This is it.
THE SS MALARKAND
It was a barrage balloon, broken and rogue, that ignited the fire. An insane floating whale it drifted across the dark water of Huskisson Docks on 1 May 1941 and collided with the moored SS Malarkand which had in its hold 1,000 tons of high explosive bound for the Middle East. These flames unquenchable, insatiable, then guided the Luftwaffe in towards their target and the burning ship with its apocalyptic cargo was hit with high-explosive bombs which explosions produced more explosions and so on until the entire hold itself exploded. The following day, as dawn rose, a dockside crane four miles away eighty feet up in its girders sported an odd, new growth: the Malarkand’s five-ton anchor. Huge and hanging there above the staring crowd, transfixed, men and women and children. The ship itself still burned and around it the oily sea still lapped but a flame had been struck that no water could douse and awe at the might that could toss steel tonnage as a child might flick a fly. Minds, hearts stilled before the force that stalked the world and attenuated by terror down into a reactive arsenal of two: revenge or collaboration. Resistance or conversion. And nothing within that of any understanding of the terrible power of destruction to simplify or maybe there was as whatever reaction stripped further and unadorned terminally eroded revealed at its barest bones just the one awesome imperative: to live and live and live. Not just live, but live for ever.
ALASTAIR, HIS GRANDMOTHER: HER LEAVING
It being an evening on which the sun still beamed although sunk low enough to diadem the peak of Moel Eilio they had made a table outside under the yew tree out of two rain barrels and a door and on it stacked bowls and plates of food and drink; a huge boiled ham, deeply pink and leaking, jugs of buttermilk and beer and water from the spring so fresh it writhed, mounds of potatoes boiled in their skins like speckled eggs and also speckled eggs themselves hard-boiled, fried carrots and loaves of bread which when tapped echoed and green bursts of lettuce and cabbage and a crusted wheel of cheese the rind of which reminded Kate of the skin of her own hands and heels, farm-calloused as they were. There was butter like a melting yellow boulder oozing whey and onions slow-baked in their skins and a long flat barky slice of fried liver. This last had been prepared especially for Kate being as it was her very favourite but the nervous acids in her stomach would allow her to do no more than nibble. Added to this the word itself and its two syllables and the hint in them of where she was going and it was like imbibing her impending loss. Like taking into her her creeping fear and it curdling inside her, thrashing, like a pregnancy to a viper.
Usually at such times as these their words would flutter like fritillaries, jostle like midges in the clean air between them; yr hen iaith would burgeon here among the hills and skim off the lakes as for centuries it had done but this day, it had been decided, would be exclusively given over to Saesneg so that Kate’s tongue and palate could grow accustomed. As a kind of rehearsal, a foretaste of what was to come. Occasionally their lips flapped and tongues shuddered and throats juggled as if gulping under the alien strain of this strange language although all were fluent in it and had been for a generation or two, yet the eldest present had memories of the Knot and the weight of it around her neck and shoulders and on that she not unfairly blamed her stoop, her hunched back which had come premature, in her mid-teens. And the butter churned on the farm had a gentle, murmuring quality to it, it was soft, pliant, malleable, creamy on the tongue with a spark of salt at the lips and a tender coating on the gum and tooth all plap and mimble and so it was not ‘butter’; it was and always would be ymenyn.
Kate’s father leaned with a jug.
—Cwrw, Katie?
A tut from her mother.
—Beer, Katie?
And another tut. —She’s had three, Aled. She do not wish to be drunk arriving at the Johnsons’, do you, cariad? Fine show that would be.
—Ach, nonsense.
Her father filled her cup. The beer, golden and headless, tinkled as it fell and hissed as it settled. She smiled at her dad and tipped the cup to her lips and drank, just sipped. This beer was something she had always loved. She would spend the next six decades in the big city trying to recapture the taste of this home-brewed beer in party and pub and off-licence and would always, always fail.
—Yew drink, bach. Settle yewer nerves.
—Do not be scaring her now, her younger brother said. —It’s not London or anywhere she’s going to. It isn’t far.
—No, but, her much younger sister said, —it’s very big, but. Ellie Siop went last year with her taid and it’s bigger than Bangor, she told me. Bigger even than Chester, she said.
—Stop yewer stories now, blant, her mother said and then in response to her husband’s raised eyebrows: —Children. It isn’t very far. Wmffra Evans goes there every month and back and he’s an old man, he’s sixty-three. And my mam used to as well, didn’t yew, Mam?
The grandmother mumbled, asleep. Striped by shadow of branch her old shrunken body slumbered around beer and gin.
—Will it be safe from the war, tho, Dad?
—Of course it will be, bach, the mother said.
—Safer than here, even, Aled said. —Plenty of essential industries in the big city, see. The Johnsons, they work in armaments. Rich? DuwDuw. More money than everyone in Caernarfon all added up.
—Everyone?
Aled nodded. —So eyr needed, see, for the war effort. Needed to make more guns. But round yur, see, all-a people round yur, all we can be is soldiers. Us men. We’re not needed yur, see, so to the Brass we’re just … we’re …
Unable to find the word he looked to his wife for help but her lips only tightened.
—Expendable, Kate said. —Yewer all expendable. That’s the word.
His eyes lit up. —That’s the word, Katie, aye. He looked to his other offspring. —See why yewer sister’s got herself such a good job? See why she’s off to the big city to make her living? Clever.
He raised his cup to Kate and drank. His eyes sparkled at her over the rim.
—Will I be needed for the war, Dad? Will yew?
—DuwDuw son, no. It’ll all be over before yewer old enough to go.
—How do yew know?
—I just do. Too young to understand yet, yew are.
—What about yew? Will yew be going?
—Ach. The mother leaned and cuffed lightly her son on the back of his head. —Shut up that talking now. Kate’s last day yur it is. War stories, DuwDuw. It’s yewer sister’s last day.
—Not for long, tho, Mam, is it? Yew said it wasn’t far. Be back soon yew will, won’t yew? The youngest daughter looked at Katie with wet eyes.
—Course I will, Kate said and smiled and sipped at her beer and nibbled at the liver congealing in grease on the plate and true it wasn’t far, could in fact be travelled in a day from here, Capel Garmon (neolithic burial chamber, multi-chambered, central chamber topped by enormous capstone; the White Horse Inn, views of Eryri from chamber or village cemetery), to there, Liverpool (docks and enormous buildings and hurrying hordes of all hues), yet between the two places was the sharp sky-puncturing spike of Moel Eilio and beyond that Yr Wyddfa itself and the Glyderau and the Carneddau, such colossal ramparts, impassable, their bulwark bulk seeming to jeer at the very notion of human traffic across them. And scattered among them in their valleys split as if by nothing but wrath or on their cold plateaus and wailing moors the lakes, Llydaw and Ogwen and Cowlyd, blood-freezing and black as tea stewed milkless or as old blood in the byres. And beyond them the Gwydyr forest and beyond that the River Conwy and then the Vale of the same name with its crags and streams and then the smaller mountains, Moel Seisiog and Moel Llyn and the Mynydd Hiraethog itself that empty wilderness cut only by drover’s trail and sheeptrack and lost in its bogs the bones of the waylaid or the wandering and discernible in its winds ever-wailing the souls of those dead as many over the aeons as those then disintegrating under gas and shrapnel in a distant country all testament to the milli
on varieties of human extinction. And still beyond that the sea at Prestatyn and the River Dee which must be traversed by ferry above the mud at low tide black and reeking or indeed skirted at Chester this route in fact taken by the train to the Birkenhead docks where warships appeared in the water beneath the tall and claw-fingered cranes facing the other docks across the murky Mersey where also other vessels would appear, those outgoing filled with singing and a celebration of sorts and those returning drifting silently into dock themselves like phantoms, these huge ships cargoed with pain and loss, and floating across the gangplanks those who have left their limbs and more commonly their minds elsewhere. Then across the conurbation the bricks and cobbles and human mass, that huddled hysteria that characterises port cities and what might Katie find there in that storm of mingled life? Only something not found in the pool-eyes of lambs or in the gentle tumbling of milk to curd. Only something not found in songbird or bee or flower or the sweetening of grass to hay and the sugary burst of that from a cow’s mouth on a morning before the swelling sun has melted the frost and the grass still spears pallid from the meadow and maybe not found even on the shrieking peaks where the rain falls enraged enough to bounce thigh-high from the old stone underfoot and where sky-high lofty lightning illuminates abrupt and sudden thunders. But shared perhaps in field and grotto in rock agleam with schist and brick-wall fluffed with soot, the slice of knife or grunt of gun in trough or gutter, pit or drain down which fluids flow to one set end, and mirrored and indeed culminated in the mass movement of men to a killing field enormous, continent-wide bloodfeast and frenzy just these teeth that snap and blades that gleam and shear the transmogrification of mammal to meat and such red necessity. And that the sum of any plunge into the beating breast wherever it may be found on high crag or pavement slab, peak or dockside will uproot only the proof if it were ever called for that the throb that drives the shovel can only simply be purely because the engine red and fleshy that propels these green needs will buckle and break time and time over only because things die, things die.
—Of course I will, Katie said again, to her whole family but primarily to her sister because she was still regarding her with big and seeping eyes. —As often as I can. Every second weekend I’ll try to come back, I will. Don’t none of yew worry about me. I’ll be fine, see. I’m not going to be going very far at all.
And then suddenly she had an appetite and she ate the now cold slice of liver and some potatoes and a baked onion with butter mashed into it and salt. The sun sank further behind the mountain and as it did more people appeared, friends and neighbours from villages more seawards than Betws Garmon, Groeslan and Creunant and Caeathro. Tales were told of more names annihilated in Flanders and healths were drunk and memories toasted and food was eaten and songs played on fiddle and harp were danced or wept to accordingly and loss rolled down into the valley from both the mountain and the coastal plain and its smell was unidentifiable yet had something in it of the clear and sharp and unsullied. Kate’s grandmother awoke to sing toothlessly ‘O Jesu Mawr’ and then fell asleep again. Much later than intended Wil Roberts of Fferm Llandwrog appeared in his charabanc which contained only enough room in it for himself and Kate and her luggage so after wet and exhausting farewells under the blackening mountain he drove her to the train station at Caernarfon where with mere minutes to spare she caught the train to Bangor where she caught the train to Llandudno where she caught the train to Chester where she caught the train to Liverpool where she arrived at the Johnsons’ house by horse-drawn cab through the city that drew from her gasps and tears and on two occasions smiles. As it was morning she was fed and allowed to rest in a huge bedroom where she only wept. She spent a decade in that house, in service, during which time in 1917, when she’d been there two years, her father died at Cambrai, part of a tank crew which caught a direct hit from an Austrian howitzer and of he himself there was nothing left to bury so they interred an empty coffin in the sloping cemetery outside Capel Garmon which in the last three years had crept closer and closer still to the village. The Johnson patriarch died after a long illness when hostilities ceased and his wife took their children to a different town and Kate then found work as a convalescent nurse, helping soldiers to recover from or perhaps simply cope with is a more apt phrase their various injuries, their missing limbs or faces or smithereened minds. In the late 1930s she intended to quit this job but of course there soon came another influx of these broken beings the convalescence of which occupied another decade during which her brother was killed in Burma and her sister took their now ancient mother with her and her new husband to America, north New York State, where shortly after arriving their mother died too. Kate lost her Cymraeg, slowly but never entirely; there was a Welsh-speaking chapel in Toxteth that she attended and she met in that city many others who shared her first tongue, but since diurnal exigencies were conducted in English then her first language dribbled away like a thaw of something, some kind of melt. In the fifties she left nursing for good and turned to hotel portering, in one of which jobs she met a Greek man, a chef who, after getting her pregnant, suddenly vanished and left her at rather too late an age for mothering to give birth to a girl, alone, although afterwards she was visited frequently by the many friends she had made, men with false limbs and glass eyes and the women who cared for them. This daughter at a very young age fell pregnant to what Kate called a roustabout and indeed she was not surprised when this man refused to recognise the child, unsurprised but not unsaddened; the desolation of her daughter and the helplessness of her grandson scoured her raw heart. Her daughter then turned increasingly to alcohol for comfort as in fact Kate herself had been doing secretly for some years and it fell to her to look after this first child, named Alastair after his father, through primary and secondary schools into his drifting and desultory years when he began to run with the wrong crowd and, Kate was sure, turn to drugs and crime. The second-born grandchild was of necessity adopted by Kate too; a straw-haired girl who began to suffer eczema in her infancy and was called Scabby at school, although she now suffers rarely from that affliction and has developed a certain attractiveness. She has lived in London for some years. By the time of Alastair’s first custodial sentence for persistent shoplifting Kate hadn’t worked for some time and was claiming a state pension and had been subject to a constant heaviness in her chest and bad pain in her joints and, most worryingly, unpredictable blackouts; the last straw came when she awoke in a butcher’s, blood in her eyes from where she’d hit the counter edge as she toppled, surrounded by concerned faces. Terrified only that she’d have to go to hospital and wouldn’t be able to have any brawn for her tea and indeed shouting very loudly about this problem, an ambulance was called and she was taken to the Royal and there she lies now. She has been there quite some time and her mind has rapidly disintegrated and her lungs are filling slowly with fluid as are her joints and her heart is weakening and will soon become too feeble to pump any blood through her furred arteries. She will die soon. She is very old; nearly a century of years on this planet she has lived. In her own way she has not forgotten whom and what she loves. Life is a confused cloud. Her grandson will soon appear to her through that cloud but she will probably not recognise him. Across an ocean her younger sister still lives, now in Canada, not America; she has three children and seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. At times she wonders about her elder sister Katie and if she is still alive. The last time this sister wrote, about ten years ago when one of her grandchildren went off to fight in Iraq, the letter was never answered and nor was it ever returned. Nor was her grandchild, at least not alive; the transcription on his tombstone in Alberta which the sister hopes Kate will see one day although the possibility of that is extremely remote simply reads:
HERDD
PERFFAITH
HERDD
WHORE
God, that Tommy. Changes his ’tude like David fuckin Beckham changes his ’do. Mean, me an Vix come in ere to give im is wedge, like, an ee gri
ns all nice as pie and gives us back a score each, tells us to get ar nails done or summin an then his man Lenny brings in that no-mark Darren an all of a sudden Tommy’s all ‘right, youse two, fuck off, werk to do’. Mean, ere he is the BIG MAN all of a fuckin sudden showin off like, in front of his boys. But ee coulda been nice about it, couldn he, I mean he coulda just said ‘see yiz later’ or summin but no, oh no, he’s gorrer come on all friggin dead aggressive tough guy like, so he tells us to fuck off and get back to werk. Back to bleedin werk, he sez! Fuck that, man. It’s been a busy friggin day what with the Eurocash conference, like, an ten sweaty Continentals in one afternoon is enough for me so I give Vicky a look like come ed, it’s Breezer o’clock an we gerrout of there quick-quick, that scally Darren checkin ar arses out as we do. Oh aye, never mind that he’s got his face all swollen like an a shaved patch on the back of his head where he’s been cut an what looks like fried friggin onions all over his kite that he fuckin reeks of, never mind all that, ee can still manage to check out ar arses, like. Yeh, so I give the divvy a wiggle of summin he’ll never get cos he can’t afford this werkin girl, oh no, no way. Lenny, God bless im, just gives us a little smile an looks away, gettin all shy like he normally does when we’re around. Sound feller, Lenny. I like Lenny. Got this lovely accent, like … dead soothing it is …
But God that fuckin Tommy.
Outside on the street in the drizzle I turn to Vicky. —Where now, Vix? Few bevvies in Concert Square is it?
She looks at me, her eyes all funny in that black eyeliner inch-thick.
—Jeez no. Avn’t we gorrer get back to werk? Isn’t that what ee just told us?
—Who, Tommy?
—Yeh.
I put me hand on her shoulder and steer her in the direction of the city centre and all the bright bars down there.
—Fuck what T just said, Vix. He’ll av his hands full tonight, did yeh not see the marks on that Darren’s head?
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