by Alys Conran
Cher comes and stays when Efa’s away. Efa says that’s alright.
“Ma’n well i ti gael cwmni,” she says.
But being with Cher’s almost like being on your own. I’m reading a magazine. Cher’s leaning against the sink. The light comes in from the window behind Cher, green through the wet leaves outside and the window. You just get a bit of sunshine, like its shining through water.
“Have you seen the way she looks at him?” Cher says it almost angrily.
Cher doesn’t like Dafydd. Cher says she’s seen him smoking, even though I can’t imagine it. Cher scowled when she found out Dafydd had come round.
“I know,” I say. Efa does go all stupid when Dafydd’s there.
“I mean, he’s horrible.” Cher’s not keen on men anyways.
“Leave it Cher, OK? Efa’s happy. I’m happy.”
“He’s horrible,” says Cher again.
“Why Cher? What’s he done to you?”
Cher’s just playing with the fridge door, opening and closing it with a sucky click. She’s tall now, taller than me, but she’s still wide.
“He’s horrible. Just is.”
Cher grabs a carton of juice from the fridge and goes out the door, leaving me and my magazine, and all these pretty girls in it with skin smooth like new paper. Cher’s moving faster now, speaking quicker, and she’s got more opinions. It doesn’t feel so safe to be around her. She does things of her own accord.
But he’s nice to me, Dafydd, really nice. And he hugs Efa and she laughs and acts like a little girl. Which is funny, to think of Efa being a little girl. I don’t think Efa’s ever been that before, not really. Not with The Home and all that.
But Cher still doesn’t like Dafydd. And the feeling’s mutual. Dafydd, when he arrives with his car full of boxes, looks down, smiling at Cher, and says “Haia Cher,” like as if he’s just pretending to say the name, like it’s stupid. He knows her. How does he know her?
Cher and Dafydd don’t get on. Cher almost never talks to him. When they’re both around, which they are most of the time, Cher looks angry. She gets a black look and her eyelids are like dark hoods over her eyes. Efa says she’s jealous, “Cos we’ve a man in our house now, and Cher doesn’t have a Dad.”
“I don’t have a Dad either,” I tell Cher. “He upped and left, and I’m not interested.” But it doesn’t make a difference, and Cher just looks confused.
And I don’t know quite why I do it, but I make Cher angry, giving Dafydd all the attention, and stroking his head and hugging him while Cher scowls on the sofa. Dafydd grabs me then, and pulls me onto his knee, as if I’m still a little kid, and he teases me about my clothes, which are too small now because I’ve grown. Efa smiles, and then me and Efa laugh like we used to back in the day. But Cher ruins it. Cher storms out with Efa going after her saying “Cher?” out the door. It’s not until Efa and Cher are gone that I get up, cos being on Dafydd’s knee without Cher and Efa feels strange.
I follow on after Cher then, passing Efa on the street who’s turning back to go to Dafydd on the sofa. When I catch up with Cher and grab her arm, Cher whirls round.
“Piss off, Iola,” she says. And it’s then I see she’s crying. And I feel bad. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.
“Sorry,” I say, but it sounds too quick. And I am sorry, but I’m not quite sure what for. Which part.
I’m still stood there, holding Cher’s arm, and then Cher does it. She leans forwards and she kisses me, on the lips. Cher’s lips are clean and soft.
I pull away, like I’ve touched something hot. And me and Cher stand facing. We stand a long while.
“Lets go down to the river, Cher,” I say then.
“Alright,” says Cher. And that’s it. Nothing’s broken. She follows me down the hill, like a stray.
“Will Pigeon be back soon?”
We’ve sat down now together, my head’s on Cher’s lap and Cher’s stroking my hair, Cher’s other hand’s curling round my belly when she says it suddenly. It’s a good thing Pigeon’s gone, so Cher can be friends with me, and we can sit and cuddle and touch while we lean against the big tree by the river.
But Cher keeps asking, “Will he be back soon?”
“No,” I say. I’m cross with Cher again, and push her off.
Cher won’t let it go. She wants to know about Pigeon’s trial. All about Pigeon, like as if I could really tell her Pigeon’s story, or like I really know anything except for that I miss him, and that without him nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, like Cher.
“Lets go and see him,” says Cher then. “Lets go and see him.”
“No,” I say, and I stand up.
“Why?” asks Cher, and her eyes are big and brown and soft, like feathers and cushions and cotton wool.
“We don’t know where he is.”
“He’s in Liverpool,” says Cher.
I stop. In England? Pigeon?
“How d’you know?”
“I saw it on a letter. They wrote and said we could visit.”
“Well you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Cher! He killed your dad!”
I say it. And it’s then it hurts me. The feeling like panic up my body and in my chest. I can’t breathe. What’s wrong? What’s wrong with me? I can hear sounds in my head, can hear people shouting in my head. It’s all terrible, big, dark. And then I’m just stood here on the grass again with Cher. Cher’s watching me. She just watches me and watches me until I go back to normal. Cher picks up a stone, and plays with it in her hand.
“So?” she says.
“What do you mean, so?”
“He was a bastard,” she says then. And then she laughs. Cher laughs.
Under the curls, there’s a spot on Cher’s forehead I just want to squeeze.
“He’s gone anyways, Iola,” she says. And her voice is kind. As if she understands. And it feels like some of that pressure lifts, just like a tiny bit of a breeze on a heavy day.
But there’s no way of getting rid of him, Pigeon. Not for good. He’ll be back. And there’s part of me can’t wait, and part of me that’d rather wait forever.
25
In the lit-up window, bright against the houses and the hill, there’s the girl. Bare except for her underwear, she stands in her room beside the bed. A selection of clothing lies across the bedcover. She places each trouser and shoe combination together, stands back, considers. Pacing over to the radio, she turns ‘Atlantic 252’ up a notch. Through the window it blares, Wet Wet Wet again.
Skipping back to the clothes, she holds the tops up against herself in the mirror, puts her head to one side, smiles at herself, then adjusts her lips so that her teeth don’t show so much. Half the decision made, she picks up a little make-up compact, kneels on the floor at the foot of the tall mirror and lifts the eyeliner to the rim of her eye, to carefully, shakily, trace all around it. She layers her lashes with black mascara. She lifts the pad of the eye-shadow and dabs it over her eyelid. A love song comes on the radio and she begins to sway dreamily.
Make-up assembled, she stands up again, still in full view of the window, the faint trace of her ribs showing above her fragile waist, a small bra covering her almost breasts. She pulls the body-top over her, buttons it at the crotch, and stands to survey.
She does a pirouette, one leg bending as she spins and the tip of its toe finding the hollow in the side of the other knee.
In the overgrown garden, stood between the old, ivied sculptures, a big bag slung over one shoulder, Pigeon watches the dark house. He almost laughs, and watches again, eyes held by the spotlighted room as Iola pulls on her jeans and stands critically, looking at herself in the mirror.
There’s the sound of feet on the gravel, and, through the darkness Pigeon peers, to see someone else there, in the garden, watching. He’s stood behind the tree. A man. Tall, strong-looking shoulders. The man’s too old to be watching Iola. Much too old. Pigeon goes up behind him.
/> “Hey!” he says, and when the guy turns round, Pigeon kicks him in the balls.
The man doubles over, and Pigeon scarpers off out the garden and down the street. He runs uphill. Uphill to the crooked house.
The man doesn’t follow, so, Pigeon, sprinting up the dark street, begins to slow down. He slows, stops, turns. It’s just an empty street, streetlights, bins, a navy-black sky, quiet, only the sound of a faint television coming from one of the houses and an uneasy breeze brushing over it all.
Pigeon walks up this street, turns, left, right, walks a downhill street and now, it’s his lane, and now his door. Pigeon reaches the door. Stands.
His mam had made it in for the exit interview. She’d sat there silently while Pigeon answered all their questions. They decided that although she seemed to be not quite all there. It’d do. He was old enough to manage anyway. Pigeon couldn’t bear to look at her, but he caught the faint smell of the crooked house from her clothes.
On leaving day, today, she was supposed to come and collect him. They weren’t supposed to sign him out otherwise. But the social worker had called. His mam was unwell again. She couldn’t come. They shouldn’t send him home to her without her signing. But they did. Pigeon was going to be old enough soon anyway, and he persuaded them, persuaded them with his tight, smooth English, so they did.
Leaving the centre, he’d felt the world slowly fix back together, but the joins between things were uneven, piecemeal, and now, standing here on the doorstep, the world has collapsed again. There’s only a blur and Pigeon and the door. The door is made of PVC now. There’s double-glazing. There’s a knocker. But Pigeon raises his fist to the door. He hesitates.
When he knocks, he can feel the street shattering behind him. His body is warm against the cool street. His mam may make him arrive. That’s possible. Pigeon waits on the doorstep for her. He musn’t breathe.
When she opens he looks at her full in the face for the first time. She’s still beautiful. And she’s still not back to normal. She looks at him, in silence.
It’s a long while.
“Pigeon,” she says eventually. And she smiles, she smiles so softly, like slow-dappling sunshine. And it’s so innocent her smile. It’s so innocent. And Pigeon knows as always that she’s not to blame. She isn’t to blame for any of it.
“O nghariad i,” she says, “Oh my love, my love.”
And now it’s her words that get lost on the way to his ears, because Pigeon can’t answer. Pigeon says nothing, steps past his mother into the house.
The living room is dark, and dusty. Pigeon goes in, and opens the curtains. The moon makes tracings of familiar furniture. He turns on the light. The old bulb flickers briefly, and then dies. In its few moments of brightness, the room's dirty. There's dust all over everything.
“Mum!” he says in English “You can’t bloody live like this.”
He walks straight through to the kitchen, grabs the bin, and brings it back to the living room, starts pushing all the old cans and bottles that litter the floor into it. He even picks up one of Efa's dust-covered magazine without recognition and thrusts it into the bin.
His mam stares at him. She stands, holding the edge of the chair and stares.
Pigeon doesn’t stop clearing until there’s some kind of order. He finds a bulb for the light, screws it in. Switches it on. He decides the curtains just need to be pulled down. They’re so faded and moth-eaten. They go into the bin too. Pigeon starts beating out the sofa cushions, filling the room with the dust of all these stagnant days in the house. Pigeon opens the windows. Cold air rushes in, blows away memory. Blows away the shape of Him, lying here, on the floor, blood running from his head. Pigeon rips up the carpet, takes that outside too. Then he brushes the hard quarry-tiled floor. Brushes and brushes it, under his mother’s gaze, and mops it too. There’s only washing up liquid to use for the mopping, but it still cleans it all away. His mam stands holding the edge of the chair until he’s finished. He cleans around her feet, not asking her to move.
“There you are, Mam,” he says when he’s done, “You can sit down now.”
She sits down, slowly, hesitantly. Looks up at him, and the light that grows slowly, weakly across her face might be a smile.
Next Pigeon goes upstairs. One room for his Mam, one for him. He takes a bin liner with him, and starts tipping into it anything that belonged to Him or to Cher. He fills two bin liners within a few minutes. He strips the beds. Carries the sheets down to the kitchen ready to wash, walking through the living room on his way.
“Hello.”
The shape is a girl. She stands in the middle of the lit-up, stripped living room. She’s a little shorter than Pigeon, but far wider than he is. She’s wearing a pink dress. It hangs over her stomach.
Pigeon stops, stands still in the room. He wasn’t expecting there to be anyone else. Just him. Just his mam.
“Pigeon!” says the girl.
She knows him. He looks at this girl’s thick face. He looks at her. She’s familiar. He knows her. He knows her well.
Pigeon sits down, staring at the girl. It’s her?
“What’re you doing here?” his voice is like a wall as he asks the question. His mam has sat back down, and is sewing, as if nothing has happened, not Liverpool, not that place, not Salim, or Neil, or any of it.
“Writing,” says Cher, slowly. Her voice is unlike a real voice. She’s like the old Cher seen through glasses that are too strong, and she sounds as if she’s underwater, as if her voice comes through air that’s as thick as soup. “Writing,” she says again, and she points at an exercise book, open on the table. The handwriting on the open pages of the book is big and ugly.
Pigeon looks at her.
“What happened to you?” he asks, looks her up and down. In there he’s learnt to be cruel when he’s afraid.
Cher shrugs. Her brows knot together. He’s made her unhappy.
“I had an accident. It was in the fair. It was a road accident.” Cher says what she knows, and he knows.
There’s a silence.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her again. His voice is leaden and dangerous.
She shrugs. He’s made her unhappy again. He can see the thought, passing across her broad face: why should I not be here? It’s a simple thought. Stupid.
This is his house. This is his house.
Pigeon sits down, and as he sits, the house moves around him, as if it’s standing in an untenable posture. Cher sits down too. She’s quiet. She knows the drill. There should be no words. No sudden movements. No thoughts or opinions other than his own. There’s only him, Pigeon, his chair, his white hands, the cigarette he lights now, and around him, the house.
But Pigeon is different to Him. Pigeon’s crying now. They sit, the three of them. Pigeon crying. His mam gently puts a hand on his shoulder, and Cher watches him. This boy that killed her father. This boy that finally killed Him.
“It wasn’t me, Mam,” he says.
“What, love?”
“It wasn’t me killed him,” again. Do the words even work?
“Oh, Pigeon,” is all she says. And he can tell she thinks he’s sick. Thinks he doesn’t know himself. Doesn’t know what he did and didn’t do.
“It was Iola, Mam. She came in and she did it.”
His mam says nothing. But when he looks up at Cher, she’s smiling.
“I’ll make us some dinner,” she says. “I’ll make us some beans.”
26
When Efa answers the door, I’m sat on the sofa opposite. I’ve been reading a book. I’m halfway through the world of the book. There’s a girl in it, and when she’s hurt, you ache. I look up from the page when I hear the neat little knocks. Six.
Him.
“O,” says Efa when she opens the door and sees him standing there. Efa turns to me. But I’m just sat here, looking at the doorway with him caught in it, like a framed picture.
It’s a dark night in late April outside. This Pigeon, standing
on my doorstep is different and the same. His different and similar face is white against the wet night air. Efa looks from me to Pigeon, from Pigeon to me. None of us say anything for a few seconds.
He’s not a boy. Not anymore. He’s something that’s got out of a box, out of where he belongs. Pigeon and me catch eyes in the air. We share something in that look that makes me cold, then he makes a blank face again, for Efa.
“Hi,” he says, in English.
“Pigeon?” says Efa. As if she even needs to ask. His is a face you would recognise, and even if he didn’t still look so much like that boy, you’d know it was him from the smile.
He grins. “Yep,” he says.
Efa starts to question him now.
“Pryd ddes ti’n ôl? Sut wyt ti? Sut ma’ dy fam?” but his answers are short and in English.
“Friday. I’m fine. Mam’s OK.”
He looks over at me.
“How’s it going?” he asks me.
I shrug. How can I answer that. How do I even talk to him?
But Efa invites him in. He comes in, sits down next to me. The sofa flinches. Efa goes through to the kitchen, starts on the phone to Dafydd. She really doesn’t care. Pigeon sits next to me, making the sofa heavy, weighing down my whole house.
“I brought you something,” says Pigeon, looking at me, looking right at me. He starts rustling in his pockets for it. He brings it out, offering it to me with his strange, familiar hands. It’s wrapped in brown paper. He gives it to me. Looking at the paper, looking at this little parcel, I feel sick. But I begin to unwrap, my hands feeling like they belong to someone else.
It’s just a magnifying glass, mottled and dusty.
“It’s yours,” he says quietly.
I stare at it. I stare at it, and in my head there’s that statement, that statement:
Ma’ Gwyn yn od.
It’s an angry boy’s voice, a child’s voice, just a kid’s.
I look up at Pigeon. Pigeon. He has a feeling about him that’s big and almost like a man. And I can feel it all beginning again, now he’s home. The story starts moving, and I can’t stop it.