The Earth Hums in B Flat (23 page)

‘Lovely meals your mother makes,' says Tada. ‘Lovely.'

I look at the mince; the pellets look like rabbit droppings and the gravy is slimy with grease. Sometimes, even John Morris won't eat Mam's mince.

‘Eat it, Gwenni, or you won't get any pudding,' says Mam.

‘What's for pudding?' Bethan speaks with her mouth full of potato. I don't look at her.

‘Instant Whip,' says Mam. ‘Strawberry.'

‘Your favourite,' says Bethan to me.

But I can't eat the mince.

‘I'll have her pudding,' says Bethan.

‘I'll eat your mince, Gwenni,' says Tada and he takes my plate and scoops the mince off it. ‘You can eat the potato and the cabbage, can't you?'

There are lumps in the potato but I try not to think about them, and the cabbage slides down my throat without me having to chew it at all so I hardly notice its bitter taste.

‘And,' says Bethan, waving her fork at Mam and spraying me with globules of gravy, ‘you didn't tell us that Aunty Siân's expecting another baby.'

Mam gasps. ‘What?' she says. ‘How do you know that? Who told you?'

The Toby jugs stir on their high shelf with a soft scuffle that I can barely hear above the tick-tock of the clock.

‘Is it supposed to be a secret, then? Is that why she hasn't been here for months?' says Bethan. ‘Because all the Penrhyn girls know. Gwenfair Jones told me.'

‘Who's she?' says Mam.

‘She lives next door but one to Aunty Siân,' says Bethan. ‘You know her mother.'

Mam groans. ‘Big Beti,' she says to Tada. ‘Penrhyn's answer to Nanw Lipstick. Used to live in the council houses until her grandmother left her that house. You should see the state of it. Like living in a slum.'

Tada nods and chews. He swallows with a big gulp. ‘Hardly the sort of thing you can keep secret, is it?' he says.

Mam's face turns red and her hands start to shake.

‘And,' says Bethan, scooping more cabbage from the bowl onto her plate, ‘we did human reproduction in biology today. The boys had to leave the lab so Miss Edwards could tell us about it. You never tell me things like that properly; the other girls knew it all. But now I know exactly how babies are made. Exactly. That's why Gwenfair told me; she said Aunty Siân and Uncle Wil had been doing it.'

Mam gasps again. ‘She should wash her mouth out with soap,' she says from behind her hand.

‘Well,' says Bethan, ‘if Aunty Siân's having a baby, they have been doing it, haven't they?'

Tada's got his head bent right down over his plate as if his food has become hard to see.

‘I bet you don't know how babies are made,' says Bethan to me.

I cross my fingers under the tablecloth's overhang. ‘Yes, I do,' I say. We've only got as far as rabbits in our biology lessons and that's bad enough.

‘How d'you know?' says Bethan.

‘Alwenna,' I say. But I would never let Alwenna tell me.

‘That girl has no shame,' says Mam. ‘She's too old for you, Gwenni. It's time you found yourself a friend your own age.'

‘Alwenna doesn't want to be my friend any more,' I say.

Everyone stops eating.

‘Be thankful for small mercies,' says Mam to no one in particular.

‘Why not, Gwenni?' says Tada. ‘She couldn't find a better friend.'

‘Don't encourage her,' says Mam, but Tada looks at her and she closes her mouth into its tight, tight line.

‘Who's going to be your friend now, then?' says Bethan.

‘I don't have to have a friend,' I say.

Bethan shrugs. ‘Anyway,' she says, ‘Miss Edwards says it's very clever, you know, this baby thing. There are these things called genes, and stuff like the colour of your baby's eyes or hair depend on your genes.' She digs her fork into her cabbage and puts some in her mouth. It must be cold by now. ‘See, two people with blue eyes can't have a baby with brown eyes.' She pauses, frowning, her fork halfway to her mouth. ‘I can't remember exactly how the gene thing worked, now.'

Bethan wouldn't. She peers at Mam and Tada, then at me. ‘See, Gwenni's got your green eyes,' she says to Tada. ‘But Mam's eyes are blue, so a blue-eyed parent and a green-eyed parent can have a brown-eyed baby like me. You see how it works? I've got to do a diagram of it for homework.'

She puts some potato into her mouth and wrinkles her nose again. ‘It's got cold now,' she says.

‘You're talking too much. Far too much,' says Mam. ‘Just eat your food.'

‘But that's not all,' says Bethan. ‘Caroline and I thought we'd like to have babies, but not for a long time. There's this other thing Miss Edwards told us about. It's called contraception. She showed—'

‘That's enough,' Mam shouts. Her chair skitters back as she leaps to her feet. The Toby jugs jitter on their high shelf. Their cheeks are mottled with red, their eyes small and black as bilberries. ‘That's enough of that sort of talk, Bethan.'

Bethan gapes at Mam. ‘Bloody hell,' she says, in English.

‘And we don't swear in this house,' says Mam. ‘I'm beginning to think Caroline's a bad influence on you. The sooner her mother takes them all back to England, the better.'

Bethan's knife and fork clatter onto her plate.

‘Time for pudding?' says Tada, lifting his glance from his clean plate to Mam's face.

Mam takes a deep, shuddery breath. She walks to the scullery and jangles the dishes and cutlery, then brings in three pudding bowls of Instant Whip with a spoon stuck in each one. She gives one to Tada, one to Bethan and keeps one for herself. The Instant Whip fills the room with its smell of summer days, sweet and ripe. My mouth waters.

‘Have you got a bowl for Gwenni?' says Tada.

‘She didn't eat her mince,' says Mam.

Tada makes to get up from his chair. Mam takes another shuddery breath and narrows her eyes at him. ‘There isn't any left,' she says.

Tada sits back. He pushes his bowl away from him.

‘All the more for me,' Bethan sings. ‘All the more for me.'

And she spoons the beautiful pinkness into her greedy mouth. ‘They never have Instant Whip in Caroline's house. She and Richard have never heard of it. Fancy that.' She pauses with her spoon halfway to her mouth. ‘I don't like that Richard any more; he's a proper mother's boy,' she says, and eats the spoonful of Instant Whip.

Will Bethan find out from her eye colour that Tada isn't her father? I wonder how many of the people in the cemetery didn't belong to their mother or father.

‘I went to the cemetery after school,' I say, ‘to get some of the dates off the gravestones for my family tree.'

‘I thought you were late.' says Mam. ‘You've been told not wander about on your own. I may as well talk to the man in the moon.'

‘You're mam's right, Gwenni,' says Tada. ‘You come straight home from now on, there's a good girl.'

I nod. ‘But about the family tree,' I say. ‘I didn't know my taid had been married to Sarah before he married Nain. And they had all those dead babies. Should I put them all on my tree? Are they related to me?'

‘Don't be silly, Gwenni,' says Mam sending a wave of strawberry scented breath over me. ‘And I've told you before, it's unhealthy to hang about in that cemetery.'

‘It's not silly,' says Tada. ‘My tada and Sarah had five children who lived, as well, Gwenni. They were my half brothers and sisters, but they were so much older than me that I hardly knew them. All except for William who was born when Sarah died. He lived with us when I was growing up but he ran off with a circus that came passing through town one year and we never saw him again, although he sometimes sent your nain a postcard from wherever he was.'

‘What rubbish,' says Mam. ‘Gwenni gets all her oddness from your family, that's for sure.'

That's not what Alwenna said.

‘What did he do in the circus?' asks Bethan. She's scraped her bowl of Instant Whip clean and is halfway down Tada's bowl.

‘He sent us a picture postcard of himself once,' says Tada, ‘hanging from a flying trapeze in a tight suit with shiny spangles all over it. Just like the song.' He begins to tra-la the song.

No one mentioned flying on a trapeze being in the family before. Nain must have forgotten. ‘Maybe that's where I get my flying from,' I say.

‘I don't want to hear another word of your flying nonsense,' says Mam. ‘All you do is encourage her, Emlyn. Do you want her to turn out odd?'

Tada gives his head a little shake. ‘You put whoever you want on your tree, Gwenni,' he says. ‘They're all related to you. Nain could give you the names of all the grown-up children.'

‘I don't want you going near that cemetery again,' Mam says to me.

‘I wouldn't go poking about in the cemetery if you paid me,' says Bethan. ‘It's creepy.' She shudders and scrapes the last of the Instant Whip from Tada's bowl. ‘And,' she says, ‘that Guto's always hanging about in there. I've seen him. And he's creepy too.' She shudders again.

‘He was there today,' I say. ‘Practising his flying from the big tombstone at the top.'

Mam's hands start to shake again as she pours the tea into the cups so that the tea splashes over the tablecloth to make more stains to give me that old family stomach when I'm eating.

‘There's no harm in him, Bethan,' says Tada. ‘He's innocent as a child.'

‘He showed me the babies' grave,' I say. ‘Mrs Evans's twins. He was putting flowers on the grave.' I take a deep breath. ‘How did the babies die?'

There is a small silence. Tada glances at Mam and then he says, ‘A terrible accident, Gwenni.'

‘I heard . . .' I say. I cross my fingers. ‘I heard at the Sale of Work meeting . . . someone said that Ifan Evans killed them.'

The silence stretches tighter and tighter until it snaps when Mam screams and slaps my face. We don't move in our seats; Bethan's mouth hangs open and my cheek burns. Then Tada stands up and catches hold of Mam's arm and says, ‘I'm going to take your mother upstairs to lie down. You two clear away and wash up.'

Mam hisses. She sounds like an adder that Alwenna and I disturbed under a sheet of corrugated iron one hot day last summer. But I won't think about Alwenna.

‘Not my daughter,' Mam says from between her clenched teeth. ‘Not mine. I never wanted her.'

Tada pulls the door shut behind them. Bethan and I stare at the closed door then Bethan turns to me. ‘Bloody hell,' she says. ‘If she didn't want to have you, all she had to do was use contraception.'

30

We're too early. I can hear the men still singing in the cemetery; a choir of them, with Mr Thomas's tenor voice breaking out on its own in a lament for Ifan Evans.

I can't take Angharad and Catrin along the cemetery path to the Chapel vestry for the funeral meal so I pull them quickly in through one of the big Chapel doors. Do they understand what is happening to their father around the corner?

‘The men are singing to send Tada to Heaven,' says Catrin.

‘No, they're not,' says Angharad. ‘They're singing to put him in the ground in a coffin where the worms will eat him. And it's your fault.'

Catrin begins to cry. ‘It's not true, is it, Gwenni? The worms won't eat him, will they?'

But they will, just as they've eaten everyone else in the cemetery. ‘But the spirit leaves the body and goes to Heaven,' I say to Catrin. Was Ifan Evans good enough to go to Heaven? And if his spirit is in the Reservoir, how will it get from there to Heaven, or Hell?

‘See?' says Catrin to Angharad. ‘Now he'll be with the babies. Maybe he won't be cross all the time, now he's dead. Maybe he'll look after them. Who looks after babies in Heaven, Gwenni?'

So, the babies are not a secret at all. ‘Angels, I suppose,' I say, though I don't know. ‘The babies – is that your brother and sister?'

‘They died when they were little,' says Catrin. ‘They fell downstairs. We always take them flowers on a Sunday. But not since Tada fell in the water. Mami's been too . . . too . . .'

‘Worried,' says Angharad.

‘Sad,' says Catrin.

I help them take off their raincoats and smooth their black velvet dresses down and straighten their white collars. I lick my handkerchief and rub the mud spots off their shiny patent leather shoes. They look like two cherubs except that Angharad is a cross cherub and tries to kick my hand when I'm cleaning her shoes.

I take off my school mackintosh, which is splattered around the hem. The rain has made everywhere muddy. I tug my gymslip down; Mam said I had to put my gymslip on because it's the only dark thing I've got. It's to show respect. But I didn't have any respect for Ifan Evans.