Faces of Fear Page 13

  Across the street, five or six kids were kicking Tizer cans around the pavement, and one of them was sitting on the steps of the launderette smoking. If that was my boy I’d thrash him, thought David. What’s the point of getting out of the pits if you’re only going to smoke. David’s father suffered from lung disease, and even if he didn’t go to chapel any longer, David was evangelical about lungs.

  He turned around, looked the other way, across the valley: toward the high, gaunt railway viaduct which spanned the Rhymney. It had once carried coal-trucks and a regular passenger service, but now it was nothing more than a silent monument to Victorian engineering. Deep beneath its arches, its banks overgrown with dripping ferns, the Rhymney river flowed, with a sound like forgotten people whispering. The river had run black once, with coal-dust. Now Markham Colliery was closed, and Pengam, and Aberbargoed, and the men were working in carpet warehouses or electronics companies or (mostly) on the dole, and the only way you could get to see a real Welsh miner’s cottage was to visit the Folk Museum just outside Cardiff.

  A bird fluttered on the wall.

  “Ellis?” David called out. “Ellis Morgan, is that you?”

  But the car-park was deserted, and the only voice that replied was Roger Jones, shouting, “Shut that bloody door, mun, it’s bloody freezing in here!”

  As he went back inside, though, David looked back toward the shops and thought he glimpsed somebody in a grey coat and a red scarf, climbing the steep angled road that led up through Maesy-Cwmmer. Somebody in a grey cloth cap, with a satchel around him, walking fast, the way that Ellis Morgan always used to walk. David had never been able to keep up with him, when he was younger. You had to walk three paces and run the next three, and by the time you reached the colliery gates he had you panting.

  “Ellis Morgan,” he whispered.

  And just as he whispered it, the figure in the grey coat and the red scarf stopped on the corner of Jenkins Street and turned around and lifted one hand in a slight, affectionate wave.

  It was too foggy and the figure was too far away for David to be able to distinguish who he really was. His face was nothing but a pale smudge; and before David could focus his eyes any better, he had turned the corner and disappeared. But why had he stopped and waved, if he hadn’t been Ellis Morgan?

  He went back inside the Butchers and closed the door very quietly behind him. His pint was waiting for him on the counter. He looked toward Old Glyn Bachelor, sitting in the corner in the photographic daylight. Old Glyn Bachelor looked back at him, and his face was serious, knowing; as if they had just shared a secret.

  At half-past two, David left the Butchers and climbed into his pale blue Vauxhall Astra. It whinnied five or six times before it finally started. It didn’t like the damp, and it needed a new battery, but there was a fat chance of David being able to afford one, now he was working part-time. He did a bit of van-driving, and the odd bit of carpentry when he could. He used to be a full-time fitter for Glyneth Kitchens, but nobody around here could run to a new gas cooker these days, let alone a fitted kitchen, and Glyneth had gone out of business.

  He had liked the kitchen-fitting. Good, clean job and you got to visit some nice houses and they always made you cups of tea. Before that, straight from school, he had followed his father into the Maes-Y-Dderwen Colliery. He had worked at Maes-Y-Dderwen for just five months and one week before the Coal Board closed it down. Job for life, mining, that was what his father always used to say. So long as there’s coal, and brave men to dig it out, there’ll be jobs.

  He hadn’t even worn the price label off his sandwich-box before he was standing outside watching them chain the gates and the winding-gear come to a standstill. That had been that. Some job for life.

  Of course the Maes-Y-Dderwen disaster had hastened the Coal Board’s decision to close. People in the Rhymney Valley could recall that date as well as Christmas, or their own birthdays. Friday morning the 15th of October, 1982. Twenty-seven minutes past ten precisely. A huge blower of firedamp had set off a coal-dust and air explosion in the very lowest and furthest extremity of the mine, the No.7 West tunnel, and eleven men had been buried and never found. They had tried for nearly three weeks to dig them out, but there had been further huge collapses, half a hillside in Hengoed had fallen in, taking three houses with it. In the end the relatives had agreed that the whole west section could be sealed off, and blessed by the Baptist minister and the Roman Catholic priest (for the two Poles among them), and consecrated as a grave.

  They had left eleven of their friends down there. Eleven sons, eleven fathers, eleven men of Maes. They had stood in the rain, arm linking arm, and sung Bread of Heaven. Not a dry eye in the valley.

  David was driving toward Fleur-de-Lys with his windscreen wipers flapping when he overtook Old Glyn Bachelor, walking through the rain with his coat-collar turned up. He pulled into the side of the road, leaned across the passenger seat, and called out, “Want a lift, Mr Bachelor?”

  “What about Nye?”

  “He’s all right mun. There’s an old blanket on the back seat.”

  Old Glyn Bachelor climbed in gratefully and slammed the door. “God. It’s raining old women and sticks,” he grumbled. He wiped his face with his crumpled-up handkerchief. Nye sniffed the old blanket and opted for the back shelf instead.

  They drove off into the rain. Past the stores and the video library and the curry house and the sloping slate-roofed terraces. This was the Wales that Dylan Thomas had never known, a strange Wales, he had called it, coal-pitted, mountained, river run, full, as far as he knew, of choirs and sheep and story-book tall hats.

  Even stranger now, with the pits mostly closed, and all the traditional shops gone, like Jones & Porter, where they used to cut the cheese with a wire, and wrap it in greaseproof.

  “Thought you saw Ellis Morgan, then, did you?” asked Old Glyn Bachelor.

  David sniffed and tugged at his bulbous little nose. “Bit scary, isn’t it? Could have sworn it was him. He walked past the window and then I saw him again on the corner of Jenkins Street. He even waved to me, waved his hand? But it couldn’t have been him, could it”

  “It happened before once,” said Old Glyn Bachelor.

  “What did?”

  “Men being seen when they were dead.”

  “When was that, then?”

  “After the Bedwas explosion in 1936. There was seven killed then. I was only five years old so I didn’t know any of them, see, but they were fathers and older brothers of some of my friends. It was the same as Maes – far too dangerous to dig them out. They tried, but half the bloody mountain fell down.”

  “But they were seen? I mean, walking about, like?”

  “I saw one of them myself, although I didn’t know till later. Gareth Evans, my mate William Evans’ da. I can remember it now as clear as daylight. It was about six years later, in 1941. I was coming round the corner by the Plas Inn on my bicycle, pretending that I was flying a Spitfire, you know the kind of thing, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah with the pretend machine guns, and there he was walking up the road from Blackwood with his cap and his knapsack and his old coat on, and he sort of stared at me like as I went whipping past. I can remember his eyes as if it were yesterday, because they were clear, do you see, they were clear like glass, like looking through windows at a rainy day.”

  “Come on, now, Mr Bachelor,” said David. “You’re scaring me now.”

  “It’s true. And it was Gareth Evans, too, because I went to William’s house about a week later for my tea, and there was his picture on the fireplace. Poor Mrs Evans couldn’t understand why I didn’t eat my jam sandwiches. She’d saved the jam specially, see, out of her ration. But what was I to say? There’s a funny thing, Mrs Evans, I saw Mr Evans walking up the hill from Blackwood just a week ago, clear as daylight?’ I couldn’t have said that, jam ration or not.”

  They reached Pengam, where Old Glyn Bachelor’s sister lived, and David pulled his Astra into the curb. There were narrow terrace
d houses on either side with shiny picture-windows and elaborately tied-up nets. The curtains in the front room of No. 19 were drawn aside for a moment, and a big beige face peered out.

  “You’re not late for your dinner, are you?” said David.

  Old Glyn Bachelor shook his head. “No, she’s nosey, that’s all. Saw the car stopping.”

  “What happened?” asked David.

  Old Glyn Bachelor was already half-way out of the car door, and Nye had jumped down from the back shelf to follow him. “What do you mean what happened?”

  “Did you ever see Gareth Evans again, or any of the rest of them?”

  Old Glyn Bachelor glanced at David quickly, and then looked away. “I heard one or two stories, but I didn’t set too much store in them.”

  “What stories?”

  “You’re persistent, aren’t you? I’ve got to get in for my dinner.”

  “Mr Bachelor, I saw Ellis Morgan.”

  Old Glyn Bachelor patted David’s arm. “You remember your history lessons, do you? Remember Owen Glyn Dwr?”

  David was baffled. But Old Glyn Bachelor wasn’t going to tell him any more. He climbed out of the car and slammed the door and he was inside No. 19 even before David could wind down his window and call out I don’t understand what you mean, Mr Bachelor – give us a clue.

  He drove home to his parents’ house in Penpedairheol. They lived on a dull, hilly estate, bungalows mostly, although all the houses were neat and tidy and freshly-painted and quite a few of the neighbours had done loft conversions.

  His mother was fat and hot and all wrapped up in a flowery pinny. He kissed her sweaty forehead and then looked in on his father. His father was sitting in front of the television watching the football. He was so painfully withered, like a beetroot that’s been left for weeks and weeks at the back of the vegetable basket. David wondered if he ought to tell him that he’d seen Ellis Morgan, but then his father coughed and wheezed and he decided against it. Didn’t want to start one of those fits, and his father probably wouldn’t believe him anyway.

  “Where’d you put my old schoolbooks, ma?”

  “What do you want them for?”

  “Just my old history book, that’s all. I want to look something up.”

  He found his books in an old cardboard box at the far end of the attic, next to the cold water tank. Mathematics for Modern Schools. Geography Today. And here it was, A History of Wales, by J.D. Lloyd, green with a red dragon on the cover, and inside the cover the rounded fourth-form writing ‘D. Davies, 38 Royce Avenue, Penpedairheol, Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, Europe, the World, the Universe’.

  His father called up through the attic door, “How long are you going to be up there, boy? There’s a draft like a bloody hurricane!” He then burst into a lengthy and horrendous coughing fit, a pain-wracked extravaganza of breathlessness and torn mucus membranes.

  David knelt in the attic with his hand pressed to his forehead in prayer and silent apology. Sorry father, I forgot for just a moment. His father was cantankerous, endlessly ill-tempered, but he was suffocating from anthracosis, his lung-tissues clogged with lesions, so that he felt every minute of every day as if some relentless pest was following him around, pressing a pillow over his face, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, and no relief in sight but not to breathe at all.

  He quickly thumbed over the soft, thick pages of A History of Wales. There they all were, the same pictures he had stared at on summer afternoons, Cadwaladr, King of Gwynedd, wearing the crown of Arthur; Llewelyn ap Iorwerth sitting in his cell at the Cistercian monastery at Aberconway, waiting for death. And here was Owen Glyn Dwr, Owain of Gruffydd, descendant of Llewelyn and the ruling princes of Wales, fighting the English at Knighton, nearly six hundred years ago.

  ‘Owen Glyn Dwr promised his followers that, forever after, any Welshman who died at the hands of the English would return to his native hearth, in order to bid farewell to his loved ones.’

  David remembered that paragraph, but he had never understood it at the time, or wanted to understand it, not when he was fourteen years old, and mad on rugby, and the crisp, white, ever-swelling blouse of the girl who sat next to him, Gwen Griffin (Mrs Johnson now, with twin babies as fat as her breasts had once been.) But could it mean what it actually said?

  Could it mean that Owen Glyn Dwr had promised that forever after any Welshman who had died at the hands of the English would return to his native hearth, back home, even though he were dead – just as Ellis Morgan was dead, and all those other men who had been crushed and lost at Maes-y-Dderwen, they were dead too?

  David’s skin prickled with the very thought of it, and he felt as if centipedes were running through his hair.

  Was this what Old Glyn Bachelor had been trying to tell him? That it was true?

  His father called up, “Either you shut that bloody door, David, or I’m shutting it myself and you can rot up there for ever.”

  He drove back along the valley and it was beginning to grow greyly dark. The smell of coal-fires was even sharper and danker, and the curving mountaintops were strung with sodium lamps. It must have been so black and shadowy and wild here once, in the days of Owen Glyn Dwr, with visible stars, instead of this orange-lit valley like a supermarket car-park. He saw two men in flat caps walking along by the side of the road, and he wondered if they had come from Maes-y-Ddwerwen, too, but when he looked in his rear-view mirror they had disappeared, or turned off somewhere perhaps, and he didn’t want to go back to find out.

  Because what if they were dead? What would he say to them?

  Are you dead, boys? And did Owen Glyn Dwr promise that you could say goodbye?

  He drove to Maes-y-cwmmer, and across the traffic-lights, and up the curving street to the corner of Jenkins Street. He stopped outside the Morgans’ house and switched off the engine. The curtains were drawn tight in the Morgans’ front room, orange and brown flowery curtains, but the lights were on, he could see that, and there was no TV flickering, which was unusual at this time of night, most families were having their tea by now, and watching the telly.

  At last, he climbed out of the car, opened the wrought-iron gate, and went down the two small concrete steps to the front door. He rang the doorbell and waited. He thought he could hear laughing inside but he couldn’t be sure.

  After a short while, the door opened and it was Denise Morgan, Ellis’s youngest daughter, not so young now, black haired, thick-eyebrowed, her cheeks flushed as if she had been drinking, or laughing, or both.

  “David?” she said.

  David felt chronically embarrassed. “Listen, Denise … I know this sounds stupid, like. But I could have sworn that I saw your father this afternoon. I was having a pint in the Butcher’s, see, and he walked right past the window, clear as daylight, I could swear by it. Then he came up the road here, and waved.”

  Denise stared at him for a long time without saying anything at all. He could hear music in the living-room, somebody playing an old Mel Torme record, and a woman laughing. Then Denise said, “Waved, did he?”

  “That’s right, waved.”

  Tears glistened in Denise’s eyes. “Come on in and shake his hand, then.”

  David swallowed; and for the very first time in his life he felt absolute terror. It was like the front step dropping away from under his feet, a lift with no cables, instant vertigo.

  “He’s here?”

  Denise reached out and took hold of David’s elbow and guided him into the small hallway with its ship’s wheel barometer from Barry Island and its pink dyed pampas grass. She opened the door to the front room, and there they all were, the whole Morgan family gathered around, Ivor that David had been to school with, and Janine who was married to a toiletries salesman in Bristol, and the two youngest, Kevin and Brangwyn, and Mrs Morgan, grey-haired, but prettily-dressed in a pink and yellow frock. There was Billy Probert from the hardware shop in Ystrad, too, he used to work at Maes-y-Dderwen, too, on the same shift as Ellis.

  And th
ere he was, sitting in his favourite armchair, Ellis Morgan himself. He had been crushed and killed all of eleven years ago, but here he was, sitting in his favourite armchair, with his family and his friends all around him, and they were laughing and talking and drinking rum and black, with Mel Torme on the CD player.

  Ellis lifted his eyes when David came into the room. He was whiter, much whiter, as if all the blood had drained out of him, but he hadn’t changed since the day that David had last seen him. Thin-faced, hollow-cheeked, with a hawklike nose and an angular chin. His eyes seemed to be paler, so pale that his irises had scarcely any colour at all, although David remembered that they had once been dark.

  He smiled at David and his smile was welcoming but strangely detached.

  “It’s David!” said Mrs Morgan. “Look Ellis, it’s David, look how much he’s grown!”

  David crossed the room and held out his hand. His heart was thumping like somebody beating a large cushion with a cricket-bat.

  “Hallo, David,” said Ellis, taking hold of David’s hand and briefly clasping it. “Long time no see.”

  “You’re dead,” said David. His whole body was over-whelmed with waves of chilly sickness. It was worse than being on a small boat, on a chilly morning, fishing for mackerel.

  Ellis leaned back in his chair and looked up at David with an expression of sadness and regret. “You won’t hold that against me, will you, being dead?”

  “You’re dead, you must be dead.”

  David turned to Mrs Morgan, but Mrs Morgan quickly lowered her eyes, and so did everybody else. Mel Torme went on groaning but everybody stayed silent and frowned at their drinks.

  “He’s dead,” David appealed. He felt as if the tiny living-room were closing in on him. The cheap varnished sideboard; the 3-D pictures of Christ.

  Denise said, “You must have known that. That’s why you came, isn’t it? So what are you shouting about?”

  Ellis smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was oddly echoey, as if he were speaking in another room. “Glenys almost had kittens when I came to the door, didn’t you love? It’s your children that accept it. They think it’s normal, children, when their father comes back, whether he’s drunk or missed the bus or simply dead.”