MORNING SERIAL
I SAW them at the pub’s corner, idling in the gloom, as I walked past them, but I only sensed their threat an instant before I felt the first blow to the head. Something wooden and weighty had opened up my skull. Baseball bats were far too universal these days. I went down into a loose slurry of small stones and gravel besides a row of empty steel barrels. I reached for the lip of one of them to get to my knees, but I never made it.
A steel-capped boot to my a**e took me down hard and another pain of sorts drove into my ribs and beat a tattoo on either side with a drum roll follow-up to the head.
I was being worked over by boys who knew an established routine, didn’t deviate from it and didn’t care about leaving a mark and the occasional fracture or broken bone. I vomited the day’s pleasure onto a boot and was rewarded for my thoughtfulness with another kicking. The drink had been a temporary anaesthetic but the pain that surged through me was like shards of bone splintering and tearing into flesh.
Those were my bones. That was my flesh. My eyes felt as if they were popping inside out and burning up like funeral pyres. Only my ears still seemed attuned to whatever my body was about to leave behind. And they heard a different kind of noise to the rhythm of boots. A shout. A voice. One I knew. Insistent and quiet as it delivered its own message to Maldwyn’s messengers:
“That’s enough. Leave him be. F*** off. Go on. Now, I said.”
Tommy.
BILLY’S old man said that “Sweet Dreams” was a lie fed to children. So he was brought up on memories. Sometimes the old man would call them history. Most of it wasn’t in any book. Daydreams, he would say, were the narcolepsy of those who drifted through lives too feeble for roots.
He taught all this, sourly and as best he could, in and out of classrooms. It was his wisdom, from his experience. Only it didn’t connect. And when it did, when a generation appeared to come awake, and finally act, then he was curtly dismissive, in ways that could be both incomprehensible and hurtful.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com