Flame and Slag (18 page)

I day-dreamed about Ellen. Her and our two girl kiddies. Two little Stevens’s squabs. Ellen had it all planned out for Monday morning. Mrs Cynon would collect the nippers at eight-thirty. She’d take and bring Lydia home from school. All I had to do was cook the dinner by half-past five, when Ellen came from the factory. Lovely Ellen, my Winchester beaut come home to Daren, dragged home by her old man.

“Here,” panted Emily. “You look dreadful,” — peering closer, head shaking, whiffling the matching downfalls of her thick brown hair. “Has it passed over? Back to normal now, Rees? You really did look awful. Here, drop of Mr Thorpe’s Sanatogen wine. He drinks it when he feels off-colour, mostly during the winter. Exercise, I tell him, take more exercise.”

I nagged stupidly. “You’re a good woman, Emily. Shall we make — ah, break some more glass next Saturday? They’re playing away next week-end.”

“Go on home,” she said. “Rees, you must go. It’s bad, bad. I feel disgusted.”

Saturdays my only living prospect, Emily Thorpe Saturdays: “Next Saturday, please?” — hoping to mend myself, thoroughly mend, uniquely as before, cherishable, ready for Ellen, but not even confronting the real Ellen, only stranded Rees between her breasts.

She reached into the barrel for the small ball hammer. “I shan’t be your weekend habit! Go home, off home!” — hammering the bench, a frantic tantrum. “I’ll tell your wife about you, so there!”

“I’m sorry, Emily, I’m sorry.”

“Good-bye, Rees,” — whimpers trembling her girl’s mouth. “I don’t like it very much. You men never realize, never, never. Go to Ellen; she’s your wife.”

Down to the blighted pith again, stuttering, offering for the last time. “You’re a guh-ood woman, Emily, good… good woman. Suh-so long then, love.”

“It is best,” she said.

The bowls players, ingrained champions one and all, were coming away from the changing-room, and out in front of the institute. Llew Hopkins leaned over the low, iron-spiked fence, snapped off a yellow carnation and skewered it in his button-hole.

“Who won the match?” I said.

“Us, bach, our side did. Been moochin’ agen, have you, in them old woods? Not much like the other Stevenses, you’re not. Moochin’ about day after day.
Myn jawch
, you wouldn’t ketch Dai or Glyn Stevens idlin’ about the place as if they didn’t know what to do with theirselves.”

“Evening paper come yet?” I said. “Is it in the reading-room?”

“Reesy, lissen, I got certain orders from the committee, orders that don’t apply to yourself special, true; but you can’t go inside there agen till you clear up. Look now, compo, shurance an’ dole cases s’only thruppence. Thruppence, mun — who’d miss thruppence a week? See Watt Howard’s son, that boy of his Luther. Get a card off of Luther, pay your dues and from then on you’re a member same as if you was still in the lodge.”

“You’d stop me reading the newspapers, Llew?” I said.

“Makes no odds. Orders is orders.”

I said, “Llew, only a fool would argue with the ’stute committee.”

“See that Luther Howard!” his town-crier’s eruption drumming echoes under the railway bridge.

Llew Hopkins, I thought, when we bury him in Daren cemetery Caib institute will fall down, on members only. Old screw-shanks Llewelyn, short-timing nights with Ellen’s mother while her mandrel and shovel Sioni cut
pwcins
down in the Four Feet. Pair of three-yard rails and two bomby trams of muck every shift, as per the bloody price list agreement.

14

She swore, “Damn it all,” swankily feline in black Bri-nylon tights: “For God’s sake be reasonable. Pull yourself together.”

“Ellen, shut up,” I said, Tal Harding conscientiously launching another cigarette to his lower lip, alcohol hunger fazing out of his system, our shrewd little Lydia wrestling too vindictively with Elizabeth on the hearth-rug (cost-price rug, de-luxe, exotic, from Daren Co-op warehouse), some clock-face slogging out the news on BBC Wales as if trilling NCB canary mutants were adapting themselves to methane gas around the perimeter of his soul, Mrs Cynon sitting statuesque, arms folded like a tribal ikon, flat planes of age starking the bones of her temple and jaw, my swanking Ellen cat-savage in tight black tights and frilled white blouse with black shiny buttons — her working-wife rig.

“Lydia,” she warned, “you’ll get a tanning, my girl.”

Tal fish-gawped his tireless G.P.O. face at Mrs Cynon, who flickered glances at all of us before readjusting herself to the Welsh news.

“Are you coming?” insisted Ellen.

Another hair-greying year gone by, other changes, hopeful changes presumed inevitable to ameliorate the flinty gamble of profitless accumulation. Changes equated to what the Joneses have or what they want to secure. Any kind of Everyman Jones, included the endless rash of Joneses registered, classified, scaled, categorised, pruned and awed, pimped upon and pulverized, blown up and taxidermized, glamorized and catechized, spangled, finagled, derided and lauded non-stop for ever until receiver Joneses and transmitter Joneses click
Blip-beep
,
beep-blip
, associating on every level except chasing back with Holy Writ haunted from some eternal Jawa.

“Can’t, Ellen, not tonight,” I said.

“Huh, sunshine Joe. Will you look after the children?”

“I’ll sit in if Rees wants to go out later on,” advised Mrs Cynon, her and Ellen exchanging sagacities with eyescrews and ties of the mouth.

Ellen and Tal were carrying-on, as we say. It’s a needling point of inductive reasoning whether or not I fitted the cuckold index. A man cannot lose what he doesn’t want. In my case not have, the wanting futile, become wasteful on that score. Or perhaps tolerable, better defines any condition both up and down from dying. Death itself we haven’t learned to bear except transmogrified, transcendentalised, transmuted, muted anyhow in dubious-cum-worthless trances, in trances exposé full-stopping at limbo. Dark trances lit by being allowed to thank the Christ one doesn’t worship that we’re still
here
, breathing, eating and all the rest; as much of the rest as necessary being crucially necessary.

Feline Ellen, side-stepping our marriage cul-de-sac, was carrying-on with Tal. A sorry arrangement. But again, still, sorrow does make the next best thing concretely desirable,
carrying-on
a vital slap at
not
carrying-on. Jealousy, too, becomes tolerable, like a dirty handkerchief for ever in the same pocket.

They went to a Daren-posh dinner and cabaret in the television-factory canteen, proceeds in aid of the widows and children of two Caib men, Seven Feet face packers on day shift, killed when a misfired night-shift shot crashed roof on top of them. Misfires are never listed in the NCB’s Ref. No. S.F.2 records, although each record sheet has a column for misfires. Two packers killed outright. Killed outright — clean meant off the tongues of colliers since long, long before Welsh coal steamed Blue Riband liners across the Atlantic. Our enhancing verdict: killed outright.

I bathed and Mrs Cynon towelled the children, the brave old suffragette favouring Lydia, who bore sweetly pink cherubim innocence to its flesh and bones penultimate, curled on Mrs Cynon’s lap, drowsing into the old lady’s murmurous croon: “
Myfi sy’n magu’r baban, Myfi sy’n siglo’r crud, Myfi sy’n hwyan hwyan, Ac yn hwyan h
w
ˆ
y o hyd.
”

Elizabeth also fast asleep.

Mrs Cynon said, “You’ll meet Percy and Howell my nephew in Daren Social.”

“I’m going along to share a couple of pints with Charlie Page,” I said.

“Charlie’s more normal now,” she approved. “It’s a bad sign when a man drops his family to go roaming the mountains.”

“Four of his children are married, the others are working except for the youngest boy. They’re off his hands,” I said.

“Rees Stevens, you can’t say such a thing about families. Families are families, blood is thicker than water.”

Charlie was in the small upstairs lounge, patiently alone, orientally spruce, his jacket pockets stretched square from carrying tobacco tins. Every Thursday he walked to Lower Daren Central Library, chasing up some archaeological item, some clinching niche in the tell-tale matrix of man and matter. He seemed dedicated, peaceful pursuit of the Hunter and Fisher Folk his charm against pneumoconiosis. On him was the grave, unflappable absorption of a boy scholar. Having won through his little purgatory, now he was green-finger planted to last a long time. We yarned about earlier days in Caib Four Feet when Andrew Booth managed the pit. Broken colliers, like damaged soldiers, have to reason out experience, justify it in talk. Sanguine behind his pint, the interlocked tips of his fingers across his chest, Charlie said, “We’ll see the end of it all,
brawd
, you and me.”

“They’ve finished spending money on Caib,” I said, “but the coal’s coming out like a sea from Brynywawr.”

“Now then, Reesy, in point of fact I was over the other side this morning…”

“Looking for the start back on the coal, no doubt?”

“Pull the other one,” — grinning spry as a faun. “No, see, according to my information they’re in the shit as regards the Seven Feet; temporary perhaps, I’m not saying it isn’t temporary.

Remember down the Four Feet? We’d have a run lastin’ a coupla years, then she’d knock out to sixteen feet of bloody rashing, dirty old
mum-glo
stuff and no matter what we couldn’t hold the top up. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Right, Charlie; we came across a few jumps in the old Four Feet,” I said.

“Same trouble in the Seven Feet. Two conveyor faces buggered at the moment. Take my word for it, boy; I was making inquiries over there only this morning. I’m not saying they won’t drive on inside the jump like we used to in the Four Feet. Only, fact is, they got to keep other things going over in Brynywawr: coke ovens and that, lotsa dead-men in the offices, little fillies an’ all.”

I said, “Aye.”

“But they don’t count. It’s the likes of you and me that know full well how the big shouts on the Coal Board operate when a face starts losing money. No messing — agreed? They say, right, look, here’s a new cutter, here’s a new system, phones and loud speakers all over the pit, walking cogs or some fuckin’ new method of working out your pay docket. Or they’ll build us a new washery like that white elephant on Caib — agreed? But the fuckin’ coal still isn’t coming up top pit, is it? Not till they’re through the jump? Course not. Bloody impossible. Right. Close the face. Bring in contractors, drive new headings, fetch in the foreigners, aye and when was it — nineteen-fifty-five? — we put our fourteen days’ notice in ’cause the Coal Board tried to bring Italian labour into the pits. Psychology, Rees-boy, they got us taped as ’gards ways and means. We fight for shillings, they talk in millions. Christ, you must give ’em credit. I mean, Christ, look at what’s happening to pits all over the bloody country. They got us taped.” He pulled a Chinese-uncle smile, patting his chest, “Not Charlie Page, though.”

“Me neither,” I said, wishing I had the stomach to work underground again. Return, go back anywhere for Ellen. For Rees, her bought-and-paid-for ex-man,
7s. 6d
., stuck in our back room, Johnnie Vaughaning my days and nights on pensioner goolies.

“Let’s find Percy,” I suggested. “He’s with his cousin, a bloke from the NCB offices in Cardiff.”

Charlie’s lips firmed together like praying. “Go ahead you, Rees, but don’t include me in a big booze-up. Another glass an’ I’ll be on my way.”

I brought them up from the bingo hall, Howell Cynon’s baldness mooning above a huge black beard. He began blinding us with production figures and the future of coal until old Charlie said to him, “You’re on about this progress, boy, but when you come to look at it sort of from the very beginning, see, you get a different idea. Understand, Howell, I’m not disputin’, only it’s a question of shoving such things in their proper respect… perspective, I mean to say. Take a dekko at it this way. Once we were babies, then we were boys, then youngsters huntin’ for a bit of oats, then married men, then fathers rearing kids of our own, then old granchas, so on, on and on I mean. Agreed?”

“The seven ages of man,” Howell said.

“Rubbish, butty, if you’ll excuse the comment. Thass the main trouble, after short cuts all the fuckin’ time.”

“Analogies do not prove cases,” — Howell sparring cleverly, up-zooming his brilliancy, ready to expertise, whip out Sheaffer and paper.

“In my opinion, honest opinion now, I’d say we were still in the baby stage as ’gards progress,” explained Charlie, switching his intimate leathery faun grin at Percy: “Big un, I’ll swop my pneumo for your swinger. Throw my missis in as well to make up the bargain.”

Percy hit his artificial shin with his alloy stick. Topping eighteen stone, losing his eyes inside rolls of malt fat, he was gaining esteem, the block-ended relish shared amongst untried, womanless men. “Come on down to Remploy with me, Charlie,” he said. “Coal Board compo on top of earnings, you’ll do all right.”

“I’ve done my whack, Perce.”

“Ker-iste, mun, there’s ten years’ work in you yet, easy.”

“Me too, thirty years,” I said.