Flame and Slag Read online

  Ellen blew, “Ugh,”— disinterested, familiar as a guerrilla girl whiffing hand-rolled fags in the company of righteous bandits, and I thought anxiously: John Vaughan, what have you done to your strange daughter?

  “Starting in the post office tomorrow?” I said.

  “Tuesday morning, Rees.”

  “Queer day to start in a new job, Ellen?”

  “I shan’t be here tomorrow.”

  Shut it, I thought, leave the girl alone — Caib’s banksman buzzing three signals again, the aerial muck-buckets floating up Waunwen like a brochure glimpse of Switzerland, trip-levered at the last pylon high up on the mountain, regular spews of muck showering down, the quadruple-humped slag tip itself older than any man in Daren. Older than Caib pit.

  “I’ve arranged to go shopping in Swansea tomorrow. Shopping and visiting some relatives. We’ll probably spend the evening in Three Cliffs if the day is warm.”

  “Last fling before old Dicko Harding puts your nose to the grindstone.” I said.

  “Tal Harding is driving me down, actually.”

  “He’s married. Old Dicko gave him the bungalow behind Caib institute.”

  Ellen said, “Married! Tal seems to be having the kind of experience my father had with my mother.”

  “But Tal’s wife, she always bounces back. It’s been going on for three or four years. Like cat and dog they are.”

  “Not any more, Rees. He’s divorcing her.”

  I said, “Ah, you can’t go wrong working for his old man. Dicko owns about ninety houses here in Daren, and he won’t last much longer. He’s too crabby to draw breath.”

  “Come inside,” she said. “You’ve walked this far.”

  “The Daren tongues will be after you and Tal Harding. Better wait until he’s divorced,” I said.

  “Tal Harding doesn’t mean anything to me. In you go, tough guy”— impulsively butting my shoulder with hers, harmlessly vindictive, like a Brownie’s revenge.

  Riven as a burnt-out aesthete, vitality siphoned up, drained away from inside his skull, John Vaughan lay baby-limp on a small, brand-new settee in Number 9 Thelma Street. You wouldn’t recognize him from the stark, owl-faced photograph in Caib institute committee room. He looked petrified, petrifying, his tiny dog-fretful blue eyes ambushed below white, furry eyebrows. His lamby curled haircut belonged to Arcadia, bulked milkily white behind his ears and on his neckline. Rivose creases dug into the putty-grey flesh of his jowls and brow, like the drying-out carcass of a hairless, foetal mammal.

  “Some other time,” I whispered. “Don’t disturb him.”

  She called softly, pleasantly sarcastic, “Dad, do you remember this handsome fellow?”

  Pleasure seemed to groan into his dog-beaten little eyes. “Well, well, mun, it’s Dai Stevens all over again. Ellen, my glasses… ta, bach, ta”, and I heard the light knock of his bony nose against the spectacles. “To the tee!” Ululant conviction smoothed the raspy anguish from his voice. “Dai Stevens will never die while you’re alive, boy! Glad to meet you! Your father was the best butty a man could wish to have. Duw, aye, now you’ve made my day. Sit down, sit down by here,” feebly swinging his legs off the settee. “Shake hands, Rees, there, put it there. Well, myn Jawch, Dai’s son, the living image.”

  “They say I resemble him more than my mother”—conveniently agreeing, glancing up at Ellen, sharing something, the power, contracted and shared from that exact moment. Because then it came, was there, soaring like a needle of smoke through a stitch-hole in Time, her pale face inscrutably gentle, lightening, trysting the moment; John Vaughan sitting stiff-armed with his workless hands on his thighs, his fleecy head bent, mouth tucked, huhrring and hissing emphysema. Bronchitis: her white lie.

  “Please lay down again, Mr Vaughan,” I said, senselessly cursing to myself, knowing he’d break, die, never survive the wet, the snow and fog of Daren winters. “I’ll call in again; we’ll have a chat when you’re feeling better.”

  Ellen followed me outside. “You’re welcome to come to tea this evening. He’ll be quite chirpy later on.”

  I said “What time you meeting Tal Harding tomorrow?”

  “Why?”

  “Let me take you to Swansea; anywhere out along the coast, too, if you like?”

  “It’s rather awkward, Rees.”

  “It’s simple, Ellen. Eleven-o’clock bus from the Square.”

  “All right, but somewhere else, somewhere less obvious.”

  “Brecon town. Ten-o’clock bus from the Square.”

  “What excuses can I make? Aren’t you the least bit concerned about Tal Harding? I’m sure he respects you, but you, why are you so tough?”

  “Tal might grow up after they bury old Dicko,” I said. “The money’ll be his then, unless his wife fiddles it out of him.”

  “That’s typical Daren big talk. You haven’t had any personal experience whatsoever. I told you Tal Harding’s marriage is finished.”

  “Ellen,” I said, “good weeks I make eighteen quid and poor weeks don’t come often, not in the Caib.”

  “Interesting,” her murmur faint, condescending as a turning-away oracle.

  “What do you mean interesting! Listen, girl, eighteen quid a week’s enough to get married on!”

  Grave, incisive, like an off-throned bitch empress, she said, “Men weren’t born to work underground.”

  “We’re all born to be anything. I saw the look you gave me in the house. For Christ’s sake, Ellen, I’m not a fool.”

  “I must have been, coming back to this place after all these years.”

  “Be glad about it,” I said, insisting. “Ellen, I’m glad, glad all over! See!”

  “And I’m a pessimist? Phu. Bye-bye now. Tea at seven o’clock,”— her pale face gone empty, promising nothing, the price of nothing.

  Afternoon warmth lifted the mountain fog, dark green Forestry Commission firs frizzing the flat-edged summit of Waunwen, and I thought, Tal, you misbegotten son of a penny-brained Cardi, I’m not letting you take Ellen Vaughan. She’s mine, claiming her, claiming the future, zombie-stalking Daren’s Sunday-resting backstreets, Grancha and Gran snoozing when I arrived home, pigeon crooning lulling over them. Obsessed now, unconsciously jockeying some archetypal mating dream while hooking my shaving-mirror over the kitchen-window latch, I noticed Caib’s aerial muck-buckets coming to a stop in the glaring sunshine.

  Tonight, I thought, bulling head-on, blurting out, “Ask her tonight! Aye, for God’s sake, tonight!”

  And Grancha wheezed, “Ah, whassat, boy?”

  “Nothing, Granch; go back to sleep,” I said.

  2

  Monday morning four weeks later and I didn’t even have a clean shirt to wear. Old Gran muttering over the sink, mulish as a man-faced hilly-billy woman, dabbing the collar of my dingy Double-two with a stained cake of white blanco. Forgetting to send our wash to the laundry, she remembered that tin of blanco; probably kept it tucked away since my summer plimsoll days in junior school. Our wedding morning was an omen of time unspent, sometimes not having a respectable shirt at all and Ellen similarly skimped for clothes being merely part of its spending. Aye, charismata for ever on its backside, more or less, due to the selective code of the Welfare State.

  “If your father Dai heard this carry-on, he’d knock some sense into you, Reesy, yes he would. But what I say is, make your own bed and lie on it. Don’t come back here when she scrags your hair out by the roots. Kate Minty wasn’t her mother for nothing. There, best I can do at short notice. Air it by the fire first,”— a round-arm jerk flinging the smeared Double-two into my face.

  I borrowed an outsize shirt off my best man, Percy Cynon.

  “Gran, don’t forget,” I said, “the reception’s at twelve o’clock. I’ll send a car for you and Granch. Where’s he now, out with his pigeons?”

  She screeched through the open window, “Glyndwr! You change them durr-ty clothes!” Her animosity mumbled on, ingrained, fruitless, ‘Ach, ach, him and
his messy old pigeons, stink the house out they do”; then again, “Glyndwr!”

  She was crone-humming the old Will Hopkin’s ballad, Myfi sy’n fachgen ieuanc ffôl when I said, “Cheerio then, Gran, wish me luck,” and for the first time since wiping my snotty nose in her sack apron old Granny Stevens pressed a tight-lipped sign on my cheek. Her gift, having abandoned cause for kissing.

  My grandfather was still sitting on the wooden steps outside his pigeon loft. We shook hands, tears wetting down alongside his nose, his moustached mouth wabbling, croaking, “Rees, always remember, boy bach, a good wife is better than bread,” so I swallowed throat-burn jogging out to the white-ribboned wedding car, the whole main street length of Daren blurring past the window before I lit a cigarette, relaxed, less for awareness than submission, admitting defeat. I felt agreeably conquered, another ready-made man.

  All the earth under the stars can only behave as earth, but people wed. Marriage the essence, each pair unfolding its own pantheon of bliss, purgation, righteousness, blasphemy, penultimate heavens and hells of perfect necessity. Ashpit ascetics carry howling marriage traces in their cells; neither can death always, not even the bloodiest, sever matrimony, unpick the wedlock between outwardly humdrum Tristrams and Isoldes, Darbys and Joans, the Romeos and Juliets of our for ever spreading fringe.

  The eight minutes registrar’s ceremony passed in mindlessness, a kind of alien truce from living, Ellen perfectly at ease with the middle-aged spinster civil servant, sharing small, shyly connected maiden smiles, the minutiae of affectionless affinity welding them together. Afterwards we crossed the road to a pub, drank champagne and journeyed the ten mountain and scrubland, tip-flanked and village-wriggled miles back to Upper Daren.

  We rented the long smoke room in Waun Arms, fifty guests eating off vestally draped trestle tables, Percy Cynon’s mother in charge (her tablecloths, too), Percy reading a speech we’d manufactured together — the least bonhomie infectious best man, fifteen stone of covenanted bachelor, almost compulsorily elected best man due to Mrs Selina Cynon’s guaranteed worth as catering organizer, as queen of protocol at weddings, funerals, socially promising births, anything intrinsic to female morale, emancipatory or of precedent in Daren. Percy and I worked neighbour stents in Caib colliery. His grandfather, Thomas Ivor Cynon, threw the first sod, beginning forty years of steam-coal production, his photograph also hanging in Caib institute. A bearded man, diminutive Viking with rolled-out lips and swollen eyes: original chairman of the Federation lodge.

  “Speech,” whispered Ellen. “My love, it’s your turn.”

  A group from the pit were singing, “Sixteen tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt”— they’d hogged the bar since before Gran blanco-ed my shirt collar. It’s a man’s world, underground, virtuous history having driven out women and children.

  I said, “Ladies and gentlemen…”

  “Luvhah!” they bawled. “The great luvhah!”

  “… I want to thank you all for making our wedding day such a wonderful success. In particular I want to thank Mrs Cynon and her helpers. If any of you blokes happen to mention this occasion in twenty years time, you’ll remember more about this good feed than anything else. I now call upon my wife, Mrs Ellen Stevens, to say a few words.”

  Mrs Cynon led the ‘Hear-hears’, the rowdies from Caib yelling, “Mrs Stevens Stamps!”

  She didn’t blush, John Vaughan sitting beside her, crying like a peeler of onions, poor sick man. “Friends,” she said, and you could hear the colliery screens clanking far enough away to sound like toy hurdy-gurdy music, “this is the happiest day of my life. I never, never expected to wear a wedding ring six weeks after returning home to Daren, which only goes to show”— flashing white teeth at the girls —“that where there’s faith there’s hope.”

  Safe on his boozy freedom road, Tal Harding rocked to his feet, whisky slopping over his snazzy waistcoat. “Three cheers for the bride! Hip-pipp!”

  The smoke room windows pinged, Tal huzza-ing up the roar like a bacchanalian Nazi.

  Ellen sat down, smiling, murmuring cruelly dry as sand, “Fool, the man’s a fool.”

  I said, “Tal lost. He’s suffering.”

  She stood up again, saying, “Thank you, thank you everybody,” calmly beckoning forward some Caib mates carrying another firkin of beer.

  Private in the happy hubbub, I leaned to her ear. “You’re a wicked one, Ellen, marrying me for my income.”

  “For love, my love. In sickness and health, for better or worse, to honour and cherish for as long as we both shall live,” promising serenely, her square hand coming down on mine. “I’ll be a good wife, Rees.”

  “God, you make it sound like penal servitude,” I said “Don’t dout the flame, girl.”

  “We’re mates for always.”

  Thirsty strays were coming in from the closed public bar, my half-canned, breathless grandfather haranguing a Caib packer whose young face shone from rich food and beer. “Your nationalization,” contended the old man, “is bound to create more pneumoconiosis. I’m telling you, bachgen. Look, all those machines throwing out dust, mun, see! Not the stone-dust like I got, pneumo! Mark my words.”

  “We must keep up with the times, Mr Stevens”—the packer smirking like a cream-fed cat.

  “Aye, boy, and suffer young!”

  Struggling under his sickly halo, Ellen’s father cried, “The finest steam coal in the world. Us miners put the great into Great Britain, that’s a fact. Carry on, Glyndwr, I’m listening.”

  “Gwaith, gwaith. Gad ’e fod. Paid a gwneyd dim rhagor!” — my lavender-doused grandmother hammering a stern bomp-bomp with her fist on the table. But Grancha croaked his judgement: “Oh, nice and lovely for you now, boy, but bad later. Very bad. Wait till later on when they don’t want our coal and the old pits close down. Oil, bachgen, oil tankers coming across the seas.”

  “Atomic power!” hailed John Vaughan, his curly white mane quivering like primped fleece.

  Ellen caught his arm. “Hush, dad, you haven’t worked underground for fifteen years.”

  “Coal is bound to lose in the long run, it’s plain for anyone with eyes to see!”

  “Shh, you’ll make yourself ill.” She grimaced, less chagrined than resolute: “Rees, I’m ready to leave now.”

  We went around the room, Ellen pacing our farewells, unflinching when she came to Tal Harding, poor Tal’s unsweated body stranded in a massive black-varnished armchair (this left-over piece from rustic times, when Daren folk were obedient to seasons and the weather), solitary at the far end of the long room.

  “Go home and sleep,” she said, patting his hand. “Rees and I are leaving now. Goodbye, Tal.”

  He appealed from his wet, helpless eyes. “Gaw-bless, Ell-en, Gaw-bless both… Reesy”, the light fading out from him, his jaw failing on gapes, all holds slipping, then Tal’s head gently, safely rolled him into unconsciousness.

  “He’s a loser,” I said. “I feel sorry for him.”

  “My mastermind husband, you’re a philosopher,” remarked Ellen like sealing dubious goods. “Right now, darling, we’ve been round them all.”

  Continuing philosophically crab-fisted, I reckon honeymoons are rendered to us by way of revelation, I mean in contrast to the wasteful commitments of nature. Meaning NATURE, natural selection’s slavery, whether it be nits breeding in Elizabeth the First’s wig, cow hippos in heat, rut-mad spiders, the deathless morality of grass, space-flight virus, anaconda dialogues, sturgeon idylls, more than all these multiplied to excelsior, whereas for people everywhere, it’s honeymoons. Wedlock fidelity. Our honeymoon edifice two thousand years old, via Deuteronomy 24:5. When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.

  Pressing on then, collier-fisted by heritage, we spent our seven days’ honeymoon caravanning in Horton on the Gower coast. Courtshi
p habits prevailed that first afternoon, but thereafter we were proven. Proved each other, I mean, but still I failed to understand my brand-new wife, couldn’t possibly except in the sanctimonious way of bachelors blinkered by pseudo-Christian rearing, slippery books, Rinso-ed films and the buttoned dialectic of Daren. Wales is agog with Daren counterparts, none of them worse than Detroit, hinterland Africa or Llasa.

  Between love-knotting and living we strolled and swam, mister and missis blindly happy as nectar-drunk midges inside a hyacinth and all day long the blue sky curved above Horton bay to the sea horizon. What people do, they are. We were lovers.

  A dozen caravans were parked in this cow-patted field overlooking the bay, others by the organized drove spaced out below the headland and right around to Port Eynon. In Port Eynon we drank light beer in a pub where verboten notices hung everywhere. This old pub had dogs, big dogs, slavering as Nansen’s huskies. Sometimes we carried small flagons to the beach and waited until after dark for sea-mating, undertones snickering all around the summer-night bay, wails dissonant to the purring tide, twined couples stumbling or sculling away from other couples. A hidden world of twos, but during day-time you’d see the inevitable sand plodders, shabby roamers, often elderly, lonely men and women with dead mahogany complexions and the shifty glances of retreat, of inadequacy, of soul-frost.

  We strung fossils and shells on nylon thread and posted them off without a cover note to the spinster registrar who read the rites over us. One morning I wrote lewd fantasy mottoes, to the unknown Mayor of Weston-super-Mare, to three image-famous gossipers pin-stabbed from an old copy of Television Weekly, then two fabricated confessional pages by Dior (Ellen fancied herself as a fashionist), and a requiem for my grandfather’s long-distance champion homer. These samples were sealed in our collection of empty beer bottles and launched off Worm’s Head, the whole campaign amusing Ellen, but I considered myself hellish clever. Penman Reeso from Caib pit operating under licence. Poetastry territory, the Gower peninsula. Gene-land for silly pit-boys.