Clang, the old tin bath struck against the wall. Water trickled onto his trouser leg as he hung it beside theback door on the rusty nail. Reminding himself to renew the worn string, he rolled a Franklin’s Mild, lit it and took a long slow drag. Immediately catching his breath, he coughed as if to dislodge a lung. He spat the result into the spotless pan of the outside lavvie. Still bare chested from his bath, he leaned his sinewy forearms on the iron gate as he regained his breath and finished his fag.
He gazed at his surroundings, damp housing, peeling broken fences and crumbling brick walls. Chunks fell from the fence outside Joe Rugby’s house as it rattled in response to a small boy’s constant try kicks for Wales.
As the smoke drifted around his hardened fingers he thought of his first wife. She’d died in childbirth trying to give life to a babe too weak to fight. He hadn’t thought of her for a while. She had been a real beauty and no mistake.
The smell of nextdoor’s bacon cooking interrupted his thoughts. He hitched his trousers and tightened the large buckle on his leather belt. He remembered using it to give his son a leathering for stealing apples, donkey’s years ago. Strange how things come full circle, he thought. He thought of his brother, Ivor, and how they’d both had a leathering from their father for stealing apples from exactly the same orchard a lifetime earlier.
It’s funny how much sweeter those apples tasted on the days they didn’t get caught. He laughed to himself as he recalled wrapping them in his jacket and eating them later, crouched amongst the ferns on the mountain.
Ivor had been the youngest, but the first to go, his life crushed by a runaway coal dram at Tirpentwys on a day shift when he should have been nights.
Williams the skiver, who swapped shifts still lives three doors down. He’s got a wife and two beautiful kids that should have been Ivor’s by rights. It’s Williams who should be the bachelor up in Cefn Cemetery, sleeping with the snails, under that heavy marble slab.
Taking a final drag and cough, he threw his fag end. It landed amongst the rhubarb, struggling to grow in the impoverished earth between the garden wall and the uneven flagstones of the backyard.
He climbed the stairs, closing the latch on the stairs door behind him. Exhausted he lay on the milpuff mattress, covering himself with the warm patchwork quilt sewn by his grandmother from cast off cotton dresses and shirts.
He needed to try to get some rest before his next shift down that black pit at the end of the back lane. Every day of his working life he descended not knowing if he would ever see the daylight again.
Copyright Meg Gurney
