by Alys Conran
The ambulanceman asks him does he want to come in with the girl? Pigeon shakes his head, says, “No. I’ll be getting back now.”
“Back where?” the man asks him.
“To my mam,” says Pigeon. He shuffles off, his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the ambulanceman and his raised eyebrow, leaving Efa and Iola to answer the questions, thinking how he better get some clothes and things together quick, before He finds out about Cher and all the spilt blood and ice cream, before Hegets wind of it, and before His rage about it all begins. The ambulance starts up and takes Cher off across the night, and Pigeon walks away, fading greyly into the crowds of the fair, where, except for the ice-cream van, and the police around it, everything slowly begins to speed and scream again as the rides quicken and beat once more under the moving lights, sped on by brusque, tumbleweed fairmen, with cash-belts at their waists and home strapped, like this fair, to their travelling backs.
And so it’s night, black night, when Pigeon gets back up to the top of the hill, pushing and pushing the pedals of Cher’s bike and his legs burning, and when he moves silently past his house and into the garden, and then into his shed, and gets his dirty grey schoolbag filled up with clothes, and takes his sleeping bag and an orange he’s kept there, and that tenner he stole from Him last week, and a packet of His cigarettes, and he goes out again into the night, across the neighbours’ gardens to find that old, ruined row of cottages, by the quarry, which are filled with nothing but the feeling of the dead hillside, where he’s going to sleep tonight, safe from Him.
Pigeon curls up there, in the old quarry barracks, where the ruined slate huts are open to the wind and rain. Pigeon sits, thinking how the hut where he sits is like a skull, with holes for its window eyes. He sits, in his sleeping bag, waits for morning, and sleeps some, propped against the old hearth, used to the cold. He sleeps, far from the shed, from the house. But still the spectre of the house throws its long cold shadow over Pigeon.
Back in town, while the boy sleeps across the valley in that skull of a hut, He pushes Pigeon’s mam in through their front door, pushes her so hard that her body tumbles and smacks like a dusty rug hit against a wall. And He shouts, “It’s that sonofabitch,” as He does it. “That sonofabitch’s half killed her, god damn him.”
And then, “Pigeon! Pigeon! Pigeon!” Until the house moves with His voice.
Pigeon’s mam lies on the floor, waiting, glad for the stillness all round her, remembering a time, when she was eight years old, when she had found a little chick, fallen or lost from its nest, and she had tried to save it, and it had died in a cardboard box full of broken paper.
All the time she lies there, while He rants and rants, where is Pigeon? Where is Pigeon? Pigeon moves in and out of sleep in the ruined barracks, shivering with smallness.
It isn’t until two days later that Pigeon ventures back to the crooked house, to tiptoe round the outside, peer in the uncovered window and see his mam sitting on the threadbare sofa, her face marked with sunshine and stormclouds and a bottle gripped in her hand as she rocks and rocks.
She looks up, sees him from the window. Stands.
Through the window she shouts. She shouts in that crazed way of shouting that people who have no words for real conversation have.
“He’s gone!” she shouts “He’s gone, Pigeon!”
Pigeon stands. Still on the wrong side of the window. Looking into his house as if he’s looking underwater at some deep pool barely penetrated by sunlight. He stands and he looks at her. It’s hope, in her face. Hope and almost belief.
He considers going in. But Pigeon knows, knows it isn’t that easy, Pigeon knows He’ll be back, whether Cher comes with him or not. And then things will be worse, worse for his mam than before. Because He always comes back. He always does.
Pigeon goes to the shed, and sits on his bed in the pitch dark. And he thinks.
In the shed there are thoughts and ideas swimming and swimming up around him, and he can make no sense of them, make no sense of the stories that come into the shed in no particular order, as if they’re lost, and the words and their meanings and where they belong in sentences and paragraphs are nothing to do with the sounds and shapes they make, there in the shed, in the pitch black.
Stories and words, they’re useless if you can’t do something, can’t step up with the right word in its place, and use it, to hit, to hurt, to kill.
Pigeon shifted on the bed. Staring straight ahead of him into the darkness where only the faintest of shadows was thrown into the shed by the dim house. The dark was velveteen. His. A place to put anger. The darkness was a refuge. Pigeon sat, surrounded by black rage.
He’d got this far with the ideas, the stories, telling them to Iola and Cher so that they grew and grew and made things different, made Gwyn something else and changed things. But still it happened. Still those things continued to happen to his mam, and to him. And there was nothing the words could do to stop them. The words put up complicated defences, made arguments to and for. But that wasn’t what you needed when He came, violent and ugly to the shed. You didn’t need words. It was fists you needed. You needed to be able to fight it, and to see its face, and to kill it.
But he couldn’t. Pigeon couldn’t. And in he goes to the drawer in the house, and he finds it, wrapped in brown paper. It’s His. It’s hard and cold. It’s violent and still. It’s like a sleeping animal. Pigeon wants to use it on Him. He wants to use it, like wanting to breathe. But Pigeon can only put it back in the drawer.
13
Cher still hasn’t come home. We don’t go to see her. We’re not allowed. But the town’s slowly turning toward the sun again. The town heads into spring, day by day, into the thick of it. And Pigeon and me are obsessed with paper, with trying to understand things with paper and black words on paper, the black, twiggy print of words, on paper that’s white as snow, the words so clear, and things making sense. Almost. We collect all kinds of ‘documentation’. Pigeon says none of it makes sense. Pigeon says Gwyn doesn’t makes sense. Then he starts saying I don’t make sense either. He says it at me in an angry voice.
“You aren’t true Iola,” he says “You aren’t true.”
“What do you mean Pigeon?”
Pigeon says it then. “There’s something in your family that doesn’t make sense.”
“What d’you mean Pigeon?”
“There’s something missing,” he says.
There’s a piece of me missing. I nod. He’s right. There are two pieces missing.
My dad.
And my taid.
Two men. The two men of my family. The two men that made It’s a world unfair for women, love. Made Nain say it again and again so it stuck to you like glue.
“Have you looked for the answers?” asks Pigeon. He says, his eyes green and hungry for information.
“What d’you mean?” I ask him. How do you look for pieces of people? How do you look for the missing parts of a story?
“Paper,” says Pigeon, “Look for paper.”
So I look through Efa’s box for letters, things to collect and read, like Pigeon would.
In the box there’s mostly Christmas cards and boring things like Happy Birthday cards which are all the same and pointless but you have to pretend to like them. It’s all like that, all the way down through the box, until almost the bottom.
And then I get a hold of it. All reeled up in elastic bands. A stack of postcards. When you look at the writing they’re all from the same person. Who are they from? I’ve never seen them before. I don’t recognise the writing. It’s scrawny, jagged. Someone wrote the cards slowly, someone who isn’t used to writing at all.
Every postcard has only one line, it says something like ‘Today I am feeling better, I hope you’re well.’ Or ‘Not such a good day today. Hope all is well.’ Or ‘How are things? Not a bad day today?’ And then there’s one that says ‘Hope Iola’s well.’
They’re from Llanfairfechan according to the post-of
fice mark. Why would you bother sending a postcard from Llanfairfechan? It’s only a little bit away in the car.
And who is this person? Who are they from? The person doesn’t sign them, just a kiss at the bottom.
Then I get to a new set, they’ve got a later date. 1990. That’s just last year. The year Nain died. The year it says on her grave. I take the elastic off them.
The first one is the same. Except. It’s not. There’s a name. It’s not a name. It’s Dad.
Dad.
I sit in the room, staring at the postcard. The room around me’s still. Dad wrote to Efa. When? When? I look through the pile. This is the last date. I go to the window. Down in the garden there’s still the strange bodies Dad had made all those years ago, metal and wood, warped by the rain, covered in bindweed, but still there.
Pigeon was right.
In the house downstairs there’s the sound of Efa coming in, back from The Home. She’s coming upstairs.
“Iola, be ti’n gneud?” asks Efa, standing in the doorway of the room now, seeing all the piles of papers I’m making. Her voice is far away.
“Where is he?” I ask her “Where is our dad?”
Efa’s quiet. She’s looking at her hands. She comes to sit down. She sits there a long time. Thinking of what to say. I’m holding the postcards like a shield between us. My sister lied to me. Efa lied.
“All Nain would say was ‘He’s left us, love. He’s left us.’” she says after a long while “It wasn’t until later she told me our dad was ill.”
I sit on our sofa, next to her, listening for more.
“It was a few years before we began to visit him on a Friday. I don’t know why Nain decided to take me. I remember we just went, and Nain didn’t say where we were going. He was in Llanfairfechan, on a ward there, with four other men.” She half smiles, but it’s a sad, scared smile, “When we walked in, I could tell Nain’d been there before. She just walked straight across the ward, sat herself down by his bed, and got her embroidery out of her bag. I remember she was doing this little pink pattern with flowers on it.” Efa’s voice crumples like burning paper. I don’t understand. What does she mean sick? What does she mean? I just wait for more.
“I remember those flowers, they were so perfect.” You can hear the crossness in Efa’s voice. So cross it’s like the smell of burning. It makes you want to leave the room.
“It took me a minute to realise it was Dad. He sat there on the bed, and watched television as if we weren’t there. He looked the same, but less thin. But he wasn’t there, Iola.” Her voice cuts off. Because she’s crying. Efa’s crying.
“He wasn’t there.” She’s sobbing. Efa? “I tried to hold his hand, but he wouldn’t hold back.” She stops again. Watching her. I think it, for the first time ever, Efa had been quite young back then. Just a kid like me.
“We went every Friday, when you were at school. Sometimes I remember he’d look at me, and it was as if he’d seen me somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember. And Nain’d just say, ‘He can’t remember, love’, in this hard voice, not looking at him, still stitching the flowers on her bit of cloth. I started to hate him more than I hated Nain.” That burning smell again, bitter and so strong I can’t breathe.
There’s a silence.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He was sick.”
“What d’you mean.”
“He was mentally sick.”
Men-tal-ly.
“In the head?”
“Yes.”
“Crazy.”
“No,” she says, and then she looks at me and says, “Yes.”
Crazy is when you’re dreaming even when you’re awake. Crazy is when you can’t keep things in order, can’t hold days and nights apart. I consider it. Dad. I look outside at the wiry, stooping shapes in the garden. They were always just keeping us company, but now, looking at them, they look frightening, like zombies. Crazy. I think of the chicken meat he’d packaged up at the factory, all sucked of air. Crazy.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Efa sighs.
“I don’t really know,” she says. “I didn’t want you to ever sit by that bed, with Nain and those flowers, and with him looking at you as if, perhaps, he’d seen you before.”
I don’t understand her. I don’t understand all of this story. Why not tell me? Why not. I needed him. I feel it, the big heavy thing around my ribs. Grief Nain called it. Grief. Grief is being so angry. So angry. Dad is alive, and sick and I need him. Dad was alive all this time and they knew where he was. They told me lies. They told me lies. Hot salty tears down my cheeks. Raggy, sore breathing. My shoulders are shaking. I’m shaking. Efa’s hug is like a mother. Warm. The burning turns to her Patchuli scent.
“Where is he now?” I ask Efa.
“He lives just outside Liverpool,” she says, “In a hostel. We can write to him. Maybe go to see him if you like?”
I stare at her. Efa. My sister, my mother, my dad, my everything. Then I look out at the shapes in the garden. The unforgettable wooden men who even the wind and rain haven’t washed away, standing still in the garden, warped and stooping, cruel.
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t want to see him. Not now. Not ever.” I run upstairs to my room. I throw myself on the cold bed, bury my face in the empty sheets.
I don’t tell Pigeon. And I stop looking through the papers right then and there. If this is one of the pieces that’s missing then stuff the other piece. I don’t want Taid. I don’t want the whole story to be so ugly. I’d rather be in bits. Because even when we find the missing stories, there’s nothing Pigeon or me can do about it. We can’t do anything about Him or about Dad, or about Efa or Nain or any of it. Except.
14
Gwyn Gelataio, son of Meurig and Mrs Gelataio, can’t remember there ever being anything else but the flowers, sitting on the coffee table in his front room. The air in the room is stale. The plastic flowers sit in the stale air in a little pot in the middle of the coffee table. Everything is beige in the room; the sofa, the armchairs, cushions, the carpet and curtains, but the flowers, in their pot of foam, are shades of indigo and crimson. Gwyn can’t remember there ever being anything else on the table, and has never considered changing this arrangement.
The pot and the flowers in it belonged to his late mother, Mrs Gelataio. Mrs Gelataio had been a devout Catholic. She was also tiny, Italian, extremely temperamental, and fond, with characteristic contrariness, of both the Rolling Stones and shrill tarantella, to both of which she would dance around her small kitchen in the port town, forgetting her prosthetic hip and high blood pressure, throwing her arms up in the air and laughing like a fresh bride.
Above all else she was fond of Gwyn. Proud of every hair that sprouted, wiry from his barrel chest, proud of his bulging belly, his lazy smile, and his legs “Shorta yesa, but astrong”.
Finding a good woman for Gwyn, picking a nice girl from between all the dirty, drunk “English” ones in this Welsh seaside town, inviting a string of them home for tea (“no, acoffee”) and organising for her son a stream of blind dates with the few girls who made it through the process of research, investigation, inspection and interview, had taken up between the hours of five and eight of every day since Mrs’ Gelataio’s weedy Methodist husband Meurig had finally given up and died, surrendering to a lung infection, and to his wife’s desire to send him to purgatory.
Before he finally passed away, Meurig, in a long career as an ear-bashed doormat, had achieved three great successes of which he was justifiably proud. First, in a rare moment of adventurous spirit, taking his life’s only ever holiday, to Tuscany, Meurig had returned with his small but impressive Italian bride and the accompanying commitment to a lifetime of earache.
The second achievement was to furnish his son Gwyn, through drilling and repetition just before bed, and through trips to Methodist Sunday School behind his wife’s Catholic back, with a narrow but serviceable command of Welsh, excluding all swear word
s and including more than a fair share of biblical terms.
Thirdly, Meurig Gelataio (who had accepted his wife’s olive oil and sunshine surname on their wedding day, quaking under a hard stare from her doting, scowling father) managed to protect his pot-bellied son from the worst of his wife’s match-making tendencies for years, simply by providing her with the coarsest girls that his seaside town had to offer, complete with offspring and council flats, likings for shellsuits, “these aterrrrible plastic atracksuits”, and ex- husbands behind bars.
So, when his father died, the world went into a frenzy of blind dates for Gwyn. At least once a week he was wheeled out, suited and booted, waxed and polished and adorned with his late father’s fake gold watch, “You cannot atell, you cannot atell, and she willa like ita yes”, a perfect side parting folding the black hair over his prematurely balding crown and enough money to pay him and the lady in question through a pub dinner “But aNO DRINK we willa not have a drinking girl.”
And this was the problem. Never mind how nice, how amenable, how domestic, how full-figured these girls were, Gwyn’s meek obedience to the no drinking rule, as he fetched first orange juice then tonic water then spring water for the ladies no matter what lambrinis, spritzers and cocktails they chose, was met with falling faces, eyes flicking to watches, and the abrupt need to go to the bathroom, to phone a friend, and to go home early.
Gwyn would arrive home to a tirade of questions. “So eeerly? So eeerly? Gwiiin but watt has ahappened tonite, you have acome home so eeerly! What is awrong with athese women, such a good man!” And then, taking his round head in her arms as Gwyn mumbled apologetically, she’d say, “It’sa all right my darrrling. So handsome! Your amother willa always love you, allllways.”
Sue was the only woman who made it through the multiple stages of the selection process and through the dry first date. Sue was a capable, down-to-earth and dowdy girl, who must have been thirty but dressed to double her age, and was about as charming as a cold fried egg. But even Sue had informed him, a few weeks in, that she could never ever imagine living with Mrs Gelataio, and was quickly dismissed from the list with a snort, for the untiring process to begin again.