Pigeon

by Alys Conran

  “Efa says you do well at school,” he says.

  Is that pride in his voice? Is that?

  “Not bad,” I say. The corners of his mouth twitch just slightly.

  He sets a big mug of tea down in front of me. Milk, no sugar. He makes it like that for me without asking. That’s how I take it. Milk, no sugar, but he wasn’t to know was he?

  “I’m s…” he starts, but I interrupt him.

  “I killed someone.”

  He stops, and we stare at each other, me and this man who has no excuses. I have no excuses either. Or perhaps I do?

  “When?” The surprise cuts through all the rubbish, the apology I’m not giving him a chance to make because I can’t accept it.

  “When I was a kid. He was my friend’s step-dad. He was nasty.”

  He looks at me, shocked. Me being here at all. Me confessing.

  “He was going to kill my friend, I think. So I killed him, with his own gun.” It sounds like a film.

  “OK,” he says, as if I’ve just told him I broke a glass. “Does anyone know?”

  “One person, maybe two.”

  “What’re they going to do about it?” He leans back in his seat, considering.

  “Nothing, I think.”

  “Does Efa know?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. Sometimes I think she does. She’s never been the same with me, since it happened.”

  “OK,” he says again.

  “Tell her?” he says.

  There’s a long silence. Then he laughs, a low laugh.

  “It’s good to see you, Iola,” he says.

  It’s good to see him too, even though he’s old and hopeless. It’s good he has no excuses.

  When I tell her, she’s sitting in her room in front of the dressing table, brushing her hair.

  “I know,” she says, without missing a stroke with the hairbrush.

  I watch her face. It doesn’t flinch. I stand there watching.

  “Don’t tell anyone will you?” she says to me.

  “I already have,” I say. “Sort of. I’ve told Cher. Pigeon’s mam knows, and Pigeon.”

  She puts down the brush. “That’s too many people, Iola!”

  “And Dafydd,” I say quietly.

  “Dafydd?” she says.

  “Yep. He found out. He threatened to tell you.”

  “Threatened?”

  I nod.

  She’s looking at me, straight at me.

  “He’s a nasty piece of work isn’t he?” she says.

  I nod.

  “I saw him with some young girl in town the other day,” she says. “All over her, he was.” She looks like she’s going to cry. But instead, she stands and comes to me, puts her arms around me. Her warm arms.

  “Out on his ear, he is,” she says quietly, “Out on his ear.” And she goes to the record player which has sat there for so many years, waiting to play our music again. She takes out a black disk, sets it on the turntable and places the needle against it. A slow waltz, ghostly like half a memory, but sweet too, like long-lost Sundays, plays into the room, and we begin to dance together. My sister and me. We dance slowly, and I hold onto this rare time when I feel honest and true and safe.

  44

  When he visits her, Pigeon’s mam lies in a cold bed. The bed where the mermaid lies is placed in the centre of the room. There’s no indication which end is which. The bed where she lies has no head and no foot. It’s disorientating, cold; a bed base, mattress, white cotton sheet. The bed where she lies has no pillow. It’s like an altar, and she is the sacrificial lamb. The room (the chamber) is also rectangular. There’s nothing on the walls and no other furniture, apart from the bed where she lies. The walls are painted a pale green. The floor is also green, linoleum, of a slightly darker shade. That’s it: floor, walls, door, and, in the middle of it, the bed, and the mermaid, lying.

  On the ceiling there’s a mark. Someone has chipped the paint on the ceiling. How did they do it? It’s a high ceiling, and there are no weapons here. Nothing allowed in that could damage, hurt, break. Pigeon looks at the small mark up there on the ceiling and he thinks. But he can’t think. The world’s full of stale mysteries, even in an empty chamber. Perhaps his mam’s a riddle?

  The doctor seems to think so. Emanuel, he’s called. He has dark skin like the skin of a tree.

  “Are you her son?” he asks.

  “Yes,” says Pigeon.

  “Are there any other relatives, anyone to contact?”

  “No.”

  “Any friends?”

  “No.”

  “No friends?”

  “None that I want you to contact.”

  “Right.” He sighs.

  “When can she leave?”

  “Not yet.” The doctor turns to Pigeon’s mam “Are you hearing voices, Mari?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He ticks something on his chart. “She’s responding well to the medication.” he says.

  “Pigeon?” his mam is looking towards him. Smiling a watery smile.

  The doctor starts when she says the name.

  “She was calling to Pigeon in her sleep,” he says. “It’s your name?”

  “Yes,” says Pigeon. “You know, the grey ugly birds that are everywhere.” Pigeon half laughs at himself. Then he stops “The ones that carry messages,” he says. “The ones that always find their way home.”

  The doctor looks blank. He writes a few notes on his clipboard, and leaves them alone. Pigeon wants to run after him, to tell the doctor how his name is a dignified, real name. To tell him about how, in old-fashioned wars, people used pigeons to carry messages of war, and then, if they could find a nice, clean pigeon, unlike himself, not grey, or slate coloured, they used that as a message of peace. Pigeon wants to tell how his name’s also the word for a language, a version of someone else’s tongue, someone else’s story adopted and grown and made into your own until it’s better than the original. Pigeon, who collected his own name first, before any of the other words he put under his bed like a hamster making a nest, would like to tell the doctor these things, but he’d balk at telling him, what no one must know, that pigeon is also the word for a victim, which is what people would think Pigeon was, if they ever knew that he’d been punished for something he didn’t do.

  On the ward there’s a small common room, where patients are allowed to go to sit in the dark, grubby chairs, and smoke if they want, or talk. There’s a man in there almost all the time. Rich. He has grey hair. He’s been in for months he says. Pigeon doesn’t ask why. He’s quiet enough. Nice. Except sometimes he looks at one place for too long, and then nods at the empty room, and seems to gesture to someone, as if he’s agreeing with something they’ve just said, with their invisible argument. But Rich is clever, and, if he catches one of the staff observing him, he’ll halt his arm, change expression, pretend that there’s nothing in the room, no one haunting him.

  Pigeon spends as much time as he can visiting, hanging around the ward, or in the common room, so that, although he avoids them, the nurses find evidence of him everywhere, scrunched- up pieces of paper, or paper aeroplanes. The nurses tried to keep an eye on him, but found that he had a habit of not being where you thought he was. They’d look for him in the common room and find just a magazine pile tipped to the floor, three magazines open on the blue carpet, as if someone had been lying on their belly, reading the articles, and in the air there was the smell of tobacco, not Rich’s dark bitter kind, but the blond, sweet stuff that Pigeon has favoured from age eleven.

  His mam sees a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, an occupational therapist. His mam sees a doctor, several nurses. His mam sees an addiction counsellor. His mam acts as if she sees none of them. This goes on for weeks.

  Finally the doctor asks Pigeon what he thinks they should do.

  “Make her talk,” says Pigeon “Make her talk to you.”

  So the doctor gives the psychologist two mor
e weeks, and asks her to do some family counselling too. Family counselling is where Pigeon sits with his mam and the counsellor, and the counsellor asks questions which Pigeon answers as briefly as possible, and his mam doesn’t answer at all.

  But this time, when Pigeon arrives in the pale-coloured room with the coffee table, the three comfortable chairs, the flowers in the pot, the counsellor with her notebook, it’s different. His mam, who’s been here for a session before he arrived, has been crying. Proper tears. Pigeon looks at her tear-stained face, and feels relief. Some dam must have broken. Some silence.

  The counsellor’s looking nervous. Why? She’s looking at the door, and then back at Pigeon. She’s looking at the panic button to her right.

  “Pigeon,” says the counsellor. “Your mother’s been telling me about what happened to Adrian.”

  Pigeon sits, perfectly still.

  “I’m going to have to pass the information on, Pigeon. Do you understand?”

  Pigeon nods. He goes to his mother, hugs her, and nods, then he leaves the room.

  The policewoman who arrives at the front door is pretty and blonde. Pigeon opens the door, and then tries to close it again in her face. But she sticks a foot out to hold it open.

  “Alla i gael gair?”

  “What about?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about what happened all those years ago.”

  It’s strange that she’s come on her own. The police always come in twos. Pigeon can understand that. He and Iola always went everywhere in a two, back when they had a criminal to catch, evidence to collect, stories to build and break.

  “You mean the murder?” asks Pigeon with a grin.

  “Yes. That.” She smiles grimly.

  “Ask away.”

  “Can I come in maybe?”

  It’s strange she asks that, when she’s on her own.

  “I’m a convicted murderer you know,” he says, grinning.

  “I know,” she says. “Can I come in anyway?”

  “No,” says Pigeon. You don’t invite people in when they come to the front door.

  “OK,” she says. She motions to the bench Pigeon’s put out in the little bit of gravel in front of the house. “Can we sit there?”

  “OK,” says Pigeon, and steps out of the house.

  They sit down on the bench. The street has a view down the hill, a view over the town and over other streets, emptied and feather grey. Lately Pigeon’s been sitting here, watching it, the town.

  “Pigeon,” she says. “That’s what you like to be called isn’t it?”

  “That’s my name,” he says.

  “OK,” she says “Look. I know you confessed, and you were convicted, but am I right in thinking you didn’t do it?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Two people’ve been to the station.”

  “Two?”

  “I can’t tell you who,” she shakes her head.

  “Gwyn?” says Pigeon straight away.

  He can tell by her face that he’s right.

  “And that woman. The counsellor?”

  Right again.

  “The thing is,” says the policewoman, “There’s no evidence your mam’s right,” then she looks at him, straight into his eyes, “except if you can give me some,” she says.

  Pigeon looks at her. He thinks of the evidence he hid. The lies he and Iola told. He looks at her.

  She says, “My boss doesn’t believe it anyway, Pigeon. He thinks it’s a waste of time me coming here. But if you can just tell me something, p’rhaps we could get your conviction overturned.” She looks at him, with frank, kind eyes. Like a mother. Like a real mother.

  Just then three children come along the silver road, two girls and a boy, running, still running in their feral, violent playtimes, laughter bubbling bright and dangerous into the white sky as they jump over the wall at the end of the street, and into the open country beyond. Their language clatters behind them between the gorse and heather, the threatening cattle, and the idiot sheep.

  Pigeon thinks of the final meaning of his name, standing there with her. Pigeon is a case in point, a matter, like the matter of Iola, of Him, of Pigeon’s mam and of Pigeon, like the matter of this story, here.

  “No,” says Pigeon, standing up from the bench “You’re wrong,” he says.

  It was days before he could face the clear-out. First he opened the windows. Let the air in. Let it in to blow out any shadow left by his mother. The breeze that thrust through the open window unsettled the piles of paper, the dust, the grief that lay all over the house. He let it. He let it in. He took a bin bag and started to lift individually the things that were his mother and to thrust them into the black space of the bag. Ashtrays, beer cans, dresses, hangers, needle, thread, old faux jewellery, tights, underwear, handkerchiefs. He spared her nothing, this mother of his that had left him. She could either leave for real now or come back made new. Occasionally, as another part of her was chucked out, a small refrain rang in his head, a ditty or a folksong, some tune she’d learnt in a broken off part of her story. He didn’t know where she’d learnt those songs, he’d never met a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, nothing. They had no family. But in those tunes you got a sense of it. A connection to something. Into the black bag, and they were gone.

  Once the bags were filled and taken out to the bins at the end of the street, the cleaning began. Pigeon was meticulous. Every shred of her had to be brushed, mopped, scoured away. She was to have nowhere to hide. No dark, untouched corner where she could sit rocking, humming to herself and ignoring him, ignoring her son, Pigeon.

  The house began to straighten out. You could almost see it. Under Pigeon’s orders, the bricks began to stand more upright, the roof corrected its angle, things became square again. When it was all done, Pigeon himself took a shower, scrubbing and scrubbing his white skin until it was so clean it squeaked. He stepped out of the shower, his old skin shed. Pigeon, a new thing, dried himself in the long light that flooded in through his clean windows.

  When Pigeon saw her standing in his doorway, a small rucksack on her back, it went through him. It was a feeling you couldn’t describe, something cold, and hot at the same time. Loss and gratitude and anger and wanting.

  He wanted her. He wanted her pale hair and thin, delicate skin. He wanted her narrow shoulders, her half smile. Her guilt. Most of all that was what he wanted. It ran through him occasionally, the idea, that it had been her all along, her stood behind the gun, holding it. But he pushed it back. It had nothing to do with her after all. Couldn’t have anything to do with her. She was just a ghost, but a ghost he wanted, he beckoned back and back to him. He wanted her, the ghost Iola, just as you always do want a spectre before it disappears.

  She’d come after his mam left him there on his own. Although he’d been alone a long time, the house felt empty when his mam was in hospital.

  To the quiet, empty house Iola came. She stood there, in the doorway, crying.

  “I’m sorry, Pigeon. Oh God, Pigeon, I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  She looked at him. Her red eyes stopped pooling. She sniffed wetly.

  “For your mum. For this.”

  “She’s not sorry. It’s what she wanted isn’t it? Mam? To go. Get out of here? Don’t bloody cry about it.” He walked through into the lounge.

  “Aren’t you sad?” She sat down on his sofa.

  Pigeon thought about it. Is that what you called it. This cold empty hungriness for a mother that had not existed for years.

  “No,” It couldn’t be. Sad was too tame a word.

  Hunger. That’s what this was. Hunger.

  “She’ll not come back,” he said. “There’s no point in crying, Iola. She’ll not bloody come back.”

  It was what he’d learnt early on. There was no point in speaking to his mam if she didn’t respond. Didn’t answer with a word or a look or a gesture. Better to sit tight with the hunger. Hold the hunger in place with your own silen
ce. His mam never really came home after He moved in.

  Iola looked at him.

  “Nei di ddod adra, Pigeon?” she asked him. Will you come home?

  He looked at her. He understands the question perfectly. Will he come home? Will he.

  “Come with me up the hill, Iola.” He said it quickly. He’d to get the words out before they dried from his tongue.

  Iola looked surprised, stood here in her nurse’s pinny. But she nodded.

  On the hill it was boggy today after so much rain. They skirted the field, keeping away from the cattle. A herd of nervy bullocks that had just been put out and were hyperactive and followed them vaguely. Iola just ignored them, and for once Pigeon followed her, copying her long strides. She’d grown tall lately, Iola. Almost as tall as he was. He had it again then. The feeling that she was overtaking him. The feeling that she’d one day leave him. Leave him to this.

  At the top of the hill they looked out at it. Their town. Its slow streets. Its shifting houses. The fidgeting gardens where cats trailed across fences, catching their small springtime prey, the poking chimneys, a couple of them smoking, even on a warm day. The town mumbled to itself beneath the deep clouds. Mumbled to itself of killings and games and lies. Even the clouds couldn’t muffle its mumbling, even the clouds couldn’t entirely smother the life out of this babbling town on the hill.

  Pigeon reached for Iola’s hand then. And she held his. Her small hand was cool. They sat like that, looking down at their town. He put an arm around her. Her hair smelt good. He kissed her hair.

  She didn’t move until he was ready, ready to walk the steep slope back, past the cattle stood against the hedgerow expecting rain, back along the snaking path, to the home he was making.

  But he didn’t go home, not yet. First he led Iola to the quarry, toward what had been hidden there so long.

  45

  I walk behind Pigeon. Along the road that leads up to the slate tips, small grey and white houses stick from the fog, from the bald hills, like squint teeth. It’s raining lightly. The tarmac shines like a black ribbon ahead of us and slate gravestones glint wet in the churchyard as we walk past. How many of those men here had been buried first by the quarries, in the belly of the cut-away mountain? Looking toward the heaps of the slate tips that glint and flicker, wet and shining in the pale sunlight, you can’t help thinking of them, those men, the men that were here when Nain was young. The men like the man that left her.