MORNING SERIAL
DAD makes tea. His hands are shaking.
Every first conversation has to start somehow.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says in Welsh. “Efa said you didn’t want to know.” His Welsh sounds like it hardly gets used, creaky.
“I didn’t,” I say. I smile. “You’re tall,” he says. His voice is a wavering, uncertain note.
“So’re you,” I say. Neither of us mention our eyes. The same dark, dark blue. Like the bottom of the sea.
“I was. Not so much now. Bent over with bad health,” he shrugs. There’s a silence. So many questions to ask, but I can’t think of the words.
“Efa says you do well at school,” he says.
Is that pride in his voice? Is that?
“Not bad,” I say. The corners of his mouth twitch just slightly.
He sets a big mug of tea down in front of me. Milk, no sugar. He makes it like that for me without asking. That’s how I take it. Milk, no sugar, but he wasn’t to know was he?
“I’m s…” he starts, but I interrupt him.
“I killed someone.”
He stops, and we stare at each other, me and this man who has no excuses. I have no excuses either. Or perhaps I do?
“When?” The surprise cuts through all the rubbish, the apology I’m not giving him a chance to make because I can’t accept it.
“When I was a kid. He was my friend’s step-dad. He was nasty.”
He looks at me, shocked. Me being here at all. Me confessing.
“He was going to kill my friend, I think. So I killed him, with his own gun.” It sounds like a film.
“OK,” he says, as if I’ve just told him I broke a glass. “Does anyone know?”
“One person, maybe two.” “What’re they going to do about it?” He leans back in his seat, considering. “Nothing, I think.” “Does Efa know?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. Sometimes I think she does. She’s never been the same with me, since it happened.”
“OK,” he says again.
> Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian
CONTINUES TOMORROW