New Welsh Short Stories (23 page)

Her face had flushed. She'd found herself bothered by an intense awareness of her hands.

‘It's so great to meet you…'

His face had been inscrutable. He'd barely looked at her.

‘Yeah, nice one.'

At the other side of the ford, our heroine sits on a stone wall to put on her boots. She is startled by a man's voice and the charging of hooves approaching. She stands and watches the gentleman try to regain control of his crazed mount. The horse whinnies and rears, sending the gentleman tumbling into the ford. Our heroine's hands flutter to her mouth and her eyes widen with concern.

The director had spoken to them both for a while about his Creative Vision, and a little about contracts and merchandising. There would almost certainly be a novelisation. For the housewives. He'd been interrupted when our hero's mobile phone beat out an alarming rhythm. Our hero'd answered the phone, excused himself vaguely and raised his hand as a generalised farewell as he left.

The gentleman is unhurt but is soaked and unpleasantly disposed. His white shirt is rendered translucent by its wetness. Our heroine laughs – not through mirth but rather from embarrassment and a strange, confusing arousal, the like of which we are led to believe she has never experienced before.

IV

Our hero is pacing and brooding. A girl named Gina has told a popular tabloid newspaper about what happened in Ibiza, in a nightclub toilet – except she's embellished it somewhat. She has spoken favourably about his skills, so it's not as bad as it could have been. His girlfriend, however, has left for a tour with GyrlzDubz and is not answering his calls. To make matters worse, they are on location in a country house in South Wales and it's raining. He is snappy with the make
-
up artist and keeps disappearing to the toilet.

Our heroine is worried about the scene, which ends with her slapping our hero across the face. She's never dreamed of slapping anyone before – least of all
Number 4 of Britain's Most Beddable Bods As Voted by Hot Magazine Readers 2012
. She has noted his agitation, and this morning read with interest Gina's detailed account of his five
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times
-
in
-
a
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row prowess. The make
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up artist remarks on the change in her complexion – the rosy flush to her cheeks requiring extra powder. The room has been painstakingly restored to its period and the set designer is arguing with the historical advisor about the appropriateness of a vase. Cameras have been placed so as not to film the view of the distant steelworks through the window. Our heroine is now standing alone amidst the bustle of the film crew's activity. She is composing herself, her lines and directions playing through her mind. Yesterday they were markings on a page; double spaced, 10pt Ariel font; today they will live – she will give them breath, and magic will then project them into the minds of thousands, millions. She stands, a single point of stillness, her mouth almost imperceptibly shaping the words as she recalls them, her hand sometimes smoothing down her hair. See how vulnerable she looks.

Are we meant to care? Why should we? We don't know her name, her background. Has her path been an easy one; have her falls been cushioned by wealth and privilege and her way made clear? Or has her young life been beset with struggle and hardship? Could she be an orphan (no, let's not lay it on too thickly)? Was she brought up on a rough council estate by a single mother whose expectations for her young daughter never rose above the tenement rooftops? None of that matters now, because here she is, sitting in the window seat, the world moving around her and she is poised and yes, we care because she is Maggie Tulliver, she is Bathsheba Everdene, she is Jane Eyre (with more mascara and regular appointments at Nice Nailz).

The room begins to quieten, places are taken, lights are lit and angled. The historical advisor quickly removes the vase at the last moment, while the set designer's back is turned, and silence descends.

Interior. Country house. Let's call it Millfield Park. Our heroine sits in a window seat, embroidery on her lap, gazing out at a view that we cannot see. Rain. Oh, the endless rain, in streams down the window pane, quickening and shifting the light upon her flawless face. The SFX team is outside with a floodlight and a hosepipe. Very effective. We see the symbolism and we appreciate it – the foreshadowing of tears to come. A bell sounds, a worried-looking maid appears, twisting her apron. A visitor. Our heroine stands, the embroidery falls from her lap. In slow motion? No – that's over-egging it. The embroidery is red on white though. Poppies. Again we appreciate the symbolism. A conversation – stilted – uncomfortable. Close-ups of eyes and mouths; words spoken hastily. Her chest flutters; his nostrils flare. The ownership of Millfield Park is under question. Unkind words about her beloved, late father. The flash of eyes. The Slap.

The slap is nowhere near as loud as she imagines it to be. In her mind, it resounds through the mansion, loosening plaster from the old walls, stirring the cobwebs in the attic, scattering a roost of rooks from the bare chestnut tree near the orangery. Her hand is pierced by a thousand burning needles. It hangs at her side. It does not belong to her, and the shapes of its fingers rise in red marks like a sunburst on his cheek. Even after the Cut is called, he is fixed to the spot, his eyes burning, and the crew is hushed. He has noticed her. She smiles, flexes her hand and walks off set.

LEARNING TO SAY
ДО СВИДАНИЯ

Maria Donovan

They are together in the cold glass box at the back of the house: she's lying on a damp white sofa, typing; he's looking over her shoulder and thinking about giving her a kiss. She feels him lean closer to the screen, almost breathing into her ear. Her fingers peck the keyboard like hens picking crumbs from a plate: she's learning to spell goodbye in Russian,
До Свидания
, sounding the letters like a child, ‘D
-
ohhhh s
-
v
-
ee
-
d
-
aaaa
-
nn
-
eeee
-
ahhh.'

Why does she want to learn Russian? Why is she emailing a man she's never met? She doesn't mean goodbye. She means so long, until the next time.

He wants to lean over and spell out: ‘Get lost,
Comrade
. She doesn't want to know.'

The glass box pushes out into a cloud; it's like that holiday when they leaned out of the boat and used a kind of clear shoebox to look underwater. Remember what that feels like, the sun burning the back of your head? Now there are no colours, no flickering fish, just naked fingers of willow poking through the fog and little birds hunched in the skeleton tree. Everything else – the broad lap of fields, the rim of sea nibbled by pines, the distant mountains – is muffled and hidden as if it no longer exists.

She feels the warmth of his hand on her shoulder and wants to rest her head against his arm.

‘PS,' she writes. ‘I don't think I can get away just now. Maybe after the move things will be easier.'

No invitation to come here: with all the rooms in the house there is no place for visitors.

Now her fingers gallop over the keyboard like tiny ponies. He looks closer, feeling his face for his glasses. She is writing in her diary: ‘Learning a new language is good for the brain.
'
Try learning Welsh – he digs a finger between her shoulder blades. You've lived here long enough. Try learning to say ‘Da boch chi'.

He went to
two
lessons and the neighbours told him, ‘No one talks like that round here.' He gave up then, said he was already too old to learn something new.

A tap on the window: a chaffinch rummaging in the seed feeder stuck to the other side. There's no horizon for her to rest her eyes on, but she's glad of the droplets of water. Behind them are all the jobs that need doing: ditches to dig out, brambles to pull, logs to split. The sun drops into the garden and shines through the mist – a yellow warning.

The day they moved here she opened her arms to the house and said, ‘I promise to love you.' She said it to the house but she was looking at him. Now there's a dead fly wrapped in a web in the corner.
There are green spots on the inside of the windows.

The sun pulls the mist to the bottom of the garden and sharpens the light. She gets out a bucket and slowly cleans the inside of the glass, listening to the radio – not the channel he would have chosen. The phone doesn't ring and she listens to an entire play without interruption. There are no more geese to feed, no ducks, no chickens. Just the wild birds hopping in and out of the willow tree, the sparrow gangs in mad rushes for the hedge and, when she goes out to empty the bucket, robins singing in the cool afternoon.

With the courage of the hour she lights the woodburner in her study. Now that she can write in any room in the house she's using this one (the first he decorated, to give her a room of her own) to pile up all the things that need to be sorted out. She looks through one box, taking out photographs, papers and cards, deciding what to keep and what to burn. Turning over every leaf.

When she's had enough of the dust she goes back to the light in the glass box and lies down. The mist has rolled away to the fence in the bottom field and all the land they owned together is clear to see inside a fluffy grey wall. Still nothing beyond. It feels like it ought to mean something.

She put the house up for sale in the middle of winter, after the dog died, but only when the first bud has broken on the willow tree do some people come to look. She asks them to excuse the boxes. ‘I moved out for a while and I'm still sorting things out.' She knocks on the wood panel walls to show how easily the rooms could be opened up. ‘We were thinking of doing that,' she says. She tells them the house is over one hundred years old, that the front is sunny all morning and the back all afternoon. ‘Oh yes,' she says. ‘We have been very happy here.'

How lovely, the people say, and if only there were outbuildings – something made of stone that would make a nice annexe. She knows they won't buy it. That's all right: it isn't time to go yet. The viewing is just a reason to make the house tidy.

Another month of sorting through boxes and she reaches the map of the world. It's papering a corner to cover a light patch where he once experimented with sanding out the dark stain from the wooden wall (too much work, he decided). A hundred times she's wished he'd tried it somewhere else.

The map will have to stay up for now. She puts her finger on places where she has been or might go and tries to imagine living there now: Amsterdam; New York; Sydney; Siena; a small seaside town in Dorset. New places or places they both knew. She looks at the emptiness of Russia and the possibilities of losing herself there. Getting lost sounds almost like a plan when you don't know where to be – except that it won't work like that: it will turn out to be somewhere after all, a place where someone has decided, this is how they want to live. Or how life has to be.

There's a local map on one of the bookshelves, a gift from the time they first moved here, printed to put their house at the centre among whirls of hills and squares of pine plantation. It looks to her like the land has been flayed – all its veins and muscles showing.

On the estate agent's website the location map is quite different: cool and green, the house seeming to exist in a flat empty space between the sea and where the mountains ought to be, tethered only by the road.

No map can show what's happening outside: that the cuckoo flowers are already taller than the uncut grass; the daffodils are in full trumpet; the willow trees toss their heads and move away across the fields.

Maybe it's the rise in the temperature or maybe it's the drop in the price but just when she's unpacked the very last box someone says they want to buy the house.

Waiting for their first visit, she checks all the rooms and smoothes the covers of the old bed. Not quite knowing why, she lies down on his side to put her arms around him. That heavy feeling grows again. It never goes away. When the car stops outside, his chest rises, lifting her head as if to say, ‘Go on.'

The new couple are in the front garden gazing up through a steady rain, already in love with the house. Their first question when they level their eyes at her and step inside is an anxious, ‘You're not getting divorced, are you? We've had two like that go wrong.'

‘Oh no,' she says. ‘You don't need to worry about that.'

It's bright and warm in the glass box at the back of the house and they all agree that on a better day there will be a wonderful view.
They ask if there is ever proper snow here – oh yes, because it's so high up, though none this year: it's been the mildest winter. Snow upon snow lies in her memory – the dog up to his elbows in the field; dog and husband digging into the snowdrifts around the back door; a duck looking quizzically at a snowman.

When they have seen the whole of the house the new people stand in the back garden with their hoods up, the wind beating their cheeks.