by Alys Conran
Pigeon was happy then, and right now, swimming in the pool, he’s happy too.
Ceri sits on the rock, watching Pigeon. She doesn’t say anything. Pigeon ignores Ceri and he just swims down there, round in circles in the pool for ages, although it must be freezing, and he ignores me too, stood up here watching him. Ceri just hangs about.
After a while Pigeon climbs out of the water, and he shakes all over like a dog, and he goes back to Ceri, cos he wants to cop a feel, and probably cos he’s cold and blue and white and she’s all warm and soft. And that’s when I leave, I leave the two of them to it.
“Bye, Iola,” he shouts, as I go round the corner. His voice spreads behind me, clear and too real.
I don’t answer, wish he’d say it in Welsh, wish he’d speak to me again, really speak to me as if none of this has happened. But it has happened. It’s happened to him. What I did has happened to him. He’s made a real life of it. Faced it, and he’s living it anyway. So he can jump into that pool, and live, and not go to school and just mark time like I do. There’s part of me that thinks that. It was me. Part of me that thinks that. And then this other part. It was him.
Perhaps he can’t talk anymore even if he tried? I had that dream again last night. Pigeon, with no mouth. With just skin where the mouth should be.
29
It’s a funny thing, that right beside the grey town there’s places like magic. There’s mountains like fists coming out of the land, their rocky tops as raw and rough as a cruel man’s knuckles. There’s rivers. In the rivers all the rain gathers like a riot. Like a stampede. And then there’s still, quiet places, like the pool.
Pigeon can’t remember ever being held before. Ceri’s arms are like a warm bath, and she’s soft. He wants Ceri. He wants her like a child wants. But he wants her like a man wants too.
Because her words are so hard, they don’t speak much. What have they got to say to each other? But her arms and her body are like a warm, comfortable bed, and he wants to be near her, and to be touched. He wants her too much. In too many different ways. He wants her. He doesn’t care who she is. He wants her to fill the spaces left between things.
“Coming down the arcades?” she asks. Her voice is a bored voice. It’s the voice of a big kid, who’s bored sitting by the river, a kid who wouldn’t understand how Pigeon feels.
“Maybe after,” he says.
Her dad owns the arcades. They get free goes on some of the machines, but it’s dark in the arcades, and shut in, and her dad’s there so Pigeon can’t touch Ceri, and then she’s nothing and he always thinks why is he there at all?
“After what?”
He’s quiet a minute, after what?
“After this!” he says taking off his shirt and standing above the still pool on the rock. It’s like it’s all going to end when you jump. That’s why you do it. If he misses, or jumps too deep…
And then there she is, Iola, stood watching. Stood watching him. Is she following him? Like before. Is she following him like before? But when he looks at her she’s got an expression on her face, watching him, and she doesn’t want him to jump.
When he gets home from the river, going to the house is like going underground into a cave where there’s no light. Cher’s outside in the shed. It’s just his mam now. She’s sitting in the living room, crying. Someone must’ve been here. Pigeon feels it. The anger. Someone has been in his house. Another man. Pigeon feels it again, that feeling, of gasping for air. When he moves closer, to comfort her, he sees that her wrists are red, and she keeps touching her neck. He lifts her hair from her neck and he sees the redness there too. He tries opening the windows, but it doesn’t work. The house is still dark, it still smells of people shut in. It smells like dust and there’s this heavy feeling when he sits next to his mam, watches her as she rocks, and listens as she half sings a hymn, and then a lullaby.
Then he remembers the book. He takes it out of the drawer. “Once upon a time,” he says. The words sound borrowed in his mouth. What does it mean? Once upon a time? He sits next to her. He opens the book to the first page. “Once upon a time,” he says before he begins, because that’s what you’re supposed to say. Pigeon tries to remember what it was like, back then, when he could make up a story, make up something good. His mam looks up, surprised. She smiles at Pigeon then, smiles at him as he begins to tell her a story where it will all be alright. A fairytale. Makebelieve. But Pigeon just begins to read to her.
“Far, far from land, where the waters are as blue as the petals of the cornflower and as clear as glass,” he takes a breath, the words in the room sound difficult and strange, but they do, they let light in. “There,” he reads again, “where no anchor can reach the bottom.”
30
Gwyn Gelataio is doing ‘Return to Learning’. On a Monday morning, he gets up in the bleary-eyed little flat he’s renting above the chip shop on the quay, inserting first one short leg and then the other into his blue jeans, pulling them up around his wide waist, and, with a little bob curtsy, doing up his flies.
“Ah,” he says, for no reason but habit.
In the fire, Gwyn lost his magazines, his sofa, a bedroom’s worth of furniture, many mod cons from the kitchen, and, crucially, the portrait of his mother – disapproval curling around her brow like a vice as the flames licked devilishly at her.
Miraculously surviving the blaze, the glass-topped coffee table and the greying plastic flowers, slightly wilted in the heat, were now the only reminders of his mother’s dreams for him. Emerging from a cloud of beige, smoke clearing his lungs, free for the first time from the ambition-by-proxy of his mother’s expectations, and in receipt of a never-dreamed-of windfall which had come bountifully from both the home insurance and the compensation awarded by the court, Gwyn found himself dreaming of a new life, and then, much to his surprise, suddenly skipping through the flow-chart-bullet-point-step-by-step world of career advice, job seminars, college open days, and evening classes, childlike and curious for the first time in his life.
Not knowing what to study, Gwyn had first made his way through a battery of GCSE courses, from Maths to English, to Cookery to French (despite his Italian boy’s headstart in romance languages, strangely acing the Cookery and failing the French) and then, still unable to decide, he had done a part-time Access course in art, constructing a monumental ice- cream cone from cardboard boxes. The work was dedicated to the loving memory of his late mother, who, no doubt, grumbled huffily from her grave that “Gwiiiin, you are awasting your atime with this aaaaarrrt raaabish” whilst Gwyn’s cone happily gave her the finger.
The art thing was cathartic, and therefore short-lived. Gwyn, the ice-cream man, it turned out, thrived on subjects even more morbid than art. The legacy of his days as a boring bachelor in need of a thrill was an enduring fascination with the bloodcurdling antiheroes he came across in the film adaptations of novels by Easton Ellis, Harris and King. So perhaps it was because of them, rather than because of any pervasive sense of victimhood, that the placid Gwyn, scuttling from his blatant failure on the art course, finally settled on psychology.
An uncertain pass at A level psychology was squeezed out of him by Megan, his rather touchy-feely tutor, via long, late-night personal tutorials. During these late-night sessions, Megan induced him, finally, to question the strange events of those few months, which had led not only to his wonderful period of homelessness, but also, tragically, to the serious injury of that little girl.
“But why?” Megan said over and over. “We have to think why? Why why why? Why did they do it?” shaking her head, and leaning towards him, eyelashes batting frantically.
Gwyn remembered the girl’s words, just before she launched at him, biting and kicking, and those words, or rather that word ‘Murderer’, repeated again by the little gremlins as they broke his kitchen window. The rolling syllables of it still played on his mind like a dodgy remix.
If Megan left satisfied (in the kind of way you’re satisfied unimpressively by a
poor petrol-station sandwich), Gwyn was left in a state of panic. Questioning things (his mother, the justice system, his place in life) had never been Gwyn Gelataio’s natural mode, and the new habit left things uncomfortably misshaped somehow.
Immediately following the fire, Gwyn had been so concerned with living arrangements, so shocked by the total life change that had befallen him, and so amazed by his new sex life, as, unimpinged by his mother’s gate-keeping, first one middle-aged woman and then another offered him a place on their sofa, and then in their bed, that he had breezed thoughtlessly through the process of filing a statement for the police and attending the juvenile courts at Pigeon’s tribunal, and had not even bothered to stay to find out how the boy was sentenced. Since Pigeon refuted his argument that there were two children present in Mrs Gelataio’s stagnant flat on that smoke-filled Sunday, Gwyn had withdrawn that part of his statement with not so much as a blink, not really being interested in justice, retribution or revenge. In fact he felt profoundly indebted to the thin boy with the green eyes who sat there on the video link, so slight and pale in the echoing chamber of righteous adults.
Having been a lonely, smothered child whose life was utterly devoid of play, Gwyn’s new experiences – as he studied in an ugly polytechnic, made choices, explored the fairytale freedom of friendships, of playing at sex – gave him new reference points. Fun was one. Imagination also had begun to simmer weakly, and Escape lingered at the edges of awareness too. These three co-ordinates threw the children’s actions, their high little voices and their schemes and plots into new relief. So, as he sits on the toilet this Monday morning before college, playing that word, the child’s echoing accusation, “Murderer. Murderer. Llofrudd,” over and over in his head yet again, Gwyn finally recognises the demon-vandal-pigeon-boy for a child. He re-appraises those pale little faces, those eyes, the voices shrieking “Murderer! Llofrudd!” that have given him so many sleepless nights, and, for the first time Gwyn recognises Pigeon and Iola’s little game as fairytale, fable, as pushing toy cars across a deep-pile carpet, or fighting imaginary dinosaurs on the sofa. Gwyn sees Pigeon’s pale face, his scared green eyes, and sees a boy caught in a web of make-believe gone wrong.
31
It’s half term, and there’s nothing to do except look out of the window and think about boys. But I don’t want to think about Llion anymore. I don’t want to think about him. Llion’s just dry hands and wanting what I don’t want to give him. And Llion’s another person who doesn’t care anyway. I hang out of the bedroom window, looking down over the grey town, and over at the mountains where the clouds move as if they’re gobbling at the craggy tops of the hills. The wind that blows down from the hills is cold and fresh and like the slap in the face I need.
“Iola! Close that window will you? It’s blowing a gale!” shouts Efa from downstairs. I go to close it.
Wait. From here at the window I can see a man walking up the road that whooshes up the hill like a muscle. He’s walking all on his own on the road, the wind like a brushstroke pulling him along. I see his short little legs and the top of his bald head, and I don’t even have to see his face with its bristly shadows to know that it’s Gwyn! Poor Gwyn.
And then I see, stood there, there on the road by the streetlight just a few meters away from Gwyn, there’s Pigeon! And I want to shout out at one or both of them Gofalwch! Be careful, Murderer! Murderer! It takes me by surprised that I want to shout that. So stupid. As if part of me still believes it.
But I don’t. So I just peer out from the window, and watch Gwyn walking up to Pigeon, watch while his arm comes out, stretching out in front of him, like he’s going to give Pigeon something with his hand, and my heart is almost stopping just to see them standing there. And the two of them almost the same height too.
And it’s then I see what they’re doing: shaking hands, like men do, like men do in meetings between men. Proper and grown up. Dignified.
I realise it properly, watching him. What we did to him, with his ice-cream van and all that, was terrible. What we burnt was his life. And that is a serious, grown-up thing to do to someone, something even adults would be ashamed of, and would hide forever. It doesn’t run out. It sticks. And I hate Pigeon, I hate him, standing down there with Gwyn, having their unknown, unimaginable conversation, because it was all him. All him, but it’s my fault in a deep, private way, that no one knows, a secret that’s closing me up like a bud that won’t open.
The young man, standing in my window frame, shaking hands, has come clean. Pigeon’s been punished already. Everyone knows about Pigeon, and what Pigeon did – to Gwyn and to Cher – and Pigeon can just kind of wear what he’s done wrong, like it’s not him, it’s just something that belongs to him, like jeans or a jumper or baseball boots. He can wear it, and not keep it buried and black. So he can look Gwyn in the eye, shake his hand, say “I’m sorry” like a good loser. He can tell everyone he was bad before, and now he’s good, and he’s sorry and he’s learnt his lesson.
I hate him.
I need to go down there and tell Gwyn it was me. I did it. I need to make Pigeon let me tell him. I grab my coat, open my bedroom door.
I hesitate though, because Efa and Dafydd are down there in the living room. I don’t want them to see me crying. I open my door to check they’re still there.
“What’ve you been doing?” Efa’s saying to Dafydd, down in the living room. “You’ve got bruises all up your arms.”
This stops me. I stand and listen. I’d noticed them too and wondered if he’d been fighting. They reminded me of Pigeon’s, years ago. I want to know about the bruises. The full story. They could be bad news for me and Efa, like He was bad news.
“Oh, you know,” says Dafydd. “Gardening.”
“Gardening?!” says Efa, not believing a word. She’s not thick, Efa.
“Have you thought that maybe Pigeon and Iola don’t think of each other just as friends any more?” says Dafydd quickly.
I hold still, push my door open a thin slice further. Through the door and through the pine banisters I can see Dafydd down in the lounge, sitting back easily on the sofa as if it’s his, his eyes tracing the headline of the front page like he’s following a fly walking across the paper. His slippers are half off his heels and his dressing gown is open some, showing the black hairs that walk like ants all over him. It’s funny, having a man in the house. The man of the house, Efa calls him. Efa was the man of the house before.
“Why d’you say that?” Efa bends to her stitching, gathering a fresh bit of cloth to the quilt and working her deft hands to pull the thread in out, in out, with the needle.
“Just an observation.” Dafydd stops in that way when you’re trying to decide if you should say something. Or maybe he already knows. It’s like he’s being dramatic.
“I caught him watching her the other day,” he says then. He doesn’t even look up from the paper he’s reading to say it. He takes a swig of coffee, lets what he’s said rise through the room. Behind the door, I feel sick. Pigeon’s watching me? He’s following me. He’ll never let me go.
“Watching?” Efa’s hands hover a moment. She’s turned her face away from Dafydd, so that I can see her expression but he can’t. Even from up here I can see how her brow moves, sinking to make that dip between her eyes.
“Yep, from the garden, watching her window, little scumbag.”
What he’s saying sinks in.
“Don’t call him that,” says Efa quickly. She’s always liked Pigeon, Efa. Doesn’t matter what he’s done, she likes him. When you say anything about him she gets that soft look in her eye, the look she used to keep for me.
Dafydd sighs. “Anyway, it’s a bit out of order. Want me to have a word?”
“No, just leave it, they’re teenagers that’s all.” Efa takes up another piece of cloth, lines it up with the first. Dafydd looks at her. He’s got this expression. He wants something.
“I know, I know, but he’s sneaky, y’know? Coming in and taking t
hat book like that. And then, look at what he did. He’s criminal.” Dafydd’s put down the paper, his voice is whiny like a kid’s.
“It’s not that simple, Dafydd. Poor Pigeon. He had a hell of a time.” Efa’s eyebrows twitch.
“Well, he probably deserved it.” Dafydd says it just under his breath, but it’s that kind of whisper that even I can hear.
“Dafydd!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Dafydd.”
“Alright. Alright. I don’t trust him though.” He stands up, his dressing gown falling open so that I look away.
“Glass of wine? You off the detox?” he asks Efa.
“Nope, not til Friday.” Efa’s head moves for no. “And anyway you’re a big phoney: telling the whole class you were going to keep it up for a month!”
“It’s the depth of the process, not the length that counts.” Dafydd sounds like a proper idiot striding off to the kitchen, his slippers clipping along the floor.
Efa, left on the sofa, looks after him and rolls her eyes. Then she spots me standing listening at the half-open door at the top of the stairs. She looks me in the eye then. It’s a long look. What does it mean? There’s the sound of a glass of wine being poured, and Dafydd comes back through, dangling the neck of the glass between his long fingers. He sits with a grumbling look. Efa doesn’t say anything about me watching. She ignores me, bends to work on her patchwork quilt, symbolising love, the family, peace, and stuff like that. I go back into my room. And sit on the bed. Stuck.
32
It was with a measure of guilt that Gwyn decided, yesterday, to look up the boy. He trawled through directories, racking his brain for Pigeon’s surname, and finally, when that failed, traipsed up the long-forgotten hill in the rain to question the old ladies about the grey little boy with the green eyes, who’d been sent away for killing, and follow their spindly pointing fingers along and down and around the houses until he was pointed straight to the helter-skelter house, and rapped its rattly door.