MORNING SERIAL
THROUGH the shadow fall of a rain becoming more and more insistent I saw one of the two move back into the entrance hall where the papier-mâché butcher and baker guarded their heritage shop windows and a collier flung his raggedy son into a flight that would never come down.
Then from behind these grotesque mannequins a third man moved and clutched one of the others around the shoulders until he broke abruptly away and moved back to the doors, which whispered open and shut as their sensors invited a response.
The glass panels gaped as two men stood on the line, then closed tight as they crossed it and out into the yard.
Wheelie was just a step in front and to the left of Lionel.
They looked at the bulk of a loaded coal dram to one side of the bus and at the recesses of the engine house wall beyond the bus, and they split, with Wheelie going the longer way around its front and Lionel more directly across the visible side to the back end where I crouched, and waited.
The rain had filled the fissures between the cobbles with small jewelled puddles.
The stage props, real enough in the colliery yard, seemed ridiculously familiar.
The gold lettering on the bus, the thick rubber tread of tyres that had once jolted paying passengers, the wet cloth smell of the damp moquette seats which I could see inside, their chromium grip bars dulled by the dank.
The doors hissed and opened once more, and in their light I saw a third man coming around the front and the side to the back.
Lionel was already there, past the conductor’s pole and platform.
He stopped when he saw me, hesitating while he looked for his back-up support.
The bag dropped to the floor of the yard as my right hand appeared with the lump hammer in it.
It was a foot away from Lionel when I swung it up, short and heavy, into his balls with all the force I could.
His hands fluttered down, useless as butterfly wings and were swatted aside.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW