MORNING SERIAL

SOMETIME later that morning my Dad appears on the pavement opposite our front door, where the black water is shallowest.

Inexplicably, he is home from work in the middle of the morning, still wearing his jacket and tie.

My mother and father speak together, half shouting across the road.

Mam sits me on the third step of our stairs and gives me my baby brother to hold. He is heavy with sleep and still warm from his cot. He is wearing baby pyjamas with feet, not like my grown up ones.

It is normally impossible to hold onto baby Gareth; usually he is in constant motion, wriggling and squirming ‘like a maggot’ as my Nana would say. Not this morning, though. He sits still with me, staring as the liquid coal rushes by the open door smelling, as I do, its wet, sulphurous stench.

The baby thus installed, Mam heads for the cupboard under the stairs and re-emerges with the garden spade and Dad’s fishing boots. Then, one by one, she hurls each item over the road to him with an urgent strength that I hadn’t known she possessed until this moment. Across the street Dad puts on his boots and throws back his work shoes underhand. They clatter into the front passage. Then he picks up the spade and is gone. I will not see him again for some days.

When finally, the front door is closed, we retreat to the middle room and the dry heat of the coal fire. I realise suddenly that I am cold. The black water has lapped the doorway of our home but it has not entered. Not quite. The slurry has not reached us either. Allyson is safe at home. We are lucky.

I stare through the window over to Merthyr Vale mountain and watch pulses of fine grey drizzle drift up the valley, like great long winding sheets of gauze, towering above us all. Slowly they knot themselves together, then drift apart, then come together once again, repeating this over and over; a churning anxiety patterned in the sky.