“Mu-um, I hope that we’re not going to have this every night now, are we?”
“No, it’s OK, love, I’ve finished now. I’ll come and join you.” Esther perched on the armchair perpendicular to the sofa. “Now, what’s been happening here then?”
CHAPTER 3
Fel cachu ceffyl mewn dŵr – like horse-dung in water (to peter out, make no impact)
It was a miserable morning as Iestyn rattled along in the ancient Land Rover, grinding up the track that zigzagged its way up the rugged hillside. The feeble wipers smeared the sleet across the windscreen and more piled in through the side window onto his face as a gust of wind managed to sneak its way through the two-inch crack: he’d told his dad that there were problems with the window and not to wind it down – but had he listened? Of course he hadn’t.
He’d already checked and fed the beef cows on the lower land and now he had to go up on the open hill to check the ewes due to lamb later and to chuck them a few bales of feed to supplement the grass. Farms surrounded the rough common land and each farm had ancient rights to graze a certain amount of stock on the land. Although in the past, these rights had included cows, sheep, horses and geese and the right to gather, crop and cut, most of the farmers now just used their sheep grazing rights, with the occasional bailing of bracken for bedding.
As Iestyn crawled over the brow, he saw another knackered Land Rover parked at a feed trough – Johnny Brechdan from Cwmtwrch Farm. He drove over to see him, bumping over the heather and scattering a hare as he went, his dog going mad with excitement in the back. Johnny had obviously just filled the trough and had climbed back into his truck and was too cold to get out again. The pair had had a good laugh as their Land Rovers sat side by side – Iestyn shouting out of his two-inch crack and then Johnny having to climb over his passenger seat as his driver’s-side door handle had come off on the inside.
Iestyn and Johnny had been friends since they had attended Bwlch y Garreg primary school, both driving themselves down their long tracks each morning, before abandoning whatever vehicle they had been allowed to take and walking the remainder along public roads.
As Iestyn’s brother had long since left the farm in the search for a warm office, Iestyn had stayed; the plan being that he would slowly take over the farm, working it under the gaze of his parents. Johnny was the only grandchild and so he was also in the same position, happy to have been primed from an early age for the role.
They would laugh together with only a hint of wryness about their lives and what their elders were willing to hand over to them. Iestyn had boasted that he’d been allowed to move from the bench to a chair with a cushion on it at the kitchen table, whereas Johnny had been asked just the night before whether Nain and Taid might finally be able to retire soon and go and live in a nice warm bungalow somewhere. They wanted to know would he actually work the farm, or would he sell it to pay for his whoring and gambling debts?
They were both large men, toughened by their lifestyle of hard work, outside in all weathers. Johnny’s fair hair was stiff as a brush under his floppy sunhat, whereas Iestyn’s dark hair was slaked to his head under his black beanie.
After a few grunts about what was new, Johnny shouted his usual question over the biting wind. “How’s the hunt for women?”
Iestyn grimaced; there was never any point in trying to evade Johnny’s questioning. It was his main interest in life and therefore he felt duty bound to check on everyone else’s progress. Johnny Brechdan never had such trouble; women seemed to drop out of the sky and land on his private parts – the woman who delivered the feed bags, the girl in the office at the vets and the German walker he found on the hill with a broken ankle and looked after for a while in a happily-ending Misery-type scenario.
“The only thing I find on the hill is a sheep with its throat ripped out by a dog and the bumper that fell off my Landy the other day – it’s just not bloody fair!” Iestyn would groan as Johnny regaled yet another success story in the realm of love – or at least superficial love with real sex.
“Oh, nearly sorted,” shouted Iestyn. “I think I saw one a week ago in Joyce’s shop – and she was under fifty. You?”
“Not bad, not bad. Saw Sarah last Friday and then bumped into Lucy in some shop in town and had a rather nice lunch hour with her! Anyway, whatever happened to Jane Hammons? Thought you were nearly in there.”
“Nah, not really interested. You know. Anyway, she’s got bigger hands than me – would never be any good at lambing. Poor old ewes – would make their bloody eyes water.”
“Not really interested? Or just interested in someone else? Come on, Iestyn, you’re not still mooning over bloody Menna Edwards are you?”
Iestyn shrugged.
“Well, get over there then. Go. Now! Just ask her out for fuck’s sake. Then if – no, when – she says ‘no, you must be fuckin’ joking you ugly old bastard,’ you can get over her and start chasing someone who might actually want to shag you, rather than just chat to you about lambing. Actually, I think Menna has turned into a bloke somewhere along the way. I reckon when she gets back to that bungalow of hers, she spends her evenings sitting in her pants, scratching and drinking cans of Special Brew.”
“Talking of which, fancy another pre-Christmas night out?” asked Iestyn.
“Aye, go on then, needs must I suppose. Eight o’clock? Bull? OK. But, by then, I want to hear that you actually went to Glascwm and that you actually spoke to Menna about something other than farming and that you ended the conversation with a comment about picking her up at eight o’clock some night this week? OK? Christ, it’s like trying to educate pork. Look: do it – or I’ll do it. I’ve always reckoned that Menna’s been giving me the eye, so…”
“OK, OK, I’ll do it. I’ll go now.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Right, I want a text message about the response by dusk, otherwise, I’ll stand you up on the pint and be round there myself for a foot rub over supper, OK?”
Iestyn grinned sheepishly and nodded. Johnny gave him one of his looks and with a great deal of false starts and shuddering, both Land Rovers rattled into life and set off in different directions across the open hills, Iestyn waving a few fingers though his open window and John showing off that he still had a functioning horn.
As Iestyn bounced back across the heather to the track and then set off to his own stock’s feeding area, he thought about what Johnny had said. He loved Johnny’s zest for life and his enthusiasm for just getting on with it. For Johnny, it was OK as things always worked out in the end – if he went and asked Menna Edwards out, he would be almost guaranteed a date by the end of a ten minute conversation, and if Menna did say no, he would have shrugged and then shagged her mother before he left the farm. But it was more difficult for Iestyn: he actually only wanted Menna. He didn’t want her mother, or the woman who had come to help with the books, or the one that he met in the shop on the way home if he’d been thwarted on all other occasions.
He’d liked Menna since his mid-teens – actually, liked was too wishy-washy. He loved her. He loved her smile, her freckled face, her strong arms and, well, everything about her. They’d been friends for years and he knew that she liked him, but probably only in a good pal sort of way.
At school, he’d been too shy to make any approaches. Then, on the day he’d drunk four pints of cider at the local fair, to enable him to even think about plucking up courage to ask her out, bloody Paul the Neuadd had beaten him to it. Word had whipped around the beer tent, as he was slugging down what was intended to be his Dutch courage, that Menna Edwards was going out with Paul Morgan and Iestyn remembered the churn in the pit of his stomach – and it wasn’t just the pints of locally brewed Death By Apples on top of a spit roast beef baguette. Years later he still thought, Damn – if only I’d gotten off my fat arse after two pints, history may have been very different.
For three years he’d been in a bad mood every time he’d spotted
Menna and Paul hacking around in the Neuadd truck, or winning rosettes at shows that his scraggy hill sheep weren’t even allowed to watch through the fence. Slowly he’d gotten over it and simply accepted it as one of life’s inevitable blows.
Eventually, he’d heard that they’d split up, although no one ever confessed to knowing the real reason and who was the dumper and the dumpee (although many spent plenty of time guessing) and he wondered whether he might step in and fill the gap. However, he’d soon got the message that he’d mucked that up too…
Therefore, being Iestyn, sorting things out had never been an urgent need – it was something he should do something about after he’d finished lambing/hedging/fencing/tailing. Maybe after he’d had a decent haircut or when he was wearing his blue jumper. In addition to this, he was also aware that it seemed that Menna had changed. Perhaps she’d never gotten over Paul the Neuadd. She was more serious, less fun loving and light-hearted. She was always just about to go somewhere or do something and it never seemed to him to be the right time – even in his sense of the words ‘right’ and ‘time’.
“She needs to spend a week with me,” Johnny Brechdan would say. “I’d cheer her up, look after her, maybe even blow through her pipes…”
“Don’t talk shite,” Iestyn would say, half worried that Johnny would do as he said – and, knowing Johnny’s record, if he’d decided that was where this month’s charm quota was going, then it usually had its desired effect. Iestyn was always glad when Johnny was chatting up some other poor cow, as it meant that he was leaving Menna in peace. Give her a bit more time, let her get over Paul the Neuadd and then perhaps he, Iestyn, could try again, maybe ask her if she might like to go out – perhaps they could go to the curry house in Tan-y-Bryn for a meal – or even a little further afield? Abergavenny, maybe, that was supposed to be good for food.
Despite Iestyn’s daydreams and on-going watchfulness, he didn’t realistically think that Menna would ever fancy him. Johnny was right; she now seemed asexual where men were concerned – had done for a few years.
So, until the situation changed, Iestyn pottered along, occasionally getting lucky at a Young Farmers’ Club dance or doing the gentlemanly thing for the friend of Johnny Brechdan’s latest conquest – and in fairness, Johnny tended to choose so well that even the ugly mate was good company, and Iestyn had many nights out in this way – it was just that he’d be a few moves behind Johnny every time, so that by the time he was getting to really know a girl, Johnny would be pissing off her friend and they would both disappear back to where they came from.
“Johnny m’n,” he would say, “can’t you be a bit kinder, just for a couple more weeks? We were just beginning to get on well then!”
“Iestyn, you’ll have to speed up your tactics, mate” he would reply. “It’s the nine and a half weeks thing: they’re met, wooed, loved and dropped within that time span. If you’re still calling each other Mr Bevan and Miss Brodie at that point, well, no wonder she can’t be bothered to come back on her own!”
Menna had been part of the crowd in the Bull for the last couple of years and they always texted her to say that they were going along. She was good fun, but she was also one of the few people of their age who still lived in Bwlch y Garreg and so it made sense to include her in their nights out.
Iestyn loved it when she managed to make a night in the pub. Suddenly the bar seemed shinier, the beer tasted nicer and his jokes were of a higher calibre. Despite this, she was as shy as he was when there were just the two of them, so they never really made it on to subjects that might reveal a little more of her thoughts about him. But times alone never really lasted long. A two-minute chat about what they might be up to at the weekend would soon be interrupted as Johnny would come out of the shitter and give them a graphic account of what had just been happening. If they met on the road, another vehicle would pull up behind and peep its horn and any conversation would have to be cut short.
Johnny was right in a way about Menna having turned into a bloke somewhere along the line. She was always dressed in asexual jeans and rugby or checked lumberjack shirt. She never acted like a female in that he could never say, Ooh, you look nice, as she usually didn’t; she looked like what she was – hard-working Menna, who’d just spent the day doing something really physical, usually in the rain, and therefore being completely appropriately dressed in coverall oilskins. If he couldn’t be bothered to dress up for the sheep, why on earth should Menna?
However, there was something about Menna that Johnny Brechdan hadn’t quite grasped. She wasn’t a bloke, as she always smelt nice. Not just “not stinky”, but actually positively delicious. He remembered Menna’s mother always scrubbing any children in her care’s hands with a massive block of dark green soap before meals or snacks were allowed to be touched. The blocks were so big and old that they had sharp corners and were impossible for little hands to grasp. He and Menna used to giggle as the block would shoot out of their grasp and land on the immaculate lino and then they would have to chase it around the floor, needing both pairs of hands to trap it and lift it back to its resting place.
Jean would be shouting at them from the kitchen to hurry up as they rubbed their hands, now red from the harsh soap, dry. No, Jean was not likely to be the kind of person who now bought her daughter Lavender of the Valley, or whatever flavour it was that women had to make them smell nice: therefore, it must be Menna choosing it and that was the difference…
He’d spent months, nay, years, trying to manipulate situations, opportunities to meet, but they never really came to anything. He knew he was being a bit pathetic about the whole thing, but he’d invested so much time in the Trying to Bump Into Menna Edwards scenario, that if she turned him down now it would probably be worse than keeping the flicker alive. He was so busy and she was so busy that it wasn’t so much a daily obsession, as a niggling itch reminding him that he should really be moving things on a bit.
As he jumped out of the truck and twisted his ankle in a rut that was frozen harder than he’d thought, he hopped about enthused and full of promise. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to report to Johnny that night that he’d not only gone to see Menna, but that he was taking her out the following week. Somewhere nice, somewhere like a new restaurant in town. Iestyn split a bag of feed with a knife from his back pocket and emptied it out into the trough. Sheep came running from all around him and nudged and buffeted the backs of his legs. “Oi, you buggers!” he shouted at them as he grabbed another bag from the truck. A couple of bales of hay were dragged out and sprinkled around the feeding area/patch of frozen mud.
He slung the empty bags into the back of the truck and jumped in. Right. He would do it now. Right now. No time like the present. Just get on with it. The time was nigh. Ripe for plucking. Carpe diem. His Land Rover shuddered into life and Iestyn crawled off, the long way round, to go and seize the day.
Iestyn finally stalled his truck in the yard of Glascwm. It was a vast, clean yard that had all the farm’s vehicles parked in a row, as if they were keeping to the allocated parking bays of a busy supermarket. At the Bevan farm, people just abandoned their vehicles wherever they decided to stop, thus cluttering up the yard. The family then spent an inordinate amount of time moving things about so as not to clonk them with a reversing tractor or a feed delivery truck. Iestyn made a mental note to tackle his mother and father about it: perhaps he should do it now and come back and see Menna later?
But the assumed scorn of Johnny Brechdan was stronger than the desire to flee and Johnny was only moaning and swearing at him for his own good. He, Iestyn, did actually want a date with Menna, he just wasn’t sure that she wanted one with him.
He could see Menna’s mother, Jean’s head peeping through the kitchen window. Damn: he’d hoped that Menna would have been there on her own, but he’d been spotted now, so there was no going back. He pulled off his beanie hat and took a quick look in the rear-view mirror at his reflection. He was horrified. His hair was slaked flat
from the hat and in need of a wash, a cut and a style. He popped his hat back on quickly.
His face wasn’t much better. His beard was at least five days old and had gone past five o’clock shadow and moved on to the lazy-bastard-can’t-be-bothered-to-shave look. His skin was glowing bright red from the wind and his nose had a drip on the end – best watch that indoors, it was always worse when he stepped in from the cold to the warm.
He jumped out into the sleet, called to his dog to “lie down, you bugger” and then reached into the back to tuck an old jacket around her, then pulled his own jacket around himself. Well, here goes nothing. Perhaps Johnny was right – if she did laugh in his face and tell him he must be joking, at least he could move on. Trouble was, he knew that he would be moving on knowing that he had turned up with dirty hair and a runny nose: he wasn’t really giving it his best shot.
“Hello Iestyn, how are you, love? Come in, come in!” called Jean from the doorway. Iestyn nodded his greetings and jogged the remaining twenty yards with Jean holding the door open, frowning as she let the weather into the farmhouse kitchen in her attempt to be welcoming. Iestyn stumbled into the kitchen and stood on the tiles in his great muddy wellies and his dripping wet coat. There, sitting at the dinner table, were Menna, her father Bill and her aunty, each eating a plate of pie with vegetables.
“Here, love,” fussed Jean, “put your coat there and your boots can go there and hats, yes, hats go over there.”
Iestyn removed his outer layers as the group at the table watched, chewing their potatoes. Menna was sat in the window, effectively barricaded in by her father and her aunty. Iestyn hauled a great drip back into his nose and then took the tissue proffered by Jean, muttering his thanks. He’d known Jean for years and he still felt like a little boy in her presence as she so definitely ruled the roost once someone stepped over her threshold.
Cold Enough to Freeze Cows Page 3