by Alys Conran
Efa collects songs. She collects them in her head and on paper and on the black records that scratch away ghostly lovely in the cottage where we live. Some of the records are Dad’s. The others come through the post. They’re the only treat Efa gets with her wages. I’ve not heard this record before.
“This song,” says Efa without even saying hello, “this is a tinker tune.”
The man on the record has a voice like brillo. You can’t understand him, although he’s speaking in English. I slump down at the kitchen table, prop my elbows up and put my chin in my hands to listen. My head’s heavy after the Gwyn thing and Pigeon. When the man’s finished his song there’s a long clickety silence before the next one.
It’s a slow deep song with a fiddle and a woman singing.
“Sad isn’t it? So sad,” says Efa all quiet in her slate Welsh “It’s in a language called Yiddish.”
It’s like losing Dad.
We listen to a few more verses of the song in the dark kitchen, and then Efa gets up, switches it off.
“Lets change it,” she says, with thin lips.
“I know,” she says, looking through the records on the shelf, “how bout the one with that woman singing in Norwegian?”
Norwegian is when you sing through your nose the same way Mrs Thomas at school speaks posh English for show. When I listen to the song I can see the Norwegian lady all the way over there across the grey sea sitting on a wood stool and singing through her nose. I watch the ink disk of the record turning round and round for the Norwegian lady’s voice.
After that The Cuban Song spins on the record player. Efa’s favourite record. It’s slinky like treacle. “Secsi!” Efa says about it, laughing, and shaking her beads as she dances round the kitchen, while, on a dusty stage someplace and sometime else shaking bottoms dance behind the twanging guitar strings of The Cuban Song. I copy my sister, dancing, and clucking with giggles. It’s as if Pigeon and the Gwyn thing never happened. It’s as if everything’s just fine.
Efa’s like this. Sometimes she’s so happy she’s going to burst. She has to dance and sing, and run around, and if anyone tries to stop her she’ll explode like a bottle of Lucozade that’s fizzed over. Then she breaks and it’s bad. She cries, and there’s no end to it. She cries and she cries, and it hurts to see and hear.
It’s because of me. It’s because Efa has to work all these hours at The Home just to keep me in clothes and hot water. Since Nain died, there’s been only me and Efa. And even now, although I’m dancing and laughing, you can’t forget it. Cos there’s something hurt about Efa, although she’s full of swaying skirts and music from all over. There’s something hard inside, something that’s like Nain.
Nain’d moved in back when Mam was sick. Nain moved in cos of Dad and his long fingers that did nothing except make shapes in the clay, the metal, the wood of the strange, rotting people that still stand, wrapped with bindweed in the garden. Nain came because of the flood in the bathroom Dad made when he fixed the shower, and the explosion in the kitchen when he tried out the pressure cooker, and the way he dyed all our knickers blue with his new overalls. Nain came cos he couldn’t look after Mam. He couldn’t cope, Dad. He could never cope.
Mam was sick forever. It was the tumours in her head. There was a picture of tumours in Efa’s big Family Health book. They’re like dark flowers, blooming, and putting the person out. And that was what happened to her. Mam. That was the way it went. And it wasn’t because of me. But then why is Efa angry sometimes, so she looks at me like that?
After Mam went to bed sick. It was Efa, me, Dad.
And Nain. It was Nain.
Nain moved in with rules, dinner on the table, and bedtime like a stone wall. Nain with her stories of the town ‘back in the day’, her slate quarry stories, about when there were no machines and just men, no trucks and drills, about singing and drinking and Sunday times, about Friday paydays and Saturday fights, about rough, dangerous work in the quarries, people dying young and filling up the slate graveyard. Nain was all about wars and dying boys, and women at home, “women’s troubles, women’s pains”. She was all about “back in the day”, Nain.
“It’s a world unfair for women, love,” she’d say, and her voice cracked like worn paint. It’s a world unfair for women, love. A world unfair. For women. Love.
“Those men,” said Nain looking with pointing eyes at Dad, “you’ve got to watch them. They only up and leave.”
It was because of Taid, or grandfather. It was cos he “went and died in Spain”. Nain only ever said it once, but it stuck. Spain was all big frilly dresses and maracas and beating your feet on the floor. Spain was the Olympics in Barcelona. All hot, blue skies and burning colours, and breaking records. When you said it, that Taid “went and died in Spain”, it was like a curry in your mouth: too hot, but good and you didn’t know what was in it. I said it to Pigeon once.
“Taid went and died in Spain,” I said.
Pigeon looked at me. “What does that mean?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I dunno,” I said. “He went there, and he died,” I said, after thinking about it for a while.
“I’ll go and die in the United States of America,” said Pigeon. “Like Elvis Presley and JFK.”
“Yeah,” I said, although I didn’t know what JFK stood for. “Yeah me too,” I said again, cos that was the way it was with me and Pigeon.
Nain had it so clear.
“It’s a Dad’s job to work,” she said. “Get back to work, Gerwyn,” she said over and over to her son, our dad. I can remember her saying it, and the arguments. “Get yourself a job,” she’d say. “Stuff the sculptures, the ornaments, the furniture. Bread and good butter are what homes are made of, Gerwyn. Bread and good butter.” And Nain was only going to play Mam, if he’d play Dad.
And playing Dad was being hardly ever there. He’d got work at the food factory. He put chicken in packets. He worked a particular set of machines which vacuum packed it, stretching the plastic over the slippy chicken. The meat couldn’t breathe under the plastic. You could see it. It couldn’t breathe. Dad brought some of it home. I can remember it, the meat, all squashed and dead.
There was only the mortuary, where they put Mam in her best dress and in a coffin, and then it was the funeral. In the funeral I stood between everybody’s legs while they sang, and while they read things from the old-fashioned Welsh of The Bible. Then it was the heather ground of the hill’s graveyard. And in the coffin there was Mam, and even though she was as thin as a baby tree, she was heavy. You could see Dad and the men were struggling with the weight of her, and at the end they almost dropped her into the cold hill. Then everyone prayed to ‘god!’ and you were supposed to go home.
Nain said it was “the only way”.
“Wipe your hands and back to work or whisky,” she said to Dad, patting him on the back like a dog.
But he hung about with a lost look by the side of the grave, just all the dull gorse bushes and the dead bracken on the hill behind him. Efa tried to go to him, but Nain pulled her arm.
“He’s just maudling,” Nain said “Leave him to it. It does no good to share grief, love.”
Grief was when you had the heavy thing round your ribs and you couldn’t even cry.
He couldn’t take it. Not Dad. Efa says he couldn’t take it. Efa says Nain had this idea. About men. You had to be like a bull. Strong. You had to earn money and be a “real man” and Dad couldn’t do it, Efa says.
He went on years: years of working at the factory. And, at home, there was just Nain. Nain, in the kitchen, making smooth, empty jam.
Back then Nain was the only one who sang. Sang perfect, stiff folk songs, the ones you learnt at school for Eisteddfod competitons. Nain sang them too pretty and too neat, this tidy kind of happiness in the way she sang them.
“Molianwn oll yn llo – o – on!” she’d sing, or “Tw rym di ro!” or “Migldi Magldi hei now now! Ffaldiradilidalym!”
Nain’s tidy folksongs were
a lie, like those pretty tea-towels they sell in Pringles to the blue-rinsed tourists, the ones that say ‘Wales’ all vague at the top. When Nain sang you could tell she wanted to break the grey quiet of the house and Dad’s old record-player which sat under dust. She wanted to rub out his hymns and his music from all over, did Nain.
He spoke less and less. He couldn’t get them out, his words. Then his breath disappeared like his words. He hung from his bones like empty clothes, and his skin was pale as if it couldn’t breathe, like the meat he put in packets at the food factory. Then he started to talk again, but not to anyone, just to himself.
“Air,” he said. “I need air. Air,” over and over.
It was spring and there were birds singing the day he went.
When I came home from school that day, there was Nain, sat at the table, a cold cup of tea undrunk in her hands, and her eyes staring straight ahead. There was Efa stood perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen. Efa’s face was white as milk and round the three of us the house was empty. When Nain spoke she just said, “He’s left us, love. He’s left us.”
We looked for him all over. There was nothing left. Only the quiet house and, down at the bottom of the garden, a shape made of wood which had swelled up with the rain. It was a man, the shape. I go to look at it sometimes now, and it’s a man, stooping.
And after that you couldn’t speak about him. Like his father. He was just like his father.
“Way it’ll always be. All they do is leave you, men, all they ever do, leave you to it.” Nain said. “Like him. Off to Spain. As if it mattered! As if it mattered to people here what happened there. As if it mattered, for god’s sake!”
She meant Taid, our grandpa. She couldn’t speak about Dad without getting him mixed up with Taid.
Nain stayed. And Dad’s junk was cleared out from the corners, hard daylight was let right into the smoky dust of the house. Nain filled the kitchen with the smells of home, but Efa and me kept looking. It was a game of hide and seek and we were searching for something, something that wasn’t quite certain. We were looking for creaking floorboards, walls that moved a bit. We were looking for Dad.
Nain watched us. “It’s this place that’s the trouble. This hill. Cursed place it is. Rotten,” and, when we kept dragging our feet all round the house, “Nothing good comes of people here,” she said “There’s no dreams, that’s the trouble, only closed shops. There’s far too much doubt here. That’s the trouble.”
Nain started entering prize draws. Efa and her made up English poems for magazine competitions, sent in jokes, riddles, whatever it took. One time we won seventy-five quid for one, and it was printed, under a pretend name: “Mrs Thatcher from Leicester,” Nain had put. “Address not supplied.”
“Why not, ‘Mrs Evans from Rallt Uchaf’, Nain?” I couldn’t see why not.
“Chei di’m lwc yn fanma ’sdi, nghariad i.” You’ll get nowhere from here, love. You’ll get nowhere. Here is nowhere.
So Efa and me are going to The Ends of the Earth. We’re going to a place called Jamaica. We’re going to Australia and Uzbekistan. Efa has lots of ideas. But now she just works in The Home.
We’d run out of money. It was Nain who’d got Efa the job at The Home. She’d got Efa to leave school for that job. It didn’t make sense. Nain doesn’t make sense. Now it’s all old people and changing them and cleaning them and talking to them all day. That’s all it is for Efa now. There are no escape plans anymore.
Even before Nain died, Efa’d started playing Mam. At night I crawled into her bed, and we whispered stories. First it is Efa, Efa that tells the stories. They are about places like Thailand and Belize where people don’t have knives and forks. They are about China and Japan where everyone slept on the floor and so their backs were straight like pencils.
I’d come home and found Nain lying on the floor. And you knew she was dead because she didn’t move. She was still and yellow and unhappy lying on the floor. And the light was still off, she’d not turned it on since the daytime although it was dark now, so you knew.
We did the funeral thing again. There weren’t many people there in chapel for the funeral. Nain was older than Mam. Older people have less friends. It’s better to die when you’re not too old.
“She never married,” said the minister standing in the pulpit above our nain in her square box, “but had one son.”
Why did the old ladies look at each other like that? Efa’s hand gripped mine. Why did the minister make Efa angry?
It was after that Efa’d got out Dad’s record player, and started with the music and the bright colours and all. Because you could. With Nain gone, you could do anything, except leave The Home.
Efa’d run out, run out of ideas by the time bedtime came, she was so busy with The Home, with the house, with money and getting by. So I started collecting stories.
“He just went,” Efa’d always told me, “upped and left. Just like that.” And then, “It’s a world unfair for women, love.” Efa said, saying it just like Nain. But I looked at her and thought how the two of them, Nain dressed in a dull pinny and slippers, and Efa in her kaleidoscope of hippy skirts, Efa and Nain were not so different anymore, not so different at all now Efa was all grown up and Nain was dead. And I just got on with it, with make-believing it all away.
Dad had gone away to make a million. Dad had gone away to find Mam. Dad hadn’t gone away at all, he was here at the kitchen table, listening to this music here, teaching me how to whistle.
“How was the party?” Efa asks me after The Cuban Song’s finished.
“Iawn.” I shrug off the question. “There was cake,” I say after, to make it realistic. “Chocolate cake.”
“You’ve had enough to eat then?” playing Mam.
“O,” I say. I hadn’t thought of that. “O yes,” I say, to be realistic again. There’ll be the fridge in the middle of the night. It’ll be a cheese sandwich. With mustard. I like mustard now, after trying it again with Pigeon. It’s hot and tasty once you get used to it, mustard. My belly’s grumbling when I think of the sandwich and all that butter and cheese. It’ll have to wait until Efa’s in bed.
Efa goes up to her room to ‘have some space’. She does that more now. All the time she does it more. She’s sick of me. Although it isn’t my fault. Is it? It isn’t my fault, The Home.
But tonight it’s a good thing Efa wants ‘her space’ cos of the sandwich, and cos I want to think about Gwyn, and Pigeon. I get the bread out, and make a sandwich on the top in the kitchen with lots of spicy mustard and some tomatoes too. White bread. Butter. Cheese.
I hold it in two hands and take it up the wooden staircase to my room in the loft, next to Efa’s. There’s just a thin bit of wood between our two rooms. There, is Efa’s ‘space’ on one side and here, here is my room. Nain and Dad had each slept at different times in the big downstairs room, and the most comfortable bed is there, and now it’s empty, but neither Efa nor me want to sleep there yet.
“Don’t come in!” shouts Efa in a cross voice when I pass her door.
“I’m not,” I say. I’m not going in, I think.
Why’s Efa so cross all the time? In my room I watch her through the slit in the wall, watch my sister in there in front of the mirror. Efa’s scarves and beads and colours are all taken off, and there’s just plain Efa sitting in front of her mirror in her white bra now. Thoughts go across Efa’s face. She looks at herself in the mirror, Efa, and she’s not happy with what she sees. She goes right up to the mirror then, pushes the skin under her eyes across her cheeks so her bags go smooth. It’s because she’s getting older and working too hard. Efa always says her face is getting ugly cos of The Home, although it isn’t, it isn’t ugly, Efa’s face. Then Efa sighs and gets her packet of pills again. She stuffs a smooth tablet into her mouth. The pills are because of The Home and because of me. The pills and the yoga are for making Efa feel better.
When Efa looks in the mirror again, there’s something in my sister’s tire
d eyes makes me feel like I’m back on the bus with Pigeon, going towards that red cross. There’s something in Efa’s eyes that’s like big weather. Angry. I look away.
I sit on the bed. The cheese sandwich is tangy and spicy and good; it fills my belly until it’s satisfied, like a sleepy cat.
10
He had it all mapped out in his head. It was going to be like one of those adventure books they had in the school library, where children can be heroes and can change things for real.
“It’s a five-stage plan,” said Pigeon to Iola like James Bond.
He communicated the plan to Iola between cigarettes – puffing and coughing and exhaling clouds of smoke into the cobwebbed air of the attic:
First. Pre-pa-ra-tion.
They would need: a walkie talkie. A copy of the plan each (not to be forgotten or lost). And lots of practice.
Second. Dis-trac-tion.
Iola was to feign an allergic reaction to the ice cream. It was like they’d seen on TV. What happened to some people when they ate peanuts. For some people, when they ate peanuts they swelled up, couldn’t breathe, turned red, shook like a storm. Iola was to hold her breath and shiver all over. So that…
Third. In-fil-tra-tion.
While everyone was distracted by Iola, Pigeon was to get in the van to spy on Gwyn.
“But…” said Iola. “But…”
Pigeon swatted her doubts away with more smoke.
Fourth. Comm-un-i-ca-tion.
Pigeon was to contact Iola from the van, and inform her of Gwyn’s mis-de-mean-ours. i.e. what exactly it was Gwyn was doing wrong.
“What is he doing wrong?” asked Iola at this point.
Pigeon looked at her in disbelief “Do you really have to ask?” he said.
She shook her head. Of course not. Of course she didn’t.
Fifth. Chase.
Iola, police in tow, was to chase Gwyn down.
“But,” she said. “How come?”