MORNING SERIAL

AT the top of the hill they looked out at it. Their town. Its slow streets. Its shifting houses. The fidgeting gardens where cats trailed across fences, catching their small springtime prey, the poking chimneys, a couple of them smoking, even on a warm day. The town mumbled to itself beneath the deep clouds. Mumbled to itself of killings and games and lies. Even the clouds couldn’t muffle its mumbling, even the clouds couldn’t entirely smother the life out of this babbling town on the hill.

Pigeon reached for Iola’s hand then. And she held his. Her small hand was cool. They sat like that, looking down at their town. He put an arm around her. Her hair smelt good. He kissed her hair.

She didn’t move until he was ready, ready to walk the steep slope back, past the cattle stood against the hedgerow expecting rain, back along the snaking path, to the home he was making.

But he didn’t go home, not yet. First he led Iola to the quarry, toward what had been hidden there so long.

45

I walk behind Pigeon. Along the road that leads up to the slate tips, small grey and white houses stick from the fog, from the bald hills, like squint teeth. It’s raining lightly. The tarmac shines like a black ribbon ahead of us and slate gravestones glint wet in the churchyard as we walk past. How many of those men here had been buried first by the quarries, in the belly of the cut-away mountain? Looking toward the heaps of the slate tips that glint and flicker, wet and shining in the pale sunlight, you can’t help thinking of them, those men, the men that were here when Nain was young. The men like the man that left her.

Pigeon turns at the top of the road, in the middle of all this nothing and cloud. I follow him. He goes through the gate to the quarry. It clunks behind him. He ignores the yellow danger signs and barbed wire as usual, clambers under the barrier, and goes towards it, the clearing between the tips where we used to throw stones into the pool of the old quarry below. I follow him as usual.

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