Pigeon E-Book

Alys Conran

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize. Lola and Pijin make up stories to test each other, stories of daring and adventure, of bad people and of Gwyn who drives his ice-cream up the hill to their town every week. Gwyn is a dangerous man and Pijin knows it. Lola is not so sure. As they grow up and their friendship grows more complicated, some of their stories fall silent, but some will come true. Pigeon is a journey through the uneasy half-forgotten memories of childhood, a story about wishful-thinking and the power of language.

Leseprobe

Contents

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Pigeon

Alys Conran

i Mam

who resuscitated this book with tears

‘Look uppigeon in your good field guide, if you have one. You will probably find that the pigeon does not exist. The most obvious bird in the country doesn’t even rate a mention. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the pigeon, as if pigeons were an embarassment to birdwatchers – as if pigeons were an embarassment to proper birds. Pigeons, however, exist. There they are, eating McDonald’s chips at railway stations, hanging about on precipitous ledges above the hooting streets, pursuing their love lives with unbridled enthusiasm around the ankles of pedestrians. Try telling them they are not proper birds.’

Simon BarnesThe Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion, or a personal introduction to Britain’s 50 most obvious birds

‘Nor shall I waste my time on pigeons, or doves as they are sometimes called, though some people seem to regard them as a fit subject for literature. To me pigeons mean just about nothing.’

Gunter GrassThe Tin Drum

1

Gwyn’s Ice Creams come in a pink and yellow van, stickers and posters peeling from the windows. Chugging away beyond a curtain of mountain and through bloom of cloud, the van clambers the to and fro road up the hillside every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Every weekend of the year it stutters up, choking, and spitting exhaust fumes, but stubborn against the grey of the hill and the town. Whining tunes come from Gwyn’s van as it rattles up the hill, set against the drone and moan of the grumbling engine.

The van’s tunes are sweet on my tongue. Music from the past 200 years all put into that bell-like warble that means ice cream and tickles kids from their houses like the pied piper. Somehow the reel’s connected to the accelerator, so that the tune deepens, slows with the road, and then the tape speeds on at a trot and a gallop whenever the van accelerates, desperately, against the steep hill.

“IIIII shhhhhhoooooouuuuuuulllllllddddddddd beeeeee soo luuckky lucky lcky lki i shd b so lcki in luv,” says the tape.

Heaven.

My mouth waters. As Pigeon and me run, my shoes are still undone and Pigeon’s too small school trousers, which he’s wearing although it’s Sunday, make his steps shorter like in a three-legged race. We race anyway, over fences, between the jumble of houses that cluster on the hillside. With snotty noses, with mouths catching at the air like fish out of water, we arrive at the slot in the van. Gwyn’s round brown and red face looks out, smiling. We bend to pant, our breath steaming all round us, white in the frosty air. We bend to breathe, our hands on our knees, backs rounded to the clouds, like that guy off the Olympics, the fastest runner in the world.

Gwyn’s looking down at us through the slot. He has thick, bristly black eyebrows and little dark blue eyes. He has a belly like a pot. Gwyn’s skin’s different to mine or Pigeon’s. Gwyn’s skin is tanned and like oiled leather. On his head there’s some black hair he brushes over his bald patch. This hair always ends up sticking straight up: like a by-mistake mohican. He has black hairs all up his arms too and Gwyn has a hairy face. Not long hair, just bristly like my dad’s was. Gwyn’s voice is bristly too. And he has what Efa calls a stutter, where there’s a blank space where your word should be, and your whole body stops.

“Iawn, b b bois?” he asks us.

Together Pigeon and me breathe “Iawn” back, although everyone knows I’m not a boi, any more than Pigeon is a prissy hogan – but I quite like being called a boi by Gwyn.

“B b be ’dach chi isio heddiw ’ta?” Gwyn’s question goes up at the end, really high, as high as here; but we still haven’t decided. Because last week I had one of the chocolate ones with the creamy outside and Pigeon had one of those thin orangey things and we said we’d swap this week but I don’t really want to cause the chocolate one is my favourite and I’m hoping Pigeon agrees but he hasn’t said so yet so I’m on the edge of going right ahead and having something else completely but I wouldn’t want to make the wrong choice. Pigeon’s my best friend.

Waiting, Gwyn, to keep talking, says “Tywydd braf”, and he grins. We grin back because this is no more fine weather than Pigeon is a hogan, or I’m a boi, or Gwyn’s van’s a BMW or we’re all Colin Jackson doing the hurdles.

The weather’s come in again; it sits all over the hill and the clouds are blowing up now like a balloon water bomb and they have a grey colour that’s almost dark blue, so you know it’ll rain forever.

In the end of thinking I have the long orange thing and Pigeon has the chocolate one like we decided last week. See? Pigeon and me, we’re likethis.

We’re walking back between the houses, our heads full of thinking like televisions, and our feet scraping along the ground, with our shoelaces left behind. And I lick it.

“Gwyn’s a gypsy,” Pigeon says.

I look at him. I’m not quite sure what that means. “He’s a gyppo,” says Pigeon. Ah.

It’s cos of Gwyn telling on Pigeon. Telling Pigeon’s stepdad about the lolly Pigeon stole. How Pigeon ran off without paying, his coat and his shoelaces trailing and bouncing as if they were running from Gwyn too. Pigeon got a black eye for that. Pigeon hates Gwyn cos all the other kids saw. Saw what happened when Gwyn shouted that he’d tell his ‘dad’, how Pigeon came running back and then followed Gwyn all the way begging him please not to, not to tell. The kids at school say Pigeon was crying, although that isn’t true, is it? I can’t imagine it. It was days before anyone saw him after that, and when he came out again, he had that black eye.

“Ma’ Gwyn yn od,” says Pigeon.

2

This morning, before the ice creams, as he sat alone in his shed bedroom, Pigeon had been able to see his new sister Cher getting ready for school in his old room. He didn’t watch, but he could see. Pigeon knelt on his bed. The shadow from the house fell on the shed’s window, and the other window, in the house, with Cher in it, made its impression on Pigeon and the shed.

Cher did up her blouse, buttoning all the way up the front. The cool blue of the shirt, it was so gentle over her soft skin. Cher’s face, serious, quiet and serious, just like Cher’s face always is.

She started combing her hair out, its sleek and lithe mass, heavy down her back. She pulled it all back off her face into a tight ponytail, brushing and brushing so that all the strands were streamlined in the same direction, and it looked smooth, her hair, like a slow and wide river, or like the satin of a ball gown.

Pigeon’s mam came, making her way down from the kitchen. And she had the tray in her white hands. His mam brought their breakfast down to the shed. And this was the best part of the day. His mam though, always looked tired, and perhaps not very well.

They sat on the bed, Pigeon and his mam, with the cereal and the tea. Pigeon drank black tea, his mam white. The air was cold, so that the tea lifted from the cup in streaks of steam. His mam had a blue mark on her face again, blue and yellow, like a wet sunset. This one was because there were other men looking at her. And He saw them. They were looking because she’s beautiful. But He said it was because she was ‘asking for it’. Which she wasn’t. She’d never ask for anything at all.

Pigeon’s mam ruffled his hair, until it all stuck up, and Pigeon, Pigeon almost smiled then, before she picked up the tray and went to the house.

As she went, she told Pigeon in her cracked, soft voice to “Hurry now, love. Get dressed”, and, although it was Sunday, she told him to get on off to school, as if it was a dream, a hope, and not telling him what to do, and it was as if her voice was getting lost in the air on the way to his ears.

Pigeon pulled on his grey school trousers, and his only black shoes, his only white shirt and his only green jumper. And he hated and hated the way the ugly clothes felt when he pushed his arms through into them, and how the clothes were scraping and pulling at him, trying to skin him alive. And, without going to the house, so that He didn’t see him, or Cher either, with her pretty smooth hair, her perfect clothes and her sorry eyes, Pigeon went on, pretended to his mam to be going to school, to the tit-for-tat-tattletale school where, between Monday and Friday, he kept his head down, right down under the radar.

Pigeon went over the wall, and down the path that was like a snake by the wood as it followed the river as that went down with the weight of the rain and the grey sky and the hill. And then Pigeon stopped. Sat. What to do with an empty Sunday? And with a half-empty mother too?

She appeared. It was Iola, come out of the wood like a genie, small with a pot belly over her skirt, knees as always covered in bruises and grazes, shoes undone, hair so light it’s almost white. Beckoning.

Pigeon took a quick look up the path in case of his mam, and then ran after Iola through the wood and back up the hill again into the grey, into the grey full of purple and orange stories that go on and on and on

They ran together to Iola’s house, to where there was a real kitchen, a real home, and as the van started its meandering songs up the road, Efa and Iola danced in the kitchen, and, smiling a little too brightly, Efa put two fifty p’s in Iola’s white palm.

Heaven.

At the van, Iola and Pigeon, their breath steamy in the cold January air, order one chocolate thing, and one orangey thing, cos, like Pigeon tells Iola, they’re “saff”, and it’s good they’re safe, cause that chocolate one, it’s delicious.

But Pigeon stares at Gwyn’s hands as he hands Iola the ice-creams. He stares at Gwyn’s man’s hands. And he hates him.

Gwyn is growing in Pigeon’s mind. He grows and is altered and bent out of shape. Pigeon would give him horns, would have him turn rotten inside. Pigeon fires up so much anger about Gwyn, that he can still smell him, long after leaving the van, and long after leaving Iola to her home, her chores, her regular life.

3

The next bit is when I’m on Pigeon’s bed in the shed. I’m reading a comic, lying, bol down, and Pigeon is bol up, his legs stretching up the shed wall. Ryan Giggs is looking down at us from the poster, looking good, but next to me, Pigeon’s ignoring Ryan and looking at his wood ceiling, where the blue-tack holds part of an old mobile: half an aeroplane and a crumbly cloud. I just read my comic, and I’m almost there, at the end, when “Murdyryr! Dyna be’di o: murdyryr!”

I’m looking up from my comic, a bit surprised. We’ve thought of a few things: kiddie fiddler, woman in a man’s body, a ghost, but Pigeon’s never got quite this far. Murderer… It feels like a big word to say, echoing between the four walls of Pigeon’s small room like trying on Efa’s big shoes.

Now Pigeon’s my best friend, but Pigeon keeps cut-outs of all sorts of things. He’ll like something, so he’ll cut it out. Recipes, even though he can’t cook, bits and pieces of Cher’s comics, someone’s marked homework, his mam’s birthday card, tickets, bits of receipts. He keeps them all under his bed in the shed, like a hamster making a nest. Paper isn’t the only thing Pigeon keeps, he also keeps money, and he keeps information: names, numbers, jobs, secrets, lies, lined up in his head like a dictionary with the town and the whole world in. This isn’t quite a normal thing, but Pigeon’s my best friend, and anyway he hardly ever talks about all the information he has in his head, and at school they don’t know. They don’t know what he does all day when he’s not there. They don’t really care. And anyway he’ll make a note if they ask. Like the one he made for me.

And with the note you can spend all day free. You can spend the day outside, in the wood or up in the old quarries, sitting, making a fire and laughing and making stories out of everything. With Pigeon everything is bright and big and better than you’d think it was. It’s all freed up when me and Pigeon don’t bother with school. You can stay out all day, until half past three. At half past three me and Pigeon had come back to the shed, and we’d eaten the crackerbreads he’d got stashed under the bed. Sometimes there are cigarettes there, but he hasn’t got any today. Today is a thinking day.

There’s a sound at the door of the shed. Someone trying to get in. Pigeon’s sister, who’s called Cher, after Cher, except actually she’s Cheryl. Cher is new. Which is amazing, that you can have a new sister, new mother excetera. I’d like a new sister or a mother too, except that mine’d smell new and nice, not like Cher, who, Pigeon says, smells like rotten fish.

Cher is good at school, better than me, and a lot better than Pigeon. She’s good at school and she goes every day, and only comes back here when it’s over, like now. Cher has a room in the house, not like Pigeon. Cher has long brown hair and brown eyes, which are very pretty and soft like feathers and cushions and cotton wool. Cher likes doing cartwheels, on the tarmac at school her legs go all round in the air and she looks like a wheel. But Cher only speaks English. English is sludgy.

“PIJIN! Just cause you’ve got stuck in the shed doesn’t mean it’s my fault!”

“I’m not sayin it is, just saying you can’t come in. Anyway, Cher, keep your knickers on and stop bein’ so loud else your dad’s going to hear us, an we’ll be dead.”

“I’ll only be quiet if you open the door.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Cause”

“Why?”

“Shush … just cause, Cher. Just cause.”

“Why, Pijin?”

“Piss off, Cher!”

“No.”

“Just stay there an be quiet then okay?”

Silence

“Why is she allowed in an I’m not?”

“Cause we’re mates.”

“We can be mates too.”

“Don’t wanoo.”

“WHY?”

“Cause.”

“Why really?”

“Cause you smell bad, an anyway I just don’t.”

“Fine, don’t care anyway.”

“Okay, me either.”

“You goin?”

“No… Pijin…”

“What?”

“Jew really think Gwyn’s a murdrer?”

“Probly.”

“Why?”

“Dunno – I can smell it.”

“Whas it smell like?”

“Blood.”

“Yuck.”

“Yeh.”

“So what’re you going to do about it?”

“Get im.”

“O… How?”

“Dunno yet.”

“CanIhelp?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Cause.”

“C’mon Pijin!”

“No way. Shut up.”

“Pijin…”

“Piss off Cher!”

“Can I stay here though? Just to listen,”

“Aright…but don’t shout.”

“Ok”

“Pijin,”

“What?”

“What, Cher, spit it out.”

“Pijin … I’m sorry about what He did … I’m sorry about what dad did, Pijin.”

“Pijin”

“Pijin?”

“Pijin?”

“Just shut up Cher okay?

…just shut up.”

I can tell Cher hates me cos she looks at me with big eyes that are sometimes crying. In here, in the dark under the covers, Pigeon holds a torch up to his chin and tells horrible stories to me about Gwyn and all his victims. The duvet glows with the light of the torch.

“Ar noson dywyll,” begins Pigeon.

On a dark, dark night.

Gwyn is a psycho and kiddy fiddler, knife carrier, mask wearer, pain-lover, torturer, and all the other things that come from those programmes on the TV that Pigeon watches, and I don’t because of Efa, and which make him speak English like cowboys and say things like “Rho dy hands up or I’ll shoot!” and “Rhedeg i ffwrdd on the count of three, neu dwi mynd i make mincemeat of you!”

Gwyn makes such a good bad guy that sometimes Pigeon even freaks himself out, turns pale under the duvet and goes quiet, like a path that gets lost up a grey hill. He snaps at me like an alligator when I laugh cos he’s scared.

He’s been collecting the evidence against Gwyn, spying on the van, asking for a receipt when he gets an orangey thing, trying to find out where Gwyn lives, and scratching bits of dirt from the van’s wheels to put into little sandwich bags to bring home. Pigeon’s even got an old magnifying glass, stole it from my house, but Efa’ll not notice, and he’s borrowed a microscope from school, carrying it all the way up the hill and stashing it in the shed.

“Wha you going to do with tha?” Cher catches Pigeon and me on the way into the shed with it.

“Anna lice it,” says Pigeon.

“Snot anna lice, stewpit, it’s analyse.”

But Pigeon just lets his shoulders go up and down like he doesn’t care and gets on with analysing the yellow juice that’s what’s left over from his ice lolly.

Pigeon and me suspect Gwyn of a lot of things: poisoning, fraud, drug dealing and spying. We can’t be sure yet, even with the all the facts lined up on the duvet: the evidence, documentary evidence, eggsybit 1. 2. 3. Even with these we can’t be sure. But Gwyn’s dangerous; Pigeon’s sure, and I’m sure too, saying ‘hmm’ and ‘aaahhhh’ at all the eggsybits. And Cher listens from outside. She listens to the English in between, and now she’s getting more and more of the other words that are all wrapped round it. And Cher one hundred per cent believes it all in a funny real kind of a way.

“Ma Gwyn yn od,” I tell Efa, at home.

“Gwyn is a Psycho, a Kiddie Fiddler, a Mask Wearer and a Torturer,” I tell Efa, saying the words like prizes.

“Don’t talk like that, Iola,” Efa says back, stirring the hippy soup in the kitchen. “Paid a deud petha fel’na.” And then she says it, what she always says, says: Be Careful With Pigeon, Iola. Iola Be Careful With That Boy Pigeon.

Although she likes him.

I can tell Efa likes Pigeon cos she sits at the kitchen table and gets him to read her bits from the newspaper. Every time he reads a bit, Efa gives him a chocolate. And I’d bet Pigeon likes Efa too, cos he looks at Efa like she’s some kind of an alien cos of all her beads and hippy smells and skirts. And I feel funny cos it isn’t like as if Efa cares about the newspaper. She’s just getting Pigeon to read, to see if she can, and Pigeon knows it. I’m black blue inside with the two of them making friends, like as if Efa’s his mother or something, and it’s like something inside me’s going bad, before it’s even begun.

4

Pigeon scuffs around the town, thinking of Gwyn, until the thoughts turn so smudged they’re black like something burnt and ruined. When that happens, Pigeon starts peering in through people’s windows, looking for light. He’s a scavenger, a scavenger for comfort. Day to day to day, Pigeon drags his feet around his pebble-dashed kingdom. Non-descript, gloomy, at the wrong end of nowhere. Perhaps.

But below the grey domain of this hill, the patchwork fields stretch their expanse of emerald down, sloping to a silver sea of torn paper waves. And above, above the hill, there are the crouching mountains, with their lakes, like broken mirrors wedged between valleys, and along the tops of the plaited ridges there’s that trembling, pencil-line horizon. It’s worth a second look. Just briefly.

So here, here’s Pigeon again. Here, grey. Just a sketch the boy. His face is sallow. There’s a snarl at his lips, and his shoulders are delicate as eggshells. Pigeon, here on the hill, wanders the pebble-dash, pebbled ash, scuffing his feet up the hill, and then up between the houses.

Pigeon goes right up to the top of the hill. To where you can sit and look down at the town all spread out like a handkerchief. Pigeon spits at it. He can spit a long way now, but still, the gob of spit lands on the grass just below him, and the town is still there. Pigeon sits on the hill, legs crossed, watching the day turning slowly. When his legs are cold through the school trousers, Pigeon stands, shakes out his legs and starts back down, for the town, the houses in their higgledey rows. He walks back into it. Into the pattern of the town, and scuffs along the streets between the shapes of the houses.

He stops at one that’s off balance. It’s skiw wiff. Crooked. Bits and pieces of it shoot out in all directions, like a peculiar, mangled space ship. It’s Pigeon’s house. Outside is Pigeon’s shed. That’s Pigeon’s hole.

Pigeon avoids the house, and goes straight round to his shed.

Back in the good days the house was chaotic, a tangle of words and arguments, and conversations even, and even fun.

Like this very particular day, back then, in the house, in spring. It was her birthday, and Pigeon’s mam had put on such a beautiful dress, and, in the dress, she was spinning and spinning in the kitchen, so that the pretty flowers on the dress streaked through the air, and a dish was knocked off the draining board by the spinning flowers on the dress. And that day she just laughed, that day, and her laugh, it was easy, like a soft breeze. So pretty, Pigeon’s mam, like a ghost, but pretty.

Pigeon can remember that day. Pigeon can still remember, and he tells his mam about it, sitting on his bed in the shed in the falling night this Sunday. And she’s quiet, but she strokes his hair as he lies his head on her lap, as he talks. And her hands are soft as feathers, so that Pigeon doesn’t know if they’re there at all. Her hands are like fairies and so is she, so that she might disappear, fade, be taken somewhere else. Pigeon smiles at her, to keep her with him, and her hands stroking his hair feel a little more real, on the bed in the almost dark.

Pigeon keeps his mam there, and he’s important, holding her hand now on the bed, smiling at her, and telling her about his day. And she asks him no questions. And he talks on and on, although she looks as if she doesn’t understand, her grey look; the words evaporating away into the cloud of her eyes.

“At the bottom of the river there’s a load of junk, Mam,” he tells her in Welsh, painting a picture of what he’s seen, the rubbish, the tipped, thrown-away toys and belongings clogging the river at the bottom of the hill, the things people have thrown away, as if they want nothing now, as if they need nothing.

Does she understand? Is she interested in him?

There are never any questions, never any explanations, but, as he talks, Pigeon feels her hand grow heavier in his, so he keeps talking until she kisses his hair, and it’s time for bed.

Before He came, Pigeon’s mam was a seamstress. She sewed, at home. She made dresses for other people. But now see the dresses, as they still hang in the dark lounge under plastic coats, like bodies, strangled. Underneath the plastic there are all the colours in the world: shiny, flat, soft, shimmery, see through, materials called beautiful names, chiffon, silk, satin. And Pigeon expected to see pretty girls in the dresses. Beautiful. But the ones who came to get them were always ugly, and never as pretty as his mam. No, never as pretty as she when she laughed. (Although it wasn’t now so very often that she laughed.)

Before He came Pigeon was inside. Pigeon’s bedroom was upstairs before He came. Hecame bringing Cher and silence, and the shed.

When He first moved in, they got off to a bad start. Pigeon was sitting on the sofa, or rather he was draped over the sofa, lording over the room, his trainers kicked off, and strewn on the floor. He was reading a book. It was a book about aeroplanes. Back then that was what Pigeon liked, aeroplanes. Back then.

Pigeon’s mam brought Him round.

At that time she still went out, at that freewheeling time still went for the shopping of her own free will, still took a bus into town. She had a friend, who she met once a week, to exchange dress patterns, have a cup of tea, talk.

Talk. Back then she did that too. Usually when she returned to the house, she’d come in through the back door. Like a lot of people they left the front door ‘for visitors’ although they never had any, and the ones they did, like Iola, came round the back too. So, usually, the front door was almost just a wall. Something that never moved, never opened. Pigeon sat upright when he heard a key turning in the front door that day. You knew it was trouble when it was the front. The police, the social worker, some kids playing pranks.

It took her a while to get her key into the lock, and even longer to turn it. Pigeon could hear her apologising, so there was someone there with her.

“I’m sorry. Oh, sorry,” she said, fumbling with the key.

Then there was a man’s voice saying “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

And then Pigeon got to his feet, walked down the hall, and wrenched the door open, making the first crack in the door as he yanked it.

“O,” she said.

“Oh,” said the man.

“O,” said Pigeon.

“Pigeon this is Adrian,” she said in English

“Hi.”

“What’s your name again, son?”

Pigeon didn’t like the way ‘son’ sounded.

“Pigeon.”

“Hi Pigeon,” He said. And when He smiled you didn’t believe it.

“Can we come in, Pigeon?” asked his mam in English, smiling, motioning gently to the hallway he was blocking.

Pigeon wanted to say no.He wanted to say this is my house, no you can’t.But he stepped back against the wall and let them pass.

The man went down the hallway making comments as if he was looking to buy the house.

“Nice location isn’t it? Feels like heaven up here after the city. Clean air. Green views. I could do this. If there was work here, I could do this.”

“What does He do?” Pigeon asked his mam. Walking behind them to the lounge.

“Why don’t you ask me yourself, son?”

“What do you do?” Pigeon said without smiling.

“I work on the docks.”

Pigeon didn’t know what that meant, so he said nothing.

“How old are you, son?”

Pigeon shrugged.

“You’ll be a bit younger than my daughter Cheryl I think. You’ll like her. She’s a lovely girl.”

Pigeon didn’t say anything.

He went back and sat on the sofa, he turned the TV on, loud.

“Pigeon,” said his mam, and sighed a small, powerless sigh.

When Pigeon looked up at Him he was looking back at Pigeon, frowning. Pigeon turned the TV up two points, looked at the man, looked away and smiled to himself. You didn’t let someone in through the front door, and then make them feel at home. And anyway Pigeon didn’t like the way the man was looking all round the house, and saying “Nice light room this. This one could do with a splash of paint, love.” He called Pigeon’s mam ‘love’, but his voice sounded uncomfortable around the word. His hands were big, Pigeon had noticed that. They were the hands of a man who liked to limit things.

He started coming at weekends. He’d be sitting in the living room, on the sofa, when Pigeon came home. He’d be watching a programme He wanted to watch. He’d be getting Pigeon’s mam to make Him dinner. He’d be telling them all things about the world. He’d not be listening to Pigeon’s mam, nor leaving her space for an answer.

“Africa’s a lost cause,” He said, watching the black children with the empty eyes and round bellies. “It’s just a useless country.” He said.

“It’s not a country,” Pigeon said. “It’s a continent.”

“Same difference.”

“No. There’s lots of countries in it. Chad, Tanzania, South Africa.” He’d got that from Iola’s big geography book.

But He just looked at Pigeon, just looked at him.

What Pigeon didn’t like was how his mam went so quiet when He was around. She was nervous. He made her feel as if everything was wrong. You could see it. It wasn’t that He said so exactly. But He was always checking everything.

He checked the clothes she’d washed and ironed. Looking at each one for marks or creases. “Okaaaay. Okaaaaay,” He said, going through the pile. When she brought out dinner, He’d look at his plate and just say, “Oh. I see.”

“What’s wrong?” she’d ask in that voice like a kid’s.

“No, darling. Nothing.” Then He’d hesitate, then hold her hand, look into her eyes, as if she knew nothing. “You just don’t put parsnips with potatoes,” he’d say. Or, “Too much gravy.”

And then she’d say it. She’d always say it. “Sorry,” she’d say. “Sorry.”

You had to never say that word. It was like when a dog lies on its back, legs in the air, letting another dog growl over it. Sorry. She kept saying it. Sorry. And she got quieter and quieter, and He, He started to take her over.

Then He brought Cher for a weekend. Cher. She arrived through the front door too.

“Pigeon, can you carry Cher’s case?” had been the first question. It was a pink suitcase. Cher was stood there, in a perfect blue dress. She looked like she’d come to the wrong house. Pigeon could see something else in her eyes. Fear. Pigeon took the case. Took it up to ‘her’ room.

His mam had asked him yesterday.

“Pigeon, we’ve only two bedrooms, and it’s summer so, Adrian was wondering, if you’d mind us setting you up with a bed in the shed just for this weekend, so Cher can have her own room.”

So this was the way it was going to be. Pigeon took his posters out to the shed straight away, his mobile of aeroplanes, all his clothes. It was better, when people tried to do something to you, to do it yourself, and worse. At school, when they tried to hit him, Pigeon’d punch himself in the eye, to stop them. They’d stare at Pigeon like there was something wrong with him. And now this was the same. People called it ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, but it put you back in the middle of things, so it was worth it. Even during the week Pigeon wouldn’t go back to the house.

“You want me back? You’ll have to get rid of Him,” he’d say when his mam begged him. Why didn’t she? Why didn’t she? That was his mam, she couldn’t make decisions on her own. She couldn’t say no to anyone, or anything. But he loved her. Pigeon loved her.

She couldn’t say no to getting married. In the photo on the mantelpiece, she wears a dress she made for someone else. She had to take it in. She’s beautiful in it. But slight and pale. He stands behind her, holding her shoulders as if she’s a steering wheel. In the photograph you can see that his hands are heavy. She looks at the camera, her eyes making blank lenses back.

Then He lost his job. They lost their house in Liverpool, and they turned up, at the front door, on a Tuesday in October. And after that it was all watching the house from the shed. It was all not being part of the house. It was all setting up a whole world in the shed. Making it into something big.

So tonight Pigeon’s shed’s like the moon. It keeps at a prudent distance. Pigeon’s shed sits, watching from the edge of the garden, bent low and afraid. Pigeon’s shed sits this Sunday night, as Pigeon curls on his bed, in the late night dull-mute dark of the hill. The shed is almost pitch. There’s only the light from the house filtering down, and only the sound of the television in the off-balance house. The television’s chatter echoes around the garden, and even into the shed.

In the house Cher and his mam are sitting still still still while He watches the television. It’s important not to be noticed. Not to stand out. There should be no sudden noises. No opinions other than His own. There should be nothing but the news on the television, only these tears on the news, a house gone, a family, two children upstairs suffocated by the smoke. There should be nothing else, only Him, drinking a beer, His wife, Hisdaughter, Hiscigarette, and the house around them.

Cher is sitting very upright, her feet together, as if they’re tied. Cher is sitting not watching the television but making sure He’s satisfied that she’s watching it, just as He’s satisfied that she’s exactly the kind of girl He wants her to be. Cher’s shoes are little pink princess slippers. Her hair’s perfectly brushed back into a ponytail, and there’s a bow there, which is powder blue. Occasionally, if she catches Himwatching her, Cher will make the right expression for the television; a smile if it’s funny, a frown for serious, or, for right now, for this family lost in the fire on the news, sadness. Not relief. Perhaps Cher has that letter now? In her pocket. The one the postman gave Pigeon, and he gave to her, so that He couldn’t steal it. Pigeon had read it first. It was from someone he’d never met. Martha. That’s Cher’s sister. Cher said not to mention her name. She lives in Manchester.Come and live with me, Cher.Said the letter. Come to Manchester.But Cher’s too scared of Him even to move in the living room.

In the shed Pigeon’s reading, reading with a wind-up torch in the dark. He has to stop every minute or so to wind it. He wears three jumpers, lies in a sleeping bag with a duvet on top his mam’s brought down from the house for him.

Pigeon’s reading the newspaper, Efa’s newspaper he stole. He’s reading it line by line. He doesn’t understand all the words, but he can read them. He says the words into the shed, and he likes the sounds of the words in the newspaper as they fill the mould that is the shed.

“Exper-i-ment. Acqui-sit-tion. Super-la-tive.”

He has a small, cold mouth, and the words fill his mouth too, they fill it with their different textures: clay, metal, soap textures, and the strange tastes of the words as he says them into the cold air.

He turns the page. There are photographs. Pigeon’s not interested in the photographs. The words he can taste. He can put the words into his pockets, keep one “extra-ordi-nary” in the space between his gums and his teeth. He can keep one behind his ear, “defen-sive-ly” one he might need at any moment. There’s a word in each shoe, a word stuffed down his sleeping bag, the vowels pushing for space like his wriggling legs.

He’ll give words to other people too. This is a good way of keeping them. He’ll even give words to Cher: like “coll – at – teral” and “expon – ential”.

Sometimes, when he and Iola are in the shed, planning, he’ll throw a good word out of the shed door as if he doesn’t care about it, and watch through the window as Cher grovels on the ground to pick it up, the sounds of it almost slipping through her clumsy lovely sieve fingers. Pigeon likes it when Cher says one of these words, slips it into a sentence about something else. Cher’s mouth is warm and soft; the words sound different in her mouth. “Pijin,” she says, nervous, “D’you reckon Gwyn’s psych-co-logical?”

Pigeon’s tried to give his mam some of the words too, when she sits by his side on the bed, when she strokes his hair. He talks, saying the words, “atten-tive”, “apa-the-tic”, “list-less”, or, in Welsh: “di-fa-ter”, “di-sby-ddu”, “brith-io”, trying to give her word after word after word. But she doesn’t hear them, she can’t hear the words anymore and they fall apart in the air, like snowballs, powdery-white and light. He’s learnt not to let too many go on his mam like this. They’ll never come back. It’s cos of Him. What He’s doing to her.

And then Iola. Throwing words her way is like making home-made rockets, shooting them up, watching them explode, crash, or disappear into next door’s garden. Half the time they go to waste, the words. She’ll be thinking of something else, not listening. But sometimes Iola’ll catch a word, wide-eyed. It’s like she can’t believe she’s caught it, by accident, the brightly-coloured ball of a word. Then, she never just holds it, or gives it back, straight, as it is, instead she’ll start fiddling with it, throw it in the air a couple of times, stamp on it, press it into a new shape. Half dreaming, she’ll pull it in two, make it something different. Sometimes she can make a word a lot worse, like “flourish” becoming “flour ish”, sometimes she can make a great word out of two bad ones, like “massakiller”, or “sicko-psycho”. She’ll say the new word slowly, badly, tastily.

But Iola, she doesn’t know what to do with a good word she’s made. She can’t make a good story all by herself, Iola. Or not yet! She’ll often just play around with the word, tickle it, play cat and mouse with it until the word almost curls up and.