MORNING SERIAL

I HAVE to walk the steps to the wooden doors myself. Anti Siwan stretches her hand out for mine, but I don’t take it, I don’t want the girls to think I’m a baby. I walk into the chapel on my own, find a seat at the back where I can open my comic and read while the sermon and the songs fall blunt and hollow into the gallery. The songs are my favourite bit of chapel so far. I sit and listen to the hymns as they swell up like a kite and then go all the way to heaven through the sagging chapel roof.

After the service it’s Sunday School, and I look out of the classroom window at the mountains which are snowy like vienetta, I think about Pigeon and while Anti Siwan talks about ‘Iesu!’ those shaky ice-cream tunes play in my head. I try for a while, to think about ‘Jesus!’ and his beard and his fish and his bread, but then I think about Gwyn’s Ice Creams instead. I line up the ice creams to choose my favourite. Which is chocolate. Always chocolate.

“Iola Williams stinks,” says Catrin, in her wasp’s voice. Siwan’s gone out the room. Sitting next to Catrin, Rhiannon giggles in her matching dress, her matching spite.

“Iola Williams stinks like silage. Iola Williams’ dress is too small for her. Iola Williams’ mam isn’t her real mam. Iola Williams’ mam’s dead. Have you seen her sister? She’s a proper freak.”

Chocolate was definitely the best, I can taste it. Anyway, thing is about Efa, she takes all these pills to keep her soul healthy, and everyone laughs at her because of the beads and the colours, but really she’s more alive than any of them, any of them who talk about her behind their snatchy dead hands and roll their eyes like marbles under their grey hair when she passes.

I ask Efa about them when I get home.

“Why aren’t they all nice with you, Efa?” “Lots of them are lovely.” “Yes but…” “Anti Gladys is just old and old fashioned,” says Efa. I wait. Efa will tell me if I wait. “She was one of the ones who told tales about our family, back in the day. She told all the old people here that Nain was a tart.”

“Why?”