Read Online Flame and Slag by Ron Berry - Free Book Online Page B

long, beaut.”
    We hugged in the open doorway, pearled morning clouds high over the western sky, and I thought, rain or fine, next weekend I’ll demolish Grancha’s old pigeon loft. Bloody eyesore stuck there on the bank.
    “What?” she said.
    “We love each other differently, but it’s good. Supreme, girl, supreme. You’re the beautiful-est. That new baby in your belly’s going to be supreme. Good morning, love.”
    “Bye-bye, Rees, watch out for yourself” — her doorstep manner composed, almost lyrical, waiting for the last glance as I shut the backyard gate.

    From the top of the spring-green tump I saw the blind-staring oblongs of our bedroom window, and I thought, aye, mixing in marriage does make a man feel sorry for bachelors. Dead-enders like Percy Cynon. The nether dream which the poor cramped buggers pad out with loyalties. Straining the old platonic pus.
    While changing into pit clothes I took on one of those precautionary moods: Hark at Reeso, Mrs Stevens’s bingo-card philosopher, vaunting his lot. Five shifts a week until I’m sixty. See our kids educated all the way, see them head out into the shrinking world, Stevens’s blood helping to colonize the womb-boxed compass. But yourself, Rees, you’ll spit coal dust long after your teeth drop from your gums. Spit up the old duff like Dai and Glyndwr Stevens.
    Yuh.
    Humming Miss Otis regrets as I entered Caib lamproom, spinning my brass check across the metal counter for lamp 967, the Miss Otis tune unconsciously reviving, finding its place inside my head as we crammed back, chest and rib-sides in the cage, old Lewsin Lewis Whistler softly, thoughtlessly, trilling the Riff Song , and brazen-headed Charlie Page handing out Mintoes to everybody, Mintoe odour pervading the roadway as we walked in alongside Andrew Booth’s boon, the trunk conveyor belt travelling back to pit-bottom. Andrew’s final endowment to Caib — he retired before the institute daffodils withered. Andrew’s two younger brothers were Coal Board men, white fingered and collared seven days a week, groomed sherangs in the regional office, both childlessly married to Aberystwyth University girls, young Plaid Cymru wives who canvassed Daren at local elections, enthusiastically futile against sanctioned fellow travellers on Daren’s hundred per cent Labour borough council, utterly futile against a die-hard nucleus of Communist voters who abused the two Nationalists as if they were degenerate debs. Pairing themselves, B.A.Aber. below B.A.Aber., they sent a telling letter to the Western Mail , revealing their experiences in the Earl Haig Club where a cidery conclave of primitive Socialists educated the ladies, regaled them with coal-face adjectives, an old Arnhem paratrooper among these life-beaten veterans from Tredegar Bevan’s Janus-faced idealism.
    Still walking in, Miss Otis ’s melody baritoning off-key inside my eardrums, tough little Charlie Page’s Mintoe down to an apple pip under my tongue, reminding myself, vowing to break apart Grancha’s pigeon loft, rake up and turf the steep backyard. Get it all done clean and tidy (rejecting the goldfish pond and the rockery schemes) before Ellen went to bed on our second child. A boy this time …
    Then Lewsin Whistler generated When those saints go marching in for a careless quartet, young Dicko Harding (scrounging tight-fist property-hogging dead-man Dicko’s daughter’s abandoned bastard — Hannah Harding ran away to Croydon, leaving Tal sole beneficiary) catarrhally croaking Louis Armstrong style as he did whenever called upon in Waun Arms , ending his joyous Saturday nights happier than his Uncle Tal boozing solitary in Regent Street Con. Club. The loneliest ex-husband in Daren. Scruffy Daren, I thought, marked like an old man’s face. But old-timers die; Ellen forgot to mention dying. Not like John Vaughan nor Dai Stevens, old blokes slowly wearing out, fading away. A Grancha Stevens’s death, leaving nothing except