New Welsh Short Stories (21 page)

It takes twenty muscles to swallow. One hundred and fifty to die. How'll I get to heaven if I can't chew my gristle? I'm stuck in time like a fly in syrup. At the centre of time there is no time. It must be quite dark and very very still. Would it take a hundred years to smile? Could you wait for an embrace? Mama, dear, would you have the patience for my ‘hello'? How many muscles in my heart and mouth would it take to say goodbye?

Daddy says a blind beetle don't know the branch is curved. But don't it feel the strain in its lungs and legs? Don't its little heart go puff puff puff? Like mine is starting to do, feeding on patches of blue and snatches of perfume. Here come the nurses. Open wide for the tuneful, moonful, spoonful… Oh my god, skiddies again. What the fuck is wrong with you?

My brother's in an asylum too, wondering which version of himself is true, wondering which version of the world to take at face value. If you see me seeing you seeing me, does it mean I'm real, does it mean I exist? If you open this lid you'll see me decaying in front of you. But you have to open the lid. You have to open the lid for me to exist.
You have to come visit me.

My heart's had a coronary. Lit up like a Christmas tree with the electric shock. Words hang heavy as chocolate pennies.
Ain't she pitiful? Only speaks in doggerel. There'll have to be a funeral. Daddy's a big man. Won't visit the box. Mummy's unwell. Won't visit the box. Arise the butterflies. Come the eclipse. Come the pained leddy. Come the big admirable. It's gone very black but there's a crack at the top of the box like a pin
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prick star. Father, at last! Daddy come fetch me on the flaming wings of liberty. Out this box. Please. Out this box. It's not that hard. All you got to do is tick this box. Just tick this box.

Hey, Dad. Here's a thing. Here's a little
gedankenexperiment
for you. You're dead like me. Your brain's embalmed in a cookie jar in the back of an old Ford. Mr Albert's brain travels over the states in an old jalope. Candied hunks for sale! Fifteen per cent more glial cells! Yum! Thinner cerebral cortex! Fewer calories! The rest of you's tearing through the fabric of space.
Your hair's in complete disarray with all that bouncing on the trampoline and you still don't wear any socks. How does it feel to fly through space in a glass elevator? You're desperate to arrive at this little star. The one I'm sitting on. May I remind you this is a very small star and it only fits one. It may take you twenty years to arrive, another ten for those long expressive fingers to grasp an essential shining point.
It'll take me ten seconds to prise you off, an eternity watching you fall. I know that a maniacal genius is not philosophically responsible for his crimes but it don't mean I want him sitting on my star, don't mean I want to take tea with him. Au revoir.

Dang! I think I ticked the wrong box. One said up, the other said down, another said round and round and round in a giant Japanese mushroom cloud.

HAPPY FIRE

Rachel Trezise

The ringleader's a simple
-
looking boy, stout legs poured into shiny, skin
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tight trousers like sausage meat into casings, ears that stick out, one more than the other. He struts up close to the plate glass, close enough that we can see his rough, rosy skin, his sad, flaccid mouth. The other kids amass in a jumble behind him, cackling as he swipes his forefinger from one side of his neck to the other. ‘Dead, you lot,' he says. He pokes his chilli
-
pepper tongue out of his mouth.

It's nothing, this.
We're used to this, the five of us, lined up in a row facing the window like Asters in a flower bed, Ruth plonked at the end, asleep in her wheelchair.
The kids back away, bored, shrinking behind the sea wall. I narrow my eyes at the bicycle path, beyond it the wet sand and black swell. The great blast furnaces of the steelworks are just out of view. The ornamental grass shivers in the pebbled courtyard. The kids are coming back, the ringleader's face blunt with resolve. He has something in his hand, the other kids bowed over with laughter, shrieking now and again. The boy holds the object to the glass, white and papery, an adult nappy. It's one of Vessie's nappies, purloined from the rubbish vat in the courtyard. Mint wrappers cling to its sticky tabs. ‘Dead, you lot,' he roars and with his other hand he shows us a single unlit match. He points at the aluminium vat and mimics an explosion, his arms flung, silent
-
movie
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melodramatic. ‘Dead you lot. Up in flames.' It's me they're after, I think. It's me who's conjured this. I feel wobbly suddenly, nauseous, as if I'm standing on the top of a very high building, as if I'm falling in love.

Vessie seems to register the match. Or recognise the nappy. She screams, a raw, clattering aria, her arms gripping the Queen Anne style chair, fingernails boring into the leather. Kylie's the nurse on duty. She comes running out of the staffroom, Vessie's tin of
Walkers shortbread under her arm. She opens the biscuits, the tin clang stemming Vessie's yelps. Apparently Vessie associates the sound with her seldom
-
seen son. He brought a tin for her once, just before she got really bad. She takes the shortbread finger from the young girl's hand and flips it into her mouth; a thumbtack to a magnet. She gnashes her false teeth like some mechanical apparatus, grinding the biscuit to dust in seconds.

‘Ten more minutes, ladies,' Kylie says, as if talking to children at a playground. She sashays back to the staffroom.

‘She'll get a nasty case of lumbago in them heels,' Bronwen says, watching her go. ‘That's how I got mine, wearing high heels behind the bar. Now I can't stand upright.'

‘
Your
lumbago's nothing,' Clare tells her. ‘Try lugging wardrobes downstairs your whole working life.
The doctor had me on diamorphine for twenty years.'
To me she says, ‘Furniture removals, see. The only woman in the country when I started.'

‘Wardrobes?' Bron says, caustic. ‘Give me
wardrobes
any day.'

Clare's tired. She only sighs at the barb. She smiles wearily at me, oblivious to my guilt, to my part in the kid's fire
-
starting threats.

A memory now, of the old Thornbush smallholding. Twenty
-
two acres. Chickens and pigs. The farmhouse was slowly crumbling, buckets for rainwater on the landing. Posies of mildew flowering in every corner. The whistling kettle cemented with grease to the hob of the Occidental Automatic. The view from my window was all field; Devon hedging and pig
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wire marking boundaries like crossword grids, no humans in sight. Two miles to the nearest village, four miles to the nearest comprehensive school. My father used to drive me every day to St Brigid's in his mud
-
splattered Land Rover. He'd be waiting on Newton Avenue when I got out in the afternoon. Port Talbot felt like an exotic country choked full of colours and complexity, an India to my Great Britain. The girls in my class went to the Pavilion on Friday nights, an extra mass on Sunday evening. Those long afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, knitting patches for blankets with my mother. I was lonelier than God.

One morning in early August 1951, a red
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hot Saturday, I'd promised to meet a couple of girls I'd acquainted in the school canteen for a picnic on Aberavon Beach. But my parents had already decided to take the swine to market in Sennybridge. I had to stay home to do the day's chores. I'd telephone the eldest girl, Dolores; I'd apologise for my absence. I hoped they wouldn't shun me. I hoped they'd invite me again to future outings. I went to the hall and lifted the telephone's receiver, my free hand gripping the lip of the console table.
Without warning I burst into tears, every flexor in my doughy fifteen
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year
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old body seething at the injustice life had dealt me: an only child, a farm girl, the maltreated heroine banished from the ball. My fingers seemed to move of their own accord, like a planchette on a Ouija board. Into the dip of the void nearest the dial stop. I pivoted the dial plate to its full extent. Nine. Nine. And in one electric moment of screw
-
it
-
all
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abandon, I hinged it back fully a third and final time.

The operator asked me which emergency service I needed. ‘A fire engine,' I told her unequivocally, a poltergeist in me speaking. ‘High flames observed at Thornbush Farm.' I banged the receiver down. I climbed to the top of the house and out through my parents' bedroom window. A finely stirred blend of accomplishment and fear pushing me up onto the roof
,
where I waited, crouched at the corner of the left gable, still wearing my petrol
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blue tea dress. ‘Where's the fire?' the ladderman asked, looking about, when he arrived. He was tall, blond. A big, tall, blond boy. Black felt topcoat, parallel rows of gleaming brass buttons. I held onto the chimney stack and shrugged. Toed the edge of a loose tile. ‘Just a cat. Got down before me.' Couldn't he see the fire? The great blaze was
in
me. He shook his head, holding the ladder firm for me to descend.

‘What school do you go to?' he asked as I neared the base. ‘St Brigid's, I'll bet.'

I jumped the last rung, his big hand clamping my forearm, sizzling currents racing through my blood vessels. I smoothed my skirt, my neck and cheeks burning. ‘How did you know?' The small crowd of firemen behind us cheered. The ladderman winked. His blue larval eyes opened wide, drinking the light. ‘You Catholic girls, wild as snakes.'

I became addicted to that attention, accustomed to the smile. I rang for the fire brigade every time my parents went to Sennybridge. I did it in favour of picnics in Aberavon and coach trips to Porthcawl. The ladderman was wrong. Not all of the girls at St Brigid's were wild. It was only me who possessed the audacity to keep telling those sorts of lies. Just to be able to see his face, to feel his tight grip on my body. Some days he joked and laughed with me and I knew that the feeling was mutual. Despite the wedding band on his ring
-
finger he longed for me as much as I did him; the pair of us like a dried garden waiting for rain. Other days he was busy attending real fires and he merely tolerated me, his smile shrivelled to a simper. It went on for two whole years, this unusual pseudo
-
romance, a small knot of a secret, lodged like a pine nut at pit of my belly.
And then the operator refused to deal with me. Dolores was engaged to be married. I spent my days and nights running about the farm, checking for fire hazards. If a real blaze sprang I knew the fire brigade wouldn't show. The livestock would perish, roasted to ash.

Kylie's back, with the work experience girl in tow. Fleece sweater and leggings, cherry
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red lipstick catastrophic against a light egg
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shell skin tone. She takes the handles of Ruth's wheelchair and swiftly twists her around, the rubber tyres numb on the check
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rib carpet tiles. Kylie claps as if rounding sheep up. ‘Time for bed now girls. And it's Wednesday tomorrow!' she says, voice breathy.
‘Nigel from the social'll be here with his bingo dabbers. What d'you think about that, eh?'

‘Not much,' Bronwen tells her. ‘A tin of roses for first prize? Down the club you'd get a joint of sirloin for Sunday, a bottle of Blue Nun at least.'

‘You're not in the club now, Bron,' Kylie says good
-
naturedly.

‘Well I know I'm not in the club,' Bronwen says, irritated. ‘I'd have had a good drink if I was, wouldn't I?'

In my room, the little flowers from the sunken garden dunked in drinking tumblers. The mantelpiece clock from Thornbush. My knitting needles and wool. Four books on the bedside; a bible, an old mass missal, the collected poems of Idris Davies and a daft and tattered paperback, a Mills & Boon, the cover showing some brown
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bodied Adonis scooping a girl onto a motorbike. Pure rubbish. But you can get them from the mobile library and read them in your sleep. It looks like a pile of things saved from a flood. What are these
things
doing
here
, I think, and I remember: Two days after Geraint passed away his daughter turned up, Teutonic hair, arms swinging. I'd met her once before, ten years earlier, when she'd come to ask for money for a deposit on a wedding venue. She was divorced now, she said. She wanted to know how much longer I'd be in the house. Her father was useful to her again in death. She'd booked an appointment for me at the Cilygofid retirement home off Heol
-
y
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Nant. She'd booked a day off work to take me. She played my forgetfulness up to the saleswoman on duty. ‘She's left the gas ring on overnight a few times.' She turned, grinning at me, her little square teeth talcum
-
powder white. ‘That's right, isn't it, Georgia? After my dad died? That's what you said?' Alzheimer's had been in the news. Dementia was fashionable.