Mercy Seat Read online

  Mercy Seat

  Mercy Seat

  Wayne Price

  First published 2015

  Freight Books

  49–53 Virginia Street

  Glasgow, G1 1TS

  www.freightbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Wayne Price 2015

  The moral right of Wayne Price to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-908754-98-1

  eISBN 978-1-908754-99-8

  Typeset by Freight in Plantin

  Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Wayne Price was born in south Wales but has lived and worked in Scotland since 1987. His short stories and poems have been widely published and have won many awards. His debut story collection, Furnace, published by Freight in 2012, was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He teaches at the University of Aberdeen. Mercy Seat is his first novel.

  Did it wait, this mood, to mature with hindsight?

  In a trance from the beginning, then as now.

  Li Shang-Yin, ‘The Patterned Lute’

  (ninth century)

  One

  I think now, nearly thirty years too late, that Christine came to us that summer not meaning to shipwreck our lives, at least not to begin with, but just to save herself somehow. Like the swimmer she was, and too far out from land, she knew she had to find something to take hold of, or drown.

  For a long time I’d assumed that if there’d been any meaning at all in what happened that August, then it was something to do with control and revenge; something primitive in both Christine and me, and in Jenny too, by the end. I’m ashamed about the pettiness of those thoughts now, but maybe it’s impossible to understand certain things without the years, and all their losses, to teach us. Maybe any kind of cruelty comes from simple need, and we could see it properly if we could step through its mirror, the looking-glass that only ever shows ourselves. But back then in the midst of it I was young, and dazed with responsibilities – marriage, and fatherhood – that had come too soon. I was staring out at the world as if I’d woken in a small room that wasn’t my own, in a strange land, and I understood so little of what I was seeing. Maybe nothing at all.

  I came to this little town by the sea as randomly as driftwood. Though I’d been bright at school, and spent most of my childhood steeped in books, I’d left at sixteen to take up an electrician’s apprenticeship at the Lady Windsor, one of the Cynon Valley collieries. It didn’t take much time for me to feel that I’d escaped one prison for another, and when the long strike began a year later and I joined the pickets at the gates it felt, secretly, like a miraculous reprieve. Looking at the grim faces of the older men around me as they passed the long empty hours with gossip, politics, rugby talk and despair for the future if the strike wasn’t won by Christmas, I felt almost drunk with a guilty, fugitive lightness I’d never felt before except in books and dreams, and which I sometimes think I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to recapture.

  When the union asked for volunteers to strengthen the picket at Cynheidre Colliery in Carmarthenshire, the westernmost pit in the south Wales coalfield, I made sure to sign up. On a wet Monday morning, sometime in October, I sat with a dozen other men squeezed tight against the window of a steamy, leaking, smoke-filled minibus and imagined that all the grey spiders’ nests of the valleys towns we crawled through – Porth, Ton Pentre, Treorchy – were unravelling behind us like traps of dirty silk, dissolving in the rain.

  Not many weeks later I packed as much as I thought I needed to take, left a note filled with words I can’t begin to remember, and rode a slow train from Cardiff to Carmarthen. I stayed a while, working and shivering through the winter on a building site, and when that job was done I carried on west until I reached the sea. I’ve hardly been back to the valleys since, except twice to see each of my grandparents buried, six months apart. They’d raised me since I was eleven.

  That was my first betrayal I suppose, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. Part of me believed I’d be back, like a prodigal, maybe as soon as Christmas, or with the spring. It wasn’t as if they’d caused me any unhappiness. In fact, for the first few years after my mother’s death my grandfather was by far the most important person in my life, and they both did their best for me in their strict but kindly Baptist chapel way. Until the long, inward solitary confinement of adolescence took hold of me I even shared in my grandfather’s enthusiasms. He read and passed on to me an endless stream of Westerns, dog-eared paperbacks from the local library, filled with prairie sunsets, blood-feuds and solitary Texas Rangers. Until my early teens I could lose myself utterly in them, and lived their simple dramas out in almost every daydream. The plots were as linear and satisfying as the dusty trails the white-hatted rangers followed, tracking down every kind of lawlessness to Indian camps, ghost towns, Mexican deserts, the dazzling snows of the High Sierra.

  On Saturdays he took me to the matinees at the Workmen’s Hall. The steep, claustrophobic little cinema, blanketed in a permanent smog of cigarette smoke, dust and the smell of mothballs, was set up on those mornings purely for an audience of retired or invalided miners. Ancient Mrs Protheroe, who’d lived just a few doors up from my mother and me when I was small, tottered about as the usher and made sure no teenagers slipped in to make use of the darkness at the back. Monday nights it was all theirs, but the Saturday matinees were sacrosanct and the place was a fuggy temple of hacking coughs, old men’s muttered greetings, and 1940s Americana – a double bill of Roy Rogers and Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger if we were lucky, or The Three Stooges, or Abbott and Costello. I remember we both despised any love interest, any sentimental complication. My grandfather would let out a soft, but quite audible angina moan that always sounded strangely private to me, as if it came from behind the door of a locked toilet cubicle. He would shift a little in his seat and I would stare at my knees and fill my head with other, manly thoughts until the embarrassment was over. Actually, not just embarrassment. It was a kind of physical dread. It gripped my throat and sometimes made me want to run from the cinema, though it pinned me helpless in my seat. A slow kiss or confession of love on that big, glowing screen would disturb me more than any kind of cliff-hanger or violence, and I could never bear to witness it.

  One summer holiday I devoted several days to memorising the Lone Ranger’s Moral Code, then greatly pleased my grandfather by being able to recite it to him like a catechism. Most of it has crumbled from my mind now, but I still recall the first of them: To have a friend, a man must be one. And the precept that puzzled me most and haunted me as a boy: Sooner or later… somewhere… somehow… we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

  He in
troduced me to music, too – my grandfather I mean, though his and the Lone Ranger’s tastes might well have coincided. His great favourites were Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers – tough, doomed country kids who would have been the same ripe old age as him if they hadn’t burned themselves through and died young, decades before that kind of waste became so fashionable in my own world. Their scrubbed, narrow faces stared out from the well-thumbed album covers at me as my grandfather read, for the thousandth time, the liner notes on the backs. I could probably still sing along to ‘Ramblin’ Man’, ‘Prairie Lullaby’, and ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Die’.

  As I grew into my teens I began avoiding our Saturday rituals (the same way, a few years earlier, I’d begun to find excuses for missing chapel services on Sundays and Prayer Meeting on Thursdays), preferring to hide away in my back bedroom with a record player, and records, of my own. It wounded him a little to begin with, I think, but he was wise enough not to fight it or mock my new obsessions. They were already twenty years out of date, but seemed dizzyingly prescient to me: Dylan, of course, Joni Mitchell, Hendrix, Cohen and Neil Young; and then, following their clues, the second-hand Sun Records I scrabbled for like a prospector at the backs of musty enthusiast shops. As soon as I began earning a little money of my own from paper rounds I’d catch a bus and a train to Cardiff one Saturday a month and walk a circuit of them all, those secretive little import and bootleg record stores that seem to have almost vanished from the earth now. I’d trudge miles between them, in sunshine or rain, from the back streets of Canton and Cathays to the winding city centre arcades. And then finding the old Blues men in those same plywood racks: Blind Willie Johnson growling ‘John the Revelator’, Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree. For years in my teens those voices, crackling like messages from another planet through my boxy Philips stereo, were all I wanted in the endless evenings for company.

  When I left my grandparents’ house I left music behind, too. I had no practical way of taking it with me, for one thing, but more than that I lost any sense of need for it, and that feeling has stayed with me ever since. I stopped looking for myself in songs the same way I stopped looking for myself in the Lone Ranger’s code, or my grandmother’s bible stories. Even a jukebox in a bar, if it plays a song I remember, can make me feel suddenly sick with impatience, anxious to be gone, like being persuaded too insistently about something you already, long ago and irrevocably, had decided.

  *

  It was a local man – one of the younger farmers I sometimes fell in with at the beach front bars, down from the fields on a one-night tear – who told me about Pugh’s farm at Fynnon-wen, high up in the Rheidol hills. One of the two middle-aged sons had hanged himself in the barn, just a month before, he said. There was work on the place for sure, he reckoned, if I could get along with that mad old bugger Pugh – a long-time widower – which he doubted. He laughed as he said it, but I wrote down the directions, and his name as a kind of reference.

  The next day, a Sunday, I waited at the gate of old man Pugh’s yard at noon, ankle-deep in mud, until the frantic barking of his dogs drew him out of one of the low, rusting sheds. Tall, completely bald and stooping in the fine, blowing drizzle amongst his yapping border collies looked as if he’d stepped straight out of the nineteenth century: above his high, caked boots he wore a narrow black suit, shiny with God knows how many years of use, and a grey, collarless shirt that must once have been black too, buttoned tight at the neck. His white face was long and horse-like, sprouting even whiter, sparse whiskers about the chin, and his pale, watering eyes looked as if they’d been soaked and stained in some antique wooden wash-tub with his shirt. I wondered if he was still dressed in mourning for his son, or if this was his Sunday outfit, but in fact through all the time I knew him, occasional changes of shirt or the addition of a black, tent-like rain cape aside, I never saw him dressed differently.

  He stared towards some far-off point behind me, somewhere in the steep green woods across the deep cut of the valley, as I gabbled about needing a few months of work, and my competence at labouring, basic handiwork, electrics and so on. I’d given it up as a wasted journey by the time I’d run out of things to say, but when I finally mentioned that all I needed was enough money to feed myself through the week and a place to sleep, his eyes locked back into focus and he shifted his colourless stare full on to my face.

  Twenty pounds, he said, then shifted the wet gravel in his throat and spat. Twenty pounds a week.

  I didn’t reply. I hadn’t hoped for much, but even in those days the amount was barely enough to live on.

  And breakfast, see. He made a slow, sideways chewing motion with his long chin. And supper, maybe, he added doubtfully, if you make it for all of us, and it’s not some kind of muck you serve up. Cawl, we like.

  I nodded, though I knew only the basics of frying and boiling. Where would I stay? I asked.

  He grunted and jerked his head back towards the shed he’d emerged from, then turned without opening the gate and stumped toward it.

  I unbolted the heavy steel bars and followed, the dogs swirling around my legs and almost tripping me into the filth. To my great relief he carried on past the ramshackle hut and led me through a screen of hazels to a narrow, sheltered patch of grass where a bulbous little caravan sat, once white but greening over now with a thin skin of mould.

  Old Pugh halted before it and waited for me to catch up.

  I stopped at his shoulder and we both gazed at the fat tin mushroom as if it had just fallen from the moon. God knows how he’d managed to set it there: I could see no clear path through the stunted trees all around. It might have sprouted up in the rain that cool wet morning. The dogs had vanished along the way. I hadn’t noticed them going, but it was very quiet now, the rain too soft to make a sound on the roof of the caravan.

  It’s not locked, he said.

  And so I worked as a farm-hand, or a shepherd as I liked to think of it, through the spring and early summer of 1985, in a place hardly touched by three quarters of a century, rounding up stray ewes on the bald hills, or coppicing the tangled blackthorns and hazels with a rusty blade from the barn, or sweating over another bubbling pot of mutton or rabbit cawl in the gloomy, brooding evenings. Sometimes the remaining son, Meirion – a slow, silent hulk of a man – would be set to work alongside me on the heavier jobs, but most days old Pugh kept us apart. I was glad: once, hammered awake out of the caravan’s damp bed in the early hours to help with spring lambing in the barn, I watched Meirion kneel beside a panting, glassy-eyed ewe that was struggling to give birth, force his huge thumb a little way inside the bulging vent and break the newborn’s trapped neck with a single sharp press. Marw-anedig, he grunted to the old man who was busy with another birth, and leered up at me when he heard his father groan and curse. I knew he’d have been more than happy to do the same to my own spine, and turned away, saying nothing. I suppose he wanted the farm to fail – or at least wanted the old man to give up at last and sell, freeing him into some other imagined life. Or it was an impulse, and there was no more sense in it than in the way he would wander the boundary hedges some evenings, thrashing at the birds’ nests in them with a heavy sickle.

  It was late June of that year, a warm day of tall blue skies, when I first met Jenny. It must have been a Sunday because I had the whole afternoon and evening to myself – Sunday was the one night in the week I didn’t need to brew up more cawl because of the heavier midday meal – and as usual on any day off that was fine I’d walked the mile or so downhill to Devil’s Bridge where I could catch the bus or hitch a ride into town. From the promenade I’d climbed Constitution Hill and meant to follow the cliff-top path to Clarach Bay, but the sound of talk and laughter lured me down like a siren song from the main path to a small rocky cove. Six or seven young men and women – students I supposed, finished with their exams – were sunbathing and swimming from a long dark platform of stone. I remember being surprised at myself, embarrassed in fact, for needing company, or even
just the spectacle of it, so badly. But the truth is I was growing strange in the pale little capsule of Pugh’s caravan: often when I found myself needing to interact in the simplest ways with people outside the world of the farm or the solitude of the hills – buying a bus ticket, say, or the rare luxury of a newspaper – I’d be suddenly tongue-tied, overcome with a sense of trying to communicate through a wall of glass, or fathoms of water.

  I must have sat watching them, drinking up the sound of their laughter and banter, for a good half hour. They noticed me, but paid no attention. I’d closed my eyes and was drifting into a half-sleep when Jenny, maternal even then, touched me on the shoulder and laughed when I startled. She was holding a half-full bottle of wine, and pushed it towards me as my eyes adjusted to the dazzle.

  Are you finished too? she said.

  Oh. No, I managed to answer. No, I’m not a student.

  She eyed me more closely, grinning, and gestured with the bottle again, though all I could think about was the light cotton skirt fluttering against her legs, almost transparent in the sun, and the cups of her pink bikini top above it, filled with the heavy cream of her breasts. I’d never been with any girl or woman, and though I can smile at my ogling now, on that sunstruck afternoon her bare skin amazed me like a vision. Go on – have a drink, she insisted and then, when I finally took the wine from her, eased herself down to sit next to me. She spoke with a warm, thick valleys lilt, and I was amazed at the wave of homesickness – all its choking brine – that the sound of her voice sent crashing through me. I sat and listened like a child.

  Though she was curious to see it, I never let Jenny visit the caravan. The thought of Meirion prowling outside with his sickle was one good reason, and my toilet situation was the other, since all I had was a tin pail under the dripping hazels – bracing but unromantic. Instead, we met in town every Sunday after that, rain or shine. She lived in a student bedsit guarded by a skinny, walking corpse of a landlady who rented out most of the rooms in her narrow three-story townhouse near the station. Mrs Horace was her name, The Horror to her tenants, mainly because she felt duty-bound to lurk outside their doors, clearing her throat noisily, if she knew one of her girls had a male visitor. But Jenny rented a basement room and her front window was a simple hop down from the pavement; it opened just wide enough for me to squirm in across a desk and onto the floor, so most often we were left in peace. Until Jenny’s graduation later that summer I think we were blindly happy with each week’s stolen few hours – the urgent, furtive romance of it all. Jenny being the first girl I ever properly knew, or thought I knew, I had nothing to compare it to, anyway.