by Alys Conran
Gwyn was astonished by the beautiful spectre of a woman that answered the door. They stared at each other, Mari half hidden behind the door, both lost for words. Stammering “Ydi Pigeon yma?” and getting only a lost headshake in reply, Gwyn could only leave a note for the boy in Mari’s trembling hand as she stood stupefied in the doorway, haloed by greying auburn hair and surrounded by the stench of lost dreams.
This message stayed grasped tight in her fist until that night when Pigeon, brushing his mother’s hair, noticed the roughened scrap of paper in her hand, and unfurled her fingers from around it, like the fronds of a fern.
Now, walking towards the boy, tall as he was, thin, almost an adult, it is with the greatest of self-control that Gwyn manages to suppress the hysterical Italian inside from eschewing the ritual handshake and giving Pigeon a big bear hug and a sloppy kiss on the cheek. A lump rises in Gwyn’s throat and something like hope starts to make a shape of Pigeon’s pale mouth, and to soften his angry almost man’s eyes. The two hands meet soberly, as Iola watches, as the streetlights dimly glow on the side of the hill, as Efa makes her quilt downstairs, and as, back along the road, Pigeon’s mother hums a sea shanty under her hanging dresses in the dark of their wobbly house, while all around them all the town sits down to meat and two veg and television stories.
“I’m sorry,” says Pigeon. He says the little word with a shrug. He almost smiles. Gwyn grins. The word is comic against all this.
“Oh,” Gwyn says, thinking why is the boy speaking English? “That’s OK. It didn’t really matter.”
“We burnt your house!” says Pigeon. Looking at Gwyn as if he’s off his rocker.
Gwyn nods. He grins again.
“It wasn’t such a bad thing,” he says, sincerely. “I needed a fresh start.”
Pigeon’s looking at him. He laughs grimly. “I know what you mean,” he says.
“Anyway,” says Gwyn. “I’m sorry you got sent away.”
“I killed someone,” says Pigeon. There’s a kind of fragile pride when he says it.
Gwyn nods. “From what I hear,” he says, “he was a nasty piece of work.”
Pigeon says nothing.
“How long’ve you been home?”
“A couple of months,” Pigeon shrugs again.
“Are you at school then?”
“Nope.”
“College?”
Pigeon shakes his head.
“Have you got a job then? Oh sorry,” says Gwyn, realising the boy’s probably unemployed.
“Sort of,” says Pigeon. “I sort of have a job.”
“Oh good,” says Gwyn. “Good.”
They stand there awkwardly.
“Can I tell you a secret?” asks Pigeon.
Gwyn nods, a bit nervously. What’s the boy up to?
“It wasn’t me.”
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean, I didn’t do it.”
“The fire?” Gwyn knows that’s not true. “I saw you,” he says, shaking his head.
“Oh no. Not that,” says Pigeon, waving his hand dismissively “I mean the murder.”
Gwyn looks at him. The lad’s still got a screw loose.
“Anyway,” says Gwyn quickly, “Must be going.” What had he been hoping to achieve anyway?
“She did it,” said Pigeon suddenly.
Gwyn didn’t even have to ask who. He knew. That pale child with the eyes. The one he’d removed from his statement. That small lie by omission. Gwyn walked away, down the road as quick as his short legs could carry him.
33
Maybe it was seeing him with Gwyn. Or maybe it’s the book: Hans Christian Anderson. Pigeon? That big gap between them. Like two sides of a whole world. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s the jump he made into that pool. The cold feeling I had, of not wanting him to. And the terrible fear as I heard him slice the water. Or maybe it is what Dafydd said? Dafydd’s thin voice, telling Efa about Pigeon. About Pigeon watching me. It could be any of these things. But I think all of them boil down to one: Pigeon is what everything’s about. He’s in the middle of everything. And even though him being back ties a knot in my stomach so tight I can barely breathe, I missed him when he wasn’t here. When he wasn’t here, running along the wet streets, or collecting things in endless piles of memories, or telling stories which hiss and bubble, or causing trouble. I missed him. Like an arm or a leg. Or a mouth, if it was suddenly gone. So when Cher calls round to go shopping together, I tell I’ll see her later up at the quarry, and I go to call on Pigeon.
It’s smaller than it was, his house, crouched on the street between other houses, and uglier than it was too. And when I go to the door, the new, pristine PVC door, I feel suddenly sick, and in my head there’s echoing sounds. In my head can hear crying and shouting and someone being hit, I can hear someone shouting No! and the sound of a shot. I have to sit on the front step and get my breathing back to normal. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard those things. Like a nightmare that repeats. Repeats.
Since He’snot there anymore, I go to the proper house, not to the shed, and I knock. The knock sounds wrong. A long word comes into my head. In-ap-pro-pri-ate. Inappropriate. Pigeon pulls the door open, doesn’t even say hello, walks along the corridor to the sitting room, expecting me to follow. It’s as if it was only yesterday I was here.
“Sut mae?” I say to his mam in the living room.
I might as well be talking to myself. His mam doesn’t say anything back. She sits sewing in one corner of the dark room. I think of her, properly, for the first real time, look closely at her sewing hands, thin and pale as they are, and see that they’re going over and over one bit of material and that what she’s doing doesn’t make any sense. She’s carefully stitched closed all the openings of the dress, closing the neckline, closing the holes for your arms, closing the hemline along the bottom, so nobody can get into the dress, and nobody can get out.
Pigeon sits at the other side of the room. Pigeon lights a cigarette. Still smoking?
I feel relieved that Pigeon’s still smoking. It’s like the old Pigeon. The old Pigeon before what happened, before what he did, what I did, what we did together.
Pigeon’s mam puts her sewing down, and starts humming a song to herself, sitting in the dark in the corner, rocking. A drink, whisky or brandy, sits cloudy in the glass by her side. It’s a lullaby she’s singing,
si hei lwli lwli lws
si hei lwli lwli lws
I recognise it as one of Nain’s. It’s funny to think of Nain ever singing a lullaby. I remember her singing it, neatly, and in a matter of fact way. But Pigeon’s mam sings it differently. It makes me think of sad things to hear it.
Pigeon goes and gets the radio from upstairs and switches it on to drown her out. The static fills the room until he tunes it to a football match and the crowd’s cheers that rise and fall like a sea thrashing. He doesn’t say anything to me. He ignores me. Or is he waiting for me to speak? His mam ignores me too. It’s like she’s not there. I sit down on the sofa as if I’m nothing.
“Efa’s boyfriend’s a scumbag,” says Pigeon suddenly.
“No, he’s not,” I say quickly, because Dafydd’s the man of our house. He’s our man.
“He is,” says Pigeon.
Why does he say this? There’s something about the way he says it, makes me think I don’t want to know.
Pigeon goes to the cabinet in the corner, gets the square bottle, fills his mam’s glass. She looks up at him, all vague, stops in her song.
“Iola,” says Pigeon into the silence, looking at me suddenly “D’you think it was my fault, what happened to Cher?”
The question kicks the wind out of me. I can’t breathe. There’s a long silence. When I speak, my voice is raw and low.
“Na, Pigeon. No way. Gwyn did it. You know that.”
“Gwyn?”
“Well it was his fault anyway, that the van fell.” My voice sounds tiny, and stupid, like a kid’s.
There’s a lo
ng silence. Pigeon pulls another cigarette from his packet. He goes to the kitchen and lights it from the stove. He comes back, stands by the door.
“Who hurt Cher, Iola?”
“Dwn im … I dunno,” I shrug. I don’t want to look at him.
Pigeon walks close to me, sits down next to me on the sofa, puts his cigarette to smoke itself in the ashtray, and reaches for one of my wrists so that I have to turn to him.
“We did, Iola.” He says it so quietly that I know it’s what he believes. I’m shaking my head. But he’s going on. “We made the whole thing up, and then we hurt her, Iola. We did it cos we hated her, didn’t we Iola? We did it.”
There’s a long silence. He’s holding both my wrists now, not holding hard, quite gently, but holding. It’s a long time before I can speak. But then I do. I find a voice somewhere, one that comes up from my ribs, from where the heaviness is.
“Na Pigeon, ti’n wrong. It was a mistake, Cher got hurt cos she made a mistake, that’s all, just kids Pigeon, kids.”
When I say that word ‘kids’, so English and so adult, it’s like I’m dressing up in Efa’s grown-up clothes again. I feel small suddenly. I’m a kid. I’m still a kid. Somewhere I still am.
“We almost killed her, Iola.” Pigeon’s hands hold tighter. He’s not in control. His bony hands are holding my wrists so tight it hurts, and in my head there’s that shouting again, that voice saying “Na!” and that sound of a shot.
“Stop saying that Pigeon, stopia Pigeon, paid a deud hyna, plis.” My voice is so thin, so small against the room.
“Cher might’ve died.”
“But she’s alright. Efa said she’ll be alright.”
There’s a long silence. Just the creak of his mam's chair and the radio sounds rising falling. Just the slow dwindling smoke of the left cigarette.
Pigeon pushes me away, gets up, walks across the room and slumps down in the armchair. He looks at me for a long time, and then there’s his hard, tight voice.
“And what about Him, Iola?” says Pigeon’s voice “What happened to Him?”
It’s so foreign to hear that name, that terrifying emphasis. Him. I don’t answer. Don’t say anything at all. I want to say you did it, Pigeon,ti nath, butI can’t. I say nothing. We both know. Even I know what happened, I can still hear it in my head.
Pigeon sits there and he says nothing at all. And then he beckons with a hand. Come over here says his hand.
“Pam, Pigeon?” But I think I know. I think I know why.
“Just come over, Iola. Come over here.”
And I walk over to him, stand there in front of him where he’s sitting in the chair. He stands up. And he puts a hand to the back of my neck and he pulls my face into him, and then his lips are cold, and hard and like a boy’s.
He stops. He sits down in the chair again. I’m standing above him, looking down. And then Pigeon’s shoulders are going up and down, up and down like he can’t breathe, and like it hurts when he does, and it’s like his whole body is full of something bad, and then I understand: this is what happens to Pigeon when he cries. He cries more, more than I am, more than I ever have. It’s like a nightmare his crying, dirty and angry and not belonging in things that I know, and not making any sense.
“Pigeon, stop! It wasn’t us Pigeon. It was something else. It was something else.”
But he can’t hear me. Even I can’t really hear.
“Pigeon!” I say, shaking him, trying to stop him crying “Pigeon!” But Pigeon’s curled up now on the armchair, curled up so tight on one side that I can’t undo him, can’t get him to look or talk, and the room’s full of static from the radio again, all the cheering gone.
I need to go. I need to go home. I leave him there. And all I can hear while I leave the house is the sound of the cheering on the radio, and above it Pigeon’s mam, still singing that lullaby ghost song.
si hei lwli lwli lws
si hei lwli lwli lws
34
After the crying there was a long empty time where Pigeon didn’t think and was still, still, still in the dark room.
Slowly, he uncurled from the knot of the foetal position he’d been lying in on the chair. He sat up, propped his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands until the thoughts returned.
He didn’t know why he’d said it. Why’d he even thought it then, when he was with Iola. Why’d he accused her of it? He didn’t know.
He didn’t know, wasn’t conscious of it, of what had happened in the house all those years ago. It was blocked out. But when she came round, he suddenly felt it all, because she was there, in his house, like she’d been before. It was because she’d come to the door, and knocked, and come in.
Inappropriate.
It was a word Pigeon’d learnt all those years back. In-ap-pro-pri-ate. It sounded in his ears now, made a noise that was like an itch, and he wanted it out.
Now she was gone, the room was back to the way it was before. Shut in. Or shutting everything out. It was dark. It was empty except for his mam, him, breathing. There was just the one real thing in the room again. It was something to hold on to. It made it all worth it. That he’d done it. Got rid of Him.
He got up, went to the drawer, took the blue book out, and began to read. His voice dry, as if it was full of salt. His mouth was too dirty for the words, and too old. But he said them, and as he did, perhaps his mam stopped rocking so hard, perhaps the room slowed, and perhaps the light coming in through the window didn’t have to push so hard through the dead air.
“The princesses,” he began, reading slowly and clearly and perfectly from the blue book, “liked nothing better than to listen to their old grandmother tell about the world above.”
He looked over at his mam. She was sitting quietly. Was she listening? Was he reading for her? He didn’t know. He didn’t know why he was reading. He was reading for the dark room, the old furniture, the dirty windows. He was reading to turn it all inside out. He took a deep breath, and went on.
“She had to recount countless times…”
He liked that, recount countless times.
That old feeling for storing words, the excitement of it, the secrecy nudged at him. He almost smiled.
“She had to recount countless times,” he said again, “all she knew about ships, towns, human beings, and the animals that lived up on land. The youngest of the mermaids thought it particularly,” he hesitated over the twists of the word, “par-ti-cu-lar-ly,” he said again, “particu-larly wonderful that the flowers up there had fragrance, for they did not have on the bottom of the sea. She also liked to hear about the green forest, where the fishes that swam among the branches could sing most beautifully.”
Pigeon stopped. He stopped to watch the light from the window, from the second-hand sun. How it moved through the thick air in the room, as if it was moving through dank water, through a dirty fish tank.
“But,” he said, focusing on the black letters, on his own mouth saying the words against the room, “the grandmother promised, ‘when you are fifteen, then you will be allowed to swim to the surface. Then you can climb up on a rock and sit and watch the big ships sail by. If you dare, you can swim close enough to the shore to see the towns and the forest.’ ”
He stopped. He was fifteen.
He thought about it. This was a story about being a prisoner. This was a story about being inside. In a centre. In a house. In a shed. In a story. He closed the book, and sat watching the white light filtering into the room. It came over him again. He needed air. Air. Where was it? Where was the surface of all this? How did you breathe in it?
35
Efa is so worried about me when I arrive home shaking and pale that, after trying for a good while to find out what’s wrong, she actually invites me to go to her class with her. I say yes to going straight away, because it’s doing something with Efa and, right now, I want to be close to her again as much as I want to breathe.
Yoga is in the old chapel where all the oth
er ladies dress like her, wearing beads and colours too, and flouncy scarves that fall from them like water. Efa goes there twice a week now, since she met Dafydd, who teaches the class. They use the Sunday school classroom for yoga and other activities, like boxing and karate.
Efa takes me. This week, Efa takes me. And it almost makes up for Pigeon. But I’m too quiet and serious for the ladies at Yoga. And they’re jealous of how I’m young and how I can still bend and stretch like a wet bit of willow while they creak and groan like dead wood before you break it. All except for Efa. Efa’s like something alive when she does yoga. I’m her sister. Maybe we’re proud?
But I can hear them talking about me while they get the blankets out, ready for ‘relaxation’, where you lie on your back and listen to Dafydd fill your body with feelings.
Efa and her English friend Pam are walking back across the hall with the blankets, one each for them, and one for me.
“She’ll come round you know,” says Pam, Efa’s friend, as if I’m not there. “They always do in the end, take my Henry.” Henry is her son who runs the boxing. “I never thought it, never thought he’d do this well, what with all the trouble he’d got into, but now look at him!” Efa face doesn’t flinch although everyone knows about Henry. He’s not exactly a saint.
Dafydd’s fiddling with the CD player, trying to find some relaxing music. Pam settles down under her blanket, closing her eyes like Jesus! but a few seconds later she opens one eye again.
“‘Course, what you’ve got to worry about is drugs. There’s drugs everywhere these days, and dealers. She in secondary school now? Yes, well, drugs, they get them onto them in the first couple of years, and that’s it: hooked! I heard they’re taking them before school these days, gets them through the exams they say, but then they get a split personality, like Hannibal Lecter.” Pam nods to herself.
The laugh comes up into my nose, and I have to pretend to be coughing. I wish I wish I wish that Pigeon was here. I wish we were here in the chapel again drawing moustaches on all these stupid women who haven’t got a clue how serious our lives have got.