MORNING SERIAL
“I’LL leave the case,” she said. “It’s interesting, I promise. Please look at it. You might say it’ll clear your mind. No doubts, eh? Love you, Billy. Really do. Sorry it didn’t work out. But life never stays still, does it?”
I watched her leave, smiling at Pavel as she did, making the air around her fragrant by her passage. Funny how deceptive things like that can be. I looked at the case.
I sighed for a time long past. I picked it up as I got to my feet, and carried it to the lift and my room. I had some reading to do. It was lucky my eyes were starting to feel up to it.
*****
I PLACED it bottom-down on the bed and contemplated it for a while. Whatever was inside would do me no good. Bran would not have brought it to do me good. It was what effect it was meant to have which alone concerned her. I went for a walk.
Just to the window. I looked out from six floors down through the screen of treeleaf to the wall of the mock castle beneath.
That wall was equipped to snarl back. The wall ran alongside the main road which roared past. The wall was topped with stone animals – a whole Victorian menagerie of them – pouncing and crawling and leaping over the battlements that would hold them in still flight forever.
A whole city had sprung up around their sculpting, one paid for like them in the same mineral coin that had made it, for a time, the world’s Coalopolis.
I crossed the royal-blue carpeted floor back to the foot of the low divan bed and stared at my nemesis. I leaned forward on impulse and released the two rusting metal catches which sprung up and back with an emphatic snap. I paused.
I knelt down. I opened the lid of the cheap cardboard and leatherette case as slowly as inevitability would allow. I had no curiosity, only anxiety.
If I knew the shallows of Bran all too well, I knew the depths of the old man even better. To be wary of one was to fear the other.
A scent of curling brown paper and a whiff of dead days uncurled to meet me.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com