The Crossing
MY wallet was on the kitchen table and money and cards were still inside. I expected nothing less. These boys might have been rough, but they weren’t muggers. I didn’t bother with the thankyou note. I left by the door I assumed I had entered a few days before.
A small rain was falling. Not enough to soak you unless you walked through it for hours. That wasn’t my intention as I winced over some broken paving stones back into the town, but enough for its prickly damp to blur the vista.
Moving forward somehow eased the pain in my ribs, though I still had to stop to lean on a garden wall or two. My breathing was all of the outward kind, a desperate wheeze followed by a short hissing intake.
I was beginning to sound like my old man. I heaved myself up off a low wall and left the side street. Public transport was fine by me, for all those other people. I needed a taxi. I stopped at a bus shelter to ask where I could find one. Right across the road, they said and pointed.
A waiting driver flipped his lit cigarette out of his window, gently oscillating as he did the “Dim Ysmygu” sign hanging from his rear mirror. “Where to, butty?”
The name on the scrap of paper which Bran had tossed me said Heritage Centre so I said it, too, and we took off. It took less than ten minutes to navigate out of the circular road system, hit the old road north-east, sweep past the long straggle of what the guidebooks and estate agents so emphatically called “Miners’ Cottages”, and through the main gates of what had once been a working colliery. I paid.
The taxi left, its socially considerate driver only lighting up as he pulled away. I stood in a tarmac-laid car park that was neatly marked out in bays, and looked at the glass front they had erected as a curtain across the dressed quarry stone in order to mark out a modern entrance to the former winding house.
Inside was a shop area littered with furry red dragons, giant glitter pencils, and tiny coal maquette sculptures of colliers, their wives and street ragamuffins.
CONTINUES TOMORROW