Sixteen Shades of Crazy
Rachel Trezise

For Gwyn Thomas (1913–1981)

‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’

Sylvia Plath

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Acknowledgements

Also by Rachel Trezise

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

They looked like any other group of twenty- and thirty-somethings, living the salad days of their lives, organs plump and red and juicy like the insides of ripe tomatoes, minds crisp like iceberg lettuce, sex powerful and biting like onion. Just another Saturday night at the Pump House, laughing big belly laughs, torsos bowed against the edge of the table as they concealed their illicit activities from the bar-staff, treasure moving around as if they were playing pass-the-parcel, the smell of perfume and alcohol shrouding their bodies like vinaigrette.

Ellie held the baggie in her fingers, fiddling with the knot, the plastic slippery with perspiration. Nowadays, street dealers were only concerned with their fleeting profits. There was no time for presentation. Nobody used paper wraps any more. She pushed her fingertip into the powder, kept it there for as long as it was polite, maybe longer, then smeared it over her taste buds, absorbing the sweet, glucosic tang.

‘What do they call this in America?’ she said, cheeks already tingling with anticipation. The south Wales valleys had been empty of soft drugs for eighteen months, no amphetamine, no MDMA. The new police chief had declared war on the B and C classes. Zero-tolerance policies sent all of the Drug Squad’s manpower to intercept shipments of party-starters in Bristol, while savvy London traffickers cruised the M4, Mercedes loaded with kilo packages of Afghan opiates. The skeletons of mining towns were populated by zombies, kids so thin and hopeless the wind would blow them over. Smackheads congregated in the gulleys, needles poised; the way women used to meet for chapel with their leather-bound bibles, honest-to-goodness recreational users left with nothing.

Ellie felt like an adolescent again, doing drugs for the very first time, a glorious thrill in her blood. ‘Is it crystal meth?’ she said, ‘or is that something totally different?’

Rhiannon snatched the baggie and balanced it in her lap. ‘Ooh cares?’ she said. She sprinkled a pinch of the powder into her wineglass. It was Rhiannon’s special wineglass, an unusual, egg-cup-shaped goblet that she demanded on every visit. She reached for another thumbful of the powder, her enthusiasm forcing the bag into the dip between her bare legs, an inch away from the hem of her new miniskirt. She was closer to forty than thirty; too old to wear that skirt, a shadow of a moustache on her top lip. Her hair was black, short and spiky, her eyes a soft, bovine brown. She had a huge laugh, like a drag artist’s. One of the stories about Rhiannon was that she’d been walking through Cardiff at three in the morning when some Grangetown wide-boy tried to drag her into an alley. She’d pulled a knife out of her handbag and slashed the tip of his nose clean off, left him for dead. It gave her a precarious allure that attracted weak men – men like Marc, who wanted to be neglected. There were lots of stories about Rhiannon, every one of them involving the opposite sex. Andy reckoned she’d married an octogenarian at eighteen, given him a heart attack in the bedroom; something he’d heard on a building site in Bridgend. The locals on the Dinham Estate said she’d made a pornographic video with Tommy Chippy for thirty quid, some of them swore they’d seen it; Rhiannon lying naked across the counter, eyes blacked out with tape, deep-fat fryers sizzling away in the background. All Ellie knew for sure was that she was a manipulative bitch; she hated women and women hated her.

‘Billy Whizz we call it in Wales,’ she said, hooting. ‘That’s where ewe live, El. Wales.’ She never overlooked an opportunity to remind Ellie where she was, because she knew Ellie wanted to be elsewhere, beneath the skyscrapers of New York. Rhiannon had resigned herself to a monotonous existence in the Welsh gutter, and no one else was allowed to look up at the stars.

The pub door opened. Rhiannon quickly balled the plastic into her fist. Big Barry the Disco came in and heaved his amplifier towards the squat stage, sweat stains forming under his yellow trouser braces. ‘The bloody prodigals’ return again, is it?’ he said as he shuffled past the boys.

Marc took the parcel from Rhiannon and hurriedly opened it on the table. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, a grin from ear to ear. He was wearing the same Liverpool football jersey he always wore, his chocolate-colour hair clipped close to his skull, receding quickly at the forehead. He was a genial man, the bassist and lead singer of a punk band called The Boobs. They’d been on a toilet circuit tour of Scotland, sleeping on the hard floor of their Transit van for six weeks, fighting for space amongst their beaten up guitars and drum-kit. They did this every five months or so, despite the lack of a record company, a tour agent, or even a cult fan base. They tossed every pound they made into the venture, as though their lives depended on it, and in Aberalaw their absence gave them the illusion of success. The stupid hacks at the local newspaper seemed to think they spent half of the year in their Malibu beach homes. Old women approached Ellie in the post office and asked her, ‘How are your Boobs doing?’

The band had got home earlier that day to the news that John Peel had listened to a demo they’d thrown at him through a backstage fence at last year’s Glastonbury Festival. He’d invited them to record a live session for the radio. Marc was happy as hell. He scoffed a whole gram of the powder, chasing it around his mouth with his roving tongue.

‘Sweetheart!’ Rhiannon barked, seizing the baggie from his hand and pushing it along the table. ‘Take it easy, will ewe? Ewe’re tiling the downstairs toilet tomorrow, remember?’

‘There’s hardly any left now,’ Griff said. Griff was the drummer, a fat, proud man with neon-orange hair; the bumptious disposition of a spoiled 12-year-old. His mother still made him corned-beef pie and salmon sandwiches to take-out on the road. He sullenly rubbed a small rock into his gum and then wiped his fingers on his check shirt, keeping the baggie in his hand, ensuring he had an audience for what he was about to say. Like a schoolboy carrying clecks to the dictatorial teacher, he looked sideways at Rhiannon. ‘He’s been a total arsehole all fucking tour,’ he said. ‘He stole a tray of muffins from Glasgow Services and kept them all to himself. He ate every bastard one and there were forty-eight of the fuckers. The only reason I’m staying in the band is because of this Peel session.’ He was always threatening to quit, and never did. ‘Should have seen the women in Scotland though,’ he said. ‘Lapped it up, they did.’

‘What women?’ Siân said. She whipped the baggie from him, turning it over in her hands. Siân was Griff’s wife. She hadn’t taken a narcotic since her first child was born. Three babies in as many years and she was down to a size twelve one week after each. No Caesareans, no stitches, no maternity leave. She worked at the video shop on a Tuesday and Wednesday and the Chinese takeaway on a Thursday and Friday – anything to keep the kids in shoes, since Griff wouldn’t lift a finger. Her glossy black hair reached down to the small of her back, framing her almond-coloured face. She had an enormous pink mouth. In any other place she would have grown up to be a catwalk model: long, sleek legs sauntering down a runway, an impossible pair of platforms on her flawless feet. But this was Aberalaw, and life wasn’t fair. She always looked like an advert for designer cosmetics, as though someone followed her around with a soft, pink light, no matter what kind of dive she was drinking in, no matter how drunk she got. In Ellie she never inspired envy as much as awe, the way people look at leopards roaming the Serengeti in David Attenborough documentaries; another species altogether.

‘I’m only joking,’ Griff said.

Siân passed the bag to Andy. ‘You’d better be,’ she said, staring at Griff, play-acting reproachful. ‘Six weeks you’ve been gone, and Niall started calling Bob the Builder Dad.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Andy said, whispering into Ellie’s ear. ‘There weren’t any girls.’ But Ellie already knew that. She’d been to too many gigs, carried too many microphone stands in and out of clubs. She’d danced on too many empty dance-floors; pretended not to know the band. Andy was no Keith Richards. But Siân was paranoid about groupies. Her days slipped away between school runs and fish fingers, and Griff was convinced he was God’s gift to starved pussy. Andy put his arm around Ellie, surreptitiously cupping one of her breasts. Ellie used her elbow to lock his hand in place. She enjoyed the warmth of his broad fingers; had missed him more this time than ever before. At night she’d woken up on the hour, every hour, waving her arm over the bedside table, searching for a pint of water that wasn’t there. He used to take one to her last thing at night, turning the lights out with his little finger. Without him around her, food was tasteless. Her sense of smell was defunct. But now she could smell the sweet fug of the rushed sex they’d had before leaving the house less than an hour ago. She imagined the ringlets of his protein swimming around inside her, life seeming once more like its happy, Technicolor self.

‘Are ewe takin’ any of that?’ Rhiannon said, pointing at the baggie in Andy’s lap.

Andy looked down at it, blond eyebrows scrunched to a frown. ‘Don’t you think we’re getting too old for it, Rhi? It’s full of toxins, you know.’

Rhiannon leaned over Ellie’s lap and grabbed it. She licked the inside of the bag, purple tongue thrashing against the cellophane. When it was clean she threw it in the ashtray. Everyone watched, eyes hopeless, as it slowly mingled in with the dust and dog-tabs, their first taste of phet for over a year.

Rhiannon lifted her wineglass. ‘Well, don’t look so bloody worried,’ she said. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’

2

It was a little after ten when the speed kicked in, dopamine rising to greet it; the time of night when life seemed full of possibility. Ellie was beginning to believe she was some sort of chemical Cinderella, blessed with wit and mystique. Big Barry was three-quarters of the way through the set-list Sellotaped to his sound desk. He’d been using the same one since he’d started the job in the late Eighties, only ever deviating to play the current number one. Rhiannon sprang to her feet when the piano intro to ‘I Will Survive’ began, drink splashing out of her glass. She headed for the walkway in front of the stage, extended chest bouncing against her ribcage. She stood facing the DJ, tight skirt preventing any real dancing, go-go boots slipping on the carpet, the other customers glaring at her. Generally, people either tolerated or detested Rhiannon. Any friends she’d ever had, she’d pissed off years ago.

‘Come on, girls,’ she said, shouting back at the table. She clapped her hands, the brass wall plates behind her shaking. This was the way Rhiannon moved; eyes screwed closed in devotion, hands held an inch away from her face, fatty palms smacking together, the slapping noise reverberating around the room. She stole Big Barry’s microphone and held it in her clenched fist. ‘Come on, girls,’ she said. ‘I wanna fuckin’ dance.’

Siân lowered her eyes and sipped from her half-glass. ‘It’s your turn,’ she said, hissing across the table at Ellie.

Ellie shook her head; she didn’t want to dance, not with Rhiannon. A gust of energy had just detonated in the small of her back, driving tiny particles of euphoria around her throbbing bloodstream. She was having a lovely time just sitting down; she didn’t want to waste a minute of it.

Siân pushed herself out of her seat. ‘I come out at night to get away from the kids, not look after her. Why has it always got to be me?’ She flicked her long hair, folded her arms, walked slowly towards Rhiannon.

A small blonde woman came in carrying a chair from the games area. She placed it at the edge of the table, struggling not to hit anyone with any of its stocky legs. Ellie didn’t recognize her. She’d never seen her before. But Marc obviously had. He was beckoning her with his waving hand, smiling and shouting into her ear, using a folded beer-mat to wipe Rhiannon’s wine spills from the table. Soon, a man followed, a tall, skinny man with a mop of dark, tangled hair. He sat next to the woman and nodded perfunctorily, eyes the colour of coal. It was hard to tell how old he was; mid-thirties – older than Andy, younger than Rhiannon; a scattering of black stubble around a pouting, mauve mouth. There was a thick silver belcher chain resting on his collarbone and dark circles under his eyes, the colour of smudged kohl. Ellie gawped at him until he opened his cigarette packet and counted what he needed for a flash, running a clean fingernail along the top of the corks. He threw some on the soggy surface of the table and balanced a further two in the V of his fore and middle finger.

‘Anyone?’ he said – an accent, not Welsh, but familiar. He looked quickly at each of the faces around the table, but if he thought anything at all about them, his stoic face hid it. Ellie waited until all of the loose cigarettes were taken and then clipped one from his hand. She thanked him, but he ignored her, tossing the last one into his mouth, holding it between alabaster teeth while he lit it with the ferocious flame of his chrome Zippo. Ellie suddenly felt conscious of her appearance. She was no Cinderella. She had a round, plain, pale-skinned face, framed by dull brown hair, not platinum-blonde like her siblings or even golden-blonde like the woman he was with.

Rhiannon reappeared, jostling against the table, tipping more drinks. ‘What’s the matter with ewe, ewe fuckin’ sourpuss?’ she said. She slammed her body into the space next to Ellie. ‘That’s what speed is for, mun, dancing.’ She pointed at Andy. ‘Cheer up,’ she said. ‘E’s home now. Ewe can get ewer oats tonight.’ She lifted the egg cup to her moustachioed mouth and downed the modicum of wine left inside. ‘Next time he goes away, ewe wanna tell ’im to leave ewe a dildo. Marc bought me iss massive pink rampant rabbit, din’t ewe, love? Wouldn’t fit in ewer ’andbag, El.’

Ellie blushed, embarrassed not by Rhiannon’s crudeness, but by her memory of her quickie with Andy, the pair of them scrambling around the bedroom, tripping over one another’s clothes. The thought had seemed heady a few moments earlier, but now it felt like a burden.

Rhiannon turned to the new faces at the table, looked the strange man square in the eyes, said, ‘Where’s my fag ’en, mush?’ He took another cigarette out of his packet and passed it across the table. Rhiannon grabbed it and popped it into her mouth, leaned forward and waited for him to light it for her. She dived headlong into conversation, her screechy monotone blaring over the music, her twisted body preventing Ellie’s joining in. It was useless to try to talk over Rhiannon, so she sat back on the bench, stole intermittent glimpses of him as he answered Rhiannon’s relentless questions, his lips swiftly fastening and unfastening. Rhiannon was still leaning towards him, head inclined, steadily pushing her cleavage into his view. After a while she started touching, smoothing her hand along his forearm, slowly at first, and then faster, squeezing at his skin. Siân was staring at him too, her forefinger hooked in her mouth, stupefied by his beauty or his oddness or his audacity, it was hard to tell what. Nobody new had turned up at the Pump House since the last Millennium.

After a while Ellie became impatient, hungry for the man’s attention. She thought up jokes to tell him. Something her friend Safia had said at work the day before had amused her, not for its content but for Safia having repeated it; something about Jeremy Beadle measuring the size of his penis. ‘He decided it wasn’t very big,’ Safia’d said, ‘small in fact; although on the other hand it was effing massive.’ Ellie’d almost pissed herself. It was obviously something Safia had heard the print boys say, and without fully grasping its meaning had memorized, intending to impress Ellie. But was it good enough? Maybe if she thought of an alternative character – she didn’t want to admit to ever having watched someone as naff as Jeremy Beadle. Ordinarily she wouldn’t admit to owning a television, but she couldn’t think of anyone who was cool and had a shrunken hand. Suddenly Andy coiled his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her close to him. They stared at one another, the balls of their noses touching. His eyes were lovely: irises a cocktail of blue gemstones, sapphire and topaz intertwining. But Ellie quickly wrestled away from Andy, looked back at the ebony eyes of the outlandish foreigner.

He was still busy with Rhiannon, head cocked towards her unintelligible banter. Ellie gave up on the joke idea, thinking he’d laugh at her, not at it. The anxiety was creeping in. The amphetamine high was over. She could feel the comedown lying in wait, bad blood pumping through her veins, and she submitted to it, began to contemplate the overflowing ashtray.

Before the bell rang for stop-tap, the blonde woman leaned over the table and said something to Rhiannon, the white strobe light revealing a crater-shaped patch of pockmarks on her cheekbones. Ellie hoped she was issuing some kind of reprimand, but she knew she wasn’t when Rhiannon put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and pointed at the door on the other side of the room. ‘Down there, love,’ she said, ‘turn left.’ The woman walked timidly, head bowed. When she’d disappeared behind Big Barry, Rhiannon turned to Ellie. ‘Fuckin’ English!’ she said. ‘Ey’re like bloody rats. Ewe’re never a mile away from one an’ ’ey just keep on breeding. With a bit of luck she’ll be in the men’s now.’

There was a queue in the lounge so Ellie went into the bar to buy drinks. Two old men sitting on the ripped benches amidst the shabby flock wallpaper. The barman was hiding behind a tabloid newspaper, crude headline about the death of Saddam Hussein’s sons splashed across the front page. She ordered four house vodkas and two cans of Red Bull. It was a ritual Rhiannon had started when the band was in Poland. She’d come back from an impromptu visit to the bar with three trebles, and placed them on the table in front of Siân and Ellie with a rebellious wink. She’d only been with Marc for a few weeks and Ellie knew now the drink buying had been an attempt to procure the girls’ friendship. Rhiannon put too much faith in money and thought she could buy relationships; gift giving was a staple in her control-freakery. But back then she seemed charming and, when the boys had returned, the vodka custom had prevailed; a peculiar proclamation of their union, like a Freemason’s handshake.

Ellie balanced the cans in the crooks of her arms, the glasses hooked in her fingers. As she turned to walk away, she stepped into somebody, her stiletto heel stabbing the rubber toecap of a basketball boot. Instinctively, she knew it was the stranger. She jolted backwards, the weight of a glass falling from her grip. Then, in her bewildered attempt to catch it before guessing which direction it was going to take, she jumped back at him, stepping again on his foot.

‘Whoa!’ he said, catching her, his arms stretched out like Jesus, as though trying to counter all eventualities. He smelled of musk and petrol and faintly of smoke. The glass landed on a beer towel, the liquid trickling out, forming a small dark patch on the Terylene. The barman caught the glass before it rolled off the edge.

‘Sorry,’ Ellie said, cheeks beginning to burn.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Want another one?’ He let go of her body and stepped backwards, the sudden absence of his touch sending an amphetamine rush through Ellie’s spine. It smashed against her cranium like a pinball he had triggered. Something about him activated a weird animalism in Ellie, an acute hunger in her abdominal walls. Immediately, she wanted to touch him again, to feel the sensation one more time. She stepped away. ‘Where are you from?’ she said. She wasn’t from Aberalaw either. She knew what a difficult time he’d have settling in.

He picked the empty glass up, gripping it with his bony, icicle-like fingers. ‘Cornwall,’ he said, sniffing it. He put it back on the towel. ‘Did you want another?’

Ellie thought about the West Country accents that had surrounded her throughout her three-year stint at Plymouth University. She was homesick suddenly for nights out at the Pavilions, for morning strolls along the Barbican, for lunchtime editorial meetings at the student magazine. When she had lived in Plymouth, she had never been homesick for Wales. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, remembering herself. ‘That one was for your girlfriend anyway.’

The man smiled affectionately at her. ‘She is not allowed to drink vodka,’ he said.

Andy daren’t tell Ellie what she wasn’t allowed to drink. Around here, the women wore the trousers, not because Welsh women were in any manner advanced in feminist thinking, but because Welsh men were so indolent; too dozy for domestic altercations. She couldn’t decide if the man’s dominance over his girlfriend’s choice of beverage was sexist, or exotic. She smiled weakly, shrugged her shoulders. She walked back to the lounge, her arms scrunched around herself like wings, the cold glasses clutched against her prickly skin. She is not allowed to drink vodka. ‘What a wanker,’ she thought as she kicked the lounge door open, knowing even as she thought it that what she was experiencing was not abhorrence. It was allure. This was girl meets boy, big style; the token of acceptance she’d been about to present to his girlfriend was bankrupt, common sense pirouetting into the middle distance, vanishing like the spilt liquor.

The rest of the night slipped away between a long, drawn-out stomach-ache and ephemeral spasms of jealousy. The amphetamine high dulled to a dreary pain, winding leisurely around her stomach, like a washing machine on a wool cycle. All night Rhiannon wouldn’t stop talking to the man. She jabbered perpetually, head bobbing like a buoy on choppy water. Every time she touched his emaciated wrist, accidentally, but more often intentionally, Ellie felt envy solidifying like a lethal tumour, deep inside her. Occasionally, the man caught Ellie’s stare, his onyx eyes glassy now from the smoke. They rested on her for a few seconds, alert and apologetic, but then quickly moved on to his drink, or, unbearably, on to Rhiannon. But Ellie didn’t stop looking at him, not even when Andy tried to kiss or speak to her. And what she noticed, just before the couple unexpectedly stood up, waved and left, was that everyone else in the pub was staring at them too, craning their necks and gawking, because this was a south Wales valley village, and nobody ever left, and nobody new ever arrived. They were like aliens, that couple, swanning in with their accents and their pockmarks. They might as well have arrived in a silvery saucer-shaped spaceship. Nobody outside of their own table attempted to speak to them, to ask where they were from or what their business here was, again because this was Aberalaw, a south Wales valley town. Instead, the other customers peered, and peered, like a mob of meerkats standing on hind legs. Then, when the couple had gone, they all turned to one another and made up their own stories.

3

On Monday, Ellie boarded her 7 a.m. train with the usual commuters: a middle-aged administrator at Ponty College and a bricky working down the Bay. They were the only three people awake in Aberalaw at that time in the morning. At 7.55 she alighted at Cardiff Central Station, the nearby Brains Brewery coming to life for another sun-soaked shift, the pungent stench of the hops saturating her twenty-minute speed-walk to Atlas Road. There she sat in a stifling workshop, sticking stickers on mugs while the rush hours whizzed past the yellow bricks of the city.

There was a crisis going on with the Alton Towers batch. They needed another five hundred by the end of summer but the Ceramics department couldn’t get the colour right. Ellie was bored of the stupid picture: a navy turreted castle with red fireworks in the background. The mugs were orange and the castle kept coming out purple. It was because the kiln was set at the wrong temperature. Everybody on the floor knew it. But the management were adamant it was Safia and Ellie’s fault. Jane was trying to stop them using hand cream, stop them eating crisps in case they got gunk on their fingers; all sorts of screwed-up rules it was illegal to instate. The desks were stacked with tray upon tray of orange mugs, all waiting for quality control. They even had a mini-skip in which to throw the rejects, smashing each one first in an attempt to prevent light fingers. Ellie had jokingly offered Jane a majority percentage in a spot of bent trade but Jane had threatened to report her. Jane, who was Ellie’s sister, had been the Ceramics manager for seven years. She was obnoxious to start with, but the job had pushed her to the edge. The factory floor was a breeding ground for paranoia. You had to keep watching your back because everyone around you would do almost anything to defend their own menial position, bereft of the courage to go and try something new. It was like a prison cell; the guy next to you initially appearing to be another hapless fool, then twelve months later turning into a loathsome psychopath whose face you dreamt about mutilating with a craft knife you stole from the art studio.

Safia threw a chewing gum at Ellie. It hit her on the cheekbone then landed at the bottom of her glue trough with last week’s tacky scraps of paper. Ellie fished it out and threw it back at Safia, a new layer of gloop staining the sleeve of her crisp white blouse.

Safia laughed. ‘Yous have a good weekend?’ she said. She was a tall Pakistani girl with clumpy mascara. She’d ambled into the factory and sat at Belinda’s desk, a week after Belinda had walked out. For the first five days she’d complained that the transfers sent in from the cover-coaters were too thin, or too thick, that the mugs were chipped and discoloured. Ellie’d liked Belinda because Belinda danced incessantly to the music in her headphones, ignoring everything Jane said. She’d had the words Fuck Work inscribed across the bust of her tabard. But Safia was pedantic.

One stormy Tuesday morning following a bank holiday, Safia and Ellie were the only daft cows who’d turned up for work. Forced to sit in the workshop together at lunch, chewing oily tuna sandwiches from the newsagent on the corner, Ellie reluctantly warmed to Safia’s worrisome and naive nature; the way she thought she’d never get over her first love, a U2 fan from Caerphilly. She was born and raised in Cardiff, the essence of the city audible in her nasal words. Her family had sent her to Manchester for two months during a perplexing adolescence and her mother had taken her to Pakistan once to meet her grandmother. Safia had cried to come home long before the four weeks were spent; screamed on the first day, scared shitless by lizards climbing up the living-room walls. She was struggling to balance her life between her Muslim family and extended Western social circle. A difficult situation arose every time someone mentioned going to McDonald’s for lunch or offered her a glass of white wine, endless bickering at home about trouser suits, uncomfortable conversations elsewhere about engagement rings and suntans.

Ellie shrugged now. ‘Fine,’ she said.

Safia copied the gesture contemptuously, unsatisfied with the answer.

‘Fine,’ Ellie said, again. ‘Went out, got pissed. Same shit, different day.’ She didn’t have the energy for a discussion about it. Her head was still fuzzy with the phet comedown. She hadn’t done powder for years, wasn’t used to the dizzying after-effects.

She picked a new mug from the pile and gently ran her fingertips along the circumference, feeling for imperfections. She peeled a decal from its backing and wound it around the mug, squinting at it as she ironed the air bubbles out with her tongue-shaped smoother. Gavin dropped a mug on the floor and Ellie looked up to see if it had smashed. It had, but he continued to work regardless, struggling with the direct print machine. He was a solid man with a girlfriend he didn’t like and twins on the way. He made mistakes and stuck by them, held his head high, took the bacon home. He was wearing a Cardiff City football T-shirt, the season fixtures printed on its back. It was a reject from the T-shirt department. Nobody wore their own stuff to work unless the only seconds out were England sweatshirts. She knew the fixtures now by heart. They’d both worked overtime fourteen days in a row. Gavin was saving for a double buggy and Ellie had to make-up Andy’s half of last month’s rent.

In the beginning, Ellie had been impressed by The Boobs. Andy was adamant that they were going to make it and Ellie had no reason to doubt him. Ambition was written through her own bones like a stick of Porthcawl rock. She knew what it was to want rabbling cities and hectic skylines, to have dreams about seeing the back of the valleys. So when she moved in with Andy, only to discover their joint income didn’t stretch to the lease, not even on a crumbling two-bedroom in Aberalaw, Ellie was happy to quit freelancing in favour of a steady income. She figured that when the hard work was done, she’d be one half of an über-couple, renowned for throwing vegetarian dinner parties at their chic Greenwich Village brownstone. That was over a year ago, and she felt as though she’d stuck enough stickers on mugs to last four lifetimes.

‘Bastard!’ Gavin said as another mug spun out of his grip. It shattered on the concrete floor. He bent down to retrieve the fragments, throwing each one into the mini-skip with an expletive.

‘Are you going to tell me about your weekend?’ Safia said, eyes narrowing to slits. ‘I thought Andy was coming home on Saturday.’ Safia didn’t have a social life. She spent most of her leisure time cooking pasanday for her family. She watched Coronation Street. She meticulously clung to the details of Ellie’s existence like a tabloid journalist unearthing the secrets of an A-list celebrity.

Every day, Ellie ran through an inventory of the things she’d done since she’d last seen Safia: what time she’d got home; what she’d eaten for dinner. Safia’s favourite subject was Andy. If he and Ellie had had sex, Safia needed to know the position, the point of orgasm, the colour of the sheets. Over time Ellie had begun to embellish these little narratives, so that she’d eaten scallops instead of battered cod, worn negligees instead of fleece pyjamas, got twenty minutes of cunnilingus instead of nothing. It was inevitable: Safia’s appetite for romance was insatiable, but Ellie had lived with Andy for a long time – they sometimes couldn’t be bothered to have sex. And today she wasn’t thinking about Andy at all; her mind’s eye was busy with the stranger’s image: his chaotic hair, his treacle-black eyes, his lily-white teeth.

It made something in her tummy swell, like a fist of dough in an oven. She was wondering why his girlfriend wasn’t allowed to drink vodka, wondering what his name was, wondering what the hell he was doing in Aberalaw. These little mysteries were far more compelling than anything to do with Andy, more compelling even than the idyllic fantasy life she had created for herself and conveyed on a daily basis to Safia. The stranger arrived seamlessly in her consciousness. One minute she’d been missing Andy; the next, there was some long-haired extraterrestrial who had materialized from thin air.

‘El?’ Safia said, as if from some distance.

Ellie sighed, annoyed by the interruption. She considered telling Safia about the stranger, but then quickly dismissed the idea. Safia was as chaste and delicate as the foil on a new coffee jar. She was religious. She’d been conditioned to ignore temptation, neglect her own feelings, banish any rebellious thoughts that accidentally found their way into her head. She wouldn’t understand Ellie’s predicament.

‘Yeah, Andy’s home,’ Ellie said. ‘And the band had some good news. A Radio 1 DJ liked one of their demos. He wants them to go on his show.’

‘Wow,’ Safia said. ‘They’re going to be famous!’

Behind her the fire exit opened. Jane appeared, heels clicking on the concrete. She stood next to their adjoining desks; hand on hip, counted the trays of mugs piled up from the floor. She noted the total down on her clipboard, her glasses slipping down her nose. ‘You know we need a whole new batch of these packed and shipped by the end of August, don’t you? Save your chitchat for your coffee break.’

4

At six on Wednesday night, Ellie was on her way home from the factory. The sun was reflecting on the bronze statue in the middle of Aberalaw Square. It was a Dai-capped miner, one arm clutching his Davy lamp, the other curved protectively around his wife and babe-in-arms. It was hard to distinguish one limb from another, especially if Ellie had been drinking in the Pump House. As Ellie got close to the pub she saw Rhiannon standing on the doorstep, talking into her mobile phone, a pair of pinstripe bell-bottom under her white hairdressing tunic. Ellie began to walk faster, trying to dodge her, scurrying past the statue towards the safety of Woodland Terrace. But a metre away from the pine end, Rhiannon’s voice rang through the village like a marauding police siren. ‘Oi, mush, come back by yere a minute.’

Ellie reluctantly turned around and walked back to the pub, her duffel bag jerking on her shoulder. She stood in front of Rhiannon while Rhiannon finished her conversation and flipped her phone shut. ‘Kelly’s gone to the dentist to get her rotten teeth out,’ she said. ‘Too many fuckin’ sweets or somethin’. Fancy comin’ in yere with me for a drink or what?’

Rhiannon was bordering on alcoholism, carried half-litre bottles of spirits around in her handbag. But she always needed someone to drink with. Misery loves company. Kelly was her teenage assistant at the salon; usually they went out together every night after work. Ellie picked at a glue stain on the thigh of her khaki cammos. Andy didn’t like her drinking on week nights; he didn’t like her drinking without him.

‘Well?’ Rhiannon yapped.

Ellie jumped.

‘Ewe ’avin a bloody drink or not?’

Ellie followed Rhiannon through the pub and into the games area. Rhiannon sat at her table, the surface of it obscured with wineglasses full of Liebfraumilch, the house white. She picked one of the glasses up and gave it to Ellie, then took a sip of her own. ‘I’ve got a game of pool on the go,’ she said, pulling a worn cue out of the umbrella stand. ‘I’ll break if ewe don’ mind.’

Dai Davies looked up from his newspaper. ‘Go on, bach,’ he said, shouting across the pub, holding his beer stein up in the air. He was a fixture at the Pump House bar, a retired cat burglar who delighted in malicious hearsay. He was also Rhiannon’s uncle.

Rhiannon held the cue against herself, the tip burrowed between her double-D breasts. She squinted at it and puffed on the chalk then ducked at the edge of the table, one leg kicking out at the rear, her cropped bell-bottom revealing a thick band of brown skin. ‘Italian coloured,’ she called herself. But she wasn’t Italian. Her parents were as Welsh as they came; career criminals from the Dinham Estate. The man who Rhiannon swore was her father, despite his being white and her clearly being mixed race, had been murdered in his prison cell when she was a kid. But not before giving her some cock-and-bull history lesson about south Walians originally being naturally dark-skinned, a story she still used to defend herself whenever someone from the estate called her a nigger.

The white ball rolled into the pocket without hitting any of the colours. Rhiannon passed the cue to Ellie. ‘What d’yew reckon about this radio show?’ she said. ‘Ewe know about stuff like that, El. Am I gonna be rich next week or what? Cause I’ve had it with that bloody salon, I ’ave. Ewe can catch all sorts of shit messing with people’s ’air. Nits, skin diseases, ’alf of those inbreds from the estate got AIDS. I should get danger money for what I do.’

Ellie shattered the virgin balls, exposing a purple stain on the green felt where Siân had tipped a pint of cider & black a few months earlier.

‘I tell ewe,’ Rhiannon said, ‘when ’ey make it I’m gonna have a big bloody mansion built on Pengoes Mountain, a big bloody electrocuted gate to keep the scum from the estate out.’ She clapped her hands, like a seal doing tricks for a piece of fish. Pool games with Rhiannon were not meant to be won. They played by loitering around the table for three-quarters of an hour, talking about whatever Rhiannon wanted to talk about, taking it in turns with slow, aimless strikes. Ellie daren’t put any effort into it. She was afraid of beating Rhiannon, afraid of what Rhiannon’s reaction might entail. If Rhiannon was anything she was a sore loser, so Ellie saved her concentration for pool games with Griff. Nothing annoyed Griff like losing a pub game to a girl.

‘Bloody tired I am,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Marc’s fault it is. Came home wanting six weeks’ worth of nooky in two days.’ Ellie cringed at the mention of nooky. Rhiannon was always fraught to portray herself as a hip, 20-year-old fashion aficionado. She read articles in Kelly’s magazines about John Galliano and Stella McCartney, was always dripping in fake haute couture. But her vocabulary perpetually belied her disguise. Words like nooky and mush and Billy Whizz. Her voice came straight from the estate.

‘Three times in one fuckin’ night,’ she said. ‘That run in the family or wha’?’

Andy and Marc were brothers, Andy the elder by a year, which meant that Ellie and Rhiannon were very nearly sisters: sisters by common law. There was a time when Ellie could stand Rhiannon, when she didn’t cross the street to avoid her, when she thought she was a suave and quick-witted femme fatale. Marc had met her eight months ago at a gig in Penmaes Welfare Hall, one of those ones where The Boobs stood in for the resident cabaret act, a glam-rock cover band called The Poseurs. As soon as the locals worked out that Andy didn’t know any T-Rex riffs, The Boobs got bottled off. One dour Sunday afternoon, a black woman had appeared on the dance-floor, strutting around on her own, a miniature bottle of Moët in her fist, a luminous pink straw, shaped like a treble clef, sticking out of the top. She was wearing a tiny yellow A-line dress and a pair of fishnet stockings, the black lace bands at the top of them exposed. Her accent was so Welsh, so cordial and melodic, it would have seemed foolish to interpret it as anything other than endearing.

Ellie clearly remembered thinking that she could do with a friend like Rhiannon. It gave her hope to think that such a sophisticated specimen of being existed in a place so overcrowded with rednecks. Of course that was all positive prejudice. Rhiannon turned out to be the most bigoted person Ellie’d ever met: a brainless, reckless tart. There was no champagne in that bottle. It was just something she used to carry around in her counterfeit Prada handbag, one of her good-time-girl props. But she’d given Marc a lift home in her red sports car and he’d never been the same since. Ellie always joked that she must do something really special in bed.

‘I mean,’ Rhiannon said, swallowing a big gulp of wine, ‘does Andy have to shag ewe every night?’

‘He would if he could,’ Ellie said. For the most part, Andy and Ellie’s libidos worked on different time zones. His was on Greenwich Mean Time; hers was on Central Daylight. They hardly ever converged. ‘Every night I hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom with his electric toothbrush. That means he wants it. He told me once that it is a family trait; that it comes from his mother. Gwynnie. Can you imagine? Apparently she’s a real goer.’

Ellie expected Rhiannon to laugh but she had already lost interest in the subject. She was standing in front of the mirrored beer advert, arranging her hair so it stuck up like the head feathers of an exotic bird, her wineglass held in the air as though she expected an attendant to come and fill it. She hadn’t expected an answer. She thought she was the only person in the village who had sex, and was therefore the only one qualified to speak of it.

They left the game half finished when Rhiannon decided she was too tired to play. She propped the cue against the wall and it immediately fell and crashed on the parquet floor. She rolled her eyes as she plonked herself down on the stool. ‘It’s that powder as well, see,’ she said. She curled her hand around her jaw, hiding her mouth from Dai Davies’s eye-line. ‘A couple of dabs on a Saturday and I’m not right till Wednesday.’

‘You took quite a lot of it,’ Ellie said, safe in the knowledge that sarcasm went right over Rhiannon’s head.

‘Bloody good stuff it was,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I’d like to know where ’e got it from, El. Eighteen bloody months I’ve been trying to get hold of some whizz like that. Nothing!’

‘Scotland,’ Ellie said. She knew Rhiannon wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it was obvious. ‘Marc brought it back from Glasgow.’

‘No,’ Rhiannon said. She shook her head, sprigs of her carefully placed hair falling flat. ‘Marc din’t have enough money to get home. Griff’s asked ’is mammy to put a loan in his account for petrol. They’d still be on a fuckin’ motorway somewhere otherwise. I bought the speed, from that English bloke, with the long ’air. ’E was in yere on Saturday with ’is missus. Just moved yere, ’e ’as, sold ’is farm in Devon or somethin’. Bloody good stuff it was, El. I don’t wanna be lining some English twat’s pocket, do I? Whass ’appenin’ in Cardiff? Anything about?’

Rhiannon was talking about the stranger. ‘He’s not from Devon,’ Ellie said. ‘He’s from Cornwall. There’s a difference.’ She looked Rhiannon straight in the eyes, something she didn’t do very often. ‘Are you sure you got it from him?’

‘Yes!’ Rhiannon said. ‘I saw ’im on the square on Saturday morning. ’E was doing a deal with a kid from the estate. I went right bloody up to ’im, asked ’im what ’e ’ad. He’s got disco pills too, he told me.’

That’s how Rhiannon knew him. That’s why she kept touching him on Saturday, as if he was her pet dog. He didn’t look like someone who sold drugs. Street pushers wore baggy, food-stained jogging-bottoms. They lived in unfurnished flats on the Dinham Estate. Ellie quickly imagined what kind of job her ideal man would have. He would be a painter or an architect, someone with a pencil in his hand. But this was Aberalaw and drug dealing was as good a job as anyone could hope to get. ‘What’s his name?’ she said.

Rhiannon snuck a glimpse at Dai. He was reading the local newspaper, studying the ‘Look Who’s Been in Court’ column, looking for stories he could exaggerate. Jenny Two-Books, the assistant from the betting shop on the High Street, had just arrived to collect her extra takings. She ran her own service for the alkies who were too drunk to walk to the shop. ‘Johnny,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Johnny somethin’.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘I don’t bloody know, El. What’s it to ewe anyway?’

Ellie felt her cheeks redden. She looked down at the assortment of wineglasses on the table, trying to hide her face from Rhiannon, but Rhiannon had already detected something in her enquiry. ‘Ewe don’t fancy ’im or somethin’, do ewe, El?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ellie said, not looking up from her drink. ‘I love Andy.’

Rhiannon lifted the egg-cup-shaped glass to her mouth, peering intently at Ellie over the rim. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I love Marc an’ all. I love Marc as much as ewe love Andy, don’t think that I don’t. An’ if I ’ear anyone saying I don’t love Marc, I’ll fuckin’ batter ’em.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean. Ellie shrugged and reached for her glass.

Rhiannon beat her to it. ‘I’ll get ewe a fresh one,’ she said, giggling, the angry smirk on her face fading from the bottom up. ‘But ewe’ll ’ave to remember ’ow many ewe owe me. I can’t afford to keep us both in wine. Things ain’t that good at the salon.’

Dai Davies folded the newspaper down on the bar. Accidentally, Ellie caught his eye. He grinned at her lecherously, made a creepy clicking noise with his slick tongue. Ellie shivered. They were psychopaths, the whole family.

5

On Fridays the village smelled like chip fat, smog clouds from the deep-fat fryers oozing from kitchen windows. Ellie was at home, in Gwendolyn Street, a Victorian terrace overlooking the rest of Aberalaw. From her bay window she could see past the terraces in front, down to the square and the statue in the centre. A couple of pear-shaped women were unpegging their faded bedclothes from the washing lines, the men driving from the electronic factories on Pengoes Industrial Estate to the Pump House or the Labour Club. Her living room was bare, save for Andy’s huge television. The fitted carpet had been a fixture since 1973; floral swirls bursting into explosions of satsuma and chocolate-brown every few square metres. The satinette sofa was covered with a cream linen throw-over, but it continually slipped away, revealing patches of mauve and royal blue. The block colour thinned the oxygen, made the atmosphere seem perpetually constipated. Buying expensive things for a rented property was negative equity, Andy said.

She was flicking through a copy of the NME when he came in; she was skim-reading stories about bands less talented than The Boobs written by journalists less talented than her. He stripped down to his denim cut-offs and T-shirt, left his paint-stained overall on the floor. He went straight to the tiny kitchen to wash his hands with antibacterial soap. Ellie put the magazine down and followed him. She sat on the chipboard worktop. ‘Good day was it?’ she said.

‘Not bad, babe.’ He whipped the tea towel from its handle and scraped his fingers in it, his skin pink with toil and hot water. He and Marc had laboured at his father’s decorating company since they were 15 and 16 years old. They probably always would.

‘It’s Friday,’ she said cheerfully, trying to alert him to the onset of the weekend. Six days and counting since Johnny-Come-Lately had turned up. Ellie would have liked to go to the Pump House in the hope of meeting him again. But Andy’d always exercised a dreadful Puritan work ethic. He didn’t like drinking all that much. It was difficult to imagine how he filled his time on the road; cooped in a Transit van saturated with lager farts, a couple of dipsomaniacs for company. ‘Do you think Marc and Rhiannon are going out?’

Andy pretended he hadn’t heard her. He opened the fridge, unleashing the sweet stench of decaying food. He picked a lettuce up by its unopened packaging and tossed it in the swing-top. He took the potatoes out of a plastic grocery bag and began to peel and cut, his blue eyes squinting at the stabs of the vegetable knife, his tongue poked out in application, the starchy water sloshing out of the basin and landing on the floor tiles around his bare feet. An abnormally big bumblebee hurtled against the window, hit the pane with a thud, then dropped out of view.

The couple ate their dinner in the living room, at either end of the sofa. Andy was watching a rugby match, knife-handle seized in his curled fingers, head tilted towards the television; a physical mannerism he’d inherited from his father. Moving images hypnotized him. Commentators spoke to him in a seductive language that left him deaf to live words. Occasionally he looked away, hurriedly piled a handful of chips into a slice of bread and quickly gnawed at the sandwich, the grease collecting in the crooks of his mouth. At the sound of the half-time whistle, he turned to look at Ellie.

‘Now that I’m home,’ he said, pausing to ensure he’d got her attention, ‘we should fix a date for the wedding.’ He folded a piece of bread in half and mopped the egg yolk up from his plate.

Ellie put her own plate on the floor, setting her cutlery at the rim. It was eighteen months since he’d first asked. She was on her way home from work, stepping off the train in Aberalaw station when she noticed something strange about the mountain behind their house. Initially she thought it was a flock of sheep that had accidentally arranged itself into some uncanny correlation. When she got to the square she started to decipher the words. ‘MARRY ME ELIZABET,’ it said, vast characters spelt out against the moss green bracken with hundreds of smooth grey pebbles. Andy was standing on the doorstep, a nervous twist in his grin. ‘What do you think?’ he said, voice quivering. ‘I nicked them from Merthyr Mawr in the old man’s tipper. Weren’t enough to do the last H.’ She agreed, immediately, emphatically, because, even if she hadn’t wanted to marry him, she thought she would grow into wanting it, the way she’d grown into her sister’s hand-me-down clothes. Two days later, embarrassed by the attention it was attracting, she asked him to go back to the mountain and take the stones down. He’d bought her a nine-carat gold diamond solitaire, the only diamond she’d ever owned, and she’d spent days scraping her knuckle against the bay window, trying to slice the pane. The ring was dull now, with time and glue from the factory. They didn’t get married because they didn’t have the money to pay for the wedding. They still didn’t have the money.

‘My aunty’ll do the cake,’ Andy said, stretching to retrieve her plate, scraping the chips she’d left into his own dish.

‘Why don’t we go abroad?’ Ellie said. ‘Tobago or Cancún.’ It was the only way she’d escape interference from Andy’s relatives. There was a quagmire of customs to observe, a trail of conventional nonsense that kept all of their family traditions intact. Andy being her first son, Gwynnie demanded a church wedding. Ellie was petrified of walking into St Illtyd’s only to find the groom’s side bursting with jubilant spectators, her own pews entirely empty. She didn’t want to marry his family; she wanted Andy all to herself. ‘That’s what people do now,’ she said. ‘The bride and groom go away on their own. It’s more meaningful, don’t you think?’

‘We can’t do that,’ Andy said. ‘My mother and father could never afford the flight.’ He popped a chip into his mouth and sidled closer to Ellie, sliding across the settee.

‘What about a winter wedding?’ she said. It was August now. She was buying time, hoping she could change his mind, or that he’d forget about it all over again. ‘February. We could serve hot toddies instead of Cava. I could wear diamantés instead of pearls, a Cossack instead of a veil.’

‘The fourteenth?’ Andy said.

‘Valentine’s Day.’ Ellie sniggered. ‘That’s just tacky.’

‘It’s romantic.’ He clambered on to her body, bunching her wrists together, holding them like a bouquet above her head. Ellie bucked and screamed, the sharp screech breaking into peals of laughter. ‘Get off me,’ she said.

Andy kissed her, his keen tongue pushing into her mouth. After a moment, she started to kiss back hungrily, looking for something that had been there two years ago when they’d met, that had been there six days ago when he’d come back from Glasgow; something that wasn’t there now. All she could taste was the rust that had worked its way between them, months of widening water. His saliva was cold. An abrupt fatigue seeped through Ellie’s body. Her lips froze, her own tongue slumping back into her throat. As Andy pulled away she glimpsed the scar on his neck, four centimetres above his collarbone, a sunken white-blue tear shredding through his wheat-coloured skin.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, voice doleful, eyes flickering in the last of the sunlight from the window.

‘Nothing,’ Ellie said. ‘Nothing.’ She waved his concern away with a chop of her hand, instructing him to continue. He began to work on her button fly. ‘Stop,’ she said pushing him away. She’d had an idea. She wriggled out of her jeans and then her pink cotton knickers, kicking them across the room. She flipped on to her naked belly and rose up on all fours. ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ she said. It’s what she always said. Sometimes he beat her to it, and asked the question, especially if he was just home from tour. ‘Have you been waiting for this?’ he’d say. ‘I bet you have.’

She could feel him behind her, on his knees, the heat coming from him. She pressed her face against the arm of the settee, breathing the musty odour from the throw-over deep into her lungs, scrutinizing it for an iota of smoke, petrol; something that smelled like that man whose name was Johnny.

He placed his hand on her hip, getting closer.

‘I’ve been aching for this,’ she said.

6

Rhiannon weaved through the tables in the restaurant, winking at people she recognized. ‘Hiiiyyyaaaa,’ she said, wriggling out of her jacket. She sat down next to Gwynnie.

Gwynnie was a big woman with a permanent expression of terror splashed across her face. Nothing in her life had been easy and she expected her cycle of misfortune to persist until the death. Her skin was mottled with anxiety, her bones arthritic with exertion, her mouth quick with over-zealous counsel. Her demeanour was comical, her head constantly bobbing about in a frantic convulsion, gigantic sweat patches under her arms. Ellie often caught herself laughing at Gwynnie when she wasn’t trying to be funny. ‘We can order now,’ she said, waving at Andy’s father. ‘Where’s the waitress, Collin?’

‘Where’s the waitress, Collin?’ Collin said, mimicking his wife’s panicked voice. ‘How the bloody hell should I know, Gwyneth?’

Eating at the Bell & Cabbage was a relatively new experience for the Hughes family. Gwynnie used to cook Sunday dinner in her own kitchen; pork with roast parsnips and fresh vegetables served in her best bone-china tureens. Collin hurtled from the bedroom to the dining table in one fell swoop, his naked stomach riding out on the chair around him. Afterwards, Gwynnie did the washing-up, the pots falling from the draining board with a clang and echoing into the living room, like smites aimed at the girls’ sloth. ‘Shit!’ she’d say, sharp as a blade. At Easter the girls had booked a table for six in the carvery, encouraged by Gwynnie’s resentful sideways glances whenever they talked about steak they’d eaten at the Bell, or salads at fast-food joints. ‘There’s nice,’ she’d say, ‘there’s lovely,’ as if it was lobster bisque at The Dorchester. Her idea of a day out was a ramble through the car-boot sales in North Cornelly, spending her paltry income on labour-saving junk – old bread-makers and sandwich-toasters, stuff most people saw fit for landfill. When the day came, Collin sat in his reclining armchair, his hands crossed over his belly, as if trying to protect it from anything that wasn’t home-cooked. He refused to leave the house. Rhiannon managed to coax Gwynnie into her car, but at the restaurant she sat in the corner weeping, fretting over Collin’s non-attendance, the waitress staring as she set the gravy boat on the doily.

Collin turned up with the carrots, his comb-over hair blown out of place by the wind. He ate his food in obdurate silence, frowning over every mouthful, Rhiannon and Ellie secretly smirking at one another.

Marc put Rhiannon’s wineglass on the table now.

‘Is it clean?’ she said, twisting it in the light from the window. ‘There was some bugger else’s lipstick all over it last week.’ She was wearing a grey sweater with glittery pink writing across the bust. Her face was made up, her eyelids licked with bold blue eye-shadow.

‘Go down the club last night?’ Marc said, pushing the potatoes towards his father.

‘Aye,’ Collin said.

‘Artist any good, Gwyn?’ Rhiannon was playing with her peas, squashing them to a paste with the base of her fork, her wine held to her mouth, her voice echoing in the glass. Gwynnie quickly chewed a fatty morsel of beef, her head bobbling. ‘Two women,’ she said. ‘They were good but I think they were lezzers. They didn’t have no wedding rings.’

Collin stopped eating and glared at his wife. He commonly regarded women with a mixture of bafflement and trepidation. Ellie often caught him purposely avoiding eye contact, the way someone with a phobia of cats avoided a stray tabby. When he was sure she’d turned away, he’d peep furtively at her, as if ensuring she hadn’t moved any closer, or grown any bigger. He hated women. His only pleasure lay in trying to make their lives as miserable as his was.

For Ellie the feeling was mutual. She abhorred the control he had over Andy. He was absent for his childhood, locked in a prison cell for tax evasion. He missed his first word, his first footstep, and because he hadn’t witnessed these developments with his own eyes, he seemed to believe that they had never occurred. He treated Andy like a two-year-old, a fate Marc had somehow managed to avoid. He’d tell him to order the lamb instead of the beef, buy diesel-powered vehicles instead of petrol; put a patio in the garden instead of a lawn. When Andy and Ellie moved into Gwendolyn Street, Ellie asked Andy if they could go shopping for a couple of knick-knacks to make the place look like a home. Collin took it upon himself to play chaperone. Ellie’d been holding an Angelo Cavalli canvas, a beautiful black-and-white photograph of the Flatiron Building, when Collin swooped on her and plucked it out of her hands. ‘Ugly, isn’t it?’ he said, discarding it. ‘What about this?’ He passed her a Claude Monet print, Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies. ‘Do you like that?’ he said. Ellie concurred, afraid of offending him. So he nodded and put it into their trolley.

When he was sure Gwynnie’d finished her sentence, Collin turned to look at Marc. ‘Heard about this new yobbo in town then, boy? I was talking to old Dai last night. Said he’s been hangin’ round the House, a scruffy lookin’ one.’

‘Are you talking about Johnny?’ Marc said.

A carrot split and fell from Ellie’s fork. It landed in the watery vegetarian gravy, driving a beige-coloured splatter across her plate. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the food. The question mark lingered in the air of the restaurant for a time, utilizing her head as its period. She could feel the weight of Rhiannon’s stare.

‘I don’t know ’is name,’ Collin said. ‘Killed a fella, Dai said.’

‘Killed a fella!’ Marc laughed. ‘Honest Dad, you’re like a pair of washerwomen when you get together. Why do you think anyone who comes from somewhere else is a criminal? He can’t afford to live in Cornwall any more, that’s all. Tourists forcing the cost of living up.’

‘What’s his last name?’ Gwynnie said.

‘Frick,’ Rhiannon said, the word bursting proudly from her lips.

‘Frick?’ Gwynnie said. She shook her head, features quivering. ‘I don’t know of any Frick families round by here.’ Gwynnie knew everyone who lived in Aberalaw, all nine hundred and fifty-one of them. She’d lived there her entire life. She’d never dreamt of moving away from the street in which she grew up, or of doing anything more ambitious than raising her children to be honest and hard-working. She was the kind of woman who’d use the word ‘eccentric’ to describe anyone who’d read a book. But there was a fine line between naivety and ignorance. She’d called the Asian shopkeepers ‘a pair of suicide bombers’ when their grandson won the bonny baby competition in the local paper. Behind Rhiannon’s back, she called her ‘half a darky’.

Andy sighed, bored with the conversation. He obviously had no interest in Johnny. ‘I’ve got some news,’ he said squeezing Ellie’s knee. ‘Me ’n’ Ellie,’ he paused for a moment, deliberately duping Gwynnie into thinking that Ellie was pregnant.

Her mouth fell open; her head leant attentively to the side.

‘We’ve agreed on a date for the wedding, Valentine’s Day 2004.’

Gwynnie started rummaging around in her handbag, pulling out a crumpled tissue. Rhiannon slumped against the back of the bench and studied the fringes of the tablecloth, considering the implications. For a day at least she would not be the centre of attention.

‘When?’ Collin said.

‘February,’ Andy said. ‘February the fourteenth.’

‘Bloody strange time to get married – you should do it in October. A marriage licence is cheaper in October. That’s when me and your mother got married.’

‘Ellie wants a winter wedding,’ Andy said. ‘Don’t you, babe?’

Ellie wanted to plunge her knife under the table and puncture Andy’s hand. Everyone was gawping at her, waiting for her to start gibbering on about bridesmaids’ dresses and seating plans. Her muscles solidified, rooting her to the chair. Her cheeks glowed scarlet. ‘That’s okay isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A winter wedding?’ She smiled self-consciously, the skin of her lips cracking as they stretched across her teeth.

‘Your auntie Maggie’s away in her caravan in February,’ Gwynnie said. ‘I’d have to do the sandwiches on my own. And flowers! They’d be extortionate that time of year. Whenever the boys have bought flowers on Valentine’s Day—’

‘Mam!’ Marc said, scolding her.

Gwynnie stopped. She covered her mouth with her shrivelling fingers.

‘I don’t expect you to do all the food,’ Ellie said. She didn’t expect her to do any of it. ‘We’ll get caterers.’

‘But it’s tradition,’ Gwynnie said, starting again.

Rhiannon yawned loudly, half covered her mouth with her hand. She ran her forefinger along the rim of her empty wineglass, waiting for someone to notice her, lipstick still in place.

‘Are you going out somewhere today?’ Ellie said.

Rhiannon realized that her wish had been granted. She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Out?’ she said.

‘Yeah, out,’ Ellie said. ‘Drinking. It’s just that you’ve got make-up on.’

7

After lunch, Ellie and Andy left Gwynnie and Collin in the carvery. They followed Rhiannon and Marc through the High Street, their bellies stuffed with profiteroles, an ice-cream van playing Für Elise. At the junction, Rhiannon pointed out her new range of professional styling products lined up on the salon windowsill. ‘Fifteen quid for the intensive light-reflecting conditioner, El,’ she said. ‘Only a two per cent mark up for ewe.’ It was the only window in the street not hidden behind a graffitied zinc shutter. Andy tried to catch Ellie’s hand but she brushed him off, reaching into her back pocket for a crumpled packet of ciggies. He watched her as she lit one, his mouth a single chisel-blow in pale flesh, clearly puzzled by her inclination to go out on a Sunday. Usually she sat in bed all afternoon, a magazine on her lap, a bar of chocolate on the bedside cabinet. Sometimes they had sex.

The Pump House picnic tables were set up around the mining statue. Griff was slouched behind a flat pint of lager and lime. Siân was sitting on the kerb, her orange ankle-length gypsy-skirt lying like a sheet over her legs, her hair scraped back from her face. She’d kicked her mules from her feet. One of them was on the pavement in front of the old YMCA, the fish-scale sequins sparkling in the sunlight. When Ellie’d moved to Aberalaw, Siân wore boob-tubes and hot-pants. With every new child, her tastes became more conservative: pastel blouses and woollen twinsets.

It was a shame to think of her smooth skin buried beneath several layers of cotton. A butterfly momentarily hovered at her throat and then danced into the ether, high above America Place.

America Place was a small street, a row of miniature fascias and hanging baskets erupting with tufts of orange pansies; a rare sight in a village marred by broken glass, concrete, used syringes, dog shit. The inhabitants had been having some sort of flower-growing competition for two years on the run. ‘Know why America Place is called America Place?’ Ellie said as she sat down on the kerb. Early in the nineteenth century, the whole street had decided to emigrate en masse. They’d appointed a chairman to book the tickets and collect the savings they’d accumulated over eight years. But he did a moonlight flit. The residents renamed the street, and called the old pub at the entrance to the estate the New York, New York. Siân knew the story. Ellie’d told her umpteen times, and on each occasion wondered why Siân didn’t find it as intriguing as she did. Ellie was besotted with anything to do with America.

‘Yeah, we all fuckin’ know,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Ewe never stop bloody tellin’ us, do ewe?’

‘Have you ever seen a film called In America?’ Siân said, spitting a chewed fingernail out of her mouth. ‘What it is, it’s about an Irish couple who go to New York with dreams of acting on Broadway, but end up in a stinking block of flats. Nobody’s taken it out yet.’ She worked in the video shop and watched each new release when it arrived, sitting at the counter with a packet of chocolate biscuits.

‘Have a good bloody look at it, El,’ Rhiannon said, ‘’cause it’s the closest to America ewe’ll ever get. Like them lot,’ she pointed at America Place. ‘Ewev’e already missed the fuckin’ boat.’

There was another thing that interested Ellie about America Place, something she never talked about: Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Dirtbox. She lived in one of the converted cottages but Ellie’d forgotten which. He’d taken her to a party there once, a few weeks into their courtship, before he’d admitted that Dirtbox was his ex-girlfriend. He introduced her as his ‘friend’, the clumsy air around the word divulging a sense of mischief Ellie couldn’t quite define. The three of them had stood in the kitchen, gazing at her potted herbs. Then Andy pointed through the French doors at the prize-winning Lionhead rabbits leaping around in their pen. ‘That’s Flossy,’ he said, ‘and the other one is Thumper. Shag like bunnies they do.’ Something in that sentence revealed the true nature of his and Dirtbox’s relationship. Ellie hadn’t imagined that Andy’d had a life before she’d arrived, and the realization had hit her like a juggernaut doing ninety. She’d immediately fled, the soles of her motorbike boots bouncing on the cracked pavements of America Place, then Dynevor Street, then the dogtooth tiles of the railway station. Andy’d followed, coins dropping out of his pockets and rolling down on to the track. As he’d reached her, the Ystradyfodwg train appeared, its brakes screeching. Andy fell at her feet, tears streaming down either side of his nose.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said tugging at the hem of her gingham dress, like a bad actor in a cheap made-for-TV film.

The electronic doors parted with a computerized bleep.

Ellie prised his fingers from her skirt, one digit after the other.

‘I’ll kill myself if you go,’ he said, skin claret.

Ellie stepped on to the train. She didn’t go in for emotional blackmail then; that self-confident, post-Plymouth period of her life which felt like an aeon ago.

‘I’ll get the round in then, shall I?’ Andy said now, ambling into the pub.

Marc picked up a newspaper, opened it to a black-and-white photograph of George Bush. ‘US admit guerrilla warfare,’ the headline said. He quickly flipped the page to a large colour photograph of a topless blonde model with generous, upturned nipples.

Rhiannon sidled closer to Siân, brushing her plump fingers through her long ponytail. ‘Feels a bit dry, love,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some new conditioner. Why don’t ewe pop in the shop this week?’ Her voice the honeyed adaptation she used to flatter people she didn’t really like. Siân pulled her hair away from Rhiannon and smoothed it on to the opposite side of her neck.

Andy came out carrying drinks on an aluminium tray. ‘Dai just told me that Gemma Williams is up the duff,’ he said. ‘Williams the Milk’s daughter. She’s only fourteen.’

Rhiannon opened a compact and stared into the mirror. ‘Stupid likkle slut,’ she said, plucking a hair from her chin with a pair of steel tweezers.

‘Is there anybody else in there?’ Ellie said. She thought Johnny might have been here, smoking his abundant supply of cigarettes, buying beer for his girlfriend, telling the bar-staff that under no circumstances were they allowed to supply her with vodka. She thought he might have been coming here for weeks; that’s why she’d come.

‘No,’ Andy said. He shrugged. ‘Why?’

Ellie ignored him, glanced around the square. The pine trees on Pengoes Mountain stretched up behind the sagging rooftops of the terraces, their branches thick with foliage, their tips piercing a cornflower sky. A car thudded over the cattle-grid, the sound echoing across the valley.

Suddenly Ribs came out of the pub. ‘What the fuck are you doin’ yer?’ he said blinking at Andy. ‘Never see ’im on a Sunday do we?’ Ribs was a closet transvestite. He lived on his own in a house in Dynevor Street. He used to share a flat with Griff in the YMCA. Sometimes he forgot to remove his make-up before he left the house and he’d sit at the bar in the Pump House for two hours, a greasy film of red lipstick staining the rim of his pint glass, cheap blue mascara slithering down his cheekbones. There was some speculation about his sexual orientation because he’d tried to kiss Collin once, after a lock-in on a New Year’s Eve.

‘What songs shall we do, Ribs?’ Griff said, ‘for the John Peel session on the radio?’

Ribs was a big fan of The Boobs. He’d been around since Marc started the band at the age of sixteen, supported them through the garage days when they practised in an abandoned allotment behind the industrial estate. He still went to every local gig, but didn’t know one song from another. He stood in front of the stage, his mouth flapping open and closed like an atheist holding a hymn book at a funeral. He wiped a sheet of sweat from his forehead, a coat of peach-coloured foundation disappearing with it. ‘It’s nearly bank holiday again,’ he said. ‘What are you going as this year?’

Some of the villagers wore fancy dress for the annual August bank holiday pub crawl, because this was Aberalaw and they had to make their own fun. Ribs’s proudest moment came whilst wearing shocking pink stockings and red stilettos, pissing in a litter bin in the High Street, his back to the road. ‘Show us your tits, love,’ a bunch of joyriders had yelled at him through a car window.

‘I’m going as a copper,’ he said, ‘a female copper.’

Ellie was looking at America Place again, and remembering that her grandmother had had wild pansies growing in her front garden, an exquisite purple colour. She had a funny name for them. ‘Johnny Jump-Ups!’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘That’s what my nanna called pansies, Johnny Jump-Ups.’ There, she’d said it. It had been balancing on her lips for a week and now it had slipped out accidentally, like a burp.

‘That’s that English bloke’s name ini?’ Ribs said. ‘Johnny?’

‘He’s a drug dealer he is,’ Griff said. ‘Dai told me, fallen out of favour with some big shot up in England.’

‘Dai’s a prick,’ Marc said.

Ellie was thrilled with the response. If she couldn’t have Johnny there, the next best thing was listening to people talking about him.

She liked the idea of him being some sort of fugitive, escaping Cornwall under the cover of darkness, his passport wedged in his back pocket. That image turned her nipples hard.

Rhiannon snapped her compact shut. She looked at Ellie, brown eyes turning to brass. ‘Very funny, El,’ she said. ‘Johnny Jump-Ups? What did she call carnations?’

‘Carnations,’ Ellie said, playing ignorant, the familiar sting finding its way to the sides of her face. Rhiannon laughed her fat, fake laugh. She dropped her compact into her bag, fastened the zip and pushed the bag aside. ‘Why don’t ewe tell everyone ewer special news, then El?’ she said. She slowly eyed everyone at the table and then after a moment, said, ‘Ellie and Andy are getting married next year, Valentine’s Day. Ain’t that romantic?’

‘No way!’ Siân said, throwing herself at Ellie.

Rhiannon drained her wineglass and put it on the ground, the glass ringing on the concrete. ‘Yep,’ she said, voice saccharine. ‘I take ewe, Andy, to be my lawful wedded husband, to ’ave ’n’ to ’old, from iss day forward, in sickness and in ’ealth, to love and to cherish till death do us part: I ’ere to pledge my faithfulness.’

‘And ooh are ewe callin’ a prick?’ she said turning to Marc. ‘That’s my uncle ewe were talkin’ about. Ewe can buy me a drink for that, butty boy. Dai is a prick, about as much use as a cock-flavoured lollipop, but only I’m allowed to say that.’

Marc nodded, stood up, headed towards the pub.

Rhiannon nudged Ellie. ‘I’m watching ewe, El,’ she said.

8

The phone at the reception desk was ringing but Rhiannon didn’t move to answer it. She was looking at herself in the giant mirror, staring at the dark fuzz on her top lip. She hadn’t been to the beautician for weeks, not since she’d asked the girl behind the counter, the skinny one with a ski-slope nose, how to go about getting rid of dull skin. Rhiannon’s face was a dingy, grey colour, like a cup of Marc’s mother’s coffee, nasty German stuff from Lidl. Eat more fruit, the girl had said, eat more bloody fruit. Fuck that. Rhiannon didn’t have time to muck around with fruit. She wanted Botox, a chemical peel or something. There was a chrome fruit basket on the shelf, full of fresh green apples. She’d only put it there to complement the colour scheme. She didn’t like apples. They were something she hadn’t grown up with. The only things she’d eaten as a kid came in watery tomato sauce – baked beans, baked beans and sausage, out of a bloody tin. She didn’t know what apples tasted like. Cider probably. She was going to get a new beautician.

‘Ouch!’ the woman sitting in front of her said.

‘Sorry, love,’ Rhiannon said. She pulled the tongs away from the woman’s head and a ginger ringlet jumped out, the scalp underneath glowing red. ‘I din’t hurt ewe, did I?’

Rhiannon didn’t like doing weddings, and this fat woman was a bride. She was from a party of six from the Dinham Estate, all of them wearing chunky gold sovereign rings on their manky, tobacco-stained fingers. It was a wonder they could afford to come here. Rhiannon charged through the nose, but the scum from up there always found a way, nicked money off their parole officers or something. They were all desperate to look like somebody else, would spend their last quid on trying to buy a new identity, something Rhiannon understood perfectly well. She’d spent most of her life wishing her arse was skinny, wishing her skin was white, wishing her hair was straight. From the age of eleven she’d spent her evenings at her uncle’s kitchen table sharing her auntie’s homework from the local Christmas trimming factory, dipping baubles in a vat of glitter. For every hundred she got 1p. She was saving to go to the salon on City Road in Cardiff. It was the only place in Wales with ammonia strong enough to relax her Afro-Caribbean kink. The customers worshipped the woman who ran it, treated her like a priestess; practically curtsied when they gave her a massive tip. With Rhiannon’s head for business it didn’t take long for her to realize that sort of power was worth a fortune.

She’d been a hairdresser for nineteen years and she took pride in her work. She’d only ever had one complaint, from Kylie Beynon, a stroppy little bitch from the top of Gwendolyn Street. She’d sent a solicitor’s letter to the salon, demanding compensation for a couple of hair extensions that had supposedly fallen out. As if. Five hundred quid she wanted. Rhiannon rang the Williams twins; a couple of smackheads from the estate. They’d do anything for a bag of ten. She told them to hand-deliver the letter back to Kylie with a can of petrol and a lighter. They were only supposed to warn her off, burn the letter up in front of her face. Kylie was washing her porch carpet with flammable shampoo. The useless pair of twats dropped the letter on the floor and the whole bloody house went up. Cut a long story, the ambulance rushed Kylie to Morriston with third-degree burns and the twins swapped life in nick for the address of their drug dealer. Kylie’s still wearing a bloody wig. The best form of defence is attack.

Rhiannon checked the woman’s blister. It wasn’t anything special. ‘Ewe’ll be OK now,’ she said, giving her fat shoulder a little squeeze. ‘A bit sore, I’ll just get somethin’ to soothe it for ewe.’

On the other side of the salon, Kelly had tipped tea over the maid of honour. She was a big, no-nonsense peroxide blonde, sitting with her legs wide open, steam rising out of her jogging-bottoms. Lesbian probably. Kelly was on the floor, wiping the tiles with a worn tea towel. Rhiannon kicked her with the toe of her black Mary Jane’s. ‘Clean it up!’ she said. ‘And get the lady another cup.’ Bloody teenagers; all they fucking did was hang around looking young, smoking Lambert & bloody Butler, sending text messages to their pre-pubescent boyfriends. Rhiannon only put up with Kelly because Kelly was too young for the minimum wage; she gave her fifty quid on a Friday and told her to fuck off if she didn’t like it.

Rhiannon noticed a toddler in the corner, drawing on her leather appointment book with a chewed crayon. She crouched down beside her and said, ‘Ewer a pretty likkle thing. What’s ewer name ’en?’ While it was looking for its voice, Rhiannon yanked the book out of its hands.

It instantly started screaming, spit running down its chin, snot dribbling out of its nose. Rhiannon turned on her heel and eyed her customers. ‘Tired is she?’ she said, trying to trick one of them into claiming it. None of them bloody moved. Rhiannon hated kids, didn’t understand why anyone would want to replicate their wretched lives; take all the things they despised about themselves and give it to someone else to despise all over again, especially the inbreds from the estate. But those are the ones who multiplied fastest. It was one mistake that she was never going to make. Businesswoman she was. ‘Do ewe want some council pop, sweetie?’ she said, turning back to the kid.

‘Give her some Coke,’ Kelly said, leaning over Rhiannon’s shoulder.

‘We haven’t got any Coke!’ Rhiannon said. She was fucked if she was going to start giving Coca-Cola away to the losers from the estate; it was over a quid a bloody bottle. ‘Make urgh stop crying,’ she said, nudging Kelly in her flat 15-year-old tit. She went back to the fat woman and daubed a dollop of Vaseline on her head. ‘Are ewe nervous about tyin’ the knot ’en, love?’ she said as she replaced the cap. ‘I would be. I’d be shittin’ my bloody kecks.’

‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘It’s only a vow-renewal ceremony. I’ve been married for seventeen years. Are you still married? You’re not wearing your ring.’

Rhiannon bit down on the hairgrip in her mouth. ‘I ain’t bloody married,’ she said. But she was married, to a chartered surveyor from Barry Island. She’d met him there in 1984, in a pub called the Pelican. She’d been sitting in the beer garden on her own, wearing a Kiss-Me-Quick hat, drinking tap water because the boyfriend who she’d gone on the day trip with, some fucking no-mark from the estate, had run away with her purse. A fella in a cream suit cut through her blurred vision, approaching her with two glasses of sparkling wine, a pink handkerchief in his breast pocket. He looked like some bloody film star. Bob Stone his name was. They got hitched a fortnight later. But nobody else knew that. And she was up shit creek without a paddle if Marc ever found out. He’d asked her to marry him again, since Ellie and Andy had announced their date, said it was about time she made a commitment to him, said he fancied a double wedding with his brother. As fuckin’ if. The last thing she’d do was share her wedding day with that couple of Muppets, even if she could get married. The woman was grinning at her through the mirror and there was a tattoo on her bottom gum, beneath her sunken teeth. ‘DEB’, it said. Rhiannon vaguely remembered a Deborah, a girl who had babysat for her a few times when her father went to Wormwood for the post office job. ‘Ooh told ewe that?’ Rhiannon said.

‘Your mother told me,’ she said. ‘I saw her last week in the chemist in Penmaes. I asked her if you were still hairdressing. She said she hadn’t seen you since you got married when you were twenty.’

Rhiannon leaned on the woman’s shoulder, pressing it down with the weight of her whole body. ‘Ewe don’t wanna listen to my mother, love. She’s as senile as a cunt. Don’t know urgh arse from urgh elbow one day to the next.’

Rhiannon’s mother was a liability, interfering all the time. Cut a long story, she was jealous, because Rhiannon had made it out of the estate. Rhiannon had never had to stand in a queue in the post office to cash a giro and everyone from up there hated her for it. It was like she’d let the team down by having the cheek to better herself. Any more lip from her mother and she’d have to send someone up there to batter her, make it look like a botched burglary.

She looked around at her shop, at the chrome shampoo bottles and glass shelves, the apples that no fucker ate. This wasn’t Curl Up & Dye on Dynevor Street. This was a proper professional salon, like Vidal Sassoon or Toni & Guy, and she was going to put a sign up in the window that said, ‘No DSS’. She put her tongs in the holster, said, ‘Ang a banger, love. Just going outside for a bit of fresh air.’ As she started towards the door she got an idea and turned around. She looked at the woman, said, ‘Did Kelly mention the price increase? It’s another ten per cent. Cost of the products, love. Iss out of my ’ands.’

In the doorway of the old ironmonger’s she reached into her tunic, took a quick slug of rum from her silver hip flask, then lit a cigarette. There was a meat wagon parked outside the butcher’s opposite. The drivers were carrying the carcasses into the shop. Ellie’d have a coronary if she could see that. She was a veggie, one of those awkward bastards, had ‘Meat is Murder’ written in felt-tip on her duffel bag. One Boxing Day, at Marc’s mother’s, she’d seen a group of fox-hunters in the street and got up from the table, went screaming blue murder at them, didn’t say boo to a fucking goose usually. But she had a crush on Johnny, Rhiannon could tell by the way her little blue eyes lit up whenever somebody mentioned his name; as if a man like Johnny’d have any interest in Ellie. She was an olive short of a pizza, that one; had some really fucked-up ideas about not taking Andy’s name, about it being the MFI who flew the planes into the big buildings; read too many of those bloody fat newspapers.

The lorry indicated out of the kerb and Rhiannon dropped her fag butt, crushing it under her heel. She was about to light another when she noticed a blue BMW slowing to let the lorry out. It was only Johnny’s BMW. Well, talk of the devil! ‘Oof,’ she said to herself as a stem of heat ran up the back of her legs. ‘Oof.’ She waved at the car as it pulled up alongside her, music blaring out of the stereo.

Louisa poked her head out of the window. ‘Is this where you work?’ she said, voice all English. ‘Are you a hairdresser?’

Rhiannon looked at the chrome nameplate shimmering in the sunlight. She’d named the shop after its own postcode, CF25. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m a stylist.’

Johnny was looking at her tunic, his eyes following the white piping at the edge of her lapels down to the dark pit of her cleavage, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Something in her chest snapped at the thought of him touching her, long fingers pressing on her buxom flesh. An electrical current shot straight from her throat to her snootch. Oof. There was a man who could turn profit out of cunning, who could afford to buy her a new pair of Manolo Blahniks. There weren’t many men around here like that, not since Rhiannon’s dad had died. Marc thought nicking a muffin from the Services was adventurous.

She panicked when the car began to roll away. ‘If ewe ever want ewer ’air done,’ she said, pointing at the plate-glass window, ‘on the cheap, like. I own the shop.’ Louisa smiled, but didn’t seem interested. She lifted an apple to her mouth and bit into it.

What Rhiannon said next was the first thing that came into her head. ‘I’m organizing a picnic on Saturday, at the park in Pontypridd,’ hand curled around her mouth, her voice strained. ‘They ’ave bands down there on the weekend. Ewe’re welcome to come along. We’ll be meeting in the Pump House at lunchtime.’

Louisa nodded and waved, the wedge of fruit jammed between her teeth.

Rhiannon stood in the doorway until the car had gone, her blood still pumping ten to the bloody dozen. She took another quick slug of rum and went into the salon. ‘Ewe’re working on ewer own on Saturday, Kel,’ she said. ‘Somethin’s come up.’

Kelly grunted.

Rhiannon smiled anew at the woman in the hydraulic chair. ‘So, where are ewe goin’ on ewer ’oneymoon, love?’ she said.

9

On Thursday night, Ellie closed her desk drawer on three mugs she was planning to steal later. She walked with Safia along the main road, cutting through the Riverside area, the quickest way back to the city. They passed a schoolyard where children were playing football, little red jumpers tied to the steel railings. There were only two white kids among them, and one little black girl, hair braided into chunky cornrows. Safia stopped to chat to the tutor, a man in a long taupe cloak. Ellie patiently listened to their mysterious language as it ebbed and flowed, hurrying Safia along Wood Street when the conversation had ended, past the Japanese and Bangladeshi shop-fronts.

At the Millennium Stadium, the low sun was boring down on the commuters who scuttled like ants around the pavestones in Central Square. Two men sat on the bus-station floor, black T-shirts faded to slate grey, their emaciated pet terriers yapping at one another. Ellie waited with Safia until her Tremorfa bus arrived, admiring the cut and thrust of the disparate metropolitan lives that moved hurriedly around her, listening to the brisk tunes of the human traffic. She loved the anonymity of the city; faceless pedestrians coiling through the walkways like one long centipede. She didn’t know their names, their secrets, didn’t know who their mothers were. In the city, anything seemed possible.

When the bus arrived Safia climbed on to it, waving through the dirty glass as she walked towards the back. Ellie ventured into the city centre, running along the wide pavements of St Mary Street and into Castle Arcade. Her breath quickened as she climbed the stairs to the Victorian attic. She could hear the resonant Zzz Zzz sounds of the violin doctor tuning a cello. The aroma of coffee and garlic from the cafeterias blended into a steam cloud lingering above the balcony. She walked to the end of the narrow landing and stood in front of the office door, staring at the white letters on the glass. The Glamour, it said, some of the u and the r flaking away. The man inside swivelled around in his old captain’s chair. It was Jamie Viggers, one of the staff writers. ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, beckoning her inside.

‘I wasn’t sure I’d catch you,’ she said. She walked over to the empty chair next to him and sat down. ‘I’ve come straight from work, a mug factory in Canton.’ She folded her arms around her waist and then unfolded them to brush an imaginary speck of dust from the thigh of her combat trousers. She glanced around the room, at the bubbling white paint, the colourful stacks of books and CDs, the splodges of coffee stains on the vinyl floor. There was a half-eaten seafood fajita on one of the computer desks, the flotsam of busy city living. ‘Andy’s been really busy with the band. They’ve been touring a lot. I had to find something which paid the rent, and freelancing didn’t.’

When Ellie was fresh out of Plymouth University with a bellybutton bar and a prescription for the combined pill, she’d come back to Wales with the blind intention of becoming a rock music journalist. She was a neurotic, depressive, frustrated romantic who loved everything from bubblegum pop to grating industrial noise, and her prose could piss all over Julie Burchill’s. She’d discovered this talent quite by accident when her friend who edited the student magazine had asked her to review The Cardigans’ concert at the Pavilions. Her plan was to part the Atlantic like Moses did the Red Sea; beat a path all the way to Rolling Stone, where the critics were the pop stars. But she’d had to start at The Glamour, where the critics were socially challenged computer geeks. One of her first assignments was an interview with The Boobs. She met them in a greasy spoon off Womanby Street where a horde of workmen were slowly demolishing the Arms Park. She’d ordered tea and death-by-chocolate and was about to devour the first forkful when the band filed into the café; valley bumpkins hiding behind swear words and ripped jeans. She was a ballsy self-assured über-feminist who scowled at monogamous relationships and housewifery, and then she’d looked up from her fat wad of cake and seen Andy, his cerulean eyes already trying to thaw her thick wall of resistance. Death by calculated erosion was how it had turned out.

She looked up at Viggers. ‘How come you’re still here?’

‘I’m the editor now,’ he said, his tiny eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘I’m here till gone seven most nights.’

She hadn’t really been referring to the late afternoon, but wondering how, in two years, Viggers hadn’t moved to London, or at least on to the Western Mail, like all Cardiff University graduates eventually did. ‘Can I lighten the load?’ she said. ‘I can take the books that nobody else wants. Or write some art previews.’ Ellie loved art as much as music. At university she often snuck into other people’s art history lectures, just to listen to the erudite lecturers gushing about the tortured lives of Kandinsky and Munch. Pop art was her favourite, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg. ‘Is there anything on at the museum?’

Viggers slapped her leg. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of The Needles, haven’t you? We’re doing this thing, paying tribute to the big Welsh bands. We’re doing one every month until we run out. It’s perfect for you because Gareth’s gone back to college to do his MA. It’s the January cover feature. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ellie said. She only wanted something trivial to keep her mind off Johnny-Come-Lately. Thirteen days and counting since he’d turned up. They were the longest thirteen days of her life. Like a frantic disciple in search of the great redeemer, she saw the shape of his face amidst the floral patterns in the front curtains, then she’d lose ten minutes staring out of the bay window, wondering where he was, heart brooding, pulse thumping. She needed to see him again, to look into his sooty eyes. Saucepans boiled over. The bath overfilled. She tripped over her own toes. Andy had caught her once, his father’s binoculars pressed against her face. She was looking at the beer garden on the square. She said she was looking at an eagle.

‘It’s probably a kestrel,’ Andy’d said.

Eventually the frenzy thawed into embarrassment. It was ridiculous, she’d only met him once, shared five, maybe ten words. But the hysteria always returned, sporadic, but inevitable, as though he himself was the drug, and she was already dependent. ‘Have you got anything smaller, a gig review or something?’

‘It’s only two thousand words, El. What’s that, a half-hour interview? I’ve got a press pack somewhere. The deadline isn’t until December. That’s four months away.’ He pushed himself out of the chair and walked to the other side of the room, stood in front of a giant-sized poster of Rhys Ifans. He rummaged through a pile of paperwork on a desk. ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he said, squatting to open a drawer. He held a pack of CDs bound together with a rubber band. ‘Will you do it, yes or no?’

Ellie shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said.

Viggers approached her, dropped the bundle of CDs into her hands. He pinched her chin and then swivelled back to his workspace, his fountain pen waltzing across a page of foolscap.

On the landing the heat had relented. The cafés were closed, the arcade doused with disinfectant. She walked back to Central Square, the city around her empty and expectant, some of the club doormen clocking on for their twilight shift, leaning in the doorways wearing dinner jackets and bow-ties. Platform Six was unmusically quiet. Ellie stood amongst the pigeons waiting for the Ystradyfodwg train. Going back to the valley always made her feel jaded, an hour journey feeling like a mammoth shift backwards in time. Aberalaw was full of resentment. The whole village disapproved of anyone it collectively deemed atypical. All the columnists in the broadsheets ever talked about was how community was dying, and what a detrimental effect its death was having on Great Britain. But in Aberalaw it wasn’t dead, and Ellie wished that it was. Community was a tyrant when your face didn’t happen to fit. Ellie was impatient now for escape, her belly like a wishing well, heavy with copper pennies, every coin representing some unfulfilled dream.

She sighed and opened her purse, took her train ticket out. Behind it was a clipped photograph of Siân and Rhiannon, herself in the middle; their arms weaved chaotically around one another. She’d forgotten that it was there; almost a year old, taken on a rare night out in the capital. Ellie and Siân had wanted to go to a roller disco in Bute Park. Rhiannon insisted on some strip club she knew of, a dank basement bar hidden under a Queen Street department store. She’d spent the whole night acting the big I Am, stuffing five-pound notes into the dancers’ thongs. The flash from the camera had penetrated their lipstick and glitter. Or it had already worn off. They looked like three little girls, the little girls they must have been before they grew up, before they discovered plastic surgery, sarcasm and narcotics, all the stuff that numbed the pain. Round faces and bug eyes. Rhiannon’s fat purple tongue was poking out. God knows she must have been through some crazy shit to turn into such a psychotic bitch. She seemed to think the world revolved around her, that she was playing the lead role in some elaborate stage play. Most people grew out of that when they were thirteen. Siân’s alcoholic father had beaten her mother senseless; kicked her, pregnant, down the stairs, cut her hair, burned her with cigarettes, and when she was in hospital, Siân bore the brunt. Siân had told Ellie all about it when she was blotto on cheap champagne, the whole three bottles that were left after Niall’s christening. Ellie hadn’t had it easy, but nothing like that.

Funny how those three faces should end up in the same club, in the same photograph, all damaged and searching for some kind of affirmation. But then nobody from the valley was a model citizen. Even Andy with his idyllic nuclear family was plagued with insecurities. They were branded into him, something he could never escape, like the ridges in his fingertips. He couldn’t have a shit without consulting his father about what brand of toilet paper to use. He was the sanest person Ellie knew and he floundered through life, waiting for the next instruction, unable to utilize his own mind.

10

At the same time, in Aberalaw, Siân was trying to apply foundation, squinting at her reflection in the mirror nailed under the open stairs. It was the only mirror in the house, something James had made at nursery. He’d painted pasta shells gold and silver and glued them messily around the oval frame. Siân cherished everything the kids made, but between the three of them it amounted to fifteen crayon drawings a day. One time she’d tried to slip a stack into the transparent recycling bag, hiding them between two cereal boxes. Immediately she was overwhelmed with guilt. She’d pulled them out again, filing them neatly on the shelf under the coffee table by subject: cats, Daddy, guns and houses.

She squeezed a splodge of the gooey, honey-coloured make-up on to her palm and tilted her head towards the light. She almost didn’t recognize her reflection, had always imagined herself as the blurred, worried-looking image she saw in Niall’s pupils; a doting, fretting mother, clammy red cheeks, a band of sweat at her hairline. But in the mirror she looked close to human. She brushed mascara on her lashes with brisk strokes, stabbing herself in the eyeball when she heard her daughter shriek.

‘Angharad!’ she bellowed, flinging the kitchen door open, the mascara wand still clenched in her fist. Her adrenal glands opened, her heartbeat hopping. ‘Angharad? What’s wrong?’

James was sitting at his plastic drum-kit, pounding on the bass pedal, the force of each blow sending his orange fringe into the air. He was four years old, a sober child. When he was newborn, Siân worried he was mute. He lay in his cot, staring at the Artex ceiling, no reaction to touch or to noise. Infancy brought an occasional scrap of conservative speech.

Angharad was leaning against the edge of the table, slugging cherryade, one of the legs of her sky-blue dungarees rolled up to her knee, an impish glint in her emerald eyes. A robust and outgoing three-year-old. When the social worker called on her at two years, asking about her speech patterns, Angharad pointed at the bar of Dairy Milk poking out of the woman’s satchel. ‘Come on, lady,’ she said, licking her lips, ‘everyone has to share.’ She put the cherryade down on the table and let go of a long burp, stared brazenly at Siân. ‘James punched me,’ she said.

Siân reached for the kitchen roll and broke a sheaf away, dabbing it against her streaming eye. The shock was wearing off, the pain returning, like a hot poker stabbing into her pupil. ‘I think you’re lying again,’ she said, though she couldn’t quite remember the last time her daughter had lied. There were no lies in Siân’s house. There were fibs, like when Auntie Rhiannon came around in a miniskirt that didn’t hide her saggy, orange-peel skin, and they all told her she looked very nice. Siân threw the tissue in the broken pedal bin. ‘I don’t think James hit you,’ she said. ‘He’s been drumming nonstop. I was listening to him. I think you’re after attention again.’ Since Griff had gone to Scotland, Angharad had become abnormally clingy, unwilling to let her mother leave the room.

Siân opened the fridge door and glanced over the contents: Chantenay carrots and florets of broccoli stacked neatly in the glass vegetable box. There were six cans of Coca-Cola lined up on the top shelf, faces forward, a gap the width of a centimetre separating each. She placed the tip of her index finger into one of the lovely spaces and ran it along the edge of the cold aluminium. It gave her an immense sense of satisfaction, doing that, knowing something was in order. She had no control over the mountains of clutter in the rest of the house. However early she got up to polish and organize, Griff and the kids were always a step ahead of her; frenzied mounds of greying underwear on the bedroom floor, rowdy torrents of toys jumping out of their numerous toy-boxes. Secretly, she envied Rhiannon, who had lie-ins on Sundays and went for aromatherapy massages in white-walled beauty parlours. What it was, Siân had never had a massage, and God knows she deserved one.

There was half a bottle of Chardonnay next to the huge carton of skimmed milk, something Rhiannon had left behind. Rhiannon made a quick exit whenever the kids were about because Rhiannon hated kids. Siân poured some of the wine into a beaker and lifted it absently to her mouth. ‘Come in the living room with Mammy and Niall,’ she said, offering Angharad her spare hand.

Angharad leapt to catch it, springing over the tiles as though over some imagined jungle ravine. Siân stood in front of the mirror again and wiped her left eye clean. She reapplied the makeup, sweeping at her lashes with the mascara brush. She popped the top off a brand-new scarlet lipstick.

‘What are you doing, chick?’ Griff said. He was standing in the doorway, a black silhouette blocking the sunlight from the street. He came into the house, scratching his head with the stem of his van key.

Siân stood still, the red lipstick frozen in mid-air. She wasn’t sure how long he’d been there watching her. ‘I’m getting ready,’ she said, ‘for work,’ though she knew it was more than that. She’d woken in the morning with a sudden craving to look like a glamorous mother, like the ones she saw every day in the films. It was pressing on her like an iron. There was a time when every man in Aberalaw noticed her. At eighteen she could stroll across the square in a shift dress and a pair of slingbacks and the boys outside the Pump House turned to stone. Only their eyes moved, like the eyes in old oil paintings. Now she could probably run through the town in her nightdress and no one would bat an eyelid. She was 28, but she could have been 82. On her way home from the school she’d nipped into the chemist on the High Street and bought the lipstick. She nearly didn’t, because it cost four pounds, and a mouth her size needed a lot of lipstick, but the name of the shade was Desire, and that seemed right. ‘Did the van pass the MOT?’ she said. She ran the colour across her lips quickly, like a tick.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘just. I saw Marc in the garage. He was buying a tartan blanket. He said Rhiannon’s organizing a picnic on Saturday. He asked me if you’d bring a few things from the takeaway.’

Siân groaned. She’d be able to get some things, cold curry samosas and pancake rolls, but she’d need to buy the salad and bread rolls. She’d need to sterilize the plastic Tupperware too. ‘Like I haven’t got enough to do,’ she said.

Griff shrugged, paused, said, ‘You don’t usually dress up to go to work, do you?’ He picked Niall up and held him to his chest, breathing in the yeasty smell of his skin. Angharad slipped her hands around Griff’s waist, still vying for some affection. They were a tangle of different-sized limbs, three pairs of the same sea-green eyes, all staring at Siân. She wished the kids had inherited her complexion. They were all freckles and sunburn. In this weather she was always smearing their shoulders with tomato guts because she couldn’t afford factor fifteen lotion. They smelled like jars of chutney. She shrugged. ‘Just wanted to see what I looked like with lipstick on,’ she said.

‘You know what you look like with lipstick on,’ Griff said. He looked at the lipstick on her mouth and then the lipstick smudge on her glass. ‘Is that wine?’ he said.

Siân looked at the amber liquid in the glass. It looked like wine.

She knew it was wine but couldn’t actually remember pouring it. She ran her tongue around her mouth, tasting it for the first time. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s wine.’

He put Niall on the settee and went into the kitchen, huffing as he brushed past Siân. She heard the breath of the kettle as he switched it on. She followed him and stood in the doorway, a deluge of contempt streaming through her waters as she watched him set two mugs on the counter and spoon instant coffee granules into them, the metal clattering against the china. Whilst attempting domestic chores, he made a lot of mess and a lot of noise, deliberately performing them badly in the hope she’d never ask him to do them again. James was still drumming. Siân whipped the plastic sticks from his hand, waved him into the living room, but he stayed where he was, sitting on the miniature stool, eyes vacant.

‘Did I say I wanted coffee?’ Siân said, surprised by her own insolence. Typically she would have drunk it, thankful he’d done something. But she was angry, in a way she’d never been before. She could feel it swimming around in the pit of her stomach, a fuming cloud of black. She picked a mug up and threw the granules in the sink.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Griff said, gawping at her. ‘You don’t even like wine. Are you pregnant again?’

‘Iesu mawr!’ Siân said, which was Welsh for Jesus Christ. ‘All you had to say was that I looked nice. I’m not pregnant.’ There was a magnificent sense of relief in the words, and in her raised voice. She’d never heard herself shout so loudly. Nobody in the house had. It was magnificently still, the only sound Siân’s own harried breathing. She felt more of the boisterous disdain wedged in her throat, fighting its way out. Before she could stop herself, she cried, ‘I can’t be pregnant, can I? Because I was sterilized! Because you wouldn’t get a vasectomy!’

Now there really were no lies in her house. She’d kept it quiet for two years, because she knew it’d break Griff’s heart. He wanted as many children as possible; refused point-blank to get seen to, like a stubborn bull who thought his manhood was in his testicles. It was hard work looking after kids, looking after them properly. Two was enough for anyone and she hadn’t planned Niall. She fell pregnant again before she had chance to organize contraception after Angharad. She couldn’t cope with four, not with two jobs. She was already scuttling about like the beheaded hen she’d seen at her mamgu’s farm. Another baby would’ve killed her. So when they told her she was entitled to tubal ligation she signed their form of consent, out of worry, not spite. Still, the news hit him like an uppercut. He was silent, his hand trembling as he dropped sugar into his mug.

‘The doctors advised me to have it,’ she said, staring at the floor. ‘They said I couldn’t provide more than three children with all the financial and emotional support they’d need. I’m not Wonder Woman, am I?’ She took a deep breath, disappointed by the last statement because she wanted to be Wonder Woman. ‘Anyway, I don’t sit in those shops every night, getting ogled by alkies so that you can pay for MOTs and drive around Scotland sleeping with Scottish groupies. I do it for the kids we’ve got.’

‘Siân!’ Griff said. ‘That money is for us to go to London. It’s our big break. Besides,’ he glanced sideways at her, ‘if you don’t want to get looked at, why would you put all that muck on your face?’ He gave the kettle a smug grin, pleased with his snappy comeback.

‘Piss off,’ Siân said, bereft of a clever retort. She passed the drumsticks to James and he took them tentatively, his mouth a big O. She took her bag from the hook behind the door. ‘There’s curry in the pot,’ she said not looking at anyone. On her way out she swigged the last of the repellent wine. She dropped her new lipstick into her handbag.

11

At lunchtime on Saturday, Andy and Ellie were five miles west of Aberalaw, in Pontypridd, the local market town; one high street with a Boots and a Woollies where people from the valley went to buy luxury goods, birthday presents for fussy teenagers, leather shoes for court hearings. Every other week they came, to stare at things they couldn’t afford, to spend time. In Marks & Sparks Andy fingered the cuff of a suit jacket, stroking it like money. ‘I like this,’ he said. Before Ellie had chance to get near it, a middle-aged woman squeezed between them and joined him in his approval, squinting at the buttons over her half-moon spectacles, heaps of plastic bags hunched under her podgy arms. After a minute she seemed to remember that she had no need for a man’s suit. Perhaps her husband was dead.

Ellie looked at the jacket. As she did she realized why Andy’d been so eager to get to the men’s department, marching in military step towards the formal wear. He was looking for a wedding suit. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, dread gripping her by the buttocks. She moved away from him, along the aisle to look at the silver cuff links. They were all packaged in little blue velvet boxes, one pair fashioned on a spirit level with a bead of purple liquid that swam around inside the transparent vials. Ellie was drawn to sparkle. She liked new, shiny things. At university she’d collected stainless-steel colanders and woks and hung them on the kitchen racks in the St Jude’s student house. She liked the way they looked when they caught the morning sun from the patio. She never used them. She never cooked. Her housemates did, and when the utensils burned or grew dull, she threw them away and used her pitiful student loan to buy more, too lazy to set to work with a scouring pad.

‘What about this?’ he said. He was holding a black shirt with a beige tie knotted around its collar, the whole cellophane package pulled close to his proud chest, his pupils broad like a kid on its first ecstasy pill.

‘Beige?’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I don’t think it’d complement my bridesmaids,’ though she had no idea what colour her bridesmaids were going to wear. At some point in her life she must have wanted a white satin gown, a pearl-encrusted headdress, a horse-drawn carriage, ice sculptures, cake-toppers, champagne fountains. Most little girls did. But not Ellie, not now; now when she saw a wedding car her instinct was to shout ‘Don’t do it’ at the bride. She’d recently seen an advert for perfume on Andy’s big television, a film of a woman sitting at her dressing table on the morning of her wedding day, then cut to the same woman strutting along a catwalk, one silk winkle-picker in front of the other, ear-splitting applause from the crowded auditorium. The voiceover said, ‘For the happiest day of her life’, or something equally fey. That’s all Ellie wanted: a big dress rehearsal. Her appetite for married life had fallen by the wayside; what she wanted was a life.

Outside it was hot, the street thick with the smell of sweat and anti-perspirant. Tarpaulin market stalls lined the road, the Asian traders standing behind clothes racks, arms folded, as adolescent girls jumbled through the stock, their mothers wincing at their choices. All around, shoppers reluctantly handed over dog-eared five-pound notes and walked away with gauzy blue plastic bags. Behind the traditional market, the booths of the French travelling bazaar wound around the corner into Taff Street, the vendors packing wine and olives in brown paper, the tricolour draped behind them, the lower half of the town immersed in the stench of Roquefort like bags of rotting rubbish.

Gangs of teenagers were skateboarding around the tax office, their wheels scraping on the concrete as Andy and Ellie walked back to the car park, cutting through the dilapidated precinct. ‘When my mother and father got married they had the reception in their own garden,’ Andy said. ‘They had to call my mother away from the oven to cut the cake!’

‘It’s two thousand and three, And!’ Ellie said. ‘And I’m not your mother. I can’t buy a metre of tulle from a fabric stall and conjure it into a veil. It doesn’t work like that. Weddings cost a fortune. We could do Route Sixty-six before we put a deposit down on a cold finger buffet. And who wants a cold finger buffet?’

Ynysangharad Park opened up in front of them, the music from the bandstand drifting over to Bridge Street. On summer Saturdays the council provided free entertainment. ‘Can’t we do that instead?’ she said. ‘Go travelling? That’s a commitment. It’s a bonding exercise.’

Andy wasn’t listening to her. He was pointing through the railings of the park, at a ginger-haired boy kicking a football against a tree trunk. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘it’s James.’ He started walking towards the boy, through the ornate park gate. ‘Griff must be here somewhere.’

They were all there, Griff and Siân, Marc and Rhiannon, Johnny and his girlfriend, on the bank in front of the stage, their bodies propped around a tartan blanket. Johnny was sitting cross-legged, at the edge of the gathering, his messy black ringlets hanging limp between his shoulder blades. His girlfriend was lying next to him, blonde hair fanned out on the ground. Ellie’s nerves began to ring, vibrating against her spinal cord; she wondered how he’d got there, without her knowing about it. She tried to swerve towards them, but Andy gripped her wrist, pulling her towards Marc and Rhiannon. She sat down next to her sister-in-law, said, ‘What are you doing here? I thought Saturday was your busiest day.’

‘Nah,’ Rhiannon said. She was wearing a stupid white rah-rah skirt, her hands slotted between her fleshy legs. ‘Din’t have much on. Kelly’s there. Best way to teach urgh is to chuck urgh in at the deep end. She don’t listen to a word I bloody say. I deserve some time off, anyway. It’s hard work running a top company, El. Not like workin’ for someone else.’ She grinned; bared the fleck of gold in her molar. It must have had something to do with her, this cosy little set-up. Ellie wanted to ask her outright what Johnny was doing here, but Rhiannon’s fat face would curdle as soon as Ellie uttered the first J. She had to wait for the mystery to unfurl of its own accord, or resort to listening to Dai Davies.

‘El?’ Marc said. He was holding a plastic bag open, presenting her with four cans of lager.

She took one. Andy shook his head, and then by thought association patted his jeans pocket to check his car keys were still there.

‘Have some food,’ Siân said, waving at the Tupperware boxes. There were salads and chicken kebabs, hot-dog sausages stuffed in fresh finger rolls, a bottle of mustard seed dressing fallen on to its side. Andy picked a salad bowl up and started gnawing at a slice of cucumber. ‘Been looking at some outfits for the wedding,’ he said as he chewed, a rivulet of juice dripping from his lips.

Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘It must have taken you ages to prepare this,’ she said, hoping Siân would reveal the origin of the picnic.

Siân shook her head. ‘Chan gave me the kebabs last night. I threw the rest of it together this morning.’ She packed some of the used Tupperware into a cooler bag, said, ‘So did you find anything you liked? There was a wedding at St Illtyd’s this morning. I saw it when I was leaving. What it was, the bride in cream, the women in coffee. What colour are you thinking about, El?’

‘Yeah, El,’ Rhiannon said, flipping on to her belly. She picked up one of James’s stray miniature cars and threw it into Siân’s cooler bag. ‘What colours are ewe ’aving? Tell Auntie Rhi. Bet ewer gonna do somethin’ really unconventional.’

‘No,’ Ellie said. She knew she should say something about shoes, rings, jewellery; something that sounded convincing. The last thing she wanted was to give Rhiannon the impression that she didn’t want to marry Andy. But she was aware of Johnny sitting mere feet away. Her nerves were still fluttering, cells colliding with one another, pushing microscopic waves of panic through her veins. ‘Ivory,’ she said, glancing at him. He wasn’t listening but she tried to change the subject anyway. She pointed at the stage, said, ‘Who’s this band, then?’

‘The Water Babies,’ Griff said. He opened a can, sending a spray of white foam across the grass. ‘They’re shit. Don’t know how they got this contract – probably related to someone from the council. Wait till the Peel session goes on air, El. Fuckin’ bunch of Muppets’ll be too shamed to show their faces.’ He twisted the metal tab from the can and flicked it at Andy.

‘Wanna get her off the pill now,’ he said, pointing at Ellie. ‘Wanna start as soon as you get hitched if you wanna catch up with us. Me ’n’ Siân are going for the soccer team.’ He looked at Siân but Siân was looking down at the blanket, her eyes fixed on a blue criss-cross in the tartan, her bitten fingers lodged in her mouth. Ellie noticed her lipstick: vermilion red; the colour of blood.

‘I’m sure she’s pregnant anyway,’ Griff said, ‘the way she keeps crying in front of films that ain’t sad.’ He spat a glob of lager on the ground. As he did, the atmosphere changed, the sun sliding behind a cloud.

Johnny stood up, his long, skinny frame stretching into the heavens. Everyone watched as he brushed grass blades from his clothes and stooped to offer his girlfriend his hand. She took it and straightened up, the grey T-shirt that had ridden up her flat torso falling down over her taut waist. For a second, Ellie had spied her belly button, big and hollow, wedged in the centre of a size eight stomach, the colour of an unripe peach. She looked down at her own pierced navel; flesh plump around the steel belly bar. She was a size twelve on a good day.

‘Sorry, everyone,’ the woman said, gesturing at the food. ‘Johnny wants chips so we’re just going for a walk into town. We won’t be long.’ Ellie felt her heart sink, her oesophagus constrict, like someone with a nut allergy who’d just swallowed a whole sugared almond.

Rhiannon sat up. ‘There’s a good fish shop on Taff Street,’ she said. ‘Does Clark’s pies an’ that. Want me to show ewe?’

The couple didn’t answer her. They were already on the path leading out of the park, walking shoulder to shoulder, their footsteps concurrent, like policemen searching for evidence. They were stick figures on the other side of the railings when Griff said, ‘Who does he think he is? Arrogant English bastard. There’s plenty of food here, but that ain’t good enough for him, is it?’

‘Fuckin’ ’ell, Griff,’ Marc said. He was inspecting an elongated mustard stain down the front of his Liverpool shirt. ‘It doesn’t cost anything to be friendly. We only invited ’em because they don’t know anyone else. They only just moved here for God’s sake. Have some tolerance, will you? We’ll keep a welcome an’ all that.’ He spat into his hand, massaged the saliva into his chest.

Ellie smiled slyly to herself. It was Marc who’d invited Johnny, ergo it was Rhiannon who’d invited Johnny. The cunning cow fancied him herself – that’s why she’d made such a hubbub about being in love with Marc. At the Pump House, when Ellie had asked for his name, Rhiannon knew what Ellie was thinking because she was thinking the same thing. Ellie stole a quick peep at her. She was turned towards the railings, looking at the park gate, a nervous hum skimming out of her curvilinear lips. She was waiting for him to come back.

Griff ripped a grass stalk out of a big clump growing next to him, threw the wheat-coloured seeds on the breeze. ‘You don’t know what it’s going to cost yet,’ he said. ‘He could be a fuckin’ yardie for all we know. Dai said—’

‘Yardies don’t come from Cornwall,’ Rhiannon said, cutting him off. She kicked him in the ribs, showing everyone her black lace M&S knickers. ‘Bloody thicko! ’Ey come from Jamaica.’ Griff stared at her for a moment, but said nothing. He turned to look at the stage.

The band had already finished. The only sound was of children splashing and screaming, the noises from the swimming pool reverberating across the park.

Exactly eight minutes later, eight minutes that seemed to go on for eight years, Johnny came back, creeping towards the gathering like an insect on its stick legs. The girlfriend sat next to Siân. Johnny sat next to Ellie, his thighs hitched up to his chest, a polystyrene tray balanced on his kneecaps. While he’d been gone, the fire in her nerves had waned, but the moment he sat down it instantly came roaring back. Her heart pumped so fast she was sure everyone could see it, pounding against her ribcage, pushing the material of her blouse out, then pulling it back in again. She held her breath and watched from the corner of her eye as he lifted the chips to his mouth and shoved them inside, one after the other, chewing them regimentally. He caught her eye and held the tray up, offering her one.

Ellie shook her head and turned away. There was an anti-war demonstration trampling along the path on the other side of the park, fifty-odd people holding handmade placards aloft. ‘No More Blood for Oil,’ one said. As long as she could feel his awesome gaze on her face, she kept her eyes fixed on the demo.

‘You ever heard of the petro-dollar?’ he said as he put the polystyrene tray down on the ground. Ellie shook her head again, colour rushing to her face. She was so tense her jaw had locked. She was incapable of speech.

‘The petro-dollar is the cause of this war,’ he said. ‘Oil from the OPEC countries is always paid for in American dollars, right? So if Japan needs oil it needs to get some Yankee dollar.’ Ellie couldn’t quite meet his stare. He was something to look at: run-of-the-mill face and infolded lips, but large iron-oxide-black eyes, darker than carbon. She couldn’t understand a word he was saying for being fixed by those strange eyes. She quickly swallowed the well of saliva building up in her mouth and it went down like double-edged razor blades. ‘So to get American dollars,’ he said, ‘Japan needs to sell goods to the American economy. Let’s say it sells them a Honda, right? The Federal Reserve prints dollars and gives them to Japan.’

As he spoke, Ellie could feel the warmth of his shoulder against the hot flesh of her cheek, his height was cosseting her; setting butterflies free in her tummy. Nobody had talked to her about anything she cared about since the day she’d left Plymouth. He was supposed to be a drug dealer, a comprehensive school dropout with a string of petty convictions and a frothy-mouthed pit bull terrier. But he knew what Ellie was thinking. A chord plucked in her stomach.

‘When Iraq decided it was going to start selling oil in euros, Uncle Sam did his nut.’ He reached into his pocket, took a packet of cigarettes out. ‘Notice how the first thing the troops did was secure ownership of the oil wells?’ he said. He lit a cigarette and passed it to Ellie. She took it with trembling fingers and watched as he lit one for himself, the Zippo’s flame dancing in the wind. She took a long drag on the cigarette, filling her lungs with the delicious nicotine.

‘That’s the first thing they did,’ she said as she exhaled, ‘stole the Iraqis’ oil.’

‘Hang a banger, mush,’ Rhiannon trilled. ‘Let’s chill out a bit, is it? Who’s gonna do a joint? We don’t talk about politics round ’ere.’ She took a lump of pot out of her bag and tried to pass it to Johnny. Johnny looked blankly at Rhiannon and then turned back to Ellie. ‘It’s tantamount to a war crime,’ he said.

Rhiannon’s mouth had fallen open, a hunk of violet tongue perched on her bottom lip. For a fraction of a second it looked as if she was going to cry. She said, ‘Fuck ewe ’en,’ her whole face turning into a snarl. She rummaged through her bag, looking for fag-papers. Under her breath she said, ‘I’ll do it my fuckin’ self.’

‘Have you finished that can, babe?’ Andy said, tapping Ellie’s leg. ‘Because I’ve got to go, I’ve got the car.’ He might have sensed the malice in the atmosphere, but more than likely was offended by the mention of cannabis. He wouldn’t condone drug use in a public place, not in a children’s park. Ellie wanted to stay, but any excuse she made would sound suspicious. She shook her lager can, realizing she’d finished it without noticing. He took it out of her hand and threw it in a black bag that Siân had reserved for the group’s litter. He took Ellie’s hand and lifted her up. Her body felt weightless, as if it wasn’t a body, but a soul, cleaving away from its carcass, leaving its shell on the ground.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.