A City Burning E-Book

Angela Graham

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 282

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Set in Ulster, south Wales and Italy, many of the stories in A City Burning concern a point of choice and decision. Characters reach a turning point at which their lives can become fuller and more meaningful, but at a cost to themselves. In others they bear witness to an event must decide whether to become involved or pass by. They could be ordinary people in Belfast during the Troubles or their aftermath, or during the Covid-19 pandemic, or priests facing a new religious reality in their ministries, or family members in a domestic situation in south Wales. Characters are forced to look into themselves; each must make a choice of how to live their future lives.These stories are vividly written and authentically realised, with Graham's eye for a telling detail and instinct for a loaded silence drawing in the reader. She has created memorable characters and situations which linger in the mind long after the story has ended."In this powerful collection, Angela Graham shows herself master of the angle of vision: her tales capture the mercurial moment when a person's world is changed forever, in a road or room, against a landscape, seascape or starscape, at the graveside or (as in the towering story, 'Life-Task') at a forsaken railway station in the aftermath of war." – Stevie Davies"Angela Graham is a brilliant new voice. This is literature that deserves to last." – Kate Hamer "A debut collection of tales remarkable for its verve, depth and range, taking us from backstage at the theatre through priestly adventures in Rome to the dark tragedies of troubled Belfast streets. All conjured up in bright words and sentences that consistently illuminate. Twenty-six stories, one singular voice." – Jon Gower

Leseprobe

A CITY BURNING

A CITY BURNING

ANGELA GRAHAM

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd,

Suite 6, 4 Derwen Road, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 1LH

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

Twitter: @SerenBooks

© Angela Graham, 2020

The rights of the above mentioned to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously.

ISBN: 9781781725917

Ebook: 9781781725924

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover photography by John Geraint

Printed by Bell & Bain, Glasgow.

CONTENTS

The Road

Life-Task

Snapshot

All Through The Night

Above It All

Acting Abby

Impresario

The Triumph

Witness

Intimacy

Repair

An Ulster Psyche

Mercy

Kinship

Saint

Coasteering

Saltem

Resistance

The Sea Hospital

Through Bushes And Through Briars

Coward

Safety First

The Scale

Pattern

Sugared Almonds

Amnesty

Acknowledgements

Author Note

THE ROAD

I made a film about it. Much later. I re-created it. Look. Here. See? A static shot. A frame empty of people. We are at the dark end of a narrow, short hallway. The sun hits our two-up, two-down at the front most of the day, and in it reaches but it can’t quite stretch to this passage-end and stairs’ foot, so it’s from darkness that the camera looks out into the bright day.

Summer outside. Summer 1969. Belfast. East Belfast, where ninety-six per cent of the inhabitants are Protestant and my family are not among that number.

Ahead there is a tiny vestibule and the heavy front door is opened back against its wall. You can see the straight path outside: a chequer-work of black and ox-blood tiles, three strides long; a hip-high wall of smooth-faced red brick is tight against its left side; it ends at a mustard-yellow wooden gate. The matching terrace of houses opposite stands very close and towers in shadow.

Imagine, in that doorway, the back of a tall woman. She’s on the threshold, arrested in the act of sweeping the first yard of path outside the door. Her right hand is at the top of the long brush-handle. Another woman, beyond the gate, has stopped and is speaking to her, to my mother. It’s a woman who lives in our street but someone we barely know. She has never stopped before. She’s on her way somewhere, as she has a coat on and a hat. I see my mother straighten up and the brush-head rise to a standstill, her right hand perched at shoulder-level. The bevelled head of the brush-shaft nestles into the socket of her palm.

What does this neighbour-stranger want?

My mother, stalwart at the door, waits. The woman looks anxious. I move forward, just a little, so I can hear. I am twelve. All the children are being kept indoors, for fear. The woman glances back up the street, the way she has come and then ahead. She’ll have seen the main road from where she stands and how empty it is, no passing cars, though it’s only early on an August mid-week evening. She’ll have known her voice would carry and be heard. I know something’s going on. The woman is weak, hovering nervously like that outside our gate. She says – she whines – “Oh, this is awful. Terrible. Things were all right before, weren’t they? Before all this began.”

My mother would have assured her in some facile way, brushing again, moving the dust towards the gate. But I knew the truth. My mother too.

Have you ever heard thrones fall? When the mighty are cast down, the thrones topple in their wake. They tumble, from an infinite height, colliding and hitting off each other in an ugly way. It should be thrilling and yet there is no sound, like a silent film. For how could there be sound? It is a soundless fall – or sounds like awe, and awe is a soundless thing.

I feel as though I am deep inside a passage tomb, in a chamber that waits and waits (while somewhere that fall unspools) for the moment when the times come right and the sun steps to its vantage-point and shafts the hall, striking the core with light. Then! Then there’s a bark of laughter in the dark. A whoop that echoes off the walls.

The words leapt inside me, licking the walls like flames: Things were not all right.

What did she want us to say, that woman? Did she want us to tell her, You have no guilt. We’ll be more than kind, now that our day has come. We’ll see you right.

She moved on. I went into the street. The sky, where the sunset should have been, was a weird orange-rose colour and a tree of smoke had risen, was rising, crawling upward, against it. Something huge was burning – the city west of us.

Sirens trailed their tales across the evening air – hurry – help me – save me – stop me. Each July the Twelfth I’d be kept indoors as the bonfires at every junction blazed to keep us Catholics down. But what’s afire now? Let them – let them taste fear for a change.

There’s another angle I never captured.

A first, and then a second, soldier was shot when I was fourteen. When I heard that three had been killed together I felt a spurt of reasonable delight. Their loss not ours. I was again in the house when I heard. I was standing in the living-room. The door to the hallway was open. Its wall, that I could see ahead of me, was papered in white embossed stripes and the masterful sun, thrusting in and along, made the contours bold in profile.

By hedges, then, I heard, on the radio news. Sparse March hedges and roadside whins, I imagined, on a cold brae, and spiteful sleet on their gullible teenage skin. A pint glass glinting in the ditch. Their trousers down.

If I’d touched it, the wallpaper would have been warm. Warm to the touch.

It couldn’t be right to be glad.

I stepped into a humble road, of cheap black tar, hedged either side.

A child can choose.

LIFE-TASK

It was a very still day. I can only say as I remember and I remember how the air was on the verge of something. We stood under a dome of cloud, whitish, like a plaster ceiling. We stood with this vast lid above us. The railway tracks insisted on the distance, the far distance over the surface of Europe, the distance between them and us. We had seen the tracks as black lines on the maps we had worried over so often. The lines entered and left the dots of cities, and now the train was coming back towards us, entering and leaving city – village – tunnel. We could imagine that train but not the people in it, not as they were now. We knew they would have changed.

I had no one to imagine in particular. Mine were lost early in the war. I was waiting at the station because I couldn’t not be there. They all had to have a homecoming even if it wasn’t my home any of them were coming to.

Yes, the air was about to do something. It was too still. Maybe the force of all those eyes – straining to see the engine breach the bend of track far off – maybe they had paralyzed it, as someone entering a room freezes at the many gazes turned in his direction. The air had been struck into immobility.

We just are, aren’t we, on a normal day? We go about our business not thinking of the air we move through and it moves around us, as the wind and weather. We battle on. But here, today, the air held its breath and I knew suddenly that the air was just like those eyes, those eyes that feel a prickle in the duct as tears gather but can’t fall. Just can’t. Why cry? These were the lucky ones, the ones coming back.

Backs I mostly saw, turned away from me, looking along the tracks. There was an uncertainty about everything. The tone wasn’t right. Coloured bunting had been strung along the station buildings but it did nothing in the stricken atmosphere. Some people wore their best – what they still had of it. Some were in their brightest colours which somehow seemed not bright enough – a sort of defeated gaiety. Others wore black. They had lost, you see, and had to signal that, even to the ones who had made it through.

Not much talk. Speculation had run dry. People checked and re-checked the official letter received, giving the train number, the passenger’s name – the crucial name – every detail verified again and again. “Yes, it’s our Taddeo. Taddeo Felipepe. See here.” A note of pride in that, the only Felipepe in town. Foolish, I remember thinking! Do you think he cares? After what he’s seen?

Just as I was deliberately releasing my fingers from the fist they’d crumpled into, I felt that uncanny tremble, building to a tremor, which runs through iron rails and buds into view as a tiny, dull mirage far off. Instantly everyone moved. The Stationmaster emerged. He had been hiding, I suspected, because he couldn’t work out what note to strike with this crowd. Banter or officiousness were his usual options and even he knew something unique was called for. He held sheets of names. People watched him carefully as if his list guaranteed a safe delivery. Everyone whose name was on that list was safe. Life could return to normal once this train emptied itself at our platform and, as it drew out and away, we could turn our backs on it and go home.

The station-master’s appearance released his staff into the crowd. Poor men. They could only pace the platform-edge uneasily. Weren’t they also expecting a brother, a son or a friend? Some nurses and nuns moved a little forward in readiness though we’d been told that these were walking wounded. Yes, if they had survived the prison camps and were in this first batch of returnees they’d have to be fairly mobile.

The town band shuffled up. The mayor patted his sash and consulted his notes one last time. A worried man. Work for amputees? Shell-shock victims hanging around the piazzas like after the Great War, arousing disgust and pity? He couldn’t guess. Too early. And the partisans to deal with, for whom these veterans were despicable. Such a settling of scores to come, not least for his own allegiances. And his wife here in a fur coat!

The locomotive drew closer and bigger and slid to a clanking stop, its great reptilian tail behind it. I felt an irrational fear that it would lurch up over the platform that kept it corralled on its track and mount towards us, hissing and snorting. The band blared out. People sought a focus, left and right, but nothing happened. No door swung wide. The crowd recoiled slightly. Why did none of the passengers come to the windows? Then a young woman dashed forward, calling a name. A porter intercepted her and, just as everyone watched her struggle, a figure appeared on the open steps of the foremost carriage. There was a blotch of colours on his breast. He paused, scanning the scene from this vantage-point and everyone turned towards him, even the struggling pair. He had shrunk inside his uniform but we recognised him. Our hero.

He looked pained. His handsome face tightened. He raised his hand – to salute, I expected – but before the gesture was complete he stopped and his hand seemed to brush aside a veil. The mountains! He could see them beyond the town. Of course. His hand snapped into a salute as he looked at our mountains. Our beautiful mountains. We felt their beauty as our own. He looked at them, at us, and his look released us. A groan rose from the crowd, then a wailing, shouts, and names one after the other as people surged towards the train, banging on the carriage windows and on the sides of the wagons that made up the bulk of it. Why was no one coming out? He made a gesture to the Stationmaster who blew his whistle in response.

They came! Hesitantly, pale, strained, keyed-up; some looking anxious, some blank… What chaos! What clutching and touching and inspecting and stumbling. I saw a man fall to his knees in front of his son. I heard a farmer say to his brother, “You look…” The brother held up the cuff of an armless sleeve. The farmer sighed, then said wryly, “You never were much good for a day’s work.” The general’s wife stood rigid in front of him, staring at his coloured decorations. Then she started to cry and he stepped towards her and embraced her, comforting her. He looked suddenly immensely weary, like a man taking on a burden.

The mayor never gave his speech. The important things were getting said without him. I watched as one reclamation after another took place. Everyone wanted to get away with their precious cargo as soon as possible. The band gave up. The platform emptied. Only one woman was left. She was not yet thirty, pretty and slight, trying hard to keep calm despite the fear rising in her as she was gradually marooned. She gripped her letter as she waited and looked at it from time to time. The Stationmaster avoided her but at last she confronted him up by the head of the train. He shrugged. I couldn’t hear what he said. Shiftily, he pointed her to the rear and I knew he thought it was hopeless. As he passed me, I heard him confirm the train number dully. Yes, the right train and date. He disappeared into his office and closed the door on the man who hadn’t come back.

She ran, as though the Stationmaster was an oracle, down the empty platform. I moved far enough to watch. She reached the very last truck just as its door was pushed heavily back. A soldier looked out. Not hers, evidently, for she immediately craned past him. He shoved the door further and a second soldier appeared. They seemed annoyed and embarrassed. One of them jumped down onto the platform, ignoring her roughly. He raised his arms above his head and I saw him grip the handles of a stretcher. His colleague shouted at her to get back as they lowered a body onto the platform. A greatcoat slid off, followed by a blanket. The soldiers both hesitated, then walked away, pulling out cigarettes. One of them glanced back briefly and his resentment was clear.

She stood, looking down. Her gaze moved the length of the stretcher and back. She made a sound. That’s all I can say. The body on the stretcher had no arms and no legs and the face was busted. I think he knew she was there, precisely because he kept his face turned away from her. He wasn’t even in uniform but in a dirty nightshirt. He looked grotesque and ridiculous and he stank. She dropped her letter and her bag and stood with her empty hands held out a little from her body, getting the measure of him. She whispered his name, then again, as he didn’t react. She knelt beside him. “It’s me,” she said. Nothing. Leaning closer, she said, “It’s you.” He opened his eyes but didn’t turn to her. “It’s you,” she repeated and she kept saying this till he moved his battered head to meet her gaze. What a lucky man. No one had ever looked at me with such love. I found my own eyes wet. She put her lips to his ruined face then leapt to her feet and bawled down the platform, “Come back here! Come back! Help me bring my husband home, you bastards!”

The soldiers hurried towards her and she left the station ahead of them, like a queen, with her consort carried behind her.

I want to be seen like he was. That was my thought. I looked at the ugly train, the tawdry bunting, the station’s vacancy. How would she see them? I set myself to learn.

SNAPSHOT

Oh, this would make Richard’s day; make his day, she thought. Myrtle stiffened in the car seat, longing to be invisible – no, to be not here. “Not here,” she begged him silently, as though her plea would reach him through the windscreen as he stood by the front bumper, looking grimly down at the number plate.

The couple whose car, in backing up to pull out, had lightly touched the front of Richard’s, looked perplexed as they stood by their bumper. The man – the husband, she supposed – had apologized readily, saying that despite the relentless holiday traffic and the pressure on the roadside parking spaces he should have been able to get out ok. It was a rare mistake on his part, he added and she thought he did look annoyed – at himself. The July traffic processed doggedly past them, between the palisade of seafront shops and the meagre promenade.

Myrtle turned towards the sea. That’s why they had parked here, after all: to see the sea. Richard, she felt, respected the sea without being interested in it. It was large and powerful and had its job to do but he was a countryman and liked firm ground under his feet. He didn’t like beaches.

There the sea was, where it always was, amazingly close to the line of parked cars, the pedestrian crossing, the rubbish bins, ice cream parlour, newsagent’s festooned with beach balls and coloured tat, the home bakery and the butcher’s shop. Nothing could take away from the flamboyance of the view. This was an ocean, more than a sea – touched by the Atlantic – and daily it threw together spectacular displays of sunshafts and cloudbanks regardless of whether anyone watching deserved them. A yellowish light pushed against grey masses of cloud. To the west, the jewel-green slopes of the Free State – it too so startlingly close – flickered, now bright, now shaded, as the sun picked out one field or another. Republic of Ireland, that’s what people called it these days. The sea, closer in to shore, heaved. She thought of a man turning over under blankets, giving you the cold shoulder, again and again.

She looked back. Had Richard said anything? No. The silent treatment. He bent down, slowly inclining his great height, and scrutinised the car. She knew what would happen. The man, unnerved by the prolonged silence, would incriminate himself.

“I don’t think there’s any damage,” he said rather meekly. No response from Richard but a continued silent inspection. “I’ve said it was my fault,” the man went on, “but I can’t see any mark.”

She saw Richard’s left hand, flat on the silver-grey car bonnet which was little different in colour to his head of thick hair that was level with the car mascot. Seventy and not a hint of the aches and pains of age. She knew he was remarkable and remarks were often made at his stately vigour, his upright presence. He’d pretend not to credit them. The hand – a massive hand – tensed on the bonnet as he levered himself back up.

“Can you see anything?” the man asked.

His voice was Welsh, she realised with some surprise. You didn’t meet Welsh people. Not here on the north Antrim coast. On holiday, probably. Then, a little muffled by the windscreen, she heard the woman say, “I can’t see anything. There’s no damage, I’d say.” She, now, was from the North – Belfast – by the sound of her. “Wouldn’t you think?” she added firmly.

“Some damage doesn’t show till later,” Richard said, shaking his head judiciously. He patted the car. “She’s just out of the showroom. I’ve had her but two days.”

“Two days. Yes,” said the man, somewhat helplessly.

“She’s just out of the showroom,” Richard repeated, looking along the whole length of the car.

“I can see why you’d be concerned but luckily there doesn’t seem to be a mark on her… on the car.”

As Myrtle could have predicted, at this, Richard pursed his lips and drew himself up. This wouldn’t do. “Your name and registration, sir.”

The woman looked angry.

“Ah, yes, of course,” the man said. “I could write the reg. down but I don’t have a….”

Richard solemnly opened his car door and took his time leaning across Myrtle to open the glove compartment and take out a pen and a notebook. She might as well not have been there. Back outside he noted down the numbers, his shoulders squared, his brow stern. Passers-by had begun to notice him.

“Your name, sir.” Not a question. An indictment.

The Welshman said something with a lot of ‘ell’ sounds that ended in ‘Griffiths’.

Richard’s pen hesitated.

“Double ell, Y, W…” the Welshman said carefully.

“Double ell,” Richard echoed. The laborious name-spelling went on. The woman glared in the background till Myrtle saw her suddenly re-focus on Richard and she gave a sneering, putting-two-and-two-together smile. Once addresses had been exchanged Richard closed the notebook and fitted its elastic strap across it.

“And your name, sir?” the Welshman asked, respectfully.

The woman gave a quick, incredulous shake of the head and raised her eyes to heaven.

“Meikle. Richard Meikle. Magherabwee House, Kildart.”

Uncertainly the Welshman said, “Meek…?”

“Meikle,” the woman said aggressively. “M,E,I,K,L,E. A good Ulster name, that.” The ‘that’ came out like a slap.

Richard turned away from her and addressed the man. “She’s brand new,” he said ponderously, his hand stroking the car’s shining flank. He gave the husband a nod, enlisting him, man-to-man, against the woman.

“Yes, sir,” said the Welshman, uneasy at his wife’s belligerence.

Suddenly she whipped out a mobile phone, held it up towards the car’s bumper and clicked. She crouched quickly and clicked again, closer. Without warning, she stood and aimed the camera at the windscreen. Click! She stepped back and got the Welshman and Richard. She moved methodically around the car, taking shots as she went. Myrtle was appalled. It wasn’t happening! It couldn’t.

Richard waved his arms and shouted, “You stop that this instant!”

“Why?” she laughed.

“Because I say so!”

She raised the phone and captured him in his outrage. He reached for her but she darted round to the other side of the car. By now, people were pointing and gawping and the traffic had slowed to get a look.

“A crime, is it? You’d know, I guess.”

Myrtle did not turn to see what was happening behind her. She imagined Richard swelling, sweating. The woman walked by the side window.

“You’ll be wanting the evidence,” the woman said jeeringly to him. “So will we. Don’t worry. We know where you live….” She paused, then, with relish, she added emphatically, and loudly enough for the street to hear, ‘Dick!’”

There was laughter from the bystanders and some amused shock.

The woman called to her husband, who looked stunned. He leapt into the driver’s seat. As the woman opened the passenger door she was already throwing her husband’s deferential ‘Sir’ mockingly back at him. “You’re not in Wales now!”

Richard got into his driving seat and the inevitable awfulness followed.

A week later, an envelope arrived with a Welsh postmark. Richard was annoyed by the contents. When he went with his newspaper to the toilet she took from the envelope several photographs: details of the car, including Richard and the Welshman. Among them was a snapshot of the hood and windscreen and there, to one side, she saw herself: a woman in her sixties, a functional hairdo, maroon clothes, and an expressionless face. Myrtle was shocked. Amidst all that carry-on, with all the fearful turmoil she’d been feeling inside, she had looked like that? Stolid and unmoved. Blank.

A note was signed Siobhán Griffiths. A Catholic, then. She was bound to see Richard in a certain light: the oppressor, the righteous bully asserting a waning authority.

She looked at a snap of Richard. She looked at herself.

Some damage doesn’t show till later.

Forty-two years.

But for it not to show at all…!

She rehearsed a word to the Richard in the photo. Then she said it aloud. “Dick,” she said. “Dick. Dick. Dick!” She caught her reflection in the act of saying it. Her teeth were bared.

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT

I look back now with a kind of dread, yet dread is about the future, about what’s going to happen, not what has already happened. So I dread…? The memory of pain.

I never thought of myself as a man given to gestures. Imagination I do have, but I tend to keep it to myself.

I remember the road: the little road under the starlight that summer. It was the year Mam and Dad sold the farm. I didn’t want it. They kept the farmhouse and the little bwthyn that had been the kernel of the homestead. You and I had used it for years already for holidays with the kids. They loved its thick walls and deep window-ledges.

At Clogwyn Uchel, on the very edge of Wales, the roads are dark (some of them are tracks, really) and the stars sort of spread themselves out overhead, display themselves, with a careless glamour; or like something much more homely, like sugar spilt across a slate, but up there, up above. A sprinkling of sugar overhead. Very confusing if you thought about it too much. And higher into the sky – it’s hard to describe! – there’s a hazy cloud of them. Growing up at Clogwyn Uchel and I never bothered to learn much about them. Anyway, the stars do what they do whether we notice them or not. They’re not waiting for our attention.

On a clear night like that one they shed enough light to see your way and the chalky ground of the lane helps. It’s a glimmering path up to the bwthyn, reflecting light from far, far above. Sometimes it even seems to me as though a bit of the sky has dropped to earth because the little white stones are like a rough and tumble Milky Way between the hedges.

You walked ahead of me, Mari. Blindly, I thought. Or like someone who’d been dazzled by something. Your feet took you.

Your mind? Numbed.

Probably. We all have to do so much guess-work about each other! What is she feeling? What will she do next? What does she want?

“Do you love him?” I called out. But you didn’t stop, or look back, or speak. I’m sure you heard me. You went on, into the little house.

I couldn’t. I walked around it to where the sea suddenly presents itself. A shock! Always. Always that shiver at finding yourself on the edge of a cliff. Acres of water ahead in a dark mass. The endlessness of the sea. It doesn’t stop. It goes about its business, rushing and crushing, floating boats, flexing itself. That night it was shuddering.

The stars. Some flung themselves down the sky. Mad bastards. Most looked on in a dignified way, blinking mildly at this recklessness. And I thought of the song. Its beautiful tune.

Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant

Ar hyd y nos.

Ar hyd y nos. All through the night.

Nothing like the crappy English version. Sickly-sweet, that. And boring. “Soft the drowsy hours are creeping… visions of delight revealing… hill and vale in slumber steeping”. And the stars don’t get a look-in! Not a mention. You pointed that out to me. When you were learning Welsh. “How come…?” you asked. You were always asking that. “Why is the verb here? Why do I have to say…?” Whatever.

And I’d say, “It just is, Mari. I don’t know why. Ask your teacher, cariad. Gwyn knows all that stuff.”

Yes, he did, didn’t he? Holl amrantau’r sêr… amrantau – such a great-sounding word for such a workaday bit of us: our eyelids. “All the eyelids of the stars are saying”. Eyelids speak? Oh, yes. They shield or conceal. They widen to reveal.

Dyma’r ffordd i fro gogoniant.

“This is the way to the land of glory. All through the night.” Go on, stars, I remember thinking that night, as I stood with them all above me, show us the way.

Oh, I closed my eyes then, I did. Because I was lost.

That stuff from the bible swam into my head:

Pan edrychwyf ar y nefoedd, gwaith dy fysedd….

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers.…” How does it go? “The stars which thou hast ordained…. What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… a little lower than the angels… crowned with glory and honour….”

Shit. Nothing like a chapel upbringing for loading you with stuff that makes you feel like shit in comparison. Sunday School set pieces. So beautiful the pictures in your head. No Special Effects needed. Just the words. You can see it happening: the stars being set in place one by one, like diamonds. And look at them up there, murmuring cheerfully to one another, “Here we are! Just where we should be. But we’ll cast ourselves from heaven in an instant. Give the word. No problem.”

But me? I was bloody lost. Lost.

We’d gone walking on the beach, earlier, you and me, between the pebbly border of the sea and the wrack and old bits of drift-wood and plastic oddments that stack up high against the cliff. Between that stony fringe – it always hurt my feet as a child; I’d teeter across it, complaining, excited at my own bravery, me versus the chilly little waves; like someone walking over hot coals, I’d think, secretly proud (look at me, Mam! Dad!) – between those stones and the cliff there’s a narrow crescent of smooth beige sand. It doesn’t change. Same for our kids as it had been for me. You and I walked along it towards the setting sun but you wouldn’t look at me and couldn’t speak. Couldn’t, I say, because you just shook your head sadly at every question.

We ended up just walking. I found myself scrutinising the sun’s angle – how the low shafts of sun hit the beach – and how they struck stars out of the damp sand: tiny mica fragments that glinted ahead of every step I took. Walking on a constellation. Yes, I could think a thought like that even with all that was going on because that’s the kind of mind I’ve got. I don’t like misery. I sheer off it. Think of something else! Cheer up! It’ll never happen.

But that night? Not a single bloody joke.

So later, when I stood out there in the darkness in front of the bwthyn, I looked up at the stars and I thought: we’re surrounded; we haven’t a chance. Stars above us. Stars below us. And we’re stuck in the middle. The shit in the sandwich. Who’d want to stay here? Why would you stay?

And then, I knew you were behind me. I felt you. You were still inside, mind; behind me, looking out through the window of the dark house; looking out at the same pointlessly lovely display, the Plough and all the other things we don’t know the names of, you and me.

And I was desperate and I suppose it was so I wouldn’t cry that I did it. I started to sing. Was I showing you I didn’t care? Big man. Mad man to sing at a time like that!

Golau arall yw tywyllwch,

I arddangos gwir brydferthwch,

“Darkness is another type of light” – to show us true beauty, the beauty of “the family of the heavens”, the stars, “in silence, all through the night”.

And I went on, louder; that tune rising, like a wave rolling up to its crest,

Nos yw henaint pan ddaw cystudd

“Night is old age”. That’s “when trouble hits us”; really hits us. Hits us when we’re least able for it; gets us in an armlock and grinds us down, Mam and Dad.

And the tune sinks gradually, gradually, into calm and quiet, like a wave relaxing. Dark night is coming, it tells us; our youth is dead. I couldn’t roll with the blows so well. I was getting the measure of myself a bit, frankly: a man in my middle years; nothing special.

Ond i harddu dyn a’i hwyrddydd

“But to make ourselves and our day’s end beautiful…” – to have something (at least something) to hold on to – “let’s put our fragile lights together… All through the night”.

I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t, couldn’t help it. I just cried.

I’d thought you’d always be there, see. Ar hyd y nos.

I stood out there and I cried. And I knew you were watching me. And I couldn’t stop.

Pity, was it, that made you stay that night? The next morning the sky was like the inside of a sea shell, pearly pink and white. The stars had gone. We were still there.

Later, much later, you told me that when you’d looked out you’d thought, My husband, singing in the darkness. I had surprised you. You saw me silhouetted against the sky while a star dropped gracefully across it, beyond me, and you thought: Have I just watched the last moment of something that’s millions of years old?