MORNING SERIAL

IT’S smaller than it was, his house, crouched on the street between other houses, and uglier than it was too. And when I go to the door, the new, pristine PVC door, I feel suddenly sick, and in my head there’s echoing sounds. In my head can hear crying and shouting and someone being hit, I can hear someone shouting No! and the sound of a shot. I have to sit on the front step and get my breathing back to normal. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard those things. Like a nightmare that repeats. Repeats.

Since He’s not there anymore, I go to the proper house, not to the shed, and I knock. The knock sounds wrong. A long word comes into my head. In-ap-pro-pri-ate. Inappropriate. Pigeon pulls the door open, doesn’t even say hello, walks along the corridor to the sitting room, expecting me to follow. It’s as if it was only yesterday I was here.

“Sut mae?” I say to his mam in the living room.

I might as well be talking to myself. His mam doesn’t say anything back. She sits sewing in one corner of the dark room. I think of her, properly, for the first real time, look closely at her sewing hands, thin and pale as they are, and see that they’re going over and over one bit of material and that what she’s doing doesn’t make any sense. She’s carefully stitched closed all the openings of the dress, closing the neckline, closing the holes for your arms, closing the hemline along the bottom, so nobody can get into the dress, and nobody can get out.

Pigeon sits at the other side of the room. Pigeon lights a cigarette. Still smoking?

I feel relieved that Pigeon’s still smoking. It’s like the old Pigeon. The old Pigeon before what happened, before what he did, what I did, what we did together.

Pigeon’s mam puts her sewing down, and starts humming a song to herself, sitting in the dark in the corner, rocking.

A drink, whisky or brandy, sits cloudy in the glass by her side. It’s a lullaby she’s singing, si hei lwli lwli lws si hei lwli lwli lws

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