Flame and Slag (8 page)

“I tried though, beaut.”

“It’s as if you were watching yourself having a baby!”

“I wasn’t, though, beaut. Be fair.”

“Rees, I love you differently from the way you love me. That’s wonderful, don’t you realize?”

“Fate, Ellen.”

“Wonderful, supreme in a way — isn’t it?”

“We pick the daftest times. Inside ten minutes I’ve got to climb the tump, change my clothes, collect my lamp and get down the pit. So long, beaut.”

We hugged in the open doorway, pearled morning clouds high over the western sky, and I thought, rain or fine, next weekend I’ll demolish Grancha’s old pigeon loft. Bloody eyesore stuck there on the bank.

“What?” she said.

“We love each other differently, but it’s good. Supreme, girl, supreme. You’re the beautiful-est. That new baby in your belly’s going to be supreme. Good morning, love.”

“Bye-bye, Rees, watch out for yourself” — her doorstep manner composed, almost lyrical, waiting for the last glance as I shut the backyard gate.

From the top of the spring-green tump I saw the blind-staring oblongs of our bedroom window, and I thought, aye, mixing in marriage does make a man feel sorry for bachelors. Dead-enders like Percy Cynon. The nether dream which the poor cramped buggers pad out with loyalties. Straining the old platonic pus.

While changing into pit clothes I took on one of those precautionary moods: Hark at Reeso, Mrs Stevens’s bingo-card philosopher, vaunting his lot. Five shifts a week until I’m sixty. See our kids educated all the way, see them head out into the shrinking world, Stevens’s blood helping to colonize the womb-boxed compass. But yourself, Rees, you’ll spit coal dust long after your teeth drop from your gums. Spit up the old duff like Dai and Glyndwr Stevens.

Yuh.

Humming
Miss Otis regrets
as I entered Caib lamproom, spinning my brass check across the metal counter for lamp 967, the
Miss Otis
tune unconsciously reviving, finding its place inside my head as we crammed back, chest and rib-sides in the cage, old Lewsin Lewis Whistler softly, thoughtlessly, trilling the
Riff Song
, and brazen-headed Charlie Page handing out Mintoes to everybody, Mintoe odour pervading the roadway as we walked in alongside Andrew Booth’s boon, the trunk conveyor belt travelling back to pit-bottom. Andrew’s final endowment to Caib — he retired before the institute daffodils withered. Andrew’s two younger brothers were Coal Board men, white fingered and collared seven days a week, groomed sherangs in the regional office, both childlessly married to Aberystwyth University girls, young
Plaid Cymru
wives who canvassed Daren at local elections, enthusiastically futile against sanctioned fellow travellers on Daren’s hundred per cent Labour borough council, utterly futile against a die-hard nucleus of Communist voters who abused the two Nationalists as if they were degenerate debs. Pairing themselves, B.A.Aber. below B.A.Aber., they sent a telling letter to the
Western Mail
, revealing their experiences in the Earl Haig Club where a cidery conclave of primitive Socialists educated the ladies, regaled them with coal-face adjectives, an old Arnhem paratrooper among these life-beaten veterans from Tredegar Bevan’s Janus-faced idealism.

Still walking in,
Miss Otis
’s melody baritoning off-key inside my eardrums, tough little Charlie Page’s Mintoe down to an apple pip under my tongue, reminding myself, vowing to break apart Grancha’s pigeon loft, rake up and turf the steep backyard. Get it all done clean and tidy (rejecting the goldfish pond and the rockery schemes) before Ellen went to bed on our second child. A boy this time …

Then Lewsin Whistler generated
When those saints go marching in
for a careless quartet, young Dicko Harding (scrounging tight-fist property-hogging dead-man Dicko’s daughter’s abandoned bastard — Hannah Harding ran away to Croydon, leaving Tal sole beneficiary) catarrhally croaking Louis Armstrong style as he did whenever called upon in
Waun Arms
, ending his joyous Saturday nights happier than his Uncle Tal boozing solitary in Regent Street Con. Club. The loneliest ex-husband in Daren. Scruffy Daren, I thought, marked like an old man’s face. But old-timers die; Ellen forgot to mention dying. Not like John Vaughan nor Dai Stevens, old blokes slowly wearing out, fading away. A Grancha Stevens’s death, leaving nothing except memories. Perishable memories, doomed, vanishing.

“Whassamatter?” Charlie said. “Talkin’ to yourself? Thass a bad sign,
br
awd
.
”

I said, “We’re short of Dowty posts and bars.”

“Unless they come in through the supply road this morning, Reesy.”

Fred Fransceska and a Ukrainian supervisor (the Germans brought their own nomenclature to Caib) turned off into the new Seven Feet roadway, Fred calling, “Shimai-ha, boys!” He’d quickly acquired a working store of idioms, catchpenny phrases direly harvested for peace of mind.

“How’s Morfed then?” Charlie said.

“Lovely, mun!” Fred’s eyes grinning inside the blue scarred anvils of his cheekbones.

“She ought to be an’ all,” groaned Charlie under his Mintoe-ed breath. “Been in practice a long time.” Then, returning to banter, bawling over his shoulder, “Aye, she’s one of the best, Freddie-boy,” — low-groaning again, “Duw, she’ll spend money faster than that Aga Khan bloke. The man isn’t born who’ll keep up with Morfed Owen.”

I said, “Charlie, share out the sweets.”

“These bloody loshins are rationed, don’t forget. Butties only, unless it’s case of colic. Good Christ, I used to suffer colic when I started on the coal. Hey, Rees, whassis I hear about big Percy Cynon? Caught fiddlin’ with some little girl over in Garden Terrace. School-kid she was, under age. Course he’s got to manage it somehow, poor sod.” Charlie gagged suddenly, dribbling Mintoe juice. “Just thought, Reesy, remember the time we queued up outside the hollow acorn tree in Daren woods? Big Percy last in the
gwt
, an’ when his turn came Margie Miskin stopped shop like, remember? Old Percy, by the lovin’ Christ, whatta state on him.”

“Who was this girl from Garden Terrace?” I said.

“Not
from
the Terrace’s far as I can make out. Why then, butty? Fancy somethin’ in ankle socks now that your Ellen’s in the club agen?”

“I’ll belt you across the ear one day, Charlie,” I said.

“Aye? You and whose army? For Christ’s sake watch those nerves of yours, Reesy; anybody’d swear you’d been stuffed by a one-armed bandit. Where do you think you are, boy, chapel? Christ, there’s no point in living if you can’t take a joke. Look a’me last New Year’s Eve. See, I goes home from work on afternoon shift, an’ there’s a bunch of kids playin’ Strip Jack fuckin’ Naked in our front room. Honest! That boy Hopkins from the butcher shop, he didn’t have a rag on him. Kids these days, hair down their backs like bloody golliwogs. My missus reckons the sexes are changin’ over. When some little fruit-cake comes down here in the old Caib an’ clears my stent, that’ll be the day for Charlie-boy to hang his tools on the bar.” He spat out and fly-kicked his Mintoe, warbling happily, “Def’nitely, aye!”

6

Wrapped in herself, the strange glow not for sharing, Ellen bundled away the dinner dishes.

“Hiya, my love,” I said.

“Selina Cynon came here this morning, after she’d been to the police station. They soon dropped the case. The girl was lying her head off.”

“But who was she, Ellen?”

“Some new family moved into Lower Daren. Key man in the radio factory — um, Mr Wilson — they’re living in one of the Board of Trade prefabs. Four children, according to Mrs Cynon. Vicky Wilson, she’s their eldest, sixteen next month.” Ellen slowly turned her head, jerkily like a pre-dawn song-bird: “Apple tart or” — gazing upward, bemused — “cake, shop cake with a cup of tea?”

“Vicky Wilson?” I said.

“Yes,” — paused like a woman surrounded by, repudiating chaos.

“Did he — Percy, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have a slice of each,” I said.

She bent down. “No wonder you married me.”

“Come again, love?”

“For sweetness!” — nose-rubbing like an Eskimo wife. “I’m putting words into your mouth,” she said.

Serenely to and from the pantry, filling the kettle, slopping out the teapot, waiting again for the kettle to whistle, maidenly absorbed for all her plumping belly, kneading the nape of my neck with her finger-tips, murmuring, “I’ve been reading the notebooks, up to nineteen-thirty. Thelma Gibby probably did have an affair with Charlotte Cynon’s husband. He’s hinting at it like a small boy who can’t keep secrets. Perhaps my dad was jealous. No, hardly, he was newly married to my mother. Thelma Gibby impressed him though, poor man.”

“Nineteen-thirty,” I said. “Year they had the first explosion in Caib. Seven men killed up in the Tylwth Teg district. Grancha Stevens used to talk about it.”

The kettle whistled, and while eating Ellen’s authentically tart apple tart and that mongrel-flavoured shop cake I fell powerfully in love with her. As many times before, many times, times all different, like exploration, a kind of inter-lifeline-fired geography. The caulking and rebirth of thinking.

It’s damaged ideas that jabber above chill-deadened senses.

Pondering aloud, Ellen observed, “Selina Cynon has some holdover the police superintendent. They’re about the same age. Is he a Daren man?”

“Born and bred, more or less,” I said. “But listen, beaut …”

“Finish your tea first, darling.”

“Something else on my mind, not tea. Listen, beaut …”

“I don’t have to listen; you’ve been searching for the last ten minutes.”

“Searching?”

“We mustn’t wake Lydia,” she said.

Lydia slept her afternoon constitutional, greyness dimming the bedroom window, Caib shaft-wheels motionless as totems raised to a foam-lipped Coal Board pharaoh.

“Where’s the famous Account?” I said.

“In the drawer this side. Reach over, can you?” She tugged playfully milkmaid as I leaned to the table drawer, urging, “Rees, keep your voice down!”

“Here we go,” I said, whispering, “Right:
That is the secret of life itself whether a man spends his three score & ten in Daren or whether he travels the whole wide world.
”

Ellen tugged impulsively. “Why don’t you tell the story about today? About Daren and Caib and us as well. Every afternoon I’ll light a fire in the back room. You won’t be disturbed.”

My stomach scrabbled away, jilted my body. “Rees Stevens’s Account, you mean, Ellen?”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Documentaries are a menace, girl. Stinking, lousy, bloody menace. No, love, I can’t write about us.”

“Why not? My father was all muddled, almost a complete failure.”

“We might fail.”

“Grancha and Granny Stevens didn’t fail.”

“We might, Ellen, we might.”

Lydia began crying; Ellen went downstairs to peel an apple for her — Lydia with my sandy hair and freckles, Ellen’s square chin and wide dauntless mouth. Hazel eyes from old Granny Stevens.

“Don’t you see how this could come between us?” I said. “I’d be like a two-headed man, one for living and working, the other for spying and listening. Worse than Saint Paul. Is that decent?”

“Decency doesn’t come into it. We’ll buy a typewriter,” — heedlessly scheming, palming Lydia out of the bedroom, giving a blasé hoist to her swollen under-belly, scorning the evidence in the dressing-table mirror, wedging herself back in bed, upright against the pillows, enthroned, positive as a daughter of Zeus. “I can type, Reesy, these two fingers and these two thumbs. Let me see, if I light the fire while you’re having dinner, you can stay in there every evening until supper-time. Tea-time at least. Lock the door from inside.”

“Beaut, be quiet a minute.
This
is what we wanted this afternoon. Understand, Ellen?”

“Of course. But after our fun and games you can lock yourself in the back room.”

“Husht, Ellen! Ellen, listen; I’m not a cripple like your father. He had nothing else to do.”

“Explain about the Germans and Poles coming to Daren,” — blithely remorseless, one hand on her diaphragm, the other patting my mouth to keep me quiet — “and Fred Fransceska marrying Morfed Owen. She’s having hers next September, by the way. She’s huge, Morfed, like a mountain. You can also put down what the men think about the pits, or Will Paynter holding his place on the T.U.C. Committee. He’s your union sec. And there’s the new manager, Ike Pomeroy. You miners, you usually exaggerate when you try to be witty. You don’t like the simple truth. Exaggerate on paper instead of telling me lies — you do, Rees! Lies, but I love you, although I’m not beautiful like you say. My figure used to be all right, passable, and I don’t want to grow old, I don’t want to stop enjoying … ninety per cent of the women around here won’t admit that.” She smiled reflectively. “At least not until they’re past feeling anything. Have you noticed?” — her mobile hand spider-running down my chest, down, flip-flip-flip, then she relaxed, fell deceptively calm, declaring cold as ice-lock, “Report it true about Caib tip-slide and all that wicked time.”