The Coward’s Tale

by Vanessa Gebbie

  His mam may cough and say there’s no time for that when all the way down the hill she was saying there was plenty. And this morning, the old iron rocking horse on its square of tarmac will go unridden and the swings on their brown chains will go unswung. ‘But Mam?’ There will be no reply. And the boy will not know if it is his mam or the man collecting leaves is to blame for his disappointment.

  Later, when the mist has gone, when he has gathered all the pale leaves he can find today on the grass, Judah Jones will carry on cleaning his windows. He will not push his bicycle up the hill to the rows of houses in Garibaldi Street, Maerdy Street and Tredegar Street, not today, oh no, not today, not tomorrow, or the next day. Not while those silver leaves are coming down off the tree by the old park gates, helped by the wind.

  Instead he will go down the hill to the High Street and set up his ladder against the stone walls of the shops, and knock and set the bells ringing on their springs to ask for warm water. And he will take his cloths and clean the windows of the General Stores and the sweet shop, the chip shop, the Public Library and the Undertaker’s, where he will wait until Tutt Bevan is out for a while not to hear the sound of his annoyance at a coffin lid that will not shut. He will knock at the door of the dressmaker’s and shine the glass so the cards of buttons, the lace ribbons, the petersham and the unfinished blouse on its canvas body can see out proper. Next it will be the Savings Bank, and Tommo Price may answer his ring at the door, and Judah Jones will ask if they want their windows done, and Tommo Price will agree, and for an hour or so all the windows that watch over the ledgers will be sudded and polished, but it will make no difference at all to the figures on those pages. And all the while there is a bucket of leaves over the handlebars of his bike where it waits all patient against the wall.

  After the Savings Bank Judah Jones pushes his bike past the cinemagoers waiting on the cinema steps, and there may be a few who notice the bucket of leaves, and they pull at the sleeves of those standing next to them to ask did they notice that as well. And Judah Jones will go over to where his soul has been waiting to go all day. The grey and square-stoned chapel called Ebenezer, empty these twenty years.

  At Ebenezer Chapel, he will lean the bike against the wall in the chapel porch where the beggar Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins sleeps at night under newspapers. If Ianto is there, Judah Jones will raise a finger to his cap, ‘A lot to do, a lot to do, mind . . .’ and the beggar will agree, lying on his bench, his hands behind his head. ‘Indeed.’

  Judah Jones begins to wash the windows, just like anywhere else, outside, going up and down his ladder and polishing the glass with his cloths, fetching water from the Savings Bank, the cinema. And when they are done, does he go home? Does he take his ladder and tie it to his bicycle and go home to Plymouth Terrace? He does not. At Ebenezer Chapel he cleans the windows once a year, not only from the outside where they collect the street grime and dust like everywhere else, but from the inside, to clean off them whatever collects on windows in empty chapels.

  Judah Jones will stand for a while outside the chapel and wait with his head on one side, listening for sound, but there will be none. He will enter all quiet with his buckets, the one holding a little clean water, the other leaves, and he will tug the doors to behind him.

  He will wait for his eyes to accustom themselves, and his feet will echo on the old floorboards. He will clean the grime from the images: Thomas and Thaddeus frowning, Matthew counting his coins. And the rest. He will clean them all with water and a cloth, all except one right at the back of the chapel, waiting in the halflight.

  Judah Jones will go to that one window at the back and gaze up at the figure on the glass. Then, after a long while, he will take from his jacket pocket a twist of paper filled with salt, and pour some into the bucket of leaves. He will take the bucket of clean water and sprinkle a little over the leaves and the salt – and wait a few moments. Then he picks a handful of damp leaves from his bucket, and reaches up to brush them gentle over the glass, rubbing at it until the leaves crumble, fall to dust and rain onto the flagstones beneath. Handful after handful he takes until his leaves are all gone, and he will do this every day while there are leaves from the tree near the park gate still tumbling over the grass to pile against the cold benches. And all the while he looks up at the half-figure caught in the window, and in the eyes of the Window Cleaner there is something more than praise.

  The Window Cleaner’s Tale ii

  And maybe the cinemagoers, later in the day, all bundled on the steps of the cinema, their breath rising from their mouths like souls that have forgotten something, will want to know about the Window Cleaner who carries an old bucket of autumn leaves into chapel. Who adds water and salt, and wipes them over a window.

  And if they ask it right, and if they rustle a toffee bag deep in a pocket, and if the rustle comes to the ears of the old man begging there, he will lean against the peeling wall and shake his head, maybe at the questioner and maybe not. He will smile at the boy Laddy Merridew slipping into the queue then changing his mind and sitting on the steps to listen, and will begin.

  ‘Listen with your ears, I have a story for them, see, about little Meggie Jones who came before Judah and who started something that only Judah Jones will finish.

  A long while back this is, mind . . . and little Meggie was living with her new husband Geraint Jones in their rented house in Plymouth Terrace, wed only a six-month and Meggie carrying their first child already. Her Geraint put his arms round her every morning in the kitchen before he left for work as a collier, to look into her face so close she would laugh.

  “My Meggie, don’t do that, don’t push me away . . .” for he looked into her face to take the shine of her eyes down to the dark of Kindly Light pit where he was a hewer.

  A beautiful man he was, mind, that Geraint Jones, gone down when he was just a lad to work in Kindly Light a few years since – alongside an experienced collier, Billy Price, a neighbour old enough to be his own father. Treated Geraint like a son, Billy Price did. And he had his own son, too – but wouldn’t let him be a collier, not at all. But that is a different story. So Billy Price was like Geraint’s own father then, and treated Meggie Jones like his own daughter.

  And there came a day when the mountain rebelled, and there was a great fall of stone in that pit under the mountain, and a clashing of rocks, and a small terrible spark and gas that found a handful of black dust . . . an explosion then, racing its fire along the roadways. And the force of it all, the smoke and the dust billowed from the shafts to hang over Kindly Light and up the valley towards the town, like a message no one wanted to open.

  And then, round the pit head, waiting, the women, the wives and the mothers all whitefaced and practising being lonely in their hearts, waiting for their men to come up.

  Some men did come up. Some were brought up alive and they staggered out into the light all shrunken somehow. And later they brought up those men who had gone, and their friends carried them through the waiting women, who looked at the faces of the men all dark and sleeping to find their own. “Is it my George?”

  “Aww, my Harry . . .”

  Later still they brought up the men who were burned down there. And some – oh, terrible – no one could tell who they were at all. The searching for a name was too much.

  And as they all came up into an air they would not have a use for, not now, their bodies were carried through the crowd and laid on the floor of the lamp room, their women following to gather round the doors, waiting to be let in to find the man they slept with not two nights since.

  With each rise of the cages, little Meggie Jones’s heart beat a little faster for it was just possible that her man was hidden, and asleep, or that he had not gone down at all today, but had gone to another place, and was in the next valley, walking, perhaps, dreaming, forgetting to come home.

  But this was dreaming indeed. He was not in the next valley, and he was not found anywhere, not among the men who held each other li
ke brothers as they died . . . not down there at all. Not at all . . . he was never found despite the looking and the looking, not brought up to the lamp room. Ever. He was truly lost under the mountain and Billy Price as well, gone together. Maybe lost under the falls of stone? Maybe crept together into a gap that seemed safe, “Here, Geraint, follow me . . .” only for that space to collapse a little later? Who is to say? Never found at all. And what did Meggie Jones have left to do but go back home, to creep into a cold bed and turn her face to the wall?

  A few little days later, in Ebenezer Chapel just here, they gathered to sing for the dead, and most of those dead were in their boxes, their faces covered for the last time. Meggie Jones sat at the back in her good coat that would not close now because of the baby coming, and she watched the other wives with their men all boxed and neat and named ready for the ground, but she had no one . . . even like that, in their boxes.

  At that very moment, the sunlight found its way through the chapel window above her head and shone onto her, onto her hand where her ring shone back in reply . . . and she looked up, and what did she see but the shadow of a man looking down on her, watching her with a half-smile. And he was beautiful.

  It was as though the window was speaking to her, right deep inside . . . where only she could hear it. And when she came to, the chapel was empty, all the others gone off to bury their men, leaving her in the dark. Meggie Jones had no one to bury, so she stayed there, stayed in her chair, raising her eyes to that window above her head where she thought to have seen a man.

  She wanted to see him. She had to see. And she climbed up with her baby all heavy inside her, and stood on that old chair to reach up to her window, and with a nail she scratched in the dust, in one corner. And right there the light shone through the dirt of ages, and that light was green and gold.

  And little Meggie Jones thought she should clean the glass to see the colours, the image, the man – and she climbed down and searched the dark and closed chapel to find a cloth, to find how to do this, her task, while the other wives had their husbands to bury.

  But she found no cloths nor water, and out she went into the evening light, thinking to go home, back to Plymouth Terrace, to the house she didn’t even know if she could stay in now, to fetch a cloth from the yard . . . but there was no need for her to go all that way at all. For in the chapel porch, piled on the flagstones, the wind had brought leaves.

  Leaves from the wild cherry trees on the hills perhaps. Bright and shining, reds and golds, flat and perfect . . . and to Meggie Jones they would do fine to wipe the grime from that window, and she took the leaves, and brought them into the chapel. She took a chair and set it right under the window. And the man in the window that was and was not her husband looked down at her as she climbed onto the chair and began to clean the glass with a handful of leaves the colour of blood.

  She stood on that chair with her unborn child, and she cleaned that window, not raising her eyes to the glass, not properly, for this was hallowed. She only rubbed a small circle down in the corner of the glass covered with its grey coat of dust. Then with a single leaf she made the letters of her own name. But now . . . in that first little circle, where Meggie Jones thought to find words, maybe a verse, instead, she found grass as soft as hair, each blade as real as tears. She found buttercups and whinberries where the gold shone through her name. The things she knew from places deep in the folds of the hills where perhaps she lay with her man and where maybe her child was begun.

  But oh look – back on the ground among the grass and the flowers, see? There among the flowers of the Beacons, were the feet of her Geraint overgrown with ivy fronds, his skin brown from the sun, the nails square and naked and strong.

  And little Meggie Jones ran her fingers over those toes and cried for the first time that day, remembering her man and knowing finally that she would not see his toes again . . . and she wiped her eyes with a handful of fresh leaves before going back to her task.

  So you see it was with tears that she washed the window, and it was her tears and those leaves that worked away at the glass, taking away the grime of years, until she saw her man standing there, her collier Geraint Jones after all, come back from under the ground in his working clothes and dark with coal but barefoot, his face as beautiful as it ever was.

  And little Meggie Jones found not only her man under candlewax and dust, and not only flowers, oh no. Her leaves set free the birds from the Beacons . . . a merlin and its mate, tumbling in the grey sky. Crows catching the wind. A buzzard, heavy as her child, floating on the up-draught.’

  At this point the cinemagoers, who will have forgotten all about the showing, and who have been looking past the storyteller, looking at the chapel just there, with its porch and its bench all tidy, are thinking perhaps they will go and see, for the door is open, and what is Judah doing now?

  But the story is only half done, the storyteller has stopped and is back begging, holding out his cap to the new arrivals, so the listeners have to send someone off to fetch him a coffee with two sugars, and they wheedle like children, ‘Aww, stop your begging now, and tell us about the buzzards? Was there really buzzards in chapel then?’

  Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins will sigh and he will stop his begging and sit on the step,

  ‘Buzzards, now who was talking about buzzards? I was talking about windows, and leaves, and in the end, I was talking about a man. For little Meggie Jones found all sorts in that window, she did indeed, and it is very true that there were buzzards, but there was also a man.

  See, under all that blanket of dust there was a man as sure as there was a man in her bed a few days back, and as sure as that man’s child was pushing at her now. She ran those wild cherry leaves down his thighs, their rough trews all transparent in the glass, and as she cleaned them of their dust she could see the town through those thighs, the houses, the High Street, the square, the shops, the men and women now coming back down from the new cemetery on the hillside, walking in knots, arms round, and through his jacket she saw boys playing again in the street.

  But his face. It is his face that really mattered, for here was this window that had been in Ebenezer Chapel for years, and in that face what did Meggie Jones see, as she wiped it clear of its dust with her leaves? She saw her Geraint’s cheek, unshaven. A hollow where her man bit the inside of that cheek for fear. A bruise all purple over his cheekbone where the mountain hit him. The birds were gone, and the hill, the flowers and the grass. All gone. What there was in the end was just the dark of coal seams, the shine of water dripping, the shine of black dust in candlelight, and a man unshaven with the face of her Geraint, looking out of the window straight into the face of his wife and the mother of his child. But he was alone, see? Alone in the dark, and under a mountain, in memory of all colliers who do not come back.’

  Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins stops for a moment, shaking his head. Then he sighs. ‘And that is nearly the end, except for one thing. That if you have love to give it has to go somewhere, for it cannot go nowhere. So little Meggie Jones gave her love to a window. I understand that, even if you don’t. Her man was lost and alone under the mountain and he came back to her in a window.

  So she looked after the windows then. Proper, all tidy. But whenever the wild cherry trees dropped their leaves, she took them, and she cleaned that window with them like they were the softest of cloths. Her child does the same. And her child is old now – the Window Cleaner Judah Jones. And maybe, like his mam, he sees who he needs to see. Who is to say? Who is to say, indeed.’

  The cinemagoers will sigh and say, ‘Aww, there’s lovely,’ and make plans to go maybe now and maybe later to the chapel to see the window. And they will ask if Judah Jones is doing the same and if his leaves are letting the window breathe and become warm under his touch . . . the beggar just sighs and says nothing.

  The Window Cleaner’s Tale iii

  Today, Judah Jones has pushed his bicycle through the park and the wind has blown the leaves from the tre
es near the gate, leaves that glint like silver coins. It has sent them scuttling over the grass to wait for Judah, piled against the benches of the Misses Watkins. And when he arrives, he smiles for no one in particular, ‘Leaves for Judah Jones, is it?’

  Maybe this very day a miracle will happen. Maybe today the man might stir in the window and a muscle will move under the painted cloth of his shirt. Maybe the fingers will flex to send blood to the tips. And maybe the chin will tilt, the head turn a little and the eyes will gaze straight into those of the old Window Cleaner.

  So Judah Jones has taken the silver leaves and filled his bucket. He has said he is sorry to the houses in Maerdy Street and Tredegar Terrace, and will come back in a day or two. And he has gone to the High Street, cleaned the windows of the General Stores, the chip shop and the dressmaker’s, the Undertaker’s and the Savings Bank, and he has leaned his bike against the stone bench in Ebenezer Chapel porch and washed the outside of the chapel windows.

  Now he is inside the chapel and has washed most of the windows of their grime. He has dampened the leaves with clean water and a little salt, just like Meggie Jones’s tears before him, and he has waited for a while in the gloom. And now, he is reaching up to his window to wipe it with leaves.

  Over time, the window to Judah has grown more beautiful, the face shining in the halflight glistening as though it has pores and sweat, the chin dark as though there is a beard coming. He reaches up to touch the man’s cheek and wonders if the glass is cold still, or whether today there will be warmth under his fingers.