the whole family.
On Fridays the village smelled like chip fat, smog clouds from the deep-fat fryers oozing from kitchen windows. Ellie was at home, in Gwendolyn Street, a Victorian terrace overlooking the rest of Aberalaw. From her bay window she could see past the terraces in front, down to the square and the statue in the centre. A couple of pear-shaped women were unpegging their faded bedclothes from the washing lines, the men driving from the electronic factories on Pengoes Industrial Estate to the Pump House or the Labour Club. Her living room was bare, save for Andy’s huge television. The fitted carpet had been a fixture since 1973; floral swirls bursting into explosions of satsuma and chocolate-brown every few square metres. The satinette sofa was covered with a cream linen throw-over, but it continually slipped away, revealing patches of mauve and royal blue. The block colour thinned the oxygen, made the atmosphere seem perpetually constipated. Buying expensive things for a rented property was negative equity, Andy said.
She was flicking through a copy of the NME when he came in; she was skim-reading stories about bands less talented than The Boobs written by journalists less talented than her. He stripped down to his denim cut-offs and T-shirt, left his paint-stained overall on the floor. He went straight to the tiny kitchen to wash his hands with antibacterial soap. Ellie put the magazine down and followed him. She sat on the chipboard worktop. ‘Good day was it?’ she said.
‘Not bad, babe.’ He whipped the tea towel from its handle and scraped his fingers in it, his skin pink with toil and hot water. He and Marc had laboured at his father’s decorating company since they were 15 and 16 years old. They probably always would.
‘It’s Friday,’ she said cheerfully, trying to alert him to the onset of the weekend. Six days and counting since Johnny-Come-Lately had turned up. Ellie would have liked to go to the Pump House in the hope of meeting him again. But Andy’d always exercised a dreadful Puritan work ethic. He didn’t like drinking all that much. It was difficult to imagine how he filled his time on the road; cooped in a Transit van saturated with lager farts, a couple of dipsomaniacs for company. ‘Do you think Marc and Rhiannon are going out?’
Andy pretended he hadn’t heard her. He opened the fridge, unleashing the sweet stench of decaying food. He picked a lettuce up by its unopened packaging and tossed it in the swing-top. He took the potatoes out of a plastic grocery bag and began to peel and cut, his blue eyes squinting at the stabs of the vegetable knife, his tongue poked out in application, the starchy water sloshing out of the basin and landing on the floor tiles around his bare feet. An abnormally big bumblebee hurtled against the window, hit the pane with a thud, then dropped out of view.
The couple ate their dinner in the living room, at either end of the sofa. Andy was watching a rugby match, knife-handle seized in his curled fingers, head tilted towards the television; a physical mannerism he’d inherited from his father. Moving images hypnotized him. Commentators spoke to him in a seductive language that left him deaf to live words. Occasionally he looked away, hurriedly piled a handful of chips into a slice of bread and quickly gnawed at the sandwich, the grease collecting in the crooks of his mouth. At the sound of the half-time whistle, he turned to look at Ellie.
‘Now that I’m home,’ he said, pausing to ensure he’d got her attention, ‘we should fix a date for the wedding.’ He folded a piece of bread in half and mopped the egg yolk up from his plate.
Ellie put her own plate on the floor, setting her cutlery at the rim. It was eighteen months since he’d first asked. She was on her way home from work, stepping off the train in Aberalaw station when she noticed something strange about the mountain behind their house. Initially she thought it was a flock of sheep that had accidentally arranged itself into some uncanny correlation. When she got to the square she started to decipher the words. ‘MARRY ME ELIZABET,’ it said, vast characters spelt out against the moss green bracken with hundreds of smooth grey pebbles. Andy was standing on the doorstep, a nervous twist in his grin. ‘What do you think?’ he said, voice quivering. ‘I nicked them from Merthyr Mawr in the old man’s tipper. Weren’t enough to do the last H.’ She agreed, immediately, emphatically, because, even if she hadn’t wanted to marry him, she thought she would grow into wanting it, the way she’d grown into her sister’s hand-me-down clothes. Two days later, embarrassed by the attention it was attracting, she asked him to go back to the mountain and take the stones down. He’d bought her a nine-carat gold diamond solitaire, the only diamond she’d ever owned, and she’d spent days scraping her knuckle against the bay window, trying to slice the pane. The ring was dull now, with time and glue from the factory. They didn’t get married because they didn’t have the money to pay for the wedding. They still didn’t have the money.
‘My aunty’ll do the cake,’ Andy said, stretching to retrieve her plate, scraping the chips she’d left into his own dish.
‘Why don’t we go abroad?’ Ellie said. ‘Tobago or Cancún.’ It was the only way she’d escape interference from Andy’s relatives. There was a quagmire of customs to observe, a trail of conventional nonsense that kept all of their family traditions intact. Andy being her first son, Gwynnie demanded a church wedding. Ellie was petrified of walking into St Illtyd’s only to find the groom’s side bursting with jubilant spectators, her own pews entirely empty. She didn’t want to marry his family; she wanted Andy all to herself. ‘That’s what people do now,’ she said. ‘The bride and groom go away on their own. It’s more meaningful, don’t you think?’
‘We can’t do that,’ Andy said. ‘My mother and father could never afford the flight.’ He popped a chip into his mouth and sidled closer to Ellie, sliding across the settee.
‘What about a winter wedding?’ she said. It was August now. She was buying time, hoping she could change his mind, or that he’d forget about it all over again. ‘February. We could serve hot toddies instead of Cava. I could wear diamantés instead of pearls, a Cossack instead of a veil.’
‘The fourteenth?’ Andy said.
‘Valentine’s Day.’ Ellie sniggered. ‘That’s just tacky.’
‘It’s romantic.’ He clambered on to her body, bunching her wrists together, holding them like a bouquet above her head. Ellie bucked and screamed, the sharp screech breaking into peals of laughter. ‘Get off me,’ she said.
Andy kissed her, his keen tongue pushing into her mouth. After a moment, she started to kiss back hungrily, looking for something that had been there two years ago when they’d met, that had been there six days ago when he’d come back from Glasgow; something that wasn’t there now. All she could taste was the rust that had worked its way between them, months of widening water. His saliva was cold. An abrupt fatigue seeped through Ellie’s body. Her lips froze, her own tongue slumping back into her throat. As Andy pulled away she glimpsed the scar on his neck, four centimetres above his collarbone, a sunken white-blue tear shredding through his wheat-coloured skin.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, voice doleful, eyes flickering in the last of the sunlight from the window.
‘Nothing,’ Ellie said. ‘Nothing.’ She waved his concern away with a chop of her hand, instructing him to continue. He began to work on her button fly. ‘Stop,’ she said pushing him away. She’d had an idea. She wriggled out of her jeans and then her pink cotton knickers, kicking them across the room. She flipped on to her naked belly and rose up on all fours. ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ she said. It’s what she always said. Sometimes he beat her to it, and asked the question, especially if he was just home from tour. ‘Have you been waiting for this?’ he’d say. ‘I bet you have.’
She could feel him behind her, on his knees, the heat coming from him. She pressed her face against the arm of the settee, breathing the musty odour from the throw-over deep into her lungs, scrutinizing it for an iota of smoke, petrol; something that smelled like that man whose name was Johnny.
He placed his hand on her hip, getting closer.
‘I’ve