by Alys Conran
She marched him down to the police station as soon as they’d finished a good breakfast of bacon and eggs.
Maggie burst through the pinging door, and strode straight up to the counter.
“Miscarriage of Justice!” she said, breathlessly “Mis-carriage-of-justice.”
Gwyn was pale, standing behind her. He tried to turn back to beige. But all that bacon, all that sex, all that Maggie, had saturated his colours so that he stood out like an ice-cream van in the winter.
The policeman behind the desk, raised an eyebrow.
“Want to make a statement?” she asked.
“Yes! Fuck. Yes,” said Maggie.
“Maggie…” said Gwyn.
“Yes, we want to make a fucking statement,” said Maggie again.
“No need to swear, madam,” said the policeman
“I didn’t!” said Maggie her eyebrows climbing.
“Maggie…” said Gwyn again.
“Right then,” said the policeman. “Have a seat, and someone’ll be with you shortly.”
Maggie dragged Gwyn to sit down.
“Now,” she muttered at him tersely. “You have to make sure you get the story right.”
“Maggie…” said Gwyn.
“You have to make sure they know exactly how it happened.”
“The problem is, Maggie…”
“And that the kid’s innocent. He’s as innocent as Jesus, and that little girl she’s a … she’s a…”
“Teenager now,” said Gwyn.
“Here,” said Maggie, producing a pen, “write down what you’re going to say.”
She sat, looking over his shoulder as he wrote.
Eight years ago a boy was convicted for a crime…
The door to the office opened.
“Come through,” said a young, female policewoman. She looked at them both. “Just one of you at a time,” she said.
Maggie looked crestfallen.
“You can make a statement later,” the woman said to her.
“It’s alright,” said Maggie “I’ve got nothing to fucking say anyway.”
Gwyn was led through into the interview room.
“So,” said the woman. “What exactly is this about?”
“I’m not really sure,” said Gwyn.
“You’ll need to be a bit more specific,” she said laughing. She was pretty. She had blonde hair. A uniform. “It’s about a couple of kids who…” Gwyn stopped.
The woman looked at him. She looked at him long and hard.
Gwyn thought of him, Pigeon, when he was just a boy. That look of pride on his face in the tribunal, standing there, in the glass box, surrounded by adults, as he said the words. I did it. I killed him.
Could you take that away from the boy and leave him still standing?
“It’s nothing,” said Gwyn “I’m sorry. Just kid’s stuff. I’m wasting your time.”
Outside, Maggie couldn’t fucking believe it. She couldn’t fucking believe her ears. She went off down the street in a fucking bad temper, and Gwyn, he felt once again a palpable, relief at being rid of another Hell of A Woman, at least for the rest of the afternoon.
42
Pigeon goes out with Elfyn every day. They go round building walls for people. Pigeon’s getting better at it, choosing the right stone for the right place, fitting them all together.
They don’t speak much, except to Nel, the frank-eyed collie, who watches them all day, sniffs around the stones, and comes to lean against Pigeon’s legs, scavenging for comfort, to be stroked.
“Dyna ti,” Pigeon says to her. “Gw’ gel.”
The Welsh has come back a bit, at least when he’s outside with Elfyn, when they’re doing the walls. It feels right then. But still, with his mam, or with anyone else, there’s no words, just a blank space in his mouth. A space that’s bright, too bright, so that when he tries, his mouth’s just empty, or perhaps not empty, too full, like when you try to speak with a mouth full of white bread.
They sit to have lunch, Pigeon and Elfyn, leaning their backs against the wall they’ve made, unwrapping the sandwiches Elfyn’s brought them, unrolling them from the brown paper. They’re big, thick sandwiches. They taste like something real. The cheese in them is tangy and spicy and good. Half the sandwiches are for Pigeon, and half for Elfyn. They don’t speak as they eat.
But after eating, as they drink bitter black tea from Elfyn’s big flask, there’ll be a conversation.
“Chei di’m gwell na’r mynyddoedd ’ma.” Elfyn says today, looking past the wall at the hills.
“Na,” Pigeon agrees.
“Does na’m gwell lle yn y byd.” Elfyn says it quietly, because it’s a fact.
Pigeon smiles. And right now it’s true. They’re on top of it, on top of the world on this heap of a hill by this wall, and there’s nowhere better, nowhere better. There’s nowhere else in the world.
His mam’s worse and worse. She sits. She stares into space and she drinks.
“Ti’n yfed Pigeon?” Elfyn asks one day. Do you drink, Pigeon?
“Na,” says Pigeon.
“Na fina machgen i. Na finna. Hen beth gwael ’di alcohol. Difetha bywyda’ a Difetha pobl,” says Elfyn.
Pigeon sits quietly, knowing Elfyn’s right. Alcohol is a home- wrecker, a people-wrecker a medicine with terrible side-effects.
Elfyn looks at him. Then gently. “Sut ma’ dy fam, Pigeon? Ro’n i’n i nabod hi, blynyddoedd yn ôl ’sdi. Pan o’dd ei theulu hi’n cadw’r post.”
Elfyn? Knew his mam once? There it is again, like her name, Mari, as if she was once someone real. It’s the gentlest of invitations. Between the words there’s Elfyn beckoning. You can talk to me. You can talk to me my lad. That’s what’s between the words.
“Mam’s OK,” says Pigeon. Keeps putting up walls.
And that’s it. The moment’s passed. Elfyn knows better than to invite more than once.
So Pigeon learnt to build walls. He built them the old way, with local rock, granite and slate. Pigeon hardly spoke now. But he was alright. That’s what they said. “Quiet, but alright.”
“He does a good job with the walls, and you can trust him, at least with that,” was what they said.
And the people who wanted the walls, they couldn’t care less about the whispers.
All around him, the town whispers. And Pigeon comes to depend on the whispers in the town. They tell Pigeon a story that he needs. The story of what Pigeon did to Him that night on the hill.
Perhaps he got off lightly, in a way, Pigeon. Just a short sentence, relatively speaking, and then a couple of years on parole. What he lost, when he gave in to his own stories, perhaps wasn’t so great, just a few words, or, to be precise, a home’s worth. And only Elfyn sees the marks left by the words, the faint imprint of having been once a part of something, only Elfyn can coax Pigeon to come a little closer to home, to utter a few sparse words of Welsh.
The old man greets each one as if it’s made of gold, or purple slate.
It’s with Elfyn, doing the walls, month after month, Pigeon’ll think.
Home, the hill, has a long memory, and it knows the story of what happened to Pigeon, and what he did. People whisper when he passes. People may whisper. But they’re only words. And he doesn’t care. Doesn’t care for words anymore. He barely speaks. And he never speaks his own language anymore. It belongs to a different time, a different boy, with shoulders delicate as eggshells. This Pigeon has only one story.
Killing Him had Pigeon back in the middle of it all. It had done what none of the words could. That he’d managed it held him together, almost.
But thinking about Iola made him uneasy. Even now, years after it all, there was an uncomfortable feeling, of things not quite sitting right, not quite being ready to be put to rest.
There was a kind of peace he was after. He wanted it all settled. He wanted it to be simple. There was something understandable in the formula he’d made: Crime, punishment, rehabilitation. It matched the formul
a he’d made for Him: abuse, anger, retribution. But Iola. She didn’t quite fit the pattern. She stuck out of his life in a way that didn’t sit right with him.
Iola was interrupting his train of thought all the time. There was a kind of a gap, a missing link he couldn’t ignore. She was a headache. He couldn’t see her clearly. What did she look like? What did she sound like? What did she have to say for herself? He couldn’t think. When he did remember times he’d spent with her, she was always listening, taking in, watching. What had she been thinking, Iola? What had she been thinking all that time?
She was caught up with it all. You couldn’t avoid it. She was caught up with it all, with the words that were locked away in his head and wouldn’t properly come back. She was there, in his head. No amount of time could get her out of that white, cold place in his head where the words were. That wasn’t a good place for her to be. It’d make her sick.
Elfyn gave him half a sandwich.
“Diolch.” he said. And Elfyn nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, Pigeon saying it: “Diolch”.
He’d seen enough of it with his Mam. Iola was in trouble. He couldn’t get her out of that place in his head, and she wouldn’t get that sickness out.
It was when you asked too much of a person, they went into the white space. Even Pigeon could feel it beckoning, that place. His mam never came out of it anymore.
“Ti’m am fyta’r frechdan ’na?” Elfyn was asking. I’ll happily eat it if you don’t, he adds.
Pigeon looks at the sandwich. He takes a bite. It’s tangy and spicy and good.
He’d better talk to her. She’s got a piece missing. Like a wall with a stone laid wrong, or missed out. He’d better get her that piece.
He spent the afternoon writing a letter to her in his head. It made sense the letter, but it was in English. It was a nice letter. It’s alright, it said. It’s alright.
She would get the letter, and she’d be alright.
They finished that section of the wall early, so he went home an hour ahead of the normal time, walking back along the igam ogam road, with the holey fence, where the bullocks could come through if they wanted to enough.
Today they didn’t. The sun was low, and the light from it slanted onto the fields, the brambles, the gorse of the hillside. Pigeon was full of space inside him. Peace it was called, but that was a grand, flimsy word for something so specific and still.
He’d talk to her, and then it’d be alright. Finally it’d be over. Iola would come out of that place in his head, and he’d get the words back, one by one. But he was going in the right direction. He was finally going in the right direction. It was something to do with Elfyn and the walls that’d done it.
He walked into the crooked house through the front door. Lately he’d started doing that. Using the front door. It felt good.
He walked past his mam in the dark living room. He opened the curtains, went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, grabbed a tea bag from the jar, and another one, for his mam. He stood, watching some birds in the wide sky outside, until the kettle boiled. He poured the water over the bags, stewed them, added milk for his mam, three sugars for him, one for his mam. He carried it through, placed his mam’s on the table at her side, picked up a notebook, started the letter.
Iola, he wrote. It’s Pigeon. I hope you’re alright.
He stopped. Crossed out the last sentence. Sat with the pencil in his hand. Where did you begin untelling a story? He couldn’t find the end of it, or the beginning to begin unravelling from.
That man, He was a bastard, he wrote.
The room hardened around him. Something made him look up. He looked at his mam. She was motionless, staring straight ahead. He looked at his mam. Then he knew it. He thought he knew it, silently, somewhere inside. Dead?
But she wasn’t. This time she wasn’t. She’d taken a pack of pills, but when the ambulance came, screaming up the hill, they woke her with a drip, and inside the ambulance, with Pigeon stroking her hand and whispering I love you I love you, she wound slowly back to life.
They kept her in that night, and Pigeon came back to the house on his own. It was the first time he’d ever been here alone. He slept on the sofa. The house creaked around him, empty. Like a white lie.
43
You can see it, how Pigeon’s finding his answers. That’s the way it is with him. Telling his own stories, and sticking to them, so that you can’t figure out what your story is all about, because it just seems like part of his. I keep at it. Working. Working. I keep on pretending my way through the town. They say I can really go places. Have you thought about University? they say. They tell me about places far away with long, exotic names where I might go, if I want to. They show me a prospectus. They think I’d make a good teacher. Efa’s keen.
“You could really go places.” She repeats it, like they all do.
It makes me feel sick. The thought of leaving Pigeon.
“’ve you ever thought about leaving?” I ask him, sitting on the very edge of his tidy new sofa, afraid to put a foot out of place.
“What d’you mean?”
“You could leave this house, go somewhere else, start fresh?”
He laughs. “I haven’t even started here!” he says.
“Pigeon.” I feel desperate. “You’ve got potential.” The words sound wrong here. Potential is an understatement for that little boy with the green eyes, who could do anything. But I carry on.
“You’re cleverer than I am. You could really do stuff.” I stop, because he’s laughing. He’s doubled up, laughing.
When he’s finished, and the house straightens, he looks at me, his face going cold again.
“God, Iola. You really don’t get it do you?” There’s a silence and then, “I need to fix things here. Can’t be thinking about going anywhere else can I?”
I think about this. Then I nod. He is fixing it slowly, fixing his house, fixing his mother, fixing his mother tongue.
I think of the story of the ‘The Little Mermaid’, which Pigeon still keeps in his house, and which I can’t bring myself to take back. I remember Efa reading the story, so much more ugly and painful than the Disney version, but so much more real. How the mermaid lost her tongue when she turned against her home in the water, but how, in the end, what she needed was to go back home, beneath the water, find her voice again. Pigeon, he’s the same. He just needs to get this house in order, piece by piece, find his way to a home to call his own, and the words and words of him will come slowly to the tip of his tongue.
I buy myself a train ticket. It’s easy. You just go to the counter, and ask. I wait, on the narrow platform, for the train. There are people saying goodbye to each other. And people with big suitcases, going somewhere far. I have nothing with me except for some money, and no one to say goodbye to this time. Eventually, the train pokes through the tunnel like an eel, and rolls dead slow into the station.
I’m going to see Dad. I decided it last night. I want to know him. I want to know what he means in his own story, instead of just in ours. I’m going to see the man who packeted the chicken, and wove the statues in the garden out of wire, and left us.
I sit on the train, watching the green, irregular fields passing, and then the towns as they get bigger and bigger on the way out of Wales. No one sits next to me the whole way. At Chester, you have to change. I get off my train and stare at all the screens. There are the names of so many towns going down them, arrival times, departures. Liverpool? Liverpool?
I must have said it aloud because, “It’s that one, love,” says the guard.
The Liverpool train is ugly. There are bits of chewing gum on the floor, no tables. The seats are old and tattered. But it’s only for half an hour. Mostly we go through tunnels and along bits of track between buildings now. Our green and grey hillside feels a long way away. It feels like maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I thought.
I don’t feel afraid, getting off the train. I have a map. On the map I ca
n see where Dad’s house is, the place where he stays now, according to Efa. She gave me the address as soon as I asked.
“I thought you’d want to go one day,” she said.
“Have you been there?”
“Once or twice,” she said. I had the feeling it was more.
There were so many questions to ask her about Dad, but I didn’t know where to begin so I just asked nothing, and she said nothing except, “Be careful”.
In Liverpool the buildings are tall and go on and on. Walking along my map, it’s just street after street. The trees grow out of the tarmac here, crack it, and push through from the earth below.
This street is Dad’s. It has lots of small, brick houses, tiny yards out the front.
The man who opens the door is old. He’s stooped like a question mark and has grey hair. He has a white beard, ruckled skin and my eyes. He looks at me.
“Yes?” he says.
I stare at him, and say nothing.
“What do you want?” he asks. And then looks past me up the street, as if I’m no one.
He doesn’t know who I am. I look at him a long while. Then, quietly, I say it.
“Iola dwi,” I say, “Eich merch.”
Inside Dad’s house it’s pretty dark, and there’s bits of metal and wood everywhere, so he’s still doing that. I follow him along the corridor to the kitchen. He walks very slowly. The house smells of something I don’t recognise. When I see the ashtray, with a long roll up cigarette in it, I know what it is.
Dad makes tea. His hands are shaking.
Every first conversation has to start somehow.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says in Welsh. “Efa said you didn’t want to know.” His Welsh sounds like it hardly gets used, creaky.
“I didn’t,” I say. I smile.
“You’re tall,” he says. His voice is a wavering, uncertain note.
“So’re you,” I say. Neither of us mention our eyes. The same dark, dark blue. Like the bottom of the sea.
“I was. Not so much now. Bent over with bad health,” he shrugs. There’s a silence. So many questions to ask, but I can’t think of the words.