Sod him.
Before he had time to peer between the vertical blinds to check if the new silver Merc was in its reserved parking slot, an all-too familiar voice rose up the stairwell. A mix of his own and his dad’s. Less Estuary, more Sloane as the years had gone by.
“Jason? You up there again?”
A woman giggled. The Girlfriend, he thought, unable to actually use her name. Then the hall phone started ringing. He slapped down his library book to hover by the landing’s banisters.
“Monty Flynn, you say? From Wales?” queried his brother in an incredulous tone.
“Sheepshagger,” mocked the one who’d soon be taking Jason’s place. Whose grey work suit was way too tight. “They’re all the bloody same.”
“About a writing course?” Colin was speaking again. “No, I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake...”
“No, they haven’t!” Jason had reached the hallway in two seconds, but Colin clung to the receiver. A sick smile twitching his lips.
“You mean, this call’s for you?”
“So?” Jason felt his skin begin to burn. He blushed as easily as a tomato in the sun. “It’s my business.”
“Hey, I’m wetting myself,” sneered The Girlfriend. “Jason, writing? Pull the other one.”
He’d not been a warehouse operative for nothing. Colin’s grasp on the receiver soon gave way to his, and the disgruntled couple backed towards the kitchen door while he tried to compose himself. The receiver felt hot in Jason’s hand. Its perforations almost clogged up with sweat. He wished now he’d topped up his mobile and used that instead. “Thanks for calling me back,” he began once the caller had introduced himself as Monty Flynn. “Bit tricky here at the moment.”
“Sounds like it. Why you need what we’ve got on offer.”
“Your Mrs Davies didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”
A pause.
“She wouldn’t.”
Jason coughed to fill another small pause. “I’ve just started reading Evil Eyes…”
“Max Byers, eh? I’m impressed.”
“That’s exactly how I want to write.” Jason scowled at his eavesdroppers with such intensity, they finally retreated into the chrome and granite Heaven newly fitted last month. “Bringing real hard bastards to life. Having them slug it out. Plenty of action, death and blood. Yeah, death and blood.”
“Mr Robbins – may I call you Jason?” The Irishman continued.“This is what’s flying off the shelves right now. Fast, gripping, pacy. So fast in fact the poor helpless reader needs something to grip on to. And remember, publishers do like a series.”
Jason felt as if his heart would explode with all the possibilities. The sense of exhilaration beat running any day. And he was no mean runner.
“D’you take a good photo?” came out of the blue.
“My mum always said I did.” That sounded pathetic, but the questions kept coming.
“You fit and active?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Describe the pic of Max Byers.”
“No trouble. Half in shadow. His eyes kind of glaring up at you. Evil eyes…”
“Exactly. You got good bones like him?”
Jason wondered where this was leading. “Sure.”
Another pause. This time he could hear a young female voice in the background.
“Helen says to get yourself over here. I agree. I think we’d work well together. What say you?”
“Who’s Helen?”
“Our cook. Prue Leith trained. Her rook pies are to die for.”
Jason wasn’t sure whether to laugh or register his disgust. The gloomy afternoon had become an early dusk. He shivered.
“Are you serious?”
“I am. It’ll soon be rook-culling time up here. Mr Davies, my groundsman, is a right good shot. He bagged twenty in one hour yesterday.”
Twenty?
“Send me the kind of mug shot we could use on a cover mock-up,” Flynn went on. “Plus any personal details to make you stand out from the crowd.”
Filling pies, filling shelves. I don’t think so.
“What about my writing?” Jason ventured.
“OK. Get a title, first chapter and outline to me by the weekend. You on email? We’ll get you a selling package going. Blurb, shout line, the works. You could be the next George Pelecanos.”
“George who?”
“Never mind. But he’s tops. One of the writers for The Wire.”
“Cool.”
Yes, the gritty serial had tempted him to watch, but his late shifts had clashed with every episode except one, and Colin hadn’t let him use his TV’s recording facility. “What about the actual words to choose when you’re writing?” he ventured again. “Never mind getting them in the right order?”
A short, hearty laugh. “Son, I’m telling you, that’s the easy bit.”
“So when do I pay?”
“Twenty percent now, the balance on your last day. We take cheques but no credit cards. Sorry.”
Odd, thought Jason, then dismissed it. “How many others have enrolled?”
“Three so far. One from Mull. The other two from Redditch. Thing is, people leave things until the last minute. Our maximum’s eight, so everyone gets a good crack of the whip.”
Jason tugged his chequebook out of his jeans’ pocket. This was a momentous decision. He could feel it in every pore, every nerve ending. But his questions weren’t over yet. “What sort of books do you write, Mr Flynn, and are they under your own name?”
A hesitation. A raspy intake of breath. “Let’s just say I’m not exactly bosom pals with the Freemasonry right now. Both my books based on their rituals were withdrawn PDQ once I’d lifted the lid. Fictionally, of course, but my work was still seen as a threat to the status quo. My lawyer scooped enough damages from the publishers for me to buy this place. So some good came out of it all.”
Jason felt as if a sudden shadow had engulfed him. A dense, cold shadow. His chequebook had just three cheques left. The Girlfriend was giggling, accompanied by clattering saucepans. Colin probably had his hand between her legs.
“I can tell you’ve a big drive, big talent, Jason,” said Flynn suddenly. “Get over here and use it.”
And with that, came Jason’s promise of payment to be sent off first thing in the morning. All the while, imagined associations with that far-off place, began spinning faster and faster in his mind.
3.
Wednesday 1st April 2009 – 12.10 p.m.
In Heron House’s gloomy kitchen, twenty-two-year-old Helen Myfanwy Jenkins used the heel of her hand to press down the pile of corned beef sandwiches that she’d just made, and immediately her mind hurtled back to her days and nights in Stanley Terrace, below Aberystwyth University’s colonnaded presence. Seat of her dreams for three years where no money, and a lurking, unpaid loan, limited her diet to whatever she could place between two slices of cheap white sliced bread.
Then, such restrictions hadn’t mattered. Art was her life; part of her soul, so as long as her pulse kept going, she wasn’t that fussed about what ended up on her plate. Her friends, especially Heffy (Hefina) Morris existed on Marlboro Lights and Cadbury’s Flakes. Others on pot, bought and sold at the Vulcan Arms every Friday night. There’d only been one crack-head in her year and he’d drowned after leaping from the pier the day the Degree shows opened. “My exhibition,” Rhys Maddox had written on a note left on his bedsit’s pillow. “Worth a Distinction, eh?”
As she wrapped the neat column in cling-film to keep it fresh for Mr Flynn’s lunch when he got back from the pub, she wondered what that intense idealist would make of her now. Here in the middle of bloody nowhere, on pants pay, while her precious oils, acrylics and canvases had lain untouched for over a month. Having interviewed a girl from a nearby home for adults with learning difficulties, plus twelve other candidates, he’d offered her the job. She’d then naively flung her arms around his neck.
That had been a February morning
of blue sky and scudding clouds – the kind no artist would get away with. And now look. Beyond the kitchen’s two rattling sash windows, a gale rocked the budding crowns of oak and the dead chestnuts into a mad dance. If this storm kept on into the night, as they often did, the longest branches would reach over to knock against her wall. Bang, bang... Worse was when Mrs Davies – or ‘Gwenno’ as Mr Flynn more familiarly called her – hovered around like a stick insect, appearing from some shady corner, stroking the same old riding crop she always carried that tapered like a rodent’s tail. Why Helen’s preferred name for her was The Rat.
Another problem was the weather. Quite different from near the sea where she could take her sketching easel outside and make a preparatory watercolour, knowing that for the finished work, the light, the colours would remain unchanged. But in her heart she knew that while she continued here at the gloomy rabbit warren called Heron House, any creativity was hypothetical. Her materials would stay unused; her ideas unexplored. If she had to explain why, she would say because of a growing feeling of entrapment. Of not fitting in.
All at once, came the quiver of air behind her, and the sense that Mrs Davies’ small, slate-coloured eyes were passing down her body from her hastily-gathered pony tail to her scuffed trainers.
“Mr Flynn’s on his way,” she announced, pointing her riding crop towards the door. “And the worse for wear again, by the looks of it. God help us is all I can say.”
How she loved delivering bad news, thought Helen, not bothering to turn round. Especially the latest divorce or miscarriage. Even the vicar’s recent speeding fine, or another’s cancer. She was also first to deliver the morning post to Mr Flynn, and had probably steamed open what might be of interest. Once or twice, Helen’s own mam had sent cards that had mysteriously gone astray, but this busy little woman had sworn blind she’d never seen them. Helen ignored her by transferring the sandwiches to a plate and adding a blue-iced cup cake – one of a batch she’d made yesterday.
“He’ll be wanting something hot, not a picnic. And as for these writing courses he’s starting...”
Helen blinked. Turned to face her. “What writing courses?”
She wished the woman wouldn’t smile.
“Hasn’t Mr Flynn told you? There’s one on over Easter. Got you down here as cordon bleu trained.” From her overall pocket, Gwenno’s ringless left hand pulled out a crumpled flier, showing Heron House magically lit by rare sunlight; barely recognisable, in fact. The cleaner’s tone soured. “Plenty of girls I know down the village can do a tidy roast. I’ve only to bend Mr Flynn’s ear.”
Cow.
“Your reputation may not matter much to you, Miss Jenkins,” Gwenno went on, “but me and Mr Davies have worked hard here to preserve ours.” She disappeared into the scullery, leaving Helen feeling her neck begin to burn; wondering why on earth Mr Flynn hadn’t mentioned anything to her about writing courses.
“There must be some mistake,” she told herself, needing to get to him before Gwenno did. What with a dodgy septic tank, a disused swimming pool thick with silt, and the draughts regularly putting out fires in the main reception rooms.
And then she recalled him speaking to a guy called Jason on the phone yesterday evening, while she’d been telling him about a length of down pipe blown adrift from the wall by her bedroom window. He’d not been the least bit bothered about that. Oh, no. It was Jason who’d made the big impression.
Having slammed the kitchen door behind her to create a satisfyingly loud bang, Helen cut across the big square hall-cum-reception room hung with old photographs of mid-Wales and its long-gone farming communities. She opened the front door on to the wind, that massive, lumpy hill the other side of the valley, and there, as The Rat had predicted, was her tall, slightly stooped employer spitting on his hands to slick down his wavy, greying hair. Using the iron boot-remover in the shape of a heron’s head, he prised off his filthy Wellingtons while she bent down to pick up last year’s dead leaves that had blown in. Big, soggy and clogged with dirt.
Helen was about to challenge him about Easter, but missed her chance.
“Worse than fuckin’ Crosskelly, this,” he muttered, carrying the boots into the tiled cloakroom, leaving her marooned in the lingering smell not of the usual whisky, but of outdoors. She saw how the heels of his mismatched socks were worn into holes. Normally, she’d have offered to fetch him new ones, but not now. “And to cap it all,” he went on, “I’ve just seen some poor sheepdog mashed up below Golwg y Mwyn. Those forestry lorries drive too damn fast. One day, it’ll be a kiddie.”
Torn between sorrow for that needless carnage and bubbling resentment towards the man who now emerged pulling his old golfing jumper over his head, Helen merely said, “lunch is ready, Mr Flynn. The usual, I’m afraid.”
“Your usual is what I like best. And for God’s sake, stop calling me Mr Flynn. It’s been a month now.”
Helen took a deep breath. It was now or never. “Gwenno said you were starting some writers’ courses here, with the first one happening over Easter? Is this true?”
“It is.”
“How will I cope, then? It can’t be sandwiches morning, noon and night, surely?” She made sure the crone wasn’t around and lowered her voice. “She never stops pointing out my limitations.”
Monty Flynn pulled his shirt’s frayed cuffs below his jumper’s sleeves, avoiding eye contact as she stuck to her guns. “I think I’ve a right to know if what she said is correct.”
“Indeed, you have.”
“And yesterday you spoke to someone called Jason. Is he coming here?”
“Indeed, he is.”
“How many others?”
“Three so far. Though I’ve not yet said a word to anyone locally, in case any punters pull out and it all falls flat. I have my pride.”
“And I have mine, Mr Flynn. You know that sardines on toast and boiled eggs are about my limit, yet you’ve put ‘cordon bleu cooking’ on your flier. Gwenno showed me. And said I could lose my job if I didn’t come up to scratch.”
He glanced towards the kitchen. “I’ll have to have serious words. I’ll also pop into Llandovery this afternoon and get you an easy-to-follow cookbook. Need to collect my sleeping pills anyway. How about that?”
But another lie had come to mind. “You also told this Jason guy that ‘Helen says you should get yourself over here.’ In fact, I’d said no such thing.”
He looked at her as though deciding if truth was a better investment.
It was.
“Sorry. But I’ve a lot on my mind at the moment. Not least that I need to make a go of these creative courses if... if I’m to hang on to Heron House.”
“You mean the mortgage?”
“My dear Ms Leith. That’s the least of it.”
***
Ms Leith...
She’d not laughed. Instead, found a paper napkin used only once before, folded and curved it into an empty wine glass. She then unwrapped the cling-film, screwed it up into a tight, oily ball and threw it into a specially adapted milk churn that served as a waste bin.
She was still cross. Mr Flynn was as slippery as an eel. Probably had been since the day he was born, but that last remark of his still played on her mind. Was this perhaps why he’d not got rid of the Davies pair despite their incompetence? She’d never dared ask and now wasn’t the time either. These writers would be paying good money. More than she could afford, even if she saved for a whole year. They’d have high hopes, just like she once had. They deserved a good deal. How would she like it if the boot was on the other foot?
And then, as she spotted The Rat creeping around inside the understairs cupboard, tried to recall meals her mam had put on the table before her da had left. Before she’d lost heart. Helen began jotting them down in the margin of last week’s Western Mail. Cawl with mutton and pearl barley. Steak and kidney pie with ale and home-made puff pastry. Pork and prune casserole plus jacket spuds. She stopped writing. So far so good, but these s
cribes would expect at least a choice of puddings, when all she could think of was ice cream with a wafer stuck in it.
Damn.
Mr Flynn entered the kitchen and pulled out his usual chair at the head of the old oak table that had once belonged to some chapel or other. He seemed his usual, casual self. “Perfect,” he said, upon seeing her architectural pile of bread and corned beef. Plus the cake. “As a reward, you’re quite welcome to join my workshops, free, gratis and for nothing. Who knows, if you come up with a good, commercial story, we might be able to open doors. Get you in the best seller lists. What with your striking Celtic looks.”
He took a bite of the topmost sandwich. A huge bite, in fact.
“You mean my red hair and freckles?”
“Very fetching indeed. I can see your cover photo already.”
Helen excused herself. He was too full of the blarney. Perhaps why she’d accepted his job offer. But as for writing from imagination, she’d never been good at making things up. No, she thought, hefting her old, waxed coat over her shoulders. Her ideas came from what was there. Visible and real. Why she was going to see the one known as Aunty Betsan who lived in a small bungalow beneath the Nantymwyn lead mine’s redundant workings. She couldn’t rely upon Mr Flynn to deliver that promised cook book, so the elderly woman, well-known for her traditional Welsh cooking, was sure to help her out.
***
Helen glanced back at Heron House through the veil of rain, but didn’t let its backdrop of rocking trees distract her from checking each of the windows in turn, including the three dormers nestling deep in the rampant ivy. And sure enough, there she was. The Rat and her cap of fine white hair, which when viewed from behind, revealed a pinkly glowing skull.
Two bullet-like eyes seemed to fix on her heart, to follow her out of the drive, along the rutted, muddy lane that soon gave way to spongy, mossy grass. Upwards then, towards Pen Cerrigmwyn with the wind on her back, Helen wondered how come she was so important to the woman, and when would Mr Flynn sort her out. She wondered too how long it would be before karting and 4X4 rallies would carve up this land the way both coal and lead mines once had. There’d been enough of that wanton vandalism near Aberystwyth. She stopped to survey an old ore hopper’s rusted skeleton and other sad remains abandoned some seventy years before. Composing a possible painting in her mind.
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