Digging Out (13 page)

Ignoring her, Parry says, “You’re in charge of Alys. Right, Gramo?”

“No one’s in charge of me, Parry,” I pipe up.

“Your da will be home any moment. He won’t like seeing you in this condition. In fact, none of us like it,” Gram reprimands.

“Oh, now, Gramo.” He chucks her under the chin. “Not to worry.” But he looks at his watch and then gets up. “I love you, Gramo. I love you with all my evil little drunken ‘eart.” He kisses her on both cheeks.

“Bye-bye, baby,” he says to me. “I’ll be seeing you.” And he salutes me, our secret salute since I was little. We’d seen it in an old Shirley Temple movie when Bojangles saluted Shirley.

And then to Mam: “Don’t let the ol’ man pull the wool over your eyes.” He stumbles to the sink where Mam is and kisses the back of her neck.

After he is gone out the door, I feel panic, and run after him.

“Wait up!” I yell at him, running as fast as I can, my arms waving wildly at him like I am still a young child. The road is slippery. It has been raining pretty near all week and the winds are high. It is dark enough that the bright light from the streetlamps and the glow from the mine across the river cast an eerie orange light. The coal tips down Merythr way stand like guards. I know Parry is off to the pub. He doesn’t turn around as I pull up next to him and shove my arm through his.

“Allie, you’ve got no shoes on. You’ll be stubbing your toe if you aren’t careful, like, and you’re bound to catch your death of pneumonia.”

I don’t have anything to say. I just want to be with him. Mam
always says I am the only one can calm Parry down. She says Parry’s anger boils up in him like a kettle of water on the high burner. He is just looking for a place to let off steam.

When I won’t be shaken off so easy, Parry starts a soliloquy.

“’e’s not a bad man, Da isn’t, ‘e’s just afraid. And it’s what done us all in. Never stood in the light of his own truth. Can’t ‘ate a man because ‘e’s known darkness all his life, can you, Allie? ‘e’s been workin’ in that mine so long it’s blinded ‘im. I should never ‘ave joined up with ‘im. Should’ve taken that scholarship. I’d be painting now.

“Go on, you get, Allie. You don’t want the ol’ man coming home and finding you gone.” He pulls me up to him then, and gives me a tight squeeze. “You’ll be all right, no matter what. You remember that, Allie.”

I don’t want to go. Don’t want to leave him, but I turn and head back down the road.

The next night, Parry is dead. He hangs himself from the big tree at the top of the cemetery behind the hundred sixteen white arches. Da finds him as he is walking home from his own rounds at the pubs. I know Parry meant for Da to find him because it is the path Da takes every night of his life.

Da calls the police from the little house in the cemetery. They come immediately, cut him down and bring him home. Mam answers the door. At first Da can’t bring himself to tell her. Then he bows his head and says, “I’ve brought your son home,” his whole body heaving with sobs.

I am upstairs, and run down. Mam holds the door open wide, the cold rushing in after them. They carry Parry’s body inside and put it on the settee in the parlor. Mam watches and doesn’t shed a tear, just covers Parry over with an afghan. Gram comes down for only a moment, stares at all of us, goes back to her room and shuts the door. I cannot bear another moment in their house. And I am out, running so fast through the cold, straight to Evan. He opens the door, and I collapse in his arms. I can’t go home that night. And then, I think, I can’t go back at all. And mostly I don’t, except for the small funeral and reception, and a couple of times each week to check on Gram.

Six months later and I am still suspended in a gloom so overwhelming that often I feel as if I am floating. Although I am alive, most of me feels nothing. As time moves on, part of me thinks Parry’s death
might in some small way be a relief to Mam. Now there are no further confrontations between him and Da or me and her. Perhaps it gives her something in common with the rest of the villagers. Now Mam has lost someone. She has lost something real she can point at as evidence of her own grief. Strangely her spirits seem to lift. Mam joins the mother’s group that meets each week. She has become one of them.

But she still keeps her distance from me.

I tell her the
Echo
is printing one of my poems. In fact they want another one and have some interest in a regular weekly poem.

“That’s nice, Alys,” Mam says, with no expression at all, either on her face or in her voice.

I tell Cram how jealous I am of Parry. Up on that graveside with all my friends. I don’t want to be here, alone. I don’t know what to do now. There seems no reason to be here or anywhere.

One early morning I ask her, “Gram, tell me why Evan couldn’t save him?”

“Oh, Alys. Don’t you be blaming Evan. No one could save that boy. There, there, Alys. At a time like this, it’s just living moment to moment, waiting until the pain has a chance to settle. That’s all you can do. Not all at once, but there’s still a whole full life ahead of you to live.”

But I am so depressed I stop going to school. Evan doesn’t try to convince me otherwise. I am either at his flat, or he is with me at home. He is always around, and it’s as if we are watching each other, looking after each other, waiting to see what the other one will do.

And then one night, I am off the couch and sleeping with him, next to Evan. His arms around me, night after night, but not making love. It’s more about comfort for both of us, our sleeping together. More about Evan taking care of me, and me letting him.

In the middle of one terrible, stormy night, I wake up cold and shaking. For a moment I don’t know where I am. I reach for Cram and Evan says, “Are you all right?”

I am half asleep and still confused and out of nowhere I ask, “Why did you leave home, Evan?”

“Oh, Alys,” he says, turning over. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Tell me, Evan.”

He sighs. “It’s not a question for the middle of the night.”

“Please.”

“This is not something I am proud of, Alys.”

“Tell me.”

He sighs again. “When I was fourteen, my mam got pregnant.” He pauses, as if he might not go on. But then he says, “To my da, it was a surprise. They were old to have more children. Neither of them expected it. I was their only child.” He pauses again, this time longer.

“Go on, Evan. Please.”

“I always wanted a sister or brother more than anything. I guess my mam always wanted more, too, and apparently she had secretly tried with no success. When my da found out she was pregnant, he wanted her to have an abortion. I’d hear them arguing, my da saying how they couldn’t afford it and how much time it would take out of their lives. Then the baby was born and it turned out to have a disease, a bad disease. She was hydrocephalic. That’s when the baby’s head gets huge and fills with fluid. The doctor told my parents it was fairly common in South Wales.”

And here he takes another breath, long and deep, the escaping sigh loud. When he resumes, his voice is softer, almost a whisper. “It was a baby girl. They named her Nellie. She was cute. I couldn’t tell that her head was bigger than it should have been. A couple of times I sat in Mam’s rocking chair and rocked Nellie while she drank her bottle. And the next thing I knew, the baby was dead and my mam was crying round the house, not speaking to my da. One night I heard them arguing and she was calling him a bastard and a baby killer. I knew immediately what had happened.

“So the next morning I got up as if I was going off to school but I just kept on walking. I hadn’t planned it. But I knew I was never going back. I put them out of my head and soon they were out of my heart. When I got to Aberfan, first off I met Parry, who told me I could get a job in the mine. So I went to the mine and signed up straightaway. Soon enough, Parry and I were having our lunch together every day. Your brother embraced my friendship. Never asked me a single thing about my past. He just became my friend … my best friend.”

I can feel his body beginning to shake and I know he is crying. His sobs are having a strange effect on me —it is the saddest story. And to know how long he has carried it with him, unshared, is even sadder. We are each filled with so much pain. I am relieved to hear him cry.

We fall asleep finally and in a dream I have gone to Evan’s house for lunch. He makes me a toasted cheese sandwich with tomatoes. I offer him a bite, but he has already eaten. Sitting in the straight-backed chair, I take my shoes off. Evan is in football shorts sitting across from me. Without thinking, I put my bare foot on the back of his calf. I can feel the long hair on his leg with my toes. I laugh and rub my foot up and down his leg, thinking about how I can get him to kiss me. I have always wanted him to kiss me, even when I was little.

He takes my foot in his hand and starts to rub it. I go all soft inside. We look into each other’s eyes while he continues to rub my foot. Slowly his hand slides up my leg to my knee. Letting my leg fall gently into his hand, he pulls me toward him. I wrap first one leg and then the other around his waist. I unbutton his shirt. He reaches toward me and lifts my hair, wrapping it at my neck in a knot. He kisses my neck. I want to tell him to love me, pick me up and take me to his bed. As though he can read my mind, he picks me up and takes me to his bed, where he undresses me, looking at me all the while, my breasts, my tummy, as he folds my clothes, placing them neatly at the foot of the bed. I am naked in front of him. But I can’t move. I wait for him. After several moments, he starts to cry. He just stands there and cries.

I wake up. It is still dark. I reach my arm out and find Evan’s leg. He sleeps in his boxers. I feel the smooth inside of his thigh. I move closer, putting my leg over his. He stirs, slightly. I touch his stomach, the silky hair on his chest. I roll onto him and slowly begin moving my hips. My eyes adjust enough to make out where I touch my fingers to his lower lip. I kiss him. He opens his eyes.

“Allie, what—”

“I want to make love to you, Evan.”

“Sweetheart, are you sure? “

“Yes. I want this, Evan. I really do.”

After that, I spend as much time as I can in bed with Evan. Sometimes it is the sweetest love I can imagine. And sometimes I cannot get enough, and I beg him to do it again and again, pushing him until we are both exhausted, falling into dreamless sleep.

“I love you, Alys,” he says after one of our longer mornings. “But
there’s something else going on here for you. What is it? Please talk to me.”

But I cannot.

I cannot tell Evan how before we made love I was fading away. There was nothing left for me to hold on to. I was like the rest of them in the village, lost to myself, lost to everything. Now the only thing that makes me feel alive is when he is banging away inside me, me rising up to meet him, the hard throb of him. But I also know it will not last. Because if Evan could not save Parry, he can never save me.

As the days move forward, it is clear as the morning light that I must leave Aberfan soon.

I write to Beti in California. She has a tea shop now, and Colin works construction. They have been there almost two years, married and settled with one child, and another on the way. I remind her that she said I might come. I could help her with the children. I tell her that I really need to come as soon as possible, that I am desperate. I have saved enough money. I post the letter, and without telling Evan what I’ve done, I wait. I wait for a long week. The week turns into a fortnight, and then a month passes.

I write in my journal or a poem here and there. And whenever I can, I cook, and sometimes I’ll use the broom and dustbin or Hoover round the kitchen. I’ve totally given up school, though. My books and notebooks are half under the bed and strewn across the floor of the small bedroom. Evan, so sweet, never says a word about the mess I leave.

“I’ve given notice at the mine,” he tells me. “I can start teaching next fall if I go to school full-time and finish getting my teacher’s certificate. I am ready to start a new life here, and I want that life to be with you, Allie. Not marriage, not yet. I know you’re not ready for that, still young and all, fifteen. But a commitment to go at life together. I love you,” he says. “Someday this village will heal and we will have helped.”

I cannot answer him. When he leaves, I put on a loose pair of his trousers, a mackintosh and wellies, and I walk out the door and up behind his flat toward the hills. It is drizzly, still dark, and the dampness chills me. I walk with my head down, straight up along a narrow path some shepherd must have tramped out a long time ago, an old stone wall on my right. I bounce my bare hand along it. The whole of
Aberfan is laid out like a toy village with Merythr Tydfil off to the right, Mount Pleasant in the distance.

I have spent my entire life here, every moment, the beauty in me like blood. But I cannot live here anymore.

I’ve known I am pregnant for a while. I’ve not had my period in two months. For a brief moment I’d considered an abortion, like Sophie Greenway did when she got pregnant and it turned out not to be Oscar’s. But I can’t.

No one knows, ‘cepting Cram. I don’t show much at all. But I will soon. If I am going to leave it must be sooner rather than later.

Now I know for sure Evan will never leave Aberfan. I am amazed how he is able to dig into his life, trying to build something new out of rubble. I know many of the villagers have done the same, as the full rows of terraced cottages queued up next to each other remind me. To me, there seems no difference ‘tween the row upon row of white arches in the cemetery and the terraced houses below.

The letter from Beti finally arrives, telling me I can come.

“But he’ll be wantin’ to marry you, then,” Gram says one morning when we are out walking. “Not just out of duty, mind you, but because there is so much love between you. You’ve both a responsibility to the child.”

I start to cry. Of course there is love between us. I’ve loved Evan since I first met him. Forever. But at fifteen, what do I know of duty or responsibility? Besides, I can’t think about love now. I have been planning another life since before Beti left, and neither Evan nor this baby can get in the way of that. Nothing can. I have to leave. If I don’t leave Aberfan, I will die, like Parry. I cannot raise a child between my own endless grief and the town’s grief.