MORNING SERIAL

17 IOLA’S gone, Pigeon goes to the gun, which lies on the floor beside Him. The gun’s dead now, the power of it gone. The gun’s just an object, just a thing Pigeon takes and wraps in brown paper again, and holds to his chest as he leaves the house, quickly by the front door.

He walks. He doesn’t run. He walks calmly to the quarry, up between the old barracks where the men used to sleep, and then into the quarried hill, where slices have been cut from the mountains, like spoonfuls snatched from a cake. Pigeon walks, then clambers up to a small tunnel in the hillside, and crawls through the black passageway, toward the green, watery light on the other side. There, in the lost world of another quarry, hidden deep inside the hill, decorated with ferns, lichen, and gentle moss, Pigeon finds a long crack in the slate wall, and pushes the gun and its brown paper wrapping deep inside, as far as his arm will go into the dark, split slate.

When Pigeon arrives back from the quarry, wet to the skin since he wears no coat, and only his thin school trousers, it’s calm in the house again. Sewing, Pigeon’s mam hums a sea shanty under her hanging dresses in the dark of their unsteady house, and all around her the town sits down to meat, and television stories.

His mother looks up suddenly, stops singing.

“Pigeon?” she asks into the heaviness of the room. It’s so dark in the lounge that it’s not possible to see her working hands or the coloured thread, the bending fabric. She keeps sewing, diligently, mechanically.

Breathing short and tight, Pigeon moves closer.

“Help,” he says, almost in a whisper. “Please, help.”

They look at each other, the dim shapes of each other. She rocks. He goes to her, sits at her feet and puts his boy’s face on her lap as she sways. She strokes his hair. They wait like that as she hums a song or two, until Pigeon hears a car outside and rises, kisses her soft, fading hair.

The car’s coming for Pigeon, but not because of the fire at Gwyn’s, or because of Him.