MORNING SERIAL

HER games can make a story different, something for Pigeon to use. Iola and Pigeon, this is the way they are.

He turns off the torch and lies in the dark, listening to the muttering television filling the garden, watching the house shadows play around the shed. The house occasionally moves, as if standing in an untenable posture, as if the creases in its muscles have grown sore. The house is silent, there are no words here, only the muttering of the TV, only Cher, Mari, only Him.

Pigeon lies in the dark, and then drifts into an empty, white sleep, curled in the shadow of the house. Dream and nightmare stories about Gwyn and Him babble up around him as night slowly turns its page, until Gwyn and Him are one man, with one pair of hard, painful fists between them.

Efa got the idea about chapel last week, in the kitchen, after I told her about Gwyn again.

“Ma Gwyn hufen iâ’n murderer,” I’d said, the idea of it fizzing on my tongue. “Mae o’n lladd pobl efo’i bare hands.”

The words tingled and popped in my mouth, but Efa just leant against the worktop in the kitchen looking at me hard, her lips like a zip.

“P’rhaps you should go to chapel on Sundays from now on, Iola,” she said then. “But you don’t.” “I did go to chapel, back in the day, and everybody should go for a bit.”

I crinkled my forehead, huffed through my nose.

“Why are kids supposed to believe in God? Nobody else does.”

But Efa wasn’t up for a fight. She blanked the ‘God!’ question.

“Be better for you to be there at Sunday school than eating ice creams and playing stupid games with Pigeon,” she said, stirring whatever it was she was pickling on the stove.

The first few chapel Sundays, Efa comes with. Nasareth Chapel’s there, on the High Street, weighing the street down. The building scowls as Efa and me walk towards it. The chapel’s made of grey stone and it’s fat like a lord. It’s too big for the small, closed shops, and the square, grey council houses that make up down-town.