The Year of Surprising Acts of Kindness

by Laura Kemp

  That’s why she’d parted with tradition today and was sat on the wall outside her cottage, kicking the bricks in anticipation of her father’s visit. Inside the Pink House was where she felt warm and safe: any upset over Caban Cwtch would only contaminate it.

  Also, she didn’t want Dad in the house. He’d give her ears a battering about what he saw as a jumble sale of a mess rather than the treasures and little collections of things they were. Really, she was just a bit untidy. He was the opposite – he had to be, on his poky boat. He’d only go on at her about filling some boxes so he could take them to the tip. And she couldn’t face it. Probably because she had a sore head, from yesterday’s celebrations after the rugby. And from the bump on her forehead which had turned the same colour as the sea. A sharp emerald green, probably the shade of viridian in her Winsor and Newton watercolours which were stored in a bamboo box. In the spare room. Out of sight. A decade ago, she’d packed away her paints. Yet she could still feel the cold tube collapse between her fingers as she squeezed a blob onto an old plate.

  ‘Get a grip, woman,’ she mumbled, seeing her breath steam in the air and fade into the overcast gloom. Raking over the blackest of coals of her foundation year in Cardiff, supposedly to prepare her for a degree in Fine Art, wasn’t going to help anyone solve this problem.

  She heard the crush of stone beneath tyres and saw a van approaching. Mel stood up to snap herself out of the trance and waved gingerly.

  ‘My gorgeous girl,’ Dad said smiling, his head popping up like a piece of toast, as he slammed the door after Gelert, who was bounding up, knocking into her, up on his back feet scratching at her flamingo leggings. He was one of those big dogs who thought he was small. And human. It was impossible to get him off the bed if she was looking after him for Dad. It’s what he did with him and habits were hard to break. Fussing him, she was unable to meet Dad’s mahogany eyes. She was cross and hurt and confused but she didn’t want him to see it so soon and for things to get off on the wrong foot.

  ‘No cuppa?’ he said, seeing her wrapped up in her damson duffel coat and tiger-with-ears hat, all ready to go, before he put his arms around her and bent to kiss her on the cheek.

  ‘I’ve a flask, if that’s okay?’ she said softly, looking up. ‘Forecast says we’re in for rain later. A dumping for twenty-fours, apparently. So we could have a walk on the beach now, get some air. You’d like that, Gelert, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘All right,’ Dad said, his hair glinting silver like a thimble. ‘Nice to have a change, eh?’

  Well, no, not really. That was what this was all about.

  ‘See the game yesterday, Mel? My word, what a nail-biter!’

  ‘Yes!’ The memory hurled her back to the excitement. ‘The pub was banging! It was awesome!’

  ‘Didn’t pass out, did you?’ he asked, his eyes laughing, as he nodded to her bump.

  ‘No! Although Barri did. He missed out on the curry Gwen had made for the night. No,’ she said, tapping her bonce with a Christmas-red mitten, ‘this was from …’ she jerked her head towards the Blue House ‘… walking into the door, there. She’s the new barmaid. Although I have no idea what she’s doing here. She’s a bit snooty, she is. Won’t last the week. She had her door locked, would you believe!’

  ‘Maybe she heard about the crime wave from three months ago when a rat broke into Mrs Williams’s shed fifty miles from here!’ Dad said, dead serious.

  Ah, he was a good man, was Dad. He’d never let her down. Even when Mam had left him for Huw when Mel was fourteen and he could’ve let distance grow between father and daughter like other men, either because it was too painful or it caused too much anger. No, he’d kept the promise she’d made him give her, to have her half the week when he wasn’t away on a cruise ship. He could easily have moved on and found himself a new family. Especially as her parents had alluded to their marriage as an arrangement of sorts. They had loved each other once but had never been in love. He could’ve disappeared from Mel’s life forever.

  She had to remember that when they got down to talking. He hooked his arm through hers and led her down the steep hill in pursuit of Gelert, who was already a dot in the distance.

  ‘So … what will it be today at the pub? Beef? Chicken? Pork?’

  ‘Lamb, I think.’ She sniffed the air as they passed The Dragon and there was a definite smell of roast. Lovely.

  ‘Lamb. Again. Always lamb,’ Dad said. ‘Maybe we should try somewhere else?’

  She didn’t reply. This was one of his jokes which he said every week. Passing the cabin, she felt her stomach contract and she waited for Dad to say something. But there was nothing. He was still on about lunch.

  ‘We could go to the harbour.’

  ‘Don’t be daft!’ she said, as the hard ground beneath her clover Doc Martens gave way to sand. Gelert was already gambolling in the waves. It was contagious, his enthusiasm. She broke free, as she always did when she got to the bay. Like a child, the urge to run and get lost in the space and stamp your footprints across the blank canvas of beach. Spinning round and round, she saw a blur of land and sea and Dad and land, sea, Dad … she pulled a dizzy face as she came to a stop.

  ‘There’s a nice new place opened up, a what-you-call-it bistro thing. The boys at the boat club, they say they do a cracking bit of crackling.’

  Her feet might have come to a halt but her tummy was now churning. He was serious. The wind whipped her eyes and she felt them watering.

  ‘Oh, there’s no need to cry if you don’t want pork.’ He said it without a smile, full of sadness. ‘What is it, love?’

  ‘A new place? You want to go to a new place? What if everyone did it and forgot all the old places?’ It was insensitive of him, considering that’s exactly what had happened to the cabin and the village.

  ‘I’m sorry, love, you’re going to have to explain this to your old man, I’m not with you.’

  This wasn’t how she’d wanted it to go. But the feeling of loss took over.

  ‘The cabin,’ she said, her tears tinting her vision with a blurry sheen of granite. ‘I opened a letter, addressed to you, like you said I should, in case it was anything urgent, and …’

  Saying it out loud, she’d dreaded it, because it would make it real. But she couldn’t sit on it any longer. ‘You’re going to sell it. I didn’t think you meant it.’

  His bristly eyebrows, as big as badgers, arched with melancholy.

  ‘Oh, Melyn. We’ve spoken about this, you know we need to shut up shop. Not for me, my time is gone, but for you. That money from the sale, it’ll be yours, I told you, to put towards a dream or a trip or a vocation or whatever it is you’re going to do, because … you can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘Why not?’ she snapped.

  ‘Because it’s no good for you. Your mother agrees.’

  ‘Oh, so you’ve been talking about me behind my back.’

  ‘We’re your parents, of course we talk about you. When are you seeing her next?’

  As if she’d listen to Mam, who’d interrupted Mel’s happy childhood by running off with Huw – and leaving Mel feeling like a spare part in her new family.

  ‘Don’t start,’ she said, ‘I’m going round for an early tea tomorrow. All right?’

  It would be just her and Mam, who’d invited her only because she probably didn’t want to be alone. Thursday was Huw’s skittles night and her half-sister Ffion would have something on. Fi came along shortly after Mam remarried and it had coincided with Mel’s stroppy teenage phase. She’d felt pushed out; it had been hard to feel included when the baby had needed so much attention. When Fi was toddling, Mel had left for Cardiff. The age gap of nearly fifteen years, Fi’s age now, had been huge. Mel had never tried to close it and it remained a gaping sore.

  Dad nodded with approval. But it made her exasperation peak. What could Mam say that would make her
agree that yes, she should up sticks?

  ‘I know it’d suit you all if I left, I wouldn’t be the big fat fly of disappointment in your soup anymore. But my life is here. The cabin. If it goes …’

  ‘It’ll be the best thing that ever happens to you. Because nothing is ever going to change for you here.’

  Her desperation kicked in. ‘What if I do it up a bit? Because it’s a bit tatty and I could give it a lick of something … say, a blue, like the domes of churches in Greece.’ She’d always wanted to go there, to try the fairest of feta and olives so black you could use them for a snowman’s eyes. She’d seen them on a travel programme.

  He blinked slowly. She took it as a rejection.

  ‘The accounts, you’ve seen them, love.’

  ‘I can turn it around.’ She needed to fight because the alternative was too horrifying.

  ‘We’ve had ten years to turn it around. It’s dragging you down. It’s a mess, that shop too.’

  ‘No! I’m going to tidy it up, the summer delivery is coming any day so I’ll pack away the winter stock and get it ready.’

  ‘How long have you been saying you’ll give it a tidy?’

  ‘I know, but it’s hard fitting it in when people need me.’

  Dad was staring out to sea now, waiting until she blew herself out. It just made her even more determined in her denial.

  ‘We’re going to do something. Me and Rhodri. Bring back the tourists and the long summers. His father wants to build on the woodland, forty homes. We’re going to stop him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if they were built?’

  ‘Dad!’ How could he say that? He was Dwynwen born and bred.

  ‘You’d at least get a footfall of customers. What do you get now? A few locals and some ramblers on the odd occasion.’

  ‘But if the development goes up, we would lose what makes Dwynwen, well, Dwynwen. It’d be new roads up the top of the village where there’d be a Spar and a bookies. Our unique selling points – our peace and quiet and natural wonders and individuality – they would be gone forever. And we down here by the bay would be forgotten. Cut off.’

  ‘Like we are now. No, Melyn. Look at you, you’re full of ideas and passion and I wish you’d put this into yourself. You’re a young woman. Thirty years old. You’re not dead yet.’

  ‘So why do I feel like it?’

  ‘Because you’re frightened. But you don’t have to be.’

  She spun round and howled a cry up to the dirty sky.

  His hand was on her shoulder. ‘You don’t have to go far. You don’t have to leave Wales if you don’t want to. What about Cardiff? It’s changed since you were there.’

  ‘You know I can’t go there,’ she said, whirling back round to face him.

  ‘How do you know if you don’t try? You might want to try that new place in the harbour, to see if you could. I know you go to see your mam in the next village but that’s something you have to do. This is different – this is about choice. Melyn, please, I’m worried, love.’

  She hated his look of disappointment. It gutted her like a bloody fish. And it made her angry.

  ‘Well, you’re the one who wants to rid me of a job and a home and a living and a life.’

  As soon as she’d said it, she knew she was being unfair. And Dad, being Dad, only responded with love.

  ‘I want you to have a future, Melyn.’

  So did she. But it was impossible.

  ‘It’s too late for a future. I stopped having one … when Alwyn died.’ She covered her face and wanted it all to go as black as death.

  ‘You’ve got to let it go. You’ve got to move on now.’

  ‘How can I, Dad, when it was my fault?’ She wept, turning around and walking away and walking and walking, shooing Gelert to return to her father, until she could reach the firm wet sand and she wouldn’t be able to hear Dad anymore. But she hadn’t got there yet.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Melyn, it was an accident.’ His words flew up into the wind and circled her head like a lasso rope, trying to catch her and bring her to her knees. Because when she fell, as she always did eventually, she would be pinned down by the lie. For the truth was that if she hadn’t been with Al that night, he would still be alive now. So onwards she went, until her feet smacked the rocks at the end of the bay, onwards to the waterfall where the flush and the fury would drown the sound of her father and her own sorrow.

  7

  What the flip had happened to her, Ceri wondered as she left the pub in a state of shock.

  She was supposed to be a businesswoman, with an online empire where her subscribers hung on her every word, but in the forty-eight hours or so she’d been here, she’d turned into a wimp of a walkover. Three times she’d meant to tell Gwen there’d been a cock-up, she hadn’t come for the job and she had been happy to help but enough was enough. Trouble was, Ceri had got dead drunk Saturday night when Gwen and Gwil hosted a lock-in. She could barely talk, let alone talk sense. Yesterday, she’d intended to pop over to speak to them but a head like a bag of spanners had put a stop to that. Midday it was when she’d got up – midday! It had been yonks since she’d done that – and she took her time soaking in a long, hot bath before she made a pasta thing from the welcome pack in the fridge. Cooking on the Aga, well, she’d felt her mother at her side and she’d had a little cry. After that, it was the rest of the day in front of the box, flicking between the Welsh channel S4C, which was oddly hypnotic, an Irish station and the Beeb and ITV. Yet more rugby, then Countryfile – a gushing special on the rare and threatened Barbastelle bat, which as far as Ceri could see were ugly, pug-nosed little blighters. In the end, she hadn’t left the house. Or put on her standard lip gloss and got dressed. The thrill of not having to bother looking good ‘just in case’ she was seen hadn’t left her all day. And anyway, it had started hammering it down. Tomorrow, she’d kept thinking, tomorrow she’d come clean and go to the beach on a recce to find a spot where she’d scatter Mum’s ashes before she left for home at the end of the week.

  But Monday had come and she’d braved the remains of the rain to see Gwen, whom she’d found in a sheer zebra-print dressing gown and lacy nightie, complaining of a headache. Over a cup of tea, Ceri had said, ‘Listen, I don’t quite know how I ended up working here, but the job, I didn’t actually come for it. I’m just visiting and—’

  Gwil had interrupted, stooping as he came into the snug. He was away now for the day on brewery business, and was Gwen sure she could cope? Yes, she’d said, putting on her best face until he’d gone – and then breaking down in tears.

  ‘There’s a meeting in Cardiff, there is. Lack of long-term viability, they say. Seeking alternative uses for the pub. Curtains, it’ll be, if we don’t turn it around. We’re the heart of the community – if we go, it’ll be the end here.’

  Ceri should’ve extended her sympathies and gone. This was nowt to do with her.

  But a light bulb went on inside of her and a casino wheel spun in her head. It was that feeling she got when she saw potential – just the same as the early days when she’d come up with a new product, just the same as the later days when she’d had a whole range to launch. The racing pulse of possibilities and the oomph of adrenaline that she could make her mark in the world. She couldn’t help it: in fact she tried to stop them by digging her nails into her palm, but a defiant barrel-load of questions came to her: how long did they have? What had they tried so far to bring people in? Maybe they could have a go at x, y and z? And, why oh why did her brain ignore the note to self she was on holiday? Gwen saw the flicker of life in Ceri’s eyes and she wasted no time.

  ‘Ideas, that’s what we need,’ Gwen had said. ‘Bring some in tonight. You can’t cover for me, can you? I can’t face the customers like this, can I? Seren’s on too, you’ll love her, you will. Bit like you, sparky.’

 
What else could Ceri do but agree? Standing here now, on the cracked step of The Dragon, Ceri considered why she’d felt a spark of fire in her belly. She didn’t understand it because she had no proper connection here: was this what Mum had meant about her drive? That she took after her father, who’d started off as a boy flogging sardines and ended up running his own boat and supplying half the restaurants in his Spanish town with fish. Entrepreneurial is how she’d put it, and while Ceri had scoffed – wasn’t it that she’d got lucky and had been in the right place at the right time? – it was curious how instinctive it was to fix things. Supposed to be on holiday, my arse! And, even after being bamboozled into another shift tonight, with the roar of the waves in her ears and the wind pushing her in the opposite direction, Ceri still couldn’t shake off the way she was looking at the grotty cabin opposite, with eyes working out ways to tart it up. It meant she could avoid the beach, too: the sand had shown itself, looking damp and boggy, pocked with raindrops as if it had cellulite, and the petrol sea was whipped with freezing foam. Ceri was going nowhere near it: not yet anyway, and certainly not to enjoy herself. It would be like abandoning her mum if she did.

  There was no sign – just that clapped-out wobbly sandwich board with Caban Cwtch written on it in a black and white font more suited to a newsagent. Why wasn’t the name painted on the bare wall in a cosy and inviting swirly design? No suggestion either what was for sale – apparently it was a café too: a simple chalkboard menu with an image of a steaming hot chocolate with whipped cream would work wonders on a cold day like this. Maybe it was just tired-looking on the outside, she thought as she crossed the lane for a ‘quick look’, maybe inside it was an Aladdin’s cave, a ‘best kept secret’ which only needed a bit of promotion and placement …