|
I couldn’t hear Mam or Dad anymore.
Damp was soaking through my jogging pants and my fingers were scuffed and sore. I cwtched my knees up to my chest and set my chin between them. It was cold, and the wind ran spirals around the heap. When I looked up I saw clear sky. The moon was in its last quarter and not so bright that it smothered the starfire.
Something shuffled to the left of me and my spine snapped as straight with shock. There might be foxes out here, or a badger with jaws like a vice.
‘Who are you?’ said the thing beside me, and I almost swallowed my tongue.
Easy-to-Read B&W Format
Fiction
Fantasy
I remember: there were laws to stop you from taking the scrap away, even though the grade was too low to count and the fires built on stolen fuel would stink and paint the wallpaper black. Coal is in my blood. My Granddad (I never called him Taid) was a pit medic before everything closed down. He was a little man, his legs curved by rickets as a side effect of being one-of-ten. He would have been too small to hold a patient down by himself. I suppose he gripped the saw while other people grappled with the limbs.
My imagination fails me when it comes to the underworld. I can guess at the dust, the tightness of the dark honeycombed hills, but I will never know what it does to you when the air runs bad, or the spark catches, filling the tunnel with sudden, searing light.
Slag heaps are too rounded: it doesn’t matter how old they are or how many spindly grasses and patches of moss have claimed them. You could never mistake them for a natural hill, a moel. They reminded me of burial barrows, or the mottes built by frightened Norman lords to mark the borderlands.
I thought maybe that dragons used them as pillows. Other times I thought I caught sight of Ellylldan, the will o’ the wisp, shining white as we rushed past on the dual carriageway. My nose was always stuck fast to the window by cold and curious snot.
They built a roadside café at the foot of a heap that marked the half way to my grandparents in the Rhondda. The sky was sometimes whirling and nearly always grey, except when we stopped there at night. Then all we could see were flashing lights and hard-edged shapes moving at high speed, and all of our senses concentrated on the spew of frying fat from the fans and the crunch of gravel under our journey-cramped feet. Mam would usher us in from the cold, hurrying us out of the shadow of the old coal hulk.
One night I spent the meal looking through the window. I fiddled with the sausages, prodded the cup of orange juice and barely glanced at the join-the-dots activity book I’d been given. Something was breathing out there, the hillside expanding and contracting like the ribs of a sleeping dog, legs lax in front of a grate filled with cold cinders.
‘Finish your chips.’ said Mam.
‘Mmm. Hywel can have them.’ I pushed cold chunks of potato onto my brother’s plate.
I wasn’t looking forward to reaching the cold, windward terrace that my grandparents lived in. It smelled of face powder, rising damp and vegetables boiled with too much salt. At night the wind came through the badly fitting window frames laced with the lonely sound of lost ice-cream trucks singing through the valley.
‘Time to go,’ said Dad, readying his wallet.
While Mam helped Hywel into his Dufflecoat and Dad paid, I made my way out into the car park. I was only little and I knew that in a few seconds I would be scolded for straying.
At first I was happy to stand alone. I chafed my hands (mittens still in stuck in my top pocket) and stamped my trainers on the floor. The wind teasled out my brown curls.
The thing on the slagheap trickled into the folds of my brain, subtle as calling harp music. I ran. Children do these things, sometimes.
‘Ffion!’ Mam called, her voice like an arrow in the dark. I was already at the chain link fence, climbing like a monkey.
‘Ffion, what are you doing?’ Dad shouted, throaty with worry. I reached the top of the fence, which was whipping under my weight.
‘She’s running away. Mam, why’s she running away?’ Hywel whined. ‘Doesn’t she like us anymore?’
I cocked my leg over the wire and started down the other side. By the time I hit the ground, Dad had his fingers through the fence and was rattling it back and forth. I looked up into his furious nostrils, past the bristle of his beard.
I had only really wanted to push my tongue out at them from the other side of the fence. But when I’d seen how angry they had been, panic set in. Steam puffed in the air as I sprinted. I leaped a ditch filled with runoff water and then climbed through a wooden fence. Then I was at the foot of the mountain of tailings.
Heaps are unstable, unsafe to climb. Tree roots and weeds anchor the mess in place but shale breaks loose and tumbles down. Rain sometimes slips between the stones and trash and carries away whole slabs. Mam had warned me many times, but I had forgotten.
I clambered the mass, mud making black crescents beneath my fingernails. My knees scraped and I grasped tussock and rock as I wriggled my way skyward.
It took me about ten minutes, all told. I reached the top and found a nest beside some horsetails and a crippled, curl-branch tree. I couldn’t hear Mam or Dad anymore.
Damp was soaking through my jogging pants and my fingers were scuffed and sore. I cwtched my knees up to my chest and set my chin between them. It was cold, and the wind ran spirals around the heap. When I looked up I saw clear sky. The moon was in its last quarter and not so bright that it smothered the starfire.
Something shuffled to the left of me and my spine snapped as straight with shock. There might be foxes out here, or a badger with jaws like a vice.
‘Who are you?’ said the thing beside me, and I almost swallowed my tongue.
I risked turning my head to the side and saw with relief that the speaker was a full foot shorter than me. He was a small man, tar black and perfectly in proportion, except for his nose, which was very long and pointed. He was completely naked, clothed just in wrinkles, and his bollocks – things I had only seen in books – dangled like cold little peanut shells between his thighs.
‘I don’t talk to strangers,’ I said.
‘I’m not a stranger. I’m a pwca.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘I’m a fairy, child.’
‘Don’t come close!’ I scrambled to my feet.
‘Don’t be scared. Sit a while, and tell me your name.’ The pwca didn’t move. He seemed anchored to the hillock, his long-little toes tangled together with the scrub grass stems.
‘No.’ I knew enough fairytales to understand the exchange. If I gave him my name, then he would have power over me.
Fear built in my chest. I didn’t have the right word for them, but I knew that there were people who did strange things, like the man who parked his car outside my school gate every afternoon until the police told him to leave. It occurred to me that, though this person was tiny and creased like a walnut, he could mean me harm.
‘I shall tell you my name then, if you promise to tell me yours. I do not break my promises.’
He held out a crinkly arm. I considered his offer for a little while, and then decided that so long as I knew his name, we would be even. I grasped the hand: the fingers felt like dry wood.
‘I am –‘ he began, and then he made a funny noise, a complicated trill through his square teeth. It sounded like something between a birdcall and a playground whistle. ‘Now your turn.’
‘Wait, no, that’s not fair!’ I said, knowing I’d never be able to replicate the sound.
‘You made a promise!’
‘My name is Ffion,’ I said, reluctantly.
‘F-f-ffion.’ He chewed on the syllables, rolled them over his tongue. ‘Do you know how old I am?’
‘A hundred years,’ I guessed, my babyish mind still at the stage where a hundred pounds sounded like a fortune, and a hundred years ago was when dinosaurs lived.
‘A thousand, and a thousand-thousand years. I have lived in fields and bogs and cellars, I have salted housewives’ porridge and startled sheep, I have unwoven thatch by the handful and I have tipped travellers from coracles. I have been down as deep as Dan-yr-Ogof and as high as Snowdon. I’ve danced down rivers and swum through drowned villages. I sat on every mushroom in every county in the country. I travelled from the old woman’s scalp down to her skirt tails. I followed Offa’s men when they dug his dyke. I travelled the hidden paths. Until.’
‘Until?’
‘The men with machines dug in the wrong places. They put this pile upon my gate and now I cannot leave.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You can help me, Ffion,’ he said, and the word tugged at my skin. ‘Take me in your car. You are going southways? I can find an open pit that leads to an open gate, and then I will go home.’
‘Dad wouldn’t like it.’ I imagined the little man perched on the booster seat: he was too small to fit safely behind a seatbelt. Hywel would have to sit on Mam’s lap. I would have to be next to the pwca. He smelled of hyssop and too-sweet honey. His eyes shone too hard.
‘Another bargain then?’ the pwca wheedled. He reached toward the tortured tree, his fingers feeling among the tiny leaves. They closed around something and then twisted, pulling it away. A cherry nestled in his hand like a purple gem. ‘Take this.’
‘I won’t eat it!’ I squeaked.
‘It will make you rich. Did you know that the digging men used to bring fruits in their lunchboxes? Some of them spat out pips long ago, plit-plut, onto slag. Seeds last a long time, wandering up and down, nudged by worm noses and the tides of soil. This one grew from a seed a hundred years old,’ he said, understanding that to me, a hundred was half of forever. ‘It is precious. The plant it came from was lost generation ago, farmed out of being. Collectors would enjoy it! Here, it’s yours.’
‘No. I don’t take sweets off strangers.’
‘Take it, Ffion.’ My shaking hand unfurled.
Under my feet I felt shiftings. One thing that Mam had never told me was that sometimes fires broke out as boulders ground together, sparking pounded dust and rotten gas into conflagration. But I remembered her tales of landslides and crushed children.
‘I’ve got to go.’ I said, my knees trembling.
‘You took the fruit, now you must take me. My feet are too small to walk half way across the country. You promised.’
‘Have it back,’ I said, my hand flat as though I was feeding sugar lumps to a horse.
You can’t do that, Ffion,’ he said, and he was right: I couldn’t.
I had a sudden vision of the future: the pwca finding blocked mine shafts, forgotten and subsiding, rockfalls clogging the underground tunnels. There was only one working pit left in Wales, and it was too modern to hold a path into another world. I imagined him lodging leechlike in my family. Oh, sometimes he would be nice, darning our socks for us, but other times he would be a horror, peeing into our milk and plucking the cat nude. I shuddered.
‘Come,’ he said, his gnarled hand closing in a fist around my sleeve. I tried to shake him off, but I was afraid of him using my name.
‘No!’ I did the only thing I could think of. With my free hand, I pulled my mittens out of my pocket. They dangled like bolas. Before I took another breath, I rammed them into the pwca’s grinning mouth. As he choked, I jerked away and then I pushed him. It was a dirty trick I’d learned from fighting with my brother. Bowled over, he landed ankles over his ears, and I heard him cursing through wool.
I tumbled helter-skelter down the hill. Cherry juice ran between my fingers like blood. Behind me, there was a flat farting noise as a vent of gas ignited. I felt the heat on my retreating back and then an explosion of air which knocked me down. Curled up into a ball, I sausage-rolled all the way to the bottom, where I fetched up in a thicket, scratched and grubby.
I picked myself up and limped back across the field.
Mam and Dad were still in the car park, hunting in the bushes that bordered the fence. They grabbed my arms and shook me, shouting: ‘where have you been?’ and other unanswerable questions. Everything was relief and anger for a few minutes and then I was bundled into the car. They strapped me in, threatening reduced television and no pocket money for three months.
As we pulled away I looked through the rear window. There was a light shining atop the heap. I guessed that it was the cherry tree – nothing more than blazing tinder now. I relaxed, until I felt the stone still resting wetly in my palm, an unfulfilled promise.
Copyright 2009, Rhian Waller. All rights reserved.
|