The Earth Hums in B Flat

by Mari Strachan

Was Alwenna right? Was it Ifan Evans’s death that pushed Mam into being ill? Was he Bethan’s father? Look at the clues. Bethan has the same colour eyes as Ifan Evans. He was Mam’s boyfriend for a while before she met Tada, and maybe afterwards – remember the swimming? Mam always stood up for him. And her nerves did get worse from the minute Nain came to tell us he was missing; before that she was her usual cross self. But this is what detective stories call circumstantial evidence, not proof. I suppose the eye colour could be proof, but lots of people have dark brown eyes. Against all this circumstantial evidence is what Mam said about Bethan’s father; she said he was an angel. Ifan Evans was not an angel.

  ‘Move your feet, Gwenni,’ says Nain. She’s still puttering about, picking up invisible bits, straightening the furniture, throwing wood on the fire, folding the grey blanket, plumping up the cushions on the armchairs. But Mam’s pink cushion isn’t here for Nain to plump up. I tried to tell Tada what Mam said about the cushion, but he didn’t understand me. He said it was the only thing Mam brought with her from her mother’s house and if it made her happy it was best for her to take it with her.

  But the pink cushion didn’t make her happy, did it? I should have burnt it like Mam burnt Mrs Llywelyn Pugh’s dead fox. The cushion made Mam miserable; it reminded her every day of terrible things that should have faded in her memory. Nain Eluned wanted it to remind Mam. Because she was mad, too. When people are mad, do they become different people, or are they versions of themselves with all the horrible things about them magnified? Mam was always cross with me but after Ifan Evans disappeared she became worse and worse. I didn’t tell Tada she called me Satan.

  ‘Where’s that nuisance of a cat gone?’ says Nain. ‘Did he run upstairs?’

  ‘He went out,’ I say. ‘The noise from the ambulance scared him and he went out when you came in.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she says. ‘We don’t want him making a mess of the beds.’

  I nod. I saw John Morris run out. He doesn’t run much, so he must have been frightened.

  ‘Right,’ says Nain, standing over me, her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t sit there brooding, Gwenni. That’s no use to man nor beast.’

  ‘I’m just trying to work out how it all makes sense, Nain,’ I say.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ says Nain. ‘It’s life, Gwenni. Just kicks you in the teeth sometimes. You may as well get used to the idea.’

  ‘I won’t have any teeth left if it kicks me any more,’ says Bethan.

  ‘No good feeling sorry for yourself, Bethan,’ says Nain. ‘Worse things happen at sea.’

  Bethan’s mouth drops open. After a second she says, ‘You’re not my real grandmother so you’ve got no right to tell me what to do.’

  Nain’s face flames like the fire. ‘Your father left you in my care, young lady.’

  ‘He’s not my real father either,’ says Bethan.

  ‘He’s as real a father as you’ll ever have,’ says Nain.

  ‘My father was an angel,’ says Bethan. ‘Mam said so.’ She wasn’t so pleased with the idea when Mam told her.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ says Nain. ‘I’ve heard everything now.’

  Bethan jumps up from Tada’s chair. ‘I’m not staying here another minute,’ she says.

  I hear Nain’s false teeth grind together. She takes a deep breath. ‘Go to bed, then, Bethan. You, too, Gwenni. Unless you want something to eat first. Best thing for you both would be a good night’s sleep.’

  My queasy stomach is back; I can feel it all the way up my throat. So I just shake my head at Nain.

  Bethan stamps her foot. ‘You’re so timid and stupid, Gwenni,’ she says. ‘And I said I wasn’t staying here and I’m not.’ And she opens the living room door and then the front door and runs out into the dark.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ says Nain. ‘You stay here, Gwenni. I’ll go and get Lol to go after the silly girl with me.’ And she, too, disappears into the night.

  As she vanishes, John Morris sidles in through the open door. He stops and looks all around the living room before coming in. What does he think is going on in this house? Maybe he thinks he lives in an asylum. He jumps onto Tada’s chair but I don’t want to sit in Mam’s chair so I move John Morris there. Now I’ll be able to curl up on Tada’s big cushion with the smell of his Golden Virginia and his Lifebuoy soap. John Morris treads and treads in a circle on Mam’s seat before he settles down. Has the rose-petal blood on her cushion rubbed off on the other cushions and the covers? It’s lucky I always sit in Tada’s chair.

  The wood Nain put on the fire has almost burnt through, so I throw two thin pine logs on quick so no flames can catch my hand and the logs spit at me. I stamp the tiny red embers that land on the linoleum. If I was really Satan, or any devil, I would like fire, not be afraid of it, wouldn’t I?

  Maybe a cup of tea will push the queasiness away. I take the kettle into the scullery and fill it under the tap. The electric light is poor in here, but I can see that the walls are blue and clear as a cloudless sky. I rub the wall by the sink with my hand. There was a mouth just here that was huge with the secrets it had swallowed. But there’s nothing here now. Maybe Tada did drown them all with his blue distemper. Maybe I just imagined they were returning. Or maybe they ate and swallowed so many secrets today that they got our old family stomach and lost the taste for them.

  I take the kettle to the grate. The pine has made a red-hot bed for it. The water on the sides of the kettle fizzles in the heat as I lower it onto the fire. I sit in Tada’s chair to wait for the kettle to boil and snuggle into his cushions and take a deep breath of his scent from them. But there’s something more than his tobacco and soap; there’s whiff of something that burns my nostrils. If fear had a stink this would be it. Poor Tada.

  Will anything ever be the same again? Where did all of this start? Long before I was born, long before Mam was born. Here is the evidence. First there was the Great War, a terrible war. Maybe it began even further back, but I have no evidence of that. The war made my grandfather violent; my grandfather in his violence drove my grandmother to madness; my grandmother’s madness made my mother ill. My mother’s illness made her behave in a strange way; though it wasn’t strange to her. Here, Ifan Evans comes in, before, and maybe after, my mother married my father; Tada who never wanted to leave her to go to another old war. Then come Elin Evans and the lost babies and Angharad and little Catrin. I don’t have any evidence that Ifan Evans killed the babies; what Nanw Lipstick says doesn’t count. Where did Ifan Evans’s black dog come from? Maybe the war made someone in his family ill, too. And Mrs Llywelyn Pugh’s husband had died in the war and her boys in the next war and then I made everything worse by stealing the dead fox, which Mam burnt before I could give it back. Then Elin confessed to killing Ifan because the detectives arrested Guto. She didn’t want them to find out who really killed Ifan. Don’t think about that. I have no evidence that any war was to blame for Guto’s mam dropping him on his head. And Elin’s arrest was more than poor Mrs Llywelyn Pugh could bear. When will it ever end? Mrs Williams Penrhiw said: We’ll never be the same again, any of us. Is that true? Is this what Nain means when she says life gives you a kick in the teeth? It seems more like battering and bruising and breaking your whole body and maybe even killing you.

  The kettle’s boiling water out of its spout. I take it off the fire before it quenches the flames. I don’t really want a cup of tea any more. My stomach is hurting and I want to stay here in Tada’s chair and go to sleep. Maybe then I’ll fly into the night sky and all this will be far away. Look at the steam rising right up to the ceiling from the kettle spout, as if it’s a genie. Those Toby jugs are peering over the edge of their shelf again. I’m going to sweep them off so they’ll smash into tiny pieces in the grate. Who is left to notice that they’ve gone?

  If I stand on the arm of Tada’s chair I might just be able to reach. I climb up on the knobbly cushion and then onto the arm and try to get my balance. It’s difficult because the
re’s nothing to hold on to. I can hear the brown clock; the clock that never stops. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I close my eyes and reach my arms out to stop wobbling. When I’m perfectly still I open my eyes and stretch up on my tiptoes to reach the nearest Toby jug and my feet lift off the arm of the chair and I float upwards. I bump my head on the ceiling and drop until I’m level with the mirror. My hair streams out like a fiery comet’s tail beyond the mirror’s frame, like the photograph of the comet’s tail streaming beyond the edge of the page that Richard once showed me in a library book. I rise to the ceiling again. How strange the living room looks from here, like a room in a doll’s house. I twist and curve towards the three Toby jugs. They look different, too. The handle on one of them has been broken and glued back again. Their glaze is crazed with tiny cracks and their eyes are dead specks of paint. Cobwebs weave them together on their shelf and my breath makes a panicky little spider dive into the middle jug. Their scarlet cheeks are powdered grey with dust. Why was I ever afraid of these? I leave them and fall and rise like a bird on the wing.

  Look at me. I’m flying.

  49

  Outside, the sun is hot in a clear sky, and when I walked home from Sunday School with Alwenna the smell of rose petals was strong in the air. In the living room it’s much darker because the sun has moved to the west now, and it’s cooler, too, so Tada has lit a small fire. John Morris is stretched out on the hearth, as close as he can get to the grate. We don’t need a big fire because we don’t have to cook; we’re going to Nain’s house for supper.

  Tada’s folded the chenille cloth and hung it over the back of his chair and I’ve spread a big sheet of drawing paper on the table. It’s really six sheets that I glued together to make one big one and it’s crinkled a bit along the edge of one piece where my cardigan sleeve got stuck to the glue, but Tada says we won’t notice that once he’s drawn the map on it. He’s drawing a map to show me where Mam is, and the roads to reach her, so that I can see that she’s not so very far away. I’ve put out all my colouring pencils and my fountain pen for him, and my blotter rocker with a clean square of blotting paper in it that Aunty Lol gave me. The old blotting paper is covered with Mrs Evans’s back-to-front writing and is in my box.

  Every Saturday, after breakfast, Tada borrows Aunty Lol’s Lambretta and travels to visit Mam along the map he’s drawing. Her treatment isn’t working yet and she doesn’t speak to him. He sits all afternoon and holds her hand and tells her about his plan to buy a house with an electric stove and a bathroom for her. And then he arrives home after supper and goes to bed and cries. I hear him through the bedroom wall. But he doesn’t cry on any other day of the week.

  Today, he went to visit Bethan at Aunty Siân’s house. He says she likes living with Aunty Siân and Uncle Wil and little Helen. And she likes helping with the baby. Is that true? I see her every day at school and she pretends she doesn’t see me. But she always did that. Alwenna asked me if Bethan is ever going to come home. I don’t know. Can you glue together two halves of a split tree like two pieces of paper?

  ‘Will you put Penrhyn on the map?’ I say. I pull my chair closer to Tada’s. ‘With Aunty Siân’s house?’

  ‘I’ll put all the places you want on it, Gwenni,’ says Tada. ‘And you can write their names on them.’

  I haven’t got a pen with golden ink but my fountain pen has a good nib in it for map-writing.

  Tada has drawn the shape of the land. He’s got the arm of Lln almost to its hand, although we don’t know anybody there. He’s drawn the coast down to Bermo where he’s put a little chapel, and where our town stands he’s made a castle with the Red Dragon flying on it. Tada would make a good cartographer. Miss Eames says cartographers have to be neat and accurate. He draws Aunty Siân’s house in the armpit of the map, and then begins to put in mountains of all shapes and sizes, and winding roads.

  ‘You can colour the mountains, if you like,’ he says.

  ‘Does Aunty Lol’s Lambretta go up and down all those mountains?’ I ask.

  ‘The roads go round, mostly,’ he says. ‘But it takes a while. It’s all right now, but I wouldn’t want to ride the Lambretta in snow and ice. Or strong winds. Still, your mam will be home long before winter.’

  ‘Guto’s never coming home to the Wern, though, is he?’ I say.

  ‘Poor Guto,’ says Tada. ‘Innocent as a child. But he’s not ill in the same way as your mam, Gwenni. I’ve seen him a few times. He’s quite happy there, you know. Quite happy.’

  But he can’t ever fly away, can he? It’s like being in prison, like Mrs Evans. She can’t get away. Or in a cage, like Lloyd George. Though he never wants to leave it now, Nain has to prod him out.

  The fire hisses and a blue flame shoots up from the coals. John Morris twitches in his sleep. Nain will have a bigger fire going to cook supper for us all.

  ‘I wonder what Nain will make for supper,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t think it matters, does it, Gwenni?’ says Tada. ‘You always seem to enjoy it.’

  I do. My cardigan is getting a bit tight, and my gymslip is really short now. Nain says she’ll try letting the hem down. She says I’m all legs, like Aunty Lol. Or like a horse.

  I watch Tada’s pencil skimming the paper. He’s making a beautiful building that looks like a palace of golden stone.

  ‘What’s that?’ I say.

  ‘That’s where your mam is,’ he says.

  I didn’t know asylums were so beautiful. Maybe Mam likes it, just like Guto. Maybe she really will get better there. Dr Edwards said her illness is one he’s very interested in, and explained it to Tada and me. Bethan wouldn’t stay to hear him. He said Mam was in the best place to have the best treatment for her condition, and once the treatment works she can come home. But there’s no cure for her illness, and she’ll have to keep taking special drugs for ever, and will need Tada’s help to stay well. Tada said: I’ll do anything for her, doctor, anything.

  Dr Edwards said that Nain Eluned probably had the same illness as Mam, because it can be passed to your children. When I told Alwenna, she cried and said: I didn’t mean it when I said you were doolally like your Nain. I told her Dr Edwards says it’s not all bad anyway. He says lots of people with the illness are creative. That means having a good imagination so you can be an artist or writer or a clever detective or cartographer or doctor. I’d like that.

  ‘Are you all right doing this?’ says Tada. ‘Have you got homework to do for tomorrow?’

  I shake my head. ‘Alwenna and I did our homework yesterday. She came up here.’

  ‘I’m glad you two are pals again,’ says Tada.

  He lays down the blue pencil he’s using to draw the rivers, and stands up to look at the map. ‘You can see the whole thing better like this,’ he says.

  ‘It’s like when I’m flying,’ I say.

  ‘It is,’ he says. How does he know that? He reaches to the mantelpiece for his tin of Golden Virginia and his Rizla papers, and begins to roll a cigarette. Then he lights it with a spill from the fire, and stands there smoking it. ‘You’re still doing it, then?’ he says.

  ‘Flying?’ I say.

  He nods, sucking on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes against the smoke so that I can’t see what he’s thinking.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ he says. He sits down again and carries on drawing the rivers. I never knew we have so many rivers where we live. Tada’ll have to tell me the names to write on them.

  ‘And are those Toby jugs still keeping an eye on us?’ he says.

  I dusted the Toby jugs just yesterday. They gleam in the light from the window. ‘No, Tada,’ I say. ‘That was just my imagination – you know that.’

  ‘Right, then,’ he says. ‘Now, anything more for the map?’

  ‘Catrin,’ I say. ‘And Angharad.’ They’re in my heart, but they’re in Cricieth too. ‘Can you draw their castle?’

  ‘Cricieth is just here,’ says Tada, making a neat grey rock and small grey towe
r. ‘See, it’s directly across the bay. That’s why we see it so clearly.’

  One day I’ll fly over the bay to find Catrin, my little wren, and I’ll take her up into the sky, holding her tight, tight by the hand so that she doesn’t fall. We’ll fill ourselves with the Earth’s song and trail it behind us like a comet’s tail across the sky, high above all the faraway countries and all the seas of the world, and everyone and everything will hear its sonorous hum, even Mam, and be filled with wonder. And then I’ll make a map of it all.

  ‘How would you draw music on there?’ I ask. ‘So people can hear it when they look at the map?’

  ‘Music people can hear,’ says Tada. ‘I’ll have to think about that one, Gwenni. Anything else?’

  ‘Mrs Evans,’ I say.

  Tada looks up from the map. ‘You know more than you’re saying about all that business, Gwenni.’

  I do. Is Tada asking me to tell him? I can’t tell anyone. Not even him.

  ‘Well,’ says Tada. He finishes his cigarette and flicks the stub into the fire. ‘The place where Mrs Evans . . . lives is too far away to be on the map, Gwenni. But if we both remember her when we look at the map it’ll be just the same as if she was on it.’

  The place where Mrs Evans lives is a prison. Does it look like a castle with high walls and small windows?

  ‘Pull your chair nearer,’ says Tada. ‘We’ll both do this colouring or we won’t finish in time for supper.’

  We sit side by side, shading the mountains and the lowlands, the rivers and the seas, and the winding roads that lead anywhere you want to go. And I write the names of the places and the people where Tada has drawn them and blot the ink tidily with my rocker.

  We both start when the back door rattles and Nain shouts, ‘Yoo-hoo. Supper’s ready.’ And as she races into the living room, John Morris races out; he’s afraid of Nain. She looks at what Tada and I are doing and says, ‘How long did that take you? You should have asked Lol for her mapbook, Emlyn. You know she’s got one. And she never uses it.’ And she rushes out again, calling, ‘Come for your food,’ just before the back door bangs shut after her.