by the stuff that had been used to clean it. Carbon tetrachloride. Mam said, ‘It was no such thing. It was DabAway. And I only freshened it up. What was I supposed to do? Leave the sweat to rot the seams? Costly fabric like that?’
They said Mam wasn’t to have known. It was in very tiny print about using the product in moderation and airing the garment thoroughly after it had been cleaned. They said four bottles was a lot, but she still shouldn’t blame herself. She said, ‘I’m not blaming myself.’ But I think she did, on the quiet.
At the end of the first week they asked me to step into the doctor’s office.
I said, ‘Are you sending him home?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘far from it. Your brother isn’t out of the woods yet. There could be kidney damage. We have to wait and see.’ I said, ‘How long?’
‘Two to three weeks,’ he said. ‘If there is damage … you might want to consider whether your mother should be warned.’
I said, ‘She’ll do whatever it takes. She’ll cash in a policy if it’s a case of going private.’
‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘It’s a case of a possible sudden deterioration.’
Dilys was visiting when I looked in on him. She was trimming his hair and they were laughing and joking, no idea he might be on death row. ‘Cheer up, our kid,’ he said, when he saw me. ‘You look like you just saw a ghost. Come and sit down. I’ve got quite a story to tell the pair of you. I’ve had an amazing experience. A vision.’
Dilys said, ‘Well, you are on a lot of medication.’
‘Nothing to do with medication,’ he said. ‘A beautiful lady came to me, in the middle of the night. She was dressed in long white robes.’
I said, ‘It was probably that little staff nurse with the nice ankles.’ I had my eye on her myself, always crackling her apron, pretending to be busy.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t any nurse. It was a visitation. She stood as near to me as you are and she was bathed in a heavenly glow.’
Dilys said, ‘You must have been dreaming. Had they given you a jab?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I was as wide awake as I am now. Something made me sit up all of a sudden and there she was, smiling at me. But here’s the best bit: she knew all about me, all about my singing career and everything.’
I said, ‘Did she tell you Industrial Brush Social Club want to charge us for a no-show?’
‘Bugger Industrial Brush,’ he said. ‘This lady laid out my whole life before me. She said my days singing on the clubs are finished. She said I have a Higher Purpose.’
Dilys said, ‘What, like Dewi Elias?’ Dewi was one of Aunty Gwenny’s in-laws, worked as a roofer for years until he slipped and had a bang on the head. Then he went for a deacon. Reckoned he’d heard celestial voices.
‘Never mind Dewi Elias,’ he said. ‘I’m on the threshold of a momentous change in my life.’
It made my blood run cold to hear him making plans, after what I’d been told.
‘See?’ he said. ‘That’s why I was spared from DabAway poisoning. She told me I’m meant to go to America and there I shall make my fortune.’
Dilys said, ‘Could it have been the lady with the library trolley?’
I said, ‘Not in the middle of the night.’ I was hoping he had seen a vision, in a way. He was too young to die.
He said, ‘She was sent from above. I know she was. One minute she was here, clear as I see you, next minute she was gone.’
I said, ‘Did she glide away?’
‘Not so much glide as fade,’ he said.
Dilys said, ‘You haven’t told Mam?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think she’d like it.’
He was right about that. Mam didn’t even like Joan Wagstaff visiting, who had been one of his best pals in school, and she was a married woman.
I’ve often wondered if it was caused by the pills or if he made it all up, but he stuck to the same story all his days. Then again, Sel never saw any harm in being approximate with the facts.
I walked with Dilys to the bus stop.
She said, ‘Are you going to say anything to Mam?’
I said, ‘I think I might. If America’s on the agenda she ought to be warned.’
I was inclined to leave well alone with the other business. If Sel started to go downhill I could always get the doctor to explain things to her. No sense in running to meet trouble.
I said, ‘It could kill her.’
Dilys said, ‘What? Him going to America? I don’t think so. She’s made like a Sherman tank. As long as Sel’s in the limelight she’ll keep rolling.’
So I brought the matter up with Mam that same evening.
‘Visions!’ she said. ‘I’ll give them visions. They’ve been letting nuns in to bother helpless invalids. I shall make a complaint to the matron in the morning.’
Mam hated nuns. We were chapel. Well, we weren’t anything, really, but if we’d had to be something we’d have been Ebenezer Congregational.
‘Well, that settles it,’ she said. She’d got a right old cob on her and I hadn’t even got as far as the details of Sel’s Higher Purpose in America. ‘I’m getting him out of there,’ she said. ‘I’ll have him moved somewhere nice and quiet where he’s not troubled by intruders.’
And she did. As soon as he got the all clear on his kidneys he was on his way to a convalescent home in Abergele, thanks to the generosity of well-wishers from the Birmingham Welsh, and then on to Aunty Gwenny’s, for fresh air and home-made currant bread. It made no difference, though. He may have been sitting in the Land of our Fathers with a rug round his knees, but in his heart he was already on his way to America.
I was six when Sel came on the scene. I’ll never forget the day. We’d had team games that afternoon, out in the yard at Bright Street Infants because it was such a nice day and I’d been called out to the front to show the class good ball control. I was feeling very pleased with myself and then when I got to the corner of Ninevah Street I bumped into Mrs Edkins.
‘Cledwyn,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a new bab at your house so you’d better come to me for your tea tonight.’
I ran home so fast, to see if it was true about the bab and beg Mam not to send me to Mrs E’s. Normally my sister Dilys could have given me my tea. She was fourteen. Only she was on holiday at Aunty Gwenny’s, getting over tonsillitis. But when I ran in the door there she was, back from the country, and Mam was on the couch in her nightie and His Numps lay in a drawer out of the sideboard, all wrapped up in blankets and a woolly bonnet.
First thing I said was, ‘Can Dilys give me my tea? I’ll be good.’
Mam said, ‘Look at you, in a muck sweat. What have I told you about running? See what’s in the crib?’
‘Is it a bab?’ I said. I’d never really seen one close up. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘Under a gooseberry bush,’ Mam said. ‘Now go and wash your face and then you can give him a kiss.’
I said, ‘How long is he stopping?’ and Mam and Dilys both laughed. The main thing was, I didn’t have to go to the Edkinses for my tea, as long as I went about on tiptoe and didn’t wake the baby. I hated going next door. There was nothing