The Earth Hums in B Flat (8 page)

‘Vixen,' says Geraint.

‘What?' says Aneurin. ‘What did you say, four-eyes?'

‘Vixen,' says Geraint. He takes off his spectacles and polishes them with his fair-isle pullover. ‘She's a girl.'

‘Are you trying to be funny?' Aneurin leans around Edwin and catches hold of a handful of Geraint's pullover and pulls it towards him.

Young Mr Ellis stands up and flaps his hands at them. ‘Boys, boys,' he says.

‘It's a fight, Mr Ellis.' Alwenna smiles at him and crosses her legs. Her stockings swish-swish against each other. ‘You'll have to stop it.'

Young Mr Ellis pushes his spectacles back up his nose and looks at her stockings.

‘Mr Ellis.' The Voice of God sounds like thunder. ‘What's going on here?'

Young Mr Ellis jumps. ‘Just a touch of high spirits, Mr Roberts.'

‘It looks more like a fight to me. Come on out of there, man.'

Young Mr Ellis looks at the way out past Aneurin and Edwin and instead climbs over the front of the pew into the next one, then out into the aisle.

‘Aneurin,' says the Voice of God. ‘I shall have to speak to your mother about your behaviour.'

‘Gwenni Morgan started it, Mr Roberts. It's all her fault.'

I shake my head. ‘We were just talking about spirits,' I say.

‘Hmm,' says the Voice of God. ‘I'll swap places with Mr Ellis. He can look after my class and I'll sit here with you. Move up, Geraint.' He sits in the pew and turns sideways to look at me. ‘So, you were listening this morning, Gwenni?'

‘We were talking about animal spirits,' I say. ‘Can animals – like foxes, say – be resurrected, Mr Roberts?'

The Voice of God can see Aneurin making faces at me without even looking at him. ‘Stop that, Aneurin,' he says. ‘Go on, Gwenni. What do you think?'

‘They're alive, aren't they? So they must have spirits. And if they've got spirits they can be resurrected, can't they?'

‘What does everyone else think? Edwin?'

‘That's daft.' Edwin has a quiff that almost matches Aneurin's, but sometimes it collapses so he looks as if he's got a long fringe, like Mrs Williams's old horse in the field behind Penrhiw. ‘That's just like a girl. Animals are animals, aren't they?'

‘Gwenni's soft in the head,' says Aneurin.

‘Aneurin,' says the Voice of God.

‘But it's silly. How can animals have spirits? We wouldn't eat them if they had spirits, would we?'

Deilwen Beynon speaks for the first time. ‘Mami says it's our spirits that make us human,' she says. Her voice is entrancing, like a breathy whisper, and her Welsh sounds so different to ours. I'm smiling at her, but she doesn't say any more. And now I realise what she did say and I stop smiling.

‘Does it say anything in the Bible about animals having spirits?' I ask the Voice of God.

‘Not exactly, Gwenni.' The Voice of God sighs.

‘So animals could have spirits, then?'

‘I suppose it's a matter of opinion,' says the Voice of God.

‘My opinion is that they don't,' says Aneurin.

‘Mine, too,' says Edwin. They both turn to Geraint.

‘I don't know.' Geraint takes off his spectacles and rubs them against his pullover. ‘But I did see our old cat's ghost. So she must have had a spirit.'

Aneurin looks at the ceiling. ‘Was that when you had your specs on or off?' he says to Geraint.

‘I saw her ghost, too. So there,' says Meinir to Aneurin.

‘I saw my Nain's ghost,' says Eirlys. ‘With Pero, her old collie.'

‘I don't believe in ghosts,' says Alwenna.

I stare at her. She believed in ghosts last weekend. We went ghost-hunting around the castle. ‘But you believe animals have spirits,' I say.

‘No,' she says. And she smiles at Aneurin again.

‘But you said your little white kitten's spirit had gone to Heaven when it got run over by Wil the Post's bike.'

‘I was just a child, then,' she says.

‘It was only last month,' I say.

Aneurin winks at her. She re-crosses her legs. Swish, swish.

‘Well, Gwenni, I think this is a draw,' says the Voice of God. ‘Now I want you all to sit here quietly until the end of Sunday School. I'm going over to see how Mr Ellis is getting on with my class.'

I pick up my Bible from beside me on the seat. Its fine, gold-edged leaves whisper as I turn them over. What are they telling me? I wonder how long it would take me to read my Bible from beginning to end, to find proof that I'm right. The Voice of God could have missed the proof. Maybe I'll find out if spirits can float on water, too. Are spirits New Testament? I'll begin with that. Tonight. The edge of the seat is digging into my legs. I shift along the pew, and see that Alwenna is leaning forward to talk to Aneurin and Edwin. Their hair is greasier than the leg of lamb. Whatever is the matter with her?

Meinir passes me a bag of sweets. ‘You can take two,' she says. ‘But don't give Alwenna any.'

I take one pear drop from the bag. Its sourness makes my jaw tighten. I pass the bag back to Meinir. I suck the sweet and watch a long strand of spider's web that Mrs Davies Chapel House has missed dangle down from the gallery and sway to and fro like a clock's pendulum above Aneurin's head. There must be hundreds of spider spirits in this Chapel. Tiny, scuttling ghosts. I wonder if the spirit of Mrs Llywelyn Pugh's dead fox is still here, waiting for me to rescue its body and give it a decent burial.

The Voice of God comes by with the breeze from his overcoat. ‘Good, good. I knew I could count on you to behave,' he says. ‘I'll let you off this time, Aneurin. Now all of you go down to the front for the hymn and the blessing.'

The classes gather back into the front pews from the musty, dusty corners of the Chapel and the youngest children are brought in from the vestry clutching drawings of Easter eggs and hopping and chirping like Easter chicks. But little Catrin isn't with them. My little wren.

‘Oh, damno,' says Alwenna. ‘Look, I've laddered my stocking on this silly seat.' A long white streak is travelling the length of her leg. ‘Mam will kill me.'

I lean towards her. ‘We made a vow,' I say, ‘that we wouldn't talk to boys. And especially not to those two.'

‘That was when we were children, Gwenni.'

‘A vow is a vow,' I say. ‘And we mixed our blood.'

‘Hymn number seven hundred and sixty-five,' says the Voice of God, ‘
A Pure Heart
.' Mrs Morris begins to pull at the stops on the organ, and pedals until the organ pumps out the music with only a few silent notes.

After the blessing we file out of the Chapel. The cloudy day seems bright after the dimness inside.

‘I've got a really good idea,' I say to Alwenna, ‘about Mrs Llywelyn Pugh's dead fox. Tell you about it on the way home.'

‘I'm going straight down home today,' says Alwenna.

‘But we always go for a walk after Sunday School,' I say.

‘Not today,' says Alwenna.

Aneurin and Edwin stand behind her. ‘Did you tell fox-face about Mrs Evans?' asks Aneurin.

‘What about Mrs Evans?' I narrow my eyes at him.

‘Alwenna's Mam says Ifan Evans has left her to go off with his girlfriend,' he says.

I look at Alwenna but she's examining the ladder in her stocking. ‘Don't be silly,' I say. ‘He can't have a girlfriend if he's married.'

Aneurin sniggers. Alwenna starts walking down the hill.

‘Wait for us,' Aneurin shouts, and he and Edwin rush past me and catch up with Alwenna, one on each side of her. I watch them walking away, Alwenna's yellow skirt with its big petticoat swaying from side to side. I'll have to tell her my good idea another time. I'll go straight home for tea. This Sunday, I won't be late for it. I think of the tinned peaches and cream and thin bread and butter Tada will have made ready. But I'm not hungry, though my stomach is quite hollow.

10

I push Bethan's arm back to her own half of the bed. She snorts and mumbles and kicks her leg out so that it lies over my left ankle. Her leg is heavy and hot and it's difficult to move it back, even when I kick it with my free leg. I arrange myself flat on my back, straight out under the bedclothes. When I rescued my ribbon this morning from the Chapel floor it had two skinny dead spiders entangled in it, but they're gone now and I smooth the ribbon back in place over the feathery bumps along the length of the mattress.

Bethan put out the light before I could find anything about spirits in my New Testament, but there's a lot more of it to read yet. I only got as far as the end of the first chapter of Matthew, which is all about Jesus Christ's grandfathers, going back for forty-two generations; I counted them. He had no grandmothers at all. There's a thin moon chasing the clouds in the sky tonight but its light isn't bright enough to read by, not even if I get up and sit next to the window. When I lift my head I can just see Mari the Doll on the chair, asleep underneath her patchwork blanket. Aunty Lol gave me the red and green wool for the blanket and lent me the needles. But the needles were size eleven, and it took me weeks and weeks to knit enough squares. When I told Mam I was knitting a blanket to keep Mari the Doll warm just in case she came alive in the night and felt the cold, Mam said: Don't be silly, Gwenni; people will think you're odd. But Mari the Doll listens to everything I tell her; maybe dolls have spirits just like people and foxes and spiders. It's no good asking the Voice of God about that when he doesn't even know about foxes. I wonder if I'll find anything in my New Testament about it.

From the trees in Bron-y-graig comes the hoot of a corpse bird. Mam always says I must cover my ears if I hear it, in case it brings a death with it. I hear it every night when it's out hunting for mice and voles. Does that count as bringing a death?

This grey blanket scratches under my chin, so I fold the sheet over it and hold them both against my mouth and nose. If I breathe in the warm, aired scent of the sheet it will make me sleepy. I try not to see Buddy Holly watching from the wall at the foot of the bed, the lens of his spectacles glinting in the moonlight. I have to dress and undress under the bedclothes ever since Caroline gave Bethan the picture to pin up on the wall, but Bethan doesn't care if Buddy Holly and all three of his Crickets see her without any clothes on at all.

I leap as the back door groans on its hinges beneath the bedroom window. John Morris squawks as Mam throws him out for the night, and then yowls as soon as the door is shut on him. He likes to sleep in the chair by the fire, not out on the wall in the cold. Two doors up, Nellie Davies's bony tabby cats join in the caterwauling. I hear Nellie Davies's sash window crash open and the slosh of the water she keeps in a chamber pot by her bed as she throws it over her two cats. Nellie Davies has got good aim; the cats are quiet now.

And listen, Mam and Tada are coming upstairs; because of his limp, Tada never manages to miss all the squeaky treads. I close my eyes and keep still. The bedroom door swings open and Evening in Paris floats in on the draught. ‘Fast asleep, both of them,' says Tada. He closes the door, and as I pull the sheet tighter around my nose the landing light goes out.

I feel the thump of the bed as Tada climbs into it on the other side of the wall from me, and the bedsprings twang as he settles himself down. Bethan flings her arm over my face. I pinch it and shove it back again. Alwenna has her own bed; she doesn't have any sisters to share with. But her three brothers all have to sleep in one bed. I try not to think about Alwenna.

‘Don't put the light out, sweetheart,' says Tada. The light switch clicks all the same and the bedsprings twang again as Mam gets into bed.

‘Don't do that, Emlyn,' says Mam. I pull the sheet and the blanket up over my ears.

‘Why not, Magda? What's the matter tonight?' says Tada through the sheet and the blanket.

‘Can't you see I'm worried?'

‘This will stop you worrying, sweetheart.'

The bedsprings twang in a frenzy; I push the sheet into my ears.

‘Don't do that,' says Mam.

Bethan grunts and turns over onto my side of the ribbon. I roll her into her own space and pinch her leg hard to make her stay there. She lies on her back and snores.

‘You'll wake the girls,' says Mam.

The quiet lasts until Tada starts to breathe heavily. I slow my breathing to keep pace with Tada's and I begin to feel distant and drowsy. I close my eyes. I wonder if I'll fly in my sleep tonight; I didn't last night, I had that bad dream instead. I want to be up in the quiet sky on my own, with only the light of the moon and the hum of the Earth for company. I wonder if I'll ever see the spirit in the Baptism Pool again.

‘Emlyn,' says Mam. I jump out of sleep. ‘Emlyn. Don't go to sleep.'