by Alys Conran
Pigeon turns at the top of the road, in the middle of all this nothing and cloud. I follow him. He goes through the gate to the quarry. It clunks behind him. He ignores the yellow danger signs and barbed wire as usual, clambers under the barrier, and goes towards it, the clearing between the tips where we used to throw stones into the pool of the old quarry below. I follow him as usual.
We’re in the middle of the empty quarry, and all this beautiful deadness. Pigeon has stopped, and is standing, as if he’s listening. Perfectly still. Waiting.
“Why here?” I ask him. I try to smile. But it’s not a certain smile. Nervous.
“Why not.”
“Before you say anything. There’s something I want to say.”
“Don’t Iola. Don’t.” His English words are bare and useless.
“I wanted to say sorry.” My English words are so tiny and vast.
“What for. It wasn’t your fault He died.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Whose fault was it then?”
“His.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yep.”
We’re quiet a bit.
“D’you mind that He died?”
“Why would I mind?” Pigeon gives a dry laugh.
“It was the gun that did it.”
I hear myself say it, and I don’t know why I did.
46
Pigeon had never considered it before. Perhaps she was right. Maybe it was the gun. That small gun they’d showed him again, in the white room, asked him if that was the kind of gun he’d used. They’d never found it, the real one.
“Yes,” he’d answered them.
“Show us how to shoot it.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“What d’you want me to shoot?”
“That wall.”
“The wall?”
They nodded.
“OK,” he said.
He’d taken the safety catch off. Click. Held it in his hands, two hands, he knew how it could throw a person to the ground. He could feel them watching him in this small room he couldn’t get out of where what you’d done was all that you were. He pointed the gun at the wall. It was like an animal in his white hands. His hands were shaking. That was the animal, the dog, growling. It snarled in his hands, and all he could do was stand while the dog did it. The dog bit at the wall, the box, this pigeonhole.
But it had no bite. He had no bite left. They’d taken out the bullets.
He walks away from Iola, up into the quarry, beckons for her to follow him. She does, obediently, like she did when they were kids.
Pigeon goes uphill, to a tunnel that’s cut through the mountain for the quarry. There are small rails in the tunnel floor, used to cart slate from one part of the quarry to the other and take it down and all over to make the perfect, clean roof slates that shelter everyone else from this rain. Pigeon follows the railed tunnel into the dark. A chink of light at the end of it shines green, and he scuffs towards it, Iola behind him, as she always used to be. At the end, the tunnel opens like a lily, opens into green, ferns and moss and caught sunlight. Awstralia people call it, this quarry hole, this lost world. Awstralia’s black, and slate blue, and luminescent green with ferns. In Awstralia there’s the steady seep of rain falling through the mountain, through heather and gorse and earth and stone and slate and bedrock, drip, onto the dark slate.
Pigeon kneels on the ground beside a slit in the slate wall of the quarry, a narrow shaft not completely blasted. He puts his arm into the split. Grappling around. Looking for something there.
“What…” Iola starts asking, and then sees the brown package he’s pulling from the rocks, its old brown paper and brown tape crumbling around the hardness of what’s inside. Iola stares at it. She stares at it. Pigeon hands the package over.
“It’s yours,” he says. “Open it.”
“Pigeon. No.”
“Well I will then,” and he takes the package back. He begins to pick and tear at the tape. It comes off without resistance, almost crumbles away, like lies can, leaving what’s underneath, black and festering and cold.
The gun.
Pigeon watches her, looking at it. She’s waiting, waiting for some feeling to pass.
“It’s smaller than I remember,” she says.
He passes it to her.
“It’s colder than I remember,” she says quietly as she takes it in her two hands.
47
What comes into my head, as I hold the gun, is just fear. Is just whiteness, and pressure. I stand holding it, looking at Pigeon and then this:
There’s a light in the crooked house. I don’t want to see Him so I go past the house, and down the garden towards the shed, and that’s when they make sense, the noises. And that’s when I know. I know what they are. I’m not stupid. I can hear Him shouting. And I can hear the sound of hitting. But most of all I can hear Pigeon. And maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s that, that crying that’s like a kid, Pigeon, who I love, I love, crying like he’s just a kid, that makes me know I have to get in the way of Him just so He stops. I’ll make it happen myself.
I’m so quiet, and I move so carefully, it’s like I’m not me. I’m not Iola. I’m someone better. Someone who knows exactly what to do. She’s strong and careful and she moves up to the house, pushes open the door, hears His shouts, the sound of Pigeon crying, and then quiet. The room and what I’m seeing begins to make a picture.
There’s Pigeon standing in the room, and there’s Him holding Pigeon to the floor, and then I see it, Pigeon’s holding it to His head.
In the crooked house, He sees me. He moves. And He’s knocked it from Pigeon’s hand and it’s gone in the air, and then across the floor until it’s right by my foot. It’s like something that isn’t real, sitting there, by my foot. And He doesn’t care that I’m here, that I’ve got in the wrong story, He doesn’t care; He’s got Pigeon by the neck like a bird. Like Nain wringing the neck of a bird.
I know what I’m supposed to do. Something big. And I move so perfectly. So perfectly. I get it from the floor, and I lift it. I lift it. And I stand with it in my hand. It’s like something that isn’t real in my hand. He’s ignoring me. Focusing on what he’s killing. He holds Pigeon down by the throat, and Pigeon is changing colour. And I hold it. It’s heavy. It’s not like something real. I wait until Pigeon looks at me. Until he sees me, sees how I’m in on it this time, well in. Then holding it while it shoots is like holding an animal that’s too strong, holding a dog while it bites someone deep.
It was it, it was it. I didn’t think it would happen. Not in a real way. And I’m on the ground, and I’m hurt, because the sound and it were stronger than me. I’m on the ground. And He’s lying on top of Pigeon.
And then Pigeon has pushed Him away. Pigeon’s face is white. Pigeon’s face is bone white and he doesn’t speak. There’s the sound of his mam singing. She’s still rocking. She’s still singing. Pigeon and me are staring at Him forever.
“Dos adra, Iola,” says Pigeon after an empty time. Pigeon’s still not looking at me, still staring at Him on the ground. Go home, Iola, he says, taking it from my hand. Go home. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t even tell Efa. Act like this is nothing to do with you. Go home, Iola. Home.
So I follow him again, Pigeon, follow what he says. Go home, go home, over the fence, along the path by the river. Go home and don’t say anything, don’t ever say anything.
And even now it makes no sense, no sense that Pigeon’d take the blame. Except perhaps he wished it was him. Wished it was. When I turned and looked back at the house, I remember now how Pigeon was standing looking down at Him, lying with all the black blood coming from His head. And perhaps Pigeon was smiling, Pigeon, perhaps he was, before he closed the curtains and the house was put out.
Pigeon is silent and patient while I stand here, holding it as if it’s going to explode.
“It isn’t mine,” I say eventually, and pass it to him.
<
br /> “No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
Pigeon’s holding the gun again now. It’s lifeless. Dead.
“What can I do about all this?” I ask him my stupid question, here in the empty quarry, and stand, hopeless, waiting for the answer. Pigeon’s answer. Pigeon’s own. It doesn’t come. He smiles just a bit, his eyes still that boy’s eyes, the boy who had all those ideas and those stories which started this whole thing off, stories that’ll go on and on as long as we’re together, me and Pigeon, as long as it’s never him or me, but both of us, together.
“How can I get back what you’ve lost?” I ask him again.
He’s still smiling, just a bit. Considering. You can feel something building.
“Geiria,” he says. Words.
He shrugs, his eyes searching the ground for them.
“Only words.”
Alys Conran writes fiction, poetry, creative essays and literary translations. Previously, her short fiction has been placed in The Bristol Short Story Prize and The Manchester Fiction Prize. Her work is to be found in magazines including The Manchester Review, Stand Magazine and The New Welsh Reader and in anthologies by The Bristol Review of Books, Parthian Books and Honno Press. Having previously studied in Edinburgh and Barcelona, she completed her MA in Creative Writing at Manchester and then returned home to north Wales, developing projects there to increase access to creative writing and reading. She now lectures in Creative Writing at Bangor and is in receipt of an AHRC scholarship to write her second novel, about the legacy of the Raj in contemporary British life.
Acknowledgments:
Diolch o galon to Laura Ellen Joyce, Jodie Kim, Kathryn Pallant and Holly Ringland for our online living room of global conversations where Pigeon could breathe. Maia, for never letting me clip my wings even when I want to. And Joe, always, for a life with dreaming at its heart, food in its belly, and laughter snorting out of its nose.
Parthian, Cardigan SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.com
First published in 2016
© Alys Conran 2016
ISBNs 978-1-910901-59-5 (epub) 9781910901601 (mobi)
Editor: Richard Davies
Cover design by Robert Harries
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.