MORNING SERIAL
AND then we’d laugh, Pigeon and me, we’d laugh. And I’d try to spit as far as Pigeon could. But I’d never manage it.
Pigeon was happy then, and right now, swimming in the pool, he’s happy too.
Ceri sits on the rock, watching Pigeon. She doesn’t say anything. Pigeon ignores Ceri and he just swims down there, round in circles in the pool for ages, although it must be freezing, and he ignores me too, stood up here watching him. Ceri just hangs about.
After a while Pigeon climbs out of the water, and he shakes all over like a dog, and he goes back to Ceri, cos he wants to cop a feel, and probably cos he’s cold and blue and white and she’s all warm and soft. And that’s when I leave, I leave the two of them to it.
“Bye, Iola,” he shouts, as I go round the corner. His voice spreads behind me, clear and too real.
I don’t answer, wish he’d say it in Welsh, wish he’d speak to me again, really speak to me as if none of this has happened. But it has happened. It’s happened to him. What I did has happened to him. He’s made a real life of it. Faced it, and he’s living it anyway. So he can jump into that pool, and live, and not go to school and just mark time like I do. There’s part of me that thinks that. It was me. Part of me that thinks that. And then this other part. It was him.
Perhaps he can’t talk anymore even if he tried? I had that dream again last night. Pigeon, with no mouth. With just skin where the mouth should be.
IT’S a funny thing, that right beside the grey town there’s places like magic. There’s mountains like fists coming out of the land, their rocky tops as raw and rough as a cruel man’s knuckles. There’s rivers. In the rivers all the rain gathers like a riot. Like a stampede. And then there’s still, quiet places, like the pool. Pigeon can’t remember ever being held before. Ceri’s arms are like a warm bath, and she’s soft. He wants Ceri. He wants her like a child wants. But he wants her like a man wants too.
> Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian
CONTINUES MONDAY