by Alys Conran
23
It was all worth it, because he felt so proud. Perhaps it was even worth it when later on that day Salim was out speaking to his mother on the phone, and Neil came into the room, into the open cell Pigeon and Salim shared, walking in like he owned it, with two other lads behind him. They jumped on Pigeon, and when their hitting was like a storm and their fists like water boiling and beating in his ears and against his shoulders, his back, his ribs, perhaps even then it was worth it? Because at least he’d got Him.
But here it was almost like it had been at home, or worse, because when you shouted then, for someone to come, for Mam, for Iola, at least someone might hear, and understand. Here there was nobody. The words that were him, were Pigeon, were useless. His words made sounds and shapes that nobody could see. Nobody heard. Nobody listened.
You could see it in the wardens’ eyes when they turned away from Pigeon: It was better to let the kids get a handle on him, that one. He needed to be knocked into shape. Besides, the lads never did any lasting damage. Knew when to stop.
Because of Allan asking, they did take him to see a psychologist. Are you alright Pigeon? Is everything alright. But you couldn’t think of the right words for all this, not in English, so you couldn’t speak, it was like having a mouth full of dry bread. You couldn’t speak.
Did he understand that his mother was ill? That word ‘de-te-rio-ra-tion’. Did he understand? Did he know what he’d done? Did he understand the terms that they’d used at the trial? Self-defence, unpremeditated, psychological trauma. These were all words used to describe Pigeon and what he’d done.
Yes he understood them. He learnt some of those words. Pigeon could give you a definition if you wanted. Res-pon-si-bi-li-ty he knew. Knew the answer to did he feel responsible? Yes. Did he regret it? Yes. But that was a lie.
And then came the other questions. What did he want to do when he was older? He wanted to build walls. Walls? Yes. Stone ones? Yes. Tall, straight stone walls. He wanted to build walls between things. Things? Places. People. He could tell you that. He could tell you in words that didn’t get close to the inside of him, not close to the shed, the crooked house, the hill, and not close to telling you about the fists and the door that closed each night and left the room smothered and dangerous.
It was because you couldn’t get the measure of him, Pigeon. He wasn’t speaking to you directly. You couldn’t trust him. There was something not right. “There’s something wrong with you,” they’d whisper in his ear. And he knew it. Knew it was because of the words that were inside, stopping him up. Stopping him from talking the talk that you needed here. He worked hard at it, putting his own words out, one by one, until the whispers stopped, and the quick, fluent English comebacks and threats fell from his mouth too, as if he was one of them.
Visting times were the best. Salim’s mother came to see him every weekday so Pigeon had the room to himself. His mam never came. It was too far, and difficult for her on the bus. He sent her letters still and now his caseworker’d got in touch with her. She was doing better. She was doing better now they said. That was good. Perhaps she’d be able to hear him and speak to him when he came home.
One time Salim took Pigeon with him to see his mother. They walked into the visiting area. Pigeon had never been there before. It was all chairs and tables, and people in little groups, sitting. Pigeon could see Neil there, talking to a man with hair full of gel. Neil had a real life too. Pigeon felt glad about it. Neil had a real life too. All this was just a bit of it. Tem-po-ra-ry, he thought.
“This way,” said Salim. “That’s her over there.”
Salim’s mum was dressed in clothes like an Arab woman on the telly. She stood up and smiled at Salim. She kissed his cheeks like a mother would. She spoke to him like a mother in quick bubbling Urdu.
“Mum, this is my friend, Pigeon,” said Salim, shyly.
Pigeon didn’t know what to do. He wanted her to like him. He extended a hand. That was what you did when you were grown up wasn’t it?
She stepped towards him, and she kissed him on the cheek just like she had with Salim. Her face was soft and kind, and as she kissed him she held his shoulders.
“Thank you,” she said smiling, with eyes like summer “Thank you for being a friend to Salim.”
Pigeon could feel himself starting to cry. He could feel the shaking travelling up from his feet to his hips and up his back. He couldn’t do it.
Pigeon ran out.
“Pigeon!” he could hear Salim shouting after him. The wardens stepped aside to let him pass. Pigeon ran back to the room, and threw himself on the bed. He bit his own hand to stop the tears. They couldn’t see him cry. They couldn’t.
After that Pigeon decided visiting times were the best, because he could read the books and be alone in the room. But he’d finished the space book now. He closed it, closed up the open sky.
They offered him a visit home.
“You could go home for a weekend,” the woman said. The psychologist.
“Why?” he asked.
“To see your mum.”
“She doesn’t care,” he said.
“It’s not that she doesn’t care,” said this woman who knew nothing about anything “She’s just been ill.”
Ill? Was that what they called it when you just let yourself disappear. Was he supposed to treat his mother like she was his patient, or his child? Was that what they wanted?
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ll just stick around here.”
Allan, in Education, had got it into his head that he could help Pigeon. That made it worse. That Allen thought reading and writing help would do it, make Pigeon’s problems go away.
“We need to get your English going,” he said to Salim and Pigeon. “I want you to leave here speaking and writing it like pros.”
Salim looked blank, and Pigeon scowled. It was just another way of saying he wasn’t right. On the hill language had been something he had. He’d got smart with it. Twisting it. Turning it. So that it said what you wanted it to, and so other people believed what you said. Here all that was lost. Just a ghost. An accent when Pigeon spoke English. An imperfection.
Pigeon pretended he couldn’t read Allan’s English words until Allan almost gave up, stumped by Pigeon’s slow, painful reading.
“C’mon, lad,” he said once, looking at Pigeon. “You can do better than that.”
I can in Welsh, was what Pigeon thought. I can in my own fucking language.
But slowly Pigeon learnt that English was a weapon, and could be a shield. You needed it in pristine condition, and you needed the tricks of it, so you could defend yourself. Your own language was a part of your body, like a shoulder or a thigh, and when you were hurt there was no defence. When the kids argued in Welsh at home on the hill it was a bare knuckled fight. But English. With English what you had to do was build armour, and stand there behind your shield to shoot people down. Pigeon buried his own language deeper and deeper in that armour. Until the beatings stopped.
Salim wasn’t able. They came for him. Time after time. Until one day Salim was taken off the wing. Pigeon never knew what happened to him. He was sent home, the lads said. But where was home for Salim? You never really knew.
Then it was the long last months alone, with only the quiet pale boy called John for company. And he wasn’t Salim. John was serious and pale, and thin and disappearing. Pigeon buried missing Salim under as many new English words as he could. Now, in education. Pigeon sat at the back of the class. John sat at the front. So you had to not speak to John. You had to let him learn.
Pigeon was somebody now. When he walked down the corridors, people shrank away. It was all just reputation. Pigeon spread stories about himself. He was tough, he was strong. He’d killed a grown man. And, as usual, you never quite knew if all of it was true.
Allan kept hoping for Pigeon. And, secretly, Pigeon kept learning, sneaking books around, under his clothes, under his bedclothes, raiding them for worlds where none of this
was happening.
Allan kept quiet about it.
“Enjoy it?” he’d whisper when Pigeon brought a book back, watching him pull it shiftily from under his jumper, checking with nervous eyes to see if any of the others had seen.
“Nah,” Pigeon’d say. But he’d grin. And Allan’d grin too. He was alright that kid, Pigeon. Whatever the others said, that kid was alright.
It was Allan who told him.
“You’re due out next month,” he said, looking Pigeon straight in the eye.
Pigeon said nothing. He took a step back. Impossible. It felt impossible. Most of the lads here knew when they were due, but he’d forgotten. There was no one to tell him. No visitors to keep him thinking about Home.
“We need to make a plan for it,” said Allan “Get you set up with a plan so it goes well for you back home.”
But Pigeon just stared at Allan. He was due out. Pigeon felt small, grey, nondescript. He felt terrified, his mouth full of too much stifling quietness.
According to Allan, it was to be home and then just keeping up with lessons and everything and ‘staying out of trouble’. What did that mean? Trouble was the house, was the hill, was his mam, was Iola, was everything he had inside his head and everything that was making its way slowly, day by day, to the tip of his tongue.
24
Walking downtown, we both ignore the crooked house as we pass it. Cher goes on about the exams.
“Iola,” she asks me slowly, “did you study yet?”
Cher’s English is like a slow song. It goes up and down, and some of the letters are pulled out long. She never learnt Welsh after all, Cher, only a few words and they sound out of tune in her mouth. Before the accident Cher’d been learning it automatically, like all the kids who move here do, but after the accident, the words just didn’t stick.
Cher means for the exams, have I started revising?
“Nah,” I say. But Cher gives me a slow, sly look that means don’t believe you.
It’s been all paper and pens and writing and thinking about school ever since Pigeon left. All hard work, that’s what it’s been, all through one school year, and then into another, and up to secondary. That’s because they think you must be good if your marks are. My marks are top or second top. You can keep safe in good marks. I keep my grades high.
Cher doesn’t. Her writing was like a kid’s when she first came back. I’d got set a task of helping her with reading. We didn’t do much reading but Cher is cleverer and funnier than you’d think once you give her time, and so we’re friends now. Until the last couple of months the other girls weren’t much interested in me anyway, because I don’t do sport or have nice clothes and until last year I was short. This year I’ve grown and got those new trousers and I’m getting some looks from the boys now, you can see it. They’ve got interested, the boys. Interested enough for behind the wall anyway. So now the girls are paying attention at school too, and it’ll be a dangerous time. A dangerous time of back and forth looks, and words that scar you across the back along the school corridors and up the town’s darkening streets where the air is turning black with the tit for tat insults of the girls. The girls are all like that. We’re all like that. Becoming a woman is so embarrassing. You feel it. The shame. And so you’ve got to lash out.
But there’s none of that with Cher. That’s the thing about Cher. Since the accident you can depend on her. She’s regular. There’s nothing lively uncoiling in her with that dangerous electricity that fills the bodies of all the other girls. Womanliness. Efa calls it. Womanliness. A warm word.
Still, I feel cold when we pass Pigeon’s house. I feel it again, the feeling of that day.
Walking downtown, we’re almost at the shop. You don’t want anyone to see you going in, because it’s a charity shop. It’d be “Iola Williams wears dead people’s clothes”, it’d be “sloppy seconds Iola” and all that. So me and Cher walk along the High Street, past Nasareth Chapel which is closed now and boarded up, and has a sign that says For Sale. They say someone’ll buy it and make it into flats, even though you can’t imagine it. How can they make that chapel into somewhere for someone to live? That should’ve lasted forever, even if we didn’t go. It was just a place that existed and should always exist. But it’s over. The chapel’s over. It’s like a big dead person lying on a slab.
Then there’s Spar, the Chemists, and then the British Heart Foundation shop.
We look quickly up and down the street. There’s no one we know, it’s too early for kids to be sitting on the bench on the street. A good time. We go in quickly.
Inside the shop there’s clothes and Luned behind the counter. We ask Luned if we can try on some of the clothes. She’s old as chapel, Luned, grey hair and skin like a windy sea. But she still works here every Saturday, and she doesn’t mind Cher and me trying things on even though we won’t buy anything.
“Gewch siwr,” she says nodding and smiling. “Gewch siwr.”
She smiles at me, but looks at Cher a bit differently. They do that. It’s since the accident, and because of her way of speaking slowly and staring at people. Now when she does it, I’ll kick her or nudge her and she’ll say “Sorry” and laugh.
You have to look and look along all the rails. Mostly it’s things you’ll never wear, or things that are too big. But you might find something decent if you have a good look around. Today it’s all just trying things on. We don’t have any money anyway. I find a skirt for Cher. Cher still has good legs, at the bottom, below the knee. Above the knee they’re too fat. Having a perfect body means having all the details right. The shape of you going out and in at all the right places, all your skin smooth, all the dips and curves just perfect. Cher grins when she sees the skirt. It’s going to be the right size. It’ll look good. You never get to see Cher looking as good as when she tries on clothes in the shop; she only wears big jumpers and old scraggy leggings, and pumps. And her hair’s a mess, and she never puts it up except in one long ponytail that looks just like a pony’s greasy tail. Cher picks out a body top and some trousers for me. They’re OK, and it’s the rules that we have to try on what the other one chooses, even if it’s gross.
We go into the changing room together. We’ve been doing this every Saturday for ages, but for the last few times it’s felt different. My body’s got more shape now, WOMANLY, and my boobs are heavier, and next to me, stood in the mirror Cher looks fat and is still the shape of a girl. I quickly put the body top on, and the trousers, and then realise Cher’s just staring.
“What?” I ask her.
“Sorry,” says Cher. “Sorry.”
But I don’t feel right in the changing room with Cher, and it might be the last time we do it because there was something not right in the way Cher was staring. There was something not right. Cher doesn’t ask me what I think of the skirt, Cher hardly looks at herself in the mirror and then she takes the skirt off, puts the leggings back on, and gets out quick.
A few weeks later, Cher and me are sitting on the sofa.
“Efa’s got a boyfriend,” I tell her. I can’t stop my voice sounding surprised. I can’t help my voice sounding like Efa had no right. And anyway how had she found the time between The Home and all that?
“Iola,” Efa’d said that morning. “Tyrd. Come and sit here, Iola.”
I thought then, for a minute, that she knew, Efa. This’d be it, I’d go over to sit at her side and then my Efa’d say it. I know what you did, Iola, she’d say. And how would it feel? Would it feel bad, or good. Perhaps it would. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so heavy if she shared it.
But it wasn’t that.
“Iola, I’m seeing someone.”
“What? Who?”
“His name’s Dafydd.”
“Dafydd?”
“Yes.”
I stare at my sister. A man? Efa? What about It’s a world unfair for women, love and all that? What about Taid? What about Dad?
“I’ll have him round soon,” Efa said. “So you can meet him.”
“She’s been seeing that guy for ages,” says Cher now, in her even way, starting slowly and then breathing along what she’s going to say, so it comes out all together in a sort of slow singsong.
“How’d you know?”
There’s a pause while Cher starts to speak, finds the words, like gathering over-ripe blackberries.
“I’ve seen them together.”
“Where?”
“Downtown.”
“When?”
“When I went to the shop,” Cher pauses. “On my own,” she adds
It’d been the day after she’d stared at me in the changing room in that way.
She hadn’t asked me to go. It was between us, that long look she’d given my body and legs that day. It was stuck between us, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Cher had bought that skirt there. That’s how I knew she’d been. It was the first time either of us had spent a penny in Luned’s shop.
Efa brings him round. He comes into the house and steps over the doorstep, and the light in the kitchen’s different. The first day he comes, Efa makes curry. It’s nice. I eat it, and listen to them talk.
“How long did it take you to train?” Efa’s asking him.
Dafydd, it turns out, is a yoga teacher. He can do yoga better than Efa, according to her. His face is full of smiles. He looks healthy, like as if he’s just been on holiday, all year. Dafydd has long fingers, they dance around like leaves. He has dark hair, and honey-coloured skin. It looks like the sunshine, his skin, not like rain.
They’re sitting on the sofa, talking, ignoring me.
“Oh, a couple of years. We’ve got a retreat coming up, Efa,” he says. “Why don’t you come?”
Efa jerks her head towards me. It’s because of me she can’t go.
“Could she stay with a friend?” he asks.
I look at Dafydd. He smiles. Efa looks at me, and then she looks at him. And maybe this is going to be like when He moved in with Pigeon? Maybe it’ll be getting chucked out for me. But Dafydd smiles. Maybe not.