MORNING SERIAL

Pigeon by Alys Conran

IT smells like dust and there’s this heavy feeling when he sits next to his mam, watches her as she rocks, and listens as she half sings a hymn, and then a lullaby.

Then he remembers the book. He takes it out of the drawer. “Once upon a time,” he says. The words sound borrowed in his mouth. What does it mean? Once upon a time? He sits next to her. He opens the book to the first page. “Once upon a time,” he says before he begins, because that’s what you’re supposed to say. Pigeon tries to remember what it was like, back then, when he could make up a story, make up something good. His mam looks up, surprised. She smiles at Pigeon then, smiles at him as he begins to tell her a story where it will all be alright. A fairytale. Makebelieve. But Pigeon just begins to read to her.

“Far, far from land, where the waters are as blue as the petals of the cornflower and as clear as glass,” he takes a breath, the words in the room sound difficult and strange, but they do, they let light in. “There,” he reads again, “where no anchor can reach the bottom.”

30

Gwyn Gelataio is doing ‘Return to Learning’. On a Monday morning, he gets up in the bleary-eyed little flat he’s renting above the chip shop on the quay, inserting first one short leg and then the other into his blue jeans, pulling them up around his wide waist, and, with a little bob curtsy, doing up his flies.

“Ah,” he says, for no reason but habit.

In the fire, Gwyn lost his magazines, his sofa, a bedroom’s worth of furniture, many mod cons from the kitchen, and, crucially, the portrait of his mother – disapproval curling around her brow like a vice as the flames licked devilishly at her.

Miraculously surviving the blaze, the glass-topped coffee table and the greying plastic flowers, slightly wilted in the heat, were now the only reminders of his mother’s dreams for him.

> Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian