New Welsh Short Stories (2 page)

I cracked the tab open slowly, letting it foam and splutter. I didn't drink any at first. I stood and held the can in my fist and listened. It seemed real quiet. I was used to the sounds of Gwilym, our neighbour on the right, puttering around, all through the night. I'd get up at some crazy hour – I'm pretty much an insomniac – and the first thing I'd do was listen out to see if he was up, too. The dark of rural Wales, the quiet lonesomeness of these small towns, can get to you. Past midnight, there's nothing happening, and nowhere to go. No all
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night diner. No cafe. No Mac's or 7
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11. No bars that stay open, and no gas stations, either. No people or light or signs of life. And so at night, when I couldn't sleep, I didn't have much. But I had Gwilym, and the sounds he made. The walls between these old terraces, they're real thin. I would hear his radio, or his footsteps on the stairs, or his voice as he talked on the phone. He had a sister who lived in Alberta, where my family comes from. He could call her up late, because of the time difference. He must also have had a sliding closet door. I never saw it, but I heard it. I heard it rolling back and forth, opening and closing, as he fetched things.

I'd always been able to detect those sounds, ever since we'd moved in. Now, nothing. I took a sip of beer, warm and metallic, and listened to that nothingness, straining against it. I kept hoping to hear something – anything – which of course made no damn sense. But then I did. I did hear something. I heard that same clack
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clack
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clack, coming from the backyard. I'd almost forgotten what I'd come down to do. I went out there with my beer. The breeze was still blowing – hot and blustery and sort of tempestuous. It wasn't normal, that kind of weather. Not for Wales. Then there was that clacking. It was coming from Gwilym's yard.

I went around the fence, over to his side, ready to find whatever I was going to find.

*

Gwilym had lived on the terrace longer than anybody. In fact, he'd been born on it. He'd moved away, during his stint on the freighters, but when he'd finished with that he returned to Llanidloes, and bought his old house back, his mother's house. Like ours, it was a two
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up two
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down factory worker's cottage. He had worked in the local factory until it closed. I worked in a factory, too – up the road in Newtown – and before that, back home, I'd worked on a fishing barge. So we had that between us. We had Alberta, too, on account of his sister. He knew all the towns, with their odd names: Drumheller and Medicine Hat and Stony Plain and Black Diamond. We would talk about those places, and what the weather was like over there, and how the Flames and Oilers were doing. When we talked, we talked over the fence between our yards. Gwilym would lean on it, his arms folded across the top, and doing that pulled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the anchor tattoo on his forearm.

I have a tattoo, too – but on my back, so I don't think he ever saw it.

Since he'd been around so long, and was retired, he'd become a kind of caretaker on the terrace. When something went wrong in our house – or anybody's house – he could fix it. He knew those houses, had seen the work done on them over the years. He'd even done some himself: after the factory closed down, he worked as a builder, on a casual basis. He'd added some of the bathrooms, fitted the kitchens. He had boarded up all the fireplaces, when that was the thing to do, and he had opened them up again, exposing the old brickwork, after the country cottage look came back into fashion. He had helped us do that to our place, and fit our woodburner. And lay our flooring. When I tore up the carpet in our living room, I found old quarry tiles underneath. They were all damp and cracked and there were earthworms coming up between them. It turned out those tiles had been laid on bare soil. Gwilym said that had been the way, back in the day. He and I dug them all out of there, put in a layer of damp
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proofing, and fitted new hardwood planking. There were other things, too. He showed me how to replace a washer on our leaky faucet, how to thaw the drainpipe when it froze up last winter, and how to re
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point the brickwork on the windward side of the house. Sometimes it seemed as if our house would have damn near fallen apart if it wasn't for Gwilym.

When we went on vacation, for weeks or months at a time – gallivanting around Europe, or heading back home to see my family – he would cut our lawn, and tend our garden, without us asking him. Some people, they might say we were taking advantage of the old guy, and maybe that's true. I'll admit that. But if you tried to stop him, or thank him, he would wave it off. He wouldn't even really acknowledge it. He was like the shoemaker's elves, in that story.
You'd look away, or go away, and something would get done. The yard always looked better when we came back from holiday than when we'd left. But never as good as his. His lawn had always been real tidy, damn near immaculate: the edges neat, the flower beds rich and fertile and free from weeds, the grass cropped short as a putting green. Now, though, it was becoming overgrown. It had only been a week since he'd died, but he hadn't been able to do any yard work awhile before that. And in the spring, in this kind of weather, nature is positively explosive. The grass was already a few inches high, sticking up in thick patches, and dandelions had sprung up around the edges. Moss was creeping across the paving stones, which were dotted with garden snails and big brown banana slugs. I had to be careful, picking my way between them. I hate stepping on the damn things in the dark.

All the gardens on the terrace are narrow – only six feet across – but they go a ways back. At the end of his, Gwilym had built a shed. The shed light was on, the door open. It was fanning in the breeze. That was what was making the clacking. Gwilym had never left his shed open. At first, I figured it must have been local kids. They sometimes come up from the football pitch below our terrace, after drinking in the stands. I thought maybe they'd snuck in, to see if the old guy had anything worth taking. They wouldn't have done it while he was alive – it's a real nice town, in that way – but maybe now that he was gone, they figured it would be okay.

I stepped in there. The workbench was clear, the drawers all shut, the tools hanging from hooks on the wall, his lawnmower propped upright in the corner. The shed was as tidy as always, as tidy as he'd left it. Nothing seemed to be amiss, or out of place. I figured the door must have been left open by the surveyor, or appraisal agent, or whatever you call them. I'd seen him earlier that day, poking around: a beefy guy in a grey suit, one size too small. He'd had a pen and a clipboard with him, taking stock and making notes. Reckoning what they could get for the place. Gwilym's sister – the one over in Canada – was going to sell it, furniture and all, at a low price for a quick turnover. He didn't have any other relatives left, and nobody in Wales.

I snapped off the light, took a sip of beer, and stepped back outside. Over the fence, in our yard, I saw movement. Somebody – a shadow – was floating down the walk. I stood still. I didn't know who it was. Not at first. But then by the shape I could tell it was Lowri. That bulge gave her away. Her robe barely covered it. She had both hands folded across her abdomen, carrying the weight of her belly before her like a medicine ball.

I put down my beer can – tucking it in a flower pot – and called her name. It took her a moment to figure out I was in Gwilym's yard. When she did, she came over to meet me at the fence, so that we were facing each other across it, like Gwilym and I used to – only now I was standing where he'd always stood.

‘I woke up and you weren't there,' she said.

‘I couldn't sleep again.'

‘I was worried. I'd been having a dream.'

‘I thought I heard something. I tried to tell you.'

‘I don't remember that.'

‘It was Gwilym's shed door, banging in the breeze.'

‘He was in my dream. Gwilym was.'

The way she said it got my attention.

‘What kind of dream was it?' I asked.

‘One of those kind.'

She started telling me about it. It was some dream. She said Gwilym had been in bed with me and her, lying between us. He was old and gnarled and yellow
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skinned – like he'd been near the end – but also very small, and healthy
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looking. It was as if the wrinkles were a baby's wrinkles, and as if the yellow tinge to his skin was from the sort of jaundice that a baby gets, not the cancer.

She said, ‘He was old and young, at the same time.'

‘Like Benjamin Button,' I said.

But Lowri didn't get the reference, or didn't care about it. She was unconsciously rubbing her belly, like a crystal ball, and looking past me, towards the hump
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backed hills.

‘Maybe it means we're having a boy,' she said.

‘That's not what the scans seemed to show.'

‘The scans aren't always right.'

‘I know that. I read about that.'

I folded my arms, and leaned on the fence, in a pose a lot like Gwilym's.
I wasn't sure about having a boy.
I wasn't sure about it at all.
We'd been expecting a girl. I could leave most of it to Lowri, if it was a girl. If it was a boy, I'd have to teach him things. How to throw a ball. How to hold his hockey stick. How to drive and how to tie a tie. I didn't know if I had it in me, all of that. I didn't even know how to tie a tie.

‘It was just a dream,' I said.

She was still gazing at the hills. I couldn't make out her face. All I could see was her hair, in the light of the streetlamp. It formed this wild tangle around her head, thicker than it had ever been. That was because of the hormones. The pregnancy hormones, they trigger all these changes in a woman – another thing nobody had ever told me. They had made Lowri's hair fuller, her breasts bigger, her skin sort of shiny and radiant. It was downright terrifying, all those changes. Standing there in the dark, my wife didn't look like my wife anymore. It was as if she'd been taken away, and replaced with this other wife, like a changeling. One of the faeries, maybe. She closed her eyes and inhaled through her nostrils, taking a deep breath.

She said, ‘I haven't been outside at night for so long.'

‘It's a weird one. So warm and windy.'

‘Everything is different at night.'

‘Sure – you can't see anything.'

She looked at me, an appraising look. And maybe a bit disappointed.

‘Don't stay out too long,' she said.

‘I'll be up in a bit.'

She drifted back the way she'd come, fading into the shadows. I stood for a spell, hands on my hips, staring at the yard and thinking about her dream. If she'd dreamed it, it could come true. I knew all about Lowri and her dreams. We didn't talk about these things but they were accepted. Part of the package that had come with marrying her. Maybe she really was some kind of faerie. If she'd dreamed it, we could be having a boy.

I went inside to get the mickey of Bell's that I had stashed under the cereal cupboard. It was the last of my whisky. I'd stopped buying whisky, when we saw that blue line, when the first test came back positive. I was trying to stick to beer, as part of my plan. Beer slows you down and fills you up. With whisky, you have a few shots and you feel as if you're just getting started. But if I was going to have a son I needed some of that whisky. I brought it outside and sat on the bench that overlooked our yard and I drank from the flask, the glass cool on my lips, the liquor hot and molten in my throat.

The grass in our yard was even longer than in Gwilym's. It had grown so long it had taken to flopping over under its own weight. There weren't just dandelions, but buttercup and dock weed and forget
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me
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not. The flower beds were tangled up with shrubs and plants that I couldn't even name. A writer had lived in the house before us, and she'd planted all that stuff. Our side of the fence was overrun by Russian vine. And at the back of the yard, if you can believe it, was a poison tree. Some kind of oleander. It was all twisted and gnarled, with a few brittle leaves, and looked as if it carried a curse. I was supposed to uproot it and get rid of it before the baby arrived. If a little kid got up close to that tree, and ate one of the leaves, he would die. That's what the estate agent had told us, with a solemn expression, on the day we signed the mortgage contract. But I'd never gotten around to digging the damned thing up, or tending the garden, or starting on any of the other jobs I'd been meaning to do.

Even the sidewalk, right where I was sitting, was a job. The concrete was all cracked and buckled. I'd been meaning to repair it, and had asked Gwilym the best way to go about it. He knew, and he offered to help me, too. He'd even booked a cement mixer for us, and ordered supplies. But then he got sick. He got too sick to do that, or anything else, either.

On the sidewalk at my feet, a snail was crawling along, leaving a trail behind it that glistened in the dimness. I watched it curl and stretch, inch by inch, with its feelers out, quivering and sensing for a way forward, groping blindly. I didn't know what it was looking for, that snail. I didn't even know what snails like to eat. Leaves, maybe. Or minerals in the dirt. I splashed a little whisky in its path, and waited to see what would happen. It came up to the dribble of liquid, which must have been as big as a pond to it, and stopped. Its feelers quavered. Then it turned and began to navigate around. I held out the bottle, over the snail, and tilted it until the liquid reached the neck, near the top. I knew what would happen. Or I thought I knew. It would be like acid, or poison. But I didn't have it in me to do that.