Flame and Slag (19 page)

Percy banged around with his stick, rejecting controversy. “Trouble is, Rees, you’re not a fit man: can’t be, mun, else they’d have put you on to something in that training-centre place. I’d go back down under tomorrow, no hesitation. Short hours, machines to do all the graft — Christ, aye, I’d be there.”

Announcing pure Admin. Exce. solace, foolproof as a Band-Aid on rabies, Howell Cynon said, “Personally I don’t think it would be wise to consider Brynywawr Seven Feet. We’re meeting geological snags, but, of course, you chaps know more about it than I do. You’ve actually experienced deterioration; you have had to deal with these problems. Serious reports are coming in from Brynywawr particularly. Indeed, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the colliery comes under reclassification, possibly closure, unless, you see,
unless
the OMS improves. Naturally, the Board’s policy is to grant a reprieve period, three months, six months, even a year if the colliery can be made economically viable.”

“Well, I’m off. Goodnight now,” Charlie said.

“Hang on, mun, I’ll give you a lift home. What’s the rush?” — big Percy playfully scything his stick at Charlie’s legs.

Charlie hooked two thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. “We’ll see the end of it all in Daren,” he said.

“Every fit man will be offered alternative employment in one of our long-life collieries,” — fashionably bearded Howell assuring three crocks as if changing pits was like changing a pair of socks. As if miners were migratory Americans hitched to romance, to LIFE not quite over the next horizon. Mobile Americans too empty to seethe outwards from stillness.

I remembered Ellen and Tal. Some fourth-rate cabaret team was smarming the crap out of the guinea-a-head diners, Ike Pomeroy and the Brynywawr manager scheduled for notice in
Daren & District Clarion
, another smell of grief for the two widows. Pan shots around the fancy-balled-up canteen. Ageless Taliesin Harding (finer boned in the nose inherited from old miser Dicko) under disciplined weaning from the booze, and Mrs Ellen Stevens, popular supervisor on 4B shop floor. Two esteemed Darenites. Yuh. Rees Stevens’s wife flogging fifty quid’s worth of marriage property to the man who lost her seven years ago. Probably trading the deal in his car, parked on the bend of the mountain road from where you can see traces of ancient cultivation shadowing the hillside above Daren woods. The carrying-on contract aided and abetted by Mrs Selina Cynon, fix-it queen of the good life rounded and whole — this huge slob’s mother.

“There’s a bloke who’s changed,” argued Percy, false surcharge quivering his exiled male hulk. “Charlie there, hardest little bugger in the Four Feet one time.”

I thought, Percy, old fork-tongued talking mirror, you’re bogged in some sort of mammy-dream and I’m neutered, useless for Emily Thorpe, let alone my black-haired, pale-faced mate. Baldy Howell’s no good for anything, never has been, he’s one of the dregged Cynons, Welsh parrot squeezing the purulence of profit and loss.

“Ker-iste, I could show you scores of men in this club with the dust,” Percy said. “Doesn’t stop them from being sociable in company. What’s he on now, Rees, still searching for remains up around Waunwen?”

“Good, fascinating,” approved Howell. “Quite remarkable in a place like Daren, especially Upper Daren. It’s such a poky dead-end hole really, since they closed the railway tunnel. My wife has always loathed coming here; she feels she can’t breathe, but, of course, she is rather sensitive — isn’t she, Percy?”

He said, “You can say that agen. Me, though, I wouldn’t shift from Daren, not for two bloody legs. Come on, knock it back; plenty of time for another round.”

Howell Cynon jibbed politely, forefingering some straggly hairs from his crimped upper lip. His Castro beard gleamed like Brylcreamed swarf.

“Bring your wife along next time, Howell,” I said.

A few parties were cross-bawling old ballad choruses, the lounge acoustics self-charming as a bathroom, the night wearing on towards stop tap. Outside the club I bulled Percy into driving us to Lower Daren.

The factory car park was full, five long rows extending to the railway fence. Man to man, Percy complained seriously, “Listen, Rees, it’s none of my business. My old lady, she’ll be wondering where the hell I’ve got to, won’t she? Course I’ve heard the talk about Ellen and Tal, but it’s none of my business. What time are they due out?”

“Ten minutes, Perce. Sit tight. I’m not using you as a witness or anything. Remember the time we didn’t see you and Vicky Wilson in Swansea market? Your old lady’s taking care of our kiddies. Just sit tight; whichever way the ball tamps, you won’t get involved.”

“None of my business, this,” he said.

As she climbed into Tal’s car, I crabbed out from the dark and held the door handle. “Much obliged, Tal”, I said. “Come with me, Ellen; we’re walking home.”

“Have you gone mad? In these shoes?” My wolverine wife, Tal on a fresh cigarette, dithering with the choke, headlights fanning and cutting out all around the car park, factory girls suavely rooted as Buckingham Palace garden-party dames, boyfriends and collier husbands laughing, confident as gunboat commanders. The chosen, the hop, step and jumping social van of Daren, heeding for whom the bell tolls.

Percy muttered, “Hullo there, Ellen. Shwmae, Tal.” Tal duffed his brand-new fag and perfect blandness came out of him. “I don’t understand your attitude, Rees,” he said.

She wrenched violently. “Stupid, let me go! Rees, if you make a scene…”

“Come on, Kate Minty,” I said.

“Let go of my arm!”

“G’night,” Percy said, plunging away on his stick.

Tal smiled like a Russian offering peaceful co-existence, leaning across her, tipping small taps under my wrist with his knuckles. “Jump in, Rees. We’ll be home in a few minutes.”

“Don’t do that, Tal,” I said, the only possible threat, as integral to neurotically archaic miners as to any hidebound gallant from Boston, Mass.

Ellen slipped off her right shoe. I slammed the door on the blow, then jerked it open again. “He’s enjoying this,” I said.”Move, girl,
out
.”

“Waster — you rotten, filthy, dirty waster!”

“Get out, beaut.”

“I’m sick of you!”

“
Out
,” I said.

She laughed, barging her black head at my stomach, abrupt rabid laughter and white teeth. I saw him closing the door, fastidious, the engine humming quietly.

“Now what, matey?”

“Don’t sneer,” I said. “Say good night to him. We’re walking home.”

He passed us at the factory entrance, sedate as a hearse driver.

“I thought you wanted to rush me into a dark corner somewhere,” — the pavement width between us and I could hear the reedy whisper of her stockings at every stride.

“Beaut, you’re slightly knock-kneed,” I said.

“What’s it all about? What are you going to do?”

“Be quiet, Ellen; for Christ’s sake shut it. I’ve listened to you getting back at me long enough, so
shut up
. That’s the message. We’re starting it this way. Stop bitching. Shut up.”

“I’m not supposed to have any normal social life, just work, work and wait for
you
to become normal. Calling me by my mother’s name… what about your own mother? She was a slut, cheap Brynywawr slut! It’s coming out more and more, her evil nature. Sometimes I feel like killing you. Two years, Rees,
two
whole years! You must think I’m made of stone.”

The streets were deserted, hay-smell wafting from a smallholding below the bomb craters left by Goering’s hit-and-run raiders in 1942. The craters were fern-sided down to stagnant pools, the tadpole ponds of boyhood. A wet quarter-moon, up-tilted to hang your shirt on the lower horn, couched the matt-black remainder as if protecting it from becoming a Patrick Moore space junction. Pigeon senseless, I aligned the North Star to the Plough, a sky-filling dark cloud sheeting over, flatly sombre, its profiled leading edge sucking out stars, layer after layer until misty rain began to fall.

She tied a yellow chiffon scarf around her head, marching stride for stride, our shoes pressing dry sole prints on the faintly damp pavement.

“Ellen,” I said, “sometimes I feel like killing you, too.”

Her tish ended adamantly, grunting scorn.

“More than wanting to kill Tal Harding,” I said. “He’s hollow, like a cup.”

“Tal’s a better friend than you’re a husband,” she said, the rubbery swish-swish from her stockings lost inside a night rustle that spumed the fine rain into a razzled maze around the street lights.

“Don’t wait for me,” I said, turning off towards Caib institute. “Good night, Ellen.”

“What? Rees, come back, wait! Rees … you swine.”

The maroon side-gate was locked. I climbed over the low, spiked fence, Llew Hopkins’s wallflowers sickly sweet, then hurried around the bowling-green and Thorpe’s bungalow.

“Rees!” she called. “Rees, wait!”

I waited inside the edge of the woods, seeing her paused in along splay of light escaping from the bungalow.

“Reesy!”

Reacting for the first time, I felt stupidly murderous, mere intent severed from the doing. Killing Ellen would be like destroying the rest of myself. Annihilation, end of the end. A man can’t hate himself that far, not unless he’s entirely lost, stone mad. Gone lunatic at past midnight in Daren woods, twenty spits and a câm from my deprived wife, a further ten câms to Emily earth goddess, dear Emily, puppeteered by goodness devoid of passion. Affectionate Emily, pansy tender Emily, warm brown across my half-blackened life.

“Where are you, Rees?”

“Here,” I said.

She kept jabbering about the children and Mrs Cynon, and I kept telling her to shut up, blundering along in the wet-grassed darkness, tension sweating, stricken desperate as a wounded rat, my imagination (affliction’s only holy) centred, pledged like the seed that made the Cross. No man escapes his cross.

Waist-deep in dripping cow parsley, I said, “Take your clothes off,” squawking scrapy-throated like a Garden of Eden rogue. “You hear me, girl, clothes off!”

“Oh, my God,” she said, and she humphed surprise matter-of-factly as a broody bird.

It wasn’t paradise regained, but thrown-out pairs make their own particular oases on wasteland. Have to, at whine’s end. Shaky, small enough victory, strolling home hand in hand, drenched as Rio Grande wet-backs. I told her about Emily Thorpe, had to tell her, driven to by resentment, by the fear of feeling inferior. She said, “Only six or seven times with Tal, because, Reesy, it was better that way than with half a dozen. Wasn’t it better? Like you and Emily, wasn’t it?”

“Something similar, Ellen,” I said.

“Two years, my love!” — thumping her hip at me, gay, two years sloughed, discarded like wrapping-paper.

“Be quiet, beaut, I’m not right yet.”

“You ah-are!”

“We’ll see,” I said.

“I love you more than ever now, Reesy.”

Around the blacked-out bungalow, down alongside the bowling-green, over the low fence, seven red carnation heads crammed inside Ellen’s brassiere (gesture of redemption, gospelly sensual), Llew Hopkin’s ’stute front lawn patch reeking of metaldehyde slug killer, and we hiked the gradient to our house, where Mrs Cynon slept bolt upright in my grandfather’s kitchen armchair, a classical portrait of matriarchal rectitude, of imperishable she-Cymru dignity.

“Percy’s been here,” she murmured, “and Taliesin Harding called in for half a minute. Not a sound from Lydia and Lizzie-fach. I’ll sleep on the couch in the back room. Don’t mind, do you?”

Ellen blanketed her warmly on the couch, whispering, her and the old lady whispering together like excited chambermaids.

Two o’clock next afternoon I waited outside the office on top pit for Ike Pomeroy.

15

Luther Howard, more persuasive than his father Watt, heeled slowly around like a witch-doctor inside a circle of clean-faced colliers.

“Now, men, let’s have it perfectly clear, shall we? We’re all agreed our original price list became null and void when we ran into this jump. Since then we’ve been on allowance, working just as hard, harder some of us in really bad conditions. My contention is this,
due
to conditions in the Seven Feet,
due
to Ike Pomeroy sticking by the old price list, it’s time we had a new working agreement. In other words it’s time for us to have a share of the cream. We’ve sent deputations, we’ve tried reason, but so far we’re up against a stone wall.” Luther’s chopping right hand stood quite still on the open palm of his left hand.

One of the men said, “Put it to the vote.”

Luther said, “Either thirty bob on top of present wages or a chance at the coal in another face, either that or arbitration. It’s up to us to make Pomeroy see things our way. Most of the blokes are married. I’m single, but as you know when it comes to victimisation by circumstances beyond our control, then by Christ it’s enough to put any man’s back up. This jump could go on for six months. We might still be on the muck next Christmas.”

“Put it to the vote,” they said.