MORNING SERIAL

PIGEON stopped. He stopped to watch the light from the window, from the second-hand sun. How it moved through the thick air in the room, as if it was moving through dank water, through a dirty fish tank. “But,” he said, focusing on the black letters, on his own mouth saying the words against the room, “the grandmother promised, ‘when you are fifteen, then you will be allowed to swim to the surface. Then you can climb up on a rock and sit and watch the big ships sail by. If you dare, you can swim close enough to the shore to see the towns and the forest.’ ” He stopped. He was fifteen. He thought about it. This was a story about being a prisoner. This was a story about being inside. In a centre. In a house. In a shed. In a story. He closed the book, and sat watching the white light filtering into the room. It came over him again. He needed air. Air. Where was it? Where was the surface of all this? How did you breathe in it? Efa is so worried about me when I arrive home shaking and pale that, after trying for a good while to find out what’s wrong, she actually invites me to go to her class with her. I say yes to going straight away, because it’s doing something with Efa and, right now, I want to be close to her again as much as I want to breathe. Yoga is in the old chapel where all the other ladies dress like her, wearing beads and colours too, and flouncy scarves that fall from them like water. Efa goes there twice a week now, since she met Dafydd, who teaches the class. They use the Sunday school classroom for yoga and other activities, like boxing and karate. Efa takes me. This week, Efa takes me. And it almost makes up for Pigeon. But I’m too quiet and serious for the ladies at Yoga. And they’re jealous of how I’m young and how I can still bend and stretch like a wet bit of willow while they creak and groan like dead wood before you break it. All except for Efa.

Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian

CONTINUES TOMORROW