by Alys Conran
And if, when he sat on the sofa in his front room, Gwyn often thought of Sue, her thick plaid skirts, her cardigans, her bunned hair, and thought that it was a shame really that she had gone, it was only before he remembered meekly that he missed his mother more, for Mrs Gelataio had finally bowed out to an attack of angina whilst complaining about her late husband and pruning her long-suffering fig tree in the rare sun of last summer, going off to heaven via purgatory where poor Meurig had been sweating it out since his funeral two years previously, awaiting the arrival of his fierce little wife, and to be directed by her, up or down.
It was Gwyn’s late mother who had dreamt up the ice-cream van. It was to be the unlikely vehicle for her son’s social advancement since Mrs Gelataio had an exaggerated perception of the status of ice cream.
Gwyn awoke one Monday morning expecting a breakfast of pancetta and strong coffee, only to hear crazy ice-cream melodies blaring in the street outside, and, when he blearily opened the curtains, to find his mother standing proud and tiny next to the clash of new colours and posters and stickers that was ‘Hufen Iâ Gwyn’s Ice Creams’ in all its brand spanking glory.
Mrs Gelataio, with her genealogical appreciation for fine ice cream, so concocted sweet icy delicacies, from dark sultry chocolate to basil and lime sorbet, only to be disappointed when the uneducated tonsils of the brats all along the coast and up into the yellow-grey hills opted for flakes, feasts, calypsos, and other such “abritish arubbish alollipop”.
“These apeople are amad,” she muttered, and the belief was further confirmed when, doubtfully sending Gwyn and the van out to a cold autumn fairground, it was found that the sales of ice creams, on that frosty day, didn’t flinch. “Craizy!” she said under her breath, patting Gwyn on the head as she counted the money onto the chequered tablecloth in the dark kitchen.
The van keeps Gwyn in just enough money to maintain his flat, his beige living room, and his stifling status quo. But Gwyn, with his brown skin, his tasty winter ice creams and his bizarre chapel Welsh; Gwyn doesn’t belong.
“Ma’ Gwyn yn od.” The words are whispered after him, as the children lick their ice creams with pink tongues. Gwyn is ‘od’, funny, strange. Gwyn Gelataio will have to be re-born.
Today Gwyn sits in his front room, in the flat his father bought for him and his mother had painted and furnished. Gwyn has never learnt to cook, nor to iron, wash, clean, make love. His mother’s doting eye had provided him with the generally comfortable and unchallenging presupposition, that there was no need; and even now, with the microwave, the drop-off-pick-up service at the launderette, Mrs Lewis who calls to clean like a whirling wind once a week, and a few copies of Playboy to play with, this idea has remained happily unchallenged.
Gwyn, who divides his time neatly in half between going out in the van and lying in bed, with a little flexibility in the schedule for eating and long breaks in the toilet, only sits in the front room every now and again, when he feels he should because it’s the room referred to, by the few people who’ve visited over the years, as the ‘stafell fyw’.
So, every once in a while, during the weekday ice-cream lull, Gwyn makes an effort to sit in the front room. Gwyn Gelataio sits on the sofa, looking at the crossword puzzle. He’s brought it here to complete. It should only take a half hour or so. And that’s plenty of living for the room to have earned its name.
He gratefully surrenders his crossword to the desire to go to the toilet, at around three thirty, shuffling across the beige carpet, through the door, across the hall and into the loo, locking the door against his mother’s ghost, pulling his big blue jeans down over his white behind, and perching on the only seat in the flat over which he feels a sense of ownership, picking up in his square hands a magazine filled with girls and cars, both of which he covets, and relaxing slowly.
CLANK! From outside.
Gwyn’s white behind lifts into the air a foot or so, and the magazine goes flying too. Running out of the toilet door, trying simultaneously to pull his trousers and paisley knickers up from around his ankles, rushing to the front room again, and pulling back the curtain a little, Gwyn, trousers still hanging at his knees, breaks out in a cold sweat.
The boy stands beside the little girl, pale, face to the window, catapult and stones in his hands, waiting.
“Agor y drws! AGOR Y DRWS!” the boy shouts, seeing Gwyn’s round face wearing the curtains around it like a wig.
Gwyn quickly drops the curtains back over the window, terrified. Ignoring the children’s demands to be let in, he tries to tiptoe across the room away from the window, a cumbersome undertaking for such a square body on such small little feet. He finally reaches the kitchen, closing the door tight and exhaling with relief against it.
In the kitchen are all the mod cons bought by Mrs Gelataio, a blue lino floor, some enduring plastic fruit in a bowl, and a photograph of herself, smiling like steel, which now stares down at Gwyn.
Gwyn has no idea what to do. Problem solving is not a forte. Children are his livelihood, flocking to his ice creams with their pences and pounds, but Gwyn has no idea how to negotiate with a child and no treats to offer, the fridge and the cupboards empty and his mind fogged by the increasingly pressing need to go to the bathroom.
He’s still frozen against the kitchen door when a crash, followed by the sound of glass breaking heralds the arrival, colliding into the door just beside his hairy right arm, of a sharp grey stone.
Gwyn looks at the stone, and from it his eyes trace a trajectory to what was once the kitchen window. In place of the window, staring through the ragged hole is a small, white face.
It stares. Gwyn stares. The boy stares. Gwyn runs back through the door, across the beige carpet, past the plastic flowers, across the hallway and into the toilet again, locking the door behind him. Then he realises the whole thing was a bad idea.
Through the toilet door he can hear the sound of glass crunching, a girl and a boy’s voices arguing, feet landing smack tinkle on the floor as they jump through the broken window, footsteps padding across the carpet and closer and closer and closer, up to the toilet door. Gwyn stands in the little toilet, just the toilet bowl looking up at him, the tiny frosted window open on its hinges as if half blinking uselessly at the street outside, his mother’s can of air freshener, and the pile of magazines set there to get him through the boredom of constipation, and that’s all.
“He’s in the toilet,” a girl’s Welsh voice, shrill as metal.
A witchy boy’s laugh.
“Tyrd allan, Gwyn!”
It’s an order that Gwyn, cowering on the toilet seat, wouldn’t think to obey.
The boy mocks him.“Scared of kids? Scared of kids are yer?” he scorns.
Gwyn’s blood pressure climbs, in fear and shame.
The toilet seat creaks dangerously as Gwyn places a foot on either side of it and hoists himself up to take a look out of the window. The street’s empty, the carefully cut lawns blank. There are no cars parked, no echoing arguments or irritating radios. Everyone’s at work. Perspiration breaks out on his upper lip, and drips begin to roll down his forehead.
The boy tells the girl to “Ista lawr yn fana” and guard the toilet door. Gwyn can hear feet, probably the boy’s, scuffing around the flat, can hear footsteps pacing across the hall and into the bedroom. Gwyn thinks of his mother’s silver picture frame, his new TV in the bedroom that swells all the people to twice their usual size, thinks that he hasn’t put those magazines away under the bed, hasn’t made the bed in fact, or opened the curtains today. Gwyn blushes, standing on the toilet.
Gwyn, crouched on the toilet seat, can still hear whispering outside the door, and the girl’s occasional sniffling, sitting low, the sniffing sound about halfway up the door. After a while, he decides to try talking to her.
“Sut mae?” says Gwyn shakily.
The sniffing quietens.
“Be ydach chi’n ei wneud yma?” His Welsh is even more formal than usual. Asking the questio
n, there’s the sinking feeling that he doesn’t want to know why they’re here after all.
There’s a silence. A sniff. Then, “Dilyn fo.”
And that’s it. There it is. No answer, no reason, just follow my leader. That’s the problem, for these children and for Gwyn: follow my leader. Gwyn knows that game well.
There’s the sound of the boy running back down the stairs, of paper rustling, of the girl whispering fiercely to her friend, the boy not replying.
Then the corner of one of those magazines pokes under the door, followed by another and another, until the gap under the door is stuffed full of paper. Gwyn looks down at the magazines. Disembodied little breasts and bottoms. Lacy underwear. Pouting lips. Then there’s a strange smell, of oil, or kerosene? A kind of scraping sound outside the door, the sound of feet receding away. It’s not until the first whisp of smoke snakes under the door that Gwyn gets it. Like a rabbit in a hole.
Still Gwyn sits on the toilet, watching the smoke sucking under the door, loitering long enough for the flames to start licking the door, the sound of crackling to begin, the small toilet to fill with smoke. Gwyn hesitates just a second or two more, then starts clambering for the window, pushing his head out, and then his shoulder, and shouting and shouting for dear life. When he’s halfway out, his fat legs hanging behind him over the toilet seat, he can feel the heat on his backside and flames licking at his ankles, because his other magazine pile, set by the toilet, with the cars, has begun to burn. And when Gwyn Gelataio tumbles to the damp grass outside he’s a new-born-middle-aged-babe, his clothes blackened by the fire, the short little hairs on his ankles singed down to a sweet, curly stubble.
15
Afterwards, on the bus, counting the streets back home from Gwyn’s, Iola’s not speaking to him. She sits next to Pigeon, shaking.
“Stopia,” he says. “Stopia.”
“Sori,” she says. And then, “Sori, Pigeon,” again. She keeps shaking.
Pigeon turns away from her, stares out the window. It’s started to rain. Wet rain. That’s what they call it when it falls like this, heavy drops, full of sky.
“Bydd Gwyn yn iawn, Pigeon?” she asks him. Her eyes are big and blue and there are no ideas in her eyes. Will Gwyn be alright? She asks him, over and over. Will Gwyn be alright, Pigeon? Will Gwyn be alright?
“Falla,” says Pigeon. He moves his shoulders for Not sure.
Pigeon should we go back? Should we go back, Pigeon?
“Na,” he says. “Na.”
It’s not the kind of thing you can go back on anyway. In his pocket there’s the box of matches. Only one left.
There’s a crumpled cigarette in his pocket too. He’ll have it when he gets back home. It’s the last ofHis cigarettes. Maybe the last cigarette Pigeon’ll have for a while. Next to him, Iola’s started to cry. Her nose drips with the tears.
She’s too small. She’s not helping anything. She has no ideas. Pigeon looks at her. She’s useless to him. He gets up at the next stop. I’m going to walk from here, he says.
She looks at him, blue eyes. No idea. No idea what he means.
She tries to get off too. “Ddim fanma, Iola,” he says. “Y nesa”. The next stop, he says. Get off at the next one.
But she wants to come now, with him. She jumps off the bus after him, crying more. She can barely walk, with her untied shoelaces, and with her tears. She’s crying so much there’s snot coming from her nose. She’s ugly. Hopeless.
Pigeon turns round to her. “I don’t want you to come by mine again, or ask for stories or anything ok, Iola?”
Pigeon looks at her once. He feels nothing when he looks at her, as if she’s just a piece of cardboard, or rubber, or wood. He turns and walks away and doesn’t turn round, knowing she’s standing in the road on her own in the rain.
He just wants to walk. He walks up the long, ugly hillside road, past the houses where there’s people sitting down to dinner, watching TV. The streetlights are orange all over town when you look down at it from this hillside road. Down-town’s small from up here, and nobody in it matters.
Pigeon walks up the hill, towards his house. There’s nothing left to do but go home for him, home to the shed and his Mam, her dead dresses, and the dark quiet. Go home and wait for them to come.
Pigeon goes into his crooked house, his actual home, for the first time in months. Pigeon walks into the lounge, where his Mam’s sitting under the lamp which she hasn’t switched on. He sits with her in the darkness. Pigeon sits, and she rocks, and he tells her slowly what he’s done, tells her as if she can understand.
“Dwi ’di brifo dyn, Mam,” he tells her. “I’ve hurt a man.” As if the words are worth something, as if they don’t fall to pieces in the dead air.
“What d’you mean, love?” she asks. But he can only say it again.
“I’ve hurt him.”
And he sits shaking. When he looks at her, all he sees is that she’s afraid too. In the silence after the words, the silence that lasts for hours, Pigeon waits for it, for them to come take him away, punish him.
But He does instead. Hecomes home, crashing in through the door, angry and drunk and heavy as a stone, and He goes for her. But not for any new reason, and not because of Gwyn. He goes for her. Goesfor her as she sits there rocking andHe wants to kill her, He says it. Says it and doesn’t mean it, just as Pigeon’s heard Him say before. But she believes him, Pigeon’s mam is screaming and begging him, so that it tears you apart.
Pigeon’s thinking it’ll be like this forever: Pigeon in the shed and his mam rocking and Him coming to keep breaking it all up. And Pigeon does it. He smacks Him full in the stomach. With the hit, which lands full and hard in the centre of His wide, strong waist, the whole room collapses down to just the two of them. Just the two of them. His mam runs out, away from, him, from Pigeon. And, in the room, it’s just Him, and just Pigeon, and Pigeon’s sore, useless fist. As for Him, he’s winded. Doubled over, but f***ing and blinding, and he’ll get his own back soon as he can stand straight again. One, two, three seconds.
Pigeon can’t see a way out. Not even Gwyn and the fire have made it any better. There’s still this feeling, like having his legs and arms bound, and like trying to breathe underwater. And Pigeon can’t. He can’t breathe.
Pigeon can’t breathe, so he’s across the room, opening the drawer, opening the drawer to get it out, holding it in his hands. It’s cold and hard. It’s violent. An animal stirring. Gasping for air, for the surface, Pigeon pushes the little catch away, like a dog baring its teeth.
16
The dark street’s quiet, Sunday quiet, and there’s just the orange lights along it, the sound of my feet walking, and, at the end of the street, the crooked house, and shouting penned in by walls.
So what if Pigeon told me on the bus after the fire at Gwyn’s to get out of his stories? So what do I care? I start walking towards the crooked house after Pigeon. I’m in on this now, so I’m not just going home to Efa as if nothing’s happened. And maybe it’ll be alright. Maybe Gwyn got out, and maybe it’ll be alright and Pigeon will want me back?
There’s a light in the crooked house. I don’t want to see Him so I go past the house, and down the garden towards the shed, and that’s when they make sense, the noises. And that’s when I know. I know what they are. I’m not stupid. I can hear Him shouting. And I can hear the sound of hitting. But most of all I can hear Pigeon. And maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s that, that crying that’s like a kid, Pigeon crying like he’s just a kid, that makes me know I have to get in the way of Him just so He stops. I’ll make it happen myself.
I’m so quiet, and I move so carefully, it’s like I’m not me. I’m not Iola. I’m someone better. Someone who knows exactly what to do. She’s strong and careful and she moves up to the house, pushes open the door, hears His shouts, the sound of Pigeon crying, and then quiet. The room and what I’m seeing begins to make a picture.
There’s Pigeon standing in the room, and there’s Him holding
Pigeon to the floor, and then I see it, Pigeon’s holding it to His head.
17
Iola’s gone, Pigeon goes to the gun, which lies on the floor beside Him. The gun’s dead now, the power of it gone. The gun’s just an object, just a thing Pigeon takes and wraps in brown paper again, and holds to his chest as he leaves the house, quickly by the front door.
He walks. He doesn’t run. He walks calmly to the quarry, up between the old barracks where the men used to sleep, and then into the quarried hill, where slices have been cut from the mountains, like spoonfuls snatched from a cake. Pigeon walks, then clambers up to a small tunnel in the hillside, and crawls through the black passageway, toward the green, watery light on the other side. There, in the lost world of another quarry, hidden deep inside the hill, decorated with ferns, lichen, and gentle moss, Pigeon finds a long crack in the slate wall, and pushes the gun and its brown paper wrapping deep inside, as far as his arm will go into the dark, split slate.
When Pigeon arrives back from the quarry, wet to the skin since he wears no coat, and only his thin school trousers, it’s calm in the house again. Sewing, Pigeon’s mam hums a sea shanty under her hanging dresses in the dark of their unsteady house, and all around her the town sits down to meat, and television stories.
His mother looks up suddenly, stops singing.
“Pigeon?” she asks into the heaviness of the room. It’s so dark in the lounge that it’s not possible to see her working hands or the coloured thread, the bending fabric. She keeps sewing, diligently, mechanically.
Breathing short and tight, Pigeon moves closer.
“Help,” he says, almost in a whisper. “Please, help.”
They look at each other, the dim shapes of each other. She rocks. He goes to her, sits at her feet and puts his boy’s face on her lap as she sways. She strokes his hair. They wait like that as she hums a song or two, until Pigeon hears a car outside and rises, kisses her soft, fading hair.