Flame and Slag Read online

  “And yourself, old Sioni sick-man rambler Vaughan,” I said, Ellen simultaneously inquiring from the stair landing, “What’s that, Rees?”

  “Your old man, him and his personal relationships. Why did your mother leave him?”

  She lit two cigarettes. “Finally you mean?”

  “Finally — ta very much, love — or whatever. Why?”

  “You’ve seen my mother, Mike Minty’s only child. She’s a selfish woman. She can’t help being what she is either; her childhood was probably worse than yours.”

  “Sometimes I feel sorry for your father, other times he’s really spewy. Do you believe Thomas Cynon and Thelma Gibby knocked it off a bit?”

  “They might well have, Reesy. It seems to me Daren people often do things out of desperation, a kind of bravado to make themselves feel important. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to Thelma Gibby. There’s something else about her — she’s like a bitch that belongs anywhere; but Twmws would take the challenge if only to prove what others expected of him.”

  “You’ve got a bitchy streak, Ellen my love.”

  “Phu, matey, you don’t know anything yet. Get dressed; tea’s on the table.”

  I climbed out of bed and back in with her.

  “Randy!” — kicking and heaving the way we gambolled in that yellow-tinted Horton caravan. “You ought to be a harem-keeper! Desist, boy!”

  “Gu-url,” I said.

  She panted excessively into my ear. “What a husband. Dog, dog, dog. Doggy without a leash. I thought you were a philosopher, cariad.”

  “Not all the time, my lovely.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Worship the basic, mutual as Alpha and Omega, annihilating both.

  At nine o’clock I called a pint and ten fags in Waun Arms. Five minutes later Percy Cynon arrived with a moon-faced bloke, bald as a cathode tube above shiny grey eyes, his false teeth slotted inside lips crimped from trying to please too many masters.

  “Meet Rees Stevens,” Percy said. “Rees, this is my cousin Howell Cynon. Pride of the family; he’s a Coal Board draughtsman, aye, dropped some ballocks in his time, too, I dare say. How’s the old Caib working?”

  I said, “They’re driving three shifts on that new main to the Seven Feet. Madmen — they make us Welsh colliers look like potchers. Sixty yards some weeks, and they’re not short of a thing. Supplies? Perce, you wouldn’t believe the half of it. What are you having, Howell?”

  “Whisky, just a tickle of soda,” he said.

  “I meant, Howell, do you want bottled beer or a pint of four ex? This isn’t Christmas-time.” He carried his number plain, not so much cupidity as stupidity. No insight, no foresight. Hindsight scavenged bare.

  “Two pints of Houghton’s,” Percy said, big Perce risen to eighteen stone since leaving Talygarn, strained veins webbing purply across his cheekbone flesh. He boozed every night, standing gigantic as a milk-stout advert against the bar counter, the straight handle of his alloy walking-stick jammed between the taut buttons of his waistcoat. My best man, the makings of a slyly shy, comfortable invert beginning to show.

  Midway through his pint Howell said, “Oops, pardon me, gents,” edging himself sideways through the bar crowd towards his call of nature.

  I said, “Nice manners on your cousin, Perce. Say, brawd, what’s she like, this kid Vicky Wilson?”

  Percy’s meaty face puffed injured righteousness, staggers hitting his breathing, chopping hyphens into his self-defence. “I doh-n’t want to hear slah-nder from nobody, ’specially yuh-ew, Rh-eesy. I nev-her touched that girl, on my muh-other’s life I didn’t … didn’t, didn’t!”

  “Smart girl is she, Perce?”

  He steadied himself, grinding his teeth, poor crippled sod, whining like a typically hounded Silurian raper. “Wasn’t my fault at all. Her fault, Rees, hers.”

  “Who mentioned fault?” I said. “It’s your own business, strictly private. Why not bring Vicky to our house for tea next Sunday? Don’t broadcast the news, just bring her along round about seven o’clock. We’ll be expecting you both. You know my Ellen; she makes friends dead easy. True now, Perce. Stop worrying, man, there’s damn all to worry about.”

  His grinding molars squeaked like honing a razor blade inside a wet tumbler. Howell Cynon came back to our table. The chat meandered, Percy drumming ratt-ta-ta-tatt on his artificial shinbone, cursing his job in a Remploy factory where they made cheap furniture for small wages. Defenceless as the sky, he harked back to that last shift when he rode the chain conveyor, his cousin Howell’s mouth plucking distaste; then clean off his own bat Howell said, “Of course it’s a Class C colliery now,” — whipping a fine Sheaffer pen from his inside pocket, opening out an envelope, his pudgy fist effortlessly sketching lines, crosses, arrows, and there it was: Waunwen mountain neatly hatched across the paper, X marking Caib pit-shaft, arrowed lines tracing the Four Feet seam northward under the course of Daren river, and Thyssen’s new main roadway to the Seven Feet aimed due west, slanting beneath Waunwen.

  “Over here,” Howell Cynon said (off the envelope), confident as a priest in his vocational prime, the Sheaffer wiggling up on end like a de-ionized Shakespearian prickstand, “we have Brynywawr colliery.” He smiled, nibbling the tip of his tongue. “Class A, do you see?”

  “Aye, they’re in the Seven Feet, been working it for years,” Percy said.

  “Exactly. And Brynywawr will rise the coal from Caib Seven Feet,” — slitting open another envelope, butting them together, hatching the limit of Waunwen, fixing Brynywawr with the same strong black X and a circled Class A, the compact skilful fist sliding back to the first envelope, ringing Class C for Caib’s X, then (skidding destiny) Howell Cynon streaked Thyssen’s roadway beneath Waunwen to Brynywawr colliery. “Nineteen-sixty-three, Percy,” he explained, cocking his bald head.

  Percy brought in three more pints.

  I asked him, “By nineteen-sixty-three, Howell?”

  He gave the kind of down-up mouth to nasally hummed answer tendered as incontrovertible from expert to layman, and drew a meticulous arch near Brynywawr’s circled Class A. “Drift outfall, do you see? The Cardiff mineral line here,” — mapping British Railways from Brynywawr right off the second envelope. “Much shorter, much cheaper. And here,” — careless now, his Sheaffer slashing haphazard, boxing an oblong around Brynywawr — “coke ovens, NCB labs, offices, car park. We shall be making a start on the Brynywawr development next spring.”

  “Howell,” I said, “where do you work? I mean where’s your office?”

  “Cardiff, naturally, but I’m not really on Planning.” He nudged Percy. “We have quite a pleasant flat in Cathedral Road, isn’t that so?”

  “Aye, nice place,” guaranteed Percy. “Mind if I speak frank for a minute?” — his cousin’s expression a tortured balm of obligatory kinship and amusement. “Burn those bloody scraps of paper and don’t breathe a word about raising Caib coal in Brynywawr. There’re lodge committee men in this bar.”

  “Birth, maturity and decay,” almost chanted Howell Cynon, unconsciously signalling Infinity with his envelopes. “Well, gents, you’ll have to excuse me. Long drive home tonight and my wife’s a back-seat driver!” Balling the envelopes, he jig-laughed his brilliant teeth.

  Percy wagged his alloy walking-stick. “So long then, Howell. You ought to pay us a visit more often.”

  “Keep up the good work,” I said.

  There was a bloke giving a slow, obsessed version of Rock around the clock out in the urinal, and a boxing match on the telly down the lower end of the bar. After the fight Tommy Farr ingratiated a few comments, knuckling his hambone hands, tentatively miming a punch or two, setting memories churning everywhere in the Principality. Memories travelling all the way from Clydach Vale, from Judge’s Hall, Trealaw, to America, and back to Porth Skating Rink — Farr’s beginning and end according to Granch Stevens. Old Granch did some sparring before the dust settled him for loving homers.

  “My cousin
’s a bit of a tom pep,” confided Percy. “You know how they are on the Coal Board, planning this, planning that. I wouldn’t take Howell’s word all the way, Rees.”

  “He had it off pat,” I said. “He’s seen the bloody drawings somewhere, but the point is the Germans are in on the development scheme and we haven’t heard a word from the NUM. Our side doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “You’ll be all right if it comes off, Rees. Riding in on bogies instead of walking. They won’t expect Caib men to walk through to Brynywawr.”

  “But all the money they’ve spent on Caib. Screens, bunkers at pit-bottom, washery, sidings, flocculation plant, new creeper for picking up the trams on top pit. Where’s the logic?”

  Percy said, “What the hell, mun, you’ll still be rising coal from the Four Feet. Talk sense, Rees.”

  Walking home, I thought: Percy might make a steady go of it with that youngster. She’s big-hearted, must be, taking him on with his one leg — innocently hoping for him, unaware that Vicky Wilson was lined up for approved school, in need of care and attention as they say. Who isn’t, though — who bloody-well isn’t? The job’s too heavy for Jesus of Nazareth.

  7

  Dirty, king-coal-grained old Daren, gulleyed and humped like an old whore-master’s carcass. We have about a dozen permissible semi-idiots and family skeletons by the breeding horde. Green skeletons. But Mrs Cynon’s secret pull with Superintendent Seymour Lloyd remained inviolate as the unreafforested glacial bog from which Daren river sprang following the Ice Age, the Government fence skirting its hollow acres of rushes, moss and shivery cotton sedge. A few days after the Superintendent bore witness against Vicky Wilson big Percy disappeared. He and absconder Vicky lodged in a Swansea Town Hill back street for two months. Every Thursday he drove home to collect his NCB compo. We bumped into them (as it’s said) in Swansea market, Vicky stiffly blonde as rafia, with Asiatic cheekbones and scatty blue eyes. Ellen steered Lydia in a collapsible two-wheeler pram. I carried some un-Daren buys (chrome coffee percolator, exotic samples of supermarket tinned foods) and Ellen’s shoes. Beautiful Ellen wore a new pair of Dolcis sandals. Our Lydia-child was swallowing purple grapes on top of crisps and a shilling Woolworth’s trifle, conditioning herself to vomit on the 6.30 p.m. bus.

  Haggard Percy, like a man living on stale air.

  Ellen said, “Your mother’s frantic.”

  “You haven’t set eyes on us,” he recommended, lowering a slow, thick grin at Lydia.

  “Why don’t you get married? Your father won’t object will he, Vicky? Why on earth should he? Apply to the court if necessary,” — Ellen warding off Percy, parrying her pregnant bulk between him and the girl. “What you’re doing now is very stupid, and,” — scoring direct at Percy — “what kind of man do you call yourself, eh?”

  “We haven’t seen you, Perce,” I said, taking Lydia’s two-wheeler. “The Daren bus is due, so all the best for now. If you feel like it, call in our house next Thursday.”

  “Vicky, shall I speak to your father?” Ellen said, enjoying her abnormal do-goodness in the undefiled way that magistrates benevolently send a broken man to prison for committing his fiftieth petty offence.

  The girl snickered revulsion.

  I said, “Step lively, wife; we’ll miss our bus.”

  Percy rocked on his heels. “It’s all right, Ellen. Let it blow over first; that’s our intention. Don’t forget, you haven’t seen us. I’m having my compo transferred to …”

  “Shut yer cake’ole,” snapped Vicky.

  Percy’s breathing jerked soft snores in his throat, Vicky lurching him around a fruit stall, her blonde hair swishing like the docked tail of a fly-tormented horse.

  I said, “Cheerio then!”

  “How long is that going to last?” — Ellen musing, having to revolve her whole body to watch Percy and the girl.

  “Madame Rees Stevens, marriage counsellor,” I said, “Problems dealt with in strictest confidence. Please enclose stamped addressed envelope.”

  “I’m concerned about Selina Cynon, not those two,” — swooping the grapes off Lydia: “Cariad, your tummy!”

  “And mummy’s tummy. Come on, beaut, you look sexy in that fur hat,” — sale price, thirty bob in C.&A.’s.

  Ellen revolved again, showing off a slow pirouette in the weekend hubbub of Swansea market, even her pink toenails sensuous in those size 3½ sandals. Imagination must be a volcanic part of loving. To see, just witness and leave be — fearlessly, I mean.

  Lydia stopped in the middle of Clap hands, clap hands till daddy comes home to throw up into a plastic bag.

  “He shall have music and mammy have none,” prompted Ellen.

  “He shall have music and mammy have none,” parroted our freckled toddler, perfectly eluding Ellen’s minor key. The men in the bus laughed and the women smirked approval.

  Percy came home a couple of Saturdays later. I had the roof off Grancha’s pigeon loft, another two swings with his Waun Level sledgehammer (this indestructible tool wrought by Thomas Ivor Cynon’s grandfather, journeyman blacksmith in pastoral Daren, whose nickname patented forty years of steam coal-mining) and the door crashed inwards. I remember Granny Stevens screwing the birds in her soul-burst grief, Grancha’s daily devotion to them, and swung the sledgehammer like a nystagmatic miniature Thor until the four walls were knocked down. By God I wanted to weep, bleed tears, but Ellen came out from the house with a gallon can of paraffin.

  “No, love, I’ll chop it up for firewood,” I said.

  “Rees, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Look, we can see Melyn brook our side of the tump now.”

  “There is something.”

  “Memories, Ellen, silly bloody memories.”

  “Write them down, boy.”

  “I’m not crippled,” I said, Percy shouting from the backyard gate, “Crippled! Whass-this then, whass-this then ?” — rollicking refreshed as a freed dobbin horse up the slope.

  Vicky Wilson had shot off to London with his wallet. He didn’t have a penny. Neither was he worried, his mother being less dependent upon straight cash than any widow in Daren.

  That night a young constable booked him in Daren Social Club car park. Later, under orders, he delivered Percy safely home, still dead drunk. Mrs Cynon advised the young copper regarding her personal friend, Mrs Seymour Lloyd, one-time eisteddfod contralto, chrysanthemum-grower, producer to Daren Dramatic Society, the full catalogue of blacks and whites, Mrs Lloyd’s whims and fancies. Worth knowing beforehand to make life easier, especially on station duty, Mrs Lloyd’s kitchen only two doors away from the charge room.

  Next morning Ellen won with the paraffin, starting a bonfire that glowed all night. Best-man Percy allocated himself three Spartan afternoon shoeing the wood ash into the sloping yard. I raked it smooth, Ellen strewed the grass seed and the sparrows daily glutted themselves from dawn until I opened the back door. So we sowed again under the supervision of another Mrs Cynon connection, Llew Hopkins, ex-town crier, descendant of a line of butchers (his grandfather’s the black bull ditched and shot-gunned when they sank Caib pit), slaughterers and butchers until Daren Health Department forbade the former. Llew maintained the gardens fronting Caib institute, again supervisory, caretaker of Caib institute his principal occupation, his word taken as law, irrefutable, free from chicanery and deceit because the crippling of his hip in the Four Feet seam designated Llew’s avocation, clarified his authority as if ordained by the Almighty. From maimed, still unhealed young lamproom attendant he went directly to the institute when Joseph Gibby fleetingly came back to Daren, and thereafter Llew served the entire life of the hall, hobbling the long billiards room with his hooting vowels and black ebony walking-stick. He frightened collier boys until they learned to respect him. Few men admired him, none attempted to redeem his dreadful oral ignorance. Llew couldn’t long-hand Llewellyn, simply LLEW HOPKINS ESQ CARETAKER CAIB INST. From Llew himself ’stute broke into Daren parlance. He had no friends,
only primal connections, e.g. Mrs Selina Cynon.

  “White cotton from that Welsh Embr’ideries shop. Milk-bottle tops,” ordered Llew many days before he came to supervise the sowing. And, “Diolch yn fawr, Selina”, gravely accepting one of Mrs Cynon’s Gold Flake cigarettes, herself sole smoker of this time-past brand in Daren, obtainable only in Regent Street, next door to the Con Club where five generations of tobacconists (the Einons: Abe, Joshua, Victor, Seaton, Reuben) had catered to four generations of Cynons, Percy’s standing order one hundred and twenty Players a week, plus a screw of Plover chewing twist every shift until he lost his leg in Caib.