At the station, Eirwen was standing beneath the Suffolk in Bloom prize-winner sign. She had shrunk again. I was waiting in the car. Gerard, picking up her suitcase (she gave him a Don’t expect a tip look) congratulated her on the win.
She frowned. He pointed upward at the sign. She saw and said, ‘Oh, are we thinking that’s funny?’
Walking to the car Gerard asked what he should call her?
‘Mrs Edwards. Or Ms Silcox, my maiden name.’
I said, ‘And you can call him, The Right Honourable Gerard Crastley.’
Passing Eirwen’s case behind me, Gerard said, ‘Thank God one day Lord will at least be shorter.’
He didn’t see Eirwen’s disgusted look.
She waited for him to turn round so he could.
‘Have you got anything special planned, or just seeing your special son,' he asked, driving onto the High Street.
‘I don’t know what there is to be done here at all.’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I told you.’ To try and make her refuse to come. ‘Very quiet.’
I had invited her to stay at Haven House while I was house sitting there through a recessed sense of duty.
‘Lovely walks,’ said Gerard.
‘I walk along the river to the South Bank every day, actually, there and back.’
She worked there booking taxis for concert goers. 'Only going from the complex, mind, they can sort their own getting ‘to’.'
And ‘from’ only in theory. In practise she advised concert goers on tube and bus routes – made of money, are we? - or asked what was wrong with their god given legs? 'The Lord will take away. My mother’s neighbour, now, Letty, who lapsed into going the two streets away to the paper shop on the bus and back. And dug up her roses from the end of the garden and moved them right up against the house so she could just chuck the tea leaves on them straight out of the kitchen window footstool pushed up close special and not have to walk down. Well, the Lord decided that as Letty wasn’t using her legs, he’d have her run over. By someone driving ever so fast to Aberbargoed. Letty never could use her legs tidy again.’
And Eirwen would proudly note down under Taxis Booked: no taxi for Clifton-Barnes after Beethoven’s Choral. A.L.V. Another Little Victory.
‘Hang on, now. Something for us to…’ She was rummaging in her handbag. ‘This letter. from Katrina. A student, at work. From Hungary. Iestyn will know how I always I try to make the supervisor put me on with the young ones rather than the old fogies?’ Eirwen meant the middle aged. ‘The young ones tell me about their college courses. And I can be excited with them. And they will listen to me, carefully, about finding their local in and out shop to stock up on their teas and coffees; emergency tinned evaps; shampoos, soaps and toothpastes; cup-a-soups - so there’s always something in quick and comforting. Let alone that no student ever thought of a communal toilet brush in their lives.’
Gerard nodded. ‘I certainly never did at Oxford Brookes.’
She looked over at him, suspicious. Decided to let it ride. ‘And Katrina wrote that she was so relieved she could speak to me Saturday afternoon during the harp recital. She’s in love with Maria, a bit older, and it’s her first experience of being in love with someone of the same sex. And she says how confused she’s been and that I’d so put her mind at rest. And she ends up saying how she honestly thought I was the most wonderful person she’d ever met. I was taken aback. Years I’ve had of being the vilified one, attacked, the scapegoat. What do you think I should do about this letter?’
I said, ‘Report Katrina to HR for harassment.’
I know. Not even a humble brag, just a brag. And this was ten years before Facebook started. Let alone five decades before the Internet saw people posting photographs of their spam and quinoa fritters in nasturtium infused aspic, Eirwen, would dish up on Christmas Day, then take her plate of food around Randall House to show the Martins and the Delaneys. Between them they were responsible for all the local outbreaks of scabies; then across to Tinworth House to show the Lingwoods, who could never bath because their tub was always full of knocked off Meccano, carpet ends, Cadbury's Smash and the vodka they distilled from it, for sale straight out of their front door.
‘People who can most do with the inspiration to aspire,’ said Eirwen. ‘Especially today. For baby Jesus.'
We were all of us, back then and there in Vauxhall, as Oscar Wilde had it, lying in the gutter.
Eirwen was all about forcing others to look at the stars.
Meanwhile, my father, Terry, and I would wait at table in our cracker hats. When Eirwen came back, she would cover all our plates of food and lay them over pans of boiling water to reheat.
A relief when microwaves came in.
Gerard said, ‘We used to have a houseboat further down the river. Just near our house in Putney.’
I could feel he was reining in his compulsion to speed.
‘I’ve got more of a flat through the park from being beside the river,’ Eirwen said. ‘Council.’
As expected, her accent, in reaction to Gerard’s heightened RP, was getting more and more common, jettisoning the strong Welsh.
She did this. She would be the classic snob or an inverted snob, playing either belligerent memsahib or baleful moron.
Mark White, my classmate, was sufficiently common. Eirwen decided he must have a treat and go with us to Wales, exchanging his shared bedroom in a gentrification bypass prefab in Kennington for a shared utility outhouse among the defunct slagheaps of Maescycwmmer.
At least when Eirwen had given the holiday to that teenage boy from the care home, I got sex.
The smartness of Eirwen’s dress for what she called her 'wig-wam parlay' with the Whites ranked immediately above what she wore for any outing more fancy than one of my dad’s shows, and immediately below the one she had earmarked to be buried in, casket fully open to show the beading.
She sat with the imaginary glass on her head, cold trickle going down her back, in the White’s ash and mouse smelling living room, her hand propped on the handle of her shopping bag on wheels like Lady Bracknell’s on her walking stick. She clearly wasn’t liking what was displayed on that pelmet.
‘Regardant to the proposed sojourn of Mark with us in the var-liz. Oh, no, nobody because of Mark shall be out of porkit – as you put it - so you must nort open your pahse under any sah-kahm-stahn-sahs. No, indeed.’ And, no, still no joy with the pelmet display. ‘Nah-oo - what I propose to do, is to be hitting the road at about nine-thirty in the morning. And then we shall, as normal, storp orff at the Orst Service Station. Iestyn will no doubt have his usual chicken Hawaiian style. And a Fanta, that we will of course need to drop a sugar cube into for the sake of to take out the fizz. This aforementioned fizz, when it strikes at the wrong angle, brings on his arse-thma…’
Contrasted with the time my friend Anna, daughter of opera singer Sir Robert Lloyd, came for lunch at 88 Ward Point during our college holidays. Eirwen dressed in a paisley smock, leggings (where from?) and slicked her hair back. She plonked down enamel plates of sausage and chips. ‘I expe’ you’re used to finer fare, given your background, dear. But ‘ere, we’re very plain eaters.’
Eirwen was looking out of the window at the shops going past in Corham. ‘Now, Iestyn, who was it said – Mair, Iris...Liz, maybe…’
I translated for Gerard. ‘She means Mair Had Her Leg Off, as opposed to Mair Who’s Dead.’
Eirwen corrected me. ‘Sadly dead.’
Eirwen, being Rhondda Valley, always included descriptors as part of people's names. Big Lill, Welsh Lill, Little Lill, Crook Back Lill, Lill From the Wrong Way Round the Balcony. Mair Had Her Leg Off, Daisy Feeds Her Kids Mince Straight from the Frying Pan, Connie Practically Bedridden, Peggy Plimsolls and Ankle Socks Hoards Newspapers, Bill Glass Eye Doesn't Fit Tidy, Liz Fastest Words per Minute Speed at the Coal Board Even Though She Insists on Keeping to her Manual Typewriter.
And more.
Eirwen said, ‘Whoever it was said they hoped being down here Iestyn would have got some much needed slimming done.’
I said, ‘Don’t lie. As if. Iris? She was also Edward the Seventh, remember. He was a fat bastard. Tell her it’s the pot calling the kettle.’
‘Iestyn was repulsive fat before he was nine. Then he got run over.’
Gerard giggled, looking puzzled.
I said, ‘I wasn’t in charge of my own food at that age, Ei.’
‘Maybe not. But you did steal your brother’s helping of rice pudding that Saturday.’
‘That’s because he always got the fucking skin!’
I had fully reverted to my status with Eirwen, and she with me – inter-cuntery.
In the rear-view mirror, Gerard gave me a mock aghast look, which Eirwen intercepted.
‘Oh, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘He’s always been this way. He’s like his father’s mother, Nancy Ak.’
I waited for her to add the usual: I had cracked on the top As in Schubert’s Mass in G, for one example, for the same reason that Nancy Ak never got up before midday, and slagged around in her housecoat stinking of wee. And could never make scrambled eggs from scratch. And Terry had to have the words written on the neck of his guitar for “Mocking Bird Hill”. The same reason aged two, I had fallen down the Randall House second floor stairs - lying there looking like an over played with action man. Or cheated at Catchy Fishy got up onstage at the ten o’clock children’s show at Butlins, Skegness. And when I begged and begged to look after the school rabbit in the holidays, got asthma so badly we had to leave the rabbit in its hutch on the fire escape. And it would, ever shall be, ever has been, the same reason that when I was X-rayed all over after being run over, they would find a cyst in my humerus. Got myself thrown out of French for refusing point blank to learn the subjunctive. And, more than anything, why I never once ever thought to clean out the cheese drawer in the fridge.
Or variations on that theme.
She didn’t.
As Gerard dropped us off, I said to Eirwen, ‘You didn’t ask him your usual question.’ That she asked the nurse who monitored by steam cubicle when I was in hospital with Croup. any of my cousins coming to stay, the boy from the home she gave the ‘lady bountiful holiday to, any younger children in the lift in Ward Point, the Ugandan exchange visit ministers at the Lambeth Mission.
‘What’s that?’
‘Does he call shit doo-doos or ah-ahs.’
‘Don’t be vile.’
As we walked into the house she (loaded question) asked if I had heard from Wales. Our relatives, she meant, not the country itself. Before I could answer she went on, sourly, 'Your aunty Sophia says how she always had a special relationship with you because of yours and her humour. Well…'
'We do. She's always been hilarious.'
'And I've never laughed, I suppose?'
Yes, once, at the Fonz’s line in Happy Days, 'Sarah Voyant - Claire's sister'.
Eirwen had piled lots of saucepans precariously on top of the AGA.
I shouted at her, 'If you don't stop fucking about you can go home on the next bus.'
'Inner Brother Joan actually warned me I shouldn't come here. She picked up you would be hostile.'
'Did she also pick up that you would arrange displays of kitchenware like there had been onset poltergeist activity?'
Quite pleased with that, thanks.
'Inner Brother Joan wouldn't concern herself with non-spiritual matters. Inner Brothers are expected not to.’
In June, 1980, Eirwen answered the phone to a wrong number acted on her compulsion to say, ‘Before you ring off and get through correctly, I have to tell you - I’m sitting in a circle.’
‘Do you close down?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sealing the chakras?’ The woman gave a chuckle through her nose. ‘No? Then you’d better come to the White Eagle Lodge on Monday afternoon and convene with the spirit, now, hadn’t you.’
And this was Inner Brother Joan.
Eirwen went to the Lodge as IBJ suggested and learned to seal her chakras, assume the trance state and convene with the spirit of White Eagle.
There were healing services on Mondays and Tuesdays. Truck, please, with past lives and spirit guides firmly discouraged. Cathars, non-survivors of the Battle of Hastings and Mary Queen of Scots were a few past lives lived; spirit guides included Dutch Nuns, Red Indians and (Eirwen’s) ‘My little girl who died in the slums around the time of Edward the Seventh – you know all those passages and windy-ways round Spitalfields? Well I’ve narrowed it down to one out of six of those for where she used to live before she died. Cholera.’
Eirwen believed that her claustrophobia was psychic residue from much of her life as a Cathar being spent hiding terrified in caves.
At nine, three and six each day Eirwen sits with limbs uncrossed, so as not to short-circuit the White Eagle spirit energy, imagining a six pointed star quickening in her midriff. When the star reaches its zenith, she will send its Christ-babe blessed light out into the world. To be shed on evil; war, famine, disease, and so on. Eirwen will seek to deflect her stream of Christ-babe blessed light away from the Middle East – in 1957 an Afghani doctor had involved Eirwen in a fully unwarranted one-night stand – also from Argos, whose full refund policy when it came to Eirwen’s upgraded TV with built-in DVD player was all Eirwen’s eye, and particularly from the dogging, pigging, horsing cow of a woman, living upstairs from Eirwen, who walked around at any and all hours, in her heels on fully wall to wall uncarpeted floors.
'She’s quite the interesting character study, Runny.’
Gerard had – thank fuckerama – given Eirwen a lift to catch the sad Sunday evening train.
An elderly couple in an open top vintage car are causing a jam on the road out of Corham.
‘Why are they still alive?’ Gerard wonders.
Drivers tooted as they pulled out to overtake.
When we drew level, the couple turned to look at us and the driver waved. Overtaking, Gerard yelled, ‘Oi, Toady, get that pile of old cock out of my way.’
I said to him, 'Let's swap mothers.’
'Mine would give you way too much leeway.'
'Does she psychoanalyse you all the time?'
He shook his head. 'No. I'm too lovely.’
‘Ask your mum what she makes of this. When I was maybe fourteen, Eirwen said to me, “I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to grow up – then I knew there would finally be someone that understood me”.’
Gerard thought, shook his head. ‘Too weird.’
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