MORNING SERIAL
FOR Ceri, he felt, this was yet another tack towards a career of contrariness, of the forthright that was a masquerade, of a transparency that was draped in shrouds of meaninglessness. It was an emptiness, a vacuum, filled only by an estimation of himself in which his own time had betrayed him despite his own best efforts. The old man said this was not, strictly speaking, the opportunism of a careerist; it was more the retreat of an integrity that could not be sustained in individuals when collective aspirations dwindled. There was less and less to be representative about more and more of the time.
His old man was big on generations. Billy’s was to be forgiven for its callowness. No choice there. But despised for its parasitical attachment to romanticised others. Utilisation of past experience masked as youthful altruism. The patterns could be seen even then. Gwilym, the railwayman’s boy, a PhD under way, one envious eye on Bran, already lecturing, available for blithe comment on TV and radio on “Our People’s History”. The old man spat at that. Maldwyn, electronics and engineering a genetic inheritance from a colliery electrician father, convinced and convincing that communications technology could democratise everything. Advising Ceri on the logistics of maps, communications and picketing raids. Bran already subbing for newspapers, readily welcomed into inner circles for her evident sympathy as much as her good looks, soon receiving exclusives and scoops and contacts denied others, and parlayed into TV pieces to camera. Billy, with his camera never out of his hand now, exhausted by the pace of things and the unrelenting tirades of his old man.
His old man had never liked cameras. Or so he said. He certainly never owned one, or borrowed one, or used one. He bought one for Billy when the boy was 16, out of an act of misplaced generosity, as he wrote on the card. Not so much a card, more a page torn from his sketch pad with a contrite fatherly face drawn in by the same hand which had endlessly drawn Billy’s mother.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com