by Alys Conran
“That’s a good name, lad,” he said in Welsh.
“It’s my real name,” said Pigeon, in English.
“Oh, I don’t doubt,” the man grinned.
After getting all the others’ names. The man just said “Reit ta,” and started walking round the back of the building, to where there was a field. The lads looked at each other. He hadn’t said if they were supposed to follow. They looked at each other and then slowly started moving after the man.
Pigeon walked across the tarmac after this man and his dog. There was something about him. He wasn’t about words. That was good. Pigeon felt good.
In the field round the back there was a big heap of stones. The man was looking through the pile. He didn’t even look up when the group got to him. Just kept on looking. Sometimes he’d pick up a stone, or manoeuvre one out of the pile with his booted foot. Then he’d say “Na… Na…” to himself, put it down. Pigeon watched the man. This was interesting.
The other lads started to talk to each other. They were talking as if they had nothing to learn from the man. They talked about last Saturday night. They’d been to town. There’d been a girl who was up for it. Pigeon tried not to hear what they said about her. He was embarrassed for the man and for them, because this wasn’t the kind of conversation you had in front of a teacher, not an old teacher like this man. The man just acted as if the conversation wasn’t happening.
The man had found some stones he was happy with. He started lining them up on the ground next to each other. The others had stopped watching completely, and they were fooling around now, looking at some pictures in a magazine one of them had brought in his coat pocket. Pigeon kept watching the man. Pigeon looked at the stones. Each one was different. They were like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the shapes were meant to be together, others weren’t. He looked at the stones, and he started to see surfaces and edges. He started to read them in a different way now. Pigeon felt good.
It went on for about half an hour. The man ignoring the lads, the lads ignoring the man. The man had begun to make a wall. You could see it was going to be a wall now. It was going to be two thin walls propped against each other to make a strong stone wall.
“Not being funny mate,” said one of the lads finally “but aren’t you supposed to be teaching us?”
The man looked up. He half smiled.
After an hour, there was only Pigeon stood there, watching. The other lads had gone to stand in the doorway of the centre, where it was more sheltered. They had to wait around until twelve, to keep probation happy.
Pigeon watched the man. He only chose the flat stones at first. You had to make the stones fit together. The man didn’t make anyone learn, but if you wanted to, you could.
When twelve o clock came, the others just wafted off, across the carpark and into town. Pigeon felt a bit awkward then, standing there watching, past the end of the lesson. Maybe he’d better leave now? But hadn’t he better say thanks or bye or something? He stood there for maybe ten minutes, watching the man. He’d made a segment of wall now. It looked good, solid. Out of that pile of stones he’d made something that made sense. It was perfect, and not perfect too. Pigeon didn’t want to leave.
“Gei di helpu, os ’sgen ti awydd?” the man says to him now. He looks up at Pigeon for a second. There’s no trick in the look.
Pigeon considers. He looks at the pile of stones. There’s one here. It has a flatish front and back, but a wave down the bottom, and a small chink taken out of the top. It’s a simple shape, the kind of shape he’s seen the man choose. He should be able to find some other stones to match it.
“Iawn,” says Pigeon, like moving his stuff back from the shed to the house. He starts looking through the pile. Picking. Choosing. Making sense of it.
And that’s how it begins, with Elfyn, the building things back again, the putting the pieces back in their place.
39
I need to start making money to leave, so I ask Efa if she can get me a job in The Home. She doesn’t see why not. But “It’s not nice work, you know, Iola,” she says, frowning.
“I know. I want a job anyway. Can you get me one?”
“I maybe could; they’re always looking for kids like you to do the bad shifts,” she says. “They won’t pay you much. Why d’you want it anyway?”
“To save up,” I say. I don’t tell her why. She looks at me a long while.
“It’s not such a bad idea,” she says, slowly.
On my first day at The Home, Efa walks me there. She walks me up to the door, like she used to at chapel, and then looks at the door, with that same dread, and leaves me to go in on my own. Her turned back is cold. A rejection.
I ring the bell, but no one comes. I ring again, no one answers. Is this what visitors have to do? Stand here on the step in the cold, waiting so someone lets them in to see their old Mum or Auntie? I ring the bell one more time, and then try the handle.
It turns. The door clicks open. The porch is small. There are some plastic flowers, a visitors’ book. But I’m not a visitor, I’m staff. A worker. I open the heavy inner door. There’s a young man with tattoos up his arms, vacuuming the blue carpet. He goes into one of the rooms with his whirring hoover, doesn’t even look up at me, as if it doesn’t matter who it is that has walked in off the street.
I walk into the hall, and stand in the middle for a second. One of the rooms has its door wide open, and there’s an old man in there, in just his underpants and a shirt, socks. His back is curved like a swan’s neck. He’s stood in front of his window, looking out, lost. I think of closing the door, so whoever comes in next doesn’t see his bare legs. I don’t close the door. I take a step or two further into the hallway.
A lady comes out of the room next door, talking on her mobile phone.
“Yeah, yeah. So I said to him, I don’t want to. Don’t want to get involved. Yeah. Cos I’ve got enough on my plate right now, I said. I got enough going on. Know what I mean? Between this place, and the kids and Mam and that. I got enough.” She breaks off to say to me, “Be with you in a minute,” and then “Anyway,” she says into the phone again, “look I’ve got to go, this girl’s here, it’s her first day. Alright yep, I’ll give you a call. No. No. Yep. Bye then, see you.”
She puts her phone back in her pocket.
“Siân,” she says.
“Iola.”
“Right then. You can come help me with the toilet round.”
And that’s all. We go together down the corridor, and start at the bottom, working our way up. It’s difficult with the old people, toileting them. You have to lift some of them, and some don’t want their clothes pulled down, and some want you to stay in the room, and others want you to leave but you can’t in case they fall. Toileting takes an hour and a half altogether. One after the other. It’s all gloves on, gloves off, wipe, clean, pull up clothes, wheel in, wheel out. One after the other. One after the other. None of the old people talk.
Siân does though, to me.
“So’ve you got a boyfriend?” she asks, letting an old woman called Meri onto the pan.
Meri slouches to the side, whimpers, and me and Siân have to get her straight again.
“So?” asks Siân.
“No.”
“No one interested?”
I can think of two who are, in a kind of way. But it isn’t right, the way either of them are interested. Pigeon nor Dafydd.
I’m quiet, and Siân’s getting fed up with it, the toileting, you can tell, she’ll take it out on the old people, moving them too quick and harsh, telling them to hurry up.
Efa’d said. She’d said watch out for Siân. “She isn’t the boss, but she wants to be, and she can get you hired and fired in two shakes.”
After toileting, it’s lunchtime, and then time for more toileting before tea, and then some people need baths before supper.
And that’s the way it goes. You go from one to the other. I don’t get told their names. Siân will sometimes say a name, and
she does seem to know them, although why she needs to, I don’t know, Siân isn’t after a conversation.
It’s a bad place The Home. You go home tired, and feeling like things have hard edges, like things are meant to hurt you. I want out of it. But I’m saving. I save and wait. Until I’m old enough to leave.
I don’t have a proper conversation with any of them until the one with Huw. Huw, the man who’d stood alone in front of the window on my first day here. You can tell even now, looking at him, that he used to be tall. His bones are big. His hands, when you put them on the handles in the bathroom, are heavy and big too. But the fingers don’t clasp well any more. You can tell from his look that he’s from the quarry. His eyes have that slate look. He’s mostly silent.
Siân and me’ve gone in to him to dress him. The room’s dark. No one’s drawn the curtains yet. Huw can’t get up by himself, his legs don’t swing round the bed anymore, and without the frame, which they’ve left on purpose too far away, he can’t lever his heavy bones out of the small single bed.
Siân doesn’t say anything, just goes to the window and pulls open the curtains. Huw turns on his bed. There’s the sound of angry breathing.
“Reit ta,” says Siân, to no one in particular. “Huw!” She almost shouts his name to wake him.
He tries to turn on the bed.
I feel bad for him. Who wants to be woken like this? By someone else and their routine for toilets and breakfasts?
But then Huw’s eyes, his grey eyes, are open. He looks at me.
“Wyres Leusa da chi ynde?” he says, as clear as day. You’re Leusa’s Granddaughter aren’t you? “Yes,” he smiles to himself “Leusa and Ned’s granddaughter.”
Leusa is Nain. But “Ned?” I’m staring at him.
“C’mon Iola,” says Siân. “Lets get him up and dressed.”
I’m almost shaking as I take Huw’s arm, and help him lever up into a sitting position. He’s heavy, and I have to watch my back, which twinges more and more, like Efa’s does, ever since I’ve worked here.
“Ned?” I ask him again.
“Your grandfather.” He says it so simply. So simply. The name sinks into me. Ned. Ned my taid, who had another story. Maybe this man knows. Maybe he knows. That old hunger for a real story’s back. For a story at all.
“Did you know him? Ned?”
There’s a long silence. Maybe I’ve lost him. Maybe this Huw’s gone back into that dreamworld they go to, which must be better than this place.
“We were best mates.” He half smiles again. “Yep. My best mate.” But then Huw’s too busy to talk what with trying to stand, and deal with Siân’s hasty, snatching hands as she pulls his clothes on, as if she’s packing shopping into bags not caring for an old man who was once my grandfather’s best mate. It’s not until me and Siân are on either side of him, supporting him, or forcing him to his feet, guiding or cajoling his hands around the bar of his frame, that Huw goes on.
“He wasn’t a bad man you know,” he says. He looks at me. His eyes are solid.
I bite my lip. In my head there’s Nain protesting. Not a bad man? Not a bad man? This Huw’d be no match for her.
But Nain’s not there to fight this now and so Huw’s words are shifting things around.
“Na,” says Huw. He smiles, and he puts his hand over mine on the frame. His hand is heavy, suprisingly firm. “He went to Spain, Ned. Volunteered. Brave, that was.” Huw’s shaking his head now. “Fought the fascist bastards,” he says. Then he goes quiet, and just looks at me. “He didn’t know Leusa was pregnant.” He shakes his head. “He was a brave man, Ned.”
It’s too much. I step away, Nain’s anger making my movements too sharp. It’s all Siân can do to hold the old man on his feet. She swears at me.
“What the bloody hell’re you doing, you stupid cow,” she says.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say. “I went a bit dizzy.”
“Well come on, help me get this one to the loo. We’ve got five more to get up before coffee.”
Nain’s anger subsides. The three of us shuffle across the hallway together. Huw doesn’t speak again. He goes into his shell. Into somewhere behind his cataracts, where my taid is.
40
Efa’s out when I get home from work, so I can search through Nain’s papers properly. I want to know it, want to know what’s happened to us, our family on this hill, what’s always been happening to us, what’s wrong.
There are three shoeboxes of Nain’s. All full of paper. The first is just snippets from newspapers. Bits of awful poems and letters she’d had published for a fiver, and competitions or prize draws she’d meant to enter. In the second is all bills and bank statements, most of the bills are overdue and most of the bank statements show how much she owed. In the third box there’s her letters, and it’s under a heap of Christmas cards I find it, the photo. Men from the quarry stood there, and the women. It’s for the Eisteddfod, a choir or a party of singers at least standing to have their photograph taken before they perform. At the front is Nain, I can tell by her eyes, but Nain’s young in the photograph, and her face is open, open and fresh and lovely, so that you can’t believe she’s the same person at all. And then there’s a face torn out, and that’s Taid. I know because I can feel Nain’s fingers all frantic as they tear through the photograph. I can feel Nain in the attic hating him, and maybe more than hate, something worse, more painful. I hold the photograph and I can feel her, hating. More than Efa hates her now even.
I can’t see the face, but I can see the shoulders, strong, and he’s tall, and you can see a bit of black hair, so Taid was dark. He’s in old trousers and a shirt, and isn't dressed as smart as the other men, who're in their Sunday clothes.
That’s all of him I find except these postcards, and this letter. It’s been scrunched up tight. I can feel Nain’s fingers trying to stop me opening it. I can feel Nain’s fingers and all her anger holding it crumpled up like this, like a dead bud.
It says a lot of words, all in posh English. It says, I, Ned Thomas, have decided to give my life to fight an unjust enemy. And then, in the margin, in Welsh, scribbled: Leusa, I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I’ve died in Spain.
How Nain hated it, Spain. Nain thought everywhere was better than here, than the hill, everywhere except Spain.
I think it: that he must’ve had a good reason after all. Taid must’ve had a good reason for all of this.
I can’t quite read his joined-up writing. I can’t quite read it, but it says “cariad” at the bottom, and he must’ve loved her, Nain, and he must’ve had a reason. Like Dad, who must’ve had a reason for being sick. I hold the letter, I read it over and over. Over and over. I look again at the envelope. It says Barcelona. Barcelona.
I hear Huw saying it. Brave, he was. Fought the fascist bastards. I don’t know about history, but I do know that my taid, even if he was on the wrong side of Nain, he was on the right side of something. A good man. Huw says it again with a half smile.
I’m between Huw and Nain.
“Ma’r lle ma’n hanner marw,” Nain’d say. This place is half dead. But really it was Nain. That was why Dad went too. Because he couldn’t bear Nain being only half a person, and that half being like a dried fig and as empty as chapel.
“There’s nothing here for you y’know,” Nain’d say, and maybe she’s right. Maybe I should leave too. Maybe like Nain said, there’s nothing here, nothing left. But what if what’s left is everything?
“What’re you doing?” It’s Dafydd stood in the doorway to Efa’s room. He’s smiling.
“Get out,” I say in a quiet, sprung voice. “Get out.”
He stands, looking at me, still half smiling.
“Get out, Dafydd,” and then, “I’ll tell my sister.”
“What will you tell her, Iola? Eh?” he laughs without moving his still eyes. “Anyway I know about you, Iola. I know it was you.”
I look away. “Get out,” I say. I don’t look at him.
“You killed that
man didn’t you?”
He grins, and he walks towards me. “Pigeon’s mother told me,” he says.
I almost consider it, what Dafydd wants. The bargain he’s trying to strike. They’ll make me bad, Dafydd and Pigeon. Like Nain made Taid. Nain made Taid out to be such an ugly, bad thing. Such an ugly person. And soon I’ll be like Taid. I’ll be just what people decide to say I am. Then my mind does what it did that day with Him. It searches for a way out. Like smoke in a burning house. I lunge past Dafydd, half running half falling down the wooden stairs, grabbing my purse and my earnings off the counter, and out.
41
It bothered Gwyn, the lie he’d told. It bothered him late at night and early in the morning when he lay in his three-quarter-sized bed in his new flat on the quay.
Miscarriage of justice, he thought, rather grandly. Miscarriage of justice!
And he, Gwyn, was a part of it. A small but crucial part. He was the one person who knew. It was like being at the centre of a newspaper story, or the plot of a novel. Except that he was Gwyn. He was only Gwyn. How could he be crucial to anything? Imagine! Gwyn: the piece that held the story in place.
Gwyn squirmed under the pressure, lying in bed, sweating. He squirmed and he squirmed. And then, because it was unbearable, he resolved to tell.
The person he chose to tell was Maggie. Maggie with the brown hair from a bottle. Maggie who knew more about sex than Gwyn had ever dreamed. Maggie who had big unruly breasts, a foul tongue, and who Gwyn had, tentatively, started to think of as His Girl.
“Fuck!” she said now, propping herself up on one elbow in his bed, her heavy boobs indignant against the room.
And then she asked the question that would haunt him:
“What the fuck are you going to do about it?”
There was a terrible imperative to the question. It closed around Gwyn with its expectation. With that question, Maggie took away the freedom of his second stab at childhood. The question made him eat a whole bar of milk chocolate, and made him, instantly, be at Maggie’s beck and call.