one another. Ellie waited with Safia until her Tremorfa bus arrived, admiring the cut and thrust of the disparate metropolitan lives that moved hurriedly around her, listening to the brisk tunes of the human traffic. She loved the anonymity of the city; faceless pedestrians coiling through the walkways like one long centipede. She didn’t know their names, their secrets, didn’t know who their mothers were. In the city, anything seemed possible.
When the bus arrived Safia climbed on to it, waving through the dirty glass as she walked towards the back. Ellie ventured into the city centre, running along the wide pavements of St Mary Street and into Castle Arcade. Her breath quickened as she climbed the stairs to the Victorian attic. She could hear the resonant Zzz Zzz sounds of the violin doctor tuning a cello. The aroma of coffee and garlic from the cafeterias blended into a steam cloud lingering above the balcony. She walked to the end of the narrow landing and stood in front of the office door, staring at the white letters on the glass. The Glamour, it said, some of the u and the r flaking away. The man inside swivelled around in his old captain’s chair. It was Jamie Viggers, one of the staff writers. ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, beckoning her inside.
‘I wasn’t sure I’d catch you,’ she said. She walked over to the empty chair next to him and sat down. ‘I’ve come straight from work, a mug factory in Canton.’ She folded her arms around her waist and then unfolded them to brush an imaginary speck of dust from the thigh of her combat trousers. She glanced around the room, at the bubbling white paint, the colourful stacks of books and CDs, the splodges of coffee stains on the vinyl floor. There was a half-eaten seafood fajita on one of the computer desks, the flotsam of busy city living. ‘Andy’s been really busy with the band. They’ve been touring a lot. I had to find something which paid the rent, and freelancing didn’t.’
When Ellie was fresh out of Plymouth University with a bellybutton bar and a prescription for the combined pill, she’d come back to Wales with the blind intention of becoming a rock music journalist. She was a neurotic, depressive, frustrated romantic who loved everything from bubblegum pop to grating industrial noise, and her prose could piss all over Julie Burchill’s. She’d discovered this talent quite by accident when her friend who edited the student magazine had asked her to review The Cardigans’ concert at the Pavilions. Her plan was to part the Atlantic like Moses did the Red Sea; beat a path all the way to Rolling Stone, where the critics were the pop stars. But she’d had to start at The Glamour, where the critics were socially challenged computer geeks. One of her first assignments was an interview with The Boobs. She met them in a greasy spoon off Womanby Street where a horde of workmen were slowly demolishing the Arms Park. She’d ordered tea and death-by-chocolate and was about to devour the first forkful when the band filed into the café; valley bumpkins hiding behind swear words and ripped jeans. She was a ballsy self-assured über-feminist who scowled at monogamous relationships and housewifery, and then she’d looked up from her fat wad of cake and seen Andy, his cerulean eyes already trying to thaw her thick wall of resistance. Death by calculated erosion was how it had turned out.
She looked up at Viggers. ‘How come you’re still here?’
‘I’m the editor now,’ he said, his tiny eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘I’m here till gone seven most nights.’
She hadn’t really been referring to the late afternoon, but wondering how, in two years, Viggers hadn’t moved to London, or at least on to the Western Mail, like all Cardiff University graduates eventually did. ‘Can I lighten the load?’ she said. ‘I can take the books that nobody else wants. Or write some art previews.’ Ellie loved art as much as music. At university she often snuck into other people’s art history lectures, just to listen to the erudite lecturers gushing about the tortured lives of Kandinsky and Munch. Pop art was her favourite, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg. ‘Is there anything on at the museum?’
Viggers slapped her leg. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of The Needles, haven’t you? We’re doing this thing, paying tribute to the big Welsh bands. We’re doing one every month until we run out. It’s perfect for you because Gareth’s gone back to college to do his MA. It’s the January cover feature. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ellie said. She only wanted something trivial to keep her mind off Johnny-Come-Lately. Thirteen days and counting since he’d turned up. They were the longest thirteen days of her life. Like a frantic disciple in search of the great redeemer, she saw the shape of his face amidst the floral patterns in the front curtains, then she’d lose ten minutes staring out of the bay window, wondering where he was, heart brooding, pulse thumping. She needed to see him again, to look into his sooty eyes. Saucepans boiled over. The bath overfilled. She tripped over her own toes. Andy had caught her once, his father’s binoculars pressed against her face. She was looking at the beer garden on the square. She said she was looking at an eagle.
‘It’s probably a kestrel,’ Andy’d said.
Eventually the frenzy thawed into embarrassment. It was ridiculous, she’d only met him once, shared five, maybe ten words. But the hysteria always returned, sporadic, but inevitable, as though he himself was the drug, and she was already dependent. ‘Have you got anything smaller, a gig review or something?’
‘It’s only two thousand words, El. What’s that, a half-hour interview? I’ve got a press pack somewhere. The deadline isn’t until December. That’s four months away.’ He pushed himself out of the chair and walked to the other side of the room, stood in front of a giant-sized poster of Rhys Ifans. He rummaged through a pile of paperwork on a desk. ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he said, squatting to open a drawer. He held a pack of CDs bound together with a rubber band. ‘Will you do it, yes or no?’
Ellie shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said.
Viggers approached her, dropped the bundle of CDs into her hands. He pinched her chin and then swivelled back to his workspace, his fountain pen waltzing across a page of foolscap.
On the landing the heat had relented. The cafés were closed, the arcade doused with disinfectant. She walked back to Central Square, the city around her empty and expectant, some of the club doormen clocking on for their twilight shift, leaning in the doorways wearing dinner jackets and bow-ties. Platform Six was unmusically quiet. Ellie stood amongst the pigeons waiting for the Ystradyfodwg train. Going back to the valley always made her feel jaded, an hour journey feeling like a mammoth shift backwards in time. Aberalaw was full of resentment. The whole village disapproved of anyone it collectively deemed atypical. All the columnists in the broadsheets ever talked about was how community was dying, and what a detrimental effect its death was having on Great Britain. But in Aberalaw it wasn’t dead, and Ellie wished that it was. Community was a tyrant when your face didn’t happen to fit. Ellie was impatient now for escape, her belly like a wishing well, heavy with copper pennies, every coin representing some unfulfilled dream.
She sighed and opened her purse, took her train ticket out. Behind it was a clipped photograph of Siân and Rhiannon, herself in the middle; their arms weaved chaotically around one another. She’d forgotten that it was there; almost a year old, taken on a rare night out in the capital. Ellie and Siân had wanted to go to a roller disco in Bute Park. Rhiannon insisted on some strip club she knew of, a dank basement bar hidden under a Queen Street department store. She’d spent the whole night acting the big I Am, stuffing five-pound notes into the dancers’ thongs. The flash from the camera had penetrated their lipstick and glitter. Or it had already worn off. They looked like three little girls, the little girls they must have been before they grew up, before they discovered plastic surgery, sarcasm and narcotics, all the stuff that numbed the pain. Round faces and bug eyes. Rhiannon’s fat purple tongue was poking out. God knows she must have been through some crazy shit to turn into such a psychotic bitch. She seemed to think the world revolved around her, that she was playing the lead role in some elaborate stage play. Most people grew out of that when they were thirteen. Siân’s alcoholic father had beaten her mother senseless; kicked her, pregnant, down the stairs, cut her hair, burned her with cigarettes, and when she was in hospital, Siân bore the brunt. Siân had told Ellie all about it when she was blotto on cheap champagne, the whole three bottles that were left after Niall’s