Flame and Slag (14 page)

Ellen called, “What?” coming out from the kitchen. “Matey, you’ll perish. I’ll bring your overcoat.”

“It’s quieter these days,” I said. “Screens idle, washery idle, only a few trucks fetching up pit supplies.”

She rode my left arm around her shoulders, snuggling in close and I winced at the warmth of her, warm as prayer made physical. “Cleaner as well, Rees. Did you mention seventy years? In seventy years time Caib tip-slide will be forgotten. Those silver birch trees will mark the edge of the forestry. They’re going to plant trees right around Daren. My father says there were trees here before, long before he was born. They were cut down during the First World War, and much earlier, the time of the Corn Laws. France and Britain were at war, remember? See across there, the hillside above Daren woods — that was cultivated long, long ago. On sunny evenings you can see the shadows of the plough marks. Tal showed me how to look for them, from this side, off the mountain road when the sun is setting.”

I felt colder than the day.

“Have you seen them, Ellen?”

She hooked my weight over her shoulders. “Hm?”

“Those bloody plough ridges?”

“Darling, I’m not interested. It’s in the Account. We were talking about my father one morning in the post office. Tal said his great-grandfather kept a shebeen where they brewed beer illegally for the navvies who were building the railway.”

“I’m cold,” I said.

“And jealous! Oh, marvellous, marvellous, you stupid man!”

“I can’t help it, Ellen. Not now, not the way I feel.”

“It will come back,
cariad
, eventually. The doctor told us it would come back. You’ve only been out of hospital a week.”

“We can’t be mates the way we used to be.”

She said, “We must wait together. It will come back. Come indoors, Rees, please. I’ve lit a fire in the back room.”

Through the back-room window, above sixteen mortar crumbling parting walls, I saw Ike Pomeroy’s wife wrapped ball furry as a Lap woman, pacing to and fro across the lawn.

“She’s pregnant at last,” explained Ellen. “Lie here on the couch, Rees. I’ll put a blanket over you.”

“Thanks,” I said, as if we were strangers hoping to become neighbours, and while the short February afternoon chilled to twilight, I slept, dreaming the reality of her return…

THEN, between the heyday and ultimate dissolution of Caib colliery, Ellen came.

From then to now, taking a double broken pelvis and spoiled husbandhood, taking these — pelvis and fulcrum — as warrant black enough to spell out Ichabod and triumph. Spell out in terms of ruffian jest and thankless document the social misery, fragmentation, the powerless jackalese of Daren decay.

11

Big Percy protesting false righteously, “Bloody hermit, worse than old Charlie Page. It’s time he pulled his finger out, tell him from me! A man’s got to,
got
to show willing. Fetch him from in there, Ellen.”

This I overheard, then her saying, “I’m sorry, Percy, he’s busy. If you’d care to wait — would you? Perhaps you’d like to help me. I think it’s one of our children’s socks stuck in the washing-machine. We’ll have to turn it upside down. Unscrew the bottom panel. Come here.”

“What do I know about washing-machines, Ellen?” — their voices blurring away into the kitchen.

At five o’clock I set out on my more or less habitual daily mile: Daren library, across to Caib institute, through the maroon-painted side gate, circle the bowling-green and Tal Harding’s bungalow (bought by one of the bank managers for £3,800) and into the woods, free-footed, mindless, a zigzag meander. Deliberate hermit, hair grey-lined at twenty-seven, frail in the mind as a man handicapped from birth, uncontrollable pisser, loving Ellen like torment refined by the upsurge and dissipation of smaller hurts, nervous day-worn abrasions. Lobo Stevens on a fag-end death wish, superior to it by the same token.

The bank manager’s wife said, “Nice afternoon, Mr Stevens. How are you keeping?”

She loomed peasant limbed, harmonious among shafts of budding gladioli, a stainless steel trowel held crucifix high to her over-ripe breasts.

Waste, I thought uncharitably, relishing the adjective. A bake-house woman like that wasted on a man burnt out in the oven.

I said, “Aren’t your gladioli early, Mrs Thorpe?”

“Very early indeed! I took a risk with them, oh yes!” She giggled, jiggling the bright trowel. “Sometimes I love taking risks, experimenting with life. D’you know, Mr Thorpe promised me a row of cloches for that border against the fence. Promises, Mr Stevens, my husband is a king on his own regarding promises. So, I decided, pot on you, and look! My little sweetpeas survived the snowstorm we had in April.”

Reading approval from obliquity, she said, “They’re on strike again in the television factory. Disgusting, I think. As I was remarking to Mr Thorpe, those people should be slogging in the colliery. Every week accidents, terrible, terrible accidents sometimes, and we hear ignorant so and so’s complaining about the price of coal. Dig it for themselves, that’s what I say.”

“Aye, right idea,” I said, benignly confirming the inhumane.

“It’s nice to see you getting better, Mr Stevens.”

“Takes a bit of time,” I said, wondering to myself, how connect with Mrs Thorpe? Socially connect. I couldn’t let her know, even encourage her to experience
me
. Experience my splintered ego. For her sake I didn’t want her anywhere close to my thinking. We were objects one to the other, incommutable as cabbage and fish. Wifely Mrs Thorpe, tolerably déclasséd by her husband’s severe urbanity, the vulture-shouldered shape and aura of him, pared by commerce down to a grey-roaned core. She wasn’t unhappy. Fringing on quaintness. Shockable as a rainbowed bubble, pink globous bum filling her blue frock, baby blue eyes comforting her engulfed mind. Connect, I thought, make it simple, easy. Appease. Surrender my broken I for thee. For thee, for thee fraternally — my tongue locked on anguish.

“Ellen and I enjoy a chat every Tuesday evening in the Women’s Guild. Ever such a lovely person, your wife,” said Mrs Thorpe. She dropped her trowel, forearmed her cleavage as she slowly bent over, plumply awkward as a man-shamed Venus, her wavy brown hair falling in two trim-edged sheafs from the whiteness of her centre parting.

I went on into the bursting woods, a flighting May-time cuckoo idiot — calling overhead. The trees heaved ceaseless sap, leaves, knots, chlorophyll alchemy, the ancient trees were vast pulsing islands breeding and feeding and bleeding a criss-crossed married myriad. Insects, birds, lice, viruses, fungi, mammals. Down below, hermit Stevens creaking along on his thickened girdle, doubling my more or less habitual distance, emerging out on the rolling hillside. I crawled upwards, feeling for the plough marks: they were there, inclining a bare inch in every yard of cropped turf.

Her father put this into his Account, but I was jealous of her, not John Vaughan the curdled old moaner. Green for jealousy. White for purity. White for leprosy, my helpless heatless piddler glassing the grass blades. “You’re no good,” I said, like warning a clip-winged hooded angel. “No good to me,” — remembering Ellen’s uncomplaining chime: “We’ll wait together”, and feeling our patient waiting transferring over to indifference. She always said, “It’s probably psychological. We can wait.” Her father perished psychologically before Caib tip-slide killed him. Perished estranged from womb, Kate Minty’s miasmic vortex. Poor old moaner.

But
, I thought, campaigning hopefully, it isn’t, cannot wholly be this sexual business. When the fire douts you light another. Fire after fire, fire from fire, spark to spark flickering, flaring, fusing, arcing the living breath. Foundering death.

Beaten to hell, I thought. I’m beaten, almost, I’m almost beaten.

I sat tree-top high on the hillside, wracked as a glutted infant, two cuckoos crochet-braining the alien day, the blind sun carnal as a bedbug, bandit warblers drilling the greenery, thrushes greased on snail-meat carolling treadmill rape, carnivorous wrens wafer-boned from incest, rawed hover-flies shagging the atmosphere, south breezes fanning the young leaves like hire-purchased eunuchs, a blast-barked oak tree false as Moses, vulcanite dung beetles trundling sheep-shit, Mrs Thorpe tickling herself sick, singeing the gladioli spikes, larks exploding skywards like crystallized shards of Frankensteinian afterbirth, prurient wood-pigeons honing their glands on cooes, and twilight, a reddened band of twilight garrotting the summer evening like a cannibal’s wreath.

Despair muttered, roused from nowhere: “Rees, go home. Try again.”

Trying again in the day-warmed bedroom, and stranded between her breasts. Desolated. Sweating the same nullity. Arid. Weeping our waiting together.

“Do something… this,” she wept. “You’ll have to now, Reesy, you must now.”

“My lovely beaut,” I said, wrecked the same as ever.

She shivered, shivered, curling away, flinching under the pillow.

In the morning a letter came advising rehabilitation, approximately twelve weeks followed by a suitable course of occupational training.

“Interfering bastards,” I said.

Ellen said, “Of course, this will interfere with everything. You can’t leave home; it isn’t fair. I don’t mind living on the dole, if you don’t. Pretty soon Mrs Cynon will be able to look after the nippers while I go out to work. Hundreds of young wives are working in Daren.”

“Sorry about last night,” I said, beginning to endure my sorries to her.

“I’m not, if you’re not. What do they mean rehabilitation? How can they rehabilitate people who’ve already been robbed?”

I said, “Ellen, we’ve been living in debt since I refused to go to Talygarn.”

“Phu, we’re the big Welsh spenders, I suppose! At least the house is paid for, but look what it cost us.
Iesu
, a roof over our heads for the price of your busted pelvis.”

“We still owe Tal Harding that fifty quid,” I said.

“Let me worry about Tal Harding, and the butcher and the baker. You’ll have to go out more, Rees. Find company, make friends, I mean. Have you heard about the contractors washing Caib new tip? It’s going to take three years. That’s something fantastic! Why didn’t they wash the old tip, for God’s sake?”

“Aye,” I said, “bloody fantastic.”

“Imagine, Reesy, first the old tip from Waun Level and Caib pit, then after the slide they dump it around Waunwen, and now they’re going to wash the same old muck and cart it away. All of it.”

“Money talks, beaut. Sometimes I feel I’d be better off tending pigeons like my grandfather.”

“You can’t avoid what you’re doing. It’s in you. Now, love, tobacco from the Co-op this morning?”

Distant from her, I said, “I wish we were real mates like we used to be.”

“Oh, God alive, we are — of course we are. Tobacco?”

“And two packets of papers,” I said. “Ta, beaut.”

“Huh, beaut. I don’t seem to have time to keep my hair tidy. When the milkman calls tell him to leave three pints. We owe him a couple of quid, but he has the biggest round in Daren, and besides, I detest his wife. Every Guild night there she is, snip-snapping like a spoilt poodle. Any husband worth his salt would chain her to the bedpost.”

“Mrs Cynon teach you that kind of talk?” I said.

“Selina knows a thing or two about what goes on around here. A councillor went to her house yesterday, asking her to join the Ratepayer’s Association. It’s being overrun by Communists from the Earl Haig, those poor devils who live on pipe dreams, not a sparkle of joy in them from one year to the next. Selina could tell this councillor bloke about the Chairman of the Watch Committee who sold twenty-four houses in Lower Daren three months before they came under slum clearance. Imagine! The damn old crook.”

I said, “Where’s your sheriff’s badge, Mrs Beaut?”

“Cheerio, love!” she yipped, Lydia and Elizabeth dumped in the pram and off to the Co-op, dauntless, ten times the woman my mad grandmother ever was.

Corruption, I thought. Corruption by every swilling corpuscle in Wales. Daren corruption in £1 notes. What could she do if Tal demanded his money? Offer in lieu? Once or fifty times? We didn’t have fifty ha-pennies in cash. The Co-op had to be paid up every quarter, grand slam at the expense of the breadman, milk-man, butcher, clubs, Electricity Board, Gas Board, furniture company. We diddled fundamentals like ace economists: new broom, dustpan or bucket, shoes, lino, bedclothes, crockery, paint for the door on the lav, firewood, light bulbs, ink instead of one-life ballpoints, Ringer’s A1 redeeming the loss of Senior Service, all-rounder soap for babies, adults and washdays, jam instead of cakes at sevenpence apiece, hot toast camouflaging margarine, the recurrent problem of finding Ellen’s non-committed half-crown every month, when we bought biscuits they were shop-softened mixtures, we rushed the telly up into the attic when a rumoured detector van toured the streets, we schemed every day to stretch the pennies. And every plan from Ellen mastered NOW. She rode todays like a fresh-mounted pony express rider, yesterdays sank behind her like utilized, finished and done with, grounded nags.

I was down to one presentable collared shirt, Ellen to her specially preserved frock, knicks and vest when I
had
to attend the nearest rehabilitation centre. Attend or else. Thirty-eight miles each day by slow train from Daren Halt.