The Crossing

BRAN was a chancer who needed to escape what her good looks had made easy and mundane for her as she looked in the mirrors which were other people’s eyes, but for her the exit routes to more satisfying success would never be dependent on the satnav of self-doubt.

Gwilym flew high inside cages erected by others, and never understood the difference between fluttering his flashy wings and flying to any purpose.

Tommy was collateral damage in a society which had devalued the power that thousands of Tommys together had once shown.

Me, I had mistaken my despair for insight and my contempt for courage, and I’d used my small gifts only to direct my retreat.

Haf was what was left, hurt and hopeful. If I owed anything to anyone in the ruins of this time and place it was, I thought, to her. It would depend on the price I could exact for damages.

It would depend on how bad the damage had been. I was counting on Ceri to tell me.

THE voice entered the room first. Greeting the waiter with a “Phillipe!” and a bear hug, and a smile for “Nadine,my lovely,” this more quietly said, as a petite blonde bobbed into view and took his coat from his back.

A thicker back than I’d remembered but still proportionate to his height, just six feet, and his wide shoulders.

His eyes made a quick inventory of the room, three or four couples who clocked him even as he ticked them off on his highly tuned radar screen, and me.

He grinned, opening up an abyss of a welcome on his handsome crag of a face.

His hair was still shaggy and lustrous on top and greying in all the right places. He was in no hurry to cross the room. This was a piece of theatre for Ceri.

He patted the lapels of his well-cut bespoke dark-blue single-breasted suit, fiddled with a black-polka-dot-on-light-grey tie as if he was Oliver Hardy, and let the voice take over again.

Out it rumbled from some warm, deep, irresistible cavern.

> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com