MORNING SERIAL

NAIN watched us. “It’s this place that’s the trouble. This hill. Cursed place it is. Rotten,” and, when we kept dragging our feet all round the house, “Nothing good comes of people here,” she said “There’s no dreams, that’s the trouble, only closed shops. There’s far too much doubt here. That’s the trouble.”

Nain started entering prize draws. Efa and her made up English poems for magazine competitions, sent in jokes, riddles, whatever it took. One time we won seventy-five quid for one, and it was printed, under a pretend name: “Mrs Thatcher from Leicester,” Nain had put. “Address not supplied.”

“Why not, ‘Mrs Evans from Rallt Uchaf’, Nain?” I couldn’t see why not.

“Chei di’m lwc yn fanma ’sdi, nghariad i.” You’ll get nowhere from here, love. You’ll get nowhere. Here is nowhere.

So Efa and me are going to The Ends of the Earth. We’re going to a place called Jamaica. We’re going to Australia and Uzbekistan. Efa has lots of ideas. But now she just works in The Home.

We’d run out of money. It was Nain who’d got Efa the job at The Home. She’d got Efa to leave school for that job. It didn’t make sense. Nain doesn’t make sense. Now it’s all old people and changing them and cleaning them and talking to them all day. That’s all it is for Efa now. There are no escape plans anymore.

Even before Nain died, Efa’d started playing Mam. At night I crawled into her bed, and we whispered stories. First it is Efa, Efa that tells the stories. They are about places like Thailand and Belize where people don’t have knives and forks. They are about China and Japan where everyone slept on the floor and so their backs were straight like pencils.

I’d come home and found Nain lying on the floor. And you knew she was dead because she didn’t move. She was still and yellow and unhappy lying on the floor. And the light was still off, she’d not turned it on since the daytime although it was dark now, so you knew.

We did the funeral thing again. There weren’t many people there in chapel for the funeral. Nain was older than Mam. Older people have fewer friends. It’s better to die when you’re not too old.