MORNING SERIAL
PIGEON looks at her. He thinks of the evidence he hid. The lies he and Iola told. He looks at her.
She says, “My boss doesn’t believe it anyway, Pigeon. He thinks it’s a waste of time me coming here. But if you can just tell me something, p’rhaps we could get your conviction overturned.” She looks at him, with frank, kind eyes. Like a mother. Like a real mother.
Just then three children come along the silver road, two girls and a boy, running, still running in their feral, violent playtimes, laughter bubbling bright and dangerous into the white sky as they jump over the wall at the end of the street, and into the open country beyond. Their language clatters behind them between the gorse and heather, the threatening cattle, and the idiot sheep.
Pigeon thinks of the final meaning of his name, standing there with her. Pigeon is a case in point, a matter, like the matter of Iola, of Him, of Pigeon’s mam and of Pigeon, like the matter of this story, here.
“No,” says Pigeon, standing up from the bench “You’re wrong,” he says.
It was days before he could face the clear-out. First he opened the windows. Let the air in. Let it in to blow out any shadow left by his mother. The breeze that thrust through the open window unsettled the piles of paper, the dust, the grief that lay all over the house. He let it. He let it in. He took a bin bag and started to lift individually the things that were his mother and to thrust them into the black space of the bag. Ashtrays, beer cans, dresses, hangers, needle, thread, old faux jewellery, tights, underwear, handkerchiefs. He spared her nothing, this mother of his that had left him. She could either leave for real now or come back made new. Occasionally, as another part of her was chucked out, a small refrain rang in his head, a ditty or a folksong, some tune she’d learnt in a broken off part of her story. He didn’t know where she’d learnt those songs, he’d never met a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, nothing. They had no family. But in those tunes you got a sense of it.
> Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian
CONTINUES TOMORROW