MORNING SERIAL

THIS hair always ends up sticking straight up: like a by-mistake mohican. He has black hairs all up his arms too and Gwyn has a hairy face. Not long hair, just bristly like my dad’s was. Gwyn’s voice is bristly too. And he has what Efa calls a stutter, where there’s a blank space where your word should be, and your whole body stops. “Iawn, b b bois?” he asks us. Together Pigeon and me breathe “Iawn” back, although everyone knows I’m not a boi, any more than Pigeon is a prissy hogan – but I quite like being called a boi by Gwyn.

“B b be ’dach chi isio heddiw ’ta?” Gwyn’s question goes up at the end, really high, as high as here; but we still haven’t decided. Because last week I had one of the chocolate ones with the creamy outside and Pigeon had one of those thin orangey things and we said we’d swap this week but I don’t really want to cause the chocolate one is my favourite and I’m hoping Pigeon agrees but he hasn’t said so yet so I’m on the edge of going right ahead and having something else completely but I wouldn’t want to make the wrong choice. Pigeon’s my best friend.

Waiting, Gwyn, to keep talking, says “Tywydd braf”, and he grins. We grin back because this is no more fine weather than Pigeon is a hogan, or I’m a boi, or Gwyn’s van’s a BMW or we’re all Colin Jackson doing the hurdles.

The weather’s come in again; it sits all over the hill and the clouds are blowing up now like a balloon water bomb and they have a grey colour that’s almost dark blue, so you know it’ll rain forever.

In the end of thinking I have the long orange thing and Pigeon has the chocolate one like we decided last week. See? Pigeon and me, we’re like this.

We’re walking back between the houses, our heads full of thinking like televisions, and our feet scraping along the ground, with our shoelaces left behind. And I lick it.

“Gwyn’s a gypsy,” Pigeon says.

I look at him. I’m not quite sure what that means. “He’s a gyppo,” says Pigeon. Ah.