I drive the hired Peugot on through Penygwaith, passing the Tandoori Garden, where I worked weekends and holidays when I was a kid. Back then it was the Seabreeze Chippy and it was owned by John Jenkins whose youngest son was my best friend. Tommy was killed in a car crash at eighteen and the old man sold the place not long after. Death wasn’t something I understood then. It just felt like he’d abandoned me.
Out of the town I go straight over a roundabout that crosses a dual carriageway I don’t remember. I take a left on the old road, heading west, stomach churning in anticipation. There’s still time to turn back, but then, as the final bend uncurves before me I catch sight of it, set back above the road on the side of the hill, the house I grew up in. I pull over, get out and climb the cracked, uneven stone steps that lead up to the house. The front garden is a tangle of dead shrubs and debris. The roof at the eastern end of the house has fallen in, leaving only a few blackened joists to clutch at the sky. Below them was my bedroom and beneath that, the kitchen. The other end of the house looks relatively unscathed, its windows intact and the roof bowed but still in place. For a while I stand there, trying to imagine the blaze, being caught in it. I don’t feel what I thought I’d feel. Just numb as stone.
It’s more than two days since Alison called to tell me my brother was dead. My brother, her husband. It was odd hearing her voice again after all that time, and it was her I kept thinking about in those disconnected first hours, not Frank. While I struggled through the process of booking a flight home from Sydney and hiring a car, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if she still felt anything for me. Is that really why I’m here, I ask myself as I stare at the empty house, trying to make myself feel something for it. I feel nothing. It is not my home. It’s just a house, a house where somebody died.
I drive back east on the old road till I see the guest house Alison mentioned, Crugua View. A woman comes out of the building to greet me. “You must be Ceri Edevane,” she says in a soft, west country accent, “I’m Susan.”
We shake hands and I follow her inside. She shows me to my room which is on the first floor at the front of the building, with a window looking south towards Moel yr Hyrddod, rising up over the town. The snow-covered mountains look like something out of the stories my father read to me when I was a child.
“I’m very sorry about your brother,” she says, formally. “I didn’t know him very well. Everybody said good things about him.”
She’s telling me what I don’t want to hear. I thank her anyway and she asks if I’d like some lunch.
“No thanks. I just need to get some sleep.”
Alone I unpack my suitcase, then undress and crawl into bed, feeling the nervous energy which has got me this far, finally begin to take its toll. I lay down with my face turned towards the mountain, thinking how still and hushed the world looks beyond the glass. My heart is numb and empty of anything that feels like grief or loneliness. The best I can manage is a muted anger. Frank would laugh at that. I close my eyes and try to think of Helen, waiting for me back in Sydney. But it’s hard at this distance to picture her face, hard to stop older, long-buried memories from swamping my dreams.
*
I’m dancing alone in the snow, leaving no tracks to show where I’ve been. White, amorphous shapes stare at me with stone eyes. My brother sits upon a throne of ice with Alison on his knee. I wake shivering with the memory of cold. The bedside clock says half past five; the silence in the house tells me it must be morning. I can’t sleep anymore so I dress and let myself out into the pre-dawn dark. I drive across the river into Penygwaith, struck by its stillness, its isolation. Fifteen years ago most of us already knew the town was dying yet few people left willingly, as if to do so would be some sort of betrayal. There was a sense of hope still, a feeling that things would get better if only we kept believing. I tried as hard as anyone but Frank took all the belief out of me.
I park on the edge of the town and walk the last hundred yards to St Mary’s church. I stop to light a cigarette before I enter the churchyard, then head towards where the dead lay with their secrets, trailing clouds of cold breath and smoke.
Once, I came here in the still of a moonless night with Tommy Jenkins, because Frank dared us to. I was eight years old and wanted to show my big brother that I was fearless and brave like he was. I would have done anything he asked. We set off up the graveyard path together, whistling tunelessly in our bravado. Frank waited at the gate, urging us on. Mist swirled about our feet and we struggled to make out the crosses and headstones that loomed suddenly in our path. There came a moment when I realised that neither of us were whistling, followed, a second later, by the realisation that I was alone.
I stood rooted to the spot, whispering Tommy’s name, terrified at being alone with the dead. No one answered until, a few seconds later, something rustled in the trees then flew by my head with a beat of powerful wings. I’d turned and fled from the awful silence and the unknown things it contained.
I walk up the path, pulse quickening, telling myself I’m no longer a child to be scared by Frank’s cruel tricks or my own overactive imagination. Only half-convinced I look for my father’s grave, up in the north-east corner beneath an old winter-stripped oak. I find his headstone and next to it, mother’s grave, just six months dug and adorned with the frozen remnants of summer’s wreaths. I squat down and look for Frank’s. To Mamma, it said. Never to be forgotten, always in our hearts. From your loving son, Frank, and his darling wife, Alison. His darling wife. My mind reels and I stumble back, almost toppling into a newly dug grave. I crouch there on my hands and knees, the side of my face pressed against a mound of hard, frozen earth. Frank’s grave, I realise, ice in my veins. I start counting all the times I’ve wished him dead, stopping only when I run out of fingers.
I remember my father’s funeral: killed when a lorry ran headlong into his car; a closed coffin at the funeral home; friends and relatives shaking my hand like I was a grown man instead of a boy of ten, saying how sorry they were for my troubles. Their words meant nothing to me. I had no troubles. Dadda was not there inside that box. They were not putting him in the ground. He was gone on a trip, looking for work. He would be home soon. He would bring me a present, like he did when he went to Cardiff or Swansea. Something magical. I smiled at the people who shook my hand, letting them know that I knew the truth, but they just frowned and later that evening, Frank told mother that I’d laughed at those who’d come to pay their last respects. She was angry and there were tears in her eyes. I didn’t know why. Later, Frank came to my bedroom. “Dadda’s fucking dead and all you can do is laugh,” he said. I had hurt mamma worse than anyone had ever done. Worse even than Dadda had done by getting himself killed, Frank insisted. “Things like this,” he said, “they always come back to haunt you.” Though he’d hurt me many times before, that was the first time that he ever really frightened me.
Dadda was the only one who ever made me feel I belonged in Penygwaith. I was part of the valley and it was part of me, he said. Who I was, was inextricably bound up with the history of the town and the mines and the men who had worked them. He had followed his father and his grandfather into the pits but three years before he was killed the last of the valley’s four collieries had shut. That didn’t matter, he said. Coal was only part of it; it was the people, their culture and traditions that had made Penygwaith and the people in it. I would never work the mines, he told me, but I would always belong here. I try to remember what that connection, that sense of belonging, felt like, but all I feel is a great big emptiness.
I gaze up at the sky and see the night’s tears stain the horizon. Memories trapped inside them, like ships in bottles: in here is a vessel of pain; shake this one and you see a snowstorm; and in here somebody dances alone.
Something falls out of the sky, lands near my head. It’s a dead bird, a robin frozen on the wing. I wonder if it’s an omen; something else I don’t believe in. All the things that happen in the world are imbued with mo
re meaning than I can understand. If each thing that happened had only one meaning, then I’d be able to make more sense of life. Maybe I’d understand why thing are the way they are. The bird fell from the sky; that means it froze to death, nothing more. Frank burnt to death at home; it means tragic accident, that’s all.
*
Later that morning, at the funeral, I’m sitting in a pew at the front of the church with my sister-in-law. We’ve hardly exchanged a word, barely even looked at each other. That word, that glance, will be saved for some more private moment. This ceremony is for Frank. Three of his friends help me shoulder the coffin from the church to the graveyard. There’s a dusting of snow on the ground. My hands are numb against the polished pine and the shuffling of feet on the gravel path lends a hesitant note to his passing, as if he’s reluctant to go. We stop beside the mound of earth that will cover him and rest the coffin on two wooden trestles. Frank’s mourners step forward one by one to shake my hand and shed the few tears they think I expect of them. I search for an appropriate emotion and settle on a blank expression that approximates grief. Alison watches me while the vicar starts the burial rites. Maybe she sees what I’m feeling. Maybe she knows it has nothing to do with Frank.
We lower the coffin into the ground and the vicar finds a few more words to say. Alison places a simple wreath on the grave next to mine. Soon it’s all over and I find myself herded along to the Vaughan Arms. There are over seventy people packed into the bar and the noise and smell are overwhelming. People I don’t remember keep telling me what a great bloke Frank was and it seems to me they’re talking about someone else, someone I never knew. My eyes search for Alison in the pub but she isn’t there. I break free of a group of Frank’s pals and stand over the open fire, clutching the mantelpiece. The flames roar in the grate and the burning log spits sparks out on to the slate hearth. My head is spinning and I picture Frank in there, suffering in the flames; or was he dead before they got to him? Imagine slow-dancing with Alison, our heads on each other’s shoulders, hugging each other for more than warmth. Imagine Frank taking her from me, or did she go to him of her own free will?
It’s dusk when I leave the pub. The mourners are singing and toasting Frank, too drunk to notice my absence. As I drive towards the house I feel the alcohol in my veins and hope the strength it lends me will be enough to get me through the door.
Standing in the garden I hear an old song drifting across the crisp evening air. Dexy’s Midnight Runners, I think but I can’t say for sure. Like Friday nights down the Bluebell in Neath. In the small field next to the house the ruins of two cars rot side by side, silent monuments to Frank’s wild youth. I press my face against the living room window but can’t see much through the net curtains. Shadows seem to flicker inside but there’s no breeze in the air, only soft music, muted by time and these dead old walls.
“I thought you’d be here.” I turn quickly, feeling like a child caught spying on something illicit. And there’s Alison standing at the top of the steps, trying to smile but not really pulling it off. “Are you going in?” she says.
“Alison,” I say, “I looked for you in the pub.”
“I left early. So, are you ready?”
I look back at the house. “It’s dark. We’ll see nothing.”
She enters the garden. “The electric’s still working,” As if sensing my reluctance, she adds, “It’s your home, after all.”
I’m puzzled that she should think so, but I say, “I’m sorry about Frank.”
“I’m not,” she says, and I remember her wreath which said, From your wife, not loving or darling wife. She gives my arm a squeeze then leads the way inside. The porch reeks of smoke and flakes of ash seem to hang in the air. She steps into the living room and turns on the light. The television is still plugged in, as is Frank’s hifi and his CDs are still stacked neatly on the shelves in the alcove beneath the stairs. I picture him sitting there, sorting through his Pink Floyd and Genesis CDs, waiting for Alison to fix him a dinner of Chicken Madras. Only the charred and twisted door to the kitchen undermines the air of normality.
I move towards it and look inside. The charred ruin of my bed is surrounded by debris in the middle of the room and a thick black sludge covers the floor.
“After the firemen,” Alison explains, behind me.
“It started here?” I ask her.
She nods and points towards the shell of the cooker, “They think he left a pan on the gas. He used to fry chips sometimes when he came in pissed.”
Above the cooker, the wall is completely black and the charcoal stubs of the ceiling joists jut out into space. I look up past the collapsed ceiling and where the roof should be I see the first faint stars of the evening.
“They say he fell asleep at the table, that when he woke the room must’ve been full of smoke and he was probably already half-choked.” She points to the burnt-out window. “That’s where they found him, crouching on the floor.”
I try to imagine him there, clawing frantically at the window, overcome by booze and smoke, knowing he was going to die. Was he afraid? Not knowing what he felt I leave the kitchen, drawn upstairs by the scent of smoke to my mother’s room. It’s as neat as it ever was, and as I step through the doorway I realise it’s the first time I’ve ever been in here alone. I open her wardrobe and the sight of her clothes depresses me, makes me feel as if I’m prying. I pass Frank’s room and go on to my own, where I squat down on my haunches in the entrance. There is nothing left in there. Even the paper has burned off the walls. More than half my life, I think, gone now to ashes. Even in his dying, Frank destroyed something of mine.
I go back along the hall and force myself to enter his room. The bed is made up and the room looks unused, unlived in. On the wall above the bed is a framed photograph of Frank, Alison and myself. They have their arms around each other while I stand off to one side, looking serious. My face is brown in the photo, as if that part of it has been scorched, while Frank looks out with his clear blue eyes, untouched by anything at all. The wardrobe is empty and there’s nothing either in the chest of drawers. I hear music, and with it the soft shuffling of feet, moving away down an empty hall. I open the window and a small breeze scatters ashes and snowflakes about the room, dragging December indoors. The brittle bones of the house creak and shudder with regret. I’m filled suddenly, with memories that Frank stole from my youth. Tears well in my eyes, more anger than sadness, and I hurry downstairs, eager to be gone.
“What is it?” Alison says, following me out to the car.
I don’t mention the music. “Your room—where is everything?”
“I’ve something to tell you,” she says. “I left him before it happened. A month ago in fact. I’ve been staying with Catherine, in Neath.”
I open the car door and collapse on the seat, stunned. Alison crouches in the doorway. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you on the phone.”
“Why not?” I ask her.
“Because I thought you wouldn’t come home and I wanted to see you.”
I say nothing so she goes on: “Me and Frank, it wasn’t good, even before your mum died.” Her eyes focus on some point in the distance. “Afterwards, things got even worse.” She shrugs her shoulders. “I guess I made the wrong choice.”
“I’m sorry things didn’t turn out how you wanted.”
“I had such plans back then.”
I want to ask if she heard the music but instead I say, “He hurt you bad, didn’t he?”
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about it now, Ceri. I’m just glad you’re home.”
“It’s not my home anymore.”
“Give it time, you’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t have time.”
“Why?”
“I’ve made a new life, in Sydney. I…” I leave the rest unsaid, so she says it for me.
“There’s someone waiting for you.”
I nod. “Helen.” A girl I left just three days ago on the
other side of the world; a girl whose face I can’t even remember.
Alison sighs, as if it’s of no consequence. But I glimpse a lapsing of will in her eyes, and I can feel my own weakening by the moment. “I’m happy for you, Ceri,” she says, kissing my forehead. “You deserve someone who’ll be good to you.”
And so do you, I want to tell her, but the words won’t come, not in this place, not with him so near.
*
At the guesthouse I sit in a chair by the window, drawing succour from a bottle of Bell’s. I kid myself it will help me make sense of my feelings, uncover some hidden truths. What it really does is block out the emotions that had begun to stir inside me. I’d come close to asking Alison to spend the night with me, in a hotel away from here. I would have too, if I hadn’t mentioned Helen. I try not to think about Alison being with Frank, and I tell myself I don’t hate the fucker anymore for taking her from me. He didn’t have to do it; he didn’t need to. He was a charmer—he could have had any girl he wanted and like a fool I believed him when he said she wasn’t his type. Sometime I think he never really loved her, that the only reason he took her was to show me that he could.
Beyond the window the stars are invisible. I remember how I felt when I left Penygwaith for good. The relief, the sense of being free of him. I wipe the steamed glass and see snow falling quietly on the land. It makes me think of fairy tales again, but this time they don’t seem out of place. If I had the courage I’d make a wish but I don’t want to tempt fate, not now when there’s a small chance I can have the thing I want most.
*
In the morning the town and surrounding hills are carpeted with snow. I try to ring Helen but she doesn’t answer. I’m determined not to prolong my time in Penygwaith, determined to hurry back to her. No matter what I might have felt yesterday, or imagined I felt, my life now is elsewhere.
The Dream Operator Page 15