New Welsh Short Stories (17 page)

The knocking continued. Beryl stood at the sink and chewed, and swallowed, until the sound grew more frantic.

Don't let it in, she said, and then, mimicking Kenny, Eh, an' why not, eh? Let the poor wee creature come in.

She laughed at herself as she strode to the door. There was nothing to fear: she was the lucky one. And she laughed again at the way the candlelight made a giant of her shadow, the way her footsteps sounded like claps of thunder. She felt full of potential.

Kenny glared at her with his green eyes.

What's so bloody funny? he said.

He had a smear of mud down his cheek, and what looked like blood on his chin. He opened his right hand to show her the damage – a long jagged wound across his palm. In his other hand, he held a string bag bulging with starfish.

Oh, poor you, said Beryl, leading him into the kitchen. She turned up the wick on the lamp and pressed his palm flat on the chopping block to inspect the wound.

Ah! Careful, you great – he said, wincing as she prodded it with a sticky fingernail.

I've seen some plasters somewhere, she said, still staring at the gash, which glistened almost sexily in the lamplight.

Medical kit in my rucksack, he said, a little out of breath, You'll need to suture it.

She was almost disappointed when she realised that Kenny hadn't meant her to stitch the wound. As she laid the strips across his palm, daintily, precisely, Kenny turned his head away.

Someone's been busy, he said, and she jerked round to where he was looking, and saw the pile of chocolate wrappers abandoned on the counter.

Must've been the ghost, she said, pressing the plaster on the wound with more force than necessary.

I hope you haven't spoiled your appetite, he said, 'cos we've got a real treat. But you'll have to prep 'em.

Beryl tried not to look at the bag in the sink. One or two of the starfish had poked their fingers through the mesh and seemed to be waving to her.

You have to be careful, he said, Here, I'll tell yer what to do.

He unhooked a starfish from the bag and laid it belly
-
up on the chopping block. He intended for her to butcher it.

I'm not eating them, she said.

Of course you're not eating them, he said, his voice normal and caustic, You'll no doubt have some crap from your stash. Pot noodle I expect. But could you at least do something for
me
for once?

And Beryl nodded and remained silent and felt the heat raging up her neck and into her face as he talked her through the prep:

You know, they're actually called sea stars, they're not fish per se, he said, losing his cadence and then finding it again.

Here are the arms – not fingers, hen, arms – and you spread them out and remove that wee sac in the middle.

She positioned the point of the knife into the centre of the body and pressed on the handle. The starfish buckled – a quick spasm – and then was still. The opening revealed a small wet orange bulb. To Beryl, it looked like an egg. To Beryl, Kenny's finger, pointing at the egg, was as fat as the fingers of the starfish. He was still talking, about the benefits of deep
-
frying over boiling, how beggars couldn't be choosers, how they probably needed more salt and he'd been told they could find a salt
-
bed nearby, and Beryl heard drone drone drone, blah blah blah, y'ken. And then he was instructing her to remove the central sac from each one which he would really have loved to do himself but for his hand.

Listen Bee, this is really important, y'ken, that wee sac is toxic, that wee sac causes paralysis. So, you know, be careful, eh?

When he went to take his boots off, Beryl was very careful. She chose the fattest of the starfish, extracted it from the bag – apologising, commiserating, pulling her mouth down at the corners in a little grimace – and dropped it whole into the saucepan. She was barely able to look as it twisted and wheeled in the boiling water; you had to feel sorry for the poor thing.

JOHN HENRY

‘Hammer gonna be the death of me'

Mary
-
Ann Constantine

He sees only the lines of the tracks stretched out ahead, through a reddish scrubland, with pines and a huge sky; tracks stretching cinematically towards a burning horizon through the red sandstone dotted with stunted prickly shrubs. The smell of metal in the heat of the sun.

And because this is the second time, he wakes a few minutes before the alarm, disturbed. It clings to his inner vision; he tries to peel it away. He showers his big body, shakes his head like a dog, and shaves, looking into his own sharp eyes in the mirror to see if there is any detectable trace. It leaves him gradually, like a thin film of oil or a headache breaking up and dissolving. He gets into the dark suit. Then he goes down to the kitchen, makes a small, strong espresso on the hob and sits at the table to stem the flow of emails and do an hour's preparation before setting out for work. He walks across the city to his office through a soft grey drizzle.

It is possible, though extremely difficult to ascertain, that the weather, at some scarcely acknowledged level, might make a difference; that he might be aware without knowing it that the city's trees are sometimes cold and naked, sometimes full of white flowers. Possible that in ways too subtle to calculate he does see passing faces and react to them with warmth or amusement or curiosity. Even buildings might matter, though again, short of persuading the gods to vaporise a bank or a Starbucks one morning merely to test his responses, it would be very hard to tell. Mostly he just carries himself along inside his mind, which is vast and cultured and perpetually busy with strategies. Although he is not a politician, and is no admirer of most he has encountered, he has the politician's gift for tipping the balance of power, for persuading, for manoeuvring, for making things happen. He can work eighteen or nineteen hours a day; sleep blots him out completely. And he rarely dreams.

He calls in at the Italian café, places his order and stands by the counter, texting a reply to a frazzled query from the head office in Nigeria, where the convoys have not been getting through. There is indistinct music, battling the mighty noise of the coffee machine, grinding and steaming. He half catches a bluesy tune.

The woman behind the counter calls out his order and hands the coffee across. He smiles and thanks her warmly, because however much goes on inside his head he does like people, especially working people, and is concerned for them. He has learned over the years how to express that concern, as one might learn a foreign language. By now he is very fluent, and most people cannot tell the difference.

He comes in here a lot, out of loyalty to an Italian grandmother he never knew and an objection to multinationals, and yet this woman is not familiar. She has thick blonde hair piled up a little frowsily, and blue nail varnish, and blue eyes that meet his.

Here, she says. His big hands, docker's hands, navvy's hands, wrap firmly round the cardboard cup.

Thank you.

She looks at him very directly. Is there anything else?

Ah, no. I don't think so. This is great.

She looks sceptical.

You're sure? she says, and he smiles because he thinks she's teasing.

Quite sure, he says. She sighs, and turns away.

He leaves, faintly concerned that he might have misread something, with a shred of song from the radio clinging inside his head, about a hammer,
he picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
, and then he is crossing a road and a cyclist whips by too close, too close altogether. And he crosses the road and heads down towards the underpass, his work bag slung diagonally across his body, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, four more messages since he last looked.

But here he slows down. Here the outside world does break in, a strumming guitar and a harsh voice singing, and a separate high call, like a market
-
trader or a bird,
BigIssue-BigIssue! BigIssue-BigIssue!
He thinks of them as Scylla and Charybdis, and though he faces this dilemma almost every morning he has not resolved it yet, it still catches him unprepared. Sometimes he has to clamp the phone to his ear and stride on past, absorbed, guilty, no eye contact. Other days his pockets yield enough for one but not the other; which halves the guilt. Today as he puts the phone away he finds enough change for both of them, and he negotiates the transaction for the magazine, clumsily, with his coffee in one hand. The chords behind him stir a recognition. But he does not recognise the woman selling the paper, who has a thin face and blue eyes and dark blonde hair.

Thanks, he says. Would you mind rolling it up and just slipping into the top of the bag? I can't, with the coffee, I'm sorry…

She nods, and does so, and then looks at him with some concern.

Is there anything else I can do? Her accent is unidentifiable, and her hand, with its dirty nails, rests briefly, gently, on his arm.

No, no. Thank you. This time he is quite taken aback.

You're sure? she says, very intently.

Yes. Thank you. He backs rapidly away, turns to throw the remaining coins into the busker's guitar case, and walks on through the underpass much faster than usual, with the words of the song amplified and echoing after him, so that he cannot help but hear the Captain say to John Henry,

I'm gonna bring that steam drill around

I'm gonna bring that drill out on these tracks

I'm gonna hammer that steel on down, lord lord.

Hammer that steel on down.

He has no idea what a steam drill is, nor why the song sounds so familiar. And as he climbs the steps out onto the busy street he doesn't quite catch John Henry's response, but he gets the feeling that it is pure defiance.

There are so many meetings scheduled for today he does not have time to eat and nobody thinks to ask him. It doesn't matter. When he works like this his own conviction drives him. He makes do with tea and coffee and a couple of the shortbread biscuits that are conjured up for the most important meeting in the afternoon, and gives everything he has to each encounter, wholly intent. He is possessed of a dark energy, which is not at all restless or demonstrative: more like the force of gravity, say, than electricity. He can be roused and articulate when necessary; patient and contemplative when not. The most difficult meeting of the week goes brilliantly his way: there will be funding for the South American project after all. In the lift going down he allows himself a moment of victory, and thinks with satisfaction that lives will be saved because of words exchanged in a cramped meeting room in a nondescript tower block in a city a thousand miles away from South America. He finds he is shaking, and realises how hungry he is. But he has a train to catch, and his taxi is waiting.

The song gusts out of the radio at him as he folds himself into the back of the cab. It is the Captain again, and he is asking John Henry

What is that storm I hear?

John Henry says That ain't no storm, Captain,

That's just my hammer in the air.

Where to? asks the driver, turning the sound down and adjusting her rear
-
view mirror.

Train station please, he says, checking over seven new messages on his phone.

You sure about that?

He looks up sharply and meets blue eyes in the mirror. Blonde curls tucked under a navy
-
blue cap.

Quite sure, he says, almost sternly. Station.

She shrugs, and as she starts up the engine there is another burst of song.

John Henry said to his shaker

Shaker why don't you sing?

Cos I'm swingin thirty pounds from my hips on down

Lord listen to my cold steel ring, lord lord.

Listen to my cold steel ring

He closes his eyes briefly. He doesn't know what a shaker is, either. But he sees the powerful arms, and feels a kind of thrill, a kind of fear. A crackling voice breaks across the music, and the driver leans into the microphone and tells her boss where she's headed.

He pays her more than she asks, hoping to make her smile. But she just takes the money with a quiet nod and gives him a look of such tender pity that he is suddenly furious, and turns and pushes through the crowds to the shop, and grabs sandwiches and bottled water and a
Guardian
. He makes quite sure, this time, to choose a check
-
out with a young man serving. Then, cutting it fine, he picks up another coffee and hurries for his train, and finds to his surprise that he has a table and plenty of room to himself. He will be able to work.

The relief he feels as the train shakes itself to life and pulls away from the platform is so profound, so powerfully distilled, it has the quality of a blessing. He eats, gratefully. Ignores the paper.
Takes his phone out of his breast
-
pocket and turns it off without looking at it. Then he pushes himself back into the corner of the seat by the window and stretches his big legs as best he can under the table, and looks out with curiosity at the warehouses and the scrapyards and the canal and the wasteland that turns to fields and willows, and then fields of crops in a reddening soil that, emptying itself gradually of houses and shacks and sheds and piles of rubble, gives way to a kind of scrubland with twisted shrubs and pines. An unfamiliar sun breaks through the mist to glare down on the metal tracks, that stretch away, way up ahead, further than he can see, to where a man shining with sweat lifts and drives a massive hammer down, again, and again, and again, in a race against a machine.