MORNING SERIAL
“WELL, look at you, after all this time. Little Billy Maddox. How are you, butt? How are you? B **** y well come ’ere.”
He was with me before I could even rise from the table. He had made it a lifetime’s practice to invite warmth but to make sure he gave it out first. I was grabbed and pulled in towards him, held almost as if I was a child. In anybody else the body cinch, the handshaking wonderment, the brown eyes lit up with an irrepressible delight at being, just the two of us, any old us, together, would have been a giveaway. Politician. Kisses baby. Congratulates Mother. Envies Father. And all that. But Ceri had somehow made natural to himself what in others were lame gestures. What you felt was what you got. Or so it appeared. What you saw was what you truly saw, and what was not to like? Everyone liked Sir Ceri Evans.
He finally let me go, still cracking a smile, and sat down with a thump. As always, he went straight to it.
“Surprised about the knighthood, were you? Can’t imagine what your old man would have said. Well. I can, actually! But hey, Lady Olwen loves it, and she b **** y well deserves it, doesn’t she? More than me, anyway!”
He laughed so all-embracingly that the other diners looked over, happy for him, and so now for themselves. He waved a little self-deprecatingly, as if to say “Enjoy” – me, this hour, your being here, with me. He had lots of ingratiating habits. He deployed the next one. A shy hesitancy, signalled by the repetition of inconsequential words, as if he was readying himself, gearing up for the task, this Ceri, for whom there had never been any hesitation in reaching out and taking what he wanted, the biggest-beaked fledgling in the nest yet with the modesty to tip his head away as he simultaneously swallowed the worm whole. All for him.
“It’s, it’s … er … a case of recognition,” he began. “Recognition, see. Not, uh, not, for me. For what I tried to, we, in the old days, your old man even, represented. See. Oh s**t. F**k the title. That’s not important. Though, mind, the Lords was mentioned, too. Aye. But. See. I have to keep active. Working. Mostly in Europe now. For Wales. So, there it is, see.”
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com