“And now,” said Tansy, wiping her nose on her sleeve, “just when it all starts to look up and I’m staying with you wonderful people and Johnny’s so kind and, and lovely, I go and make a silly pass at him and mess that up too! I just can’t seem to help myself!” She buried her face in her free hand and sobbed.
“Oh dear, I thought Johnny was a little quiet today. Don’t worry, you can sort these things out. Talk to him; Johnny’s a straightforward boy, he’ll understand. And to be perfectly honest with you, I am sure that young Johnny will know exactly where you are coming from if you see what I mean… Now, dry your eyes and how about helping me peel a few potatoes for lunch?”
“Of course,” Tansy sniffed and she took a deep breath. She wasn’t so sure that Nain would think it all quite so harmless if she knew that yesterday she’d grabbed her grandson’s cock uninvited and nine months previously, well, best not to even think about that…
Iestyn came in from the garage at the side of the house with a handful of tools. “Hey, it’s bloody marvellous out there – tools to die for and all so neatly hung up. I’m going to have to get that Greg bloke to come and sort our end barn – we’ve reached the stand-at-the-door-and-throw stage!”
“Bloody Bevans… Now, what have you got?”
“I’ve got two claw hammers, one medium and one large, to pull up carpets with, a chisel in case the lino’s stuck down and one of those electronic measuring things – just because I wanted to see how it works… Look, if I point it at you, right? Now move – see? Different measurement! The ceiling to the floor is…two-metres ten and in the hallway to the upstairs is…”
The sound of a key being turned in the front door made Iestyn jump. “Shit,” he said and stuffed the measurer in the hall dresser’s drawer.
“That’s the wrong place,” sniggered Johnny, “it’s supposed to go on hook 9B!” They were giggling like schoolboys when the door was pushed open and a tall pale man with short brown hair peered in, frowning as soon as he saw them.
“Hello?” he said suspiciously. “Are you the men from the insurance company? Sorry I’m late, I got delayed by an accident on the roads. I’m Greg Shackles, I part-own the house…”
“No, no,” Johnny said, sobering up as sincerely as he could, “you’ve just missed him. I’m Johnny Harris and this is Iestyn Bevan. We’ve been looking after Tansy and came here on her behalf to let the insurance man in? I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were coming, otherwise I’d have told him to wait and let you deal with him.”
The man looked peeved, but that was probably his look, anyway, he certainly looked comfortable with it. “Well, actually, I knew nothing about any of this, but the insurance company phoned my mobile to check some details – I am still the policyholder after all – and that’s how I knew that my property had been flooded.”
“Well,” started Johnny, “in fairness to Tansy, I think she’s been a bit overwhelmed with everything – you know she’s had the baby now, don’t you? She meant to tell you about the flood, I expect it slipped her mind.”
“Yes, I am sure that it did,” Greg said as he walked past Iestyn and Johnny and went to look in the lounge. “But there tends to be a lot of things that happen to slip our Tansy’s mind…” He peered quickly into the kitchen and tutted at the sight of all the rubbish in bin bags on the floor.
Iestyn could see that Johnny was about to rise to the bait and pulled at his arm with a warning glance. Johnny made do with mouthing wanker behind Greg’s back as he walked back past them and started up the stairs.
“Bit of a mess isn’t it?” said Iestyn, following him up, “but not too bad, the insurance guy said. It’ll need new electrics and all that, but luckily, as the water was clean and wasn’t sitting for too long, it shouldn’t need a complete re-furb of joists etc.” Greg grunted again, clearly not happy with Iestyn’s prattling. He made a derisory check of his old bedroom, the nursery and the bathroom.
Then he opened the door to the study and gave a cry of despair. “Bloody Tansy! I see she managed to put all her stuff up out of the way, but my stuff – oh no – let’s leave it in a puddle until it ruins!”
Iestyn was moved to one side by Johnny to see Greg standing with a pile of Practical DIY magazines in his hands that he had gathered from behind the door.
“Look, mate,” Johnny said, clearly struggling to keep his cool. “Tansy came back here four days after giving birth – in our kitchen, actually – to find her home was flooded. I don’t think the first thing on her mind was to save your wank mags…”
“They’re not wank mags, they’re …”
“She was knackered and sore and trying to make a home for her new baby – your new baby – and…”
“My new baby?”
“Yes, your…”
“Oh no. Not mine. Is that what she told you? That I abandoned her, pregnant with my child, because what? Because she couldn’t cook my eggs properly?”
Iestyn could see it was all getting a bit heated and moved between the two men. “OK both, let’s calm down shall we? Greg – Johnny didn’t mean to interfere in your and Tansy’s business, and Johnny – Greg wasn’t criticising you, now…”
However, Greg wasn’t listening to Iestyn. His pale blue eyes were fastened on Johnny and his lips had been pressed into a thin line. “No, I’m not having this,” he said. “I don’t care who you are – Tansy’s new boyfriend is it? Probably. That would be about right: I’m long gone as far as Tansy is concerned, bloody long gone.”
“OK, OK, that’s enough,” Iestyn put his arms out to keep them from making any move towards each other.
Greg butted his hands away, “It’s fine, I’m going; there’s nothing for me here any more,” he snorted and then pushed past them both. At the top of the stairs he stopped and turned. “But I’ll ask you this – if you went to a dance, against your better judgment maybe, with your wife, the woman you loved, and while you were getting her a fuckin’ burger at the end, she was off shagging some bloke behind the burger van, what would you do? Would you bring up Burger Boy’s baby? No? Well, nor would I…” and he stormed off down the stairs leaving Iestyn and Johnny staring at each other open-mouthed.
Iestyn felt the penny drop in his own mind and he could then see the exact moment on Johnny’s face when his did too.
“Burger Boy?”
“Bacon Sandwich Lil?”
“Fuck me: I’m a dad.”
They ripped up a few carpets and dumped them in the skip outside. The work was half-hearted and quiet. They decided to return and finish the upstairs another day. Then they drove home in silence, Iestyn at the wheel. Every now and then Johnny shook his head and said, “Fuck me.” Iestyn’s face was a picture. Stony, stony blank and then a little snigger would creep to the corner of his mouth, his nostrils would twitch with the effort of not bursting and then he would recover himself and carry on looking straight ahead, trying to be there for his friend if he were needed, but to keep his comments to himself if he weren’t.
As they approached Johnny’s track, Iestyn turned to his friend. “What’ya going to do?”
“Dunno. Go to bed I’spect.”
“What, forever?”
“Maybe.”
Iestyn wracked his brains. “Perhaps – perhaps it’s fate, you know, the woman you’ve fallen in love with and the baby you’ve fallen in love with, well, perhaps…”
“Iestyn?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut the fuck up, will you?”
“OK.”
“Actually, drop me here on the track can you? If anyone asks, say I’m just checking something, yeah?”
“OK.”
“Oh, and Iestyn?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep it to yourself will you? This is serious stuff; it won’t do anyone any good if this gets out – me, Tansy, Gwennie, anyone.”
“’Course, mate. Just between you and me.”
“See you.”
“Yeah, see you. And shout if you need anything �
�� you know, a chat or something.”
“Iestyn, I shagged a woman behind a burger van. She was pissed, I was pissed. There’s a baby. What is there to chat about?”
Johnny climbed out and jumped into the slush, sending a pile of it shooting up the inside of each leg. Iestyn ground the truck off up the track, parping the feeble horn as he went. Johnny put his hand up in salute to the disappearing vehicle and then sank into the snow on the bank. He put his head into his hands and burst into tears.
He was still sitting there when Iestyn drove back past in his own truck.
“All right?” he called from the already-open window.
Johnny’s hand went up, but his head remained down. Iestyn would probably have managed a beep of his horn as he rumbled past, but there was instead the sound of a curse and the air stayed silent.
Eventually Johnny hauled himself to his feet, wiped the snow from his behind and started plodding home.
What was he going to say to her?
Dunno.
If Gwennie was his, should he tell her he knew?
Dunno.
Should he say nothing, let Tansy take Gwennie home and let things develop in their own way?
Dunno.
Should he propose to Tansy, formally adopt Gwennie and all live happily ever after?
Don’t-bloody-know.
As he shuffled slowly through the slushy snow, Johnny Brechdan thought back to that seemingly fateful night. It had been a good day at the Cefn Mawr Show. He, Iestyn and another lad, Dai, had been in the beer tent early then had watched the trotting races in the afternoon. They had put twenty quid on an outsider and won nearly £500 in return: it had been a fantastic day!
As the night approached, they had joined the throngs of youngsters heading to the adjoining farm and to the dance in the large barn. There, they’d drunk beer in plastic cups, danced, drunk a line of shots, danced some more and fallen over in the puddles of beer on the floor as a line of drunk young farmers shimmied across the RSJs above them. It had been the best sort of night that blokes could have. There were women around them, but not with them and they had stayed a group of lads, laughing, joking and necking drinks, all won by a twenty-pound bet.
There had been this woman near them: that much he remembered. She was tallish and wore a Viking helmet with two blonde plaits sticking out of each side, and she had been looking at him. She had been dancing with another man, but she’d been looking at him. Her face had been painted with a Welsh flag on each cheek, and she had been looking at him… Apparently, that had been the bit when he’d started doing the can-can…
The details of the rest of Johnny’s night had been filled in, with great hilarity, by the others. The band finished playing and the lights went on, huge spotlights lighting up the fact that the barn was no longer a suave night club, but was instead a big old barn, its dance floor being a concrete slab, stained by animal piss and covered in stamped on plastic glasses. Red, sweaty, shiny people stood and chanted, “More! More! More!” but the band stuck to their guns and left the stage – now recognisable as a large flatbed trailer.
Apparently the Viking had been standing next to Johnny and had tickled his pink shiny face with her plait as her companion shouted for the band to return.
Then she had pinched a sip of his drink. Then she had apparently pinched his bum. So he had pinched hers.
According to Iestyn, they had then held hands, the Viking walking in front of Johnny all the way through the crowd. She had been talking to her partner who was in front of her, whilst doing the conga with Johnny, as subtly as pissed people can do anything amongst a crowd of a thousand other hot, sweaty, drunk, horny youngsters who were also teetering on the edge of fucking their lives up.
“I wanna burger!” the Viking had shouted and her companion had grumbled something back and headed off as quickly as he could so as to beat hundreds of other hungry people to the one burger van.
As the man had disappeared into the throng, the Viking had turned and kissed Johnny, a passionate, no holds barred type of a kiss that rendered him helpless, his arms flailing behind him as he was tipped backwards.
Apparently Iestyn and Dai had then left him and his new friend and headed off in the quest for food themselves – bacon sandwiches. Out of the kindness of their hearts, they had also bought one for him and then had hunted for him, eventually stumbling across him and the Viking, courtesy of someone’s head lamps, rutting in the wet grass behind the burger van. His buttocks were apparently brilliant white and going far too fast. Her breasts were apparently magnificent. The small crowd that stood round them were cheering them on, as being sixteen-year-old drunks with little sexual finesse, they had no thoughts about quality, but were just pleased that the agricultural show was continuing even further into the night.
Iestyn and Dai had thoughtfully held onto Brechdan’s bacon sandwich until he surfaced.
The Viking disappeared quickly after the finale, and Johnny sorted his trousers out, told the crowd to fuck off or he’d kill them and then came to claim his prize. He had not been well in the back of the truck that they’d hitched a lift in that night and Iestyn said that they had made the right choice by sticking his head out of the rear door all the way. As it was often said: it had not been his finest hour.
However, it had now become clear that that particular hour had had repercussions. It had caused him embarrassment and a great deal of ribbing: that he’d known about. But far more than that, it had caused Gwennie – beautiful, innocent, tiny Gwennie. He’d been so drawn to her, so much more so than any rational explanation could have reasoned. The reason was now clear – of course he was drawn to her: Mother Nature had made it that way.
As her biological father, Mother Nature needed him to be drawn to her, to love her and protect her. It was his duty. No child would ever ask to be brought into the world thanks to two drunks shagging in the spotlights of a beat-up old Subaru. When she came to know about such things – and aside from the “Yuck, my mum had sex?” phase, she would prefer to know that she had been a planned for, much wanted baby, conceived by two people who loved each other. Not as a time-filler for two drunks as an harassed eighteen-year-old flipped cheap burgers and burned water-filled bacon.
A text message bleeped and Johnny instinctively reached for his phone. Hannah: what did she want? Hi, I’m rd yr parts later and wd love 2 b round yr parts . He clicked it off, annoyed at the distraction – yet, this was the life that he’d be giving up. The happy life of a single man, looked after at home, self-employed, good friends and women, women everywhere!
He could simply take Tansy and Gwen home, tell Iestyn that Tansy said her dates meant Gwen belonged to a guy she’d been having an affair with for years and quietly shut the door on the responsibility of it all. Then he could text Hannah and get her back round his parts and return to the easy, uncomplicated, orgasmic existence that had been so simple before Tansy Shackles had shouted across his yard on that cold dark night.
He looked up and could see the farm in the distance – only a field and a half’s worth of track to go: he needed to slow down…
Right. Tansy, what of Tansy?
Two days ago, he’d been telling everyone how much he loved Tansy. He loved her strength, her beautiful blue eyes, her uninhibited laugh and the way her face lit up when he walked into the room. He loved to sit next to her and just absorb her contentment when she was feeding Gwennie and playing with her tiny fingers. Need that change simply because of what he knew?
Her kiss the day before had rocked him, but only because it wasn’t exactly how he wanted it and precisely the time of his choosing; he considered that he did know best when it came to timing in seduction, and that had been a poor choice. However, he felt he was over that. Iestyn had actually been right for once. It may not have happened with a beautiful sun setting over a distant hill, or as a precursor to making delicious love in fields of wild flowers on a summer’s day, but he was fine with it: he was a big boy now and had to accept that women did the
se things when they wanted to too.
So, it was back to the love that was Burger Boy and Bacon Sandwich Lil. There was no doubt that it was karma for all the times that he had planned, chivvied and manipulated situations to give his happy-go-lucky penis a good work-out. Any one of those women might well have the right to feel a bit miffed to know how they had been primed and moulded until spontaneous things happened.
When they had gotten a bit keen, they would have been upset to know that he hadn’t really been busy, or that his truck hadn’t been off the road. Then, when they were called back for a final curtain call, it hadn’t been because Johnny still loved them after all, it would have been because he felt enough water had gone under the bridge for them to have mainly gotten over him – and he fancied another shag.
It was therefore right and proper that the woman he actually had fallen for was the kind of woman whom he hadn’t needed to manipulate and indeed, if anything, she had grabbed his bottom first. Yes, he had spent his whole adult life yearning for tall Vikings to drag him off into the night, and now that it had happened, it couldn’t be right to claim the twisted moral high ground and object.
However, he thought, if he did the decent thing, the possibility of future dalliances behind burger vans, in wild flower meadows, whatever, were over. On cue, his phone bleeped again, Hey! Bob’s away & I need someone to lay my carpet – fancy? Ah, Harri, beautiful, beautiful Harri, short, round and full of surprises!
Nain and Taid were always on at him to find a nice girl and settle down. “You’re missing out, love,” Nain would say. “Your cock’ll go septic and fall off,” Taid would warn. He knew that they would be more than happy to move out of the farmhouse and into a nice new bungalow somewhere on the land and let him run the farm, but he didn’t feel ready for such responsibility yet; he was too busy enjoying himself, wasn’t he?
He smiled at a few memories and his step perked up as he reached the farm gate. He knew what to do. He’d made his decision and as he wriggled with the catch on the gate and shouldered it open, he knew that, for him, it was the right one.
Cold Enough to Freeze Cows Page 24