had all long fallen. I didn’t wait long for a train. This time the scenery, through the windows, dissolved in the rain.
Haf was waiting for me in the bar. She was bundled up in her Puffa jacket, her jeans tucked into her ankle boots, and only her much too pale face on show. It was a pretty face. It was a good show. I gave her the envelope and drank a bottle of Italian beer whilst she read it. She didn’t smile. She did sigh, and look at me as if she hadn’t wanted me to know even if she had had to tell me. She asked what next. So I told her. Or some of it. I missed out the very next bit, and skipped to where I was going to meet Ceri that night. I told her the plan, and why, and she nodded. I kissed her on the cheek. I looked at my watch. It was time to leave. It was long past the time to make things right. There was time, though, to tidy a few things up before another tomorrow came unwanted upon us. I left her with the promise of a different tomorrow, one still to come.
I got to the heritage centre, five minutes away, about an hour earlier than I’d arranged and just in time for the first tour of all somebody else’s yesterdays. I took it. They certainly weren’t my yesterdays. They were set at a convenient distance, filtered through a haze of nostalgia which blurred any recovery of any real time. The pretend real selves here were bigger than life-size dummies – cloth-capped colliers, aproned Mams and rosy-cheeked urchins with the occasional top-hatted coalowner and moustachioed engineer – all in static cameos with booming stereophonic voiceovers. It took an hour to shuffle from one engine house to another – I skipped the underground simulation – and the only time I felt a twitch of recognition was, irony of ironies of course, when I sat in front of the slide show of old photographs and saw the innocence of all those there captured and exposed, again, for all time. It was because they didn’t know, taker or taken, what they were doing that I felt, at last, undone in face of the enormity of it all.
I waited at the tour’s end on the wet cobblestoned yard of the former colliery. I was sheltered against the rain by an out-of-time and out-of-service red double-decker bus that was parked side on to the main building. I had left the voice message for Maldwyn to come to meet me in the yard after four. It was now 4.15 and the fine rain was blowing from the hills, overlapping in parabolas against the rain-beaded windows of the bus. One solitary drop would be momentarily still and then start to run, a tail following behind. I peered through the smearing dropping lines on the glass, back towards the enclosed entrance way and its swishy automatic doors. They purred and two figures stood, not moving, just looking out, not seeing me on the other side of the bus. I put my right hand inside the hessian bag to feel that the short shaft was lying the right way. I called Mal’s name out into the rain and then I moved, holding the bag’s handles in my left, to the back of the bus. And waited some more.
Through the shadow fall of a rain becoming more and more insistent I saw one of the two move back into the entrance hall where the papier-mâché butcher and baker guarded their heritage shop windows and a collier flung his raggedy son into a flight that would never come down. Then from behind these grotesque mannequins a third man moved and
clutched one of the others around the shoulders until he broke abruptly away and moved back to the doors, which whispered open and shut as their sensors invited a response. The glass panels gaped as two men stood on the line, then closed tight as they crossed it and out into the yard. Wheelie was just a step in front and to the left of Lionel. They looked at the bulk of a loaded coal dram to one side of the bus and at the recesses of the engine house wall beyond the bus, and they split, with Wheelie going the longer way around its front and Lionel more directly across the visible side to the back end where I crouched, and waited.
The rain had filled the fissures between the cobbles with small jewelled puddles. The stage props, real enough in the colliery yard, seemed ridiculously familiar. The gold lettering on the bus, the thick rubber tread of tyres that had once jolted paying passengers, the wet cloth smell of the damp moquette seats which I could see inside, their chromium grip bars dulled by the dank. It was seconds in reality. The doors hissed and opened once more, and in their light I saw a third man coming around the front and the side to the back. Lionel was already there, past the conductor’s pole and platform. He stopped when he saw me, hesitating for the instant in which he looked for his back-up support. The bag dropped to the floor of the yard as my right hand appeared with the lump hammer in it. It was a foot away from Lionel when I swung it up, short and heavy, into his balls with all the force I could. His hands had fluttered down as useless as a couple of butterfly wings and were swatted aside. He grunted and dropped to his knees, from where he felt the hammer, now switched to the horizontal, smash into the bridge of his nose and spit blood, bone and cartilage onto the cobbles. He lay slumped, head down and silent and I turned to threaten Wheelie with more of the same, but his days of dealing with anything that was not already prostrate had gone. He stood stock-still. Then there was the third figure. I swivelled to face him. Of course, Tommy. He pushed me aside to check I hadn’t killed his lifetime prop. I hadn’t. But I had hurt him bad and the emergency ward would soon see him, a trifle less intact than when he’d woken up in the morning. Like me, he’d live, with a few painkillers, a bandage or two, and a caring friend. The same one.
That friend stood up and said: “You bastard. You fucking bastard.” I nodded and held the hammer ready.
“Tommy,” I said. It was an acknowledgement, just that.
“He’ll fucking kill you,” was a reply more than a threat.
“Maybe. He half-tried already, didn’t he?” A gambit, but it worked.
“Christ, Billy. That was, you know, business. And in any case I stopped it going too far. Christ, we took care of you, you ungrateful bastard.”
An apology? I didn’t think so.
Tommy bunched his fists.
“I won’t wait for Lionel. I’ll do you now. And I won’t stop. Not this time.”
I showed him the easy swing of the hammer as his body tensed to rush me but I really wanted words to stop him. Words to direct him elsewhere.
“D’you know about Haf, Tommy? Really know?”
What I knew was already enough, I gambled, to ease Tommy into the violence that had always mirrored his sentimentality. But I didn’t know everything yet. Maybe that was just as well. For all of us.
“What’re you fuckin’ getting at?”
“You’re fond of her, aren’t you? Seen her growing up. After Norma died. You with no kids. Maybe Bran even encouraged you to think … well, she’s good at that, isn’t she? But then she’d have told you ‘No’, as well, because she wouldn’t want you too close, not with Mal and her, making the nest, so to speak. And that’s what I want to tell you about your boss, see Tommy.”
He wanted to shut me up. I could feel that, like a current whipping back and fro between us. And he could have done it, too. Hammer or no hammer. But he wanted to hear it, too. So much that I was no longer sure I should say it. But then I did, say it outright, because I wanted the dirt to sting and maim. Not him, of course, just Mal.
“You know when Bran and Mal split up. And he’d have told you that, amongst other things, like maybe she was fucking elsewhere when she wanted, maybe even you, for old times’ sake, eh Tommy? That she’d told him, her husband of course, that Haf was not his after all and she’d told Haf, her troublesome, meddlesome daughter that it was me all along, her Daddy-in-exile, so there was the row of all rows and Mal left, and later, soon, Haf followed. And you didn’t know, did you Tommy, that Mal, your boss, was soon fucking her. His maybe daughter. Haf.”
He said I was a fucking liar, but he flinched and whispered when he said it. I told him to ask Bran. Or better still Maldwyn. He looked over my shoulder to where the automatic doors had opened again. Mal was standing where the yard and the rain and the truth began. He shouted – “Tommy, what the fuck’s going on?” – and moved further into the rain. I dropped the hammer. Tommy pushed past me and gathered Lionel up.
“Give me a hand,” he yelled at Wheelie and he gave me the look that told me even as I walked away that he believed me, and there would be consequences. Because with Tommy there always would be. I dropped the envelope for Mal at Tommy’s feet and said, “Read it before you give it to him. Then give it to him.”
* * * * *
I walked away from the yard and back out onto the road. I bent into the rain, as naggingly penetrating as ever, and walked up the road. It was a hundred yards or so, but I broke no records getting to the hotel. In the rain, on that road, the hotel looked more incongruous than the first time. Maybe it was me that just wasn’t congruent anymore. Out of step. Out of time. Out of place, and yet inside from outside. It was beginning to sound like the soapy wisdom of a moody song. I told it to stop. I had them order me a cab and waited in the dry.
* * * * *
Sir Ceri Evans was running late. There had been no further messages. It was probably the common assumption of what had become an uncommon life. That he could be late with no apology. I was at ease with that. I was even more at ease with the large G & T that was nursing me. The brasserie was at the back of a grooved wooden deck two flights up from the pavement of the washed and scrubbed waterfront. The marble-topped table had been booked and I had been sat at it on a spindly bentwood chair for over half an hour. The view was of a flat viscous lagoon that struggled to reflect back the light of its ambient Venusberg café-bars and restaurants. That, too, was OK by me. I needed a matt finish to soothe the prickly gloss of the day. It was more soothing anyway than the signature buildings near which the taxi had dropped me for my short promenade to the brasserie.
The buildings were new to me. I struggled not to sum them up too quickly. There seemed around the parliamentary one to be a skirt of slate that lapped up the steps and into the building as if to bring to a darker ground the plate glass which promised transparent government. Its pine roof had a funnel of wood which looked like a wheatsheaf ready for harvesting. It felt more sauna than smoke-filled room. I wondered if this county council Cymru had really stripped itself down so soon to such an indecent basic openness. Indecent in comparison with all its past traditions, that is. I was encouraged. And, as a traditionalist, relieved to see that somebody must have commissioned a lot of slate from a grateful constituency. Next door was an architectural Leviathan. A gargantuan sheepfold, in slate again, topped off by a riveted brass-gold biker’s helmet with a stencilled message in a bottle about horizons and stones that was in cut-out lettering in English and Welsh. It glowed in the dark like the jagged mouth and eye-holes of a pumpkin. I had walked through the strip and huddle of eateries, bars and cafés to the restaurant where I sat and waited.
I let my mind, what was left of it to match the battered body where it had found almost fifty years of house room, wander. Back, of course. To Ceri eventually. I had followed his career as it soared from union office to county council eminence and serial chairmanhood as he moved – who didn’t? – from left to right and was then rewarded with a knighthood. It had served to transmute him into an elder statesman stance. Non-executive positions on the boards of pub
lic utilities and not-for-profit organisations were added to his portfolio. He was rewarded, appropriately of course, as a consultant on public affairs. Pro-bono, he polished his CV by chairing Task and Finish groups and gave his weighty name to their shelved reports. He graced conferences and sat in on seminars. He became revered, honoured and trusted, the more he grew independent of his, and our, past lives. It was, I suppose, a familiar trajectory. Certainly one which would not have surprised my old man. But would he really have predicted it? Would I have really believed that kind of outcome for that Ceri from that time?
That Ceri. That time. My old man’s Ceri had been twenty-five or so when I was first made aware of him. He had, the old man said, just wandered into one of his WEA classes, on Art and Literature in the Industrial Age, or some such stirring title, and sat, apparently transfixed, at the back. He was, in the early 1960s, considerably younger than the dwindling band of educational veterans which my father’s grizzled application of social history to culture usually attracted. Ceri was an orphan and an apprentice collier who had married Olwen at eighteen. Lady Olwen now. Ceri never threw anything away that might prove useful, and a lifetime of philandering – early and late – had not broken the utility of his marriage to Olwen, who ran his home and raised his children to be teachers and solicitors, all in his absence. The marriage was no fiction, it was just a side story within the space of his personal, always personal, narrative. He had been recommended to go to the old man’s class by the kind of union official who, in those days, acted as recruiting agent for educational uplift. He had been told to broaden his horizons if he was to make a mark in the union. He was already a Young Communist of course. But then that was like saying, for his youth and ardour in that place at that time, that he went to chapel or liked the movies or shagged girls or chainsmoked. He didn’t do the first and the last, as a matter of fact. But he did believe. And he did see how that helped him to be seen, to be noticed. In the Good Cause, of course.