MORNING SERIAL

Take my Henry. He was into all sorts, and look at him now.” She closes her eyes, like a satisfied cat.

“Breathe!” says Dafydd.

In, out, in, out, in, out, in. Relaxation is just more time of thinking about Pigeon. Pigeon kissed me. Pigeon told me I killed a man.

There’s a knocking sound. A hollow knock. It’s a beckoning sound. It’s the door. Ceri.

She’s knocking at the door, so he has to go out. She’s not met his mam yet. It isn’t a good idea. He can tell. Ceri couldn’t handle it, talking to someone who didn’t understand and didn’t listen. So they go out. He holds her hand. It’s like clay, soft and real. They don’t have much to say.

Why does she come, he wonders. From her, he gets someone to touch. Someone to want. Someone soft, and like a mother, and like a girl. But she gets just him. He’s thin and tough. Like a bad meal. Why does she want him?

“My dad says your mam’s sick.” She says it suddenly. They’re passing the railings by the park. They’ve stopped walking, because she said it. It’s darkish, so he can’t see her face. What does she want him to say? What does she want him to do? He’s managed to keep her away from the house up til now, away from his mam. How can he explain to Ceri what’s wrong with his mother? Where’s the beginning of the story? Pigeon looks for it, in his mind, like finding the beginning of a roll of cellotape. He looks, but there’s no sign of it. The beginning. None of the roughnesses of the story he knows promise openings or endings. And anyway, if he were to start unsticking all this by talking, who knows what story he’d tell Ceri? Who knows what he might turn his life into by telling her about himself.

So he says nothing. He can feel Ceri thinking. He can feel her thinking next to him as they walk together. She’s making stories of him, and he’s not having it. Pigeon won’t let her make this story hers. He holds his silence tight around him, and although she tries to ask him a couple of things, like “What’re you doing on Saturday?” he doesn’t answer. He guards his silence just as he was taught to in the Centre, and as he was taught to in the shed.

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