Mercy Seat (2 page)

The next day, a Sunday, I waited at the gate of old man Pugh's yard at noon, ankle-deep in mud, until the frantic barking of his dogs drew him out of one of the low, rusting sheds. Tall, completely bald and stooping in the fine, blowing drizzle amongst his yapping border collies looked as if he'd stepped straight out of the nineteenth century: above his high, caked boots he wore a narrow black suit, shiny with God knows how many years of use, and a grey, collarless shirt that must once have been black too, buttoned tight at the neck. His white face was long and horse-like, sprouting even whiter, sparse whiskers
about the chin, and his pale, watering eyes looked as if they'd been soaked and stained in some antique wooden wash-tub with his shirt. I wondered if he was still dressed in mourning for his son, or if this was his Sunday outfit, but in fact through all the time I knew him, occasional changes of shirt or the addition of a black, tent-like rain cape aside, I never saw him dressed differently.

He stared towards some far-off point behind me, somewhere in the steep green woods across the deep cut of the valley, as I gabbled about needing a few months of work, and my competence at labouring, basic handiwork, electrics and so on. I'd given it up as a wasted journey by the time I'd run out of things to say, but when I finally mentioned that all I needed was enough money to feed myself through the week and a place to sleep, his eyes locked back into focus and he shifted his colourless stare full on to my face.

Twenty pounds, he said, then shifted the wet gravel in his throat and spat. Twenty pounds a week.

I didn't reply. I hadn't hoped for much, but even in those days the amount was barely enough to live on.

And breakfast, see. He made a slow, sideways chewing motion with his long chin. And supper, maybe, he added doubtfully, if you make it for all of us, and it's not some kind of muck you serve up. Cawl, we like.

I nodded, though I knew only the basics of frying and boiling. Where would I stay? I asked.

He grunted and jerked his head back towards the shed he'd emerged from, then turned without opening the gate and stumped toward it.

I unbolted the heavy steel bars and followed, the dogs swirling around my legs and almost tripping me into the
filth. To my great relief he carried on past the ramshackle hut and led me through a screen of hazels to a narrow, sheltered patch of grass where a bulbous little caravan sat, once white but greening over now with a thin skin of mould.

Old Pugh halted before it and waited for me to catch up.

I stopped at his shoulder and we both gazed at the fat tin mushroom as if it had just fallen from the moon. God knows how he'd managed to set it there: I could see no clear path through the stunted trees all around. It might have sprouted up in the rain that cool wet morning. The dogs had vanished along the way. I hadn't noticed them going, but it was very quiet now, the rain too soft to make a sound on the roof of the caravan.

It's not locked, he said.

And so I worked as a farm-hand, or a shepherd as I liked to think of it, through the spring and early summer of 1985, in a place hardly touched by three quarters of a century, rounding up stray ewes on the bald hills, or coppicing the tangled blackthorns and hazels with a rusty blade from the barn, or sweating over another bubbling pot of mutton or rabbit cawl in the gloomy, brooding evenings. Sometimes the remaining son, Meirion – a slow, silent hulk of a man – would be set to work alongside me on the heavier jobs, but most days old Pugh kept us apart. I was glad: once, hammered awake out of the caravan's damp bed in the early hours to help with spring lambing in the barn, I watched Meirion kneel beside a panting, glassy-eyed ewe that was struggling to give birth, force his huge thumb a little way inside the bulging vent and break the newborn's trapped neck with a single sharp press.
Marw-anedig
, he grunted to the old man who was busy with another birth,
and leered up at me when he heard his father groan and curse. I knew he'd have been more than happy to do the same to my own spine, and turned away, saying nothing. I suppose he wanted the farm to fail – or at least wanted the old man to give up at last and sell, freeing him into some other imagined life. Or it was an impulse, and there was no more sense in it than in the way he would wander the boundary hedges some evenings, thrashing at the birds' nests in them with a heavy sickle.

It was late June of that year, a warm day of tall blue skies, when I first met Jenny. It must have been a Sunday because I had the whole afternoon and evening to myself – Sunday was the one night in the week I didn't need to brew up more cawl because of the heavier midday meal – and as usual on any day off that was fine I'd walked the mile or so downhill to Devil's Bridge where I could catch the bus or hitch a ride into town. From the promenade I'd climbed Constitution Hill and meant to follow the cliff-top path to Clarach Bay, but the sound of talk and laughter lured me down like a siren song from the main path to a small rocky cove. Six or seven young men and women – students I supposed, finished with their exams – were sunbathing and swimming from a long dark platform of stone. I remember being surprised at myself, embarrassed in fact, for needing company, or even just the spectacle of it, so badly. But the truth is I was growing strange in the pale little capsule of Pugh's caravan: often when I found myself needing to interact in the simplest ways with people outside the world of the farm or the solitude of the hills – buying a bus ticket, say, or the rare luxury of a newspaper – I'd be suddenly tongue-tied, overcome with a sense of trying to
communicate through a wall of glass, or fathoms of water.

I must have sat watching them, drinking up the sound of their laughter and banter, for a good half hour. They noticed me, but paid no attention. I'd closed my eyes and was drifting into a half-sleep when Jenny, maternal even then, touched me on the shoulder and laughed when I startled. She was holding a half-full bottle of wine, and pushed it towards me as my eyes adjusted to the dazzle.

Are you finished too? she said.

Oh. No, I managed to answer. No, I'm not a student.

She eyed me more closely, grinning, and gestured with the bottle again, though all I could think about was the light cotton skirt fluttering against her legs, almost transparent in the sun, and the cups of her pink bikini top above it, filled with the heavy cream of her breasts. I'd never been with any girl or woman, and though I can smile at my ogling now, on that sunstruck afternoon her bare skin amazed me like a vision. Go on – have a drink, she insisted and then, when I finally took the wine from her, eased herself down to sit next to me. She spoke with a warm, thick valleys lilt, and I was amazed at the wave of homesickness – all its choking brine – that the sound of her voice sent crashing through me. I sat and listened like a child.

Though she was curious to see it, I never let Jenny visit the caravan. The thought of Meirion prowling outside with his sickle was one good reason, and my toilet situation was the other, since all I had was a tin pail under the dripping hazels – bracing but unromantic. Instead, we met in town every Sunday after that, rain or shine. She lived in a student bedsit guarded by a skinny, walking corpse of a landlady who rented out most of the rooms in
her narrow three-story townhouse near the station. Mrs Horace was her name, The Horror to her tenants, mainly because she felt duty-bound to lurk outside their doors, clearing her throat noisily, if she knew one of her girls had a male visitor. But Jenny rented a basement room and her front window was a simple hop down from the pavement; it opened just wide enough for me to squirm in across a desk and onto the floor, so most often we were left in peace. Until Jenny's graduation later that summer I think we were blindly happy with each week's stolen few hours – the urgent, furtive romance of it all. Jenny being the first girl I ever properly knew, or thought I knew, I had nothing to compare it to, anyway.

In the weeks after her graduation – an English degree – Jenny toyed with the idea of moving back to Merthyr where her mother taught at the local primary school, and maybe getting work as a classroom assistant while she figured out her options for the future. But soon after, the first chill of autumn began to blow in for blustery wet days on end and Jenny took it into her head that it would kill me to stay out at the farm into winter. I laughed at her predictions of the caravan blowing down the mountain with me like a rattle inside it, or of my freezing to death in the first cold snap, but underneath my joking I was a little frightened too; not so much of the weather, but of the long dark nights to come with only the old man and Meirion for human company, each orbiting the flimsy caravan, field to stony field, in their own private, deeper winters. One Sunday at the end of September, Jenny told me she'd decided to take a secretarial job with the local council, and wanted us to look for a place together, maybe a bedsit big enough for two, and then a flat, later, if I could find work in town that paid well
enough. She was already pregnant in fact, but hadn't told me. Out of pride I told her I'd think about it through the week, but really there was no choice to make.

The day I left, old Pugh said nothing as he handed over my twenty pound note, but his long chin moved with that way he had of chewing on air, or on whatever words he kept locked in his mouth. After a moment's hesitation he took a small folding knife from his pocket – a stubby, heavy, old-fashioned thing with a worn bone handle and a thick blade curved like a hawk's beak. It was the kind of hook you might use to dig a sharp stone from a hoof, and he handed it to me in a clumsy, thrusting movement. I was astonished, but took it from him with a mumbled
diolch
. I kept it with me for years, until it was stolen along with my backpack while I slept in some barn in the Basque hills; long enough I'm sure to have outlived the old man.

*

Within a week I'd found work – part-time but steady – at a warehouse on the edge of town. It was owned by Mr Anzani, who ran a cafe and delicatessen on the High Street but made his real money from wholesale supply: before the big chains like Costco and Makro took over and squeezed him back into retail, he was the hub for just about every coffee shop and deli on the Ceredigion coast, and inland to Lampeter. He'd come to Wales from Sicily as a child, and was fond of telling me how his first job had been as a delivery boy for his uncle, an ex-prisoner of war who'd stayed on after his release and opened an ice-cream shop in Mountain Ash, just six or seven miles from where I was born. That tickled him. I didn't tell him
my father must have bought ice-cream there when he was a boy because he'd been brought up in a nearby street, but the thought of it unsettled me and Anzani's reminiscences always left me restless for hours after I escaped them.

My first day there a little old woman, stooped and frail, but dressed very smartly in dark maroon, came in off the street and abused me in Italian before shuffling back out again. By my second week in the job she was turning up quite regularly, and was getting more confident, haranguing me in English too. By then I'd found out from one of the van drivers that she was Anzani's ancient, crazy mother and her fussing was because the business had been milked in some small way by the warehouseman I'd replaced. So I paid no attention. At least it broke the monotony of the work a little. If I was high up amongst the crates taking inventory she'd get particularly infuriated, and would break into shrill, stilted English. Hey!You! Why you sitting up there like a mohnkey?

I'm counting the crates, Mrs Anzani. I need to see behind the crates.

What? What are you saying? Why don't you get down? Get down you lazy mohnkey!

We went through the same routine at least once a week, and in the end I'd get tired and climb down and shift a few boxes to the loading bay to calm her down.

I lied to Jenny about the hours I worked: my first lie to her, and harmless enough, I thought. I liked to be able to wander off and have time alone after my shifts, time where nobody knew or cared what I might be doing or where I might be found. It was a token freedom, I suppose. The warehouse stood at the foot of a hill, next to the clatter of a tyre-fitter's and near the furthest point of a straggling,
scrubby golf course that had its club-house above the harbour, half a mile away. There was rarely anyone around except for the slow moving mechanics and maybe the odd rambler cutting in from the coast across the golf links and ambling back into town. After finishing my shift I'd often make my way up the grassy slope to the ninth hole with its tattered red flag and then climb a little way beyond it, easing sideways between bushes of gorse and broom, to a small clearing, a sun-trap in the late afternoons, where I could sit and daydream, or brood. Sometimes I'd steal a bottle or two of Peroni and a jar of olives to take with me. Until the first hard frosts set in, the gorse around the clearing was often busy with big, black heather gnats: clumsy fliers, trailing their long, broken-looking legs behind them, bumping from one late yellow flower to another. I liked to watch them stumbling amongst the thorns; they seemed drunk and peaceful from the sweet coconut smell of the blossoms.

We were in Jenny's single bed when she told me she was pregnant. By then she was two months gone and already through the morning sickness, which I'd noticed but had been too ignorant to understand. You were still working on the farm when it must have happened, she said. It was the day we walked to Clarach and it rained, and the cows followed us through the field when we took a shortcut on the way back. Remember how frightened I was? I thought we'd slip in the mud and they'd trample us.

I didn't answer and we lay there silent a while in the dark. It was a warm night for late autumn and neither of us could sleep. After a time she said, I'm keeping it, anyway, whatever happens.

I turned onto my back and stared up at the low ceiling. It occurred to me that I'd never noticed anything specific about the room before. It was simply the place where I came to lose myself in Jenny, and all its physical features had always been a blur of vague impressions: its stuffy warmth, its lingering, faint smells of perfume, nail varnish and sandalwood joss sticks, the wobbling desk in front of the window that every Sunday I wriggled my stomach across and over; the dip in the middle of the bed where the springs had failed, probably years before we ever had the use of it. And the light shade, I noticed now: colourless in the near dark, but pale and fringed with short, braided cords, some of them tangled. It looked oddly familiar and I wondered if my grandparents had a similar light shade in their own bedroom. I wondered what colour it became in the day.